Pearl Angelica stopped at the foot of the bluff and patted the leather carry bag that swung from her shoulder. She sighed and absorbed the scents of soil, mossflowers, forest trees, and distant frost, herald of the changing season.

When she peered across the valley spread before her, she caught her breath. Who were those three figures who trod the yellow dirt trail that cut the moss two kilometers away? What were they? They were bipeds much like humans, and they walked erect. But something about them seemed strange, misshapen, yet not quite truly alien.

They were moving slowly toward her, weren't they? Then she would wait right where she was, she thought, and be glad for the chance to stand still. Her calves hurt from the steep descent.

The strangers must have entered the valley along the stream that drained the lake. The path they were on skirted the center of the valley, where the tree, the Tower, her people had grown stood a solitary pillar. From time to time they paused and turned to stare toward that wonder, or toward the few orange pumpkins that served as scattered quarters and workspaces, the Macks and Roachsters on the yellow tracks that cut the moss. There, near the lake, was the pumpkin where her father, Frederick Suida, waited for death, only rarely summoning enough awareness to speak sensibly or stare out the window at the Tower he had proposed and planned. To the north of the Tower, a dozen dozen slabs of grey stone marked the small graveyard that held those bots and humans who had died on the planet.

She touched her bag again. There was very little in it besides the papers that had wrapped her lunch. This region, so close to the base, had long since been picked quite clean of novelties, and there were field workers whose job it was to sample more distant regions. What she really sought were the panoramas of this world, for her heart yearned for whatever their equivalents might be on the homeworld she had never known. That those equivalents existed, she had no doubt. The pictures her people had brought with them could not lie.

Nor did they look much like what lay before her. Not even the autumn pictures, for here the trees went only from green to grey. And instead of grass, First-Stop--Tau Ceti IV--had thick mats of a plant that resembled moss, if moss could have purple leaves and myriads of tiny white flowers and plump white berries. This ground cover softened the floor of the valley right up to the edges of the small lake off-centered to the west, where it was replaced by reeds and other water-loving plants. At the landing field a little to the east, the yellow soil was darkened by the scorchmarks of plasma flames. Where the encircling bluffs plunged to meet the valley, the moss rose up, thinned, grew patchy, gave way to shrubs and other plants. Above, the nearly cloudless sky was an inverted bowl, its rim scalloped by the bluff-tops and bordered by the now dimming green of the forest that thrived on higher ground.

She looked upward, past valley, Tower, clouds, and sky. If it were night, she might be able to see the orbiting Gypsy, the starship her people had carved from an asteroid and fitted with Q-drives.

Pearl Angelica shook her head in frustration. She and many of her colleagues sought creatures whose genes might give the gengineers new tools or which might fit whole into the Gypsy's contained ecology. The great ship held people, their creatures, the plants that produced both food and oxygen. But they had left Earth without being able to gather all the organisms and genes they needed. For one thing, they had no bees to pollinate the plants. They had to fertilize all their flowers by hand.

The Gypsies of the Gypsy were wanderers just like their namesakes of old Earth. But the latter had only had to carry their homes with them. Wherever they went, they were surrounded by a living environment that met all their needs. Yet ... Those ancient gypsies had long forgotten their land of origin. Their roots were a matter of guesswork for storytellers and scholars. Would that happen to her own people? Would they move on through the starfields of the galaxy? Would they lose even what little contact they still maintained with Earth and the Orbitals and gengineers who had chosen to remain in its solar system? Would they forget Earth, reduce it to the status of myth or less? Would she never get the chance she craved to see once more the world of her ancestors, the world of her roots?

That dream was hopeless. She was a bot herself, and the Engineers would never let her taste the soil of Earth. Morosely, she let her roots uncoil from the bushy ruffs that covered her calves and grope for the dirt beneath her feet. Her mood began to lift at the first comforting rush of root-ease. Her posture relaxed. A hint of a smile appeared on her lips.

But then she sniffed, her shoulders tensed, her roots retreated from the soil. There was in the air an animal muskiness that had not been there a moment before. It was not the strangers. They were still far off, and the wind was toward them.

There was sound, the lightest of scratchings, the crunch of one pebble against another on the ground.

