"Captain Wing-Marra! " said Hiuptis, practically squawking with rage and frustration. "I forbid-I utterly forbid-"

  "Excuse me," Wing-Marra said. "I'll be right back, I promise you."

  Quickly, before he could change his mind, he stepped into the zone of darkness.

  The first thing he noticed on the far side was that he was still alive. He had been prepared to die-eleven cycles might well be quite enough, he had often thought-but that had not happened.

  The second bit of information that came to him was the amber glow on the arm-monitor of his suit that told him he was now in the presence of an atmosphere. An oxygenbased atmosphere, at that. He could probably take his spacesuit off altogether in here, though he did not intend to. This place was like a world unto itself, sealed off within the screens that shielded

  it. Perhaps the atmosphere in here was the one the city had had when this

  moon was still alive.

  Then, as his vision adapted to the low light level within the inner shield, he saw the city.

  It was stunning beyond his comprehension. Low buildings, yes-Murry-Balff's readouts had been right about that. In a perfect state of preservation, absolutely new looking, and so totally strange in their architecture that he felt as though he had wandered into a land of dreams. Everything seemed to melt and flow: domes became parapets, walls became balconies, windows turned to arches. All was fluid, and yet everything was fixed, solid, eternal.

  Unfamiliar colors teased his eyes. He could almost have believed that he was seeing in some far comer of the spectrum, that these were the hues beyond violet, or perhaps the ones below red.

  Wonderstruck, he moved forward, down a narrow street that seemed to widen invitingly as he entered it.

  The movement, he realized, was an illusion. Nothing moved here. All was in stasis: timeless, silent, free from any sort of decay. There was no dust. There were no cracks in the walls. This was a city outside time, shielded against all harm. No tectonic movement within the depths of this moon had left its mark on these flawless structures. No meteors had come plunging through the airless sky to crash through these roofs. No spider had spun here. Moth and rust were strangers here. An eternity and a half might have passed since the builders of this place had taken their leave of it, but nothing about it had changed.

  How was that possible? What spell of enchantment kept this place invulnerable against the tooth of time?

  He went close, peering through windows that seemed opaque and translucent at the same time. There were objects in the buildings: artifacts, mechanisms. He saw things on shelves that baffled and awed and astounded him. Wing-Marra began to tremble. Should he go in? No, he thought. Not now. Not yet. He might be pushing his luck too far. Who knew what traps awaited him in there, to guard those ancient treasures against intruders? And yet, to think that all the wonders of an unknown technology were just on the far side of those shimmering walls-

  He was choking with amazement. There was no place to compare with this in all the galaxy.

  He touched a wall. It seemed to give slightly against the pressure of his fingertips. And then suddenly the sky above him was ablaze with the whirling snakes of the Kekule ring. The fiery vision of a gigantic organic molecule danced before him. It was none that he had ever seen or even imagined before; immense, bewilderingly intricate, joined in a thousand thousand places, holding forth the possibility of infinite complexity. He stared into it and it was like staring into a new universe. After a time he let go of the wall and took a few tottering steps backward.

  The vision faded at once and was gone.

  But the impact, lingering, was overwhelming. WingMarra's mind throbbed. He had to get away. He needed to come to terms with what he had seen. He could not bear to remain in this place any longer.

  He swung about and ran through the silent streets toward the blackness, and burst through it, and stumbled out into the antechamber. The bright lights dazzled him painfully and he shrank away from them, covering his face for

  a moment, closing his eyes. When he felt able to open them again, he saw

  them all staring at him in wonder, Crotonites, Locrians, his own people, all of them appalled, all of them aghast.

  "You are alive?" Hiuptis whispered.

  "Alive, yes. How long was I in there?"

  Eslane Ree said, "A minute or so. No more."

  "It seemed like- years."

  "What was in there?" Ayana Sanoclaro asked.

  Wing-Marra gestured. "Go in and see for yourself."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Go in!" he cried. "All of you! You've never imagined anything like that!

