Sarnac brushed what he decided he might as well call an insect—there were no pedantic biologists around—from his face. It wasn't the exercise in futility it would have been on Earth, for these insects hadn't acquired a tormentingly persistent taste for homo sapiens. Sarnac's visitor instinctively recognized a life form it couldn't live on, and took the hint.
Of course, it cut both ways. If the local life forms couldn't live on them, the reverse also held true. It wasn't that Danuan food would poison them. Some of the plants would—but even without the notes and specimens they had left behind at their base camp, they could recognize the safe ones. But it also wouldn't sustain them. Certain essential vitamins were missing. Luckily, they had salvaged some vitamin supplements from the shuttle. What would happen when those ran out was something Sarnac had resolved not to let himself think about just yet.
He had brought the crippled shuttle down to a near-miraculous landing, sans gravs, in the dense forest. At first, the shuttle had been suspended in a tangled canopy, formed by gigantic ancient trees, and it had taken some ingenuity to lower themselves and the gear they could carry to the ground. After which they had gotten as far as possible from the alarmingly swaying shuttle and the creaking, groaning trees that supported it. The support soon gave way and the shuttle smashed to the ground, breaking its back and bursting into flames.
And now they were doing the only thing they could think of: continuing to get as far as possible from the wreckage, which the Korvaasha should have no trouble finding. In fact, they evidently had found it, for the trio—the sole humans on this planet—had already dodged one patrol. The three decided to head for the river they had noted during their descent, and to follow it westward to the sea. There, on the coast opposite the island they had explored, maybe they could find natives who spoke a dialect close enough to that of the islanders, which would allow Natalya to communicate, using the language disc in the pocket computer she had salvaged.
What they would do then—besides wait for some miraculous rescuers and try to think of a way of signalling them—was something else Sarnac decided to defer for future consideration. For now, they had a goal. Analysis might prove the goal irrational, but it was better than hopelessness.
"Bob!"
Frank's voice, vibrating inside Sarnac's skull, interrupted his brown study. "I'm blocked by a tributary. Come ahead. I'll stay out of sight."
"Roger," Sarnac spoke softly into his implant communicator. It wasn't necessary to subvocalize; if the Korvaasha were that close, the humans would be dead or prisoners. But they didn't dare shout at each other, any more than they could venture into the open area near the riverbank. To avoid Korvaash orbital surveillance they were keeping under the forest canopy, with the river visible as an occasional flash of reflected sunlight on the water through the trees to their left.
"Come on, 'Tasha."
Natalya nodded wearily and trudged a little faster. The exploding instrument panel had showered her left shoulder and upper arm with shards of metal and plastic, and their first aid supplies were minimal. It wouldn't get infected—and drugs kept the pain at bay—but her body cried out for healing rest. So far, she had kept up without complaint.
Soon the trees began to thin out ahead, and Frank motioned to them through the undergrowth. They settled in beside him on the edge of a bluff and joined him in staring morosely through the trees at the confluence of the river they were following and the tributary that blocked their further progress.
"Well, Fearless Leader, what now?" Frank inquired. "Do we try to swim it?"
Sarnac chewed his lower lip. It was the obvious course—or would have been if Natalya had had two good arms. Still, they could probably get her across. Sarnac was a good swimmer, Frank a competent one.
"Yeah," he decided. "But we can't risk it now. We'll wait till dark." He stole a look at Natalya's haggard face and decided it was just as well that they were being forced to take the break she would never have asked for.
Swinging their satchels to the ground, they settled down on the pseudo-turf, and tried to relax in the heat. They were still wearing their light-duty vac suits, having had nothing else on but underwear. The suits weren't really heavy, but they weren't intended as tropical wear. At least they provided some protection from the undergrowth.
"Hey," Sarnac spoke with a crooked grin, "have you considered that we're doing what Scouts are supposed to do? Haven't you ever noticed that in the VR adventures Scouts always seem to be trekking through jungles?"
