had raged and roared about her was become a memory. She had radiated its heat into space. The brutality of five-gee boost lingered only in aches, bruises, exhaustion, nothing that a good rest wouldn't heal; she flew at gentle Erthuma weight.

  Memory still echoed. Nor had the ship yet relinquished her booty. Snakelike bodies crowded the decks. Pungent odors and sibilant words filled the air. Laurice picked a way among them, bound aft. Wben she thought some hailed her, she responded with a nod or a wave and passed on. It was all she could do. They had their medics and others tending to the hurt among them. She was ignorant of their requirements, and in any case wrung dry, wanting no more than to creep into her cubicle, draw the bunk sheet over her, and sleep.

  Her course took her past the laboratory. Yoran saw and shambled to the door. "Milady," he called in an undertone. She heard urgency and stopped.

  He beckoned her to enter. They were alone there, the others having gone to their own places. His back was bent and fatigue showed leaden in every gesture. Nonetheless the ugly face grinned.

  "What do you want?" she asked.

  He rubbed his hands together. "I wanted you to know fir-st, milady. " He leaned close. She was too fired to draw back. He spoke in a near whisper, although no Naxians were in this corridor and probably none but Copperhue knew any Merse. "As we were finishing the evacuation, milady, I saw one of them carrying a data box, and what'd be in it but their observations? Different model from any of ours, but it had to be a data box. Things were crowded, confused. I shoved in and slipped it right out of that ridiculous false hand. The bearer didn't notice; walking wounded. Nobody did. I've got it here, and I'm about to copy off the file. Then I'll leave the box for them to find, as though it got dropped accidentally. But when the stuffs translated, we'll know what they found out, at least this part of what they did. So our efforts paid off that much, didn't they, milady?"

  You little tumor, she thought. I shouldn't accept this.

  But I suppose I must. Maybe I should even congratulate you.

  He peered at her. "I did well, don't you think, milady?" he asked. "You'll put in a good word for me when we get home, won't you, milady?"

  "I'll stay neutral, if I can. It's up to you." She turned and left.

  Copperhue, bound forward with its-his personal kit, met her farther on.

  They halted. "How fare you, honored one?" it-he greeted. Under the 'trans, did she hear concern? "I have not seen you since you went to aid in the rescue. "

  "I'm all right,." she said. "Everybody is, or as much as could be expected, I guess. You?"

  "Sh-s-s, I hold back. The Naxian officers know that a member of their race has been aboard this ship, but they know no more than that. Captain Vargen agrees it is best they not meet me. On his advice, I seek the number two hold. "

  Slightly surprised, Laurice noticed herself bridle. "I should hope, after what we've done, they won't cause trouble. "

  "No, but why provoke emotions? I can bide my time. Soon we make rendezvous and transfer our passengers. After that, in view of our condition and the delta vee we have expended, Captain Vargen says we shall go straight home. Surely other researchers will come from Ather, and from many more worlds."

  "I don't imagine those Pythons are so grateful to us they'll make their

  discoveries public."

  "Would you in their place, honored one?"

  Laurice laughed a bit. "No, probably not." Though in the long run, now that the great secret is out, everybody will know everything that can be known about it.

  She stroked Copperhue's head. "Go rest, then," she said, "Pleasant dreams." "I fear yours will not be," it-he replied.

  Her hand froze where it was. After a space she said, "Well, of course you feel what I'm feeling."

  "I feel that you are woefid. I wish I could help." "And ... and him?"

  "He was full of pride and gladness, until there came a dread I believe was on your account. Ilat was the last I saw of him, about a quarter hour ago." "Don't worry about it."

  "I do not worry much about you, honored one. You are undaunted. He- But go, since that is your wish. May the time be short until your happier day." Laurice walked on.

  In the crew section, the assistant physicists had already closed their doors and must be sound asleep. Deck, bulkheads, overhead reached gray and empty, save for the tall form that waited.

  She jarred to a stop. They stood for a time. Air rustled around diem. "Laurice," Vargen said finally.

  "I should think you'd be resting or else in conference with Commander Crystal," she stated.

