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Tidal Race



another beach, another world. Elizabeth walked along purple-tinged sand, the skiff keeping pace a few meters behind her. The skiff’s pilot, Delavar, was an old acquaintance on whose loyalty and reflexes she was more than ready to rely. Somewhere behind the navy sky the Cairns ships hung in gravity-defying non-orbit, in any emergency a screaming red-hot minute away. The air was thick and stank of iodine. A few tens of meters to her left, the last exhausted ripples of breakers whose surf broke hundreds of meters farther away hissed into the sand. The tide was far out and on the turn. Giant oystercatchers the size of moas stalked the shallows, stabbing the sand with beaks like swords. Kilometers to her right, a row of cliffs denned the horizon. This beach was huge, visible from space as a white crescent like a life-size drawing of a small moon. They’d called it Atlantis Flats. The red sun loomed high in the sky, far bigger than any sun she’d ever stood beneath, but utterly dwarfed by the ringed gas giant that, gibbous, filled an eighth of the sky above the sea. It looked as though it were floating on the ocean beyond the horizon, the colors of its bands and the dark of its nightside segment and a long, wavy ink-black line from its razor-thin ring bleeding into the water.

Just half a kilometer ahead of her, the city of the selkies rose from the beach and the sea, straddling the mouth of a broad river. Built on stone pillars and wooden pilings resting on the bedrock beneath the sand and silt, and rising about twenty meters above them, the city extended to about a hundred meters beyond the low-water mark and spread for nearly three kilometers along the shore. Intricate inlays of shell fragments embedded in its wood-and-stone buildings shone in the sunlight and glittered in the reflected light from the sea. A haze of smoke and steam hung over it, constantly replenished by the funnels and flues of an industry which, going by the expedition’s earlier discreet aerial surveys, processed wood, fish, algae, and kelp. It resembled thousands of such settlements dotted along the coasts of the planet’s continents and islands; it was twice the size of the next largest. Inland from the coastal villages and towns unpaved roads linked quarries and logging sites. Other than that, all traffic and communication seemed to be by sea or river: small sailing vessels, long canoes, signaling by smoke and flag and mother-of-pearl mirror flash. No aerial traffic had been detected, not even skiffs.

Beneath the pillars in front of her, a sail snapped up and began to move swiftly across the sand toward her. She stopped, and the skiff did likewise.

“Wait here?” asked Delavar, through the beads on her ears.

“Yes,” she whispered back, through the bead on her throat.

Their communications, like the visual display of the scene, were being relayed to the fleet.

After a couple of minutes the sail-powered vehicle—a three-wheeled, low-slung frame of wood and wicker—tacked and slewed to a halt not far away. Two selkies vaulted out; another remained on board, one hand on the rope connected to the boom of the sail, the other resting casually on three spears.

The two selkies on the sand walked forward, empty hands spread. Elizabeth reflected the gesture with even greater polite hypocrisy. One walked ahead of the other, and stopped a couple of his long steps away. His looming face peered down at her. She tried to smile.

“Welcome,” said the selkie, startling her immeasurably. “We have been expecting you.”

Elizabeth stepped back, staring. It was the selkie from Lemuria Beach.

“You may remember me, from another shore,” continued the selkie. “I think I recognize you.”

“How do you speak our language?” Elizabeth asked. “And how did you get here?”

The selkie scratched his midriff absently. “Those of us who were on that shore returned to this one, on a ship of the eight-armed ones. The same taught some of us your speech.”

Once again Elizabeth revised upward her opinion of selkie intelligence. “And how did they know it? We have not spoken with them.”

“They listen and watch,” said the selkie. He scratched again, and put a fingertip between smacking lips. “They listen and watch us now.”

Reflexively, Elizabeth looked behind her, then, more rationally, upward. The zenith was empty. The selkie’s deep chuckle welled up.

“They are near, but not there. They wish to know if they can come here safely.”

“We will not attack them,” said Elizabeth.

Delavar made a sort of strangled noise that set up feedback in her earbeads. She silently willed him to shut up.

“Very well,” said the selkie. He looked up, as though belying his earlier statement, and said something in another language. Then he turned again to Elizabeth.

