“I regret things tend that way.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So do I.”

  The second set of ships returned. More Memories embarked on their journeys. The treaty was holding.

  There was a meeting aboard Ship to formalize the agreement. Cup’s successor was Brook, a tall, elderly Shar whose golden fur was darkened by age. A compromise candidate, President Gram said, his election determined after weeks of fighting for the successorship. He was not respected. Already pieces of Cup’s old faction were breaking away.

  “I wonder, your Excellency,” Brook said, after the formal business was over, “if you could arrange for our people to learn your language. You must have powerful translation modules aboard your ship in order to learn our language so quickly. You were broadcasting your message of peace within a few hours of entering real space.”

  “I have no such equipment aboard Ship,” Drill said. “Our knowledge of your language was acquired from Shar prisoners.”

  “Prisoners?” Shar ears pricked forward. “We were not aware of this,” Brook said.

  “After our base Memories recognized discrepancies,” Drill said, “we sent some Ships out searching for you. We seized one of your ships and took it to my home world. The prisoners were asked about their language and the location of your capital planet. Otherwise it would have taken me months to find your world here, and learn to communicate with you.”

  “May we ask to arrange for the return of the prisoners?”

  “Oh,” Drill said. “That won’t be possible. After we learned what we needed to know, we terminated their lives. They were being kept in an area reserved for a garden. The landscapers wanted to get to work.”

  Drill bobbed his head reassuringly. “I am pleased to inform you that they proved excellent fertilizer for the gardens. The result was quite lovely.”

  “I think,” said President Gram carefully, “that it would be best that this information not go beyond those of us in this room. I think it would disturb the process.”

  Minister-General Vang’s ears went back. So did others’. But they acceded.

  “I think we should take our leave,” said President Gram.

  “Have a pleasant afternoon,” said Drill.

  “It’s important.” It was not yet dawn. Ship had awakened Drill for a call from the President. “One of your ships has attacked another of our planets.”

  Alarm drove the sleep from Drill’s brain. “Please come to the airlock,” he said.

  “The information will reach the population within the hour.”

  “Come quickly,” said Drill.

  The President arrived with a pair of assistants, who stayed inside the airlock. They carried staves. “My people will be upset,” Gram said. “Things may not be entirely safe.”

  “Which planet was it?” Drill asked.

  Gram rubbed her ears. “It was one of those whose location went out on the last peace shuttle.”

  “The new Memory must not have arrived in time.”

  “That is what we will tell the people. That it couldn’t have been prevented. I will try to speed up the process by which the planets receive new Memories. Double the quota.”

  “That is a good idea.”

  “I will have to dismiss Brook. Opposite Minister-General Vang will have to take his job. If I can give Vang more power, he may remain in the coalition and not cause a split.”

  “As you think best.”

  President Gram looked up at Drill, her head rising reluctantly, as if held back by a great weight. “My son,” she said. “He was on the planet when it happened.”

  “You have other offspring,” Drill said.

  Gram looked at him, the pain burning deep in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  The fields around Ship filled once again. Cries and howls rent the air, and dirges pulsed against Ship’s uncaring walls. The Shar broadcasts in the next weeks seemed confused to Drill. Coalitions split and fragmented. Vang spoke frequently of readiness. President Gram succeeded in doubling the quota of planets. The decision was a near one.

  Then, days later, another message. “One of our commanders,” said President Gram, “was based in the vicinity of the attacked planet. He is one of Vang’s creatures. On his own initiative he ordered our military forces to engage. Your terraforming Ship was attacked.”

  “Was it destroyed?” Drill asked. His tone was urgent. There is still hope, he reminded himself.

  “Don’t be anxious for your fellow humans,” Gram said. “The Ship was damaged, but escaped.”

  “The loss of a few hundred billion unconscious organisms is no cause for anxiety,” Drill said. “An escaped terraforming Ship is. The Ship will alert our military forces. It will be a real war.”

  President Gram licked her lips. “What does that mean?”

  “You know of our Shrikes and so on. Our military people are worse. They are fully conscious and highly specialized in different modes of warfare. They are destructive, carnivorous, capable of taking enormous damage without impairing function. Their minds concentrate only on tactics, on destruction. Normally they are kept on planetoids away from the rest of humanity. Even other humans find their proximity too…disturbing.” Drill put all the urgency in his speech that he could. “Honorable President, you must give me the locations of the remaining planets. If I can get Memories to each of them with news of the peace, we may yet save them.”

  “I will try. But the coalition…” She turned away from the transmitter. “Vang will claim a victory.”

  “It is the worst possible catastrophe,” Drill said.

  Gram’s tone was grave. “I believe you,” she said.

  Drill listened to the broadcasts with growing anxiety. The Shars who spoke on the broadcasts were making angry comments about the execution of prisoners, about flower gardens and values Drill didn’t understand. Someone had let the secret loose. President Gram went from group to group outside Ship, talking of the necessity of her plan. The Shar’s responses were muted. Drill sensed they were waiting. It was announced that Vang had left the coalition. A chorus of triumphant yips rose from scattered members of the crowd. Others only moaned.