She turned toward the trail that descended the bluff at her back. It was flanked by moss and shrubbery, shadowed by saplings, paved by dirt that shaded from the valley's yellow to a rich brown, almost black, where the forest's trees overhung the top of the steep slope. Weathered slabs of stone jutted from the surface as if to form an irregular staircase.

At the base of the trail stood three round-bellied Racs, quietly staring over the valley and grooming each other's thick fur as they waited for her to notice them. Each wore a belt and shoulder strap that supported several small pouches; Pearl Angelica knew they held stone blades, herbs the Racs found satisfying to sniff or eat, polished bits of wood and bone, of Gypsy glass and metal debris.

The largest of the three Racs was a black-eared male whose light yellow fur bore a single black stripe from the top of his head to the base of his spine. A stone-tipped spear leaned into the crook of one elbow. Pearl Angelica recognized him as one of those Racs who wandered in and out of her people's buildings in the valley, studying the visitors to their world. Most of his tribe were content to keep their distance. Other tribes...

The male pointed. She turned, and now the strangers were close enough for her to realize why they had seemed both alien and familiar. They too were furred and dressed in straps and belts, but thick tails hung to their knees.

An early model, she thought. The Racs' ancestors had been raccoon-like forest animals, nearly the size of a German shepherd but with larger brains. Not long after the gengineers had reached and named Tau Ceti IV, they had blunted the muzzles and enlarged the brains even further. But they had done it in several steps, only the last of which had removed the tail. The earlier versions had then been settled elsewhere on the globe. Most people thought they must have forgotten by now that the Gypsies existed.

Yet here they were.

She faced once more the three beside her. They had the polite dignity of creatures who felt inferior to no one, not even the technologically advanced Gypsies. The male stared self-assuredly back at her with the rich, brown eyes of his kind. His eyebrows were shelves of bristling hairs. "I am Blacktop," he said, and he raised one blunt-clawed hand to scratch at the side of his flattened, chinless muzzle.

Pearl Angelica nodded at him and scratched at her cheek with her fingertips. The greeting gesture was recognizably the same in both the Racs and their wild ancestors, as if it were as wired into the Rac nervous system as the smile was in humans.

The two females repeated the gesture. The smaller held only a basket, suggesting that she intended to gather mossberries in the valley. The other held a shorter, lighter version of Blacktop's spear; she, like he, would hunt the animals that also sought the berries. Both females had more common pelt markings, stripes and swirls of olive on grey, though the olive of the smaller was a little greener than that of most Racs.

"Leaf," said Blacktop, shifting one hand to the shaft of his spear and using the other to indicate his smaller companion. "And Cloudscurry." Then he pointed toward the approaching strangers. His voice rose in pitch and grew smoother, almost melodic. "Who are they?"

Pearl Angelica recognized the vocal change. When a Rac was feeling peaceful, even happy, its tone scraped against the ear as if a snarl must lie not far beneath the surface.

"I have no idea."

The strangers had noticed them now. They no longer paused to study the valley's marvels. They walked faster, almost jogging, yet it was clear that it would be several minutes yet before they arrived.

"Winter comes," said Blacktop to Pearl Angelica. His voice said he was still feeling anxious or aggressive. "Will you still be here when snow covers the moss?"

"Of course," she said. She scowled, knowing as they knew that it was only a matter of time before the Gypsies did indeed leave this world. "We are not ready to go yet." The gengineers had chosen the Racs for their attention because they seemed on the evolutionary verge of sentience already. Soon enough, they would leave the new species to its own devices.

Now Leaf said, "They can't leave." A row of swollen nipples was visible down each side of her chest, embedded in her fur. Somewhere, in the Rac village in the forest atop the bluff, she had a litter of unweaned children. Her voice grew smoother, angry. "We still have too much to learn."

The strangers were now within hearing range, but they said nothing. Neither the Racs nor the bot spoke to them, though all four carefully studied them and the things they carried. Their markings were much the same, olive stripes on grey backs and sides, creamy bellies, black rings around their tails. They were clearly males. Their pouches bulged as if with supplies for long travel. Stone-bladed knives were thrust through slits in their belts. Stone-tipped spears filled their hands.

"Why do you think we call this world First-Stop?" asked Pearl Angelica. "We have to leave, as soon as..." She turned back toward the valley and pointed at the tree that rose a kilometer away. It was almost two hundred meters tall. "We're almost done with the Tower."