"Yeah, right," Frank replied sourly. "Those bullshit artists ought to show the kind of places we usually end up. Deserts, or landscapes where the vegetation is so sparse and primitive . . ."
". . . that it isn't very picturesque," Natalya finished for him. Even in her haze of exhaustion she disagreed out of habit. "You know perfectly well that those programs are all made in Brazil, Frank. Shouldn't we be making some kind of raft for our gear? These satchels aren't waterproof."
Sarnac decided to put his foot down. "Frank and I will make one. Your job is to get some rest so you'll be able to keep up tomorrow." She subsided with minimal protests, and the two men got busy with monomolecular-edged knives and carbon-fiber rope carefully doled out from a line they might need later for climbing.
"Why don't we make a full-sized raft and float down this river?" Frank wondered out loud as he cut off another limb. "We could cover ourselves with branches and leaves during the day."
"Don't even think about it. We might be able to fool surveillance satellites, but the first time a Korvaash patrol on the riverbank eyeballed us we'd be dead meat."
"Aw, come on, how many patrols can there be in this area? I think . . ."
Sarnac never learned what Frank thought, for a loud crack! shattered the stillness. At the same instant, the woodpile they had been accumulating seemed to explode into flying splinters. They were instantly flat on the ground, for they knew the sound of a bullet-sized projectile breaking mach. When Sarnac stole a look upward he saw a Korvaasha gesturing silently with his heavy railgun for them to rise. Even in his shock, he couldn't help but reflect that his captor looked as wrong on Danu as he would have on Earth—or anywhere in a universe ordered according to human standards of rightness.
Many people had tried unsuccessfully to analyze the stomach-churning effect that the Korvaasha had on humans. Some of them lacked the crude bionic parts attached, with such obscene obviousness, to the anatomies of the specialized lower castes—but they were equally hideous.
Part of their eight-foot height was accounted for by long thick necks, with gill-like slits that opened and closed in a sucking action, as they performed respiration and produced inaudible speech. The thick, wrinkled greyish hide was not really what made the Korvaasha repulsive—nobody finds elephants nightmarish. There was something indefinably odd about the angles and proportions of the torso and limbs, but compared to some extraterrestrials, the bilaterally symmetric, two-armed, bipedal shape should have seemed positively homey. Maybe, Sarnac thought as he got to his feet, that was it: the Korvaasha weren't quite different enough. Except, of course, for the head.
The thinness of the skin over the roughly serrated skull, the slowly pulsating tympani that served as ears, and the wide lipless mouth that ingested food in a way that he couldn't bear thinking about . . . all were bad enough. But the single umber eye—large and faceted in a pattern that allowed depth perception—was truly disturbing.
Their Korvaasha captor made another jabbing motion with his long, heavy railgun. Among human infantry it would have been a tripod mounted squad support weapon. High technology didn't always act as an equalizer. The heaviest gauss weapons that humans could use as small arms accelerated mere steel slivers—like the weapons they had left with Natalya. Unarmed, they felt no inclination to argue with a being aiming a weapon at them. They shuffled together through the forest in the direction the Korvaasha had indicated.
They soon emerged in a small clearing where Natalya crouched beside their satchels, under the eye of a second Korvaasha. This one had more obvious enhancements than the first one, including a metallic forearm which was probably some kind of weapon housing. He was talking silently into a portable communicator, just as the pair of them could have been communicating in their subsonic speech for some time, for all the humans knew.
The alien put his communicator away, leaned down, and grasped Natalya's arm in a massive hand of four, mutually opposable digits. Her self-control broke in a strangled scream of pain as he jerked her to her feet. Sarnac saw Frank's jaw muscles clench and his eyes narrow, clearly estimating the distance to the satchel holding their needlers. Don't do it, Frank, he silently pleaded. Then the men's captor jabbed them in the backs with the muzzle of his railgun, pushing them forward as the other Korvaasha shoved Natalya ahead and scooped up the satchels, and the moment was past.