  I wasn't hurt-why should you be?" He looked down at the Crotonite commander. "You mean to say that you never went in there, not once, not any of you?"

  "No," Hiuptis murmured. "Never. We thought it was too dangerous. We only scanned it from outside, and nothing more. The shields-we were not sure if they were lethal. Finally we risked a penetration of the outer one. But the other-the other-"

  "So you didn't put the shields up yourselves?"

  The Crotonite made a gesture of negation.

  "No," Wing-Marra said. "Naturally you didn't. Neither the invisibility shield nor the decay-proof shield inside it. We couldn't figure out how you had done it, and of course you hadn't done it. You don't have the

  technology for that. Nobody in the galaxy does. You just stumbled on the

  whole thing, and you've been dancing around the edges of it. Well, go on in now! All of you! Go and see! My God, there are miracles in there! And who can even guess how old it all is? Fifty million years? A billion? It can

  sit like that forever ... right to the end of time."

  "Captain-" It was Linga Hyath. "Captain, you're getting too excited. " "Damned right I am!" Wing-Marra cried. "Go in there and see! Go in, will you? See for yourselves!"

  Afterward, when everyone had come stumbling out, hushed and dazed and dumbfounded, a strained silence fell. The vastness of the wonders that they

  had seen seemed to have overcome them all.

  Only the Locrians appeared able to come to terms immediately with that grand and staggering experience. To Wing-Marra's amazement they joined hands and pranced about in a weird, jubilant dance, rubbing their antennae together as they cavorted. No doubt they were already counting the profits that could be mined from the hoard of treasure beyond the shield.

  It was then that Hiuptis came to Wing-Marra and said, in a dark, cold tone

  the Erthuma had not heard from it before, "You wingless ones will leave our research center now, and you will not return. You will obey without further discussion."

  Theie was insistence in Hiuptis's crackling voice and menace and something else; the implication, perhaps, that everyone there needed a time to retreat and digest the meaning of the discovery. But mainly there was menace and insistence. Wing-Marra suspected that there might be real violence, despite all taboos, if they tried to remain any longer; and Blue Sphere backed up his suspicions with the blunt warning that the Crotonites were reaching a point of exasperation that might prove explosive.

  "Don't worry," Wing-Marra told Hiuptis. "We're going to go. You can have the place to yourselves again."

  The Locrians halted their strange dance instantly. One of them turned to Wing-Marra in amazement, its great eye gleaming, and said, "But our agreement-I"

  Wing-Marra met its glare with one of his own. "We can discuss that later. I'm calling for a withdrawal. I'm not ready to take any further steps here. You can do as you please. 99

  "Leaving this find to them?" the Locrian said, astounded. "Incredible! You actually mean to withdraw and let them have- "

  "For the time being," said Wing-Marra. "Only for the time being."

  The Locrian rose to its full height and waved its forelimbs furiously in protest. But Wing-Marra, turning quickly away, began to walk toward the perimeter of the outer screen, toward the ground vehicles waiting just outside it.

  Sanoclaro came up beside him. "Are you serious? You're really just going to pull out now?"

  He whirled to face her. "What do you think I'm going to do? Start a war

  with Crotonis over it? These Crotonites are half crazy with confusion and

  rage and greed and outraged pride and God knows what other emotions, all of them dangerous. They're right at the point where they'll kill to get us out of here, now. Do you want to see if they will?"

  "But to allow them sole possession of such a find--"For the moment," said Wing-Marra. "Only for the moment. They're in possession, but they don't have ownership. Nobody does. They discovered it, sure. But they didn't claim it, which they probably thought was very clever. Then the Locrians found out about it and got us involved. I went in on my own hook, which the Crotonites hadn't dared to do, and discovered that it's accessible and full of incredible things. You understand this sort of stuffYou can see how muddled the claim is by this time. Let higher

  authorities figure it out now. The only thing that's certain is that

  nothing's ever going to be the same again in this galaxy."

  "But what do you think the city is?" Sanoclaro asked.

  "Something left behind by a race greater than any of the Six," said Wing-Marra quietly. "That's all I- know. I couldn't begin to guess who they were. Or are."

