EYES OF AMBER

Joan D. Vinge

The beggar woman shuffled up the silent evening street to the rear of Lord Chwiul’s town house. She hesitated, peering up at the softly glowing towers, then clawed at the watchman’s arm. “A word with you, master—”

“Don’t touch me, hag!” The guard raised his spear butt in disgust.

A deft foot kicked free of the rags and snagged him off balance. He found himself sprawled on his back in the spring melt, the spear tip dropping toward his belly, guided by a new set of hands. He gaped, speechless. The beggar tossed an amulet onto his chest.

“Look at it, fool! I have business with your lord.” The beggar woman stepped back, the spear tip tapped him impatiently.

The guard squirmed in the filth and wet, holding the amulet up close to his face in the poor light. “You … you are the one? You may pass—”

“Indeed!” Muffled laughter. “Indeed I may pass—for many things, in many places. The Wheel of Change carries us all.” She lifted the spear. “Get up, fool … and no need to escort me, I’m expected.”

The guard climbed to his feet, dripping and sullen, and stood back while she freed her wing membranes from the folds of cloth. He watched them glisten and spread as she gathered herself to leap effortlessly to the tower’s entrance, twice his height above. He waited until she had vanished inside before he even dared to curse her.

“Lord Chwiul?”

“T’uupieh, I presume.” Lord Chwiul leaned forward on the couch of fragrant mosses, peering into the shadows of the hall.

“Lady T’uupieh.” T’uupieh strode forward into light, letting the ragged hood slide back from her face. She took a fierce pleasure in making no show of obeisance, in coming forward directly as nobility to nobility. The sensuous ripple of a hundred tiny miih hides underfoot made her callused feet tingle. After so long, it comes back too easily …

She chose the couch across the low, waterstone table from him, stretching languidly in her beggar’s rags. She extended a finger claw and picked a juicy kelet berry from the bowl in the table’s scroll-carven surface; let it slide into her mouth and down her throat, as she had done so often, so long ago. And then, at last, she glanced up, to measure his outrage.

“You dare to come to me in this manner—”

Satisfactory. Yes, very … ” I did not come to you. You came to me … you sought my services.” Her eyes wandered the room with affected casualness, taking in the elaborate frescoes that surfaced the waterstone walls even in this small, private room … particularly in this room? she wondered. How many midnight meetings, for what varied intrigues, were held in this room? Chwiul was not the wealthiest of his family or clan: and appearances of wealth and power counted in this city, in this world—for wealth and power were everything.

“I sought the services of T’uupieh the Assassin. I’m surprised to find that the Lady T’uupieh dared to accompany her here.” Chwiul had regained his composure; she watched his breath frost, and her own, as he spoke.

“Where one goes, the other follows. We are inseparable. You should know that better than most, my lord.” She watched his long, pale arm extend to spear several berries at once. Even though the nights were chill he wore only a body-wrapping tunic, which let him display the intricate scaling of jewels that danced and spiraled over his wing surfaces.

He smiled; she saw the sharp fangs protrude slightly. “Because my brother made the one into the other, when he seized your lands? I’m surprised you would come at all—how did you know you could trust me?” His movements were ungraceful; she remembered how the jewels dragged down fragile, translucent wing membranes and slender arms, until flight was impossible. Like every noble, Chwiul was normally surrounded by servants who answered his every whim. Incompetence, feigned or real, was one more trapping of power, one more indulgence that only the rich could afford. She was pleased that the jewels were not of high quality.

“I don’t trust you,” she said, “I trust only myself. But I have friends, who told me you were sincere enough—in this case. And of course, I did not come alone.”

“Your outlaws?” Disbelief. “That would be no protection.”

Calmly she separated the folds of cloth that held her secret companion at her side.

“It is true,” Chwiul trilled softly. “They call you Demon’s Consort!”

She turned the amber lens of the demon’s precious eye so that it could see the room, as she had seen it, and then settled its gaze on Chwiul. He drew back slightly, fingering moss.

” ‘A demon has a thousand eyes, and a thousand thousand torments for those who offend it.’ ” She quoted from the Book of Ngoss, whose rituals she had used to bind the demon to her.

Chwiul stretched nervously, as if he wanted to fly away. But he only said, “Then I think we understand each other. And I think I have made a good choice: I know how well you have served the Overlord, and other court members … I want you to kill someone for me.”

“Obviously.”

“I want you to kill Klovhiri.”

T’uupieh started, very slightly. “You surprise me in return, Lord Chwiul. Your own brother?” And the usurper of my lands. How I have ached to kill him, slowly, so slowly, with my own hands… . But always he is too well guarded.

“And your sister too—my lady.” Faint overtones of mockery. “I want his whole family eliminated; his mate, his children …”

Klovhiri … and Ahtseet. Ahtseet, her own younger sister, who had been her closest companion since childhood, her only family since their parents had died. Ahtseet, whom she had cherished and protected; dear, conniving, traitorous little Ahtseet— who could forsake pride and decency and family honor to mate willingly with the man who had robbed them of everything … Anything to keep the family lands, Ahtseet had shrilled; anything to keep her position. But that was not the way! Not by surrendering; but by striking back—T’uupieh became aware that Chwiul was watching her reaction with unpleasant interest. She fingered the dagger at her belt.

“Why?” She laughed, wanting to ask, “How?”

“That should be obvious. I’m tired of coming second. I want what he has—your lands, and all the rest. I want him out of my way, and I don’t want anyone else left with a better claim to his inheritance than I have.”

“Why not do it yourself? Poison them, perhaps … it’s been done before.”

“No. Klovhiri has too many friends, too many loyal clansmen, too much influence with the Overlord. It has to be an ‘accidental’ murder. And no one would be better suited than you, my lady, to do it for me.”

T’uupieh nodded vaguely, assessing. No one could be better chosen for a desire to succeed than she … and also, for a position from which to strike. All she had lacked until now was the opportunity. From the time she had been dispossessed, through the fading days of autumn and the endless winter—for nearly a third of her life now—she had haunted the wild swamp and fenland of her estate. She had gathered a few faithful servants, a few malcontents, a few cutthroats, to harry and murder Klovhiri’s retainers, ruin his phib nets, steal from his snares and poach her own game. And for survival, she had taken to robbing whatever travelers took the roads that passed through her lands.

Because she was still nobility, the Overlord had at first tolerated, and then secretly encouraged, her banditry. Many wealthy foreigners traveled the routes that crossed her estate, and for a certain commission, he allowed her to attack them with impunity. It was a sop, she knew, thrown to her because he had let his favorite, Klovhiri, have her lands. But she used it to curry what favor she could, and after a time the Overlord had begun to bring her more discreet and profitable business—the elimination of certain enemies. And so she had become an assassin as well—and found that the calling was not so very different from that of noble: both required nerve, and cunning, and an utter lack of compunction. And because she was T’uupieh, she had succeeded admirably. But because of her vendetta, the rewards had been small . . until now.

“You do not answer,” Chwiul was saying. “Does that mean your nerve fails you, in kith-murder, where mine does not?”

She laughed sharply. “That you say it proves twice that your judgment is poorer than mine… . No, my nerve does not fail me. Indeed, my blood burns with desire! But I hadn’t thought to lay Klovhiri under the ice just to give my lands to his brother. Why should I do that favor for you?”

“Because obviously you cannot do it alone. Klovhiri hasn’t managed to have you killed, in all the time you’ve plagued him; which is a testament to your skill. But you’ve made him too wary —you can’t get near him, when he keeps himself so well protected. You need the cooperation of someone who has his trust— someone like myself. I can make him yours.”

“And what will be my reward, if I accept? Revenge is sweet; but revenge is not enough.”

“I will pay what you ask.”

“My estate.” She smiled.

“Even you are not so naive—”

“No.” She stretched a wing toward nothing in the air. “I am not so naive. I know its value …” The memory of a golden-clouded summer’s day caught her—of soaring, soaring, on the warm updrafts above the streaming lake … seeing the fragile rose-red of the manor towers spearing light far off above the windswept tide of the trees … the saffron and crimson and aquamarine of ammonia pools, bright with dissolved metals, that lay in the gleaming melt-surface of her family’s land, the land that stretched forever, like the summer … “I know its value.” Her voice hardened. “And that Klovhiri is still the Overlord’s pet. As you say, Klovhiri has many powerful friends, and they will become your friends when he dies. I need more strength, more wealth, before I can buy enough influence to hold what is mine again. The odds are not in my favor—now.”

“You are carved from ice, T’uupieh. I like that.” Chwiul leaned forward. His amorphous red eyes moved along her outstretched body; trying to guess what lay concealed beneath the rags in the shadowy foxfire-light of the room. His eyes came back to her face.

She showed him neither annoyance nor amusement. “I like no man who likes that in me.”

“Not even if it meant regaining your estate?”