Sarnac thought he saw something off to the side. He could hear a rustling sound. And there it was again—or was it? It wasn't an object, it was more a flickering . . . no, a wavering, in the shape of a swiftly moving human form in the woods. Wait a minute, now there was an object—a knife blade, floating in mid-air where it would be if the phantom were real, and holding it. What the hell . . . ?
With the eerie silence that, it seemed to humans, accompanied everything the Korvaasha did, the one with the railgun convulsed, his neck-slits palpitating madly with what must have been a horrifying subsonic scream as the seemingly magical blade swept in from the side and slashed him across the base of the neck. Blood—thick, pale red Korvaash blood, that unpleasantly suggested human blood mixed with white syrup—fountained.
The other Korvaasha could hear his comrade's cry. He whirled around with a speed that Sarnac doubted his bionic enhancements could entirely account for. With a sharp snick! a long blade extruded itself from his artificial forearm. He shoved Natalya to the ground, and dropped the satchels as he moved toward his fellow, writhing weakly on the ground.
Before Sarnac could move, Frank sprang forward in a desperate dive for the satchels. As the Korvaasha swung back toward him, he snatched out one of the needlers—about the size and shape of an old-time machine pistol—and fumbled with the safety.
Then the Korvaasha was on him and he instinctively lifted his left hand with a repelling gesture. The Korvaasha's implanted blade flashed, and Frank's hand flew off from the blood-spurting stump of his left wrist.
"Frank!"
At Natalya's scream, Sarnac snapped out of his paralysis. He sprang forward, unmindful of futility—and then, with a flash of reflected sunlight, that magical-seeming knife flew past him, as if thrown in a flat trajectory, and embedded itself in the Korvaasha's side.
The alien arched his back in surprise and pain as Frank rolled over on his left side, face contorted with agony, and brought the needler practically into contact with his enemy. There was a rapid-fire, crackling noise, and a row of tiny, closely spaced holes appeared on the Korvaasha's back. For an instant, the tableau held. Then blood gushed from the Korvaasha's neck-slits and he crashed to the ground.
It was over. It had only taken a few seconds. The first Korvaasha's convulsions had ceased, and Natalya was applying a tourniquet to Frank with material snatched from the first aid kit. Sarnac was also on the ground beside Frank, whose pain was ebbing thanks to his biomonitor implant, but whose eyes were glazing over with shock and drugs. It was then that they heard, coming from midair, a sentence in a liquid, altogether unfamiliar language . . . and a slender, apparently female human figure suddenly stood there, dressed in a grey coverall with a face-concealing hood.
Sarnac felt an odd calm. Too much had happened too fast and he was beyond worry. But then he noticed that Natalya was also staring at the impossible new arrival, her mouth hanging open like his own. The stranger touched something at the base of her throat, and the hood spread apart. Pulling it back, she revealed a face, as human as her form, although the features and coppery complexion were exotic. Then she spoke in an English that was oddly accented but clearly her language from birth.
"Quickly! Let's carry him this way to the cache where I left my first aid kit. Oh, don't forget the hand! We need to get as far away from here as possible. These two"—she kept talking as she reclaimed her knife from the body of the Korvaasha, and slid it into a pocket of her coverall—"had reported in, so they'll be expected. And . . . and what are you staring at?"
Sarnac opened his mouth several times, but there were so many questions that he couldn't frame any one of them. All that finally came out was, "You . . . you look human."
The most out-of-place sound imaginable, there and then, was laughter. But the stranger laughed. "I'm sorry," she said when she'd caught her breath, "but you just unwittingly repeated one of history's most famous lines—a line spoken by my great-grandfather. And the reply I'm supposed to make is: 'Thank you. So do you.' "
"But . . . but . . ." Sarnac forced himself not to start dithering. "But . . . who are you?" he exploded. Then something clicked. "Who, that is, besides the pilot of that fighter that saved our bacon?"