The tallest of the strangers leaned his spear against one shoulder, barked, scratched his muzzle--a trifle longer and sharper than Blacktop's--and spoke in tones that were rough enough for politeness's sake but were also touched with the gloss of caution. "I am Wanderer."

His companions repeated the greeting gesture. "Stonerapper."

"Shorttail." His tail indeed was shorter than those of his companions.

Blacktop, Leaf, Cloudscurry, and the bot answered appropriately. Then Wanderer said, "I did not expect to find the Valley of Creation."

Blacktop grunted inquiringly.

"We have tales of a valley where we were raised from beasts, taught to speak and make things like these." The stranger indicated his spear and belt and pouches.

"The tales are true," said Pearl Angelica.

"I did not believe them."

Blacktop said, "Then why are you here?"

"To see the world tree," said Wanderer. "My mother saw it once from a distance, poking above the edge of the world. She told other stories, and people laughed. They did not believe her. I did."

"It is no longer a tree," said Leaf in a voice that almost purred. The fur on her shoulders was stiffening and rising, giving the impression that her arms and claws were powered by immense muscles.

"We see." Wanderer was pointing toward it. His fur twitched in response to Leaf's, but he managed to suppress the bristling. His companions were less successful. Their fur bristled too, and their tails swelled and jerked from side to side. Cloudscurry joined Leaf in her challenge to the interlopers, leaning forward, ready to kill or die.

Blacktop and Wanderer had more presence of mind. Both males kept their fur flat, roughened their voices, and smacked the shafts of their spears across the challengers' bellies. Leaf and Cloudscurry, Stonerapper and Shorttail blinked and settled back on their heels, though their fur did not go down.

"You called it Tower," said Wanderer at last. "But it was the tree. My mother said it held up the sky. When it fell, the world would end."

"It will not fall," said Blacktop.

"It still has bark and branches."

"Not for long."

"It is already dead."

The slender pinnacle that dominated the valley gleamed yellow-white where it had already been stripped of limbs and bark. Bioblimps hung in the air about it, some suspending workers on long lines while they wielded chainsaws and other tools. Others wrapped their tentacles around massive limbs that had just been cut from the Tower's shaft, slowing their fall toward a pile of severed branches to the south.

The Bioblimps were descended from jellyfish scaled up and freed from the sea. They had been designed on Earth for hauling cargo and passengers through the skies of a resource-poor world, not for holding workers precisely still in mid-air or for following the same short paths over and over again. They were straining to do jobs for which they had never been intended, their gasbags swelling as they generated more hydrogen for added lift. The hum of the propellers on the small control cabins slung beneath their gasbags was clearly audible despite the distance.

Leaf laughed deliberately, insultingly. Cloudscurry joined her, tentatively at first and then more vigorously.

Stonerapper and Shorttail stiffened and began to sing in their throats.

Blacktop and Wanderer once more used their spears as staves. For a moment it seemed that the junior Racs would pay no attention, but then they settled back on their heels.

Pearl Angelica's mouth was dry. She was sweating. Struggling to smile and deflect their attention, she indicated the workers on the ground. They were bent over the buttresslike roots that heaved out of the soil, boring holes, inserting hoses, activating pumps. The distance was too great to tell whether they were humans or bots except by the flashes of color that were their clothes or leaves.

"They're flooding the wood now," she said. The pumps would force thousands of gallons of water thick with silica and other minerals into the wood. "In a year or two, every pore will be filled with rock. It will last for millennia."

"Tell us again," said Leaf, her voice still ominously smooth. She meant, "Tell them." "The tip swells. It does not taper into thinness like on a real tree."

"We will hollow it out," said Pearl Angelica. Workers were in fact already standing on the flange that surrounded the bulbous tip of the Tower. "We will make a chamber at the very top. In it we will leave records of who we are, where we came from, why we came, even how we came."

"You will tell us how to do everything that you can do," said Blacktop.

"Even how we made you," Pearl Angelica agreed, nodding.

"But it is too high," said Cloudscurry. She was watching the strangers from the corners of her eyes. "We cannot reach it."

"You must learn some things by yourselves," said Pearl Angelica. This was policy, but she thought it made sense. "When you have learned enough to reach the top of the Tower, then you will be ready to use what you will find there."