“As a mate of yours?” Her voice snapped like a frozen branch. “My lord—I have just about decided to kill my sister for doing as much. I would sooner kill myself.”

He shrugged, lying back on the couch. “As you wish …” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Then what will it take to be rid of my brother—and of you as well?”

“Ah.” She nodded, understanding more. “You wish to buy my services, and to buy me off, too. That may not be so easy to do. But—” But I will make the pretense, for now. She speared berries from the bowl in the tabletop, watched the silky sheet of emerald-tinted ammonia water that curtained one wall. It dropped from heights within the tower into a tiny plunge basin, with a music that would blur conversation for anyone who tried to listen outside. Discretion, and beauty… . The musky fragrance of the mossy couch brought back her childhood suddenly, disconcertingly: the memory of lying in a soft bed, on a soft spring night… . “But as the seasons change, change moves me in new directions. Back into the city, perhaps. I like your tower, Lord Chwiul. It combines discretion and beauty.”

“Thank you.”

“Give it to me, and I’ll do what you ask.”

Chwiul sat up, frowning. “My town house!” Recovering, “Is that all you want?”

She spread her fingers, studied the vestigial webbing between them. “I realize it is rather modest.” She closed her hand. “But considering what satisfaction will come from earning it, it will suffice. And you will not need it, once I succeed.”

“No …” He relaxed somewhat. “I suppose not. I will scarcely miss it after I have your lands.”

She let it pass. “Well then, we are agreed. Now, tell me, where is the key to Klovhiri’s lock? What is your plan for delivering him —and his family—into my hands?”

“You are aware that your sister and the children are visiting here, in my house, tonight? And that Klovhiri will return before the new day?”

“I am aware.” She nodded, with more casualness than she felt; seeing that Chwiul was properly, if silently, impressed at her nerve in coming here. She drew her dagger from its sheath beside the demon’s amber eye and stroked the serrated blade of waterstone-impregnated wood. “You wish me to slit their throats, while they sleep under your very roof?” She managed the right blend of incredulity.

“No!” Chwiul frowned again. “What sort of fool do you—” He broke off. “With the new day, they will be returning to the estate by the usual route. I have promised to escort them, to ensure their safety along the way. There will also be a guide, to lead us through the bogs. But the guide will make a mistake …”

“And I will be waiting.” T’uupieh’s eyes brightened. During the winter the wealthy used sledges for travel on long journeys— preferring to be borne over the frozen melt by membranous sails, or dragged by slaves where the surface of the ground was rough and crumpled. But as spring came and the surface of the ground began to dissolve, treacherous sinks and pools opened like blossoms to swallow the unwary. Only an experienced guide could read the surfaces, tell sound waterstone from changeable ammonia-water melt. “Good,” she said softly. “Yes, very good… . Your guide will see them safely foundered in some slush-hole, and then I will snare them like changeling phibs.”

“Exactly. But I want to be there when you do; I want to watch. I’ll make some excuse to leave the group, and meet you in the swamp. The guide will mislead them only if he hears my signal.”

“As you wish. You’ve paid well for the privilege. But come alone. My followers need no help, and no interference.” She sat up, let her long, webbed feet down to rest again on the sensuous hides of the rug.

“And if you think that I’m a fool, and playing into your hands myself, consider this. You will be the obvious suspect when Klovhiri is murdered. I’ll be the only witness who can swear to the Overlord that your outlaws weren’t the attackers. Keep that in mind.”

She nodded. “I will.”

“How will I find you, then?”

“You will not. My thousand eyes will find you.” She rewrapped the demon’s eye in its pouch of rags.

Chwiul looked vaguely disconcerted. “Will—it take part in the attack?”

“It may, or it may not; as it chooses. Demons are not bound to the Wheel of Change like you and me. But you will surely meet it face to face—although it has no face—if you come.” She brushed the pouch at her side. “Yes—do keep in mind that I have my safeguards too in this agreement. A demon never forgets.”

She stood up at last, gazing once more around the room. “I shall be comfortable here.” She glanced back at Chwiul. “I will look for you, come the new day.”

“Come the new day.” He rose, his jeweled wings catching light.

“No need to escort rne. I shall be discreet.” She bowed, as an equal, and started toward the shadowed hall. “I shall definitely get rid of your watchman. He doesn’t know a lady from a beggar.”

“The Wheel turns once more for me, my demon. My life in the swamps will end with Klovhiri’s life. I shall move into town … and I shall be lady of my manor again, when the fishes sit in the trees!”

T’uupieh’s alien face glowed with malevolent joy as she turned away, on the display screen above the computer terminal. Shannon Wyler leaned back in his seat, finished typing his translation, and pulled off the wire headset. He smoothed his long, blond, slicked-back hair, the habitual gesture helping him reorient to his surroundings. When T’uupieh spoke he could never maintain the objectivity he needed to help him remember he was still on Earth, and not really on Titan, orbiting Saturn, some fifteen hundred million kilometers away. T’uupieh, whenever I think I love you, you decide to cut somebody’s throat… .

He nodded vaguely at the congratulatory murmurs of the staff and technicians, who literally hung on his every word waiting for new information. They began to thin out behind him, as the computer reproduced copies of the transcript. Hard to believe he’d been doing this for over a year now. He looked up at his concert posters on the wall, with nostalgia but no regret.

Someone was phoning Marcus Reed: he sighed, resigned.

” ‘Ven the fishes sit in the trees’? Are you being sarcastic?” He looked over his shoulder at Dr. Garda Bach’s massive form. “Hi, Garda. Didn’t hear you come in.” She glanced up from a copy of the translation, tapped him lightly on the shoulder with her forked walking stick. “I know, dear boy. You never hear anything when T’uupieh speaks. But what do you mean by this?”

“On Titan that’s summer—when the triphibians metamorphose for the third time. So she means maybe five years from now, our time.”

“Ah! Of course. The old brain is not what it was …” She shook her gray-white head; her black cloak swirled out melodramatically.

He grinned, knowing she didn’t mean a word of it. “Maybe learning Titanese on top of fifty other languages is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

“}a … ja … maybe it is …” She sank heavily into the next seat over, already lost in the transcript. He had never, he thought, expected to like the old broad so well. He had become aware of her Presence while he studied linguistics at Berkeley— she was the grande dame of linguistic studies, dating back to the days when there had still been unrecorded languages here on Earth. But her skill at getting her name in print and her face on television, as an expert on what everybody “really meant,” had convinced him that her true talent lay in merchandising. Meeting her at last, in person, hadn’t changed his mind about that; but it had convinced him forever that she knew her stuff about cultural linguistics. And that, in turn, had convinced him her accent was a total fraud. But despite the flamboyance, or maybe even because of it, he found that her now-archaic views on linguistics were much closer to his own feelings about communication than the views of either one of his parents.

Garda sighed. “Remarkable, Shannon! You are simply remarkable—your feel for a wholly alien language amazes me. Whatever vould ve have done if you had not come to us?”

“Done without, I expect.” He savored the special pleasure that came of being admired by someone he respected. He looked down again at the computer console, at the two shining green-lit plates of plastic thirty centimeters on a side that together gave him the versatility of a virtuoso violinist and a typist with a hundred thousand keys: His link to T’uupieh, his voice—the new IBM synthesizer, whose touch-sensitive control plates could be manipulated to re-create the impossible complexities of her language. God’s gift to the world of linguistics … except that it required the sensitivity and inspiration of a musician to fully use its range.

He glanced up again and out the window, at the now familiar fog-shrouded skyline of Coos Bay. Since very few linguists were musicians, their resistance to the synthesizer had been like a brick wall. The old guard of the aging New Wave—which included His Father the Professor and His Mother the Communications Engineer—still clung to a fruitless belief in mathematical computer translation. They still struggled with ungainly programs weighed down by endless morpheme lists that supposedly would someday generate any message in a given language. But even after years of refinement, computer-generated translations were still uselessly crude and sloppy.

At graduate school there had been no new languages to seek out, and no permission for him to use the synthesizer to explore the old ones. And so—after a final, bitter family argument—he had quit graduate school. He had taken his belief in the synthesizer into the world of his second love, music; into a field where, he hoped, real communication still had some value. Now, at twenty-four, he was Shann the Music Man, the musician’s musician, a hero to an immense generation of aging fans and a fresh new generation that had inherited their love for the ever-changing music called “rock.” And neither of his parents had willingly spoken to him in years.

“No false modesty,” Garda was chiding. “What could we have done without you? You yourself have complained enough about your mother’s methods. You know we would not have a tenth of the information about Titan we’ve gained from T’uupieh if she had gone on using that damned computer translation.”