The woman regarded him with very dark eyes. "Very astute, Lieutenant Sarnac. Oh, yes, I know your name; we've been monitoring your communications." She took a deep breath. "Again, I'm sorry. In answer to your question, my name is Tiraena zho'Daeriel DiFalco." She raised a forestalling hand. "And, for now, that must suffice. I know I've got a lot of explaining to do, but it will have to wait. It's more urgent—wouldn't you agree—to tend to your friend's wound. Move!"
Sarnac moved.
Frank was asleep, after being treated with a pen-sized device that Tiraena assured them would stimulate cells to regenerate themselves.
"I suppose," Natalya said, "you can grow the hand back." Her sarcastic tone didn't quite last to the end of the sentence; the change in Frank's stump was too obvious to allow much scoffing.
"Oh, no," Tiraena replied, deadpan. "Regeneration on that level of complexity hasn't been made workable yet. And when it is, I'm sure it will require much more complex equipment than this. As it is, I'm afraid he won't be able to use his hand until the nerves are reconnected."
It was late afternoon, and they were in a glade near the riverbank, sheltered from satellite surveillance by an overhanging bluff. Tiraena had assured them that she had devices emplaced nearby that would warn of any foot patrols.
"And now," Sarnac said firmly, "I seem to recall we were promised an explanation."
"You were." Tiraena sat on the ground, and the two Scouts lowered themselves down, facing her, with their backs to the bluff. "I hardly know where to begin. I suppose the beginning is as good a place as any." She paused thoughtfully. "I assume your world still remembers that two of your centuries ago there was a project to terraform a planet in your home system."
"Mars," Natalya supplied. "And of course we remember it. I'm a native of that world."
"Ah, so the terraforming was finally completed!" Tiraena looked strangely pleased by the news.
"Yes . . . after the disappearance of almost all the project's personnel from their asteroid base," Sarnac put in. "It's considered the greatest mystery in centuries. And why do I have a feeling you're about to solve it for us?"
Tiraena smiled. "It's a rather long story, and I'll have to ask you to forego questions until I'm done. You see, during that same period, the inhabitants of Raehan, a world about a thousand light-years from the Solar System, had discovered displacement point travel. They began an expansion that brought them into contact with an aggressive, expansionist alien empire."
"Sounds familiar," Sarnac commented.
"Ah, but these people—the Raehaniv—had been at peace for five hundred years. In fact, they had been socially almost static for all that time. You see, they'd been through an era of war and social disintegration that almost destroyed them, and they had deliberately halted change in the name of stability. Their technological prohibitions had begun to break down, but not their attitude toward war, which was to simply deny that it could happen any more. When it did happen, they were philosophically paralyzed.
"Oh, one other thing about the Raehaniv: they were human. Yes," she added as her listeners' mouths began to open, "I know, that's impossible. Well, you're right. It is. It's one of the things I'll have to ask you to just accept for now."
"All right," Sarnac said, gritting his teeth. "We'll just accept that—and the fact that you know English, and have the technology you do, and are here on this planet where you don't seem to have any business. For now we'll accept all that. So go on with your story of these philosophically paralyzed Raehaniv."
"Actually, one of them wasn't: my great-great-grandfather, Varien hle'Morna. He had invented the technique of utilizing displacement points, among other things, and used his discoveries to grow rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Before the war, he had discovered—and kept secret—a displacement chain connecting the sun of Raehan with the star you call Alpha Centauri." She smiled at their expressions. "And he wanted so badly to investigate the high-energy civilization that he knew existed at the yellow star four-and-a-third light-years from there, that he also invented an application of gravitics that allowed faster-than-light travel without recourse to displacement points."
Sarnac was halfway to his feet when Tiraena gave her forestalling gesture. With an effort, he subsided.
