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against the seedship outline. They were engaged in the drawing of the shields, and sure as topology, the
spirals of force had to have a dimple on the opposite side that would iris wide enough to let in glovers.
The sisters twisted the forces, and Prufrax could see the dimple stretching out under them
The exercise ended. The elfstate glovers were cast into sudden dark. Prufrax came out of the mock
unprepared, her mind still bent on the Zap. The lack of orientation drove her as mad as a moth suddenly
flipped from night to day. She careened until gently mitted and channeled. She flowed down a tube, the
field slowly neutralizing, and came to a halt still gloved, her body jerking and tingling.
"What the breed happened?" she screamed, her hands beginning to hurt.
"Energy conserve," a mechanical voice answered. Behind Prufrax, the other elfstate glovers lined up in
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The Venging
the catch tube, all but the special-projects sisters. Ya, Trice, and Damu had been taken out of the exercise
early and replaced by simulations. There was no way their functions could be mocked. They entered the
tube ungloved and helped their comrades adjust to the overness of the real.
As they left the mock chamber, another batch of glovers, even younger and fresher in elfstate, passed
them. Ya held her hands up, and they saluted in return. "Breed more every day," Prufrax grumbled. She
worried about having so many crew she'd never be able to conduct a satisfactory Zap herself. Where
would the honor of being a glover go if everyone was a glover?
She wriggled into her cramped bunk, feeling exhilarated and irritated. She replayed the mocks and added
in the missing Zap, then stared gloomily at her small, narrow feet.
Out there the Senexi waited. Perhaps they were in the same state as she ready to fight, testy at being
reined in. She pondered her ignorance, her inability to judge whether such things were even possible
among the enemy. She thought of the researcher, Clevo. "Blank," she murmured. "Blank, blank." Such
thoughts were unnecessary, and humanizing Senexi was unworthy of a glover.
Aryz looked at the instrument, stretched a pod into it, and willed. Vocal human language came out the
other end, thin and squeaky in the helium atmosphere. The sound disgusted and thrilled him. He removed
the instrument from the gelatinous strands of the engineering wall and pushed it into his interior through a
stretched permeum. He took a thick draft of ammonia and slid to the human shapes chamber again.
He pushed through the narrow port into the observation room. Adjusting his eyes to the heat and bright
light beyond the transparent wall, he saw the round mutated shape first the result of their unsuccessful
experiments. He swung his sphere around and looked at the others.
For a time he couldn't decide which was uglier the muttered shape or the normals. Then he thought of
what it would he like to have humans tamper with Senexi and try to make them into human forms.& He
looked at the round human and shrunk as if from sudden heat. Aryz had had nothing to do with the
experiments. For that, at least, he was grateful.
Apparently, even before fertilization, human buds eggs were adapted for specific roles. The healthy
human shapes appeared sufficiently different discountingsexual characteristics to indicate some
variation in function. They were four-podded, two-opticked, with auditory apparatus and olfactory organs
mounted on thehead , along with one permeum, themouth . At least, he thought, they were hairless, unlike
some of the other Population I species Aryz had learned about in the mandate.
Aryz placed the tip of the vocalizer against a sound-transmitting plate and spoke.
"Zello," came the sound within the chamber. The mutated shape looked up. It lay on the floor, great
bloated stomach backed by four almost useless pods. It usually made high-pitched sounds continuously.
Now it stopped and listened, straining on the tube that connected it to the breed-supervising device.
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The Venging
"Hello," replied the male. It sat on a ledge across the chamber, having unhooked itself.
The machine that served as surrogate parent and instructor stood in one corner, an awkward parody of a
human, with limbs too long and head too small. Aryz could see the unwillingness of the designing
engineers to examine human anatomy too closely.
"I am called " Aryz said, his name emerging as a meaningless stretch of white noise. He would have to
do better than that. He compressed and adapted the frequencies. "I am called Aryz."
"Hello," the young female said.
"What are your names?" He knew that well enough, having listened many times to their conversations.
"Prufrax," the female said. "I'm a glover."
The human shapes contained very little genetic memory. As a kind of brood marker, Aryz supposed, they
had been equipped with their name, occupation, and the rudiments of environmental knowledge. This
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