Part Three

The Year Ten

1

_Argo IV_ answered Dunin's brown hand at the tiller, sliding south under a following breeze. Her chief designer Paul Mason liked to call her a sloop, admitting that on no planet would any sloop have cared to be found dead with a pair of twelve-foot oars amidships. She was thirty-six feet fore and aft. Without a sawmill, shaping boards for her strakes had been harder than trimming and placing the single tree trunk that was her keel. Much of her joining was with wooden pegs; there was iron in her too, from the single deposit of ore on the island of Adelphi. Her building had started seventeen months ago in the Year Nine. One month ago Paul's daughter Helen had cracked across her bow an earthen flask of wine brought to maturity by Nisana and _Argo IV_ had slipped out of the mouth of the Whitebeach River for a maiden voyage--a forty-mile circuit of the island, including the passage of a strait where a current from open ocean ran formidably between Adelphi and a small nameless island in the south. Since then she had journeyed short distances up and down the coast, learning her own fussy ways and teaching them to her makers.

_Argo II_ had been a clumsy oared raft of heroic history. Nine Lucifer years ago, roughly the equivalent of twelve Earth years, _Argo II_ had not only brought fifteen survivors of a war to the island, she had also, broadened and repaired, returned to the mainland over the ten-mile channel to pick up a sixteenth survivor, Abara, and the gentle white beasts he had refused to abandon. He had guided them south, through seventy miles of unknown terrors, and ten miles further along the beach, until it came to an end at sheer cliffs; here _Argo II_ found him. One by one--probably no one but Abara could have coaxed them aboard--_Argo II_ had ferried all five of the olifants across. During the rains that came for a dark ending of Year Two, the swollen Whitebeach River had torn _Argo II_ from her moorings and she had been swept away down the channel. Now she would be driftwood scattered over the infinity of the unexplored; she was remembered.

_Argo III_, still in existence and more often called Betsy, was only a boxed platform with outriggers and two pairs of oars. With four giants at the oars and a favorable current she could approximate three miles an hour and carry several tons. She had been built in the Year Four and was still busily bringing slabs of building stone from the base of the coastal range. The stone was red and black or sometimes purple, heavy, already smoother than marble without polishing; unlike any common stone of Earth, it was so hard that wind and sun and water over the centuries had done little with it. Wright believed that was why the coastal range could rise to such heights from a narrow base. While the years in their millions had turned other mountains to level ground, the glassy rock remained: it could be broken for use but defied erosion like a diamond.

_Argo IV_ was unequivocally a ship; after her trial Paul had carved for her bow a figurehead with the dreaming face of Pakriaa.

"Maybe," Dunin said, "with a few more like this the first explorations could be around the coast instead of overland? If we had two or three more ships when Kris-Mijok is old enough to go?"

Paul knew Dorothy had winced, though her face was turned to the evening-reddened field of water. "If he still wants it, when he's old enough to go...."

Kris-Mijok Wright, her third-born child and only son, had been born in the Year Three; in Earth years he was only nine. His hunger for the long journeying might be mainly a reflection of his devotion to Dunin, herself full of visions and not yet a woman. A tentative half joke, a means of channeling a child's fantasy into patience, had somehow become a sober adult plan: that the first major explorations would begin when Kris-Mijok would have a man's strength to take part in them.

"We might have such ships by then." Paul tried to sound judicial. "Say the Year Eighteen or Nineteen. Yes, a coastal exploration might be better than trying to cross the continent. Not a circumnavigation though, at first."

Dunin's big face blossomed in a grin. "Only about thirty-six thousand miles by the old map made from the air. Open water at north and south poles, plenty of it. Could do it in less than a year."

"More like fifty thousand, allowing for deflections, tacking, pull of currents we don't know. Storms, flat calms, contrary winds, repairs, expeditions ashore for provisions. You pull your horns in just a bit, my girl. Do you remember a desert plateau the map shows in the southern hemisphere? Solid cliff rising out of the sea for over seven hundred miles, and on top of it roasting sand all the way across the continent--and that plateau is only a small part of the coastal desolation down there. From the equator to the 30th parallel I don't think you'd have a chance to go ashore--and nothing to help you if you did."

Dunin still grinned. "Just sail past it."

"Yes--well out to sea, with the equatorial sun at work on you. Very few islands in that region, some of them bare rock." And he thought: _If I might go myself...! I am fifty now, in Earth years, a young fifty...._

He knew also that Dorothy would not prevent him. She would not go herself: she would remain at Adelphi, faithful to the daily things, undramatic labors and loyalties that make civilization something more than a vision. She was a young thirty-eight, though she had already borne five children. If he went away, she would mind the watch fires on the beaches, as she had done nine years ago; she would work in the school, the house, the gardens, stand by Christopher Wright during the depressions that sometimes overcame him. She would grow old waiting. Therefore, Paul knew, he would never leave her. "The explorations will come in good time, Dunin," he said. "You'll have 150 years to watch and take part. I think you'll live to see the other continent too, and the great islands in the southwest. In the meantime--there's so much exploring to be done right here!" He watched the water too, aware of Dorothy's face turned to him, sober and appraising. "You know, Dunin--that island we visited today--that could hold a community of a thousand between its two little hills. And I'm remembering the one forty miles north of us. _Argo II_ was swept ashore there: get Doc to tell you that story sometime. I was sick for a week and laid up in one of the limestone caves while the others repaired the raft. A round island less than five miles across. We might sail there next trip."

"The other continent," Dunin murmured, and she watched the rising blue-green mound of Adelphi in the south. "The islands of the southwest...."

