“How could that be?” My throat sac must have fluttered in confusion, making burbly sounds. “Your people came to Jijo two thousand years ago. Mine almost as long. Even humans have been here a few hundred. Every inch of the Slope is explored, and each Buyur site poked into, scores of times!”

Huck stretched all four eyes toward me.

“Exactly!”

Floating from her cranial tympanum, the Anglic word seemed stressed with soft accents of excitement. I stared for a long time and finally croaked in surprise.

“You mean to leave the Slope? To sneak beyond the Rift?”

I should have known better than to ask.

All it would have taken was a shift in the roll of Ifni’s dice, and this would be a very different tale. Things came that close to going the way Huck wanted.

She kept badgering me, for one thing. Even after we finished repairing the lattice and went back to loitering near the ships moored under huge, overhanging gingourv trees, she just kept at it with her special combination of g’Kek wit and hoonlike persistence.

“Come on, Alvin. Haven’t we sailed to Terminus Rock dozens of times and dared each other to keep on going? We even did it, once, and no harm ever came!”

“Just to the middle of the Rift. Then we scurried home again.”

“So? Do you want that shame sticking forever? This may be our last chance!”

I rubbed my half-inflated sac, making a hollow, rumbling sound. “Aren’t you forgetting, we already have a project? We’re building a bathy, in order to go diving—”

She cut loose a blat of disgust. “We talked it over last week and you agreed. The bathy reeks.”

“I agreed to think about it. Hrm. After all, Pincer has already built the hull. Chewed it himself from that big garu log. And what about the work the rest of us put in, looking up old Earthling designs, making that compressor pump and cable? Then there are those wheels you salvaged, and Ur-ronn’s porthole—”