Sunchild drifted in slow circles overhead, a shifting golden shape invisible against the sun, hard to see even when he slipped down to brush against treetops or hover over the ornamental lake. He came and went, came and went, like Willow and Bodri pretending no interest in the two Vrya and what was happening between them. Like Willow and Bodri he listened carefully to what was said and not said, watched the woman move with angular energy about the sunny patch of lawn, back and forth before stolidly standing Hyaroll, her voice rising to a screech then disciplined back to calm, watched Hyaroll resisting her with his silence, his stone face. Willow finished pricking in the design and set the needle aside. Sunchild came floating down to squat beside her, shaping as always into Otter’s form. The first time that happened, she was furious and cursed him for mocking her grief, then listened skeptically as he explained he could not help it, he caught that image from her too strongly for him to resist it. She watched him trying to change and saw Otter’s face melting like hot butter, reforming as soon as it melted. Go away, she said to him. I believe you, go away for a while. She put her hand across her eyes, dropped it to cover nose and mouth, then reached out to Sunchild’s slippery shine. Are you ghost? she said. No, he said, nor demon. Just me. Yes, go away, she said, let me think on this, let me make a song. Let me sing it with you, he said, I am a child “alone, let me sing with you. Not yet, she said, my mourning is not done, give me time to mourn my man, give me time to mourn my children, give me seven days, Sunchild, then I’ll teach you to sing with me.

  Now he squatted beside her and looked gravely down at the blue lines she’d pricked into her hide, the double spiral sunheart and the slanting wavelines, the water of mourning, the sun of joy. He pressed Otter’s strong square hands on the reddened flesh (she felt only the lightest of tingles) and smiled Otter’s lookatme smile as the redness went away.

  Behind Sunchild the Vryhh woman changed her tactics, moved close to Hyaroll, patted his arm, spoke coaxingly cooingly to him. “Come on, Daddy dear, do it, hmmm? You don’t even know what she’s like. All you have to do is say nay instead of aye.”

  “Go away.”

  “What?”

  “Go away.”

  “I won’t. I won’t go until I have your answer.”

  “You got it, same as it was the first time. The Tetrad will recognize Shareem’s daughter as Vryhh.”

  During this last bit the iron man who served Hyaroll came out of the house to stand beside him. Willow rubbed at her thigh and wondered if Old Stone Vryhh had called him. Maybe he’d have that ironhead snatch up the woman and carry her off kicking and screaming and cursing; be a sight if he did and serve her right. Make a song I will to set ol’ Bodri giggling. If he does it. Come on, Old Vryhh, I’m tired o’ her fussin.

  Hyaroll shook off the woman’s hand, spoke to ironhead. “Megathen, get her away from me.”

  Willow leaned forward, biting back a grin, waiting.

  The woman glared into the angles of ironhead’s not-face. “Don’t touch me. I’ll go.” She switched the glare to Hyaroll. “That dirty half-breed won’t last a year. You wait. You’ll see.” She whipped around and stalked off toward the shaggy kadraesh trees and the wide white plates behind them where the fliers landed.

  Willow grimaced and turned away so Sunchild wouldn’t see the disappointment in her face and ask about it.

  Hyaroll stumped off toward the house, followed by the silent ironhead, who moved as if he were made of flesh, not stiff metal; the iron men that served the Vryhh fascinated and frightened and occasionally infuriated Willow. She had talked enough about them to Bodri and Sunchild to grasp that they were neither demons nor conjurations and she didn’t need to be afraid of them, but sometimes she had the feeling that Old Vryhh was looking at her out of their eyes. She didn’t like it and avoided them when she could.

  “He looks old.” Sunchild sounded surprised and shocked.

  “Old Stone Vryhh, pretty soon he get so hard set he don’t move no more.” Willow wiped the needle on a bit of leather and put it in the case Hyaroll had given her a couple of wakenings ago. “He old like this dirt.” She patted the ground beside her. “Always been old.”

