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of the estuary.”
    Another dead one. They beached themselves in their thousands after the fallout hit them. “The body’s still there, then.”
    â€œNo.” Ade folded his arms and stared down at the pebbles for a few moments. He looked up, eyes wide and wary. “It ran off.”
    Northern Assembly, Ebj continent, Umeh, Cavanagh’s Star system: near the Maritime Fringe border
    Minister Rit picked her way between rubble on the construction site and wondered when the Maritime Fringe forces would pour across the border again.
    The Eqbas had withdrawn their ship and she didn’t know if they’d be back. They’d agreed to help Umeh restore its ecology: her husband, Par Paral Ual, had lost his life for asking them to intervene, and she expected that sacrifice not to be wasted. Once invited, Eqbas didn’t walk away, but they seemed to have walked away now, as if Umeh was so far beyond their help that they’d lost interest in reshaping it.
    It was still Rit’s duty to see that her husband’s wishes were honored. She didn’t know how to cope if they weren’t.
    â€œI expect them to come back to discuss the bioweapons,” said Rit.
    Ralassi, her ussissi aide, half closed his eyes in faint disapproval. “They always keep their word.”
    â€œMeanwhile, then, we rebuild.” Humans, her late husband used to tell her, were prone to descend into anarchy in wartime. They abandoned their sense of community. “Are your people going to return?”
    â€œPerhaps.” Ralassi trotted on, inspecting the progress. He was one of the few ussissi who seemed not to run with the pack. “But they seem to be settling into life on Wess’ej. Whatever happens, that’s home. We evolved with the wess’har, regardless of what other partnerships we might form. Never forget that.”
    Buildings along the route of the Maritime Fringe’s abortive advance stood smashed to the first and second floors, their colored fascias blackened and peeling. Most of the fallen masonry had been cleared, at least the length of the road ahead. The dead had been taken away and cremated long before. Joists and scaffold crisscrossed Rit’s field of view like a web.
    Nothing in her genetic memory, no voice or recollection of her many ancestors, could tell her what move to make now. Isenj rarely fought among themselves. It had taken an external threat—the wess’har and their cousins from Eqbas Vorhi—to tip them into brief, destructive skirmishes, and then—then they paused, bewildered, and looked around at what they had done, and tried to repair it.
    â€œWe still have a tree,” said Ralassi.
    Yes, they still had a tree. In the crater gouged by an explosion, a dalf was growing in the exposed soil, soil that hadn’t seen the light of day for centuries until the brief battle—if the rout of the Fringe armored column could be called that—ripped foundations out of the ground. Long feathery projections, translucent gold in the hazy sun, had unfurled from three slim stalks at the tree’s head.
    Esganikan Gai said it was important that the utter sterilityof Umeh should be broken by a living tree planted in that rarest of things, a patch of bare soil. She insisted on it.
    The humans called it a park, except parks had more trees and a variety of other plants. The dalf would have been better off staying on Tasir Var, where it came from; but Esganikan, in that wess’har way of hers, carried on regardless and imposed a park upon the Northern Assembly.
    Rit remembered trees, or at least her ancestors did; that meant they were significant memories. Rit’s ancestral memory also recalled a time when the wess’har were simply newcomers to the system, settlers with impossibly advanced technology who were happy to settle on Asht’s uninhabited twin planet and trouble nobody.
    â€œHow did we live in peace with wess’har for more than