No one knew Turtle's true age. Turtle would not say. They joked that DownTown had been built around him.

Turtle seldom talked about Turtle. Whence had he come? What was he? The last indigene of V. Rothica 4? There were ruins in the deserts. Unlikely that he was of the precursor race, though. Nobody was that old.

An artifact, then? Like Lady Midnight? Created in a laboratory for some inscrutable purpose even he had forgotten? The warrens of DownTown festered with artifacts who had outlived the usefulness of their designs. And it was thick with mistakes. The hobby life designers seldom destroyed their mistakes. They just turned them out. And some were terrible. And some bred true.

If not an artifact, might Turtle be an alien, lost, stranded, planetbound far from home?

That was the popular theory.

Turtle told nothing about himself directly, but Turtle told stories, only to the very young, on the streets of DownTown. He mirrored childhood dreams, singing interstellar songs, spinning epics of great ships clambering the Web. He told tales of warmer worlds and far suns, of races no DownTowner would ever see, of great fires searing the deep between the stars as warships met in battles of unimaginable fury. Perhaps he spoke of the destruction of the Enherrenraat. Or perhaps he spoke of another struggle more remote in space and time. He sang his songs of far wars in shades of emotion that said he had seen them himself, that he might have been among those who had gained only shattered dreams.

Turtle broke a long silence. "If it does try to carry its message to Cholot Varagona it will be taken. Canon garrison will pulse P. Jaksonica station. Every Traveler out will carry a call for the Guardships. The first to arrive will pick the thing's brain to the last synapse. Then it will come sniffing up the creature's backtrail. First stop: Merod Schene."