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By Root 1766 0

her departure from the Reach. She found the piece terribly moving not just in an aesthetic sense, but also in what it symbolised. The bronze casting, perhaps three metres high, was of a figure standing and staring inland, a staff in its right hand - a male member of the Lho-Dharvo race, the aliens native to the Reach. To human eyes, the statue seemed to be out of proportion, too tall and attenuated for the insectoid width of its starvation-thin limbs, as if stretched to the point of being unable to bear its own slight weight. Its rib-cage was long, each individual, curving bone distinct beneath its copper and bronze piebald skin. Its head was long and thin, too, with large eyes, no nose other than two vertical slits, and a mouth no more than a thin humourless line. To a human observer, the alien at first seemed too alien, and then when the eye accepted its similarities, it appeared reassuringly humanoid. Only then, when the observer had been fooled into accepting the alien as familiar, did its differences reassert themselves and mark the statue for what it was - a member of a sentient species not human.

It was, thought Ella, a fitting tribute to an extinct race. Eleven years ago, the first of the Lho had succumbed to a viral epidemic, and four years later all three million aliens on the four continents of the Reach - or Dharvon, as they knew it - were dead. Ella had read of the extinction in a Paris magazine, and she felt now much the same sense of impotent rage and personal loss.

As she watched, an engineer took a cutting tool and sliced through the statue's thin left ankle. A noose suspended from the crane was slipped around the alien's noble head.

A noise on the other side of the square, behind Ella, made her turn. A flier descended and landed on the cobbles. Someone - in the descending twilight it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman - climbed out and stared across at the statue's removal.

Cautiously, Ella approached the engineers. She stood beside a sergeant who seemed to be in charge of the operation.

She gestured at the statue as its left leg was severed with a shriek of tortured metal. Now only its staff secured the statue to its plinth. The hawser around its neck tightened, drawing the alien off-centre.

"Why...?" she asked, shaking her head.

The sergeant glanced at Ella. He was a tall, grey-haired and patriarchal European, as noble in his own way as the statue.

"I wish I knew," he said in a Scandinavian accent. "It's rather beautiful, isn't it? But I have my orders."

They watched together as the staff was severed. Released from its final mooring, the alien hung from the noose and rotated absurdly. Half a dozen soldiers steadied the statue and directed it towards the hover-truck.

Unable to find the words to express the sense of loss that was like a cavity within her, Ella turned and hurried off across the square.

Someone stepped from the shadow of the fountain. For a second, she thought it was the driver of the flier, but then she saw that the figure was short, dumpy: an old woman.

"Ssst! Senorita!" the woman hissed. "A hotel, yes?" She pointed along the harbour to a white-washed building overlooking the sea. She smiled, a gold tooth gleaming in the light of the sun.

Ella hesitated. She had wanted to revisit the Santa Rosa, to stir old memories.

The old woman caught her arm, not unkindly. "Senorita, it is almost curfew!" she said in Spanish. "They will take great delight in shooting you in the head at the first stroke of eight! Please, this way..."

Ella judged that there was nothing mercenary in the old woman's concern; she seemed genuinely concerned for Ella's safety. She gestured towards the hotel, taking Ella by the hand and dragging her from the square.

As they turned the corner, the woman looked back over her shoulder at the tall figure standing beside the flier. She hissed something under her breath, then hauled Ella up three steps and through the timber door of a small whitewashed building.

Two old men were bent over a board-game in the bar-room. Wooden chairs and tables