Shannon frowned faintly, at the sting of secret guilt. “Look, I know I’ve made some cracks—and I meant most of them—but I’d never have gotten off the ground if she hadn’t done all the preliminary analysis before I even came.” His mother had already been on the mission staff, having worked for years at NASA on the esoterics of computer communication with satellites and space probes; and because of her linguistic background, she had been made head of the newly pulled-together staff of communications specialists by Marcus Reed, the Titan project director. She had been in charge of the initial phonic analysis, using the computer to compress the alien voice range into one audible to humans, then breaking up the complex sounds into more, and simpler, human phones … she had identified phonemes, separated morphemes, fitted them into a grammatical framework, and assigned English sound equivalents to it all. Shannon had watched her on the early TB interviews, looking unhappy and ill at ease while Reed held court for the spellbound press. But what Dr. Wyler the Communications Engineer had had to say, at last, had held them on the edge of his seat; and unable to resist, he had taken the next plane to Coos Bay.

“Veil, I meant no offense,” Garda said. “Your mother is obviously a skilled engineer. But she needs a little more—flexibility.”

“You’re telling me.” He nodded ruefully. “She’d still love to see the synthesizer drop through the floor. She’s been out of joint ever since I got here. At least Reed appreciates my value.’” Reed had welcomed him like a long-lost son when he first arrived at the institute… . Wasn’t he a skilled linguist as well as an inspired musician, didn’t he have some time between gigs, wouldn’t he like to extend his visit, and get an insider’s view of his mother’s work? He had agreed, modestly, to all three—and then the television cameras and reporters had sprung up as if on cue, and he understood clearly enough that they were not there to record the visit of Dr. Wyler’s kid, but Shann the Music Man.

But he had gotten his first session with a voice from another world. And with one hearing, he had become an addict … because their speech was music. Every phoneme was formed of two or three superposed sounds, and every morpheme was a blend of phonemes, flowing together like water. They spoke in chords, and the result was a choir, crystal bells ringing, the shattering of glass chandeliers…

And so he had stayed on and on, at first only able to watch his mother and her assistants with agonized frustration: His mother’s computer-analysis methods had worked well in the initial transphonemicizing of T’uupieh’s speech, and they had learned enough very quickly to send back clumsy responses using the probe’s echo-locating device, to keep T’uupieh’s interest from wandering. But typing input at a keyboard, and expecting even the most sophisticated programming to transform it into another language, still would not work even for known human languages.

And he knew, with an almost religious fervor, that the synthesizer had been designed for just this miracle of communication; and that he alone could use it to capture directly the nuances and subtleties machine translation could never supply. He had tried to approach his mother about letting him use it, but she had turned him down flat: “This is a research center, not a recording studio.”

And so he had gone over her head to Reed, who had been delighted. And when at last he felt his hands moving across the warm, faintly tingling plates of light, tentatively re-creating the speech of another world, he had known that he had been right all along. He had let his music commitments go to hell, without a regret, almost with relief, as he slid back into the field that had always come first.

Shannon watched the display, where T’uupieh had settled back with comfortable familiarity against the probe’s curving side, half obscuring his view of the camp. Fortunately both she and her followers treated the probe with obsessive care, even when they dragged it from place to place as they constantly moved to camp. He wondered what would have happened if they had inadvertently set off its automatic defense system— which had been designed to protect it from aggressive animals; which delivered an electric shock that varied from merely painful to fatal. And he wondered what would have happened if the probe and its “eyes” hadn’t fit so neatly into T’uupieh’s beliefs about demons. The idea that he might never have known her, or heard her voice… .

More than a year had passed already since he, and the rest of the world, had heard the remarkable news that intelligent life existed on Saturn’s major moon. He had no memory at all of the first two flybys to Titan, back in ‘79 and ‘81—although he could clearly remember the 1990 orbiter that had caught fleeting glimpses of the surface through Titan’s swaddling of opaque, golden clouds. But the handful of miniprobes it had dropped had proved that Titan profited from the same “greenhouse effect” that made Venus a boiling hell. And even though the seasonal temperatures never rose above two hundred degrees Kelvin, the few photographs had shown, unquestionably, that life existed there. The discovery of life, after so many disappointments throughout the rest of the solar system, had been enough to initiate another probe mission, one designed to actually send back data from Titan’s surface.

That probe had discovered a life form with human intelligence … or rather, the life form had discovered the probe. And T’uupieh’s discovery had turned a potentially ruined mission into a success: The probe had been designed with a main, immobile data processing unit, and ten “eyes,” or subsidiary units, that were to be scattered over Titan’s surface to relay information. The release of the subsidiary probes during landing had failed, however, and all of the “eyes” had come down within a few square kilometers of its own landing in the uninhabited marsh. But T’uupieh’s self-interested fascination and willingness to appease her “demon” had made up for everything.

Shannon looked up at the flat wall-screen again, at T’uupieh’s incredible, unhuman face—a face that was as familiar now as his own in the mirror. She sat waiting with her incredible patience for a reply from her “demon”: She would have been waiting for over an hour by the time her transmission reached him across the gap between their worlds; and she would have to wait as long again, while they discussed a response and he created the new translation. She spent more time now with the probe than she did with her own people. The loneliness of command … he smiled. The almost flat profile of her moon-white face turned slightly toward him—toward the camera lens; her own fragile mouth smiled gently, not quite revealing her long, sharp teeth. He could see one red pupilless eye, and the crescent nose-slit that half ringed it; her frosty cyanide breath shone blue-white, illuminated by the ghostly haloes of St. Elmo’s fire that wreathed the probe all through Titan’s interminable eight-day nights. He could see balls of light hanging like Japanese lanterns on the drooping snarl of icebound branches in a distant thicket.

It was unbelievable … or perfectly logical; depending on which biological expert was talking … that the nitrogen-and ammonia-based life on Titan should have so many analogs with oxygen-and water-based life on Earth. But T’uupieh was not human, and the music of her words time and again brought him messages that made a mockery of any ideals he tried to harbor about her and their relationship. So far in the past year she had assassinated eleven people, and with her outlaws had murdered God knew how many more, in the process of robbing them. The only reason she cooperated with the probe, she had as much as said, was because only a demon had a more bloody reputation; only a demon could command her respect. And yet, from what little she had been able to show them and tell them about the world she lived in, she was no better or no worse than anyone else—only more competent. Was she a prisoner of an age, a culture, where blood was something to be spilled instead of shared? Or was it something biologically innate that let her philosophize brutality, and brutalize philosophy—

Beyond Tuupieh, around the nitrogen campfire, some of her outlaws had begun to sing—the alien folk melodies that in translation were no more than simple, repetitious verse. But heard in their pure, untranslated form, they layered harmonic complexity on complexity: musical speech in a greater pattern of song. Shannon reached out and picked up the headset again, forgetting everything else. He had had a dream, once, where he had been able to sing in chords—

Using the long periods of waiting between their communications, he had managed, some months back, to record a series of the alien songs himself, using the synthesizer. They had been spare and uncomplicated versions compared to the originals, because even now his skill with the language couldn’t help wanting to make them his own. Singing was a part of religious ritual, T’uupieh had told him. “But they don’t sing because they’re religious; they sing because they like to sing.” Once, privately, he had played one of his own human compositions for her on the synthesizer, and transmitted it. She had stared at him (or into the probe’s golden eye) with stony, if tolerant, silence. She never sang herself, although he had sometimes heard her softly harmonizing. He wondered what she would say if he told her that her outlaws’ songs had already earned him his first Platinum Record. Nothing, probably … but knowing her, if he could make the concepts clear, she would probably be heartily in favor of the exploitation.

He had agreed to donate the profits of the record to NASA (and although he had intended that all along, it had annoyed him to be asked by Reed), with the understanding that the gesture would be kept quiet. But somehow, at the next press conference, some reporter had known just what question to ask, and Reed had spilled it all. And his mother, when asked about her son’s sacrifice, had murmured, “Saturn is becoming a three-ring circus,” and left him wondering whether to laugh or swear.

Shannon pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his caftan and lit one. Garda glanced up, sniffing, and shook her head. She didn’t smoke, or anything else (although he suspected she ran around with men), and she had given him a long, wasted lecture about it, ending with “Veil, at least they’re not tobacco.” He shook his head back at her.

“What do you think about T’uupieh’s latest victims, then?” Garda flourished the transcript, pulling his thoughts back. “Vill she kill her own sister?”

He exhaled slowly around the words “Tune in tomorrow, for our next exciting episode! I think Reed will love it; that’s what I think.” He pointed at the newspaper lying on the floor beside his chair. “Did you notice we’ve slipped to page three?” T’uupieh had fed the probe’s hopper some artifacts made of metal—a thing she had said was only known to the “Old Ones”; and the scientific speculation about the existence of a former technological culture had boosted interest in the probe to front-page status again. But even news of that discovery couldn’t last forever… “Gotta keep those ratings up, folks. Keep those grants and donations rolling in.”

