Heim looked upon him in his beauty and desolation, and found no words.

  Fiercely the Aleriona asked: “Guess you not how I must feel alone, I who think more Earthman than any save those few created like me? Know you not that glory there was to be on Earth, to lock with minds that had also no horizon, drown in your books and music and too much alive eye-arts? Barren are we, the Intellect Masters of the Garden of War; none may descend from us for troubling of Alerion’s peace; yet were we given the forces of life, that our will and fury rear tall as yours, and when we meet, those forces bind us through rites they knew who stood at Thermopylae. But…when you seized me, Gunnar Heim, that once you ransomed your daughter with me…afterward saw I that too was a rite.”

  Heim took a backward step. Coldness ran down his spine and out into every nerve end.

  Cynbe laughed. The sound was glorious to hear. “Let me not frighten you, Star Fox captain. I offer only that which you will take.” Very gently: “Friendship? Talk? Together-faring? I ask you never betrayal of your people. Well might I order a wresting from you of your knowledge and plans, but never. Think you are a war captive, and no harm that you share an awareness with your captor, who would be your friend.”

  My God, it leaped in Heim. The sounds about him came through as if across a barrier of great distance or of fever. Give me some time and…and I could use him.

  “Recall,” Cynbe urged, “my might on Alerion stands high. Well can I someday make a wall for the race that bred you, and so spare them that which is extinction.”

  No! Sheer reflex. I can’t. I can’t.

  Cynbe held out one hand. “Clasp this, as once you did,” he begged. “Give me oath you will seek no escape nor warning to your breedmates. Then no guard shall there be for you; freely as myself shall you betread our camps and ships.”

  “No!” Heim roared aloud.

  Cynbe recoiled. His teeth gleamed forth. “Little the honor you show to me,” he whispered.

  “I can’t give you a parole,” Heim said. Whatever you do, don’t turn him flat against you. There may be a chance here somewhere. Better dead, trying for a break, than—Something flashed across his brain. It was gone before he knew what it was. His consciousness twisted about and went in a pursuit that made the sweat and heart-banging take over his body again.

  Somehow, though every muscle was tight and the room had taken on an aspect of nightmare, he said dryly: “What’d be the use? I credit you with not being an idiot. You’d have an eye kept on me—now wouldn’t you?”

  Where a man might have been angered, Cynbe relaxed and chuckled. “Truth, at the least until Fox II be slain. Although afterward, when better we know each the other—”

  Heim captured the thought that had run from him. Recognizing it was like a blow. He couldn’t stop to weigh chances, they were probably altogether forlorn and he would probably get himself killed. Let’s try the thing out, at least. There’s no commitment right away. If it’s obviously not going to work, then I just won’t make the attempt.

  He ran a dry tongue over dry lips, husked, and said, “I couldn’t give you a parole anyway, at any time. You don’t really think like a human, Cynbe, or you’d know why.”

  Membranes dimmed those eyes. The golden head drooped. “But always in your history was honor and admiration among enemies,” the music protested.

  “Oh, yes, that. Look, I’m glad to shake your hand.” Oddly, it was no lie, and when the four slim fingers coiled around his, Helm did not let go at once, “But I can’t surrender to you, even verbally,” he said. “I guess my own instincts won’t let me.”

  “No, now, often have men—”

  “I tell you, this isn’t something that can be put in words. I can’t really feel what you said, about humans being naturally horrible to Aleriona. No more can you feel what I’m getting at. But you did give me some rough idea. Maybe. I could give you an idea of…well, what it’s like to be a man whose people have lost their homes.”

  “I listen.”

  “But I’d have to show you. The symbols, the—You haven’t any religion as humans understand it, you Aleriona, have you? That’s one item among many. If I showed you some things you could see and touch, and tried to explain what they stand for, maybe—Well, how about it? Shall we take a run to Bonne Chance?”

  Cynbe withdrew a step. Abruptly he had gone catlike.

  Heim mocked him with a chopping gesture. “Oh, so you’re scared I’ll try some stunt? Bring guards, of course. Or don’t bother, if you don’t dare.” He half turned. “I’d better get back to my own sort.”

  “You play on me,” Cynbe cried.

  “Nah. I say to hell with you, nothing else. The trouble is, you don’t know what you’ve done on this planet. You aren’t capable of knowing.”

