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was high and dim, with clouds across her face. Freedom hadn’t risen yet. “How soon must I leave?”
    “As soon as Freedom come,” she said. “Then I lead you afoot to the edge of the forest, and there ye stay until just before sunrise. Then off and in. Head east but about a third to the south till ye touch a lake. Then they say the true road to safety is due south, into Jones. Follow no paths. Follow no manshape or woman shape ye see. And pay no heed to day and night.”
    She brought out woman’s clothing from a trunk and held it up to me. It was shabby enough, and old, but modest and virginal.
    “My own,” she said, “though I misdoubt I ever did fit it on my old corpse, what’s swoll up with fat these last year and ten.” She laughed, and put it in my pack.
    Freedom rose, and she led me out the door and along a path leading due east from her house, and not much traveled by. She chattered as we went.
    “What be the need of troopery at all, ask I? They flash a bit of hard metal, dip it in another’s blood, and then what? Is the world all changed? Do men now fly Offworld, are we of Treason now freed by all the bloodshed? I think we be like dogs that fight and kill over a bone, and what has the winner got? Just a bone. And no hope of any more after that. Just the one bone.”
    Then an arrow swicked out of the darkness and into her throat and she dropped dead in front of me.
    Two soldiers stepped into the moonlight, arrows ready. I ducked just as one let fly. He missed. The second hit me in the shoulder.
    But by then my pack was to the ground, and I buried my dagger in the first man’s heart, then kicked the other to the ground. There were ways of fighting that they never taught the troops.
    When they were both still I cut off their heads so there was no hope of their regenerating and telling what they knew. I took the better of their two bows and all the glass-tipped arrows, then went back to where the woman lay. I pulled the arrow from her throat, but saw that she wasn’t healing at all. One of the oldest branches of the family, then, that was too poor to stay in the chain of genetic advancement that had resulted in masterworks of self-preservation like the royal family, like the royal troops.
    And genetic monsters like the people in the pens. Like me.
    I gave her grief, letting the blood drip from my hand onto her face. Then I put the arrow that had struck my shoulder into her hand, to give her power in the next world, though I doubted privately that there was such a thing.
    The packstraps chafed my wounded shoulder, and the pain was bad, but I had been trained to endure pain, and I knew that soon enough it would heal, like the wound in my hand. I walked eastward, following the trail, and soon came into the shadow of the black trees of Ku Kuei.
    The forest was as sudden as a storm, from the bright light of Freedom into utter darkness. The trees looked eternal, right from the edge, as if five hundred years ago (or five thousand, the trees are that large) some great gardener had planted an orchard just so , with the edges neat and crisp along the property line.
    The forest had already been like this, though, three thousand years ago when the ships of the Republic (the lying name for the foul dictatorship of the servile classes, said the histories) took the great rebels and their families and dumped them on the useless planet called Treason, where they would be exiled until they had ships enough to come out. Ships, they said with a laugh, with silver the strongest workable metal on the planet.
    Metal we could only buy, and then by selling something that they wanted. For centuries upon centuries every Family would put something in the bright cube of their Ambassador; for centuries upon centuries the Ambassador took it—and returned it. Until we stumbled upon a way to exploit the agony of the radical regeneratives.
    But some of the Families did not take part in the rush to trade with our captors. The Schwartzes