"Varien saw very clearly that the Raehaniv were doomed," she went on. "So he decided not to give the secret of the new drive to his government. Instead, he went to your system with the idea of offering Earth's governments Raehaniv technology, including the secrets of interstellar travel in exchange for help for Raehan. He first made contact with the people working on what I think was called the Russian-American Mars Project in the asteroid belt. His offer placed those people in a quandary for two reasons. First, the empire the Raehaniv were fighting had a fixed policy of planetary extermination for any world that attacked it; the prize of a technological quantum leap was tempting, but the penalty for failure was too terrifying. Second, they knew that their homelands on Earth were falling under the control of antitechnology fanatics who were rabidly opposed to any presence in space whatsoever."
"That's true," Sarnac admitted. "Our civilization was falling apart—had been for some time. From what I've read, those people in space had grown pretty alienated from the nut-house Earth had become."
"As it turned out," Tiraena stated, "that very alienation held the solution to the dilemma. The Mars Project people accepted Varien's offer on their own, without informing their governments. With Varien's help, they outfitted a small fleet with Raehaniv-level technology, and departed the Solar system under the leadership of the military commander of the asteroid base . . ."
"Wait a minute! I knew there was something vaguely familiar about your last name! That commander, one of those who vanished . . ."
Tiraena nodded. "Yes. Colonel Eric DiFalco, United States Space Force, my great-grandfather. My great-grandmother was Varien's daughter, Aelanni. They led the exodus from the solar system, going to great lengths to keep Earth in ignorance, and to obliterate all evidence of the expedition's star of origin. You see, Colonel DiFalco—I never knew him, but my parents and grandparents used to tell me about him—was resolved to protect Earth from the consequences of possible failure on his part. However little he thought of his country's political leaders, he continued, to the end of his life, to love the idea of the 'United States,' even though he knew it had become unworthy of the loyalty he and the rest of its soldiers still lavished on it. The mysterious disappearance was part of the wall of secrecy he erected around Earth."
Sarnac squirmed uncomfortably. Could it be that the ghost of the nation his ancestors had defended still had the power to haunt him? He was glad Frank was asleep . . . but no, Frank needed to hear this.
"The upshot," Tiraena continued, "was a colossal irony. The war was won, and Raehan was liberated from its occupiers. And then DiFalco and the other Terrans found that they couldn't go home. They couldn't even find home. You see, the displacement chain to Alpha Centauri wasn't there any more."
For a long moment the two Scouts sat in silence, awaiting Tiraena's explanation of the patently nonsensical statement she had just made. Finally, when the silence had stretched on, Sarnac spoke hesitantly. "Ah, Ms. DiFalco . . ."
" 'Tiraena' is sufficient, Lieutenant."
"All right, Tiraena. We obviously have a linguistic problem here, despite your admittedly impressive command of English. I thought I understood you to say . . ."
"I meant precisely what I said, Lieutenant. Not only that displacement chain, but all previously charted chains had ceased to exist, and new ones had come into being." She sighed. "After the fact, our ancestors were able to deduce what had happened. Displacement points, as you must know, given your apparent level of technology, owe their existence to the gravitational relationships of the stars. But the stars are not stationary with respect to each other. The 'shape of space,' to employ a fallacious but widely used term, had changed at a very inopportune moment."
"But that's ridiculous!" Sarnac blurted. "The stars are in continuous relative motion! So this 'shape of space' is in a constant state of flux. Displacement points shouldn't be able to remain stable—even momentarily!"
"You overlook the staggering number of factors involved, and the complexity of the pattern," Tiraena retorted in her rather patronizing way. "That pattern has a tremendous . . . 'inertia' is as good a term as any. But when the stellar distribution has altered enough to overcome that inertia, the effect is instantaneous throughout its range, which seems to encompass much of the galactic spiral arm."
Sarnac started to protest further, but Natalya cut in. "No, Bob, this has been theorized before, but the theories have been ignored. Wishful thinking, I suppose." She turned to Tiraena. "So you're saying that the existing displacement network, on which all our interstellar contacts depend, is just a temporary phenomenon?"
"Precisely," Tiraena nodded.
"But . . . but that means that any day now our links with all our colonies, all our bases, could just go blooey!" Sarnac shook his head like a punch-drunk prizefighter. "How often does this happen?"
