If he'd planned repeating his Conan act, Tl*m*nch*l was too fast for him. That being drew its sidearm, aiming at the same spot on the hull of the Honorable Orrin Hatch (alias Geronimo) which the Gutierrez had attacked on the Laika. There was no report, but a head-sized ragged hole opened in the vessel's side, shot flames, and went black as the fire inside died for lack of oxygen. By that time, Eichra Oren had used his fusion-powered pistol on the John Galt, formerly the Honorable John McCain, and put her fire out, as well.

  Inside his helmet, Empleado shook his head. He pushed a button on the panel of the combination elevator-air lock. The door closed, and the machine descended. He stepped out at treetop level under the canopy, where there was almost as much activity as topside. Several aerostats hovered directly below the points where the ruined spacecraft stood—for what reason the former KGB man couldn't say.

  One carried Mister Thoggosh himself.

  Half a dozen individuals, identifiable as aliens under their transparent coverings, gave him what he was sure was a dirty look as they stepped into the air lock he'd just stepped out of. Empleado shrugged to himself indifferently, put a foot on the first step of the spiral escalator, going down, and headed back the way he'd just come from the human camp.

  Mister Thoggosh returned to his office/living quarters that afternoon, looking forward to the peace and quiet of his accustomed solitude—and the comfort of peeling off the environmental filmsuit he wore to protect his gills and other soft tissues in the desiccating atmosphere preferred by his land-dwelling associates.

  Lightweight and transparent though it was, the absurd getup still made him feel uncomfortably confined, and restricted his movements. Moreover, it had been no help when it came to shielding him from the heat of the shuttle fire which had been perceptible even through the world-enveloping organic canopy beneath which he'd hovered—all day, it seemed—in his aerostat.

  The heat had worried him most, not just for the craft—which would have come in handy exploring the Cometary Halo—but for the entire colony. The canopy had begun as intertwined branches at the tops of great trees that supported it a kilometer above the asteroid's real surface. Ultraviolet exposure had softened and polymerized it into a covering to hold the atmosphere on the planetoid and protect its inhabitants from the cold, vacuum, and radiation of space. Intense heat was one thing it had not been engineered to withstand.

  All afternoon, he'd had disturbing mental images of the canopy melting, bursting, and spewing its contents, including thousands of sapient beings, into the void. Had it not been possible to put the fires out immediately, his people would have cast the stricken vessels off and let them burn several kilometers away from the canopy. Thanks to fast thinking and even faster action on the part of Gutierrez, that had proven unnecessary. The canopy had held. Cooled again, it appeared as reliable as it had been to begin with.

  Dictating the hundredth memo of the day into his implant for transmission to the appropriate recipient, the nautiloid descended a flight of stairs into the fluorocarbon with which his apartments were filled, cycled the lock, and floated inside. A stand of housekelp waved a friendly, mindless greeting, and he began to feel at home.

  "Princess of the Royal Web Nek Nam'l Las, Chief Logistics Engineer. Copy to her aide, Voozh Preeno, and to Llessure Knarrfic, Administration. Note her rank according to customs of her people. My dear Princess, colon, I transmit this for the record, comma, to commend you and your division on their energetic and brilliant assistance during the emergency connected with the destruction of the human spacecraft, period. Had it not been for your swift judgment and attention to vital detail, comma, in excess of duties for which you originally contracted, comma, there is no way to estimate the disastrous consequences which might have resulted, period. Paragraph. You will be gratified to learn that this exemplary performance will find a substantive reward in the form of a bonus in the amount of—"

  The nautiloid stopped dictating abruptly, disturbed by a sense that something was out of place in his office. The tentacle which had begun reaching for the fastener of his filmsuit froze in place as he realized what it was: his prized songfish, which usually greeted him with its beautiful trilling, was silent.

  Grateful to be away from what he regarded as the eerily inhuman environs of the nautiloid settlement, Empleado trudged through the forest, back toward the American encampment.