Dorothy leaned against the hand-hewn rail, looking northeast, saying lightly, "There he is...." The stone figure in the coastal range grew visible as the channel current pressed them a little too far eastward. The vast features were not clear; one could find the line of shoulder. "And Sears said, 'He looks west of the sun.' Was it long ago you told me that, Paul?"

"In a way it was.... Penny for 'em, Dorothy?"

"Oh----" Her brown face crinkled in the way he hoped for. "I was climbing down off philosophy with my usual bump--wondering what hell the twins have been raising while we're away. Brodaa's patience with them passes belief. With her own three sets of twins she's had practice. I wish Pak could have had children. Twenty-nine--late middle age for her people.... Helen's going to make a better med student than ever I was--don't you think, Paul? Seems like more than just a kid's enthusiasm."

"I think so." And Sears' plump daughter Teddy (Theodora-Pakriaa) would no doubt find herself too, sometime: there was no hurry. Even Christopher Wright no longer seemed to feel that time was hounding him, though his years by the Earth calendar were sixty-five, his hair and beard were white, his wiry thinness moved deliberately to save the strength he had once been able to spend like unconsidered gold.... "Look!"

Dorothy said carefully, "But that is impossible." A column of smoke on the flank of the coastal range, above one of the beaches where building stone was found. Blue-gray against the red and black, it rose straight in untroubled air. "They weren't taking Betsy out till we got back."

"Too high anyway," Dunin said. "No need to climb so high for the stone."

Dorothy whispered, "I have _never_ quite believed that Ed and Ann----"

"Oh, Dorothy! Well, we----"

"Yes, I saw the lifeboat go down on the channel. It didn't sink." She shut her eyes. "It was a misty evening, lover, more ways than one. Remember, Dunin?"

"I'll always remember."

"Paul, I know that when the open-sea current below the island took the lifeboat it must have been smashed against the cliffs--oh, of course--and for nine years the sea spiders will have used the pieces of it for their little castles and hideaways. All the same--Ed and Ann could have managed to swim ashore. Cross the range somehow or go around it."

"Nothing to eat. Barren rock straight up from the beaches, where there are any beaches, for ninety miles south of the only place where they could have landed and for twenty miles north of it."

"But no kaksmas in the coast range either; no omasha, this side. There _are_ beaches here and there. They might have found--shellfish--blue seaweed."

"Nine years----"

"It _is_ smoke. Our people wouldn't be up there...."

"You've never wanted to talk much about that day."

"No, I--haven't. I didn't behave too well myself. Yes, there are things I've never told.... Paul, Ed Spearman was like somebody I didn't know. He did say in so many words that he planned to go to Vestoia, not to--to throw himself on the mercy of Lantis, but to 'give her civilization'--he said. We tried, Ann and I, tried to reason with him against that. I think he had some alternative plan--maybe flying south of Vestoia as far as the fuel would take him and starting a community of his own--with Ann and me, you know, and himself the old man of the tribe."

"And without us," said Dunin mildly.

"Yes, dear, I recall that. He put that in words...." In a way, Paul did not want her to go on, living it over again, but she had a need to speak of it. "I suppose his plans made a kind of sense if you accepted the premise. As I couldn't, of course. When he said you were all lost, I believed (I had to believe) that he was--not lying perhaps, but telling something he hadn't truly seen. I know that was where I let go--I raged and screamed, and when he grabbed my arm (probably just wanting to quiet me down)--well, if he's living he'll have two or three white scars down his cheek. Uh-huh: the Dope comes clean. I ever think I was trying to get hold of my pistol when Arek took it away, and took his away too. After that she forced him to give a precise account of everything that had happened, every detail. She made him tell it five or six times, watching for contradictions. She was--justice embodied. I was afraid of her myself even while I loved her for it. I knew what he told us then was the truth: the fuel was low, he'd come direct to the island with no real knowledge of what had happened to you. He was saner after the telling. He lost a--a certain look of exalted listening, as if somebody behind Arek's shoulder were telling him what to do. Arek never gave back his pistol. We were on the beach. The giants had been bringing wood all day for a beacon fire. I remember the exact shape of a big shell at my feet, the look of a bit of driftwood tossed in by the channel breakers...."

"And Ann--"

"Oh, Ann! Tom two or three ways as usual. She was very much in love with him, you know, from our first days on Lucifer. But her mind was a battleground with no armistice. I think Ed always knew that. When he pleaded with her--reasonably too--she couldn't think, she could only cry and say: 'I won't go with you--I won't go.' He stopped trying--suddenly, as if he'd knowingly turned off a light inside himself--unsteady light and the only one he had, I reckon. He said, 'So much for the human race: but I'll see what one man can do here before I'm dead without issue.' And he walked off to the lifeboat, while Arek let his pistol dangle from her finger--and, Paul, I shall always think he knew Ann would run after him. I saw her tugging, trying to pull him out of the boat--but she was pulled in and it was gone."

"And I remember," said Dunin, "what you did after we lost sight of it."

"What I did...? What was that, Dunin? I'm blank there."

"You went to the beacon fire and put on more wood."

"Well," she said vaguely, "of course. We all did.... That _is_ smoke, Paul. Lantis' pygmies or the wild giants couldn't be there on the cliffs."

Dunin said, "Oh, there are no giants in that country, Dorothy. Those low hills I remember west of the first camp--those kaksma hills were an impassable boundary in the old days. The country west of them--nobody went there, ever. And south of them--Vestoia. My wild kindred are all very far north of here...."

_Argo IV_ eased up to the wharf, where Elis and Arek handled her like a toy, making her fast with ropes of a fabric as good as linen. Wright was there with them, and Tejron, and Pakriaa and Nisana, who were inseparable. "Too far," said Wright, and handed Paul the field glasses. "Just smoke."