  Vang, now simply General Vang, arrived at the field. His followers danced intoxicated circles around him as he spoke, howling their responses to his words. “Triumph! United will!” they cried. “The humans can be beaten! Treachery avenged! Dictate the peace from a position of strength! We smell the location of their planets!”

  The Shars’ weird cackling laughter followed him from point to point. The laughing and crying went on well into the night. In the morning the announcement came that the coalition had fallen. Vang was now President-General.

  In his sleeping chamber, surrounded by his video walls, Drill began to weep.

  “I have been asked to bear Vang’s message to you,” Gram said. She seemed smaller than before, standing unsteadily even on her tripod legs. “It is his…humor.”

  “What is the message?” Drill said. His whole body seemed in pain. Even Lowbrain was silent, wrapped in misery

  “I had hoped,” Gram said, “that he was using this simply as an issue on which to gain power. That once he had the Presidency, he would continue the diplomatic effort. It appears he really means what he’s been saying. Perhaps he’s no longer in control of his own people.”

  “It is war,” Drill said.

  “Yes.”

  You have failed, said Memory. Drill winced in pain.

  “You will lose,” he said.

  “Vang says we are cleverer than you are.”

  “That may be the case. But cleverness cannot compete with experience. Humans have fought hundreds of these little wars, and never failed to wipe out the enemy. Our Memories of these conflicts are intact. Your people can’t fight millions of years of specialized evolution.”

  “Vang’s message doesn’t end there. You have till nightfall to remove your Ship from the planet. Six days to get out of real space.”

  “I am to be allowed to live?” Drill was surprised.

  “Yes. It is our…our custom.”

  Drill scratched himself. “I regret our efforts did not succeed.”

  “No more than I.” She was silent for a while. “Is there any way we can stop this?”

  “If Vang attacks any human planets after the Memories of the peace arrangement have arrived,” Drill said, “the military will be unleashed to wipe you out. There is no stopping them after that point.”

  “How long,” she asked, “do you think we have?”

  “A few years. Ten at the most.”

  “Our species will be dead.”

  “Yes. Exterminated. Our military are very good at their jobs.”

  “You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is…instinct. Or reflex.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Drill.

  Gram’s body trembled. “That is the tragedy of it,” she said.

  An hour later Ship rose from the field. Shars laughed their defiance from below, dancing in crazed abandon.

  I have failed, Drill told Memory.

  You knew the odds were long, Memory said. You knew that in negotiations with species this backward there have only been a handful of successes, and hundreds of failures.

  Yes, Drill acknowledged. It’s a shame, though. To have spent all these months away from home.

  Eat! Eat! said Lowbrain.

  Far away, in their forty-mile-long Ships, the human soldiers were already on their way.

  Surfacing

  There was an alien on the surface of the planet. A Kyklops had teleported into Overlook Station, and then flown down on the shuttle. Since, unlike humans, it could teleport without apparatus, presumably it took the shuttle for the pleasure of the ride. The Kyklops wore a human body, controlled through an n-dimensional interface, and took its pleasures in the human fashion.

  The Kyklops expressed an interest in Anthony’s work, but Anthony avoided it: he stayed at sea and listened to aliens of another kind.

  Anthony wasn’t interested in meeting aliens who knew more than he did.

  The boat drifted in a cold current and listened to the cries of the sea. A tall grey swell was rolling in from the southwest, crossing with a wind-driven easterly chop. The boat tossed, caught in the confusion of wave patterns.

  It was a sloppy ocean, somehow unsatisfactory. Marking a sloppy day.

  Anthony felt a thing twist in his mind. Something that, in its own time, would lead to anger.

  The boat had been out here, both in the warm current and then in the cold, for three days. Each more unsatisfactory than the last.

  The growing swell was being driven toward land by a storm that was breaking up fifty miles out to sea: the remnants of the storm itself would arrive by midnight and make things even more unpleasant. Spray feathered across the tops of the waves. The day was growing cold.

  Spindrift pattered across Anthony’s shoulders. He ignored it, concentrated instead on the long, grating harmonic moan picked up by the microphones his boat dangled into the chill current. The moan ended on a series of clicks and trailed off. Anthony tapped his computer deck. A resolution appeared on the screen. Anthony shaded his eyes from the pale sun and looked at it.

  Anthony gazed stonily at the translation tree. “I am rising toward and thinking hungrily about the slippery-tasting coordinates” actually made the most objective sense, but the righthand branch of the tree was the most literal and most of what Anthony suspected was context had been lost. “I and the oily current are in a state of motion toward one another” was perhaps more literal, but “We (the oily deep and I) are in a cold state of mind” was perhaps equally valid.

  The boat gave a corkscrew lurch, dropped down the face of a swell, came to an abrupt halt at the end of its drogue. Water slapped against the stern. A mounting screw, come loose from a bracket on the bridge, fell and danced brightly across the deck.

  The screw and the deck are in a state of relative motion, Anthony thought. The screw and the deck are in a motion state of mind.