  The bulky spacesuit he carried over his arm would have been a burden had it not been for the light gravity. Whatever it had cost him in nerve-strain and fatigue, it had been worth wearing the sweat-stinking armor and rubbing elbows with that nightmare menagerie. He'd had three objectives in mind, and seen all of them accomplished in half a day. His old superiors would have been proud of him had there been some way to report to them—and if they weren't busy preserving their own hides just now in a world turned politically upside down.

  His way through the woods followed what was becoming a well-worn trail. Before he knew it, someone would be suggesting that it be paved. For some reason that annoyed him, and he left the path where it curved about the base of one of the great trees and took the other way around. The ground was reasonably clear of cover here, and the footing was no more difficult than on the path.

  He hadn't gone another hundred yards when he saw something glistening between the spreading roots of another canopy tree, as if someone had been littering, discarding, of all things, a huge wad of transparent kitchen wrap. That thought suddenly made him freeze in his tracks, hair stirring at the back of his neck. There was only one thing on this asteroid that looked like kitchen wrap.

  Someone had been littering, all right—and apparently trying to do his job for him in their clumsy, violent way. Pushed hastily between the barrel-sized roots was the dead body of one of the lobster people, its head smashed to a pulp.

  In effect, Empleado realized, somebody had just killed a cop.

  Mister Thoggosh was as angry as he ever got.

  Almost anyone who knew the nautiloid Elder would have agreed that this was angry enough. His assistant, Aelbraugh Pritsch, had once remarked, when he thought he was outside his employer's hearing, that for a cold-blooded entity, the Proprietor was more terrifying in his hot-blooded wrath than any other being he'd ever met—or even heard of. At the time, the giant mollusc had felt somewhat complimented. Now what he experienced was a hostility toward whoever had done this to him, so powerful and implacable that he wondered how he could possibly contain it without bursting.

  The brilliantly colored and beautiful songfish that had come with him on the arduous voyage to this alternative reality was floating belly-up in its little cage, eyes clouded over and scales fading to a deathly white. Its melodious singing would never soothe him again. Monitors built into his desk, which he usually relied on to tell him that the fluorocarbon surrounding him was sufficiently charged with oxygen, were flashing an infuriated red of their own.

  He'd never been meant to see those monitors. The would-be murderer had assumed he'd pull his nearly invisible suit off as soon as he stepped through the door. He'd very nearly done that. Only his abstraction and fatigue, his concentration on the memo he'd been dictating, and a subtle feel of wrongness within his suite, had stayed his tentacle until he'd reached the area of the sandy floor at the opposite end of the room set aside as a desk. According to his instruments, the fluorocarbon had been contaminated with a lethal volume—it must have taken several liters—of an industrial solvent combining the attributes of carbon tetrachloride and dimethyl sulfoxide: highly penetrative and extremely deadly.

  What made him angriest, having been in the midst of a commendatory note to one of his employees, was that it must have been someone he trusted. The door, for example, wouldn't open to just anyone, but employed a crude form of judgment based on information automatically derived from the day-to-day operation of his implant. In short, someone he trusted had tried to kill him, and it made him furious.

  Terrorism, under which this incident must be categorized, was an interesting and instructive phenomenon in the abstract. His culture intelligently took its appearance as a sign of deep social maladies. Like political assassination, it was an ultimate check and balance, never to be altogether discouraged. Those who practiced terrorism functioned something like canaries in coal mines—or his poor songfish in its little cage—informing those who ran civilization that they were failing a few sensitive individuals at the fringes and were therefore in danger of failing less sensitive, more sensible individuals if they continued along whatever course had triggered the event in the first place.

  That said, Mister Thoggosh was unable to view his own attempted murder quite so detachedly. Prudently, he believed, he'd already set automated devices to cleaning up the mess himself. He hadn't made it to his present ancient age entirely by accident. He decided to tell no one about this, with the exception of the closest thing his culture offered to a detective, the p'Nan moral debt assessor—and his good friend—Eichra Oren.

  Someone was going to pay for this.

  In blood.

