'Yes,' Dane said.
'Why not come up here in that?'
'We couldn't put down anywhere nearer the village than an hour's walk; the trees are everywhere in these altitudes.'
St. Cyr closed his eyes and imagined that he was somewhere else, anywhere else.
Shortly, Dane said, 'Here we are.'
St. Cyr opened his eyes and saw a tiny round valley, the brink of which they had just passed. Dozens of neat campfires filled it, threw flickering shadows on colorfully painted trucks, trailers and tents. Now and then, as fuel was added to a fire and the flames leapt higher, a tongue of yellow light licked the low, gray roof of vegetation, ruining the illusion of a vast hall with a ceiling several miles overhead.
'I'll bet Norya's expecting us,' Dane said.
St. Cyr had not seen him this enthusiastic before, grinning, his eyes bright.
'You sent word that we'd be coming?' St. Cyr asked.
'No. But Norya will know about us. She has certain powers…'
The intelligent species native to Darma was not, in appearance at least, greatly different from mankind. They were of the same approximate height as a man, and of similar weights. They walked on two legs, one knee joint per limb, and they had two arms and two hands for the manipulation of tools. Each hand had six fingers, though this deviation from the expected was so inconspicuous as to hardly cause comment. They were dark-skinned, but so were a number of races of mankind. All of them that St. Cyr encountered were dark-haired, though they may have harbored a few blonds among them. Their eyes seemed either to be gray, the same shade as the leaves on the Dead Men, or a startling amber that caught the firelight like cat's eyes. Their ears lay flat against the skull and contained very little cartilage. Their noses were short, flattened, the nostrils somewhat ragged. Their mouths were not rimmed with lips but were sudden, dark gashes in the lower third of their faces, placed somewhat closer to the chin than in a human face. When they spoke Empire English, as St, Cyr and Dane did, their words were muffled, drawn thin and flat by the lack of lips to help shape the vowels. Their own language was one of consonants, clicks, and whistles that sounded to St. Cyr even more complex than formal Mandarin Chinese.
As the cyberdetective and the Alderban boy passed between the gaudy tents and trucks, walking briskly toward the silver trailer in which Norya lived, the Darmanians smiled and nodded, spoke an occasional greeting — but were, on the whole, watchful.
St. Cyr saw now that they had larger eyes than men, with enormous, pebbly lids.
They moved with feline grace as they passed the men, and often they seemed to go out of their way to avoid encountering the humans.
As they reached the silver trailer, the door opened. A stocky man, clearly of Earth-normal human blood, came down three metal steps and brushed by them without a word. He wore a full beard, odd in this day of electrolytic beard removal at puberty, and that bush of facial hair made his scowl seem twice as fierce as it was.
'Who's he?' St. Cyr asked.
'His name's Salardi. He came here with a team of archaeologists who were researching some native ruins, and when his job was done he decided to stay.'
'A wealthy man?'
'No. He lives with the natives, eats off the land.'
Salardi turned the corner at an orange and blue tent and disappeared.
'He doesn't seem to be happy here.'
Dane said, 'The word is that he's wanted in connection with a crime of some sort in the Inner Galaxy. He joined the scientific expedition to get free passage out here toward the rim, away from the Founding Worlds' laws.' He started forward again, turned and said, 'Come on. Norya's waiting.'
I will.
At the trailer door, which stood open, an old woman's voice greeted them before they had started up the steps. 'Welcome, Dane. Please bring your detective friend inside.'
Dane turned and smiled at St. Cyr. 'You see? She has powers.'
They went up the metal steps and into the main room of the trailer, closed the door after them. They stood in a candle-lighted chamber, the odor of incense heavy on the air. The furniture here looked hand-carved, each piece made from a massive block of wood. Dead Men wood? St. Cyr wondered. In the largest of the chairs, at the far end of the room, sitting with a blanket across her lap and legs, Norya waited for them.
'Here,' she said, indicating a pair of chairs directly in front of her.
They sat down.
St. Cyr found it difficult to put an age to the alien face before him, though he was certain that Norya was old, inestimably old. Her eyes were nested in dark wrinkles; furrows cut her brown cheeks like wounds, bracketed her slit mouth. Her dark hair had long ago turned white, and it fell in ropy clumps over her narrow shoulders. When she smiled at St. Cyr, her lipless mouth looked like a gash made by a sharp knife.
'Norya, this is—'
Keeping her gaze fixed on the cyberdetective, she said, 'Baker St. Cyr. I know. I've seen this entire meeting in a vision.' Her voice was webbed with tiny cracks, like a piece of crumpled isinglass, yet it was loud enough and clear enough to be easily heard.
'What are these — visions like?' St. Cyr asked.
'They come to me at odd moments, when I am unprepared. It is as though, for a few minutes or hours, I am living in the future, not the present.' She unfolded her six-fingered hands and placed one on each arm of the chair, as if she were bracing herself. 'But you did not come here to hear about my visions. You want to know about the
'Yes' — St. Cyr.
'Please, Norya' — Dane.
'Move your chairs nearer me,' she said.
They did this.
'Put a hand over my hand.'
St. Cyr covered her left hand, Dane her right.
Her hands were warm and dry.
She closed her eyes.
'Now what?' St. Cyr asked.
'Now I show you the wolf.' Crumpled isinglass.
It began insidiously, with a steady dimming of the candles. St. Cyr looked around the room and saw that none of the tapers had been touched — and yet they threw considerably less light than they had only a moment ago. And what light there was had changed from yellow to a gray-green shade that depressed him.
'It happened in my fourteenth year, in the autumn, before the leaves fell, many decades ago.' Norya's voice was no more than a strained whisper now, faint, scratchy.
St. Cyr looked back at her, expecting some kind of change, though he could not guess what. She was the same as she had been: old.
He felt a breeze across his face, cool and pleasant.
When he turned to see if the trailer door had been opened, he found that he could no longer see a door. Midpoint in its length, the room grew hazy and metamorphosed into a forest, the slick trunks of the Dead Men rising on every side, sparse vegetation tangled across the woodland floor.
Yes, St. Cyr thought. And she's a good one.
A moment later, the entire room was gone. He could not see Dane or Norya any longer. He was a disembodied observer, standing several feet above the earth, watching what unfolded at the gypsy camp below.
He saw a child playing in the forest a quarter of a mile from the last of the tents and trailers, a boy no more than seven years old, darting in and out of peculiar rock formations, poking into cul-de-sacs in hopes of finding some adventure. St. Cyr was aware that the boy was Norya's brother. In one of his spelunking efforts, he came across a cavelet that served as a wolfs den. It was occupied. Terrified at the confrontation with the wolf, the boy turned and