“My name is Khaphthash,” he said.

“Mine is Elizabeth.”

For a moment, its syllables sounded just as strange in her ears.

Khaphthash smiled, tipping his head back, and looked to one side. “They are coming,” he said.

Elizabeth looked in the same direction and saw, as it seemed far out to sea, a tiny silver disk rapidly approach. A few meters away, a small elliptical patch of shadow as swiftly enlarged on the sand. She blinked and shook her head, and saw that the disk was not above the sea, but tiny and above the sand in just the right place to cast the shadow, but it was at the same time unquestionably far away and approaching—no, it was really small and becoming bigger and bigger. The sand beneath it began to move, the grains arcing in precise trajectories quite unlike sand being blown about: She could look down and see it flowing around her boots. A wide circle with a complex internal pattern formed as the disk approached, or enlarged. The perspectives kept shifting until it was suddenly there in front of her, its three legs extending and settling on the beach in the exact position of three internal sworls in the sand circle. The mode of arrival was deeply unsettling and uncanny to witness.

“Did you see that?” she whispered to Delavar.

“An incident of high strangeness,” said Matt’s voice in her ear.

“That was an emergence from a lightspeed jump,” said Delavar. “I have never before seen it done in a skiff, or so close to a planet.”

“Yep,” muttered Elizabeth, “three meters is close to a planet all right . . . ”

Still, that explanation made the arrival, if not comprehensible, at least rational. The skiff’s hull was perfectly reflective, a huge lens of what looked like the surface of a liquid in its smoothness, like mercury. In a moment, a hatch opened and a ladder extended. An octopodal alien skittered down it and across the sand to her. As it approached she heard Delavar making small, distressed noises.

“Are you all right?” she whispered.

“I will be,” said Delavar. “I am experiencing fear that I know to be irrational. This is new to me.”

Elizabeth was experiencing no fear at all, which at some level of her consciousness she thought disturbing. The alien’s golden fur was astonishingly beautiful—she had to resist an impulse to stroke it—and it gave off a pleasant, musky fragrance: laced with soothing pheromones, she guessed. The tips of its limbs, as it walked, were compressed to hard, sharp points that left deep, small indentations in the sand. As it stepped closer she saw that the fur was irridescent, and was almost certainly not simply hair but some kind of optical fiber. Every follicle must be light-sensitive, for that to make any kind of functional sense. She tried to imagine the sensorium of a mind that could use so much input, a flow of information orders of magnitude greater than even the all-around vision provided by the eight eyes, and failed.

Its breathing-mouth—a triangle of overlapping lips, with jaws but without teeth—was on the side facing her. The alien raised its two front limbs and waved them. The palm-buds expanded, opening to the tips of the tips of the tips, like a ring of dandelion clocks, then contracted back to eight-fingered hands that it moved together, the fingertips touching and rhythmically tapping each other in a curiously human, almost effete gesture. It stood about a meter and a half tall, its head-thorax somewhat larger than a human head, and more domed than that of the specimens Elizabeth had seen so far.

Thinking to reduce any possible intimidation from her greater height, Elizabeth moved to squat. Instantly the octopod whirled around, presenting its eating-mouth, open in a flash of teeth. Startled, Elizabeth fell back on her butt, hands scrabbling the sand. The selkie, Khaphthash, reached over a hand and helped her back to her feet as the octopod returned to its former position.

The breathing-mouth opened and the alien spoke, in a curiously high-pitched and breathless voice, like a very old person with emphysema.

“My apologies. Please do not do that. The posture triggers a fighting reflex.”

“My apologies,” Elizabeth replied, mentally kicking herself. It seemed too banal to be the first words spoken to an extraterrestrial. “We are pleased to meet you at last.”

“And we you,” said the alien. “As you can deduce from my grasp of your language, we have been observing your planet for some time.”

“We had suspected that,” said Elizabeth. “We have come here to learn of your intentions.”

“Very good,” said the alien. It swung its head as though looking around, a surely unnecessary thing for it to do, and therefore likely meant as a reassuring imitation of the human. “Let us repair to the city, where we can discuss these matters in more comfortable surroundings.”

