“The flowing stone is already far below where it used to be. Soon we will need no one to keep it from bursting through. You have saved the holy city.”

  But at the treaty tower, the watermages saw the steam and wailed. “You’re making our holy water vanish!”

  “Will the rains not come?” said Brickel. “When the stonefather restores the stone of the lake bed, will the rivers not flow and fill it again? Now in your hot blood and mine, the mixture of water and stone that flows in all of us, we will sign again the treaty that you broke.”

  The ancient document was sealed under clear quartz; Brickel did not need Runnel’s help to separate the quartz from the surrounding stone and lift it off. There he and the watermages opened their veins and dipped pens in blood and signed their names again.

  When it was done, Lord Brickel replaced the quartz and fused it again to the granite pedestal.

  “Now give us back our lake!” they said.

  Runnel first restored the sacred spring and stream that flowed down the slope of Mitherjut. Then he worked his way from the farthest edge of the Mitherlough, shrinking the stone of the lake bed so it was no longer porous. But he did not release the water from the stone; instead, he guided it to flow down to the magma, ever deeper, cooling it more and more. “Yes,” murmured the rockbrothers. “It will be as if the stone had never been hot. The flowing stone is deep again, where it belongs.”

  As the lake bed sank back down, the steam continued to rise. It was not until well after dark that the entire lake bed had been restored. Now the waters of the inflowing rivers flowed out onto the stone, and slowly the lake began to form itself again. It would take many days to refill the lake as it had been. But it would refill.

  “Move my household into the city,” said Lord Brickel. “We will have a new home in the shadow of Mitherjut, near the walls our ancestors built. I will invite as many stonemages to come to the city as you now have watermages. One for one, our numbers equal. We will sit on your councils in exactly the same numbers as you. We will have an equal voice in the making of the laws. All according to the treaty we have signed today.”

  And the watermages said yes, for they could see that their lake was coming back to its place.

  Runnel flowed his stoneclant into the rock of the treaty tower.

  High above, at the crest of the Mitherjut, his body of flesh rose upward out of the stone.

  But it was not the same body that had sunk into the stone earlier that day. For he had been too closely bonded with the granite of the mountain, and now his skin was hard and flecked; there was stone in him, all through him. He moved as flexibly as ever, but he could feel that his feet would never grow tired from walking, and only the sharpest obsidian could cut his skin. He was not pure stone like his clant had been, but neither was he pure flesh and bone.

  He put on his clothes again and made his way down the way he had come. No one noticed him in the gathering night. He was just a boy walking the streets.

  When he got to the low port across from Hetterferry, he only had to tell the ferryman that he was Lord Brickel’s servant. After the events of this day, that paid for his passage, for everyone feared the stonemage. After all, they believed that it was Brickel who had done all that was done today. They could not afford to cross him by offending his servant.

  At the stonemage’s house, Demwor was already there, but his errand had changed. Instead of disposing of the stonemage’s wealth, he was supervising the move to the upper city. Runnel immediately began to help with the work, and if anyone noticed that he was now carrying loads far heavier than anything Ebb could bear, they said nothing about it. In the darkness, no one could see how his skin had changed.

  All night they worked, carrying everything to the ferry. On the other side, a team of puddlesons lifted everything onto their backs and carried it up the long stair.

  By dawn, Lord Brickel’s new house was ready, and, exhausted, they all fell into bed and slept well into the next day.

  Except for Runnel, who was not weary. He lay down on the stone of the new cellar floor and fused the stone walls of the house together into living rock. This was the home of a stonefather—it would look like it.

  Lord Brickel came to him late in the morning.

  “What were you thinking?” he said softly.

  “Isn’t this what you and your friends were working for?” asked Runnel.

  “Were you planning this, then? All of it?”

  “None of it,” said Runnel. “I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was doing.” Then he told Lord Brickel about the rockbrothers, and the near volcano that the water of the lake had cooled. “I didn’t know the water could do that,” he said.

  “It was Tewstan that guided you,” said Brickel.

  “Look what it did to me,” said Runnel.

  He led Brickel up the stairs and stood where the light shone through a window.

  Brickel touched his skin. “You are part of the Mitherjut now,” he said, in awe. “I’ve heard of such things, a man taking the stone inside himself. But I’ve never seen it.”

  “Will it go away?”

  “No,” said Brickel. “Not if the lore is true.”

  “I don’t know anything,” said Runnel. “Will you take me as your apprentice? Will you teach me?”

  “Me? Teach you, a stonefather?”

  “Is there a stonefather somewhere in the world right now who can do it?” “No,” said Brickel.

  “Then what you know, all the lore, all the secrets, I have to learn it. Will you teach me?”

  “Of course.”

  “And let the watermages go on believing that you’re the stonefather,” said Runnel. “I don’t want to be Lord Runnel Stonefather.”

  “You have no choice,” said Brickel. “Among stonemages, that is your name, though we shorten it. ‘Runnel Stanfar.’”

