And he could get something done while he waited for Lawn's pond. Jeffer touched the blue button (the panel went blank) and the yellow (there appeared a line diagram of the CARM's bow, the hut section). He touched a yellow dot in the image, and turned his fingertip. Then he moved aft.

The residual goop in pond water stayed in the tank after the pure water was gone. Jeffer's finger motions had (magically, scientifically) caused a spigot in the aft wall to ooze brown mud. He cupped the globule in his hands. He tossed it at the airlock, and most of it got through. Another globule formed, and he sent it after the first. He wiped his hands on his tunic. The mud flow had stopped.

Next he pulled several loops of hose from cargo hooks. He rotated one end onto the spigot, then tossed the coil through the twin doors. Done! When Lawri's blob of pond arrived, she would find the CARM ready to be fueled.

Jeffer returned to the controls. He had a surprise for his wife.

Two sleeps ago, while the rest of the tribe was roasting waterbirds from the pond, Lawri had held one of the creatures up for his perusal. "Have you ever really looked at these?"

Jeffer had seen waterbirds before . . . but he'd kept his mouth shut, and looked.

There were no feathers. The modified trilateral symmetry common to Smoke Ring life expressed itself in two wings and a tailfin, all in smooth membrane on collapsible ribs. The wings could be held half collapsed for motion within the denser medium of water. Only one of the three eyes looked like a normal bird's eye. The others were big and bulbous, with large pupils and thick lids. The bodies were slippery-smooth.

"I've eaten them, but . . . you're right. I've seen everything from mobies to triunes to flashers to drillbits, and they don't look like this. Earthlife doesn't either. Do you think it's so they can move through water?"

"I've tried looking them up in the cassettes," Lawri had said. "I tried bird. I tried water and pond. There's nothing."

Jeffer's next sleep had ended with a dream fading in his mind, leaving a single phrase: "... even the fish can fly."

He'd had to wait until now to try it.

He tapped yellow (the display vanished), then white (and got a tiny white rectangle at the dorsal-port comer). White read the cassettes; white summoned Voice. "Prikazyvat Voice," he said.

The voice of the CARM was a throaty bass, as deep as Mark the dwarf's voice. "Ready, Jeffer the Scientist."

"Prikazyvat Read Fish. Read it aloud."

The cassette was one that Jeffer had stolen from London Tree, but it was no different from Quinn Tribe's lost records of Smoke Ring life forms. As Voice spoke, print scrolled down the display screen: words recorded long ago by one of Discipline's abandoned crew.

FISH