tling out of the
horizon toward them.

Qualpha's was where the trouble had first broken out, after the bug-out
from Sanders; the troops hadn't been able to get there in time, and it
had been burned. Another village, about the same distance south of the
plantation, had also gone up in flames, and at a dozen more they had
found the natives working themselves into frenzies and had had to
sleep-gas them or stun them with concussion-bombs. Those had been the
villages to which the deserters from Sanders' had themselves gone; from
every one, runners had gone out to neighboring villages--"The Gone Ones
are returning; all the People go to greet them at the Deesha-Phoo. Burn
your villages; send on the word. Hasten; the Gone Ones return!"

Saving some of those villages had been touch-and-go, too; the runners,
with hours lead-time, had gotten there ahead of the troops, and there
had been shooting at a couple of them. Then the Army contragravity began
landing at villages that couldn't have been reached in hours by foot
messengers. It had been stopped--at least for the time, and in this
area. When and where another would break out was anybody's guess.

The car was slowing and losing altitude, and ahead he could see thin
smoke rising above the trees. He moved forward beside the pilot and
pulled down his glasses; with them he could distinguish the ruins of the
village. He called Bluelake, and then put his face to the view-finder
and began transmitting in the view.

It had been a village like the one he had just visited, mud-and-wattle
huts around an oval gathering-place, stockade, and fields beyond. Heshto
brought the car down to a few hundred feet and came coasting in on
momentum helped by an occasional spurt of the cold-jets. A few sections
of the stockade still stood, and one side of the khamdoo hadn't fallen,
but the rest of the structures were flat. There wasn't a soul, human or
parahuman, in sight; the only living thing was a small black-and-gray
quadruped investigating some bundles that had been dropped in the
fields, in hope of finding something tasty. He got a view of
that--everybody liked animal pictures on a newscast--and then he was
swinging the pickup over the still-burning ruins. In the ashes of every
hut he could see the remains of something like a viewscreen or a
nuclear-electric stove or a refrigerator or a sewing machine. He knew
how dearly the Kwanns cherished such possessions. That they had
destroyed them grie