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not be rescued . “You may not care whether ‘the dying is slow or fast,’ Yoninne, but the distinction is important to me, and perhaps to the whole human race. From what Pelio said, I think he’s got part of our equipment: the ablation skiff, the pistols … and the maser. With the maser we could make ourselves heard on Novamerika; they must be listening to the telemetry station Draere set up. And as for the ‘risk’ they’d be taking to rescue us: don’t you realize what we’ve stumbled into? This world could be the greatest find anyone has made since mankind left Old Earth—the greatest discovery in thirteen-thousand years. These Azhiri can teleport . Even if their trick doesn’t violate relativity, even if they can’t ‘jump’ faster than light, it still means that the entire structure of human colonization is going to be transformed. All down the centuries, man’s colonies have been isolated by an abyss of time and space, and by the enormous cost of travel from one solar system to another. Colonial civilizations, as on Homeworld, rise and fall just as surely and just as rapidly as they did on Old Earth. No doubt man has colonized several thousand worlds, but we know of only a few hundred, and most of those through hearsay. Whatever greatness a civilization achieves dies with it, simply because we are so isolated.”
    Ajão realized his voice was gradually rising. He was making a point that haunted many, including Leg-Wot. How often and how loudly had he heard the pilot denounce the Homeworld Union for not spending more money on interstellar colonization, “trade,” and radio searches for unknown civilizations. “But now,” he continued, more softly, “we may have found a way around all this. If we can find the secret of the Azhiri Talent—even if we can alert Novamerika and eventually Homeworld to its existence—then the distances between the stars will not matter, and there could be a truly interstellar civilization.”
    Leg-Wot looked thoughtful, less glum. Bjault had always believed that humanity as a whole was one of the few things she really cared about. “I see what you mean. We’ve got to get back word, whether we survive or not. And we’ve got to learn everything we can about these people.” Her face lit with sudden, unthinking enthusiasm. “Why do they always teleport from one pool of water to another? I’ll bet these guys have a high-class technology hidden beneath all the medieval window dressing. The pools are some sort of transmitting devices.”
    Ajão breathed an inward sigh of relief that the girl had snapped out of her mood. It was hard enough dealing with his own discouragement. He shook his head, and said, “I think these people are every bit as backward as we thought before, Yoninne. I’ll wager that teleportation is a natural mental ability with them.”
    “Well, then, why do they always seem to teleport from pools of water?”
    Bjault’s reply was lost in the shrill whistle that suddenly sounded from one of the boat’s upper decks. It was almost like a steam whistle, though Ajão couldn’t see where the sound came from. Whatever its origin, the whistle obviously signaled something important. The two guards who a moment before had been playing a dice game—at least it looked like dice, even though the stones were dodecahedra—stood up abruptly. One of them swept the dice into a leather bag. They both settled back in padded couches and strapped themselves in. The moment Ajão had seen all those couches, with their uniform system of restraints, he had guessed that they were only incidentally used to tie down prisoners. It was just one more bit of evidence for his theory. In another few moments he hoped to see a much more important confirmation.
    The whistle continued to wail for nearly a minute, as crewmen and soldiers took their places. When the tone abruptly ended, he could hear the townspeople cheering on the pier somewhere behind him. They had dutifully assembled