“While dromids are prone to develop militant new religions overnight, I have heard. On this island, then, a new one happens to have turned against the ouranids, no? Tragic—though not unlike persecutions on Earth, I expect.”

  “Anyhow, we can’t help till we have a lot more knowledge. Jan and I are trying for that. Mostly, we follow the usual procedures, field studies, observations, interviews, et cetera. We’re experimenting with mindscan as well. Tonight it gets our most thorough test yet.”

  Chrisoula sat upright, gripped. “What will you do?”

  “We’ll draw a blank, probably. You’re a scientist yourself, you know how rare the real breakthroughs are. We’re only slogging along.”

  When she remained silent, Hugh filled his lungs for talk. “To be exact,” he proceeded, “Jan’s been cultivating a ‘wild’ ouranid, I a ‘wild’ dromid. We’ve persuaded them to wear miniaturized mindscan transmitters, and have been working with them to develop our own capability. What we can receive and interpret isn’t much. Our eyes and ears give us a lot more information. Still, this is special information. Supplementary.

  “The actual layout? Oh, our native wears a button-sized unit glued onto the head, if you can talk about the head of an ouranid. A mercury cell gives power. The unit broadcasts a recognition signal on the radio band—microwatts, but ample to lock onto. Data transmission naturally requires plenty of bandwidth, so that’s on an ultraviolet beam.”

  “What?” Chrisoula was startled. “Isn’t that dangerous to the dromids? I was taught they, most animals, have to take shelter when a sun flares.”

  “This is safely weak, also because of energy limitations,” Hugh replied. “Obviously, it’s limited to line-of-sight and a few kilometers through air. At that, natives of either kind tell us they can spot the fluorescence of gas along the path. Not that they describe it in such terms!

  “So Jan and I go out in our separate aircraft. We hover too high to be seen, activate the transmitters by a signal, and ‘tune in’ on our individual subjects through our amplifiers and computers. As I said, to date we’ve gotten extremely limited results; it’s a mighty poor kind of telepathy. This night we’re planning an intensive effort, because an important thing will be happening.”

  She didn’t inquire immediately what that was, but asked instead: “Have you ever tried sending to a native, rather than receiving?”

  “What? No, nobody has. For one thing, we don’t want them to know they’re being scanned. That would likely affect their behavior. For another thing, no Medeans have anything like a scientific culture. I doubt they could comprehend the idea.”

  “Really? With their high metabolic rate, I should guess they think faster than us.”

  “They seem to, though we can’t measure that till we’ve improved mindscan to the point of decoding verbal thought. All we’ve identified thus far is sensory impressions. Come back in a hundred years and maybe someone can tell you.”

  The talk had gotten so academic that Hugh positively welcomed the diversion when an ouranid appeared. He recognized the individual in spite of her being larger than usual, her globe distended with hydrogen to a full four meters of diameter. This made her fur sparse across the skin, taking away its mother-of-pearl sheen. Just the same, she was a handsome sight as she passed the treetops, crosswind and then downward. Prehensile tendrils streaming below in variable configurations, to help pilot a jet-propelled swim through the air, she hardly deserved the name “flying jellyfish”—though he had seen pictures of Earthside Portuguese men-of-war and thought them beautiful. He could sympathize with Jannika’s attraction to this race.

  He rose. “Meet a local character,” he invited Chrisoula. “She has a little English. However, don’t expect to understand her pronunciation at once. Probably she’s come to make a quick swap before she rejoins her group for the big affair tonight.”

  The woman got up. “Swap? Exchange?”

  “Yeah. Niallah answers questions, tells legends, sings songs, demonstrates maneuvers, whatever we request. Afterward we have to play human music for her. Schonberg, usually; she dotes on Schonberg.”

  —Loping along a clifftop, Erakoum spied Sarhouth clearly against Mardudek. The moon was waxing toward solar fullness as it crossed that coal-glow. Its disc was dwarfed by the enormous body behind, was actually smaller to the eye than the spot which also passed in view, and its cold luminance had well-nigh been drowned earlier when it moved over one of the belts which changeably girded Mardudek. They grew bright after dark, those belts; thinkers like Yasari believed they cast back the light of the suns.