  “But my common name, here on the streets of the city. Let me be…Runnel Cobbleskin. Your apprentice. Your servant. Let this skin be known as something that you did for me, to make me strong and tough.”

  “You really don’t want to take your rightful place of authority?”

  “I’m a child,” said Runnel.

  “You were man enough yesterday, to steal the lake from the wetwizards and burn it into steam.” Brickel laughed. “Once I stopped being so terrified myself, it was really funny.”

  “If I had known what I was doing there at the bridge, I would never have done it,” said Runnel.

  “You should have obeyed me. But it turned out well.”

  “I’ll obey you now,” said Runnel.

  Brickel laughed. “Except when you think I’m wrong.”

  The days and weeks and months passed by, and Runnel’s new stoneskin did not stop him from growing taller, till he had a man’s height. Stonemages came to the city, many of them to live there and take part in the government of the place, but many more merely to meet the young apprentice who had restored them to their holy city. Runnel went with them and stood in the circle when the leading rockbrothers built back the dome of living rock that had once enclosed the bodies of those who saved the city from the Verylludden.

  They showed no outward sign of his prominence among them, lest the watermages realize that Runnel was their stonefather. But they all knew that it was Runnel whose power did most of the stoneshaping; that it was Runnel who drew up to the surface the fading outselves of the dead rockbrothers. He fashioned for them bodies of stone, which stood around the inside wall of the dome, their feet fused to the living rock. As long as their outselves persisted, they would have the use of these bodies; and when they faded, these would be their memorial.

  When Runnel Cobbleskin was eighteen years old, by the nearest reckoning he could come up with, he went to Lark, who had long since come into her own as a birdfriend, keeping doves at the crest of Mitherjut that carried messages far and wide. He took her into his arms, and she held him close.

  “Lark,” said Runnel, “I want to hold you forever, the way the living stone holds the waters of the Mitherlough.”

  “I’m only a weak-skinned girl, and mostly water,” she said. “You’re too hardskinned for me now, Stanfar. How can I take a stone as my husband?”

  “Gentle can be as good as soft,” he answered. “And there’s no burden I cannot lift for you.”

  “I have flown with my birds high above the earth,” she said. “But I will make my nest with you.”

  The Gold Bug

  It was all based on trust, wasn’t it? You join the Fleet, you train until it’s as natural to pilot your ship as to dance, as reflexive to fight with the ship’s weapons as to use your fists. Then you go where they send you, leaving behind your family and friends, knowing that relativistic travel ensures you’ll never see them again. To all intents and purposes, you’ve already given your life for your country—no, your species.

  You can only trust that when you commit to battle near some far-off world, the commander they’ve assigned to you will actually win, will make it worth the sacrifice.

  As to you, personally, does it matter whether you live or die? Sel Menach asked himself this question more than once during the two-year voyage to war. Sometimes he thought it really didn’t matter at all. All he cared about was victory.

  But when they got to the Formic world, forty lightyears from Earth, and he and his warship hurtled from the transport and faced the enemy formation, he discovered that no matter what his mind decided, his body was determined to live.

  It was a child’s voice he heard over his headset, giving commands to his squad. And another child giving commands to his commander. They had been warned; it had been explained to them. Mazer Rackham’s voice came over the ansible, acquainting them with how these children had been screened, trained, tested, and now the finest military minds among the human race, the most relentlessly competitive, with the fastest reflexes, would give them their orders.

  “They don’t know the test they’re taking is real,” said Rackham. “To them, it’s all about winning. I can assure you that the supreme commander, Ender Wiggin, does not waste his resources. He will be as careful of your lives as if he knew you were there.”

  We’re trusting our lives to children?

  But what choice did they have?

  In some ways, the actual battle was not too different from what the children must be experiencing on their simulators. Inside Sel’s fighter, there was no sound except the voices of commanders and fellow pilots, and the Dvoak and Smetana he always played to help keep him calm and focused. When a fellow pilot was killed, all Sel heard was the soft voice of the computer saying “Connection broken with” and the fighter’s i.d. If the killed ship had been maneuvering fairly nearby, there would be a blink of light on the simulator.

  An hour after they poured out of the transport it was over. Total victory. Not a Formic ship in the sky. And their losses had been, all else being equal, light.

  Mazer’s promise about the child commanders turned out to be true. When the surviving fighters returned to the transport and sat together to watch the replay of the battle on the large simulator, no one could find a single decision to criticize.

  Each of the individual children had done well; but on the third viewing Sel began to grasp thegenius of Ender Wiggin’s overall strategy. He had maneuvered the enemy into an untenable position, forcing the enemy to expose himself, the enemy to be aggressive, the enemy to sustain the losses. Wiggin had been careful of lives that he didn’t even know were involved.

  But victory in this place was not complete victory. Who knew how many ships were under construction on the planet’s surface? How long would it be before a new enemy arose?

  They watched the succeeding battles, fought near different worlds, on their simulator, and Sel’s awe at these children only grew. There were mistakes, but the overall design of the battles was always so deft that they were all in awe of Ender Wiggin.