  SIXTY-TWO Councils of War

  "Boss?"

  The familiar voice, sourceless and inaudible to the unaided ear, echoed within Eichra Oren's skull.

  The Antarctican moral debt assessor had just returned to his office and living quarters, built in the forest between the American encampment and the Elders' settlement. Now he shrugged out of his transparent filmsuit and stepped into the shower. The suit had protected him from the flame and smoke of the fire and had dealt in its own way with the sweat and grime of his exertions, but he still needed hot, soapy water running over his body in order to feel clean.

  He also needed to speak aloud, although it wasn't technically necessary. "What's up, Sam?"

  "I hate to disturb your privacy, Boss, but we wondered if we could have a word with you."

  The debt assessor's house drew its water supply directly from the veins of the great tree it was attached to. Even the energy required to heat the water had first fallen on a billion leaves as sunlight. Eichra Oren ducked his head under the shower tap, briefly enjoying the warm, gentle drumming on his scalp. " `We'?"

  "Mister Thoggosh and I. For reasons he'll explain when I give him a chance, he's sitting in a quiet corner of Nellus Glaser's greasy spoon at the moment, having nine or twelve beers and feeling extremely pissed off about being kicked out of his own office. I'm hanging out wherever the little dot goes when you turn off the TV. Boss, there's a pattern starting to take shape that neither of us likes very much. We thought you'd better know about it as soon as possible."

  Eichra Oren finished rinsing, willed the water off, and stepped out of the spiral shower enclosure—an idea he'd swiped from the Americans' most famous science-fiction writer—which made a door or curtain unnecessary. Currents of warm air sucked moisture out of the enclosure and would have dried his body if he'd let them, but he also needed the feel of a rough towel on his skin. He'd rubbed his face dry and was starting on his thick, wavy hair before he replied.

  "One incident, however spectacular and disastrous, hardly constitutes a pattern, does it?"

  "Why, Boss! I wouldn't have believed it possible, but I think you've hurt my feelings!"

  Another familiar voice, equally sourceless, amplified Sam's complaint. "Three incidents, my young friend. First came the `accident' that happened to Oasam, then the shuttle fire. Afterward, when I returned to my quarters, the fluorocarbon there had been contaminated with a deadly poison. I'm gratified to say that I discovered this act of sabotage before I removed my protective clothing."

  "Otherwise we'd both be communicating with you from electric limbo. Or is it purgatory? Anyway, who'd have guessed there'd be a digital afterlife? Ain't seance wonderful?"

  Despite his present fire-blackened mood, Eichra Oren chuckled to himself. He'd discussed all of the philosophical ramifications with Mister Thoggosh, Dlee Raftan Saon, and Rosalind until he was tired of thinking about them. Nobody would convince him that this wasn't his old friend, but only a clever copy, talking inside his head.

  Tossing his damp towel at a rack that would clean and dry it, he strode from the bath into the bedroom where a closet operating on similar principles had already cleaned and pressed his clothing. For the moment, he felt a great reluctance to resume one of the Hawaiian shirts and the faded Levis he'd worn since coming to 5023 Eris. Originally selected to help the Americans accept his presence here more readily, they remained as alien-feeling to him as, say, Gutierrez might have felt in one of Raftan's "ghillie" suits of multicolored fabric strips.

  Instead, he chose a lightweight, knee-length tunic from his native Elder-influenced Antarctican culture, although he did slip his feet into a pair of comfortable Japanese running shoes, sitting on the edge of the bed to tie them and thinking about the power laces he'd seen in one of the American movies Sam had come to love. Another thought passed through his mind—untransmitted to the beings he was conversing with—that he'd been on this asteroid too long and that it was past time to go home.

  "All right, granted," he told them at last. "Three incidents does point to a pattern of some kind, and I don't like it any better than you do. We no sooner deal with one set of problems, culminating in the defeat of a military invasion, when somebody tries to cause us even more grief. What do you two suggest?"

