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the front room. Karriaagzh said, in Karst One, so Karl couldn’t follow, “We (you and Marianne personally) might/could leak information to the human governments. I know a bird-kind who speaks English.” Karriaagzh’s brain could grasp both the sequential call-derived Karst One and the sonar-based Karst One. I wondered if he could learn Gwyng languages as Black Amber was learning one of his.
    “Do you know how ridiculous it would be to smuggle in a bird to earth, find a scientist who’d listen, and get any people involved in this?”
    “You still don’t trust yourself?” Karriaagzh asked.
    “It’s most other humans I don’t trust. Karriaagzh, isn’t premature contact against Federation policy?” I said, wondering if Marianne, with her old Red saving-the-Universe fervor, had already gotten involved.
    Karriaagzh’s bill flew open, but before it snapped together, he stuck his fingers in at the mandible hinges.
    “Black Amber corrupts (you/everything),” he said.
    “Marianne, aren’t you sick of being played between the two of them,” I said. Karl wriggled back against an armchair and then went rigid, trying to be invisible, wanting to hear what grown-ups fought about.
    “I want to see more humans,” she said. “And you’re being played between Black Amber and Karriaagzh, not I.”
    “Molly was at Black Amber’s.”
    Marianne handed Karriaagzh his Clothes as she said, “I’d like to see Anne Baseman again; my other Berkeley professors.”
    I said, “We met a mathematician in Berkeley who was working on something like gate theory.”
    Karriaagzh pulled on his tunic, then his pants, one hand down inside them smoothing his feathers. He said, “Carstairs stopped working/thinks aliens will feed him the information.”
    I said, “The aliens we met don’t know anything.”
    Karriaagzh said, “We have physically disguised contacts in other places than Berkeley…”
    “So, let them leak—”
    “…but they are more obedient to the Institute of Analytics and Tactics than Alex in Berkeley.”
    I remembered Alex the Ahram, scarred head where his skull crest bone and overlying muscles had been removed. Now looking like a human blond with an unusual baldness pattern and a rather massive jaw, he snuck around Berkeley smoking high-potency marijuana and telling everyone he was an alien. Marijuana had an inhuman effect on him.
    I said, “I don’t want to go back.”
    Marianne said, “Karriaagzh, let’s wait a little. I don’t want to be from an unequal species if our guys can figure it out themselves. What are the chances?”
    “Ten years to fifteen years,” Karriaagzh said. “What if the Sharwani find your people? The History Committee is forcing us to guard the Federation’s planets first.”
    “I’m not in a hurry to meet officials from Earth,” I said, remembering jail, congealed Lysol in the cell corners thick as jam.
    Karriaagzh said, “Your people would be happy to work with you. You’ve been law-abiding ever since moving here.”
    As if I’d been a bad guy before the aliens reformed me. “Humans abandoned me.”
    “ Come on, Tom ,” Marianne said in English.
    Karriaagzh settled down on his hocks again, his face feathers twitching. He picked up Marianne’s tone, or knew that much English. He said, “You abandoned yourself, perhaps.”
    My head rocked back on my neck. “Let us try to get the Sharwani tamed. That’s enough for me and Marianne to do.”
    Marianne and Karriaagzh looked at each other. He rose, then she handed him the box of feather-mending equipment and the falconry book stolen from a Terran library by a shape-shifted creature who probably got drunk in human bars and wept from loneliness.
    Marianne said, “I don’t like being a jailor, Tom.”
    “You volunteered us for this,” I said. “You want to let the Sharwani run around the house?”
    Karriaagzh said, “I’ll go now,” and stalked to the elevator, lifting his hocks high behind him.
    As soon as the elevator