"I'll take you to him right now, if you'll give me a lift. He's probably working on the clinic today. You won't know where that is, it's bright-new. Just a second." Zed dashed back into his cabin to put something in order, a hint of that former twelve-year-old in his run. Miles felt like banging his head on the lightflyer's canopy, to try to force his spinning brain back into gear.

Zed returned, to hop into the lightflyer's backseat, and give Martin a string of directions interspersed with running commentary as they rose into the air and passed over the next ridge. He brought them down about two kilometers away in front of the rising frame of a six-room building, the biggest structure Miles had ever seen in Silvy Vale. Power lines were already strung to it, feeding a rack of pack-rechargers for power tools. Half a dozen men paused in their labors to watch them land.

Zed clambered out and waved. "Lem, hey Lem! You'll never guess who's here!" Miles followed him toward the building site; Martin sat at the controls and watched in bemusement.

"My lord!" Lem Csurik's recognition was instantaneous too; but then, Miles's appearance was, ah, distinctive. Miles could probably have picked Lem out of the crowd in turn with a moment's study. He was still the wiry hillman of about Miles's age that Miles remembered, though obviously much happier than the day a decade back when he'd been falsely accused of murder, and even more confident-looking than the time Miles had briefly seen him in Hassadar six years ago. Lem too went for an engulfing two-handed greeting.

"Speaker Csurik. Congratulations," Miles said in return. "I see you've been busy."

"Oh, you don't know the half of it, my lord! Come see. We're getting our own clinic—it's going to serve the whole area. I'm pushing to have it undercover before the first snow flies, and all ready by Winterfair. That's when we're getting our doctor, a real one, not just the medtech who flies the circuit once a week. The doc's one of your lady mother's scholarship students from the new school in Hassadar; he's going to serve us here four years in exchange for his schooling. Winterfair's when he's supposed to graduate. We're fixing him up a cabin, too, upslope; it's got a real nice view—"

Lem introduced his crew all around, and took Miles on a tour of, if not the clinic yet, the dream of the clinic that burned in his imagination so hotly, Miles could see its ghostly outlines all complete.

"I saw the electric dam in the valley, coming in," Miles said, when Lem at last paused for breath. "Where did that come from?"