Garda clucked. “Are you angry at Reed, or at T’uupieh?”

He shrugged dispiritedly. “Both of ‘em. I don’t see why she won’t kill her own sister—” He broke off, as the subdued noise of the room’s numerous project workers suddenly intensified, and concentrated: Marcus Reed was making an entrance, simultaneously solving everyone else’s problems, as always. Shannon marveled at Reed’s energy, even while he felt something like disgust at the way he spent it. Reed exploited everyone, and everything, with charming cynicism, in the ultimate hype for Science—and watching him at work had gradually drained away whatever respect and goodwill Shannon had brought with him to the project. He knew that his mother’s reaction to Reed was close to his own, even though she had never said anything to him about it; it surprised him that there was something they could still agree on.

“Dr. Reed—”

“Excuse me, Dr. Reed, but—”

His mother was with Reed now as they all came down the room; looking tight-lipped and resigned, her lab coat buttoned up as if she was trying to avoid contamination. Reed was straight out of Manstyle magazine, as usual. Shannon glanced down at his own loose gray caftan and jeans, which had led Garda to remark, “Are you planning to enter a monastery?”

“… we’d really like to—”

“Senator Foyle wants you to call him back—”

“… yes, all right; and tell Dinocci he can go ahead and have the probe run another sample. Yes, Max, I’ll get to that …” Reed gestured for quiet as Shannon and Garda turned in their seats to face him. “Well, I’ve just heard the news about our ‘Robin Hood’s‘ latest hard contract.”

Shannon grimaced quietly. He had been the one who had first, facetiously, called T’uupieh “Robin Hood.” Reed had snapped it up and dubbed her ammonia swamps “Sherwood Forest” for the press: After the facts of her bloodthirsty body counts began to come out, and it even began to look like she was collaborating with “the Sheriff of Nottingham,” some reporter had pointed out that T’uupieh bore no more resemblance to Robin Hood than she did to Rima the Bird-Girl. Reed had said, laughing, “Well, after all, the only reason Robin Hood stole from the rich was because the poor didn’t have any money!” That, Shannon thought, had been the real beginning of the end of his tolerance.

“… this could be used as an opportunity to show the world graphically the harsh realities of life on Titan—”

“Ein Moment,” Garda said. “You’re telling us you want to let the public watch this atrocity, Marcus?” Up until now they had never released to the media the graphic tapes of actual murders; even Reed had not been able to argue that that would have served any real scientific purpose.

“No, he’s not, Garda.” Shannon glanced up as his mother began to speak. “Because we all agreed that we would not release any tapes just for purposes of sensationalism.”

“Carry, you know that the press has been after me to release those other tapes, and that I haven’t, because we all voted against it. But I feel this situation is different—a demonstration of a unique, alien sociocultural condition. What do you think, Shann?”

Shannon shrugged, irritated and not covering it up. “I don’t know what’s so damn unique about it: a snuff flick is a snuff flick, wherever you film it. I think the idea stinks.” Once, at a party while he was still in college, he had watched a film of an unsuspecting victim being hacked to death. The film, and what all films like it said about the human race, had made him sick to his stomach.

“Ach—there’s more truth than poetry in that!” Garda said.

Reed frowned, and Shannon saw his mother raise her eyebrows.

“I have a better idea.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray under the panel. “Why don’t you let me try to talk her out of it?” As he said it, he realized how much he wanted to try; and how much success could mean, to his belief in communication—to his image of T’uupieh’s people and maybe his own.

They both showed surprise this time. “How?” Reed said.

“Well … I don’t know yet. Just let me talk to her, try to really communicate with her, find out how she thinks and what she feels; without all the technical garbage getting in the way for a while.”

His mother’s mouth thinned, he saw the familiar worry crease form between her brows. “Our job here is to collect that ‘garbage.’ Not to begin imposing moral values on the universe. We have too much to do as it is.”

“What’s ‘imposing’ about trying to stop a murder?” A certain light came into Garda’s faded blue eyes. “Now that has real … social implications. Think about it, Marcus—”

Reed nodded, glancing at the patiently attentive faces that still ringed him. “Yes—it does. A great deal of human interest…” Answering nods and murmurs. “All right, Shann. There are about three days left before morning comes again in Sherwood Forest. You can have them to yourself, to work with T’uupieh. The press will want reports on your progress …” He glanced at his watch, and nodded toward the door, already turning away. Shannon looked away from his mother’s face as she moved past him.

“Good luck, Shann.” Reed threw it back at him absently. “I wouldn’t count on reforming Robin Hood; but you can still give it a good try.”

Shannon hunched down in his chair, frowning, and turned back to the panel. “In your next incarnation may you come back as a toilet.”

T’uupieh was confused. She sat on the hummock of clammy waterstone beside the captive demon, waiting for it to make a reply. In the time that had passed since she’d found it in the swamp, she had been surprised again and again by how little its behavior resembled all the demon lore she knew. And tonight… .

She jerked, startled, as its grotesque, clawed arm came to life suddenly and groped among the icy-silver spring shoots pushing up through the melt at the hummock’s foot. The demon did many incomprehensible things (which was fitting) and it demanded offerings of meat and vegetation and even stone—even, sometimes, some part of the loot she had taken from passersby. She had given it those things gladly, hoping to win its favor and its aid … she had even, somewhat grudgingly, given it precious metal ornaments of Old Ones which she had stripped from a whining foreign lord. The demon had praised her effusively for that; all demons hoarded metal, and she supposed that it must need metals to sustain its strength: its domed carapace—gleaming now with the witch-fire that always shrouded it at night—was an immense metal jewel the color of blood. And yet she had always heard that demons preferred the flesh of men and women. But when she had tried to stuff the wing of the foreign lord into its maw it had spit him out with a few dripping scratches, and told her to let him go. Astonished, she had obeyed, and let the fool run off screaming to be lost in the swamp.

And then, tonight—”You are going to kill your sister, T’uupieh,” it had said to her tonight, “and two innocent children. How do you feel about that?” She had spoken what had come first, and truthfully, into her mind: “That the new day cannot come soon enough for me! I have waited so long—too long—to take my revenge on Klovhiri! My sister and her brats are a part of his foulness, better slain before they multiply.” She had drawn her dagger and driven it into the mushy melt, as she would drive it into their rotten hearts.

The demon had been silent again, for a long time; as it always was. (The lore said that demons were immortal, and so she had always supposed that it had no reason to make a quick response, she had wished, sometimes, it would show more consideration for her own mortality.) Then at last it had said, in its deep voice filled with alien shadows, “But the children have harmed no one. And Ahtseet is your only sister, she and the children are your only blood kin. She has shared your life. You say that once you”—the demon paused, searching its limited store of words—”cherished her for that. Doesn’t what she once meant to you mean anything now? Isn’t there any love left to slow your hand as you raise it against her?”

“Love!” she had said, incredulous. “What speech is that, O Soulless One? You mock me—” Sudden anger had bared her teeth. “Love is a toy, my demon, and I have put my toys behind me. And so has Ahtseet … she is no kin of mine. Betrayer, betrayer!” The word hissed like the dying embers of the campfire; she had left the demon in disgust, to rake in the firepit’s insulating layer of sulphury ash, and lay on a few more soggy branches. Y’lirr, her second-in-command, had smiled at her from where he lay in his cloak on the ground, telling her that she should sleep. But she had ignored him, and gone back to her vigil on the hill.

Even though this night was chill enough to recrystallize the slowly thawing limbs of the safilil trees, the equinox was long past, and now the fine mist of golden polymer rain presaged the golden days of the approaching summer. T’uupieh had wrapped herself more closely in her own cloak and pulled up the hood, to keep the clinging, sticky mist from fouling her wings and ear membranes; and she had remembered last summer, her first summer, which she would always remember … Ahtseet had been a clumsy, flapping infant as that first summer began, and T’uupieh the child had thought her new sister was silly and useless. But summer slowly transformed the land, and filled her wondering eyes with miracles; and her sister was transformed too, into a playful, easily led companion who could follow her into adventure. Together they learned to use their wings, and to use the warm updrafts to explore the boundaries and the freedoms of their heritage.

And now, as spring moved into summer once again, T’uupieh clung fiercely to the vision, not wanting to lose it, or to remember that childhood’s sweet, unreasoning summer would never come again, even though the seasons returned; for the Wheel of Change swept on, and there was never a turning back. No turning back … she had become an adult by the summer’s end, and she would never soar with a child’s light-winged freedom again. And Ahtseet would never do anything again. Little Ahtseet, always just behind her, like her own fair shadow … No! She would not regret it! She would be glad—

“Did you ever think, T’uupieh,” the demon had said suddenly, “that it is wrong to kill anyone? You don’t want to die—no one wants to die too soon. Why should they have to? Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you could change the world into one where you—where you treated everyone else as you wanted them to treat you, and they treated you the same? If everyone could—live and let live …” Its voice slipped into blurred overtones that she couldn’t hear.