  “Not like this.” He turned the butter shimmer of his eyes on her, blank eyeshapes blind as those in the ancient statues moldering back into the dirt they came from that Hyaroll had set up in another part of the garden so long ago he’d forgotten he had them. How Sunchild really saw was something she didn’t understand, though he’d explained it a dozen times or more. She passed her hand across her eyes, her mouth, ran the tip of her tongue along her upper lip and lower. He was a golden god sculpted from sunlight as he knelt beside her, his beauty hitting her like a blow. Every waking it did that at least once, astonishing her anew until she became accustomed to seeing him and forgot the form in the friend. He caught a bit of seed fluff floating past, watched it dance on his palm, then shook it off. “Have you thought what’s going to happen to us if Hyaroll dies? Seeing how he was today, well, the fear sort of forced itself on me.”

  She stroked her forefinger lightly over the new design on her thigh, then clucked her tongue and slapped her thighs, beginning one rhythm, then another and another, and finding no hope in any of them, let her hands lie limply on her thighs. “I see this and that and it a burn in the belly, a bad smell in the nose. Can’t make a song of a bellyache and a bad smell.”

  A rumbling chuckle and Bodri came trundling around, settling himself on grass beside Willow with flirt of his carapace and a rustling sigh. “Succinctly put, Whisper in my heart. Can’t reason without data, try it and your brain rots, thus the bad smell.”

  Sunchild blurred a little, developing delicate antennae in response to Bodri’s emanations; Willow was the stronger sender, so he kept Otter’s form. “Then we’d better start gathering some, hadn’t we?”

  “Have.” Bodri’s antennae flared to full stretch, curled back into their resting mode. “And I’ve been thinking.” He swung his big head back and forth between them, the laughter gone out of him. “Three things. Maybe he lets kephalos keep on running things after he’s dead. If we’re waking then, we live out our lives here and that’s it. If we’re in our boxes, well, we won’t know anything about it, we’ll just stay there till the power runs out and we rot. A throw of the dice which it is when the time comes. That’s two possibilities. The third one puts kinks in my entrails. He doesn’t like letting loose of anything that’s his. What if he’s arranged that when he dies, kephalos opens all the boxes and has one grand funeral fire with us for fuel? It would be quite like the man to make sure no one else enjoys his possessions.” He looked around, lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have been thinking it is time we found a way out of being put back in the boxes.”

  Willow nodded, then she frowned and looked suspiciously about.

  Sunchild watched her a moment, puzzled, then his mouth moved into the archaic smile that curled the lips and missed the eyes and hinted at mystery beyond mystery but right now only meant that he understood what was itching at her. He moved away until he could shed form, then he began flowing about the lawn, a flittering streak of light. He arced overhead and whipped about them, darted down, slid into the earth, came up under the stone bench were Hyaroll had been sitting before the woman came to destroy his peace, flowed through it, went soaring into the sky, extending his substance down and down and down until he was a faint gold stain on the air, one edge almost touching the grass, the other almost touching the dome web. He quivered there a moment, then snapped back together, came to squat beside Willow and Bodri, a meld of beetle and boy, Otter’s face and body and Bodri’s fern-frond antennae. “There are ears and eyes,” he said, “but no one’s listening; kephalos is busy with other things, and Hyaroll, he’s sitting in a chair staring at nothing. For what it’s worth, O source of all wisdom, I think you’re right, I think our end is fire.”

  Willow stared at him. “Little burning won’t do you much.”

  “Leave it to Hyaroll, Willow, he’ll find a way.”

  “Hmmp.” She pulled loose a blade of grass, chewed awhile on the tender end. Holding the green strip between her teeth, she looked at Sunchild, fluttered her hand like a bird in flight, moved it from near the ground to as high as she could reach, then let it drop onto her thigh. “No cage keepin you, Sunchild. How come you stay?”

  “Is a cage. The dome. I can’t pass the barrier shields. The forces that make it would tease me apart so thoroughly I’d never be coherent again.” He laughed. “Like dropping an ice cube in that lake; it’d melt and you’d never ever get it back again.”