"It is for us," said Leaf. She was glaring now. "Just us. No one else. Not savages with tails."

"We made you all," said the bot. "It's for all of you."

But Leaf insisted: "For us!"

"It is our world too," said Wanderer in a voice as smooth as hers.

"It is our valley!"

"We were here before you!"

"You heard her say it," put in Stonerapper while Shorttail lifted his spear above his head.

"You were expelled, discarded like broken pots."

"For whoever climbs the Tower," said Pearl Angelica. Suddenly she felt far less certain of what she and her people were doing. By making successive "editions" of the Racs, they had created races. The last made, the one that dwelt nearest the valley when the Tower was completed and the Gypsies left, would all too naturally think itself the Gypsies' heirs, the Tower's owners, the god-blessed best of all Rac kinds. Other kinds or tribes or races would surely never agree to such superiority unless it was forced down their throats by force of arms.

Or was she seeing them as more human than they really were?

No. She could see it in their postures and gestures, hear it in their voices, smell it in their scents, suddenly more pungently animallike than ever. Leaf and Cloudscurry and all their tribe would do their best to keep the Tower theirs alone.

Blacktop made a placating gesture and with obvious effort roughened his tone. "God helps those who help themselves." Then he turned back to the bot. "Are you gods?"

The comment and the question startled her. She had just thought the word, hadn't she? She had not said it aloud. As far as she knew, no one had taught the Racs anything about religion. Speech, yes, and the making of huts and fire and tools, of pottery and baskets. But never religion.

Her father had once told her the reason why: Humans were all too prone to letting others take the responsibility for their lives, and the Racs' intelligence, like their genes, was much like the humans'. They must therefore be protected against the human error, or else all the Gypsies' efforts at creating an intelligent species that might someday join them in space might be wasted.

"Why do you even ask?" she said.

"I can read," said the Rac. When the females beside him eyed him admiringly--Were they his mates? His kin?--he took a deep breath and swelled his chest. "Most of us cannot. I learned when I was young."

"Who taught you?" She knew that she would have to pass on word of this unexpected skill. No one had thought reading was something that would do the Racs any good at this stage in their development. But the Racs were capable of numerous surprises.

"My playmates. Human children." He paused, and then he repeated his question: "Are you gods?"

"No!" Pearl Angelica's denial exploded from her lips. "You've been in the library, haven't you?" There was a small one in the pumpkin nearest the base of the Tower.

When he nodded, she sighed. "No," she said. "We're not gods. We're just makers. When we came here twenty-five years ago, we found a world without intelligence, though it had animals--your ancestors--that seemed promising."

"You were fleeing," said Blacktop. It was no secret, why the Gypsies had built the Gypsy and left Earth. "But here you have no enemies. You could stay if you wished."

"What are gods?" asked Wanderer. He was watching them intently, his eyes darting from speaker to speaker.

"You made us," said Leaf, thrusting her chinless face forward. "From the wild ones. And Blacktop has told us, makers are gods. That is what gods do."

"No," said Pearl Angelica again. "People made you. We made you. And not without mistakes." She paused as Leaf showed the strangers her teeth, revealing her thought that they were mistakes, still tailed, less smart, less favored by the gods. She thought of the Gypsies who said they should have waited until they had perfected the Racs' new model and feared that, by releasing the early batches, they had only guaranteed a future of racism and war. They had taught neither, just as they had not taught religion; now conflict seemed inevitable.

"We made you," she repeated. "The way we..." She gestured toward herself. "Look at me." She wore only a belt and an apron of many pockets. From her thighs to her shoulders, she was covered with scalelike green leaves. Her legs and arms, her neck and face, were covered with pale green skin, her head with red-bronze petals. She unfurled her roots from their ruffs and lifted a leg to draw their attention to them. "I'm a bot," she said. "My ancestors were plants. The humans, the gengineers, they changed them into..."

Stonerapper interrupted. "You're not like the others."

He had seen the other bots as he had walked across the valley. They had lawns of small blossoms, not just petals, on their scalps. Their leaves were long fronds that curled around their torsos. Small bulbs between their thighs held extra brain tissue.