  "Are? But you said the site might be a billion years old! "

  "It might, yes. Or a million. And its builders might have become extinct

  before there was vertebrate life on

  Earth. Or they might still be out there somewhere, hidden away in some unexplored arm of the galaxy, or in some other galaxy entirely. Maybe we'll stumble upon them. Or maybe they'll come back from wherever they are and pay us a visit. Or maybe they'll never be heard from again. In any case, the damage is done."

  911

  "'Me damage.

  "There's a city full of a superior alien technology sitting here. Now that we know what to look for, we may find that there are fifty more invisible cities just like it stashed around the galaxy too, or five hundred, full of the most astounding gadgets anyone has ever dreamed of. You can bet that all that technology, if anybody can figure out what to use it for, is going to destablize the equilibrium among the Six Races that keeps this galaxy peaceful. Or worse: Suppose the builders themselves ever come back and decide to play with us---choosing sides among the Six Races, picking allies, making enemies, maybe looking for vassalscan you imagine what that will do?"

  "Yes," said Sanoclaro quietly. "I can."

  They reached the ground vehicle. Wing-Marra turned for one last look at the place where the city lay hidden.

  He saw nothing. Nothing at all, only the bare bright expanse of the flat stark plain, and a few Crotonite groundcrawlers. He shook his head. Everything will be different from now on, he thought. Nothing will ever be the same again.

  "Let's get back to the ship," he said wearily. All his people stood waiting by the vehicles, each one of them seemingly lost in astonished recollection of the vision they had seen. "I need to put together some sort of a report," he said. "The whole Erthuma sphere will know about this place by tomorrow. The whole damned galaxy, I suppose. "

  "And then?" Eslane Ree asked. "What will we do after that?"

  "Who knows? That's not my concern right now. I've had enough excitement. l9ve got other work to do, you know. I still want to see what sort of hydrocarbons are floating around in that molecular cloud. " He allowed his eyes to close, and the alien city sprang to life behind his

  lids, strange dreamlike buildings stretching on and on to the horizon, and every one of them laden with implements and devices of unknown and perhaps unknowable use. He saw the vision again, bearing promise of chemistries beyond any chemistry he had ever known. His whole being throbbed with the recollection of what he had seen and felt behind that wall of darkness. A magical place, he thought. A place of wonders. And, maybe, of terrors. Time would tell.

  Yes, he thought, everything is going to be different now, all throughout the galaxy. And, he suspected, he, too, would never be quite the same again. After such a vision, how could he be?

  He smiled. Eleven cycles old, and he could still feel a little shiver of wonder now and then. That wasn't so bad. Of course, it -took something pretty spectacular to get that kind of response out of him: a cloud thirty light-years wide loaded with complex organic molecules, say, or an alien city a billion years old. But he had lived eleven lifetimes, after all. After eleven cycles he couldn't be expected to react in a. big way to anything ordinary. He had seen all the ordinary things before, too many times.

  He shrugged. It would be interesting to stick around for another cycle or two, and see what was going to happen next.

  "Okay," he said, beckoning them all to get back into the ground vehicles. "I think we're finished here for the time being. Let's go."

  THE DIPLOMACY GUILD

  D"ID BRIN

  "ONE OR TWO PHILOSOPHERS HAVE SUGGESTEI) THAT you Erthurnoi have taken on this queer obsession of yours because you live so hot and fast. You sense the chill currents of time upon your backs, and so feel a need to copy yourselves, in order to be two places at once."

  Phss'aah's words flowed so smoothly from the translator grille that it was easy to lose track of the Cephallonian philosopher's train of thought. Anyway, I had been distracted for a moment by the whining of the miserable Crotonite, huddled in the comer. It was a pathetic figure, whimpering and mumbling to itself, flexing the broken remnants that had once been powerful wings.

  One more burdensome responsibility. I had been cursing both fate and my boss's bureaucratic meddling for saddling me with the creature, cruelly scomed by its own kind . . . and yet an ambassador plenipotentiary from

  that powerful interstellar race.

