"You should not have attacked the Checker's Hand. We tend it tended it."

"Is that why you killed Jiovan? For a fan fungus?"

"For that, and for returning from exile. You were cast out for assassinating a Chairman."

"That's news to me. We've been in Quinn Tuft for over a hundred years."

She nodded as if it didn't matter. She was strange . . . she was a stranger. Gavving knew every man, woman, and child in Quinn Tuft. This citizen had dropped on him out of the sky, complete and unknown. He wasn't even sure he should hate her.

"I'm thirsty," he said.

She passed him a squeezegourd pod half-full of water. He drank.

The clump that was Quinn Tribe seemed minutely closer. Gavving might have been imagining it. He said, "What do we do now? The way you use a jet pod, maybe you handle yourself better in the sky than we do. Can you tell us what to do next? Dalton Tuft-"

"Dalton-Quinn Tuft," she corrected him.

"Your half of the tree is probably safe, but it's being pulled out by the tide. I can't think of any way to reach it. We're lost." Then his curiosity suddenly became unbearable. "Who are you?"

"Minya Dalton-Quinn."

"I'm Gavving Quinn," he said for the second time in his life. The first had been at his rite of passage into adulthood. He tried again. "Who are you all? Why did you want to kill us?"

"Smitta was. . . excitable. Some of us are like that in the Triune Squad, and you were killing the Hand."

"Triune Squad. Mostly women?"

"All women. Even Smitta, by courtesy. We serve the tuft as fighters."

"Why did you want to be a fighter?"

She shook her head, violently. "I don't want to talk about it. Will your citizens accept me or kill me?"

"We're not-" killers? He'd killed two himselL It caine to him that if the Grad had taught him rightly, those times when the Scientist would have whipped them both for such talk, then . . . then Minya's half of the tree, falling out from Voy, was also falling out of a drought. So.

"Can I tell them this? If we can get you back to the far tuft, you'll see to it that we're made members of your tribe. It looks better if I can say

that. Well?"

She didn't speak at once, and then she said, "I have to think."

The meat and the fan were passing at fair speed when Clave cast out a weighted line. He'd reserved their last pod. Another mistake, maybe. Now they'd have only one chance . . . but the dark stranger caught the line neatly and made it fast. They braced against their mutual spin.

Gavving shouted across the gap. "This is Minya of Dalton-Quinn. Tribe. She wants to join us."

"Don't pull in yet. Is she armed?"

"She was."