knowingly done anything I was told not to do."

Mr Snow greeted this with an enigmatic smile. 'I'm sure you haven't.

Nevertheless your little jaunt yesterday has made things very

difficult."

'In what way?"

Mr Snow drew his hand down over his beard before replying. 'There are

certain people who feel that you should never have been taken alive and

that you now know too much."

Steve frowned. 'How did they work that out? If you are the only

person Clearwater and I have spoken to..."

Mr Snow shrugged. 'Certain assumptions have been made."

'One of them being that I must have discovered Cadillac and Clearwater

are what we call "yearlings" - straight Mutes?"

'Yes - you could say that is their principal concern. They wanted to,

ahh - question you ' 'I bet..."

'... I advised them to wait until you came to talk to me about it."

Steve looked down at his quarterstaff, ran his hand along it, then

looked up at Mr Snow. 'You knew I was coming... How?"

'There's no mystery about it. I keep telling you. All things are

known to the Sky Voices."

Steve tried to bite back a smile. 'In that case you must have known

what was going to happen yesterday."

'Not necessarily. I said "All things are known to the Sky Voices".

That does not mean that I know everything."

Steve breathed an inward sigh of relief. 'Okay. But why should these

red-heads want to jump on me? "That path is already drawn" - isn't

that what you keep telling me? So how can whatever's happened be my

fault? You can't have it both ways. If you guys are not happy with

the way things are going why don't you take it up with Talisman, or the

Sky Voices, or whoever it is that's supposed to be running things up

there?"

'Good point,' conceded Mr Snow.

'Here's another,' continued Steve. 'There's no need for anyone to get

worked up about this - not unless they're deliberately trying to stir

up trouble. If I had bumped into Clearwater on any other day I would

never have known that she and Cadillac were straights. And even if, by

chance, I had discovered the truth, why should it be such a big

secret?

You and I discussed this weeks ago. The Southern Mutes have been

trading in straights for centuries."

'Not female straights."

'True,' admitted Steve. 'I overlooked that."

It was a lie, of course. Steve knew perfectly well that, ever since

the Break-Out in 2464 when the Federation first learned of the

existence of unmarked, smooth-skinned Mutes and the first rare

specimens were found, no female straight had ever been captured or

handed over in lieu of tribute. Indeed, it was widely believed that,

due to some genetic quirk in an already flawed process, female

straights simply did not exist. The M'Calls had not only produced one

- they possessed a perfectly formed, highly intelligent, breeding

pair!

It was the kind of hard data that the Amtrak Executive would give their

eye teeth for and was bound to earn him good grades at his next

assessment. Always assuming there was one.

Steve thought back to something Mr Snow had said in an earlier

conversation. About the ancestors of the Mutes being straight-limbed

people from the Old Time. Up to the moment of discovering the true

colour of Cadillac's and Clearwater's skin, Steve had believed that to

be a grotesque lie. Since birth he had been taught that the Trackers

were the only true descendants of those who lived before the

Holocaust.

The hellfires that had consumed the Blue-Sky World had been ignited by

the Mutes who - according to the Archives - were already subhuman.

But what if Mr Snow's version of history contained an element of

truth?

What if Cadillac and Clearwater proceeded to give birth to their own

kind, and more like them amongst the other Plainfolk clans spawned

succeeding generations of straights? Mutes would no longer be Mutes.

The whole basis for the centuries-old conflict would disappear.

Christopher Columbus I How would the Federation function if it had no

one to fight? For over five hundred years, dispensing death had become

the way of life for generations of Trackers. In every aspect of its

organisation, in thought, word and deed, the Federation was geared to

the conflict with the Mutes. Since the age of five his own life had

been totally dedicated to learning how to k