In the gestation chambers of Kalonia, it was Malorye who supervised the generation of the new body for he was not only a gardener of plants but a gardener of people. Long ages before the Season Of Innocence artilects had known how to culture a body without a womb and without a mind. It was a skill which had been refined and streamlined over the millennia by the Guardians Of Earth and passed to their successors so that the body the seers now grew took only six weeks in its oh so subtle chemical vat to reach adult maturity. Now came the time to practice a second and more difficult set of skills; an operation where Tenereck, Malorye and Hirrilow were all required to exercise careful co-operation. After three slow and painstaking hours it was done. Crinomu had been decanted from the vurtiverse into the new body and he was ready to join the Embassy to the Substrate.

The first meeting of Crinomu and Orietta, a meeting that in time would have momentous consequences...

Crinomu explained to Orietta that he was the newest member of the Embassy to the Substrate, freshly decanted from the vurtiverse. "The seers have a task for me," he said. "There are times when their old bodies are not capable of serving the station as it needs. That's why they poured me out in the form of a younger and fitter man to work for them. They wish me to complete a survey of the Kalonia plateau instruments and perhaps some beyond the plateau to institute repairs and improvements where they are needed. They don't like to delegate these tasks to machines and they can't or won't do it themselves." 

"Why are they all such old men then?" Orietta said. "Why couldn't they be like you?" Unaccountably she blushed at his raised eyebrow. 

"Oh that's just an affectation," Crinomu laughed. "Pure fashion and vanity! They could be any age they want after decanting but they feel it befits their status and dignity to inhabit an old body. I can't see the sense of it myself but then I'm not a seer!"

So it was that over the next few weeks, with Hirrilow's approval, Orietta broke some of her lessons and accompanied Crinomu on his surveys of the varied instrumental outliers of Kalonia; monitoring posts, weather centres, energy collectors and communication devices of various arcane kinds. Many were cloaked and secret, covered by veils of smoky illusion. Some seemed to fade in and out of the ether. All were very strange. Orietta began to enjoy her journeys with Crinomu and to look forward to them. She found his irreverence amusing. He had a way with words and a natural warmth. And too, he seemed to take more of a genuine interest in her own stories and conversation than anyone else had done, even her favourite Malorye. 

"I've lived in this Station Of Seers for a very long time," he said one day, "but not for all my life. The seers are not my masters. Their goals are very worthy, I'm sure, serving the laws of the Vow Of Earth and all, but they do take themselves too seriously sometimes!"

Orietta allowed Crinomu to ride Paramal and on days when she chose to gallop over the plateau for no purpose other than the joy of wind in her face and sun on her skin he would often accompany her, listening to her accounts of life in the Rider tribe where she had been born and raised. She told him all about Asanka and about the tradition of the marriage journey; how a newly wed couple would visit all the scattered Rider tribes carrying no weapons and receiving the hospitality demanded by custom at each gathering as a token of the bonds of community that held the tribes together.

"We were crossing these downs to reach a small settlement in the Glenning valley but no one had warned us about the alegoyle and because we were on the marriage journey we were travelling very light with nothing to defend ourselves." Somehow it was easy to talk to Crinomu about these formerly painful things. In return he told her stories from before the Great Forgetting; strange tales of his life as a traveller in the Galactic Compact, for Crinomu was one of the very few beings left alive on Earth who had journeyed beyond the boundaries protected by the lost Guardians Of Earth in a different age when such things had been possible. 

"Have you been to the Moon?" she asked him once wistfully, looking at the mottled green and blue orb hanging in the sky. 

"I have," he told her. "It is a beautiful world but a sad one; a place of great misty fern forests reaching far into the sky where each step you take is as slow and high as a dream of flight. The seas there are cold with tall gelid waves flecked with white foam that seem to take an eternity to break on the grey shores. Sail ships with their hulls carved from ice ply the ocean of storms and the sea of tranquillity and huge leather winged birds soar over the mountains. It is a doomed world, made by men but now abandoned by those who still have the knowledge to maintain it. That is the price the inhabitants of the Moon have to pay for the Vow of Earth and the Season of Innocence. Without the care and attention that brought it into being, the air will get thinner and thinner and the Moon will slowly dry and pass away to become the lifeless ball of rock it once was." 

They shared a moment of melancholy; he remembering his trip to the Moon from so many, many years ago and she giving herself space to wonder anew about what life must be like on that world so different from her own and fated to die such a lingering death. "No sense brooding," Crinomu laughed at last. "The Moon's still good for a few thousand years yet! Here, catch this!" They were passing one of Malorye's orchards and reaching up he playfully plucked a ripe apple and tossed it to the smiling young woman.

Before winter came to the downs of Illunon, Oreitta and Crinomu were lovers. Now at last Orietta was happy and her restless unvoiced need to escape from Kalonia was stilled by the comfort of her new relationship. The seers were pleased and in particular Malorye for this development was the one that they had hoped for when they had decanted Crinomu. With the exception of Gyrun they had all come to like Orietta and did not want to take harsh measures against her or to see her discontented and sad but they could not let her go. The rules of the Guardians were very clear on that point. Match making was an ancient and subtle skill which they had almost forgotten for it had been countless years since they had practiced it and the union of artilect and human had never been a common one. Yet from the moment that he volunteered in the council, Hirrilow instinctively felt that Crinomu was a good choice for Malorye's plan of benign seduction and that his personality was the right one to please the Rider woman. Nothing had been guaranteed but it looked as if it was all ending happily. Even Gyrun had to admit it and no longer called for Orietta to be "put to sleep" lest she escape. But there were dangers in the plan too and the danger of failure not the only one amongst them. There was, too, the danger of too much success. As the snows retreated and another of the uncounted springs of the Season Of Innocence spread over the land again that was the path down which fate would lead Crinomu. And the world would never be the same again...