rand back in the
cavern, which had bitten into his flesh with the pain of a real blow.

"No, you weren't dreaming. You happened to be tuned in one of those
handy little gadgets our lady friends here use. And, so tuned in, your
desire for the wolverines being pretty powerful just then, they came."

Shann grimaced. This was unbelievable. Yet there were his meetings with
Logally and Trav. How could anyone rationally explain them? And how had
he, in the beginning, been jumped from the top of the cliff on the
island of his marooning into the midst of an underground flood without
any conscious memory of an intermediate journey?

"How does it work?" he asked simply.

Thorvald laughed. "You tell me. They have these disks, one to a Wyvern,
and they control forces with them. Back there on the beach we
interrupted a class in such control; they were the novices learning
their trade. We've stumbled on something here which can't be defined or
understood by any of our previous standards of comparison. It's frankly
magic, judged by our terms."

"Are we prisoners?" Shann wanted to know.

"Ask me something I'm sure of. I've been free to come and go within
limits. No one's exhibited any signs of hostility; most of them simply
ignore me. I've had two interviews, via this mind-reading act of theirs,
with their rulers, or elders, or chief sorceresses--all three titles
seem to apply. They ask questions, I answer as best I can, but sometimes
we appear to have no common meeting ground. Then I ask some questions,
they evade gracefully, or reply in a kind of unintelligible double-talk,
and that's as far as our communication has progressed so far."

"Taggi and Togi?"

"Have a run of their own and as far as I can tell are better satisfied
with life than I am. Oddly enough, they respond more quickly and more
intelligently to orders. Perhaps this business of being shunted around
by the disks has conditioned them in some way."

"What about these Wyverns? Are they all female?"

"No, but their tribal system is strictly matriarchal, which follows a
pattern even Terra once knew: the fertile earth mother and her
priestesses, who became the witches when the gods overruled the
goddesses. The males are few in number and lack the power to activate
the disks. In fact," Thorvald laughed ruefully, "one gathers that in
this civilization our opposite numbers have, more or less, the status of
pets at the best, and necessary evils at the worst. Which put _