  “Hmmp. Is over everywhere? I walk five days that way and that and that”—forefinger pointing, she moved her hand in a wide sweep—“and I get to a wall. Over all that?”

  “Like a lid on a pot.”

  She patted the ground beside her. “Go down.”

  “The pot’s the same as the lid, Willow in my heart. Hyaroll likes to keep what he has.”

  “Hmmp.” She turned to Bodri. “Eh Old Bug, you been thinkin maybe how we catch Old Stone Vryhh and thump him good so he let us loose?”

  “I fear not, little Willow.” Bodri curled his antennae tight against his bulging skull and settled himself more solidly on the grass until he seemed little more than a mound of rock and vegetation. He half-closed his eyes and sighed noisily, ruffling the grass in front of him. “My folk were never hunters, my Willow. Plants don’t run away or chase you to eat you. I have tried to think of traps and ambushes and stratagems like that, but nothing works right. I’m back to theorizing without hard data, and it’s a sorry ground to stand on when your life depends on standing.”

  Willow drew her legs up and wrapped her arms about them, then sat glooming over all she knew about the dome and what it contained.

  Sunchild watched them awhile, then jumped to his feet and began dancing about the grassy oval, playing with the butterflies, chasing seed fluff blown about by the erratic breeze. Though considerably older in actual years than Willow and Bodri, he was very young for his kind and easily bored with sitting still. And it was a late spring day of surpassing perfection and life was strong and new about him. The smell of death coming off Hyaroll had startled the what-if reflex in his mind and he’d spoken the thought as naturally and easily as he absorbed and stored energy from the sun. And with the same ease, he set the problem aside. He did not hunker down like Bodri and worry at problems until he understood every facet and managed to tease out a number of solutions whose choice depended on the effect desired. Nor did he find answers like Willow in the concrete patterning of song and dance. He absorbed everything around him, then let his cells rub up against each other until they produced a collection of nonserial gestalts, an almost random flow of metaphor into which he dipped a languid hand and came up with the answer or image or poem or equation or whatever it might be that something in him felt was needed, a zigzag sort of thinking that had many strengths and nothing at all to do with rigorous analysis of a problem or the development of a line of action step by hard-won step. So while Bodri scratched at old ground to see if he could find something he’d missed, while Willow clicked her tongue and tapped her fingers and worked her memory, Sunchild flowed from shape to shape to no-shape and enjoyed the day.

  “Sunchild talk to kephalos.” Willow smoothed her thumbnail along a short thin eyebrow, drew it slowly down the side of her face. “Hmmmp.” She looked into her palms, closed her hands into fists, opened them, rippled her fingers. “Maybe he tickle kepha into openin a hole, we steal Old Vryhh’s flier, go.” She flung one hand in an arc sweeping up. “Away-away.”

  Bodri grunted. Tentacle fingers wandered through the garden on his back, pinching and prodding, tending the plants like a girl lost in the delight of brushing long thick hair. He wrinkled his black snout, yawned, showing broad chisel teeth and massive grinders. “What’s the point of going out of the dome? Where would we go? What would the other Vrya do to us?” He opened his eyes wide. “And how long would it take for him to hunt us down? Day and a half maybe, probably less.”

  “Ummmp.” Willow gazed through the transparent dome at the ancient hills, the worn-out old mountains reaching a few tough snaggles toward the sky, the sun glittering on glaciers as ancient as the stone. She sighed. “Can’t kill Old Vryhh. Catch him?”

  “How?”

  “Ummp.” She got to her feet, began wandering aimlessly about the patch of grass, feet and body shifting into a few seconds of one dance, then another and another, staying with nothing longer than a breath or two. Bodri closed his eyes again. She was making him dizzy.

  Sunchild came sliding down shifting into the fronded boy, shimmering with excitement, losing his edges to no-shape. “Stasis box,” he sang to them, his voice gone high and ethereal. “Push Old Vryhh in and forget him.”

  gameboard (second of two)

  AVOSING

  Third of seven planets circling the green star ADIL-BADU (Eye of the Jester) in the Pajungg constellation TAH BADU (God’s Fool), fourth Pajungg-colonized world.