Elis grumbled, "What's up there to burn? No vegetation. Rock."

The smoke seemed to be thinning. "How long since our last trip over?"

"Eight days, Paul," Tejron recalled. "My impatient eldest wanted to see if he could handle Betsy's oars, remember?"

"He could, too." Paul remembered. "Sears-Danik pulled his weight, my lady. Yes, that was the last time. And we saw nothing unusual."

Only Nisana thought to ask, "Good voyage today, Paul?"

"Fine, darling. You should have come."

Wright was carefully calm. "I'll go over, with Paul, Elis--and--"

"And me," said Dorothy, not smiling.

"Well.... Okay, Dope."

Pakriaa's thin wrinkled face turned to him. "Nisana and I? Miniaan--she would remember the Vestoian dialect--but she is at the city. It would need an hour to send for her, and then it would be getting dark."

"Yes, come with us...."

The site of Jensen City was not where Wright and Paul had originally dreamed of it but two miles south, where the radiance of Sears Lake hung in the hills. A gap in the west admitted ocean winds; the outlet of the lake ran for a mile to the edge of a red stone cliff and tumbled over in a waterfall five hundred feet high. There would one day be houses along that mile of river. Already, near the waterfall, there was a temple of red and black stone devoted to quiet without ritual, thought of sometimes as a memorial to Sears and to the other dead, more often simply as a place to go for the satisfactions of silence. It had no name; Paul hoped it would never have one.

Miniaan of Vestoia was an eager citizen. The old wound had left one side of her head cruelly scarred; from the other side she was beautiful, by Charin as well as pygmy standards. Younger than Pakriaa, she was the mother of four, by Kajana--the archer whom Mijok had once carried on his shield, who would never walk again nor live a day without pain, and who was more cheerful as a permanent habit of mind than any of the other pygmy survivors of that war. The fifty-four pygmy children of Jensen City were all fathered by Abara and Kajana--a fact which caused old Abara to draw dead-pan comparisons between himself and Mister Johnson and to grow darkly desperate when Kajana wistfully asked him to explain why it was a joke....

Elis shipped the oars; Paul let down the anchor, a heavy block of stone, in two fathoms of blackening water; Elis lifted the dugout over the side and held it for them. He himself swam the short distance to the beach and eased the canoe through the shallows. Even now at low tide there was barely a quarter mile of gray sand between water and cliffs. Chipping away of building stone had created a fair path a hundred feet up; beyond, natural irregularities made it possible to climb another two hundred to the first setback of the great sea wall--a ledge which ran only as far as the next patch of beach, five miles south. Sunset had been ending when _Argo IV_ came home; here there was a depth of evening quiet, no sign of smoke or life, no sound but the long hiss and moaning of small waves. "We might make a fire here," Wright said. "But there's enough light. They--they?--must have seen _Argo_."

"There," Dorothy said, and ran up the sand.

The others watched in frozen helplessness as the woman came down the crude cliff path, gaunt, seeming tall only because of the gauntness--flaring ribs, thighs fallen in, every arm bone visible. Her hair was black disorder to her waist, her body a battleground of bruises, dirt, scars old and new, and she winced away from Dorothy with protesting hands. "You mustn't touch me because I'm very dirty, but I know who you are. Besides, I had to burn the last of my clothes. My baby died. I know who you are. You see, my milk stopped. You're Dorothy Leeds. I left him on the cliff. Matron would not approve. You see----"

"Ann--Ann----"

"I have two other sons, but this one died. On the cliff. I used to know a man who called me Miss Sarasate, but that was just his way of talking--I don't happen to be in practice." Still trying to fend off Dorothy's arms, Ann fell on her face....

Pakriaa was speaking softly, in the room where Ann was sleeping--Wright's room. "She will be healed," Pakriaa said. "I can remember--and you remember it too, Paul--how my own mind refused to be my servant for a while." Since Ann had been brought to Jensen City, Pakriaa and Nisana had never left her: the little women, both now far from youth, took on the duties of nursing with a fierce protectiveness, so that there was little for even Dorothy to do. Ann had slept heavily all night and morning. At noon the stone-walled house remained cool; mild air entered at the screenless window openings, stirring the wall map of Adelphi and the three of Paul's paintings which were the only decorations Wright allowed in this ascetic shelter. There was glass-making now, but in such a climate, with no serious insect pests, it seemed a waste of effort to make windows; a long overhang of the eaves was sufficient against the rains. The house was large, U-shaped around a garden courtyard open toward Sears Lake; the walls were of black stone, the roof of a material indistinguishable from slate, carried by hardwood timbers. Wright shared this house with Mijok and Arek, Pakriaa, Nisana, Miniaan, and their children and Arek's. There were five other such communal houses overlooking the lake; a seventh was building. The children were everywhere: it was, and would be for many years, a city of the young. Rak had died in the Year Four, a matter of falling asleep without waking, but Kamon lived, sharing a house with Tejron, Paul and Dorothy, Brodaa and Kajana. Lately Sears' daughter had taken over the task of caring for Kajana in his helplessness, lifting him to and from a wheel chair that Paul and Mijok had contrived or carrying him to a hammock slung near the waterfall, where he could watch the ocean and its changes. In middle age, Kajana had taught himself to write, and kept a journal of the colony with a sober passion for detail.

Ann had not waked when Dorothy and Nisana washed her and clipped the dreadful tangle of her hair. "She will be healed," Pakriaa insisted. "Maybe in the next waking." And when Ann's gray eyes came open an hour later, they did show a measuring sanity, recognizing Dorothy and Paul, but wincing away when Nisana smiled and touched her.

