ved him. But the Last Hot Time was at hand; the whole
world would be destroyed by fire, and then the Gone Ones would return.

So there were uprisings on the plantations. Paul Sanders had been
lucky; his Kwanns had just picked up and left. But he had always gotten
along well with the natives, and his plantation house was literally a
castle and he had plenty of armament. There had been other planters who
had made the double mistake of incurring the enmity of their native
labor and of living in unfortified houses. A lot of them weren't around,
any more, and their plantations were gutted ruins.

And there were plantations on which the natives had destroyed the klooba
plants and smashed the crystal which lived symbiotically upon them. They
thought the Terrans were using the living crystals to make magic. Not
too far off, at that; the properties of Kwannon biocrystals had opened a
major breakthrough in subnucleonic physics and initiated half a dozen
technologies. New kinds of oomphel. And down in the south, where the
spongy and resinous trees were drying in the heat, they were starting
forest fires and perishing in them in hecatombs. And to the north, they
were swarming into the mountains; building great fires there, too, and
attacking the Terran radar and radio beacons.

Fire was a factor common to all these frenzies. Nothing could happen
without magical assistance; the way to bring on the Last Hot Time was
People.

Maybe the ones who died in the frenzies and the swarmings were the lucky
ones at that. They wouldn't live to be crushed by disappointment when
the Sky Fire receded as Beta went into the long swing toward apastron.
The surviving shoonoon wouldn't be the lucky ones, that was for sure.
The magician-in-public-practice needs only to make one really bad
mistake before he is done to some unpleasantly ingenious death by his
clientry, and this was going to turn out to be the biggest
magico-prophetic blooper in all the long unrecorded history of Kwannon.

A few minutes after the car turned south from the ruined village, he
could see contragravity-vehicles in the air ahead, and then the fields
and buildings of the Sanders plantation. A lot more contragravity was
grounded in the fallow fields, and there were rows of pneumatic
balloon-tents, and field-kitchens, and a whole park of engineering
equipment. Work was going on in the klooba-fields, too; about three
hundred natives were cutting open the six-foot leafy balls and