She had waited, but it said no more, as if it were waiting for her to consider what she’d already heard. But there was no need to think about what was obvious: “Only the dead live and let live.” I treat everyone as I expect them to treat me; or I would quickly join the peaceful dead! Death is a part of life. We die when fate wills it, and when fate wills it, we kill.

“You are immortal, you have the power to twist the Wheel, to turn destiny as you want. You may toy with idle fantasies, even make them real, and never suffer the consequences. We have no place for such things in our small lives. No matter how much I might try to be like you, in the end I die like all the rest. We can change nothing, our lives are preordained. That is the way among mortals.” And she had fallen silent again, filled with unease at this strange wandering of the demon’s mind. But she must not let it prey on her nerves. Day would come very soon, she must not be nervous; she must be totally in control when she led this attack on Klovhiri. No emotion must interfere … no matter how much she yearned to feel Klovhiri’s blood spill bluely over her hands, and her sister’s, and the children’s … Ahtsect’s brats would never feel the warm wind lift them into the sky; or plunge, as she had, into the depths of her rainbow-petaled pools; or see her towers spearing light far off among the trees. Never! Never!

She had caught her breath sharply then, as a fiery pinwheel burst through the wall of tangled brush behind her, tumbling past her head into the clearing of the camp. She had watched it circle the fire—spitting sparks, hissing furiously in the quiet air— three and a half times before it spun on into the darkness. No sleeper wakened, and only two stirred. She clutched one of the demon’s hard, angular legs, shaken; knowing that the circling of the fire had been a portent … but not knowing what it meant. The burning silence it left behind oppressed her; she stirred restlessly, stretching her wings.

And utterly unmoved, the demon had begun to drone its strange, dark thoughts once more, “Not all you have heard about demons is true. We can suffer”—it groped for words again—”the —consequences of our acts; among ourselves we fight and die. We are vicious, and brutal, and pitiless: But we don’t like to be that way. We want to change into something better, more merciful, more forgiving. We fail more than we win . . , but we believe we can change. And you are more like us than you realize. You can draw a line between—trust and betrayal, right and wrong, good and evil; you can choose never to cross that line—”

“How, then?” She had twisted to face the amber eye as large as her own head, daring to interrupt the demon’s speech. “How can one droplet change the tide of the sea? It’s impossible! The world melts and flows, it rises into mist, it returns again to ice, only to melt and flow once more. A wheel has no beginning, and no end; no starting place. There is no ‘good,’ no ‘evil’ … no line between them. Only acceptance. If you were a mortal, I would think you were mad!”

She had turned away again, her claws digging shallow runnels in the polymer-coated stone as she struggled for self-control. Madness, … Was it possible? she wondered suddenly. Could her demon have gone mad? How else could she explain the thoughts it had put into her mind? Insane thoughts, bizarre, suicidal … but thoughts that would haunt her.

Or, could there be a method in its madness? She knew that treachery lay at the heart of every demon. It could simply be lying to her when it spoke of trust and forgiveness—knowing she must be ready for tomorrow, hoping to make her doubt herself, make her fail. Yes, that was much more reasonable. But then, why was it so hard to believe that this demon would try to ruin her most cherished goals? After all, she held it prisoner; and though her spells kept it from tearing her apart, perhaps it still sought to tear apart her mind, to drive her mad instead. Why shouldn’t it hate her, and delight in her torment, and hope for her destruction?

How could it be so ungrateful! She had almost laughed aloud at her own resentment, even as it formed the thought. As if a demon ever knew gratitude! But ever since the day she had netted it in spells in the swamp, she had given it nothing but the best treatment. She had fetched and carried, and made her fearful followers do the same. She had given it the best of everything —anything it desired. At its command she had sent out searchers to look for its scattered eyes, and it had allowed—even encouraged—her to use the eyes as her own, as watchers and protectors. She had even taught it to understand her speech (for it was as ignorant as a baby about the world of mortals) when she realized that it wanted to communicate with her. She had done all those things to win his favor—because she knew that it had come into her hands for a reason; and if she could gain its cooperation, there would be no one who would dare to cross her.

She had spent every spare hour in keeping it company, feeding its curiosity—and her own—as she fed its jeweled maw … until gradually those conversations with the demon had become an end in themselves, a treasure worth the sacrifice of even precious metals. Even the constant waiting for its alien mind to ponder her questions and answers had never tired her, she had come to enjoy sharing even the simple pleasure of its silences, and resting in the warm amber light of its gaze.

T’uupieh looked down at the finely woven fiber belt which passed through the narrow slits between her side and wing and held her tunic to her. She fingered the heavy, richly-amber beads that decorated it—metal-dyed melt trapped in polished waterstone by the jewelsmith’s secret arts—that reminded her always of her demon’s thousand eyes. Her demon—

She looked away again, toward the fire, toward the cloak-wrapped forms of her outlaws. Since the demon had come to her she had felt both the physical and emotional space that she had always kept between herself as leader and her band of followers gradually widening. She was still completely their leader, perhaps more firmly so because she had tamed the demon; and their bond of shared danger and mutual respect had never weakened. But there were other needs which her people might fill for each other, but never for her.

She watched them sleeping like the dead, as she should be sleeping now; preparing themselves for tomorrow. They took their sleep sporadically, when they could, as all commoners did— as she did now, too, instead of hibernating the night through like proper nobility. Many of them slept in pairs, man and woman; even though they mated with a commoner’s chaotic lack of discrimination whenever a woman felt the season come upon her. T’uupieh wondered what they must imagine when they saw her sitting here with the demon far into the night. She knew what they believed—what she encouraged all to believe—that she had chosen it for a consort, or that it had chosen her. Y’lirr, she saw, still slept alone. She trusted and liked him as well as she did anyone; he was quick and ruthless, and she knew that he worshipped her. But he was a commoner … and more importantly, he did not challenge her. Nowhere, even among the nobility, had she found anyone who offered the sort of companionship she craved … until now, until the demon had come to her. No, she would not believe that all its words had been lies—

“T’uupieh,” the demon called her name buzzingly in the misty darkness. “Maybe you can’t change the pattern of fate… but you can change your mind. You’ve already defied fate, by turning outlaw, and defying Klovhiri. Your sister was the one who accepted …”(unintelligible words)”… only let the Wheel take her. Can you really kill her for that? You must understand why she did it, how she could do it. You don’t have to kill her for that … you don’t have to kill any of them. You have the strength, the courage, to put vengeance aside, and find another way to your goals. You can choose to be merciful—you can choose your own path through life, even if the ultimate destination of all life is the same.”

She stood up resentfully, matching the demon’s height, and drew her cloak tightly around her. “Even if I wished to change my mind, it is too late. The Wheel is already in motion … and I must get my sleep, if I am to be ready for it.” She started away toward the fire; stopped, looking back. “There is nothing I can do now, my demon. I cannot change tomorrow. Only you can do that. Only you.”

She heard it, later, calling her name softly as she lay sleepless on the cold ground. But she turned her back toward the sound and lay still, and at last sleep came.

Shannon slumped back into the embrace of the padded chair, rubbing his aching head. His eyelids were sandpaper, his body was a weight. He stared at the display screen, at T’uupieh’s back turned stubbornly toward him as she slept beside the nitrogen campfire. “Okay, that’s it. I give up. She won’t even listen. Call Reed and tell him I quit.”

“That you’ve quit trying to convince T’uupieh,” Garda said. “Are you sure? She may yet come back. Use a little more emphasis on—spiritual matters. We must be certain we have done all we can to … change her mind.”

To save her soul, he thought sourly. Garda had gotten her early training at an institute dedicated to translating the Bible; he had discovered in the past few hours that she still had a hidden desire to proselytize. What soul? “We’re wasting our time. It’s been six hours since she walked out on me. She’s not coming back… . And I mean quit everything. I don’t want to be around for the main event, I’ve had it.”

“You don’t mean that,” Garda said. “You’re tired, you need the rest too. When T’uupieh wakes, you can talk to her again.”

He shook his head, pushing back his hair. “Forget it. Just call Reed.” He looked out the window, at dawn separating the mist-wrapped silhouette of seaside condominiums from the sky.

Garda shrugged, disappointed, and turned to the phone.

He studied the synthesizer’s touch boards again, still bright and waiting, still calling his leaden, weary hands to try one more time. At least when he made this final announcement, it wouldn’t have to be direct to the eyes and ears of a waiting world: He doubted that any reporter was dedicated enough to still be up in the glass-walled observation room at this hour. Their questions had been endless earlier tonight, probing his feelings and his purpose and his motives and his plans, asking about Robin Hood’s morality, or lack of it, and his own; about a hundred and one other things that were nobody’s business but his own.