  "This is more important. " He made as if to approach her, but curbed the motion. "Laurice, why are you here? Why not the cabin? When you didn't show, I asked Darya, and-'t

  "If you please," she said, "I am very tired and need some rest of my own." Bewilderment ravaged die haggard features. "Laurice, what's wrong? We saved those beings, we're safe ourselves, why do you look at me that way?"

  Get this over with. "You saved them. It was your decison, your will." "But-no, wait. " He swallowed, straightened his shoulders, and said, "I see. You're angry because I put your life at risk. No, that's unfair. Because I gambled with everybody's. Including mine."

  "No," she sighed, "you do not see. It's because of why you did."

  He stared.

  "Worse than staking us, you staked what we'd gained here for our people," she told him. "It was in fact a crazy thing to do, from any normal viewpoint. Maybe, morally, it was justified. Seven lives, a valuable ship, and an invaluable store of knowledge, against half a hundred other

  lives. We did win through, and I daresay we have gotten some goodwill that

  our leaders may find useful in future negotiations. But ... Vargen, none of

  this was what you had in mind. Not really. Was it?"

  "What do you mean?" she barely heard.

  She shook her head, like one who remembers a sorrow. "You redeemed yourself. You met again with the terror you'd nin from, and this time you overcame it, first in your spirit, then in reality. Even if you'd died, you'd have won what mattered, the respect of your peers back, and of yourself.

  "I'd come to know you. Copperhue's now confirmed my understanding, but it wasn't necessary. I knew. What mattered to you above all else-the only thing that mattered-was your redemption. "

  "No," he croaked, and reached for her.

  She denied the wish to lay her head on his breast. "Yes," she said. "Oh, never fear. You'll receive the honors you've earned, and I'll speak never a word against them. But I can't stay with any creature so selfish. Please leave me alone. -

  She dodged by him, into her cubicle, and shut the door. The light came on. She doused it and lay down in the kindly darkness.

  ISLANDOFTHEGODS

  HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  WAVES SLAPPED GENTLY AGAINST THE BOW OF THE galley Hewnall as it drew near the Island of the Gods. That was what the locals called it, at any rate; Terry Fischer thought of it as Laputa. The setting sun, a G-3 star the Azusans called Tonclif, silhouetted the artifacts, monuments, whatever they were, that the Hidden Folk had left on Laputa-and floating above it. That was how the island got its Erthuma name.

  The Hidden Folk had been gone at least a million years. Their creations seemed as fresh as if they'd left yesterday and would be back tomorrow.

  Like all the remains of the Hidden Folk, they also remained maddeningly incomprehensible.

  The merely human eye had trouble even grasping the proper proportions of some of those-things-ahead. Lines faded, twisted, shifted; curves bent in ways curves had no business bending.

  Terry looked away, shaking her head. "This isn't what alien ruins are supposed to be like," she muttered, not for the first time. "Where's the big monolith that looks like the old UN building's granddad?"

  "I presume this is the image to which you refer," the robot Chives said. It projected a scene from the immortal 2001: man-apes capering around a black rectangular prism.

  "Yes, that's it," Terry said. "Now turn it off, if you please. You're making the natives restless." Several crewmales had stopped rowing to gape at the picture hanging in

  the air. The rowmaster hissed at them. They got back into their rhythm before the oars fouled.

  "My apologies," Chives said. The still from 2001 vanished. The star called Tonclif glittered off the coat of green enamel that gave Chives its name. Rather more to the point, the paint job made the robot the same color as the Azusans, and made them less nervous about it. Not that it much resembled them otherwise: they were man-sized bipeds, yes, but dinosaurian, with clawed hands, forwardslung torsos, and long, stiff, spiky tails to counterbalance the weight of those torsos.

  They were also primitives, Terry thought with faint contempt. The Hewnall was as fine a machine as they could build, yet the Greeks had sailed better when their fleet beat Xerxes' at Salamis. But for Laputa and its other chief oddity, Tonclif IV might have been one of the many worlds that, while they housed intelligent life, were hardly worth visiting.