  “Arvan!” Heim wasn’t sure how much was wrath in that explosion and how much was something else. “I take your challenge. Go we this now.”

  A wave of weakness passed through Heim. Whew! So I did read his psychology right. Endre couldn’t do better. The added thought came with returning strength. “Good,” he accepted shakily. “Because I am anxious for you to realize as much as possible. As you yourself said, you could be a powerful influence for helping Earth, if the war goes against us. Or if your side loses—that could happen, you know; our Navy’s superior to yours, if only we can muster the guts to use it—in that case, I’d have some voice in what’s to be done about Alerion. Let’s take Vadasz along. You remember him, I’m sure.”

  “Ye-e-es. Him did I gain tell in your party, though scant seemed he to matter. Why wish you him?”

  “He’s better with words than I am, He could probably make it clearer to you.” He speaks German, and I do a little. Cynbe knows English, French, doubtless some Spanish—but German?

  The admiral shrugged and gave an order. One soldier saluted and went out ahead of the others, who accompanied the leaders—

  —down the hall, into the morning, across the field to a military flyer. Cynbe stopped once, that he might slip contacts over eyeballs evolved beneath a red coal of a sun.

  Vadasz waited with his guards. He looked small, hunched and defeated. “Gunnar,” he said dully, “what’s this?”

  Heim explained. For a moment the Hungarian was puzzled. Then hope lit in his visage. “Whatever your idea is, Gunnar, I am with you,” he said, and masked out expression.

  Half a dozen troopers took places at the rear of the vehicle. Cynbe assumed the controls. “Put us down in the square,” Heim suggested, “and we’ll stroll around.”

  “Strange are your ways,” Cynbe cantillated. “We thought you were probed and understood, your weakness and shortsightenedness in our hands, but then Fox II departed. And now—”

  “Your problem is, sir, that Aleriona of any given class, except no doubt your own, are stereotypes,” Vadasz said. “Every human is a law to himself.”

  Cynbe made no reply. The flyer took off.

  It landed minutes later. The party debarked.

  Silence dwelt under an enormous sky. Fallen leaves covered the pavement and overflowed a dry fountain. A storm had battered the market booths, toppled cafe tables and chairs, ripped the gay little umbrellas. Only the cathedral rose firm. Cynbe moved toward it. “No,” Heim said, “let’s make that the end of the tour.”

  He started in the direction of the river. Rubbish rustled from his boots, echoes flung emptily back from walls. “Can’t you see what’s wrong?” he asked. “Men lived here.”

  “Hence-driven are they,” Cynbe answered. “Terrible to me Aleriona is an empty city. And yet, Gunnar Heim, was this a…a dayfly. Have you such rage that the less than a century is forsaken?”

  “It was going to grow,” Vadasz said.

  Cynbe made an ugly face.

  A small huddle of bones lay on the sidewalk. Heim pointed. ‘That was somebody’s pet dog,” he said. “It wondered where its gods had gone, and waited for them, and finally starved to death. Your doing.”

  “Flesh do you eat,” Cynbe retorted.

  A door creaked, swinging back and forth in the breeze off the water. Most of the house’s furniture could still be seen inside, dusty and rain-beaten. Near the threshold sprawled the remnants of a rag doll. Heim felt tears bite his eyes.

  Cynbe touched his hand. “Well remember I what are your children to you,” he crooned.

  Heim continued with long strides. “Humans live mostly for their children,” Vadasz said.

  The riparian esplanade came in sight. Beyond its rail, the Carsac ran wide and murmurous toward the bay. Sunlight flared off that surface, a trumpet call made visible.

  Now! Heim thought. The blood roared in him. “One of our poets said what I mean,” he spoke slowly. “Wenn wir sind an der Fluss gekommen, und im Falls wir die Möglichkeit sehen, dann werden wir ausspringen und nach dem Hafen Schwimmen.”

  He dared not look to see how Vadasz reacted. Dimly he heard Cynbe ask, in a bemused way, “What token those words?”

  With absolute coolness, Vadasz told him, “Man who is man does not surrender the hope of his loins unless manhood has died within.”

  Good lad! Heim cheered. But most of his consciousness crawled with the guns at his back.

  They started west along the embankment. “Still apprehend I not,” Cynbe sang. “Also Aleriona make their lives for those lives that are to come. What difference?”