"Do not be afraid of us," Pakriaa whispered. "We are still proud. But our pride now is that no one is afraid of us.... You came to my house in the old old days, remember? My blue house, and I thinking I would be Queen of the World? I laugh at that now. Do not look at what I was, Ann."

"Pakriaa.... Paul, you haven't changed much."

"One of our other friends is about to bring a man-sized meal----"

"Why, Paul, you must be----"

"Fifty, Earth calendar----"

Dorothy said, "We measure it in Lucifer years, pretty please."

"Nicer," Paul admitted. "That way I'm around thirty-seven. Ann, you--let's see: one Earth year, one point three eight--damn mental arithmetic--let's call you half past twenty-seven."

"Imagine that." Ann achieved a smile. "And--Pakriaa?"

"Twenty-nine. See--already I am an old woman and ugly."

"Don't be absurd, Pak," Dorothy said. "And this lady----"

"You would not remember me," said Nisana.

"Oh, but I do, I do. You--voted for Paul----"

Pakriaa chuckled with unforced gaiety. "Politics," Nisana chirped. "P.S., I got the job." Paul pinched her tiny ear lobe and stepped out to the kitchen, where he found Wright with Arek. The children were at school, with Brodaa, Mijok, and Miniaan: ordinarily Wright would have been there too. When the youngest of this house were through with lessons they would go wandering in the hills with Mijok and Muson, so that Ann might have quiet, with only distant sounds of the laughter and playing in sunlight. "She's awake," Paul said, and Wright hurried to the bedroom, but Arek lingered, filling a tray.

Arek had grown almost to Mijok's height, filling out, a red mother goddess still bemused by inner discoveries. Her fine soft-furred fingers fussed at the earthen dishes on the wooden tray. "No ambition, no achievement--nothing, I think, could be worth the price of what's happened to her. Whether she recovers completely or not. There's human right and wrong. I think sometimes, Paul, it's not necessary to do much wondering. You can look straight at a thing and say: 'This ought not to be.'"

"Granted," Paul said, watching the garden through the broad kitchen window. His eldest, Helen, must have elected to do a little work after school instead of strolling away with the others. She was weeding, her brown head sheltered from the sun by an improvised hat of leaves; but for that she was prettily naked as the day she was born, and though she was humming to herself, she restrained the sound so that Paul could hardly hear it. She saw him in the window and grinned and waved. She had most of Dorothy's warm coloring, with Paul's long-legged slimness.

Arek saw her too and smiled. "What Ann should have had too.... Paul, I told you once, we love you. All the good new things we have--your work. All the same there's a devil in--some of you. As in us too, of course. Need of the laws is obvious. If Spearman is responsible--the Vestoians too, maybe?--then I think we live in too much seclusion here." She took up the tray. "Too easy to live all the time in Paradise and--leave things undone."

"Yes. Vestoia is big, Arek--or was, when it almost destroyed us."

"True. But you tell me that over there on the beach she said, 'I have two other sons.' Living, did she mean? We must find them, and Spearman too."

"I believe she can tell us about it soon."

"Understood that I go with you when you find them."

"Yes. Yes, Arek...."

In the bedroom Arek's manner was altogether changed. "Observe: this is asonis _rôti à la mode Versailles_, whatever that means. All I did was roast it. These are (Paul says) lima beans Munchausen, and here we have could-be asparagus. And by the way, the cheese tastes better'n it smells."

"Cheese----"

"Asonis milk," said Wright. "They moo, too."

"Oh, you've tamed them." Pain fought with interest in the haggard face. "Yes, Ed wanted to do that, but we--somehow we never----"

"If you're good," Arek said, "and eat all that, there's cake."

"You found something for sugar?"

"Can't tell it from terrestrial," Dorothy chattered, "only it's pink. From a tree fruit sort of like a plum. We have a plantation of 'em across the lake. You boil it down to nothing and the sugar crystallizes out. We make another kind from sap, not as good as maple. Flour--that's from the same old wheat that came from Earth. Miniaan--oh, you don't know her yet--Miniaan and Paul have experimented around with the local grass grains--nothing yet that measures up to wheat." Ann picked at the food, crying weakly at the first mouthful. "Ah, don't do that," said Dorothy, looking away. "You came home, that's all."

Later she ate ravenously. "I want to tell you----"

It took a long time in telling. Once she fell asleep but woke an hour later, obsessed with a need to continue....

The lifeboat drifted south, its last remnant of fuel gone in a mad effort to leap the coastal range. Water sneaked in at the seal of the floor window, damaged in an earlier landing, and Ed Spearman talked to himself. "Fugitives from a Sunday school--we'll live." Like a hurt boy he said, "We'll show 'em...." When the current beyond the island swept them toward the cliffs, he opened the door and pulled Ann into the water, dragging her, forgetting that she was herself a strong swimmer. Later, on the beach, he was tender, trying to comfort and reassure her with a vision of the future abundantly real to him. They had no food, no way to light a fire of driftwood. They would go to Vestoia, he said, convince Lantis that they were friends, with something to offer her empire; they would "bring her civilization."

From this beach there seemed to be no passage north. They could have found one by climbing high into the range--Ann did so, nine years later. But Spearman found a ledge of sorts running south: it might take them the eighty-odd miles to the lower end of the range or give out at any point, trapping them. It did give out twice; both times, rather than clamber higher on the cliffs, Spearman hurled his famished body through the breakers and swam south, aided by the current until it was possible to continue along the rocks. Ann followed, not quite wishing for the death the ocean could have given easily. They kept alive with shellfish and seaweed washed ashore and small crustaceans that hid in the tide lines and in crannies of wet rock; there were pools of rain water and violent small streams plunging down the range. It took them fifty days to cover the eighty miles. ("I think I spent a hundred coming back," Ann said. "Couldn't swim, with the baby. It would have been against the current anyway. Climbed--sometimes went back miles from a dead end to try again.") In the afternoons the sun pressed on them with total fury; then they could only crawl into what shadow the rocks gave and wait for the torture to cease.

