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“Yes. Well, trade makes ties to defeat war. And if you can get the Terrans well tied up, you’ll have the smiles of the Council, Kyger.”
    Again that flash of feeling. Troy could not be sure which man was involved. The golden man stubbed out his smoke stick.
    â€œYou have a fussel—”
    Kyger picked up a refreshment bulb, squeezed its contents into his mouth. “I have. It’ll have to prove itself in flight, though, before I market it.”
    â€œJust so. I am due to make an inspection trip through the Wild. Trust me with that testing—send along your man here.”
    Kyger glanced at Horan. “All right. He knows how to handle the bird, uncrated it when the rest of us couldn’t get near. Very well, Hunter. When do you wish to leave, and for how long?”
    â€œThree days to be gone. I must swing up as far as the Marches. As to when—well, shall we say in two days? That will give your bird that much longer to rest before we take him out.”
    Kyger crushed the beverage bulb in one hand. “Agreed. You,” he said to Troy, “will hold yourself ready for the Hunter Rerne’s orders.”
    The golden man left, walking with an almost soundless tread that Troy did not now find surprising. Kyger continued to sit for a long moment, his eyes still on the door through which the other had gone.
    â€œRerne.” He repeated that name very softly. If there was any expression in his tone, Troy failed to read it.
    The Hunters, the rangers of the Wild, were conservation experts. Guardians of the vast sections of carefully preserved forest and unsettled lands, into which parties of visitors or the villa dwellers of Korwar might be guided to enjoy the thrills of primitive living while still in flyer touch with the safety and luxury of civilization, they were almost legendary in Tikil. And the office had become, through two centuries, hereditary, going to the members of some ten or twelve families, all of them First-Ship pioneers on Korwar.
    Rerne’s Clan lived to the north. And this man, because of his youth, must be one of the two brothers whose discovery of the ill-fated Fauklow expedition was still something of a saga in the port city. Troy fingered the belt from which no knife hung. Even a subcitizen could seldom hope for a chance to penetrate the Wild. The trackers, foresters, woodsmen themselves all came of lesser families allied by old ties to the Clans. Yet he was going with Rerne in two days’ time!

FOUR
    The news flash came during the slack time at the shop. Those visitors who favored the afternoon had gone, and the evening strollers were not yet abroad. Kyger had retreated to his office; his employees gathered for their evening meal. Troy balanced a plate on his knee in the courtyard. Through the window vent over his head he could hear the mechanical recitation of the day’s events over Kyger’s com.
    â€œâ€”the so-far unexplainable and sudden death of Sattor Commander Varan Di.”
    Troy stopped chewing. Two feet away stood the flitter, and right now there was a box resting in it intended for the hillside villa of Sattor Commander Varan Di, a special shipment of food for the Commander’s pet.
    â€œâ€”resigned from the overlordship of the Council during the previous year,” continued the drone from within. “But his years of experience led him to agree to continue as consultant on special problems. It is rumored that he was acting at present as adviser on the terms of the Treaty of Panarc Five. This has been neither confirmed nor denied by government spokesmen. Statement issued by the Council: ‘It is with deep regret—’”
    The monotone of the com snapped into a silence, the more noticeable because of that sudden break. Troy went on eating. The death, “unexplainable and sudden” as the com had it, of a retired military leader and former Council lord now had very little to do with Troy Horan. Ten