  Heim didn’t believe he could hide his purpose much longer. So let it be this moment that he acted—the chance did not look too bad—let him at worst be shattered into darkness and the end of fear.

  He stopped and leaned on the rail. “The difference,” he said, “you can find in the same man’s words. Ich werde diesen Wesen in das Wasser sturzen. Dann springen wir beide. It’s, uh, it’s hard to translate. But look down here.”

  Vadasz joined them. Glee quirked his lips, a tiny bit, but he declared gravely: “The poem comes from a saying of Heraclitus. ‘No man bathes twice in the same river.”

  “That have I read.” Cynbe shuddered. “Seldom was thus dreadful a thought.”

  “You see?” Heim laid a hand on his shoulder and urged him forward, until he also stood bent over the rail. His gaze was forced to the flowing surface, and held there as if hypnotized. “Here’s a basic human symbol for you,” Heim said. “A river, bound to the sea, bound to flood a whole countryside if you dam it. Motion, power, destiny, time itself.”

  “Had we known such on Alerion—” Cynbe whispered. “Our world raised naked rock.”

  Heim closed fingers on his neck. The man’s free hand slapped down on the rail. A surge of arm and shoulder cast him and Cynbe across. They struck the current together.

  -7-

  His boots dragged him under. Letting the Aleriona go, he writhed about and clawed at the fastenings. The light changed from green to brown and then was gone. Water poured past, a cool and heavy force that tumbled him over and over. One off—two off—he struck upward with arms and legs. His lungs felt near bursting. Puff by grudged puff, he let out air. His mind began to wobble. Here goes, he thought, a breath or a firebeam. He stuck out as little of his face as he could, gasped, saw only the embankment, and went below again to swim.

  Thrice more he did likewise, before he guessed he had come far enough to risk looking for Vadasz. He shook the wetness from hair and eyes and continued in an Australian crawl. Above the tinted concrete that enclosed the river, trees trapped sunlight in green and gold. A few roofpeaks showed, otherwise his ceiling was the sky, infinitely blue.

  Before long Vadasz’s head popped into sight. Heim waved at him and threshed on until he was under a bridge. It gave some protection from searchers. He grabbed a pier and trod water. The minstrel caught up and panted.

  “Karhoztatas, Gunnar, you go as if the devil himself were after you!”

  “Isn’t he? Though it helps a lot that the Aleriona don’t see so well here. Contacts stop down the brightness for them, but Aurore doesn’t emit as much of the near infrared that they’re most sensitive to as The Eith does.” Heim found it calming to speak academically. It changed him from a hunted animal to a military tactician. “Just the same, we’d better stay down as much as we can. And stay separate, too. You know the old Quai des Coquillages—it’s still there? Okay. I’ll meet you underneath it. If one of us waits an hour, let him assume the other bought a farm.”

  Since Vadasz looked more exhausted than himself, Heim started first. He didn’t hurry, mostly he let the current bear him along, and reached the river-mouth in good shape: so good that the sheer wonder of his escape got to him. He spent his time beneath the dock simply admiring light-sparkles on water, the rake of masts, the fluid chill enclosing his skin, the roughness of the bollard he held, the chuckle against hulls and their many vivid colors. His mood had just begun to ravel away in worry (Damn, I should’ve told Endre what I know) when the Magyar arrived.

  “Will they not seek us here first?” Vadasz asked.

  “M-m, I doubt it,” Heim said. “Don’t forget, they’re from a dry planet. The idea of using water for anything but drinking doesn’t come natural to them; you notice they’ve left all these facilities untouched, though coastwise transport would be a handy supplement to their air freighters. Their first assumption ought to be that we went ashore as soon as we could and holed up in town. Still, we want to get out of here as fast as possible, so let’s find a boat in working order.”

  “There you must choose. I am a landlubber by heritage.”

  “Well, I never got along with horses, so honors are even.” Helm risked climbing onto the wharf for an overview. He picked a good-looking pleasure craft, a submersible hydrofoil, and trotted to her. Once below, she’d be undetectable by any equipment the Aleriona had.

  “Can we get inside?” the minstrel asked from the water.