But at last there were trees. Level ground. In a few miles, a rapid friendly river. ("Are there rivers here? I've forgotten. Nothing prettier in the world. I let that one close over me. Ed pulled me out--we had to go on.")

There were five more of those bright leaping coastal streams in a journey of another fifty miles southeast through good country, where the great range thinned out into rolling jungle and meadowland. There were asonis and small game. Spearman made himself weapons. Ann could remember these days almost with pleasure. They had, she said, something the flavor of a delayed childhood, a glimpse of Eden. Spearman was for a time simply a strong and intelligent man measuring himself against nature for survival, master of a simple environment with none to question his decisions and no social complexities to warp them. ("I wished we could settle in that country, the two of us. I even begged for it. He had to go on.")

From the remembered map, Spearman knew there was an obscure pygmy settlement south of the end of the range, some fifty miles below Vestoia: merely a cluster of parallel lines that had appeared in the photographs, it might or might not be a part of the empire of Lantis. It was near the headwaters of a seventh river, which flowed, not to the coast, but eastward, into the deep, wide, violent outlet of Lake Argo. ("He never told me why he was following that river so cautiously, until we reached the villages. And history repeated itself.")

The villages were a furtive, chronically frightened community. They knew of Vestoia but believed, correctly, that the groping tentacles of empire had not yet found them. Lantis' drive was mainly to the east, where the country was easier and pygmy settlements were numerous; even her war against Pakriaa's people had been a diversion, more a matter of hurt pride than gainful conquest. Between these hidden villages and Vestoia there were meadows, dangerous with omasha, and some swampland; below the two small Vestoian lakes the current of the river Argo was too fierce for the flimsy boats of Lantis. So the villages of the seventh river, under a sly but feeble queen, waited like a rabbit in a hedge. With sharply calculated drama--but smiling this time, Ann said, like a pleased teacher at a blackboard--Ed Spearman overturned another idol and became a god.

At the end of two years, when Spearman's goddess had borne him twin sons, there was industry in the villages. There was an army of a thousand spears, bladed with iron from certain small hills in the north between Vestoia and Spearman City. These hills were dangerous with burrows, but workers of a particular kind could be made to go there. The soldiers overcame their distaste for the bow when they had watched the course of arrows properly vaned and tipped with iron or bronze. They did not need to be taught how to hate Vestoia--nevertheless they relished it when Spearman decided that political realities demanded he should tell them an epic tale, the tale of a war he and companion gods had waged against that place. Vengeance, divine or human, was a thing the pygmies had understood from the first biting and scratching of infancy.

Ann had been bewildered by that first gust of oratory against Vestoia. Spearman had neglected to prepare her for it during the long two years spent in teaching the pygmies a limited English and the beginnings of industry: it might not have been clear to himself that such a move would be necessary in order to hold his people's enthusiasm and devotion. Ann wondered. "You had thought once of going to Vestoia----" Spearman turned on her with an anger partly cynical humor: "They hurt us, didn't they? Oh, I might have toyed with the idea as a choice of evils before we found our real friends. They killed Doc, didn't they? And Paul and Sears and those milky giant friends of ours."

"But you didn't see----"

"_What?_"

Spearman believed now that he had seen the full end of that war. Ann got it through her head after a while. When he said that Vestoia must be punished for past wrongs, there was a smiling half admission of disingenuous policy. "It'll work," he said. "We can get away with it." But the death of all the others except Dorothy had become for him something like an article of faith, not to be examined. At this moment, Ann said, she had begun to think of a northward journey, but the odds were darkly against it. The twins were still nursing and sickly; the demands of mere daily living are heavy on a goddess who must also supervise housekeeping. There was, for instance, the endless squabbling treachery of the household slaves. At that time also, Ann hoped to soften or divert some changes that seemed to be taking place in Spearman himself. ("I wonder if they were really changes....")

Spearman detested slavery, he said. But in a primitive economy how else could you get the work done? Even in daylight, when the kaksmas were half helpless, only the bravest soldiers would go into those hills--not to work, but only as guards for the chained lines of laborers, guards who could run fast if the kaksmas came out for a day-blind attack and leave the slaves to be consumed. Bad: Spearman was sorry such things had to be. Still, the slaves were poor or sometimes dangerous material at best; besides that, they hated responsibility and were therefore really happier in slavery and received better care than they could otherwise have had. So you had to see it as almost a eugenic, even a humanitarian measure as well as an unavoidable transitional phase, and in any case you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. At the use of meat slaves for the palace household, Spearman had to draw the line, and he instituted laws against the custom for the rest of his little kingdom, but they were difficult to enforce without compromising matters of greater political importance. "Transitional" became a somewhat sacred word for Spearman over the years, a sustaining conception when things went badly and when his ingrained sensitivities brought from Earth were violated by the brisk egg-breaking of a Neolithic culture.

Even the first war against Vestoia, in the third year of Spearman's deification, was part of a transitional phase, although Spearman did not feel that his pygmies were advanced enough to be troubled with fine distinctions. It is better for a god to resist pressures for explanation.

