As the Elder sat in his sparse but warm home listening with his heart stretched thin to the vivid images of his daughter being described, the city on the shore slept. But the humming of another series of byways and highways never slackened -- the energetic endless dynamic networth of exchange, exploration, growth, and interaction which filled the soil and oceans of Tern. The ways of animal life, with their bursts of frenzied activity during part of a day's cycles, and their plunge into somnolent quiet for another part, is alien to the thinking of the planet's trees, grasses and plants. For them, all parts of time are living parts, and all the power of their imagination, which in animals is largely reserved for dream-time, is constantly on-call and involved in the moments of their being and growing. Thus the notion of dreams as a way to see beyond the normal realm of spacetime is not known to those forms of life of the Plantiarchs line. Such seeing is as much a part of real living, for them, as the drawing up and releasing of water is.

In the wooded hills a few kilometers back from the river delta, the people of Tern have build a place dedicated to improvng the understanding of this difference and of what the thought forms and cultural ways of the non-fleshed residents of their planet are. These long, polished wooden buildings which cling to the side of the steep foothils of the Ternian mountain range, amongst leaping springs, young waterfalls and stout red native trees, have been the dream and goal of the brightest and the best of young Ternian scholars for centuries. As a result the Insitute of Diverse Life Forms, fueled by the particular economics of Tern's situation and its shortage of metals found abubdantly i other segments of the universe, has become the seat of more wisdom about the dynamics of natural ecological communication and survival networks than could be found anywhere else in the known universe.

Despite the late hour, the lanterns still burned in the Institute's main research wing, where one of the Council of Elders and three of the Insititute's leading scientists pored over a projection in three dimensions in the center of the table. It showed the major and minor threads of the Ternian Plantiarchs networks, the tiny capillaries and grouped hairthin branchings, larger arterial root paths and major trunk channels that joined the seas, the rivers, the plains and the forest of Tern.