It scuttled back off to its skiff, which led the way at a slow pace along the beach. The selkies wheeled their odd contraption along.

“Who is piloting your skiff?” asked Khaphthash.

“A saur named Delavar.”

“Your people were taken to your world by saurs?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth.

“Our people have old tales of encounters with saurs,” said the selkie. “They are not pleasant.”

“Would there be trouble if Delavar came out of the skiff?”

“Trouble?” The seal-man looked sidelong and down at her, his small chin disappearing into the blubber of his neck. “No, not hostility. There would be surprise. It might be a good surprise, for our people. And they have to meet sometime. Why not now?”

“What do you think, Delavar?”

“I am consulting with the fleet,” Delavar murmured back.


“Go for it,” says Matt, before anyone can object.

Gregor glares at him, Salasso casts him a heavy-lidded look of reproof, Susan Harkness busies herself with the recording apparatus, and the Cairns’ flagship skipper, Zachary Gould, pointedly looks away out of the viewscreen. Matt doesn’t care: He’s the First Contact Convener, and he decides this sort of stuff, even if Elizabeth did pull rank—and, to be fair, her prior experience with the selkies—to be the one on the ground. Anyway, he’s on a roll, in a mental state that his distant but still vivid memories associate with amphetamine-fueled all-night coding sessions, and which he is sensible enough at some level to recognize as dangerous, but seductively productive.

The ship he’s on is, like its four companions, shaped like the fuselage of a rather boxy aircraft, maybe a World War Two bomber or something like that (Matt is vague about aviation history) made from thick steel and armor-plated glass and about fifty meters long by four high and ten across, except for the skiff-docking bay, which is at the stern and is eighteen meters across. The ship is called the Return Visit. The others are called Explorer, Investigator, Translator, and Experimenter. Matt’s suggested names (Rectal Probe, Up Yours, Probably Venus, Strange Light, No Defence Significance, et cetera) were all rejected at the committee stage.

It’s taken years to get here. Two years and a few months, which to Matt’s edgy impatience felt longer. Partly it’s been a whole lot of tedious politicking, within the Cairns clan, with the other Cosmonaut Families, with the Heresiarchy and with the city-state governments, starting with Kyohvic and working down. Negotiating with the heretical minority of saurs who agree with Salasso and are working in space with the humans has been a whole ’nother kettle of fish, and by the gods Matt knows by now what a kettle of fish actually is, having consumed many of them in the negotiations. Running on the rolling logs of a public discussion of a real alien presence and alien invasion threat, a discussion conducted amid the waterspouts, crop circles, cattle mutilations, sea serpents, and general flying crockery of mass hallucination and hysteria—has had Matt for the first time in his life devoutly if guiltily wishing he could engineer a good old-fashioned government cover-up, not that there’s a government on Mingulay or Croatan that could cover its own ass if you handed it a Blue Book.

On top of that there’s been the hard technical graft, from the sort of thing he’s been making a living at for the past few decades—porting applications from ancient wet and dry nanotech salvaged from the old Bright Star across to a renascent technology where debugging really does mean cleaning the moths off the valves—to top-level project management of the teams building closed-system life-support from old spec and first principles. Because of the short journey times neither the established space-going species nor the upstart humans have any experience in the field, or even much in the way of theory. Even convincing folk that breathable air and potable water, not to mention an unopposed landing, at the other end is not the way to bet when you’re making a four-light-year jump into an unexplored system has been a wearing, because essentially political, struggle.

Anyway, it’s done, and they have carbon scrubbers and distillation kits and filter beds and hydroponics and some icky gunk from the saur manufacturing plant that, allegedly, manufactures plants. They even have space suits. The five ships of the fleet, each with a complement of twenty or so variously warm bodies, human and saur, have primitive ship-to-ship and space-to-ground missiles, none of which would have impressed a moderately competent pyrotechnician of the Ming Dynasty, and a piratical arsenal of firearms and plasma rifles, which would. If the explorers have to convince anyone that their intentions are peaceful and their armaments defensive, it shouldn’t be hard. Nevertheless, this is the biggest collective effort ever mounted by the Bright Star Cultures. The human two-thirds of the crews are—apart from Gregor, Elizabeth, himself, and a few other old and unaging Cosmonauts—young and adventurous types who can stand the thought of dying and the even more daunting thought of finding everyone they knew a minimum of eight years older when they get back. And if they are daunted, well, pay reckoned by time elapsed rather than time lived is a big inducement, as it has hitherto been in the Cairns commercial fleet.