  For an instant, Erakoum was captured by the image, spheres traveling through unbounded spaces in circles within circles. She hoped to become a thinker herself. But it could not be soon. She still had her second breeding to go through, her second segment to shed and guard; the young that it presently brought forth to help rear; and then she would be male, with begetting of her own to do—before that need faded out likewise and there was time for serenity.

  She remembered in a stab of pain how her first birthing had been for naught. The segment staggered about weakly for a short while, until it lay down and died as so many were doing, so many. The Flyers had brought that curse. It had to be them, as the Prophet Illdamen preached. Their new way of faring west when they grew old, never to return, instead of sinking down and rotting back into the soil as Mardudek intended, surely angered the Red Watcher. Upon the People had been laid the task of avenging this sin against the natural order of things. Proof lay in the fact that females who slew and ate a Flyer shortly before mating always shed healthy segments which brought forth live offspring.

  Erakoum swore that tonight she was going to be such a female.

  She stopped for breath and to search the landscape. These precipices rimmed a fiord whose waters lay more placid than the sea beyond, brilliant under the radiance from the east. A dark patch bespoke a mass of floating weed. Might it be plants of the kind from which the Flyers budded in their abominable infancy? Erakoum could not tell at her distance. Sometimes valiant members of her race had ventured out on logs, trying to reach those beds and destroy them; but they had failed, and often drowned, in treacherous great waves.

  Westward rose rugged, wooded hills where darkness laired. Athwart their shadows, sparks danced glittering golden, by the thousands—the millions, across the land. They were firemites. Through more than a hundred days and nights, they had been first eggs, then worms, deep down in forest mould. Now Sarhouth was passing across Mardudek in the exact path that mysteriously summoned them. They crept to the surface, spread wings which they had been growing, and went aloft, agleam, to mate.

  Once it had meant no more to the People than a pretty sight. Then the need came into being, to kill Flyers…and Flyers gathered in hordes to feed on yonder swarms. Hovering low, careless in their glee, they became more vulnerable to surprise than they commonly were. Erakoum hefted an obsidian-headed javelin. She had five more lashed across her back. A number of the People had spent the day setting out nets and snares, but she considered that impractical; the Flyers were not ordinary winged quarry. Anyhow, she wanted to fling a spear, bring down a victim, sink fangs into its thin flesh, herself!

  The night muttered around her. She drank odors of soil, growth, decay, nectar, blood, striving. Warmth from Mardudek streamed through a chill breeze to lave her pelt. Half-glimpsed flitting shapes, half-heard as they rustled the brush, were her fellows. They were not gathered into a single company, they coursed as each saw fit, but they kept more or less within earshot, and whoever first saw or winded a Flyer would signal it with a whistle.

  Erakoum was farther separated from her nearest comrade than any of them were. The others feared that the light-beam reaching upward from the little shell on her head would give them away. She deemed it unlikely, as faint as the bluish gleam was. The human called Hugh paid her well in trade goods to wear the talisman whenever he asked and afterward discuss her experiences with him. For her part, she knew a darkling thrill at such times, akin to nothing else in the world, and knowledge came into her, as if through dreams but more real. These gains were worth a slight handicap on an occasional hunt… even tonight’s hunt.

  Moreover—There was something she had not told Hugh, because he had not told her earlier. It was among the things she learned without words from the gleam-shell. A certain Flyer also carried one, which also kept it in eldritch contact with a human.

  The big grotesque creatures were frank about being neutral in the strike between People and Flyers. Erakoum did not hold that against them. This was not their home, and they could not be expected to care if it grew desolate. Yet she had shrewdly deduced that they would try to keep in its burrow their equal intimacy with members of both breeds.

