ad spaced out
from Gram almost exactly two years after the _Nemesis_ had departed.
He still hadn't any idea where Andray Dunnan was, or what he was
doing, or how to find him.

The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by the
scheduled liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds,
and then by trading ships and outbound Space Vikings to the Old
Federation. Two years and six months after the _Nemesis_ had come
out of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso on
Tanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to sell a cargo
and get repairs. They bought his loot--he had been raiding some
planet rather above the level of Khepera and below that of
Amaterasu--and healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it. He
had been dealing with the Everrard family on Hoth, and professed
himself much more satisfied with the bargains he had gotten on
Tanith and swore to return.

He had never even heard of Andray Dunnan or the _Enterprise_.

It was a Gilgamesher that brought the first news.

He had first heard of Gilgameshers--the word was used
indiscriminately for a native of or a ship from Gilgamesh--on Gram,
from Harkaman and Karffard and Vann Larch and the others. Since
coming to Tanith, he had heard about them from every Space Viking,
never in complimentary and rarely in printable terms.

Gilgamesh was rated, with reservations, as a civilized planet though
not on a level with Odin or Isis or Baldur or Marduk or Aton or any
of the other worlds which had maintained the culture of the Terran
Federation uninterruptedly. Perhaps Gilgamesh deserved more credit;
its people had undergone two centuries of darkness and pulled
themselves out of it by their bootstraps. They had recovered all
the old techniques, up to and including the hyperdrive.

They didn't raid; they traded. They had religious objections to
violence, though they kept these within sensible limits, and were
able and willing to fight with fanatical ferocity in defense of
their home planet. About a century before, there had been a
five-ship Viking raid on Gilgamesh; one ship had returned and had
been sold for scrap after reaching a friendly base. Their ships went
everywhere to trade, and wherever they traded a few of them usually
settled, and where they settled they made money, sending most of it
home. Their society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and their
religion an absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the