One of these young adventurers is Susan Harkness, the Cairns’ youngest daughter, who has wangled her way as recorder onto this dangerous expedition by threatening to do something more dangerous if she isn’t. Over the past couple of years Matt has stopped seeing her as too young, and she has stopped seeing him as too old, and they have had an intermittent and relaxed relationship, to her parents’ fury and disgust.

Right now she’s seeing things from her mother’s point of view; but only, Matt hopes, literally.


Close up, the selkies’ city looked more than ever like an enormous pier. Its stone pillars and wooden piles were crusted with barnacles and limpets, tufted with green algae, draped with wrack. All of the buildings that she could see looked, on this closer inspection, more like scaffolding. There was little in the way of walls or roofs, and few structures seemed entirely enclosed. Elizabeth supposed that the selkies did not set much store by shelter. Much of the wood was rotten, or bored by shipworm. The stonework was pitted and slimed; even above the tidemark it looked thoroughly weathered. Deep in the structure’s dim underside great wheels turned, presumably mills driven by the river; when the tide was coming in, they would revolve in the opposite direction, to just as powerful effect. On this Earth-sized moon of a gas giant with a red giant sun, the tides were swift and fierce.

Crowds of selkies sat or stood on the internal planks and platforms of the structure, or waist-deep in the water beneath, gazing at her. Scattered among them, octopods swung or scampered with the liquid grace of gibbons. Here and there in the city the silvery disks of skiffs glinted; there seemed to be no passages wide enough for them to enter or leave by, and Elizabeth puzzled about that for a moment until she suddenly realized that they could have emerged from lightspeed jumps in situ, right there. No wonder there were no skiffs in the sky!

The two skiffs beside her stopped as the selkies hooked their sailing vehicle to the end of a long rope, which began to be winched up. The two pilots emerged at the same moment and walked together to the foot of a winding wooden stair. A clamor boomed through the piers as the watching selkies craned their necks and shouted, hooted, drummed on the timbers or smacked the water. It was like the din of an enormous kennel. After recoiling for a moment, Elizabeth walked forward and ascended the stair. Khaphthash and his companions brought up the rear. Gradually the noise died down. Above the smells of wrack and sea Elizabeth caught whiffs of the octopods’ soothing scent, and wondered if it was this that calmed the selkies.

The steps were soggy and slippery, but fortunately wide enough to accommodate the great slapping feet of the selkies. Its handrails were too high for her, but all the more reassuring for that. As she climbed higher Elizabeth noticed the abrupt change at the high-tide mark, where the encrustations of barnacles gave place to the new, artificial encrustation of colorful shell fragments, and the wood was no longer rotten but smoothed, and treated with some tarry or oily substance. But the signs of age and weathering persisted: the wood was often white, almost papery to the touch, and the stonework crusty with lichen, soft with moss; some of the shells were faded or crumbling.

At length the octopod stepped off the stair onto a long platform with a broad, low table in the middle. The place stank of fish—no, of their bones and of shells, which had been tossed in a loose-woven wicker basket in one corner. Large clamshells, evidently dishes or drinking vessels, marked positions around the table. The selkies, so advanced in other simple technologies, seemed not to have invented pottery. The octopod skittered to the far side of the table; Delawar and Elizabeth hesitated for a moment, then joined the selkies in reclining beside it. As she lay on her side, propped on one elbow, Elizabeth could see numerous eyes—octopod and selkie—peering down from the dim vaults above and around. She could feel through the floor a constant vibration, which came to her ears as a hum overlaid by rhythmic thuds, as the tide-powered wheels sped up on the incoming race.