  If Hugh had been anxious for her to be soul-tied to him this night, doubtless another human wanted the same for a Flyer. It would be a special joy to her to bring that one down. Besides, looking as she fared for a pale ray among firemites and stars might lead her toward a whole pack of enemies. Rested, she began to trot inland.

  Erakoum was hunting—

  Jannika Rezek was forever homesick for a land where she had never lived.

  Her parents had politically offended the government of the Danubian Federation. It informed them they need not enter a reindoctrination hospice if they would volunteer to represent their country in the next shipful of personnel to Medea. That was scarcely a choice. Nevertheless, her father told her afterward that his last thought, as he sank down into suspended animation, was of the irony that when he awakened, none of his judges would be alive and nobody would remember what his opinions had been, let alone care. As a matter of fact, he learned at his goal that there was no longer a Danubian Federation.

  The rule remained in force that, except for crewfolk, no person went in the opposite direction. A trip was too expensive for a passenger to be carried who would land on Earth as a useless castaway out of past history. Husband and wife made the best they could of their exile. Both physicians, they were eagerly received in Armstrong and its agricultural hinterland. By the modest standards of Medea, they prospered, finally wining a rare privilege. The human population had now been legally stabilized. More would overcrowd the limited areas suitable for settlement, as well as wreaking havoc on environments which the colony existed to study. To balance reproductive failures, a few couples per generation were allowed three children. Jannika’s folk were among these.

  Thus everybody, herself perforce included, reckoned hers a happy childhood. It was a highly civilized one, too. In the molecules of reels kept at the Center was stored most of mankind’s total culture. Industry was, at last, sufficiently developed that well-to-do families could have sets which retrieved the data in as full hologrammic and stereophonic detail as desired. Her parents took advantage of this to ease their nostalgia, never thinking what it might do to younger hearts. Jannika grew up among vivid ghosts: old towers in Prague, springtime in the Böhmerwald, Christmas in a village which centuries had touched only lightly, a concert hall where music rolled in glory across a festive-clad audience which outnumbered the dwellers in Armstrong, replications of events which once made Earth tremble, gongs, poetry, books, legends, fairy tales.… She sometimes wondered if she had gone into xenology because the ouranids were light, bright, magical beings in a fairy tale.

  Today, when Hugh led Chrisoula outside, she had stood for a moment staring after them. Abruptly the room pressed in as if to choke her. She had done what she could in the way of brightening it with drapes, pictures, keepsakes. At present, however, it was bestrewn with field gear; and she hated disorder. He cared naught.

  The question rose afresh: How much did he care at all, any longer? They were in love when they married, yes, of course, but even then she recognized it was in high degree a marriage of convenience. Both were after appointments to an outpost station where they would maximize their chances of doing really significant, original research. Wedded couples were preferred, on the theory that they would be less distracted from their work than singletons. When they had their first babies, they were customarily transferred to a town.

  She and Hugh quarreled about that. Social pressure—remarks, hints, embarrassed avoidance of the subject—was mounting on them to reproduce. Within population limits, it was desirable to keep the gene pool as large as possible. She was getting along in age, a bit, for motherhood. He was more than willing. But he took for granted that she would maintain the home, hold down the desk job, while he continued in the field…

  She must not reprove him when he came back from his flirtatious little stroll. She lost her temper too often these days, grew outright shrewish, till he stormed from the hut or else grabbed the whiskey and started glugging. He was not a bad man—at the core, he was a good man, she amended hastily—thoughtless in many ways but well-meaning. At her time of life, she couldn’t likely do any better.

  Although—She felt the heat in her cheeks, made a gesture as if to fend off the memory, and failed. It was two days old.

  Having learned from A’i’ach about the Shining Time, she wanted to gather specimens of the glitterbug larvae. Hitherto humans had merely known that the adult insectoids swarmed aloft at intervals of approximately a year. If that was important to the inhabitants of Hansonia, she ought to know more. Observe for herself, enlist the aid of biologists, ecologists, chemists—She asked Piet Marais where to go, and he offered to come along. “The idea should have occurred to me before,” he said. “Living in humus, the worms must influence plant growth.”

