Her elders stopped rowing and sprang to their feet, drawing the sweeps inboard by habit. They had been watching their goal, but had not looked carefully at the darkness above it. Neither could see, very clearly at that distance; their mask windows were of salvaged window glass, and their eyes middle-aged.

Even after the child called the smoke to their attention, it was hard for them to be sure t at it was not ordinary rain scud. The ubiquitous oxides of nitrogen could be found in both.

“She’s right,” Kahvi said at last. “There is a fire beyond the slope. “What are those Hillers doing?”

“Maybe.” Earrin was less certain. “Let’s see what Bones can make of it. He has decent eyesight.” The man strode across the floats to the nearer of the tow lines and gave it a quick double pull. Both ropes became slack at once, and a moment later the native, as the Fyns regarded the being, surfaced a few meters away. Kahvi gave the come-here gesture, and the child imitated her, though Bones would have had some trouble seeing her inside the tent. The creature plunged toward the raft in a series of dolphin-like leaps, the last of which carried its grotesque figure smoothly to the deck. For a moment it lay like a stranded fish; then the slender body curled upward until it stood erect, towering well above the human beings.

The float supporting its hundred and twenty kilograms rocked irregularly in the chop, but the four lower limbs flexed to keep the body upright in spite of their fantastic slenderness and apparent frailty.

Two of them framed the horizontal flukes which were used in dolphin-style swimming; the other two originated half a meter farther up the slender trunk and extended far enough sideways and forward to provide a trapezoidal support area quite large enough to make balance easy. From a little distance, where the tentacles were not noticeable, Bones would have looked absurdly like a fish standing on its tail, to anyone who had ever seen a fish. Kahvi and Earrin had not; their own species was the only macroscopic form of native animal life still surviving on Earth.