Khaphthash gave a long, loud sigh. “It is good that you are here,” he said. “I wish we could offer you hospitality. But our food might not be palatable for you. We do not treat it with fire, as you do.”

Delavar’s head bobbed as he looked sideways at the selkie. “My species enjoys fish. Perhaps we shall trade for it, in the future.”

“The future, yes,” said the octopod, its wheezy voice sounding impatient. “That is what we must discuss.”

“We have some questions about the past,” said Delavar.

Elizabeth had found herself surreally wondering if all that kept the selkies from venturing farther inland was their ignorance of kippering. The reedy tremble in Delavar’s voice shocked her out of it. She looked closely at the saur, and saw the small tremor in his hands just before he noticed it himself and locked his fingers together and pressed the edges of his palms against the edge of the table. By saur standards, this all indicated a serious loss of sangfroid. The unease, the prickling of the hairs, that some humans experienced in the presence of the saurs must be vastly multiplied for a saur meeting an octopod. To humans, saurs were an enigmatic, vastly more ancient, and vastly superior species that had haunted the human habitat and imagination, glimpsed in the shadow and in the corner of the eye, since the Ice Ages. The saurs had not even that dubious tradition to buffer their encounter with a species older and wiser still, and more intimately involved in their origin. For them, to meet the octopods was to meet their makers.

The octopod waved a limb. “We know little of the past,” it said. “The past is eaten and assimilated. We do not share the interest of all your kinds, in”—it made a poking, stirring motion of its bunched fingertips—“what remains. We prefer to reach for the new fruit, the fresh fish, the bright strange molecules.”

“It is possible to learn from the past,” said Elizabeth.

The octopod fixed her with its multiple gaze. “It is not. We have observed your kind for some time, and the saur’s kind for longer. We see no evidence of this learning of which you speak.”

“Very well then,” said Elizabeth. “Let us speak of the present and the future.”

The octopod’s fiber-optic fur moved as though a wind passed over it. Its fingers flowered to thistledown.

“That is good,” it said. It placed fingertips together, cat’s-cradling a sphere, then expanded the sketched ball like a child’s construction toy. “We are part of a wave-front of our kind that is passing through what you call”—the ball shrank, solidified—“your sphere. Some of it is already deep within your sphere, other parts—such as ourselves—are still outside, but we will soon be within.”

Elizabeth winced at the cacophony as Gregor, Matt, and others shouted simultaneously. She snapped her fingers by one ear to tune them out for a minute.

“Do you intend to settle on our planets?”

The octopod fanned two of its hands. “Only the unoccupied portions. There is no need for conflict. Your kinds do not make full use of the biospheres.”

Elizabeth stared at the alien—for the first time seeing it as alien.

“You must be aware,” she said, “that our populations are increasing, and expanding into what you call the unoccupied portions. That could result in conflict in the future.”

“Khaphthash’s people are of your people,” said the octopod. “They too increase, but they do not come into conflict with us. You share your planets with the other hominidae, with the saurs and with the great squid, and you do not fight. What is one species more? By developing the unused parts of your planets we could offer you much to exchange, as do the species which are there already. We are aware that the world-minds may wish us to fight, to diminish our numbers. We wish to avoid this by becoming that of you as we are that of Khaphthash’s people.”

“I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t understand that . . . last thing you said.”

“We and Khaphthash’s people wish to join the Bright Star Cultures.”


Elizabeth and Delavar have returned. With them around the table are Gregor, Matt, Salasso. Zachary Gould, the captain, is chairing. Susan sits to one side, running her cameras and scribbling notes. The room is spartan and terrifying. It smells vaguely of food. Along two walls it has windows, but only an occasional rolling glimpse of the planet below, or a longer and less reassuring look at the gas giant above, make them anything but black mirrors.

The discussion has been going on for some time.

“It’s very straightforward,” Matt says. “They’re telling us”—he shifts to the breathy register of the octopods—“ ‘Resistance is useless. You will assimilate us.’ ”

The sough of ventilation and the creak of bulkheads are for a moment loud.

“I’ll give you the first,” says Elizabeth. “I’m not so sure about the second.”