  Wrong, he thought, there is no Other in the Dwellers’ speech.

  We, I and the screw and the deck, are feeling cold.

  We, I and the Dweller below, are in a state of mutual incomprehension.

  A bad day, Anthony thought.

  Inchoate anger burned deep inside him.

  Anthony saved the translation and got up from his seat. He went to the bridge and told the boat to retrieve the drogue and head for Cabo Santa Pola at flank speed. He then went below and found a bottle of bourbon that had three good swallows left.

  The trailing microphones continued to record the sonorous moans from below, the sound now mingled with the thrash of the boat’s screws.

  The screw danced on the deck as the engines built up speed. Its state of mind was not recorded.

  The video news, displayed above the bar, showed the Kyklops making his tour of the planet. The Kyklops’ human body, male, was tall and blue-eyed and elegant. He made witty conversation and showed off his naked chest as if he were proud of it. His name was Telamon.

  His real body, Anthony knew, was a tenuous incorporeal mass somewhere in n-dimensional space. The human body had been grown for it to wear, to move like a puppet. The nth dimension was interesting only to a mathematician: its inhabitants preferred wearing flesh.

  Anthony asked the bartender to turn off the vid. The yacht club bar was called the Leviathan, and Anthony hated the name. His creatures were too important, too much themselves, to be awarded a name that stank of human myth, of human resonance that had nothing to do with the creatures themselves. Anthony never called them Leviathans himself. They were Deep Dwellers.

  There was a picture of a presumed Leviathan above the bar. Sometimes bits of matter were washed up on shore, thin tenuous membranes, long tentacles, bits of phosphorescence, all encrusted with the local equivalent of barnacles and infested with parasites. It was assumed the stuff had broken loose from the larger Dwellers, or were bits of one that had died. The artist had done his best and painted something that looked like a whale covered with tentacles and seaweed.

  The place had fake-nautical decor, nets, harpoons, flashing rods, and knickknacks made from driftwood, and the bar was regularly infected by tourists: that made it even worse. But the regular bartender and the divemaster and the steward were real sailors, and that made the yacht club bearable, gave him some company. His mail was delivered here as well.

  Tonight the bartender was a substitute named Christopher: he was married to the owner’s daughter and got his job that way. He was a fleshy, sullen man and no company.

  We, thought Anthony, the world and I, are drinking alone. Anger burned in him, anger at the quality of the day and the opacity of the Dwellers and the storm that beat brainlessly at the windows.

  “Got the bastard!” A man was pounding the bar. “Drinks on me.” He was talking loudly, and he wore gold rings on his fingers. Raindrops sparkled in his hair. He wore a flashing harness, just in case anyone missed why he was here. Hatred settled in Anthony like poison in his belly.

  “Got a thirty-foot flasher,” the man said. He pounded the bar again. “Me and Nick got it hung up outside. Four hours. A four-hour fight!”

  “Why have a fight with something you can’t eat?” Anthony said.

  The man looked at him. He looked maybe twenty, but Anthony could tell he was old, centuries old maybe. Old and vain and stupid, stupid as a boy. “It’s a game fish,” the man said.

  Anthony looked into the fisherman’s eyes and saw a reflection of his own contempt. “You wanna fight,” he said, “you wanna have a game, fight something smart. Not a dumb animal that you can outsmart, that once you catch it will only rot and stink.”

  That was the start.

  Once it began, it didn’t take long. The man’s rings cut Anthony’s face, and Anthony was smaller and lighter, but the man telegraphed every move and kept leading with his right. When it was over, Anthony left him on the floor and stepped out into the downpour, stood alone in the hammering rain and let the water wash the blood from his face. The whiskey and the rage were a flame that licked his nerves and made them sing.

  He began walking down the street. Heading for another bar.

  GRACE(2) meant grace in the sense of physical grace, dexterity, harmony of motion, as opposed to spiritual grace, which was GRACE(1). The Dweller that Anthony was listening to was engaged in a dialogue with another, possibly the same known to the computer as 41, who might be named “Upwelling Reflection,” but Deep Dweller naming systems seemed inconsistent, depending largely on a context that was as yet opaque, and “upwelling reflection” might have to do with something else entirely.

  Anthony suspected the Dweller had just said hello.

  Salt water smarted on the cuts on Anthony’s face. His swollen knuckles pained him as he tapped the keys of his computer deck. He never suffered from hangover, and his mind seemed filled with an exemplary clarity; he worked rapidly, with burning efficiency. His body felt energized.

  He was out of the cold Kirst Current today, in a warm, calm subtropical sea on the other side of the Las Madres archipelago. The difference of forty nautical miles was astonishing.

  The sun warmed his back. Sweat prickled on his scalp. The sea sparkled under a violet sky.

  The other Dweller answered.

  Through his bare feet, Anthony could feel the subsonic overtones vibrating through the boat. Something in the cabin rattled. The microphones recorded the sounds, raised the subsonics to an audible level, played it back. The computer made its attempt.