The music world had tried to do the same thing to him once, but then there had been buffers—agents, publicity staffs—to protect him. Now, when he’d had so much at stake, there had been no protection, only Reed at the microphone eloquently turning the room into a sideshow, with Shann the Man as chief freak; until Shannon had begun to feel like a man staked out on an anthill and smeared with honey. The reporters gazed down from on high critiquing T’uppieh’s responses and criticizing his own, and filled the time gaps when he needed quiet to think with infuriating interruptions. Reed’s success had been total in wringing every drop of pathos and human interest out of his struggle to prevent T’uupieh’s vengeance against the innocents … and by that, had managed to make him fail.

No. He sat up straighter, trying to ease his back. No, he couldn’t lay it on Reed. By the time what he’d had to say had really counted, the reporters had given up on him. The failure belonged to him, only him: his skill hadn’t been great enough, his message hadn’t been convincing enough—he was the one who hadn’t been able to see through T’uppieh’s eyes clearly enough to make her see through his own. He had had his chance to really communicate, for once in his life—to communicate something important. And he’d sunk it.

A hand reached past him to set a cup of steaming coffee on the shelf below the terminal. “One thing about this computer,” a voice said quietly, “it’s programmed for a good cup of coffee.”

Startled, he laughed without expecting to; he glanced up. His mother’s face looked drawn and tired, she held another cup of coffee in her hand. “Thanks.” He picked up the cup and took a sip, felt the hot liquid slide down his throat into his empty stomach. Not looking up again, he said, “Well, you got what you wanted. And so did Reed. He got his pathos, and he gets his murders too.”

She shook her head. “This isn’t what I wanted. I don’t want to see you give up everything you’ve done here, just because you don’t like what Reed is doing with part of it. It isn’t worth that. Your work means too much to this project … and it means too much to you.”

He looked up.

“Ja, she is right, Shannon. You can’t quit now—we need you too much. And T’uupieh needs you.”

He laughed again, not meaning it. “Like a cement yo-yo. What are you trying to do, Garda, use my own moralizing against me?”

“She’s telling you what any blind man could see tonight; if he hadn’t seen it months ago …” His mother’s voice was strangely distant. “That this project would never have had this degree of success without you. That you were right about the synthesizer. And that losing you now might—”

She broke off, turning away to watch as Reed came through the doors at the end of the long room. He was alone, this time, for once, and looking rumpled. Shannon guessed that he had been sleeping when the phone call came and was irrationally pleased at waking him up.

Reed was not so pleased. Shannon watched the frown that might be worry, or displeasure, or both, forming on his face as he came down the echoing hall toward them. “What did she mean, you want to quit? Just because you can’t change an alien mind?” He entered the cubicle, and glanced down at the terminal—to be sure that the remote microphones were all switched off, Shannon guessed. “You knew it was a long shot, probably hopeless … you have to accept that she doesn’t want to reform, accept that the values of an alien culture are going to be different from your own—”

Shannon leaned back, feeling a muscle begin to twitch with fatigue along the inside of his elbow. “I can accept that. What I can’t accept is that you want to make us into a bunch of damn panderers. Christ, you don’t even have a good reason! I didn’t come here to play sound track for a snuff flick. If you go ahead and feed the world those murders, I’m laying it down. I don’t want to give all this up, but I’m not staying for a kill-porn carnival.”

Reed’s frown deepened, he glanced away. “Well? What about the rest of you? Are you still privately branding me an accessory to murder, too? Carly?”

“No, Marcus—not really.” She shook her head. “But we all feel that we shouldn’t cheapen and weaken our research by making a public spectacle of it. After all, the people of Titan have as much right to privacy and respect as any culture on Earth.”

“Ja, Marcus—I think we all agree about that.”

“And just how much privacy does anybody on Earth have today? Good God—remember the Tasaday? And that was thirty years ago. There isn’t a single mountaintop or desert island left that the all-seeing eye of the camera hasn’t broadcast all over the world. And what do you call the public crime surveillance laws— our own lives are one big peep show.”

Shannon shook his head. “That doesn’t mean we have to—”

Reed turned cold eyes on him. “And I’ve had a little too much of your smartass piety, Wyler. Just what do you owe your success as a musician to, if not publicity?” He gestured at the posters on the walls. “There’s more hard sell in your kind of music than any other field I can name.”

“I have to put up with some publicity push, or I couldn’t reach the people, I couldn’t do the thing that’s really important to me —communicate. That doesn’t mean I like it.”

“You think I enjoy this?”

“Don’t you?”

Reed hesitated. “I happen to be good at it, which is all that really matters. Because you may not believe it, but I’m still a scientist, and what I care about most of all is seeing that research gets its fair slice of the pie. You say I don’t have a good reason for pushing our findings: Do you realize that NASA lost all the data from our Neptune probe just because somebody in effect got tired of waiting for it to get to Neptune, and cut off our funds? The real problem on these long outer-planet missions isn’t instrumental reliability, it’s financial reliability. The public will pay out millions for one of your concerts, but not one cent for something they don’t understand—”

“I don’t make—”

“People want to forget their troubles, be entertained … and who can blame them? So in order to compete with movies, and sports, and people like you—not to mention ten thousand other worthy government and private causes—we have to give the public what it wants. It’s my responsibility to deliver that, so that the ‘real scientists’ can sit in their neat, bright institutes with half a billion dollars’ worth of equipment around them, and talk about ‘respect for research.’ “

He paused; Shannon kept his gaze stubbornly. “Think it over. And when you can tell me how what you did as a musician is morally superior to, or more valuable than, what you’re doing now, you can come to my office and tell me who the real hypocrite is. But think it over, first—all of you.” Reed turned and left the cubicle.

They watched in silence, until the double doors at the end of the room hung still. “Veil …” Garda glanced at her walking stick, and down at her cloak. “He does have a point.”

Shannon leaned forward, tracing the complex beauty of the synthesizer terminal, feeling the combination of chagrin and caffeine pushing down his fatigue: “I know he does. But that isn’t the point I was trying to get at! I didn’t want to change T’uupieh’s mind, or quit either, just because I objected to selling this project. It’s the way it’s being sold, like some kind of kill-porn show perversion, that I can’t take—” When he was a child, he remembered, rock concerts had had a kind of notoriety; but they were as respectable as a symphony orchestra now, compared to the “thrill shows” that had eclipsed them as he was growing up: where “experts” gambled their lives against a million-dollar pot, in front of a crowd who came to see them lose; where masochists made a living by self-mutilation; where they ran cinema verité films of butchery and death.

“I mean, is that what everybody really wants? Does it really make everybody feel good to watch somebody else bleed? Or are they going to get some kind of moral superiority thing out of watching it happen on Titan instead of here?” He looked up at the display, at T’uupieh, who still lay sleeping, unmoving and unmoved. “If I could have changed T’uupieh’s mind, or changed what happens here, then maybe I could have felt good about something. At least about myself. But who am I kidding …” T’uupieh had been right all along; and now he had to admit it to himself: that there had never been any way he could change either one. “T’uupieh’s just like the rest of them, she’d rather cut off your hand than shake it … and doing it vicariously means we’re no better. And none of us ever will be.” The words to a song older than he was slipped into his mind, with sudden irony. ” ‘One man’s hands can’t build,’” he began to switch off the terminal, “anything.”

“You need to sleep … ve all need to sleep.” Garda rose stiffly from her chair.

“… but if one and one and fifty make a million,’” his mother matched his quote softly.

Shannon turned back to look at her, saw her shake her head; she felt him looking at her, glanced up. “After all, if T’uupieh could have accepted that everything she did was morally evil, what would have become of her? She knew: It would have destroyed her—we would have destroyed her. She would have been swept away and drowned in the tide of violence.” His mother looked away at Garda, back at him. “T’uupieh is a realist, whatever else she is.”

He felt his mouth tighten against the resentment that sublimated a deeper, more painful emotion; he heard Garda’s grunt of indignation.

“But that doesn’t mean that you were wrong—or that you failed.”

“That’s big of you.” He stood up, nodding at Garda, and toward the exit. “Come on.”

“Shannon.”

He stopped, still facing away.

“I don’t think you failed. I think you did reach T’uupieh. The last thing she said was ‘only you can change tomorrow’ … I think she was challenging the demon to go ahead; to do what she didn’t have the power to do herself. I think she was asking you to help her.”

He turned, slowly. “You really believe that?”

“Yes, I do.” She bent her head, freed her hair from the collar of her sweater.

He moved back to his seat, his hands brushed the dark, unresponsive touchplates on the panel. “But it wouldn’t do any good to talk to her again. Somehow the demon has to stop the attack itself. If I could use the Voice’ to warn them… . Damn the time lag!” By the time his voice reached them, the attack would have been over for hours. How could he change anything tomorrow, if he was always two hours behind?