  The words of Phss'aah shook me from gloomy perusal of my newest guest. Remembering courtesy, I turned back to the huge tank taking up half the volume of my ship's visitor suite. The vaguely porpoiselike form within flailed water into a froth of bubbles, but the Cephallonian's visage remained calm and restrained.

  "I'm sorry . . . " and I made the wet sound approximating Phss'aah's name

  as near as a descendant of Earth humans could form it. "I didn't quite catch that last remark."

  Bubbles rose from the cetacoid's twin exhalation slots, and now I read what might be mild exasperation in the flex of his long snout. Instead of repeating himself, Phss'aah waved a stubby, four-fingered flipper-arm toward the aquabot that shared his tank. The bulbous machine had already planted a sucker on the glassy wall and spoke in its master's stead.

  "I believe Master Phss'aah is proposing a hypothesis as to why humans-you Erthumoi-were the only one of the six starfaring races to invent robots.

  The notion is that it is because you have such short natural life spans. Being ambitious, your race sought ways to extend themselves artificially.

  In order to be many places at once, they put some of themselves into their machines."

  I shook my head. "But our lives aren't any shorter than Locrians' or Naxians'--

  "Correction," the robot interrupted. "You are counting up an individual's total span of years, including each of his or her consecutive natural lifetimes. I believe you have had four renewals for a total of three hundred and four standard Earth years, Ambassador Doming. But my master apparently believes your Erthuma worldview is still colored by the way existence was for you during the ages leading up to high civilization. In any event, you invented artificially intelligent constructs such as me well before learning how to Renew."

  The machine--md Phss'aah-did have a point. Not for the first time I tried to imagine what it must have been like for my ancestors, facing certain death after only a single span of less than ninety standards. Why, at my first Renewal I was still barely formed ... an infant! I'd only completed one profession by then.

  How strange that most human beings, back in olden times, became parents as early as thirty years of age. In most modem commonwealths and nations of the modem galactic Erthurnoi, you weren't even supposed to think about breeding until the middle of your second life, when you were mature enough to contemplate the responsibilities of reproduction.

  All this time Phss'aah was watching me through the

  glass with one eye, milky blue and inscrutable. I almost regretted that human-invented technology now enabled the Caphallonian to use his artificial mouthpiece as yet another veil to shelter behind. Though, of course, getting Phss'aah to rely upon this fancy assistant drone was actually quite a coup for me. The idea was to sell large numbers of such machines to the water race and then to each of the other Big Five, so that they would get used to what they now called the "bizarre Erthuma notion" of artificially intelligent, semiautonomous devices ... robots. As the newest starfaring race, we newcomer Erthumoi could do with a chance to become indispensable.

  "Hinin, " I answered cautiously. "But the Crotonites --I nodded in the general direction of my unwanted guest in the comer-"have even shorter life spans than natural, old-style humans, and they don't even Renew. Why then, didn't they invent robots? It's not for lack of skill with machines.

  They're quicker and more nimble than anybody, with unsurpassed craftsmanship. Lord knows they have easily as much or more ambition than anybody else."

  The Cephallonian rose to breathe, then returned trailing bubbles. When he spoke, the wall unit conveyed an Erthuma translation, this time bypassing the robot.

  "You reply logically and well for one of your kind. I do not know the answer to that. Certainly you and the Crotonites share the quick metabolisms characteristic of breathers of supercharged atmospheres. They, however, are oviparous fliers. You, on the contrary, descend from arboreal mammals. Mammals are gregarious-"

  "Some mammals."

  "Indeed." And some of Phss'aah's irritation briefly showed. Cephallonians do not like being interrupted while they are pontificating an elegant new theory. That was exactly why I did it. Diplomacy is such a delicate business.

  "Perhaps another reason you invented intelligent machines was because-"

  This time the interruption was not my fault. The door behind me opened with a soft hiss, and my own secretarybot hovered into the guest suite, floating on magnetic waves induced in the walls and deck.