That first war was well planned, with limited objective. Six hundred spearwomen and archers crossed the Argo below Vestoia and fell on the city from the east, so that there was no clue to their southern origin; they set afire a mile of the lake settlement, took three hundred captives, and vanished--again eastward, leaving a few crippled defenders to convey the message that they would come again. It had the desired effect: the armies of Lantis foamed eastward like crazed hornets, while Spearman's force slipped home across the Argo without a trace. In the following year they struck again, again from the east, but with a larger force, laying waste nearly a third of that part of the city on the eastern shores of the Vestoian lakes. The palace of Lantis, nerve center of empire, was on the west shore. Probably the queen knew nothing of what had happened until she saw the far shore buried in smoke, and by the time she crossed over, she would have learned only that Spearman's army had promised to come a third time and take Lantis herself and assume command of the empire.

They did, just six years after that lonely journey along the rocks. Ann's twin sons were five years old, five Lucifer years. In the first two campaigns, Spearman had not shown himself in person to the Vestoians. In this third battle he was at the head of his army, massive and tall; with a cold, unhappy precision, he was using a long hardwood stick with a razor-edge semicircular blade. And this time his legion had driven in out of the west, directly against the palace and the temples and sacred places of the Queen of the World.

Lantis was aging then, and sick, and bewildered; she probably never understood that it was merely a question of her own methods being used against her. Even when her city was in flames around her and her people were scattering into forest and swamp and lake, she could neither yield nor destroy herself; thus it was her misfortune to be taken alive.

A week later Ann and the children were brought by litter from Spearman City; Spearman recognized the political advantage, almost necessity, of their presence at the triumph. Lantis was ceremonially dragged through the still-smoldering and stinking streets and forced to drink an infusion of the green-flower weed that destroyed the self: this was pygmy custom, which Spearman watched in regretful disgust, anxious that his small sons should preserve the impassive dignity proper to gods. "They're far from human, you know--they don't feel things as we do...." The boys were puzzled and curious.

So far as Ann knew, however, Lantis was not eaten at the festival. "He told me she was mercifully put away after the excitement died down, and another meat slave was sacrificed, made up to look like Lantis--not deception, but ritual substitution; Ed felt he'd achieved quite a step in progress there. It showed, he said, they were beginning to accept ritual for reality under the influence of----Oh, the devil with it.... He moved his capital to Vestoia. The palace was restored--modernized. I lived there--two and a half years. That's where I bore him another son. I'll never know how I came to allow it--a kind of madness, hate close to love--something.... He didn't want me any more, you know. He had some ideas about--ascetic discipline--purity--I don't know what exactly--and he didn't try to explain it to me. I'd hated him with all my mind for years--before the Vestoian wars--but I'm not a good hater. I even still imagined I could influence him a little--until the baby was born and he was in black despair because it wasn't a daughter. I had to escape. I could feel my mind, my self, rotting away--dissolving, as the Vestoian empire was dissolving, for that matter. He couldn't hold them. It began to fall apart right away. They were terrified of him and of his Spearman City bodyguards--weasels.... They simply drifted away into the woods and didn't come back. I doubt if they've organized anywhere else. Lantis must have had a rare sort of skill--the city was all hers: she built it out of Stone Age villagers, and it died with her. Ed tried everything to keep them--bribes, threats, endless spying and public executions by his guard. Bread and circuses, meaningless offices for favorites with fancy clothes and no duties. It didn't work. At the time I escaped, the population was down to--he'd never tell me, but my guess is under ten thousand for the whole city. There was an epidemic--rather like flu. I used that as a reason to take the baby back to Spearman City, knowing Ed would need to stay and go on trying to hold things together. I thought he would let me take the twins--John--David----"

"Rest awhile," said Arek. "We're going to bring them home too." Ann could not speak. "How would you like to bathe again in our lake? I'll hold you up. Water's warm with the sun--best part of the day----"

"I'd like it. It's so pretty. What do you call it?"

"Sears Lake."

"Sears.... What am I made of? I haven't thought or asked----"

"It was a Vestoian arrow," Wright said. "At the end he enjoyed remembering Earth."

2

"The city is a desolation." Miniaan slipped out of shadow into the clearing, where the others waited for her without a fire; she was shaken, short of breath. No longer young, she had hurried on the ten-mile return journey from Vestoia through high-noon heat of jungle. "I could not even find the house where I was born. Oh, Pakriaa--Paul--of every ten houses, seven are empty. The streets are dirt and rubbish. No one knew me. Well, that's not strange. Those I met supposed I was a stranger, probably from the east. But the ones who were suspicious did not challenge me--they slipped into their sorry houses and stared at me through the cracks." She sat down in weariness, wiping sweat from her scarred head and shoulder. "Word of what I said will travel quickly. But not one followed me here. I made sure of that."

Arek asked, "Have you had anything to eat?"

"No, I--only walked through the streets.... Doc, some had English words--a few, badly spoken. No one could pronounce _d_ at the beginning of a word, and they had absurd turns of speech I don't understand. One woman said to me, 'One fella goddamn skirt belong you what name?' I thought she was asking about this skirt I made in the old fashion, but then we spoke in the old tongue: I found she only wanted to know who I was and where I came from. It seems that now, under Spearman-abron-Ismar, they indicate--what word do I want?--social--social levels----"

"Castes?"

"Castes, that is it, Paul--they indicate castes by the color of a skirt. In the old days there were only two castes--soldiers and voluntary laborers, not considering the family of Lantis or the slaves at the bottom. Now there are--oh, ten, twenty, I don't know. Those who work at the dye pots must never do anything else, and they can look down on the workers in hides; this woman was a maker of arrowheads and despised both.... I told her (and some others) that I was a stranger from a distant village, and I said I had heard by rumor of other gods and giants, who would come one day soon to talk with Spearman-abron-Ismar--yes, they call him that, Spearman-male-issue-of-Ismar. It frightened her: she made excuses and ran away. I told it to another, an old woman, who broke out cursing and weeping. She said, Oh, no more of them! No more----' And sat down in the street and scattered dust on her head."

