Like its counterpart in the South, the Northern Hemisphere, with 780 noncarbon-based life forms, had its Zone and its own embassies and ambassadors. In all, 702 hexes maintained permanent or semipermanent representatives in Zone, and had their own interzone council with rotating chairmanship. Yet the North had more problems than the South, which, though it had races so alien from one another as to make identification difficult, had more of a sense of unity. The Markovians had been carbon-based, and they naturally devoted much of their energies to other forms also based on carbon.

But they couldn’t overlook a bet. In their suicidal project to find for their children the glory their forebears had missed by attaining a stagnant godhead, the Markovians could not afford to miss the slight chance that they were doomed because they were carbon-based.

North Zone was the true experimenter’s paradise. There were no rules or restrictions on the 780 Northern hexes, and some of the life forms were so wildly alien that they could not even find common ground with one another. Such had been the way with the Uchjin, in whose nontech hex Trelig and Yulin had crashed. They had an ambassador on station—it was the only reason the refugees had made it to the South—but few could talk to them. Their utterances just didn’t make sense; their frame of reference, concepts, and the like were so totally alien that it would have been impossible even to convey to them what the ship was or what it represented.

“No,” however, translated quite well, even to the Northern races who had themselves tried to gain control of the ship—and some in the North were fully as greedy and Machiavellian as others in the South—and they had really tried. To no avail.