"One like them was my mother," said Pearl Angelica. "They changed her seed. They moved my bulb inside me. They gave me a longer life." That last was her greatest difference. Few other bots lived more than ten years. She was already in her fourth decade. "But they only changed. They didn't make. Changed the way they changed the wild Racs into you. Changed the way they changed a tree into..." She pointed toward the Tower in the distance. It had begun as a sequoia; the gengineers had shaped it a little and hastened its growth tremendously. "Not made, not really, but remade." She thought of her Uncle Renny Shafer, who once had been a sentient, talking dog but had chosen to become human in order to have the woman he loved. "Remade," she repeated. "We are not gods."

There was a long pause while Leaf hefted her empty basket and eyed the vast expanse of moss and mossberries and mossblossoms. These blossoms would be wasted, for the first killing frosts were not far off, but the moss cared nothing for that. It was programmed in its genes to try endlessly to reproduce, to generate berries and seeds enough to survive harvesting by the wildlife of this world, and now by something it had never faced, something it might one day prove unable to survive, sentience, Racs eager to cache supplies against not only winter but also drought and flood and every other catastrophe they might someday imagine or create.

Finally, Pearl Angelica spoke again. "You're better off than we are. Than I am."

The Racs blinked and looked startled. They were far more used to thinking of the Gypsies as holding all the advantages. But they said nothing.

"You're here," said the bot wistfully. "You're home. We are a long, long way from home, and most of us will never see the world we came from. Most of us do not even care. But I do. I want to see Earth. I want to sink my roots into its soil and taste my root-home." Her voice died wistfully into a silence disturbed only by the sound of rustling leaves on the slope of the bluff.

Finally, Cloudscurry asked quietly, "Were you ever there?"

Pearl Angelica shook her head. "I was born and raised in space. But I remember the look of Earth. I could see it from the station, and later from the Gypsy, before we left. I was only a sprout, but I remember. I remember."

All six Racs stirred uncomfortably, but the bot paid them no further attention for a long moment. Finally, she said, "It's a long way off now. When we leave--and we must--it will be longer still."

"When will you leave?" The way Leaf shifted her basket on her arm suggested that she was now less interested in the answer than in getting on with her gathering. Cloudscurry touched her furry arm in silent enforcement of her attentiveness, and she stilled.

"When the Tower is done. When I have found..." Her tone turned thoughtful. "We need bees. Small animals that visit flowers and carry the yellow dust that makes them set their seeds."

Blacktop puffed his cheeks in a grimace of resignation to the inevitability of the Gypsies' departure. Then he nodded. He knew what she meant by bees.

But so did the strangers. "We will catch some for you," said Wanderer.

"No!" said Cloudscurry. Her shoulder fur was once more bristling. "This is our valley. Our task. We do things for the gods."

"You are visitors," said Blacktop. "Guests." He did not seem quite comfortable with the concept, as if it were something else he had encountered in the Gypsies' books. Certainly these strangers were the first visitors or guests the Racs had ever seen. "You will sit and tell stories of your home. We will do the work."

"I've caught some myself," Pearl Angelica cautioned them all. "But they cannot live aboard our ship."

"Remake them, then," said Cloudscurry. The miracles of gengineering seemed quite routine to her and all the other Racs, even though they were centuries from a similar capability themselves.

The bot sighed. "The gengineers say they're too busy already."

Suddenly stiffening, Blacktop lifted his spear and pointed toward the Tower. The other Racs spun with him. Pearl Angelica turned and saw a Bioblimp straining at a tree limb that had just been cut from the Tower's shaft. The limb, as large as many a forest tree, was a little too heavy for the Bioblimp to lift; the best the genimal and its small propeller could do was slow the fall of its load, guiding it toward the slash pile to the south. But...

Hard by the base of the Tower were the pumpkin shells that served the project's supervisors and workers. A little further off, set by itself with a view of both the Tower and the valley's small lake, was the pumpkin that housed Pearl Angelica's father and his nurses.

"Wrong direction," said Wanderer. He swung his own spear toward the lake. "It will land ... there."

Pearl Angelica gasped. He was pointing toward the isolated pumpkin in which Frederick Suida's life guttered like an exhausted candle flame. "My father! Dad!"

Cries of alarm rose in the distance as others realized what was happening.