  Lorah chose that moment to come spiraling down from what Terry kept wanting to call the Crotonite's nest. His wings were too weak to let him fly in Tonclif's atmosphere, but he still made a fine sailplane. He landed just in

  front of Terry, folded those batlike wings over his back. His small black

  eyes glittered as he peered up at the human.

  "What was that picture you were looking at?" he demanded. His short beak

  and the breathing tube that ran into the comer of his mouth from the tank strapped on his chest made his English hard to follow, but Terry had grown used to it.

  "A scene from an old filin-a piece of visual fiction," she answered. "Fiction," Lorah said scornfully. "This is another word for lies."

  "No, this is a tale known not to be true," Terry said. "It was an early imagining of what contact with a more advanced species might be like for humans."

  "You see the reality before you." Lorah preened his fine gray hair. He turned, used one of his two stubby arms to point to the great masses floating above the island they

  were approaching. "You also see proof ahead that the Hidden Folk were

  winged, as we are. Why else would they have built as they did? Surely no

  dirt-hugger would have felt at ease so far off the ground."

  "Oh, I don't know," Terry said easily. "The human name for this place comes

  from an island that floated in the air in one of our fables. "

  Lorah hissed at her. Crotonites had moods, and reveled in them. Terry was briefly glad she had got Lorah annoyed. In a perverse way, he would be happier on account Of it.

  "More lies. More human frivolity," he said after another sip on the supplemental oxygen heavily laced with ammonia and hydrogen cyanide that let him survive in what was, to him, an unpleasantly thin atmosphere. "The Hidden Folk, I assure you, had no use for lies or frivolity. "

  "To be perfectly accurate, we have no idea what the Hidden Folk had uses

  for," Chives said. "By 'we,' I include not only Erthumoi but all six starfaring races currendy inhabiting this galaxy."

  If the Crotonite had hissed at Terry, he snarled at the robot: "I do not care to discuss the matter with an overautomated bottle opener."

  None of the other five species with advanced technology had gone in for

  developing artificial intelligences. Ile big, slow Samians found the concept vastly amusing. Crotonites tended to look on it as a perversion of both machinery and intelligence. Crotonites, Terry thought, tended to look on' everything they hadn't come up with for themselves as a perversion of one kind or another.

  "Chives is right, Lorah, as I'm sure you know quite well enough, " she said sharply. "If we were sure of anything much about the Hidden Folk, we wouldn't need to keep exploring sites like this one in the hope that one day parts of them would start to make sense.' :,

  "They make sense enough to my people, Lorah retorted. "It is you other races whose brains are stuck down in the dirt with your bodies and cannot soar toward the truth. "

  "Your comment reminds me of a tale in my database,"

  Chives observed, his voice electronically smooth as always: "the tale of the mentally defective Earthman who could not recognize his own illness, but instead projected it outward, saying to his only friend, 'Aye, the whole world's mad save me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee.' "

  Terry knew Chives was not programmed to be deliberately insulting. Its database was so large, though, that everything anybody said reminded it of a story. Since by human standards Crotonites were self-centered and rude, the stories they made it recall also ran in that direction.

  Before Lorah went from snarling at Chives to screeching at it, the Azusans distracted him by starting to screech themselves. They had formidable teeth for an intelligent species, Terry thought-as they hooted and pointed, she was reminded of nothing so much as a pack of Deinonychus that had just spotted some large, lumbering herbivorous dinosaur to tear and rend.

  "What's happened?" Terry called. Chives translated her words into the Azusans' language. She kept repeating herself, and Chives kept getting louder, until the locals finally paid attention to her.

  "That ship beached there in the harbor. " The Hewnall's captain was a stalwart male named Ekrekek. He kept the claws on his index fingers filed to needle points. The left one sparkled now as he stabbed it out toward the offending vessel.

  Terry looked at the ship. It looked like a ship, longer and broader than the Hewnall, perhaps, but just a ship. She carried some lightweight binoculars on her belt. She looked at it through them. She still couldn't see anything wrong with it. "What about it?" she asked.