“My view is the opposite of Elizabeth’s,” says Salasso. “The human capacity for both resistance and assimilation is considerable. The choice is genuine.”

“It strikes me,” says Gregor, “that both alternatives may be pursued. Our friend Volkov set out to persuade Nova Babylonia to prepare for resistance, after he failed to persuade us. We know he is very persuasive, especially when he doesn’t have another Cosmonaut running interference.”

Matt smiles in acknowledgment.

“Well, that’s all right,” he says. “Volkov may have the whole Nova Solar System bristling with nukes and death rays and gods know what by the time the Bright Star Cultures—with or without the octopods—spread to it. If in the meantime things have turned out badly between us and the octopods, well, tough shit for us, but we’ll get some posthumous revenge. And if not, if we’re walking along holding their eight hands, there’ll be nothing to fight about. As the one Elizabeth and Delavar spoke to said, they’ll be just another species in the Second Sphere.”

“There are times,” says Elizabeth, ostentatiously making sure Susan is getting this and not just recording it, “when I don’t know whether to be more shocked at Matt’s cynicism or his naivety. I’m not interested in posthumous revenge, thank you very much! I am interested in the safety and happiness of our own people.” She glances at the saurs. “Of all our peoples. So much for the cynicism. What is naive is Matt’s remark that if all goes as the octopods say they hope, there’ll be nothing to fight about. Suppose Volkov succeeds, and Nova Terra is all geared up to fight an octopod invasion. Two things can happen. One is that some of the octopod travelers who haven’t been in contact with us—and we know there are other parts of the migration en route right now—emerge from the jump and blunder straight into Volkov’s defenses, which they have no reason to expect. The other is that we—the Bright Star Cultures, now including the octopods—spread there, jump by jump, just as our traders are spreading now.

“We make our final jump into the Nova Sol system, evade the defenses because we’re expecting them, and tell the Nova Terrans the good news: the long-feared aliens are now a part of our rich tapestry! They don’t want to take over the worlds, oh no! They just want to settle the underdeveloped parts of our biospheres! Do you have any idea how that will look, to the kind of paranoid militarist culture that Volkov will have built? Of course you do, Matt, you are not a complete fool.”

Zachary Gould coughs politely. “The Science Officer will please address her remarks to—”

“Sorry, Zack,” says Elizabeth. She stops glaring at Matt and looks around at the others. “They’ll have spent decades preparing for an octopod invasion—perhaps already, as they see it, fought one off—and when we turn up, we will look to them like collaborators with the aliens. The octopod invasion will be us.


“This is indeed a problem,” says the orange-furred emissary of the octopods.

It’s here with two others, one black and the other multicolored. Their arrival, though prearranged, has been unnerving. The sight of an alien skiff emerging from a lightspeed jump right inside the Return Visit’s temporarily empty docking bay without the airlock’s having to be opened has given everyone on board a vivid impression of just how advanced the aliens are.

The three aliens are huddled at one end of the messroom, which has been used as a conference room. They cling to the edge of the table or the backs of chairs with some of their hands, and with others keep touching each other’s hands, and with yet others gesticulate. They keep changing position unpredictably and startlingly. Matt has no doubt that it’s only their calming pheromones that are keeping most of the people who are in the room, and especially the saurs, from climbing a few chairs or walls themselves.

“Fortunately,” says the black one, “we have a possible solution. We do not have the jump coordinates for any of the stars in the Second Sphere, other than the one you have come from and the one at the center.” It makes some agitated movements of three limbs. “The former, we have only recently calculated ourselves. The latter, we have as an item of legacy information. It is very common knowledge among us. Consequently we can jump from here to your Mingulay, and also from here to your Nova Terra. We suggest that most of us and you go to Mingulay, and some of us and you go directly to Nova Terra.”

“What good would that do?” asks Elizabeth. “Your other travelers will have already arrived by the time the Nova Terra expedition arrives.”

“That is true,” says the orange-furred one. “They will very probably be dead. That is unfortunate but cannot be helped. However, the expedition we propose would be armed, and cautious.”

“Ah,” says Matt, leaning forward. “You have weapons?”

