"No!" Segnbora started to say, but the thought snagged on the new language living in her throat, and wouldn't move. The Dracon tongue, she realized then, put a great emphasis on accuracy of expression, and her one, bald, angry word was therefore insufficient. "You look absolutely beautiful," she said at last, "and I wish to the Dark you'd go away.""It wasn't my idea to become mdahaih in a human, believe me," the Dragon said. "Nor was it that, of the rest of the mdeihei. They've been making a great deal of noise about it."She had never heard the words before, and she under-stood them instantly. Mdahaih: indwelling within a host body and mind. Mdeihei: the indwellers, the souls of linear ancestors, the thousand-voiced consensus, the eternal com-panions.The thought made Segnbora's hair stand up. She realized then that the sound she had been hearing in the background was not the Sea. It was other voices, like that of the Dragon. It's a pleasant enough sound, she thought. A single Dragon sounded like a bass viol talking to itself — a deep breathy voice full of hisses and rumbles and vocal bow-scrapes. But Drag-ons in a group seemed to prefer speaking together, and had been doing just that ever since she walked back into her cav-ern. The result was a constant quiet mutter of seemingly sourceless voices: scores of them, maybe hundreds, coiling together words and meaning-melodies in decorous, dissonant musics. Now they were growing louder, They didn't approve of Segnbora, of her clumsy gropings and, her rudeness to them in the darkness into which they had been thrust. Nor did they approve of the abnormal singleness of her mind, and they said so, in a dark-hued melody that sounded like a consort of bass instruments upbraiding its audience."I don't much care whose idea this whole thing was," Segn-bora. said, "But won't you, creatures please—" She fumbled for the right word, but there was no word for undoing the mdahaik relationship. "Won't you just go away?" she said finally, feeling uneasy about, the vagueness of the term.'"'Where?" the Dragon, said, puzzled. "Out of us!" She stopped, then, annoyed. In this language there seemed to be no singular pronouns. The only singular forms in the language were for1 inanimate objects, and human beings, and other such crippled, single-minded, entities."That is impossible," the Dragon explained patiently. It had. lowered its voice into its deepest register, the one used for addressing the very young. "You are mdeihei, and will be until you die,'*'*The word it used was res *uu>: lose-the-old-body-and-move-into-a-new-one. Segnbora rubbed at her aching head in bewil-deimenl."Listen," the Dragon said, "if you were one of us, you'd bring about hatchlings in time, and the soulbond between you and them would be established once they broke shell The bond would grow stronger in them as they grew, and weaker in you as you became old. Finally, when you left your body, you would be drawn into them: become mdahaih. And so it would be with their hatchlings, on through the generations, forever …""Forever," Segnbora whispered, feeling weak. "But all those voices — they can't all be your ancestors…. we wouldn't be able to hear for the noise!""The ones furthest back are hardest to hear. They fade out in time — which may be as well. The mddhm are for advice, among other things, and what kind of advice can someone gone mdahaih fifty generations ago give to the sdaha, the out-dweller? The strongest voices are the newest, the first four generations or so."Segnbora sat down on the floor, miserable. The great head inclined slightly to watch her, causing another brief storm of rainbows. "What happens," she said eventually, "if I die, and there are no children, and no one is close by to accept the linkage, the soulbond, as I seem to have done for you?"She could see no change of expression in the iron-and-diamond face, but the Dragon's tone went grave. "A few have died and gone rdahaih," he said: not "indwelling" or "out-dwelling," but "und welling." "They are lost. They and their mdeihei vanished completely, and from the mdnhei of every Dragon everywhere. They cease to be. ." Segnbora shuddered.The Dragon's wings rustled in its own unease. "Yourpeo-ple have a word," he said. "A Marchwarder taught it to us: 'immortality." He said that humans desire it the way we desire doing-and-being. We have '"immortality' already; only rarely do we lose it. Had you not come to the Fane, we would have gone rdahaih. Mercifully the Immanance at the heart of what-was-and-is saw to it that you were there." I'll never get married, then, Segnbora thought, heavy-hearted. Humans had a Responsibility: They had to reproduce tfaem —selves at least once, and until the Responsibility was fulfilled she was not free to marry any man or woman or group. She couldn't take the chance of passing this curse along to a child. She couldn't! It was going to be hard to die without knowing whether she would see the Shore—"O sdaha," the Dragon said quietly, "since we're going to be together for a long time — regardless of your plans for hatchlings — perhaps we might know your name?"She stared upward, angry again in the midst of her pain. "I don't remember asking you to listen to me think!""Among sda'tdae, there's no use in asking for permission or refusing it," the Dragon said. "One hears. You'll find there's little I will hide from you. Nor do I understand why so many of your memories are lying here sealed in stone, though doubtless, answers will become plain in time."The pattern of notes the Dragon wove around them said plainly that he considered her something of a disappoint-ment. Still, there was compassion in the song behind the words, and amusement mixed with wry distaste at the situa-tion he found himself in. Segnbora rose slowly, She was finding it difficult to be angry for long with someone so relentlessly polite — espe-cially when, he was. so large. She was also getting the uneasy feeling that all the courtesy and precision built into the Dra-con language was there to control a potential for terrible savagery."Segnbora d'Welcaen tai-Enraesi," she said, giving him the eyes-up half bow due a peer."Hasai s'Vheress d'Naen s'Dithe d'Rr'nojh d'Karalh mes'-en-Dhaa'lhhw'ae," the Dragon said, giving his name only to the nearest five generations.The named ancestors sang quiet acknowledgment from the shadows beyond the sunlight. Hasai lowered his head almost to the floor' and raised his wings in greeting, spreading them fully upward and outward in an awesome double canopy. Membranes, like polished onyx stretched between batlike finger-struts, and the sunlight was blocked suddenly away.Her breath went out of her again, in sheer amazement. "Oh, my," she said., awed, "you are big. May I look at you?""Certainly."Segnbora walked around to her left, putting some fifteen yards between herself and Hasai so she could see more of him at once. Fifty feet of jeweled neck led down to two immense double shoulders, from which sprang both the backward-bent forelimbs, now folded underneath Hasai, and the first * "upper arm" strut of the wings. Each of these struts ended at the first bend of the wing in a curved crystalline spur, as sharp as the diamond talons on each forelimb's four claws, but much longer.Segnbora walked the length of the Dragon, out of the shadow of his wings, past the great corded hindlimbs, which were taloned as the forelimbs were. Slowly she walked along the crystal-spined tail, scaled in sapphires above, crusted in diamond below — and walked, and walked, and walked. Finally she came to the end of it, where the sapphires were small enough to be set in an arm-ring, and the last crystalline barb, sharp as a sword, lanced out ten feet or so from the foot-thick tailtip.She looked back up the length of the body between the wings. It was like looking at a hill wrought of gems and black metal. Even supine on the stony floor, the slenderest part of Hasai's body, his abdomen, was at least fifteen feet high and perhaps forty around. His upper shoulders were at least thirty feet across. There was just too much of him. "I can't understand how you fly," Segnbora said, starting back up the other side.