  "Aside from my own determination, becoming manifest even as we speak, to combine the surviving structural elements of the three American shuttles into one undamaged, `Elder-enhanced' spacecraft," Mister Thoggosh replied, obviously pausing to take a sip of beer, "I understand that you're already trying to find out precisely what happened to Sam, at the request of Model 17, is that correct?"

  "Danny Gutierrez." The man nodded, then realized that the gesture would go unperceived, since he was unwilling to pass along everything he might be feeling at the moment, even to Sam. "Once I got my emotions untangled and my thought processes straightened out, I realized I'd be doing exactly that, even if nobody had asked me to. Not just what happened to Sam, but who did it and why. I haven't had time to make much of a start yet. And I'm going to need Sam's help."

  "Just what I always wanted!" groaned the former dog, his tone only half serious. "Oh well, on the other hand, I guess it isn't everybody who gets to investigate his own murder!"

  "No, it isn't."

  Grinning, Eichra Oren took his sword of office from the bed where he'd tossed it, pulled it from its scabbard, and peered critically down each of its edges in turn, looking carefully for small nicks and scratches. The alloy the weapon was composed of lay far beyond the metallurgical abilities of the Soviet Americans, but their spacecraft had been constructed of an aggregate of rather odd materials and there was no telling what damage they might have done to his blade.

  Satisfied that his weapon was intact, he nevertheless slipped a small white ceramic hone from a pocket on the back of the scabbard, sat cross-legged on the bed with the sword across one knee, and gently stroked its already gleaming edges, a gesture as unnecessary—and yet somehow needful—as his shower and rough toweling.

  It seemed to be his day, he thought, for that sort of useless, necessary gesture, all around.

  After a few minutes of this, he spoke again. "Very well, here's your pattern, gentlebeings. And after sufficient reflection, it becomes a reasonably obvious one. Somebody is trying to set the Americans against us, and vice versa."

  "Again," Sam added.

  "I was very much afraid you'd say that." Mister Thoggosh gave forth with one of his counterfeit electronic sighs. "That was my thought, as well. You both know these Americans much better than I do. Politically speaking, how effective are their memories? Is it too much to hope that both parties have been through enough together by now, not to be manipulated again in such a manner?"

  "Why don't you tell us?" Sam demanded. "You're supposed to be the wise and ancient being here."

  "Then I greatly fear, Otusam, that it is my considered opinion as the wise and ancient being in residence here, that unless we discover who's really doing all these terrible things—and stop him cold, or her—precisely the same tensions and mistrust which threatened to destroy us all once before will return. To that end—discovering and stopping this culprit, I mean—I should like to assign the task to you, Eichra Oren. That is, if you're willing."

  Eichra Oren experienced a transitory glimpse through Mister Thoggosh's eyes, of the interior of the restaurant he'd taken refuge in while his quarters were decontaminating themselves. He wondered briefly what he'd see if he looked through Sam's "eyes." So far he hadn't asked. He surprised himself, replying without hesitation.

  "I'm willing, right enough, Mister Thoggosh, provided Sam is, too. And I suspect that we've already been presented with a clue of sorts. Our `culprit' has to be somebody unattached to either group, human or nautiloid."

  The giant mollusc made a sort of hiccuping noise of startled objection. "That's rather a leap, even for you, my young friend. How did you arrive at this conclusion?"

  "Yeah," Sam asked, "and who the hell does it leave?"

  "Excuse me, I probably should have said ex-Soviet American, rather than human, but even that doesn't say it quite right. I intended to exclude any of Horatio Gutierrez's people, even the former KGB agents among them. Whoever he or she happens to be, our villain has to be one of the most recent newcomers—Chinese, Russian, or American—not to have known about Mister Thoggosh's filmsuit, and that it would function as a layer of emergency protection against any poison."

  The Proprietor took a moment to mull it over. "It may be more a measure of my desperation than of objective reality, but that sounds reasonable to me. You're suggesting it's some straggling survivor of the recent battle, someone who didn't get rounded up by Tl*m*nch*l's security people or Colonel Tai's Extra-Special Forces?"