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bunk to doze, I saw something scratched into the bricks of the wall: a crude drawing, a head with round
eyes and a downturned mouth, arms and legs sticking out of it, hair in jags. Beside this figure, five crude
letters: B-O-B-R-T. We looked for and found other drawings scattered around the room, on the floors
or walls.
"Children," the young sailor, Cortland, said.
Salap let his shoulders droop, and lay on his bunk with a sharp expulsion of breath. "Ser Olmy, I am
ashamed," he said.
I shook my head, but could not think of anything to say.
The hours passed, and it grew dark outside. No one came for us, and no one brought information.
A single light bulb came on within the room, casting a dismal pale pink glow, a sick and depressing
color under the circumstances.
"Do you think they're going to kill us?" Rissin asked.
"No," Salap said.
Rissin began to fidget on his bunk above mine. "This is not what I thought would happen," he said.
"Not as long as we were with Lenk."
I tried to puzzle the situation through. Either the Brionists were savages on the order of the worst
human history had produced, or we were simply in crude detention, until Brion and Lenk had finished
negotiations. I tried to imagine what strengths Lenk would negotiate from.
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*18*
The door opened and the thick-faced guard watched as a man and a woman in light blue aprons
brought four covered plates. The guard was now armed, I saw -- a small pistol. We took our plates and
the door was closed. The plates contained a thoroughly cooked green vegetable and a scoop of
paste-thick wheat gruel.
The light went out. The steward and the young sailor did not notice; they were asleep. Salap gave a
little grunt and moved around in the darkness.
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"Olmy, are you awake?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Lenk said Brion had a great secret. Do you think he meant using the scions as servants?"
"Perhaps."
"Do you know what that implies?"
"I think so," I said.
"It could dwarf the importance of our little skeletons," Salap said. "It changes the way we have to
think about the ecoi..."
He lapsed into silence, standing in the middle of the room, facing the dim glow of the square
window. "I am lost," he said. "Everything I knew is turned upside down. All my studies ... Everything the
explorers found, or thought they found. Brion has gone beyond us all." Salap came closer to my bunk
and whispered, "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to stay here, like you, until they come and get us."
"Unless you're from the Hexamon."
"What do you think, that they'd send some sort of superhuman? You want me to break down the
walls and let us escape?"
Salap chuckled dryly. "If you were from the Hexamon, would you reveal yourself to Brion, or to
General Beys? It could make a significant impression."
"This is stupid talk," I said. "The disciplinary was crazy. Randall was gullible. I'm no superhuman."
Salap stood. I heard him rubbing his hands together in the dark. "I have no wife and children, no
alliance with a family," he said. "I have never cared much for family life. But I have always taken care of
my researchers, my assistants, my students. I've failed."
"We're all helpless," I said.
"You don't get my meaning. I have always seen a single bright thread of destiny stretching ahead of
me. And I've felt those around me would be safe, as long as that thread stretched taut..."
"We're not dead yet," I said, finding this line of talk no more useful than the last.
"I have never known what to think of the Good Lenk," Salap said. "When we followed him here, he
seemed all-knowing, very thorough. But he has not handled the factions well. So much rancor, so little
resolve ... Unwilling to crack heads, I believe."
"You think he should have cracked a few heads?"
"I think he should have been prepared to do what needed to be done. Ready for what happened.
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Perhaps the dream is over for Lenk."
Cortland stirred and poked his head over the edge of the bunk. "Have some courage," he said in a
harsh whisper. "Don't speculate about things you can't know. Brion may be in for a surprise."
"What kind of surprise?" I asked, suddenly intensely curious. The situation had been entirely too
simple, when history demanded that it should be complex and dynamic.
"I'm just a sailor. I don't know much of anything. But Lenk never plays from weakness."
Salap made a small chuff of disbelief. "Let him surprise me, and I will be in his debt even more."
"We're all in his debt," Cortland said with little-boy confidence. "He took us from Thistledown.
General Beys doesn't know everything."
"You were born here," Salap said. "You never saw Thistledown."
"How old were _you_ when you came here?"
"Twenty," Salap said.
"And you?" the sailor asked, aiming his voice in the dark to where I sat on the lower bunk.
"I was born here," I said. "I never saw Thistledown. I've read about it."
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