  Moister soil was required than existed at Port Kato. They went several kilometers to a lake. The walking was easy, for dense foliage overhead inhibited underbrush. Softness muffled footfalls, trees formed high-arched naves, multiple rays of light passed through dusk and fragrances to fleck the ground or glance off small wings, a sound as of lyres rippled from an unseen throat.

  “How delightful,” Piet said after a while.

  He was looking at her, not ahead. She became very conscious of his blond handsomeness. And his youth, she reminded herself, he was her junior by well-nigh a decade, though mature, considerate, educated, wholly a man. “Yes,” she blurted. “I wish I could appreciate it as you do.”

  “It is not Earth,” he discerned. She realized that her answer had been less noncommittal than intended.

  “I wasn’t pitying myself,” she said fast. “Please don’t think that. I do see beauty here, and fascination, and freedom, oh, yes, we’re lucky on Medea.” Attempting to laugh: “Why, on Earth, what would I have done for ouranids?”

  “You love them, don’t you?” he asked gravely. She nodded. He laid a hand on her bare arm. “You have a great deal of love in you, Jannika.”

  She made a confused effort to see herself through his eyes. Medium-sized, with a figure she knew was stunning; dark hair worn shoulder length, with gray streaks that she wished Hugh would insist were premature; high cheekbones, tilted nose, pointed chin, large brown eyes, ivory complexion. Still, though Piet was a bachelor, someone that attractive needn’t be desperate, he could meet girls in town and keep up acquaintance by holocom. He shouldn’t be this appreciative of her. She shouldn’t respond. True, she’d had other men a few times, before and after she married. But never in Port Kato; too much likelihood of complications, and she’d been furious when Hugh got involved locally. Worse yet, she suspected Piet saw her as more than a possible partner in a frolic. That could break lives apart.

  “Oh, look,” she said, and disengaged from his touch in order to point at a cluster of seed pyramids. Meanwhile her mind came to the rescue. “I quite forgot, I meant to tell you, I got a call today from Professor al-Ghazi. We think we’ve found what makes the glitter bugs metamorphose and swarm.”

  “Eh?” He blinked. “I didn’t realize anybody was working on that.”

  “Well, it was a, a notion that occurred to me after my special ouranid started me speculating about them. He, A’i’ach, I mean, he told me the time is not strictly seasonal—that is not necessary here in the tropics—but set by Jason—the moon,” she added, because the name that humans had bestowed on the innermost of the larger satellites happened to resemble a word which humans had adopted, given by dromids in the Enrique area to an analog of the sirocco wind.

  “He says the metamorphoses come during particular transits of Jason across Argo,” she continued. “Roughly, every four hundredth. To be exact, the figure is every hundred and twenty-seven Medean days, plus or minus a trifle. The natives here are as keenly conscious of heavenly bodies as everywhere else. The ouranids make a festival of the swarming; they find glitterbugs delicious. Well, this gave me an idea, and I called the Center and requested an astronomical computation. It seems I was right.”

  “Astronomical cues, for a worm underground?” Marais exclaimed.

  “Well, you doubtless recall how Jason excites electrical activity in the atmosphere of Argo, like Io with Jupiter—” the solar system, where Earth has her dwelling! “In this case, there’s a beaming effect on one of the radio frequencies that are generated, a kind of natural maser. Therefore those waves only reach Medea when the two moons are on their line of nodes. And that is the exact period my friend was describing. The phase is right, too.”

  “But can the worms detect so weak a signal?”

  “I think it is clear that they do. How, I cannot tell without help from specialists. Remember, though, Phrixus and Helle create little interference. Organisms can be fantastically sensitive. Did you know that it takes less than five photons to activate the visual purple in your eye? I suppose the waves from Argo penetrate the soil to a few centimeters’ depth and trigger a chain of biochemical reactions. No doubt it is an evolutionary relic from a time when the orbits of Jason and Medea gave an exact match to the seasons. Perturbation does keep changing the movements of the moons, you know.”