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too alien.”
    “There … he is moving out now.”
    “No, he is still within you, just more Connected,” Ayuvah said. “Feel him, just the slightest cold. You’ll feel it at the top of your belly. He is walking your future.”
    Tull sensed it now, a cold lump in his stomach, much like a rising fear. “How long will he take?”
    “It depends,” Ayuvah said. “Your future may be short, it may be long. Your path will branch a thousand, thousand times. He will try to travel all of your futures, see all of your potential. He may be with you for only an hour, or perhaps he will be there all night.”
    Tull imagined carrying Chaa inside him for a day, and wondered if he would become accustomed to the sensation.
    He looked downhill toward Pwi Town. The shanties there were made with faded gray planks, bleached by salt spray and sun. The walls of many homes leaned at odd angles, their foundations sagging under the weight of many years. Tull felt intimately familiar with every stone, every board, and every person in this town.
    A fisherman across the street, Beremon Smit, waved good-bye to his wife and four children and set out south of town, heading toward the mines down at White Rock.
    Another man gone, Tull thought. One less to protect the town, just as Scandal said.
    A cloud floated overhead, casting a sudden shadow. Caree wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her leathery hand and looked up. Behind Tull, in the inn, a guest began shouting drunkenly, “You mutant! I’ll abort your mutant butt! Where’s my knife! I’ll abort you!”
    Scandal shouted, “Here sir, calm yourself!”
    But the man growled, “I don’t know which is worse here—the food, the booze, or the company.” It was a line meant to offend everyone in the inn, but meant to offend Scandal most of all.
    Scandal broke a bottle over the counter and shouted, “All right! He’s mine! He’s mine!”
    Tull did not turn to see the fight. He imagined Scandal, big bear of a man, waving the bottle as he threatened the guest into submission. Scandal was a businessman, and if it came to fighting, he would fight like a businessman, beating the customer into submission with slow punches calculated to minimize the damage, as if he were beating dust from a rug. No profit in killing the customers. Tull knew Scandal too well, knew this town too well.
    Tull smiled. He’d had many good meals here at Moon Dance Inn, and the accumulated emotions, the kwea, of those good meals left him feeling intoxicated and fulfilled.
    He felt inside him, felt the icy presence still there. A Spirit Walker is walking my future , he thought. He will know everything about me. The sense of wonder and fear that came with this knowledge tainted the kwea of satisfaction.
    Tull’s trick ankle was bothering him, and he began limping home, downhill and across the river to Pwi Town.
    Ayuvah must have sensed Tull’s need for quiet, and said nothing.
    The wind surged through Tull’s hair. After sunset the force of the gravitational winds combined with the nightly thermal winds that swept down from the mountains. The little town of Smilodon Bay was perched on the east coast of the Rough, a wilderness so large and rugged that the Slave Lords of Craal had never conquered it. Yet on such nights, Tull felt small and powerless, as if the Slave Lords sent the winds, as if his footing were inconsequential and force of those winds would lift him and blow him out to sea.
    On the road north of Moon Dance Inn was the section of town where Tull had been raised. The kwea from that part of town was powerfully evil, and Tull did not go there, for he could feel a shadow looming over it. So Tull skirted that part of town and walked past a wine shop; in an alley behind it, Tull had once necked with a young human girl, Wisteria Altair. He could not pass that alley without feeling the kwea of hot arousal from his youth.
    Each place they passed held kwea, and as Tull walked through town, he felt like a