"Your father? But you're a bot," said Leaf. She sounded perplexed, for bots, though they had breasts and in form resembled human females, were like the plants that had supplied half their genes. They were dioecious, both male and female, makers of both pollen and eggs. They were also considered "she" by both humans and themselves.

"My mother was his wife." And Donna Rose had been as short-lived as every bot except Pearl Angelica. She had died years before. Frederick, half human, half pig, not plant at all, had lived longer. But his time too had come. He had been ill now for months, bedridden, attended by physicians and nurses. The pumpkin had been his choice at the beginning, that he could be near his daughter, that he could watch the Tower grow and be finished. Now he too rarely knew where he was or what he had done. And he was a target.

A figure, brilliant yellow in the coverall most humans wore, not the leaf-green of the bots, appeared in the doorway of Frederick's shelter. It faced briefly toward the shouts, looked upward, and turned to rush inside once more, leaving the door wide open behind it.

People were running toward the pumpkin. Others flagged down a Mack, its descent from a bulldog plain in its squashed face and bowed legs, opened the cargo pod strapped to its back, and crowded aboard. Two insectile Roachsters, long and low and spiky in their profiles, their passenger compartments embedded in the shell of their backs, left their dirt tracks and rolled across the mossflowers.

"Too late," moaned Pearl Angelica. "They can't stop it. Oh, Dad!"

Air currents lifted the Bioblimp, dropped it, pushed it first to one side, then the other. But the straining engine and propeller defeated the breezes and kept the gengineered jellyfish and its burden slanting through the air toward a spot somewhat beyond the pumpkin.

"It will drop the limb," said Blacktop. "Soon."

Even as he spoke, the yellow coverall appeared once more in the pumpkin's doorway. Others, clad in other colors and in the green of bot leaves, followed. They were carrying a stretcher, on it a single body covered with white sheets. They ran, and in that moment the Bioblimp uncurled its tentacles and released its load just as the Rac had foretold.

The Bioblimp, still fifty meters above the ground, leaped upward as the weight of its burden fell away. The tree limb, propelled by the momentum its carrier had given it, slanted steeply downward. Air resistance swept its leafy branches upward as if they were the vanes of a dart. Its thick butt hung down, swaying, plunging.

"He's out!" breathed Pearl Angelica exultantly. "He's safe!"

The massive limb struck the domed top of the pumpkin, smashing through, small branches lashing in elastic reaction, breaking, showering leaves and twigs and larger pieces over the ruined structure below. A moment later, the crash of the impact rolled across the valley to the bot's ears.

The limb now jutted from a jagged hole in the pumpkin's dome. The building's windows were shattered. The walls were cracked. The pumpkin itself was knocked askew on its stone foundation cradle.

The small cluster of refugees had turned to view the disaster by the time the Mack, the Roachsters, and the running Gypsies reached them. People milled and gestured, and Pearl Angelica could hear that their voices were rising in frenzied chaos.

Overhead, the rogue Bioblimp hovered above the scene as if to savor the havoc it had wrought.

"It has to be an accident," said Pearl Angelica. She was aware of an extra fillip of relief as she thought, accidents don't happen to gods. We have escaped divinity.

All six of the Racs shook their heads. "It was too exact," said Cloudscurry. She spun her spear in one hand and jabbed its point emphatically into the dirt between her feet. "Right to the heart."

"But why would anyone want to kill my father?"

All seven stared at the Bioblimp as if it might speak to them in answer to her question. As they watched, the door in the side of the vehicle's control cabin opened. For just a moment, someone stood in the opening, and then he--or was it she?--jumped. When the sunlight caught the spinning body, it revealed only that it was wearing blue.

"A human!" breathed Blacktop in a smooth, tight tone that even to Pearl Angelica's alien ear suggested awe and dismay.

"But why?" cried the bot once more.

"Your ancient enemies remain."

"It was an accident," said Pearl Angelica. "It had to be."

"No," said Blacktop. His voice was smooth with anger, yet it was also patient, definite. "They could not have followed you. You, your people, have told us they do not have the means. But they hide among you."

Leaf glared at the stranger Racs. "Or they come upon us. They sneak through the valley and plant seeds of hate."