“No,” says the alien. “Some plasma rifles.” It sketches a shrug with several of its shoulders. “But you have.”

Matt tries not to laugh. He can see the others doing the same.

“I don’t know that we’d get many volunteers for going straight to Nova Terra,” says Zack, manfully keeping a straight face. “That’s a two-hundred-something-year round trip. Most of the crews are expecting to go home and still see their folks, and even the few as don’t haven’t signed up for jumping forward a couple of lifetimes.”

“I’d go,” says Matt immediately. He glances at the two saurs. They both nod slowly: The two saurs have a lover in common, Bishlayan, but long partings are something they are used to.

“Maybe some of the other Cosmonauts, as well,” he adds.

“Not much of a crew,” says Zack, still making as if he takes the proposition seriously.

The aliens’ hands are busy with mutual blurry touch. They do that a lot, Matt has noticed, and he has a good idea why; it’s direct exchange of molecular-coded information—memories, perhaps even genes. Social intercourse, or sexual—with their mode of reproduction, perhaps there is no difference.

The rainbow-hued octopod flourishes a blossoming fuzzy hand, and inhales. “Please explain to us the problem about the crews going home.”

They explain.

“Ah,” wheezes the orange octopod. “We have a possible solution to that problem. Any of your people can live as long as the saurs and the Cosmonauts. Would this help?”


Elizabeth sat in the cockpit (or on the bridge—the terminology hadn’t quite been settled yet) of the Return Visit and scanned the viewscreens, which were much more useful than the windows. They showed three of the other ships, surrounded by a small cloud of the beautiful smooth skiffs of the octopods (or Multipliers, to use their own troubling term for themselves). A hundred kilometers away the Investigator hung in a lower orbit, moving slowly ahead of the other group. Around it were five Multiplier skiffs, apparently keeping pace. How the jump coordinates for the Nova Sol system had been transferred from the Multipliers’ drive to the Investigator’s she didn’t know; it had kept Matt, Gregor, and two of the octopods busy for several days.

In a few minutes the Investigator and its tiny convoy would be making a lightspeed jump of a hundred and three years, taking them to one year out from Nova Sol. “Defuse the situation, or defang the defenses,” Matt had said. “Hell, if Volkov is still alive I might even be able to persuade him.”

Even with most of the armaments from the other ships transferred to its arsenal, it still seemed pathetically inadequate for the task. On the other hand, it was hard to see how anything would be adequate, short of a massive military mission, which neither the humans nor the Multipliers were willing or yet able to mount. The ship had a crew of eight humans and two saurs, Salasso and Delavar. She did not underestimate the courage of any of them, but she would miss the saurs most.

The radio crackled. “Investigator to the fleet. Jumping in two minutes.”

“Gods be with you,” said Zack.

“Hopefully not.” It was Matt’s voice. “But thanks, Zack, I know what you mean.”

Gregor shifted in his seat, glancing around the screens. “I hope Susan’s getting all this—where is she, by the way?”

“Over on the Explorer,” said Elizabeth.

At that moment Susan’s voice came over the radio. “Uh, Gregor, Elizabeth, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t miss this chance, and I knew you wouldn’t—”

Elizabeth felt as if she’d fallen through ice. “Where are you?” She already knew; the voice had come on the open channel to the Investigator.

“Jumping in one minute,” said Matt.

“Abort the jump!” Gregor shouted.

“You know I can’t do that,” said Matt’s voice, maddeningly calm.

“This has nothing to do with Matt,” said Susan. “I’m sorry, I love you, but I want to go.”

Elizabeth unclenched her teeth and grasped Gregor’s hand. “We both love you, Susan,” she managed to say. “And we’ll see you again. You can be sure of that, darling.”

She took another deep breath and spoke slowly, weighing and meaning every word: “Matt, we’re going to take the Multipliers’ offer. We’re going to live for a very long time, and we’re coming after you, and when we get you, we’re going to fucking kill you.”

“Good luck,” said Matt, as though he hadn’t heard.

“Good-bye,” said Susan.

“Okay, people,” said Matt. “Let’s jump.”




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