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the sixty or so dark-robed little people who had approached me—I was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.
    I reminded myself that these were almost certainly the same group of “smiling children” who had slit Tuk’s throat while he slept and left him to die like a butchered pig.
    The closest Bikura stepped forward, stopped five paces from me, and said something in a soft monotone.
    “Just a minute,” I said and fumbled out my comlog. I tapped in the translator function.
    “Beyetet ota menna lot cresfem ket?” asked the short man in front of me.
    I slipped on the hearplug just in time to hear the comlog’s translation. There was no lag time. The apparently foreign language was a simple corruption of archaic seedship English not so far removed from the indigene argot of the plantations. “You are the man who belongs to the cross shape/cruciform,” interpreted the comlog, giving me two choices for the final noun.
    “Yes,” I said, knowing now that these were the ones who hadtouched me the night I slept through Tuk’s murder. Which meant that these were the ones who had murdered Tuk.
    I waited. The hunting maser was in my pack. The pack was set against a small chalma not ten paces from me. Half a dozen Bikura stood between me and it. It did not matter. I knew at that instant that I would not use a weapon against another human being, even a human being who had murdered my guide and might well be planning to murder me at any second. I closed my eyes and said a silent Act of Contrition. When I opened my eyes, more of the Bikura had arrived. There was a cessation of movement, as if a quorum had been filled, a decision reached.
    “Yes,” I said again into the silence, “I am the one who wears the cross.” I heard the comlog speaker pronounce the last word “cresfem.”
    The Bikura nodded in unison and—as if from long practice as altar boys—all went to one knee, robes rustling softly, in a perfect genuflection.
    I opened my mouth to speak and found that I had nothing to say. I closed my mouth.
    The Bikura stood. A breeze moved the brittle chalma fronds and leaves together to make a dry, end-of-summer sound above us. The Bikura nearest to me on the left stepped closer, grasped my forearm with a touch of cool, strong fingers, and spoke a soft sentence that my comlog translated as, “Come. It is time to go to the houses and sleep.”
    It was midafternoon. Wondering if the comlog had translated the word “sleep” properly or if it might be an idiom or metaphor for “die,” I nodded and followed them toward the village at the edge of the Cleft.
    Now I sit in the hut and wait. There are rustling sounds. Someone else is awake now. I sit and wait.
    Day
97:
    The Bikura call themselves the “Three Score and Ten.”
    I have spent the past twenty-six hours talking to them, observing, making notes when they take their two-hour, midafternoon “sleep,”and generally trying to record as much data as I can before they decide to slit my throat.
    Except now I am beginning to believe that they will not hurt me.
    I spoke to them yesterday after our “sleep.” Sometimes they do not respond to questions and when they do the responses are little better than the grunts or divergent answers one receives from slow children. After their initial question and invitation at our first encounter, none of them originated a single query or comment my way.
    I questioned them subtly, carefully, cautiously, and with the professional calm of a trained ethnologist. I asked the simplest, most factual questions possible to make sure that the comlog was functioning properly. It was. But the sum total of the answers left me almost as ignorant as I had been twenty-some hours before.
    Finally, tired in body and spirit, I abandoned professional subtlety and asked the group I was sitting with, “Did you kill my companion?”
    My three interlocutors did not look up from the weaving they were doing on a crude loom.