"Did you see--him?"

"No, Paul. I saw the palace--changed, with new tall doors. There were soldiers at the entrance, so I did not dare go near. They wore a headdress--it was the old bark fabric, I think, but a shape I never saw. I saw the great stockade--always the biggest thing on the shore of North Lake--still in repair; there was the same sluice, to wash away the blood of the meat slaves. There is still a ferry near it, where the crossing is narrow at the lake's inlet; I could see across--streets and tree-sheltered houses. And outside the city I saw a mound, very foul. Once the city was clean. There was a boy playing near it--ran when he saw me, but I caught him and asked him about that mound. I could hardly understand his gabble. It seems that nowadays in Vestoia children have reason to be afraid of grown women. When we could talk he told me the mound was the grave of the False Empress, the Wicked One--everyone who passes is required to defile it. A law."

Pakriaa laced her wrinkled hands at her throat, smiling at Christopher Wright, quoting a few of his own words: "'The laws are living things: let men guard them against crippling and disease.'"

Nisana asked, "What is next to do?"

"We sleep on it," Wright said. "Long journey. We're tired. We'll go there in the morning. With our weapons of course, but...."

Mijok said softly, "First-light is a good time."

"I think there won't be any fighting," Miniaan said, and she relaxed and leaned happily against Muson's plump knee and ate the meal Arek had ready for her in fastidious birdlike bites. "If they're troubled by the rumors I scattered they'll slip away and hide, not fight. They're weary, bewildered, disillusioned people--at least that is the temper of the city as I felt it."

Nisana murmured, "With Spearman's bodyguard it could be different."

"Why," said Wright, "he'd never turn them against us. Not if he's the man I used to know, or anything like that man. He came a long way with us once." But Paul had to wonder: _Was he ever with us?_

There were six giants in the party: Mijok, Arek, Muson, Elis, Sears-Danik, Dunin. Elis was the year's Governor at Adelphi, but Dorothy had held that position the year before and would assume its simple duties in his absence. Nisana's eldest twin daughters had wanted to come, but Nisana had not allowed it, requiring them to stay in school under Brodaa's temperate discipline; the only pygmies here were herself, Pakriaa, and Miniaan. The group had come 120 miles overland, after _Argo IV_ set them on a beach north of the coastal range: this had seemed better than taking the sloop south, where harbor would be uncertain and the winds and currents unknown. The first twenty miles ashore had been a retracing of Abara's long-ago journey with the olifants, through swampy and treacherous jungle. After rounding the range they could follow the eastern edge of the grassland that spread on its lee side, traveling in the open only at night, to avoid omasha. For all of one day they were bedeviled by a swarm of biting flies, and since there were brown wings circling they could not escape into full sunlight, where the flies would not follow. Eventually Pakriaa found an evil-smelling plant and remembered its use from old times. The juice of the root was a protection; the smell was almost as distressing as the bites but less dangerous. Miniaan of Vestoia had never heard of the plant's use: perhaps that explained why Vestoia had never exploited the otherwise pleasant region due west of Lake Argo.

There was fitful sleep in the daylight following Miniaan's return, and then an evening meal. Arek and Muson and the two young giants seemed untroubled by tomorrow, full of speculative curiosity. Mijok was uneasy, though he would not put it in words; Elis, too, would be remembering. Wright said again, "He came a long way with us.... Jensen chose him--remember that: chose him from among seven hundred other physically fine youths who had the same training, the same kind of courage, who wanted the--privilege, as he did."

"I can always wonder what Jensen himself would have made of Lucifer."

Wright said, almost with reproach, "Jensen was a great engineer, Paul, but he was also a student of history. Compared with what his leadership would have been, mine has been weak, vacillating, academic--it was bound to be. I take credit for some achievements. I've said give protoplasm a chance. We have done that. We've established the climate of liberty under law (for our very small group) and proved that a human mind can by-pass twenty thousand years of blundering, with no other help than a flexible language and the few basic rules of civilized action--as the so-called savages of Earth always proved it whenever they had a chance to secure a genuine education and fair treatment. But--in our material development there must have been a thousand lost opportunities--things Jensen (and probably Ed Spearman) would have seen at once."

Paul laughed. "Ed could have designed a better sloop."

Wright dismissed that with a chuckle. "Ach--she floats, boy. She sails.... When I get angry or impatient or discouraged--when I stick too tight to a plan of my own and fail to hear the opposing argument--then I remember that Jensen had a charity, a patience, a kindliness, almost as great as Sears had--"

"Tocwright," said Pakriaa, half amused, "why do you search yourself? Must you always be sitting in judgment on your own mind?"

"Why, yes, dear, I must." His fingers played in his white beard. "Cod-and-baked-beans origin.... Remember my fussy little _History of the Americas_, the first book Dorothy and Nisana copied out for me when we found how to make good paper from the marsh grass...? But self-searching is a vice-and-virtue not limited to the Charin tribe, Pakriaa--ask yourself. And ask Elis." The black giant smiled. "So--I'll go on with it just a little. Paul, is it weakness in me to ask that when we find Ed Spearman, you do most of the talking? I want to be--merely friendly if I can, not say much. At least until we know what sort of man he's become. Nine years ago, I don't think he ever had much resentment against you. You hear both sides--usually the surest way to make an extremist hate you bitterly, but somehow people don't. You're a--kindly listener; I only try to be, pushing down a big part of my natural temperament to do it.... Why, I think I never even appreciated the full nastiness of sarcasm until one time (it's not such a small matter)--one time on the space ship, when Sears reproached me for it: something that went against his own nature, by the way, because he was always too afraid of finding fault with others."

