"The one I was captured with! Kael McCanahan, the Earther! Where is he?"
The jailer shook himself free and started down the corridor. Over his shoulder he called, "Look in the storehouse beyond the cell block. We keep all prisoners' effects in there!"
He was dead. He had thrown himself into the fiery maw of the thing that was Noorlythin. Who called him now? Who spoke these lies?
_You live, Terran. You served as the catalyst that enabled us to focus our powers against Noorlythin._
Even a high school student knew that a catalyst retained its own identity during the chemical change it brought about between two substances; even such substances as were the Doyen, gods of space.
He lay on a floor in the wreckage of the guardroom in the palace of Akkalan. In the distance, but growing closer, he heard the faint strumming of harpstrings. He lay there and listened to the harp, as life flowed stronger into his body.
The McCanahan stood up and he waited, big and brown, marked with scars.
Flaith stood in the broken doorway, her fingers falling from the harp. Tears had formed twin channels from her red-lashed eyes along her cheeks. When she saw Kael, she did not know him. And then he grinned, and his long hair and scarred brown body were forgotten.
She flung herself at him, and lay against him, trembling.
He told her of the High Mor and what he had been, and of how the Doyen had destroyed him. "We've won, Flaith. He's dead, forever. With the harp--and the vibrators that we'll build to duplicate its pitch--the Solar Combine will move on Sfar. Smash it, and its robot life!"
Laughter bubbled in her throat as she looked up at him. "They'll reward you, Kael. Make you somebody big on Terra!"
"An admiral at least! How would you like to be wed to an admiral, Flaith mavourneen?"
Her answer rocked him, in the hunger of her mouth on his.