By then it was obvious. The woman in purple had passed them and was heading toward Gavving.

Gavving watched her coming. There was little else he could do. When he could see her face he watched her watching him. The rictus of hate he'd seen earlier wasn't there. He saw close-cut dark hair, a triangular face with an oddly narrow chin, an expression that was thoughtfbI, judging.

She was going to go past.

He didn't know how to feel about that. He didn't want to die alone, but he surely didn't want to die with those mini-harpoons through him. She was close now. She reached behind her back for a tethered miniharpoon. He could only try to put the meat between them as she pulled her odd weapon apart, looking him in the eye, and released it~

The feathered thing buried itself in warm meat.

Then Gavving moved in frantic haste, pulling his knife, reaching for her line-Her words were strangely twisted, but he understood her. "No, no, no, let me live! I have water! I have jet pods! I beg you!"

It might be so. He shouted, "Freeze! Don't reel yourself in! I have to think"

"I obey."

She hung, tethered, motionless.

"You've got water and I've got food. What if you kill me and keep both?"

"My sword," she answered and produced the long knife and threw it.

Startled, Gavving reached out and managed to catch it by the handle.

"My bow," she said, and he had time to bed the knife in the meat before she threw him the pull-it-apart weapon. He caught that too.

Now what? She was just waiting.

"What do you want?"

"I want to join you, your people. There's nobody else."

He could festoon himself with his weapons and hers, and so what? With nothing between them but forty kilograms of smoked meat, either could snatch a weapon and kill the other at any time. He'd have to sleep sometime.. . and still she waited.

He thought suddenly, W7iy not? I'm dead anyway. He called, "Come on.',

She coiled the line as she came. Gavving had been hanging onto his pack, but she hugged herself up against the meat with no thought for

what it would do to her purple clothing. She worked a jet pod out of one of the dozen pockets that gave her body its shapeless, lumpy look. She set it and twisted the end. When it had expended itself there was some change in their velocity. She used another. Then another.

"Why were you carrying so many?" he asked. "I took them from my friends."

From their corpses. Gavving turned away. Quinn Tribe now formed a single clump around- "The Checker's Hand," said his enemy. He had trouble understand

ing her odd pronunciation. "They're all moored to the Checker's Hand. Good enough. Fans are edible. So is dumbo meat."

"I know that word. Checker: the Grad's used it, but he never tells anyone what it means."