  TAH BADU (God’s Fool): appears low on the horizon in early spring (point of observation being

  DJIVAKIL, the planetary capital) in the north temperate zone of Pajungg; it is a grouping of nine stars that the Pajunggs see as a dancer kicking his feet in an extravagant caper. The Tah Badu is an important figure in Pajungg myth, making an appearance in almost all the hero tales, sometimes only mentioned, sometimes as a major force. He is the disrupter, the trickster, the puncturer of pomposity; he can be very subversive to the established order, and songs featuring him tend to be both obscene and dangerous, the singer sometimes losing his tongue if not his head.

  DAY: 32.111 hours-Pajungg The settlers could have produced clocks that eliminated the extra

  seconds but clung instead to the best of home. Every ninth day there is an extra hour added to keep the timing right, the AMUN-BAR. The nineday cycle suited them, the AMUN-BAR suited them. After several decades it took on a mystical quality for the Avosingers. Life seemed brighter, sharper, somehow more electric, more exhilarating than during the mundane hours. The AMUN-BAR became their intimate connection with this new world, something that separated them from homeworlders and outsiders. It was something that could not be explained, only experienced.

  YEAR: 367.001 days

  Oblate spheroid, mean diameter 14,312 km

  Density 4.06 times that of water

  Rotational axis tilted 16°

  No moons

  Two major continents

  BADICHAYAL (Jester’s Fantasy): lightly explored, sparsely settled

  ANGACHI (Nothing Much): officially unexplored; known from orbital photographs to be mostly desert beyond the coastal fringes

  Seventeen major island groups: officially unexplored; positions known from orbital photographs

  KEAMA DUSTA: Sole settlement large enough to qualify as a city. Settlement and development of Avosing has been unusually slow for several reasons. Few heavy metals, those present hard to get at. Pajungg reluctance to disturb the homeworld and the Colonial Authority further by permitting more emigration. Pajungg refusal to grant permanent residence permits to non-Pajunggs. Avosinger reluctance to take in outsiders. And the POLLEN.

  POLLEN: Avosing is a pollen-saturated world with few seasonal changes in the intensity of the phenomenon, though the mix of pollens does change; the heaviest saturation is in the forest area and around its fringes. These pollens are nontoxic but all are hallucinogenic to some degree; the coarser grains must be breathed in or absorbed by the blood through unprotected cuts to have any effect on an organism, but the finer grains can be absorbed through the skin. The effect varies with the individual and the particular mix of pollens he takes in. For most of the Avosingers, the most important effect seems to be visions of the dead; it is as if the spirits of the dead had migrated with the living to Avosing; it is not uncommon even in the heart of Keama Dusta to see someone conversing animatedly with scented air and shadows. This particular reaction is apparently determined by culture, since smugglers and other visitors interviewed don’t share it. The Avosingers have developed ways of coping with the pollen effect and have incorporated these into their daily lives; they have become quite sensitive to their rhythms and make sure they aren’t doing something vital when they’re due to tune out the world. They have also developed several native counters to the pollens for use during emergencies. These are kept secret and are sold to traders and other outsiders for exorbitant prices, Avosingers being as practical as they are mystically inclined.

  SWEETAMBER: Avosing’s major resource The resinous semifossilized substance produced by a dying Kekar-Otar tree, usually one with a girth approaching a thousand meters, in conjunction with colonies of jarbuatin, arthropods about the size of a man’s big toe. The jarbuatin consume certain layers of wood within the tree and excrete a gelatinous substance that over a handful of centuries, under the proper conditions, crystallizes into the substance generally called SWEETAMBER. The crystals are quite hard when they’re ripe, closely resemble black opal; when warmed against bare skin they interact with natural oils to produce a delicate perfume that is attractive in all senses of that word.

  AMBERMINER: Any person, male or female, successful at finding SWEETAMBER and staying alive to bring it out.

  AMBERJACKS: gangs of men who keep to the fringes of the forest, preying on amberminers. The forest usually gets them if the miners don’t.