  Ekrekek made a series of noises like something going badly wrong inside a steam engine. "Expletives," Chives said helpfully. After a while, the captain began mixing in a few words that were not expletives: "That's a tail-biting, nest-robbing, egg-sucking Gormanian ship, that's what about it. 19

  "Oh," Terry said, and then again: "Oh." The pack of Deinonychus had not spotted prey after all. They'd spotted

  rivals. Tonclif IV was one of the handful of worlds in the galaxy with two intelligent species. Saying Azusans and Gormanians did not get along was like saying magnesium oxidized rapidly when heated: It was true, but it didn't convey the full flavor of the reaction.

  That was so most of the time, at any rate. Terry said, "Is this not the Island of the Gods? No one fights on the Island of the Gods."

  Gormanians and Azusans agreed on that. It was about the only thing on which they did agree. The island they called the Island of the Gods lay about midway between the continents where their two species had evolved. They'd both discovered it about the same time. The awe the remains of the Hidden Folk raised in them was enough to overcome even the hatred they felt for each other.

  But now, Ekrekek said, "It is our time, my people's time, to visit the holy island. The Gormanians have no business setting foot there for the next two moons. We would be within our rights to slay them."

  For the past hundred years and more, the six starfaring races of the galaxy had upheld and strengthened the truce the two local species had worked out on their own. That was only partly altruism: Research on the Hidden Folks' artifacts went more smoothly if the locals were not busy killing each other. The easiest way to keep Azusans from fighting Gormanians was never to let the twain meet. Fortunately, their religious calendars made it practical for each species to visit the island exclusively for half the year.

  Terry wondered why the Gormanian had come here now. She said, "Surely only an emergency would have made that ship land on the Island of the Gods out of season. "

  "And so?" Ekrekek answered. "They have transgressed, and we will make them pay for their transgressions." He wore only a series of belts. Some were decorative; some, along with his gilded tailspikes, showed his rank; some

  were for hanging things on---the Azusan equivalent of pockets. From one of

  the latter he took a bronze-headed axe and waved it about. His sailors screeched. They brandished weapons too.

  Lorah spread his wings. With them folded on his back, he looked small and unimpressive. Now they enfolded him like a cape, lending him a presence he had not had before. He did not need Chives to translate for him; he spoke Azusan himself, and sarcastic Azusan at that: "You, my good captain Ekrekek, are an idiot."

  "And you are a liar," Ekrekek retorted, his manners bad as the Crotonite's. "The gods decree that we kill the sixlegs where and when we find them. Finding them on the gods' own island in our proper time can only mean a gift from the gods of their blood. "

  "Their gods bid them slay you," Lorah answered, "and from the size of their ship as many of them are here as of you. How do you propose to return to Azusa with most of your crew slain? Do your gods bid you to slay yourselves to no purpose?"

  "Anyone who dies killing a Gormanian assures himself a joyous afterlife," Ekrekek said. Even so, he lowered his axe, though he did not let go of it. "That may be," Chives broke in, "but are you, are any of you"-it rotated

  its metal head through three hundred sixty degrees to look at all the

  sailors; the Azusans stared and muttered to themselves-"so eager to enter the afterlife at this moment?"

  "Keep quiet, contraption," Lorah said. "I am doing well enough on my own." While Ekrekek still looked defiant, Chives's remark had its effect on the Azusan captain's crew. Suddenly they seemed to remember that, while they were going to fight the Gormanians, the Gormanians would also fight back. Terry watched Ekrekek gauge his males; he seemed to be making the same calculation she was. She said, "For all you know, shipmaster, the Gormanians may already be in ambush among the wonders on the Island of the

  Gods, ready to take you by surprise after you land."

  "They will be sorry if they try," Ekrekek said. Terry's heart sank. Getting caught in the middle of a batch of battling primitives was not why she'd come to Tonclif IV. Then the captain of the Hewnall went on, "But we will stretch a point for the sake of you off-worlders. So long as

  the cursed sixlegs do not attack us, we will not bare our weapons against them."