Pearl Angelica stared at Wanderer, Stonerapper, and Shorttail. "They couldn't have," she said. "You can't make evil happen just by wishing it. And I don't think you stopped to talk to anyone. You were heading for the village up there, weren't you?" She pointed to the top of the bluff, where the Racs made their home and the smoke of their fires was visible from afar. When the strangers nodded, she blinked. Tears filled her eyes. She bowed her head and clenched her fists. "But how could the Engineers have done it?"

"You are gods," said Blacktop. He sounded more convinced than ever. Then, to forestall the protest promised by her suddenly raised head and open mouth, he added, "Or makers. And I have read. All gods have enemies who seek to undo their works. The battle is ancient and eternal, and it has come to us."

"You brought it," Leaf virtually sang at Wanderer, her hand tight on the handle of her basket, her voice as smooth as Blacktop's.

"It followed them," said Blacktop chidingly. "They could not escape it. Nor could we." He paused while Pearl Angelica turned back to the view of disaster across the valley. Other Bioblimps had the rogue in tow. Bots and humans were gathered around the body of the would-be assassin. Frederick Suida's nurses still clustered around his stretcher. Others were already climbing over the damaged pumpkin, removing whatever furniture and other items had survived the bludgeon that had fallen from the air, estimating the damage, already planning the necessary repairs.

Finally, thoughtfully, Blacktop said, "Even if the humans had never come, all we lacked was awareness, and they have told us that that was only a matter of time."

"A million years or so." When Pearl Angelica began to shake with shrill hiccups, prelude to the hysterical laughter of relief, Cloudscurry dropped her spear and wrapped a furry arm around her shoulder. She quieted, though the tears flowed more freely than ever.

Eventually, she was able to speak again. "How could killing Dad undo anything? The Tower was his idea, but ... All he can do now is watch."

"The Tower is too big to harm," said Cloudscurry. "But without your father, perhaps your people would lose interest. You would not finish it. You would not fill the chamber at the top."

"And you would leave immediately." Leaf gestured anxiously. "You would abandon us."

"Your ancient enemies remain, and they are ours as well," said Blacktop. "We will hold this in our minds and in our histories. You will leave, and in your absence they may try to destroy..." He shook his spear toward the Tower. "But it is ours. You are giving it to us. And we will keep careful watch until we are able to climb it. Be sure of this, we will keep it safe."

Wanderer began to nod as he spoke. When Blacktop fell silent at last, he said, "The Tower is new and strange. But my people know of the humans. They made us too, and we have tales of the days when we lived here as you do now. We will help you protect the Tower."

"No!" cried Leaf. "It is ours! You will never touch it or see it again or know... !"

"Leaf!" Blacktop's bark was stern, and the female Rac stopped talking and seemed to wilt.

"They are the enemy!"

Pearl Angelica was suddenly thankful that the Racs had a leader like Blacktop. Perhaps there would be no war after all. But still..."Knowledge." She leaned against Cloudscurry's furry side as she spoke. "It's the only sort of treasure you can give away to others and never give it up. The hardest thing about it is getting it in the first place."

"Climbing the Tower," said Wanderer. He was staring at the immense spike with a speculative twist to his mouth.

Blacktop wore the same twist when he eyed the leader of the visitors. Finally, he said, "We need no berries today. Come. We will take you to the village." He gestured, Cloudscurry removed her arm from the bot, and the six Racs began to climb the bluff.

Pearl Angelica stared after them for a long moment. The village was set not far from the edge of the bluff, just past the border of the forest. As they walked up the path, Leaf bent to the scattered patches of mossberries within her reach, gathering a taste of what she must have planned to feed her children. Blacktop strode with his head bowed, thoughtful, surely planning how to tell his fellows about other races of Racs with tails and subtly different faces, about gods and ancient enemies and the Racs' mission as a species, or perhaps only as a tribe, to guard the Tower against all harm. Mission, she thought. That might be all it took to lead to conflict. Not races, not racism. Certainly Earth's history suggested that a sense of mission could do as much damage as any sense of difference.

But then she put all thought of the Racs from her mind and looked toward the valley once more. The distant crowd seemed less frantic now. Another Mack had arrived, and people were carrying the body of the terrorist toward its cargo pod. Others stood quietly about her father's stretcher, their postures suggesting that despite the excitement and the jostling he must have received he had come to no harm. Still more were walking back toward the Tower and their tasks.