“I know how to get around the time-lag problem.”

“How?” Garda sat down again, mixed emotions showing on her broad, seamed face. “He can’t send a varning ahead of time; no one knows when Klovhiri will pass. It would come too soon, or too late.”

Shannon straightened up. “Better to ask ‘why?’ Why are you changing your mind?”

“I never changed my mind,” his mother said mildly. “I never liked this either. When I was a girl, we used to believe that our actions could change the world; maybe I’ve never stopped wanting to believe that.”

“But Marcus is not going to like us meddling behind his back, anyway.” Garda waved her staff. “And what about the point that perhaps we do need this publicity?”

Shannon glanced back irritably. “I thought you were on the side of the angels, not the devil’s advocate.”

“I am!” Garda’s mouth puckered. “But—”

“Then what’s such bad news about the probe making a last-minute rescue? It’ll be a sensation.”

He saw his mother smile, for the first time in months. “Sensational … if T’uupieh doesn’t leave us stranded in the swamp for our betrayal.”

He sobered: “Not if you really think she wants our help. And I know she wants it … I feel it. But how do we beat the time lag?”

“I’m the engineer, remember? I’ll need a recorded message from you, and some time to play with that.” His mother pointed at the computer terminal.

He switched on the terminal and moved aside. She sat down, and started a program documentation on the display; he read, REMOTE OPERATIONS MANUAL. “Let’s see … I’ll need feedback on the approach of Klovhiri’s party.”

He cleared his throat. “Did you really mean what you said, before Reed came in?”

She glanced up, he watched one response form on her face, and then fade into another smile. “Garda—have you met My Son, the Linguist?”

“And when did you ever pick up on that Pete Seeger song?”

“And My Son, the Musician …” The smile came back to him.

“I’ve listened to a few records, in my day.” The smile turned inward, toward a memory. “I don’t suppose I ever told you that I fell in love with your father because he reminded me of Elton John.”

T’uupieh stood silently, gazing into the demon’s unwavering eye. A new day was turning the clouds from bronze to gold; the brightness seeped down through the glistening, snarled hair of the treetops, glanced from the green translucent cliff faces and sweating slopes to burnish the demon’s carapace with light. She gnawed the last shreds of flesh from a bone, forcing herself to eat, scarcely aware that she did. She had already sent out watchers in the direction of the town, to keep watch for Chwiul … and Klovhiri’s party. Behind her the rest of her band made ready now, testing weapons and reflexes or feeding their bellies.

And still the demon had not spoken to her. There had been many times when it had chosen not to speak for hours on end; but after its mad ravings of last night, the thought obsessed her that it might never speak again. Her concern grew, lighting the fuse of her anger, which this morning was already short enough; until at last she strode recklessly forward and struck it with her open hand. “Speak to me, mala ‘ingga!”

But as her blow landed a pain like the touch of fire shot up the muscles of her arm. She leaped back with a curse of surprise, shaking her hand. The demon had never lashed out at her before, never hurt her in any way: But she had never dared to strike it before, she had always treated it with calculated respect. Fool! She looked down at her hand, half afraid to see it covered with burns that would make her a cripple in the attack today. But the skin was still smooth and unblistered, only bright with the smarting shock.

“T’uupieh! Are you all right?”

She turned to see Y’lirr, who had come up behind her looking half frightened, half grim. “Yes.” She nodded, controlling a sharper reply at the sight of his concern. “It was nothing.” He carried her double-arched bow and quiver, she put out her smarting hand and took them from him casually, slung them at her back. “Come, Y’lirr, we must—”

“T’uupieh.” This time it was the demon’s eerie voice that called her name. “T’uupieh, if you believe in my power to twist fate as I like, then you must come back and listen to me again.”

She turned back, felt Y’lirr hesitate behind her. “I believe truly in all your powers, my demon!” She rubbed her hand.

The amber depths of its eye absorbed her expression, and read her sincerity; or so she hoped. “T’uupieh, I know I did not make you believe what I said. But I want you to”—its words blurred unintelligibly—”in me. I want you to know my name. T’uupieh, my name is—”

She heard a horrified yowl from Y’lirr behind her. She glanced around—seeing him cover his ears—and back, paralyzed by disbelief.

“—Shang’ang.”

The word struck her like the demon’s fiery lash, but the blow this time struck only in her mind. She cried out, in desperate protest; but the name had already passed into her knowledge, too late!

A long moment passed; she drew a breath, and shook her head. Disbelief still held her motionless as she let her eyes sweep the brightening camp, as she listened to the sounds of the wakening forest, and breathed in the spicy acridness of the spring growth. And then she began to laugh. She had heard a demon speak its name, and she still lived—and was not blind, not deaf, not mad. The demon had chosen her, joined with her, surrendered to her at last!

Dazed with exultation, she almost did not realize that the demon had gone on speaking to her. She broke off the song of triumph that rose in her, listening:

“… then I command you to take me with you when you go today. I must see what happens, and watch Klovhiri pass.”

“Yes! Yes, my—Shang’ang. It will be done as you wish. Your whim is my desire.” She turned away down the slope, stopped again as she found Y’lirr still prone where he had thrown himself down when the demon spoke its name. “Y’lirr?” She nudged him with her foot. Relieved, she saw him lift his head; watched her own disbelief echoing in his face as he looked up at her.

“My lady … it did not—?”

“No, Y’lirr,” she said softly; then more roughly, “Of course it did not! I am truly the Demon’s Consort now; nothing shall stand in my way.” She pushed him again with her foot, harder. “Get up. What do I have, a pack of sniveling cowards to ruin the morning of my success?”

Y’lirr scrambled to his feet, brushing himself off. “Never that, T’uupieh! We’re ready for any command … ready to deliver your revenge.” His hand tightened on his knife hilt.

“And my demon will join us in seeking it out!” The pride she felt rang in her voice. “Get help to fetch a sledge here, and prepare it. And tell them to move it gently.”

He nodded, and for a moment as he glanced at the demon she saw both fear and envy in his eyes. “Good news.” He moved off then with his usual brusqueness, without glancing back at her.

She heard a small clamor in the camp, and looked past him, thinking that word of the demon had spread already. But then she saw Lord Chwiul, come as he had promised, being led into the clearing by her escorts. She lifted her head slightly, in surprise—he had indeed come alone, but he was riding a bliell. They were rare and expensive mounts, being the only beast she knew of large enough to carry so much weight, and being vicious and difficult to train, as well. She watched this one snapping at the air, its fangs protruding past slack, dribbling lips, and grimaced faintly. She saw that the escort kept well clear of its stumplike webbed feet, and kept their spears ready to prod. It was an amphibian, being too heavy ever to make use of wings, but buoyant and agile when it swam. T’uupieh glanced fleetingly at her own webbed fingers and toes, at the wings that could only lift her body now for bare seconds at a time; she wondered, as she had so many times, what strange turns of fate had formed, or transformed, them all.

She saw Y’lirr speak to Chwiul, pointing her out, saw his insolent grin and the trace of apprehension that Chwiul showed looking up at her; she thought that Y’lirr had said, “She knows its name.”

Chwiul rode forward to meet her, with his face under control as he endured the demon’s scrutiny. T’uupieh put out a hand to casually—gently—stroke its sensuous jewel-faceted side. Her eyes left Chwiul briefly, drawn by some instinct to the sky directly above him—and for half a moment she saw the clouds break open …

She blinked, to see more clearly, and when she looked again it was gone. No one else, not even Chwiul, had seen the gibbous disc of greenish gold, cut across by a line of silver and a band of shadow-black: The Wheel of Change. She kept her face expressionless, but her heart raced. The Wheel appeared only when someone’s life was about to be changed profoundly—and usually the change meant death.

Chwiul’s mount lunged at her suddenly as he stopped before her. She held her place at the demon’s side; but some of the bliell’s bluish spittle landed on her cloak as Chwiul jerked at its heavy head. “Chwiul!” She let her emotion out as anger. “Keep that slobbering filth under control, or I will have it struck dead!” Her hand fisted on the demon’s slick hide.

Chwiul’s near-smile faded abruptly, and he pulled his mount back, staring uncomfortably at the demon’s glaring eye.

T’uupieh took a deep breath, and produced a smile of her own. “So you did not quite dare to come to my camp alone, my lord.”

He bowed slightly, from the saddle. “I was merely hesitant to wander in the swamp on foot, alone, until your people found me.”

“I see.” She kept the smile. “Well then—I assumed that things went as you planned this morning. Are Klovhiri and his party all on their way into our trap?”

“They are. And their guide is waiting for my sign, to lead them off safe ground into whatever mire you choose.”

“Good. I have a spot in mind that is well ringed by heights.” She admired Chwiul’s self-control in the demon’s presence, although she sensed that he was not as easy as he wanted her to believe. She saw some of her people coming toward them, with a sledge to carry the demon on their trek. “My demon will accompany us, by its own desire. A sure sign of our success today, don’t you agree?”

