It is getting quite dark outside, and Thrym and Ranna are sitting before the drone screens. This is the second night, this time they are better prepared. Nembi has transferred a batch of resources from Thrym's oversized compcore to Ranna's network. Now they have enough minidrones and computing power, and that turned out to be a good thing. Massaging his front, Thrym looks in desperation at the central screen, where the different colors of seven eth tracks trace a crazy dance. The sight makes Thrym is even madder at Ranna than the night before. He casts a dirty look at his companion and asks: 'Well, have you decided which one is ours? If any of them is, at all?'

She looks back defiantly and replies: 'It is not my fault that it went sleeping amidst an eth congregation, right?'

Thrym laughs dryly:' Oh yes, it is your fault. My idea was to have them in a little clean cage on a laboratory table, do you remember?'

'And how would the animal in that cage have showed that it still had a memory, and a sense of purpose? How would you have known that they think?'

He replies dryly: 'Very easily, Ranna. I would have asked them, after the reconversion.'

A soft beep attracts their attention. Another eth leaves the shelter of the cracked beam. The eth is a big male, and Thrym assigns a drone to it. He then goes back to watching the pattern of eth tracks on the other screens. He glances at Ranna, and thinks of what he will do with her, when this is over.

I kept still, here where it is safe, as long as I could, but the hunger is back. My body moves, in search of food. I hope it will be Dark outside. Some kindred have left already, maybe they were hungrier, or their minds are weaker, incapable to withhold their bodies. Or to stupid to understand the danger. But there were no noises of cracking scales, no death stench from squashed scent glands. I move, good, outside is Dark. No strong odors of food, but cow, and deer some distance away. They have about the same strength, I can choose, I choose cow. Cow will bring me to Rias.

It takes much time to reach the cow dung. I am so hungry; there is nothing else in my mind but the need to get there and to eat. Then I reach it, and start to feed. The hunger subsides slowly. There is again room for thoughts, and I look around. There are other two kindred on the heap, both males. No need to fight, there are no females, and there is plenty of food. I whisper my name, Mreq. Only the largest male answers: 'Tiin' The other one is a yearling, stupid and nameless. We feed. My mind clears again, as the hunger subsides. I have to go where the cows are. I will need sex, the next dark period. I have eaten all I can hold. The smell of cows is in the wind, faint but clear. I start to follow it.

Looking at the screen, Thrym notices that the last eth is going in the direction of the path that leads from the meadows to the village. There the creature stops to feed. Thrym frowns. During the previous day, he made a simulation program, which calculates, for every given point which dung heap is closest and most attractive to an eth. He sets it now to follow the new target's course, looks at the results, and frowns again. This does not prove a thing. This eth is also following a minimal energy path. When it left the shelter of the concrete beam, the tropism potentials were very low. The creature choose to go this way, but it could have chosen any direction, at this low tropism level. And once it got under way, every other yard could have been dictated by simple tropism. He curses under his breath. He can't be sure, at this point in time.

Ranna comes back in, carrying a tray with coffee and biscuits. She puts it down, and cast a glance at the screen. 'Hey, Thrym, one of them is going in the right direction. We found it!'

The way he looks at her makes her understand all to quickly that she jumped to the wrong conclusion again. 'Ok. It just looks that way. How will we ever be certain?'

Thrym shrugs. 'I programmed a tropism predictor. The red contour around each eth shows the weight of the tropism's that are supposed to govern the moves of ordinary eth. The arrow shows the direction they move in. As long as they move as you expect from a mindless machine, in the direction of maximal tropism, the arrow is green. If they deviate, it becomes yellow, then red. Red sounds an alarm.'

Ranna claps her hands. 'Great. So all we have to do is wait for an arrow to become red?'

Thrym grins. 'Basically, that is the idea. But the program is far from perfect. It needs a supervisor. Any female will do fine.'

Ranna sighs, and accepts the unavoidable. 'Ok, I'll spend the night watching bugs. Maybe the lab was a better idea. If we had them in a cage then it would have been you who'd have spent the night watching them.'

Eyebrows raised in, surprise, Thrym replies: 'Why would I have done that?'

Ranna answers briskly: 'Well, they're nocturnal, no? There is no point in observing them during the day, right?'

Thrym looks at her, slowly shaking his head. 'Ranna, how can you be so dumb on occasions? They are nocturnal because they can't stand the sunlight and also because there are too many daytime predators. But in a laboratory without windows, they'll be active when the lights are out. I'll just put them in stasis for a night and they'll come out of it in a different time zone.'

Ranna gives him a dirty look, and then, sulking, turns her chair to watch the screens. Thrym shrugs, and leaves. The double humm of the automatic door is all there is to mark his leaving.

I move in the direction of the cow scent, I'm not hungry, my body has no powerful urges. The terrain is easy to move over, hard mud with deep narrow cracks, easy to cross, but wide enough to hide in. I smell no monsters. Vaguely I'm aware that I must trust the reflexes of the body. Vaguely I know that having been Other makes me a poor eth. An eth untrained in surviving, but large enough to be an interesting prey for all kind of monsters. An eth my size would have learned how to survive those. Probably by sticking to a territory where it knows in which direction to find the nearest shelter. But I cannot stay in one place. I must find Rias. The smell of fresh cow dung is getting stronger, and I feel hungry again. But that is no problem. My body's urges will lead me exactly where I need to go.

Ranna watches the predictor contours on the screen, the alarm doesn't go off a single time, and the screen is filled with the irregular paths of eths following their tropisms. One line is straighter than the others are; one line leads towards the village. A while ago, that line crawled of the main screen, and Ranna instructed the computer to project it on a separate screen. She has given up on the others, but still hopes this will turn out to be the Mareq eth. If it is not, it never came out from under the concrete beam, or it lost all sense of special purpose. Looking at the screen, she wonders. She is beginning to understand why this is so important to Thrym. Changing the bodies is one thing, an incredible feat of genetic engineering, but nothing more. But nobody knows what happened to the minds of those two men. Not she, not Thrym, nobody at all. She suddenly realizes something. If those minds still exist in these eth bodies, that means that they would follow into other bodies too. Her eyes open wide. On Thrym's desk, there is a picture of the black Boojum, by far the most dangerous animal on Lorend or any planet she knows of. The beast stands on its four hind feet, the frontal segments of the body raised up, the main tentacles with their four large claws spread in a threatening stance, and the four small, arm-like manipulators pulled under the scales for protection. It has been proven that a Boojum can live a thousand years. Would that be Thrym's ambition? As close to immortality as you get. A safe, powerful body. The Boojum is amphibious, Plenty of fish, plenty of sea, plenty of places to hide a technology core in a subsea cavern. She shivers. If that is his aim, and she spoiled his experiment, he must be raving mad. She suddenly understands she's in great danger. There is only one way out. Ranna breathes deeply. She will do it when he comes back. Otherwise it might be too late.

I am getting hungry again, but food is near enough. I can smell some old dung, close by. If I eat now, and then go into hiding, next night I will be in the village. The village is safe. Cows, fresh dung, no rats. Rias. I reach the old dung heap, half rotted, and dig deep into it. The inside is warm and tastes strange. I eat. I feel drowsy, but the hunger is gone. I stay here, deep in the dung heap, safe. The drowsiness rises lie a fog in my mind. I just let go, let the sleep come.