"We have no idea. That one time, two of your centuries ago, is the only recorded occurrence. But you're right about the unreliability of the displacement network. We now probe through displacement points very cautiously, pausing to determine the realspace location of each new system. As I mentioned, we have a means—called the continuous-displacement drive—for effectively exceeding lightspeed. But it's relatively slow; a ship built for speed and little else can cover almost fifteen light-years a day, but most ships are lucky to make a fifth of that. We want to make sure we can maintain contact that way, for we've learned the danger of overdependence on displacement chains. So, of course," she added with a smile, "did our enemies. Their empire ceased to exist as an empire."
"But bits and pieces of it must have survived," Natalya opined.
"True, and that's another reason we've been very cautious about displacement point exploration. We're always alert to the possibility of meeting one of those bits and pieces. We never have, though. Until now. In this system."
She paused and let it sink in.
Sarnac shook his head again. Too much. He needed sleep. "Do you mean that this alien enemy of yours was the Realm of Tarzhgul?"
"No," Tiraena denied, and her voice suddenly acquired a hard edge. "The Realm of Tarzhgul is merely a kind of free-living polyp of the monster we faced—an entity which the Korvaasha called the Unity. It expanded for more centuries, and incorporated more of this spiral arm, than we can know. It was a centralized state, distended far beyond the sane limits of such a structure, and still expanding under the drive of an ideology that had become institutionalized monomania. It demanded the enslavement of all accessible sentient life—including the Korvaasha themselves." She paused moodily. "I'm named after a granddaughter of Varien, a child who was murdered during the Korvaash occupation of Raehan. Someone in every generation of my family has been named after her. It's been a way of keeping alive our memory of what the Korvaasha did to our world, and of what renewed contact with their survivors could mean if we ever relax our vigilance.
"But we've never met such survivors. We once found a dead world that had been part of the Unity. The Korvaasha there must have been unable to function in the absence of rigid centralized control. They didn't—couldn't—do what they needed to survive, because the proper authorities weren't telling them to!"
"Then," Sarnac challenged, "how do you account for the Realm of Tarzhgul?"
"Like all surviving Korvaasha everywhere, it must be descended from the ones who were able to adapt to new conditions—the dangerous ones. So the Unity didn't really die. It was like a cancer, metastasizing through the galaxy."
The sun was setting behind her, forming an appropriate, blood-red backdrop.
Sarnac finally prompted, "But you mentioned that you had finally encountered the Korvaasha in this system."
Tiraena's head bobbed up and she blinked. "Oh, yes. Although, strictly speaking, there has been no encounter because we've been concealing our presence from them ever since they entered the system. We had been here for some time, you see. As I said, we explore very cautiously, and as a matter of routine precaution, we built a very heavily stealthed underground base after we determined there was no Korvaash presence. But we didn't keep any space-combat capability here. Maybe the fact that this planet is so homelike—nearly identical to Raehan, in fact—made us grow lax. All we had were pickets stationed in the outer system, which immediately departed under continuous-displacement drive. The rest of us remained in hiding in our base, spending our time fantasizing about what the relief fleet would do to the Korvaasha once it got here.
"Then you came! We've never entirely given up trying to locate Sol, or stopped wondering what became of the Terran branch of humanity. You can't imagine how frustrating it was! We couldn't contact you without revealing our own presence. All we could do was watch while the Korvaasha withdrew to the outer system—except for a few light units they left concealed on this planet—as soon as they detected your arrival."
"You mean," Sarnac demanded, "that there've been two cat-and-mouse games going on in this system the whole time we've been here?"
"Surely you could have done something to warn us!" Natalya said accusingly.
"We tried to think of something, but we were in a quandary. Especially because we knew that they were only letting you get settled in before attacking. Finally, we decided to risk dispatching an armed courier aircraft to make contact with you three at your camp."
"Piloted by you," Sarnac stated, while assimilating the fact that what they had seen was considered an armed courier, not a full-fledged fighter.