  As the Admiral of their expedition said, “No military force has ever been so well commanded or so wisely used.”

  Then came the final battle, when they were lost in despair. Vast swarms of enemy ships hopelessly outnumbered the human fleet.

  “If he thinks it’s a game,” said Sel to his friend Ramon, “or even a test, what’s to stop him from refusing to go on?”

  “Refuse or not, we’ve lost the war right here.”

  And this time it seemed that Wiggin had met his match, as he broke with all his previous practice and simply sent his paltry fleet straight into the swarming enemy.

  But there was a method to his madness, it seemed. As they listened to the chatter—the boy called Bean talking to Ender Wiggin—they began to get a glimmer of what Ender might have in mind.

  And then the order came, the final mad assault on the planet’s surface, the detonation of the M.D. device, the disintegration of the entire world.

  Victory.

  They celebrated. They drank. They wept for joy. They remembered all the people back on Earth that once upon a time they knew and loved, and wept again in grief. For by now they were all forty years older, and before this fleet could return eighty years would have gone by.

  But they weren’t going home. They had never planned to. Knowing what relativistic space travel would do to them, that they could never return to the lives they had once had, they set out on this expedition knowing that if they won, it would cease to be a military fleet and become, all at once, a colony.

  They had expected to have to fight for control of the planet’s surface, and it was to be a mission of extermination, like the one the Formics had launched against Earth. But after that last battle, it wasn’t necessary. The queens of all the conquered worlds had been gathered together on the last planet. All their eggs in one basket, so to speak. When they died, the workers and larvae on all the worlds died with them. Not immediately, but within hours or days.

  Sel Menach set foot on the Formic planet that the enemy had tried to protect from them, not as a soldier, but as a xenobiologist. It was his job to find some way to protect the alien life forms from the terrestrial ones, and vice versa. Could alien parasites pose a danger to them?

  The answer was yes. Until Sel found a comprehensive drug treatment, more fighter pilots died from near-microscopic airborne burrowing worms than had died in their battle in space.

  But he found the treatment, which, injected monthly, made human blood fatal to the worms. He found ways to keep maize and amaranth from succumbing to alien molds.

  Within a few years, his expertise became less important, on a daily basis, and he was just another worker in the human colony. The Admiral was now the Governor. And Sel Menach was, to all intents and purposes, a peasant.

  He, like half the males, lost the lottery to have a fertile mate. The unchosen men had the option of taking drugs to control their libido, so they were not consumed with envy or frustration. Sel did not bother with the drug. Not that he felt no desire; he simply had better things to think about. He worked his turn as a farmer during the days, then returned to his lab at night to work on genetic solutions to the problems of yield and storage and pest resistance.

  Others, with different areas of expertise, studied climate patterns and determined that this world was in a cycle of ice ages like those of Earth, though the hot phases would never be as intense or brief as the warm times on Earth. Earth would have another Ice Age long before this planet did; but the cold here would be deeper, and the terrestrial seeds and roots were not adapted. It was Sel’s job to help them adapt to the extreme cold so that the plants that humans depended on for survival would outlast the thousands of years of winter, when at last they came.

  It would be millennia from now. But that was the way Sel had learned to think. It was the only attitude that could make his losses bearable. I am not living in my own lifetime now, he told himself. I am living on a planetary scale. I am living for the survival of generations of children unrelated to me.

  He was nearly fifty years old when the first generation of children reached a marriageable age. He went to the Governor then and told him that the first preference for mating should go to the older men who had not mated in the first generation. “These would be, in effect, exogamous marriages,” Sel explained. “If this new generation marries only each other, then the gene pool will be too small; if they bring in the sperm of the older men who never mated, then the gene pool is vastly increased.”

  The Governor sighed. “This is not going to be a popular decision,” he said. “These young people were not pilots or soldiers. They know the Formics only as legends and pictures and vids. They want to marry for love. They’ll assume at once that your advice is that of an old man yearning for young flesh.”

  “Which is why I remove myself from consideration. I recommend as a scientist, not as a man; ten generations from now, we’ll be far stronger for having followed my advice.”

  In the end, the Governor made it a voluntary and temporary thing. Young women who agreed would be married to older men, but only until one child was born. That child would be raised by the mother and her new, younger mate, with the biological father as godfather to the child. Some women refused. Most consented—and, as the Governor said to Sel, in private, “It was because of the great respect they have for you. They know they eat so bountifully because of your work with the plants and animals they use for food.”

  Sel refused to accept the praise. “I only happen to be our chief xenobiologist. If another man of the same training had been in my place, he would have done the same things.”

  “The problem we have, my friend,” said the Governor, “is that many of the women insist that it’s your seed they want, and no other.”

  “But mine is not available,” said Sel.

  “Forgive my asking, my friend, but don’t you like women?”

  “Like them, love them—and children, too,” said Sel. “But it will never be said that I benefitted personally from this odd little experiment in exogamy.”

  “You disappoint many women.”

  “I would also disappoint them if I mated with them. My children would probably be as ugly as me, and as stubborn.”