Chwiul frowned, as if he wanted to question that, but didn’t quite dare. “If it serves you loyally, then yes, my lady. A great honor and a good omen.”

“It serves me with true devotion.” She smiled again, insinuatingly. She stood back as the sledge came up onto the hummock, watched as the demon was settled onto it, to be sure her people used the proper care. The fresh reverence with which her outlaws treated it—and their leader—was not lost on either Chwiul or herself.

She called her people together then, and they set out for their destination, picking their way over the steaming surface of the marsh and through the slimy slate-blue tentacles of the fragile, thawing underbrush. She was glad that they covered this ground often, because the pungent spring growth and the ground’s mushy unpredictability changed the pattern of their passage from day to day. She wished that she could have separated Chwiul from his ugly mount, but she doubted that he would cooperate, and she was afraid that he might not be able to keep up on foot. The demon was lashed securely onto its sledge, and its sweating bearers pulled it with no hint of complaint.

At last they reached the heights overlooking the main road— though it could hardly be called one now—that led past her family’s manor. She had the demon positioned where it could look back along the overgrown trail in the direction of Klovhiri’s approach, and sent some of her followers to secret its eyes further down the track. She stood then, gazing down at the spot below where the path seemed to fork, but did not. The false fork followed the rippling yellow bands of the cliff face below her— directly into a sink caused by ammonia-water melt seeping down and through the porous sulphide compounds of the rock. There they would all wallow, while she and her band picked them off like swatting ngips … she thoughtfully swatted a ngip that had settled on her hand. Unless her demon—unless her demon chose to create some other outcome …

“Any sign?” Chwiul rode up beside her.

She moved back slightly from the cliff’s crumbly edge, watching him with more than casual interest. “Not yet. But soon.” She had outlaws posted on the lower slope across the track as well; but not even her demon’s eyes could pierce too deeply into the foliage along the road. It had not spoken since Chwiul’s arrival, and she did not expect it to reveal its secrets now. “What livery does your escort wear, and how many of them do you want killed for effect?” She unslung her bow, and began to test its pull.

Chwiul shrugged. “The dead carry no tales; kill them all. I shall have Klovhiri’s men soon. Kill the guide too—a man who can be bought once, can be bought twice.”

“Ah—” She nodded, grinning. “A man with your foresight and discretion will go far in the world, my lord.” She nocked an arrow in the bowstring before she turned away to search the road again. Still empty. She looked away restlessly, at the spiny silver-blue-green of the distant, fog-clad mountains; at the hollow fingers of upthrust ice, once taller than she was, stubby and diminishing now along the edge of the nearer lake. The lake where last summer she had soared …

A flicker of movement, a small unnatural noise, pulled her eyes back to the road. Tension tightened the fluid ease of her movement as she made the trilling call that would send her band to their places along the cliffs edge. At last—She leaned forward eagerly for the first glimpse of Klovhiri; spotting the guide, and then the sledge that bore her sister and the children. She counted the numbers of the escort, saw them all emerge into her unbroken view on the track. But Klovhiri … where was Klovhiri? She turned back to Chwiul, her whisper struck out at him, “Where is he! Where is Klovhiri?”

Chwiul’s expression lay somewhere between guilt and guile. “Delayed. He stayed behind, he said there were still matters at court—”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

He jerked sharply on the bliell’s rein. “It changes nothing! We can still eradicate his family. That will leave me first in line to the inheritance … and Klovhiri can always be brought down later.”

“But it’s Klovhiri I want, for myself.” T’uupieh raised her bow, the arrow tracked toward his heart.

“They’ll know who to blame if I die!” He spread a wing defensively. “The Overlord will turn against you for good; Klovhiri will see to that. Avenge yourself on your sister, T’uupieh—and I will still reward you well if you keep the bargain!”

“This is not the bargain we agreed to!” The sounds of the approaching party reached her clearly now from down below; she heard a child’s high notes of laughter. Her outlaws crouched, waiting for her signal; and she saw Chwiul prepare for his own signal call to his guide. She looked back at the demon, its amber eye fixed on the travelers below. She started toward it. It could still twist fate for her. … Or had it already?

“Go back, go back!” The demon’s voice burst over her, down across the silent forest, like an avalanche. “Ambush… trap … you have been betrayed!”

“—betrayal!”

She barely heard Chwiul’s voice below the roaring; she looked back, in time to see the bliell leap forward, to intersect her own course toward the demon. Chwiul drew his sword, she saw the look of white fury on his face, not knowing whether it was for her, or the demon itself. She ran toward the demon’s sledge, trying to draw her bow; but the bliell covered the space between them in two great bounds. Its head swung toward her, jaws gaping. Her foot skidded on the slippery melt, and she went down; the dripping jaws snapped futilely shut above her face. But one flailing leg struck her heavily and knocked her sliding through the melt to the demon’s foot—

The demon. She gasped for the air that would not fill her lungs, trying to call its name, saw with incredible clarity the beauty of its form, and the ululating horror of the bliell bearing down on them to destroy them both. She saw it rear above her, above the demon—saw Chwiul, either leaping or thrown, sail out into the air—and at last her voice came back to her and she screamed the name, a warning and a plea, “Shang’ang!”

And as the bliell came down, lightning lashed out from the demon’s carapace and wrapped the bliell in fire. The beast’s ululations rose off the scale; T’uupieh covered her ears against the piercing pain of its cry. But not her eyes: the demon’s lash ceased with the suddenness of lightning, and the bliell toppled back and away, rebounding lightly as it crashed to the ground, stone dead. T’uupieh sank back against the demon’s foot, supported gratefully as she filled her aching lungs, and looked away—

To see Chwiul, trapped in the updrafts at the cliffs edge, gliding, gliding … and she saw the three arrows that protruded from his back, before the currents let his body go, and it disappeared below the rim. She smiled, and closed her eyes.

“T’uupieh! T’uupieh!”

She blinked them open again, resignedly, as she felt her people cluster around her. Ylirr’s hand drew back from the motion of touching her face as she opened her eyes. She smiled again, at him, at them all; but not with the smile she had had for Chwiul. “Y’lirr—” She gave him her own hand, and let him help her up. Aches and bruises prodded her with every small movement, but she was certain, reassured, that the only real damage was an oozing tear in her wing. She kept her arm close to her side.

“T’uupieh—”

“My lady—”

“What happened? The demon—”

“The demon saved my life.” She waved them silent. “And … for its own reasons, it foiled Chwiul’s plot.” The realization, and the implications, were only now becoming real in her mind. She turned, and for a long moment gazed into the demon’s unreadable eye. Then she moved away, going stiffly to the edge of the cliff to look down.

“But the contract—” Y’lirr said.

“Chwiul broke the contract! He did not give me Klovhiri.” No one made a protest. She peered through the brush, guessing without much difficulty the places where Ahtseet and her party had gone to earth below. She could hear a child’s whimpered crying now. Chwiul’s body lay sprawled on the flat, in plain view of them all, and she thought she saw more arrows bristling from his corpse. Had Ahtseet’s guard riddled him too, taking him for an attacker? The thought pleased her. And a small voice inside her dared to whisper that Ahtseet’s escape pleased her much more… . She frowned suddenly at the thought.

But Ahtseet had escaped, and so had Klovhiri—and so she might as well make use of that fact, to salvage what she could. She paused, collecting her still-shaken thoughts. “Ahtseet!” Her voice was not the voice of the demon, but it echoed satisfactorily. “It’s T’uupieh! See the traitor’s corpse that lies before you—your own mate’s brother, Chwiul! He hired murderers to kill you in the swamp—seize your guide, make him tell you all. It is only by my demon’s warning that you still live.”

“Why?” Ahtseet’s voice wavered faintly on the wind.

T’uupieh laughed bitterly. “Why, to keep the roads clear of ruffians. To make the Overlord love his loyal servant more, and reward her better, dear sister! And to make Klovhiri hate me. May it eat his guts out that he owes your lives to me! Pass freely through my lands, Ahtseet; I give you leave—this once.”

She drew back from the ledge and moved wearily away, not caring whether Ahtseet would believe her. Her people stood waiting, gathered silently around the corpse of the bliell.

“What now?” Y’lirr asked, looking at the demon, asking for them all.

And she answered, but made her answer directly to the demon’s silent amber eye. “It seems I spoke the truth to Chwiul after all, my demon: I told him he would not be needing his town house after today … Perhaps the Overlord will call it a fair trade. Perhaps it can be arranged. The Wheel of Change carries us all; but not with equal ease. Is that not so, my beautiful Shang’ang?”

She stroked its day-warmed carapace tenderly, and settled down on the softening ground to wait for its reply.

The End

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