  “Ja, she’s not locked. Yachtsmen trust each other.” Heim unslipped the lines, pulled the canopy back, and extended an arm to help Vadasz up on deck. They tumbled into the cabin and closed the glasite. “Now, you check the radio while I have a look at the engine.”

  A year’s neglect had not much hurt the vessel. In fact, the sun had charged her accumulators to maximum. Her bottom was foul, but that could be lived with. Excitement surged in Heim. “My original idea was to find a communicator somewhere in town, get word to camp, and then skulk about hoping we wouldn’t be tracked down and wouldn’t starve,” he said. “But now—hell, we might get back in person! It’ll at least be harder for the enemy to pick up our message and send a rover bomb after the source, if we’re at sea. Let’s go.”

  The motor chugged. The boat slid from land. Vadasz peered anxiously out the dome. “Why are they not after us in full cry?”

  “I told you how come. They haven’t yet guessed we’d try this way. Also, they must be disorganized as a bawdyhouse on Monday morning, after what I did to Cynbe.” Nonetheless, Heim was glad to leave obstacles behind and submerge. He went to the greatest admissible depth, set the pilot for a southeasterly course, and began peeling off his wet clothes.

  Vadasz regarded him with awe. “Gunnar,” he said, in a tone suggesting he was not far from tears, “I will make a ballad about this, and it will not be good enough, but still they will sing it a thousand years hence. Because your name will live that long.”

  “Aw, shucks, Endre. Don’t make my ears burn.”

  “No, I must say what’s true. However did you conceive it?”

  Heim turned up the heater to dry himself. The ocean around—murky green, with now and then a curiously shaped fish darting by—would dissipate infrared radiation. He had an enormous sense of homecoming, as if again he were a boy on the seas of Gea. For the time being, it overrode everything else. The frailty and incompleteness of his triumph could be seen later; let him now savor it.

  “I didn’t,” he confessed. “The idea sort of grew. Cynbe was eager to…be friends or whatever. I talked him into visiting Bonne Chance, in the hope something might turn up that I could use for a break. It occurred to me that probably none of his gang could swim, so the riverside looked like the best place. I asked to have you along because we could use German under their noses. Also, having two of us doubled the odds that one would get away.”

  Vadasz’s deference cracked in a grin. “That was the most awful Schweindeutsch I have yet heard. You are no linguist.”

  Memory struck at Heim. “No,” he said harshly. Trying to keep his happiness a while, he went on fast: “We were there when I thought if I could pitch Cynbe in the drink, his guards would go all out to save him, rather than run along the bank shooting at us. If you can’t swim yourself, you’ve got a tough job rescuing another non-swimmer.”

  “Do you think he drowned?”

  “Well, one can always hope,” Heim said, less callously than he sounded. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they lost at least a couple of warriors fishing him out. But we’ve likely not seen the last of him. Even if he did drown, they can probably get him to a revival machine before brain decay sets in.—Still, while he’s out of commission, things are apt to be rather muddled for the enemy. Not that the organization can’t operate smoothly without him. But for a while it’ll lack direction, as far as you and I are concerned, anyhow. That’s the time we’ll use to put well out to sea and call de Vigny.”

  “Why…yes, surely they can send a fast flyer to our rescue.” Vadasz leaned back with a cat-outside-canary smile. “La belle Danielle is going to see me even before she expected. Dare I say, before she hoped?”

  Anger sheeted in Heim. “Dog your hatch, you clotbrain!” he snarled. “This is no picnic. We’ll be lucky to head off disaster.”

  “What—what—” Color left Vadasz’s cheeks. He winced away from the big man. “Gunnar, did I say—”

  “Listen.” Heim slammed a fist on the arm of his seat. “Our amateur try at espionage blew up the whole shebang. Have you forgotten the mission was to negotiate terms to keep our people from starving? That’s been dimmed. Maybe something can be done later, but right now we’re only concerned with staying alive. Our plan for evacuating refugees is out the airlock too. Cynbe jumped to the conclusion that Fox herself is on this planet. He’s recalled a lancer and a cruiser to supplement his flagship. Between them, those three can detect Meroeth raising mass, and clobber her. It won’t do us any good to leave her doggo, either. They’ll have air patrols with high-gain detectors sweeping the whole planet. So there goes de Vigny’s nice hidey-hole at Lac aux Nuages. For that matter, with three ships this close to her position, Fox herself is in mortal danger.