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By Root 847 0

loan, but the banks wanted to know what I was going to do with it. When I told them I was going to revive the Angalia mines they told me I couldn't do that because there was no source of labor on the planet, because the CenDip report said Angalia had no intelligent sentients. Without credits, I couldn't start the mine. And without the credits for the mine, I couldn't—well, we'll get to that in a while. Look, I falsified a few PTA reports. Said the population had tripled. Ration bars aren't exactly a hot item in international trade," he said dryly. "I had to have a large surplus to bargain with. Fortunately, I had an outlet right at hand. That bastard Harmon was keeping the Loosies at semi-starvation level so he could trade some of their ration bars for liquor. I had to have a little talk with the black market trader to convince him I wanted hard credits instead of hard liquor, but eventually he . . . um . . . came around to my way of thinking."

"Don't tell me how you persuaded him," Forister said quickly. "I don't want to know."

Blaize grinned. "Okay. Anyway, you've seen the mine; now I want to take you on a tour of Project Two. We'll have to go up the mountain for that, I'm afraid; I want you to get the long view."

The path up beside the mine was steep, but switchbacks and steps made it easier than it looked from a distance. As they passed the mine door, several Loosies looked up from their work to smile at Blaize. Their loose-skinned, grayish hands moved rapidly back and forth in flickering gestures that Nancia captured as imageflashes for later interpretation. For now, she was willing to accept Blaize's translation.

"They're asking who my mentally handicapped friends are, and whether you'd like a ride down to the processing sheds," he explained.

As he spoke, the team working at the mine's mouth filled a wagon with chunks of ore and poised it at the head of the rails swooping down into the valley. The three workers perched on top of the ore, hands gripping the sides of the wagon, and a member of the next team gave them a shove that started them off on a roller-coaster glide down the hill, swerving around rocks and dipping into hollows.

"Lost a few that way, at the start," Blaize commented, "before I remodeled the rail track so that the dips wouldn't throw anybody off."

The vegetation thinned out above the mine, giving them a view of the terraced gardens that replaced cliffs and rocks wherever a shovelful of soil could find a place. Micaya sniffed appreciatively and commented on the pungent aroma of the herbs growing in the mini-gardens.

At the top of the mountain they enjoyed a panoramic view of what had been the Great Angalia Mud Basin, now a grassland in which fields of grain shared space with brightly colored blossoms.

"This'll be our first year's crop," Blaize said. "I'd just finished the necessary preparations for planting last year, when those nitwits I came out with were here for the meeting. None of them noticed anything different, of course. But if your brainship can call up files of the first survey—"

"She can do better than that," Forister told him. "She's been here herself. Nancia, do you observe any changes here? Apart from the growing things, that is?"

Blaize paled between his freckles. "Nancia?"

"You have some problem with my brainship?" Forister inquired mildly.

"We . . . didn't part on the best of terms," Blaize confessed in a strangled voice.

Nancia was feeling rather more kindly towards Blaize now, but she wasn't quite ready to admit that to him. "Horizon shows changes between all major peaks," she reported in the neutral, tinny voice forced on her by the contact button's limitations. "Magnification of one area of variation shows new construction of rammed earth and boulders blocking a system of gullies that appears now to be under 17.35 meters of water. . . ."

"Lake Humdrum," Blaize said. "My first terraforming effort. Trouble was, I had to block all the outlets, and build up reservoir walls, before I could guarantee the floods wouldn't crash through the mud basin. Then we needed irrigation