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to the stars.
    But was it truly worthless, just because it couldn’t let us build starships? This world was one of the rare ones that had given rise to life. Did we even understand why life arose here at all? Was it really enough to know that we could eat the plant life? Had we no curiosity about the differences between the native life and the chemistry of our own bodies? We had learned enough about ourselves to create monsters like me, but we hadn’t learned enough about this world to truly say we lived here. Yet on the eastern border of Mueller there was a place where the very trees had learned enough about us to make a lone wanderer die of dreams beneath their shadow.
    All these thoughts led to only one conclusion: The certainty of my death. And yet they filled me with a strange excitement, a longing to live long enough to learn more about this world. I had received a great insight. There was another road to freedom besides iron won from the Ambassadors. We had been given a whole world, hadn’t we? Could we be free by no longer pressing upward against the prison wall of gravity, and instead turning downward and discovering what lay beneath our feet; outward, discovering the native life around us and learning wisdom from it?
    It was that excitement that drove me on. I even wondered for a time if, in the moments before I died, the plants would speak to me, meaning not that they would find voices, of course, but that their poisons would provoke some illuminating vision that would tell me what this world had planned for us interlopers, us strangers. Now as I laid hold on trunks, leaning and staggering my way through the wood, I silently asked the trees to speak to me. Kill me if you must, but don’t let me die without having known my vanquisher.
    Until at last I could not make my legs go anymore, they crumbled under me, and it was only early afternoon, if my guess at the sun’s place was correct. As I staggered forward and collapsed to my knees, I saw a shimmer of bright blue before me; I had come at last to the lake.
    It was not so wide I couldn’t see the other shore, far and faint in the haze of vapor rising invisibly from the surface, but it was long enough that I saw no end, either north or south. The sun dazzled on the bright water. And yes, it could only be two o’clock in the afternoon.
    I lay by the water and slept, and woke the next day at what seemed to be the very time I had gone to sleep.
    I despaired, but also I hoped. For I had slept, that was certain. My muscles ached, my legs were rubbery under me, but I could move again, I had the fresh vigor that could only mean I had had, if not as much rest as I needed, at least enough to go on. Above all, I was awake . The poisons in the air had not consigned me to die here in my sleep.
    Perhaps it was only because I had won free of the trees and collapsed here, where perhaps the open water cleared the air. I felt it was a kind of victory, to have reached this place. I thought back to the map of Treason I held within my head—one of the things that lingered from school days, the map of the world that dated from the first orbital surveys when our ancestors arrived. There were other lakes, strung out eastward of here. If this was in fact the southwesternmost lake, then striking due east would take me to the largest of the lakes, and by skirting the southern shore and following a large river to the easternmost lake, I would be within reach of the borders of Allison.
    I knew that the southern tip of the lake was where the woman had told me I should turn south. But Jones was too much in the shadow of Mueller; Dinte might have spies there, and Father certainly would—there was always the chance that Father might have changed his mind and decided the good of Mueller required my death.
    My best hope, now that I had proven I could defeat the menace of Ku Kuei, was to go east, fight my way through to Allison, only one Family to the west of Nkumai. There I could complete the