Tiraena nodded. "As bad luck would have it, their attack commenced while I was en route. By the time I was approaching your island, you were headed east, pursued by those two fighters."
"From which you proceeded to save us. I haven't gotten around to thanking you for that."
"Well, I couldn't just do nothing," she snapped.
Why so defensive? Sarnac wondered. Then it hit him: she had acted against orders, running the risk of compromising the Raehaniv base's secrecy, to save them. Sarnac looked at Tiraena with new eyes, seeing a kindred spirit. As if to cover her embarrassment, Tiraena put on her light-gathering goggles. It was getting dark, and a fire was of course out of the question. The other two followed suit, with their bulkier but still effective models.
"At any rate," Tiraena hurried on, "I had to make a very rough landing, and a lot of things were damaged beyond repair—including my sidearm. I had to make do with this." She patted the pouch which held her knife. "At least my suit's chameleon surface was still functioning."
"We wondered about that," Natalya interjected.
"It's useful, but it's only completely effective when you're standing still. There's a finite time gap between the sensors picking up the background and the microcircuits reproducing it." With a slightly playful expression, she spoke a few syllables of what Sarnac assumed was Raehaniv. Suddenly her head and hands floated in midair with no seated body beneath. Then the hands fumbled with the hood behind her neck, and the head vanished as well.
I will not gape like a yokel! Sarnac told himself firmly. He stole a glance at Natalya. She was wearing an expression of grimly determined nonchalance.
Natalya and Sarnac heard more Raehaniv, and Tiraena reappeared, pulling back the hood. "My suit was very expensive," she continued. "It was issued to me in case I found myself in a situation like this one."
"Well, now that you're in it, what do you plan to do?" Sarnac asked.
"Continue down the river to the coast and make contact with the Raehanvoihiv in that area. I can—"
"With the what?" Natalya asked.
"Oh . . . the native sentients. We call this planet Raehanvoi—New Raehan. The culture around the estuary carries on a limited coasting trade with other high-neolithic groups to the south. We can travel concealed on one of their large sailing rafts, and once we reach the southerners' region it will be only a short trip to the base. Even if we don't get all the way there, we'll be in concealment while we await the arrival of the relief fleet."
"Maybe we won't have to wait that long," Sarnac said truculently. "Ever consider the possibility that our squadron may whip the Korvaasha and come back for us?"
"It would be unwise to invest much hope in that. The Korvaash force in this system has a prohibitive advantage in tonnage, and we've seen nothing to indicate that you possess any significant technological advantage." She seemed to realize that she might have been just a mite tactless, and continued in what Sarnac thought probably represented her best effort at a conciliatory tone. "But don't worry. Our fleet will be arriving eventually. In the meantime you are welcome to accompany me to the base. You'll be a sensation: people from the lost homeworld we've been searching for for two centuries!
"But for now," she continued, rising to her feet, "we'd better get some sleep. Your friend will be able to travel in the morning, and we'll want to cover as much ground as possible."
"Wait a minute!" Natalya was almost plaintive. "You can't stop now! You still haven't said anything about the fact—which you asked us to accept, even though it's patently absurd—that homo sapiens could have evolved independently on another planet, this Raehan."
"I never said anything about independent evolution, Lieutenant Liu. The human race did, in fact, evolve on Earth. Its presence on Raehan dates back about thirty thousand of your years."
I really wish she'd stop saying things like that, Sarnac thought, too numb to feel more than mild irritation with this impossible woman for continuously kicking the foundations out from under his intellectual universe. Aloud: "Uh, Tiraena, do you mean . . ."
"I do. And to answer your next question, we have no idea how our original Raehaniv ancestors—Palaeolithic savages like their Terran contemporaries—got to Raehan." Her face wore an odd little smile. "We're completely in the dark about it, Lieutenant Sarnac. And now your people will join us in that darkness."
Tiraena had a skullcap-like device which granted its wearer electromagnetically induced sleep for any preset period. Sarnac envied her, for sleep would not come to him under the alien stars.