"I'll talk with him first, Doc, if you want me to. But I wonder what I can say. I keep seeing Ann. The things she told us--he things Miniaan has told us today."

"A city that never was," said Miniaan sleepily, "never was even in the old times. Maybe I dreamed it. If you are quiet, maybe I will allow us to wake up in a moment on the island of Adelphi...."

"Ann is not changed," Muson reflected, "even though the baby died."

Mijok said, "I'm not sure. I think she is. In what way I can't define. But she's not the same sad little thing I watched when she was sleeping in that fever. Well now, that was truly long ago. She puzzled me more than the rest of you, and you were all a great mystery--and I with a dozen words and the old terrors crawling on my skin like lice. Maybe it was her seeming weakness, her secret look of listening--which I thought I began to understand when she taught me the Earth music, but I don't suppose I ever did understand it." Mijok laughed and looked away. "Doc, it was very difficult for me to grasp that you were not begotten out of the west wind by a thunderbolt. You'll never know how difficult, because you were never a savage. You were born to be articulate. Those twenty thousand years of blundering--bad I don't doubt they were, but they gave you something. I am as if the forest had generated me, with no past."

Miniaan murmured and rolled over on her back to look up into the leaves. "I too. I was never born. Someone with no father nor mother looked at that filthy mound they say is the grave of the Queen of the World. The mind of a white-furred Charin is my father and my mother."

Elis suggested: "Ann has come neater to the immediate present."

"Why, Elis--" Pakriaa was surprised. "She said something like that to me herself, a short while before we came away. She said, 'My yesterdays became tomorrows before I lived them. I want to find today, Pakriaa. Where is today?'"

Miniann pursued the dark stream of her own thought, which now seemed to be giving her pleasure and not pain: "This morning I found how yesterday can bury itself with only the smallest scattering of years. There will be other cities. Never again Vestoia."

Wright asked gently, "But you can remember good and pleasant things of the old city, the way it was when you were young there?"

"Oh, I can, I can. But I'll have today, too. I think I found it first when I bore my little sons, at Adelphi." She sat up, leaning on Pakriaa's shoulder. "I've had good todays at Adelphi. I don't understand how it could have been abandoned by this Spearman I've never seen."

"In a way," Paul said, "you did see him. You were one of those who came on the canoes up Lake Argo. You saw the boat set your fleet afire."

"Yes. That was war.... And before I was wounded I killed, I think, seven of your people, Pakriaa. One with a blue skirt. I wounded her in the throat, and I have heard she died in the forest, looking north."

"Yes, Tamisraa. My sister Tamisraa was a bitter woman," Pakriaa said, "and quite brave. Miniaan, all that was over long ago, in a forgotten country. Now we pull weeds in the same garden."

Night came tranquilly. Elis, who kept the last quarter of the watch, waked them before first-light. There was the help of a full red moon, and they followed the sound of a swift river which flowed into North Lake through the palace district of Vestoia.

For more than a mile outside the city the jungle was like a park, undergrowth removed, vines cut away. But the vines were coming back. Greedy purple fingers curled to recapture and reclaim....

In the outskirts no one halted or questioned them. They saw no armed women; here and there a man crouched in a weedy doorway with staring children half hidden behind him. Mijok, Elis, Sears-Danik and Arek walked on the outside, with shields upheld against a possible arrow or thrown spear. Rifles and pistols were now history, all ammunition spent; they lay in a closet off Wright's room at Adelphi which he called the Terrestrial Museum. Paul, Wright, and Elis had Earth-made hunting knives, still keen. Miniaan, leading them, held a spear, but there was a blue-flower garland below its blade, symbol of peace. Pakriaa and Nisana preferred to carry no weapons; Muson and young Dunin had never handled one in their lives. Miniaan said over her shoulder, "There is the old stockade. Here we turn right, toward the palace."

There was scurrying and disturbance now. Beyond Mijok's shield Paul saw a few lean women running; one of them halted at Miniaan's call and approached uneasily. There were questions, dubious replies. At the far end of the shaded avenue was a growing cluster of red bodies before a thatched building with one tall doorway. Miniaan explained: "I told her that we come peacefully and want to talk with Spearman-abron-Ismar. And she says she thinks he would be asleep at this hour."

"So?" Wright frowned and fretted. "But the word you left yesterday would certainly have reached him." The Vestoian twittered a last word or two and ran away down the street; Paul saw her elbowing through the crowd in front of the palace. "We might go forward a little...."

Most of the group melted away; some forty armed women remained, in a ragged formation blocking the entrance. They made no threatening or even warning gestures, but their staring was heavy and cold. The volunteer messenger returned, pushing through them to speak again with Miniaan; once or twice a halting gabble of something like pidgin English made Miniaan wave her hand impatiently. She turned to Paul. "It seems Spearman told her to say that he is under the--the climate? The weather? Is this meaningful?"

Wright said, "Tell him his third-born son is dead and the doorway of his palace is too narrow for our friends. Wait.... He asked nothing about Ann?"

"She does not say so."

"I can send him no message. You see what I meant, Paul? Paul--you--send whatever word you think best."

"Well.... Miniaan, ask her to tell him that--Ann could not come with us. That we want to talk with him and, as Doc said, that his door is too narrow for some of us."

The soldiers seemed to catch a glimmering of it; they made way for the messenger, and it might be there was less suspicion in them, more curiosity. Sears-Danik, Tejron's dreamy eldest boy, whispered to Paul, "I am trying to remember him. Not much hair on his head--it was brown. I was only seven when he flew us to Adelphi. His voice--heavy."

"Yes. His hair may be gray now, Danny, as mine is. His face will look older--it never had a young look. His body will not have changed much."

Dunin asked, "He is older than you?"

"No, dear, a little younger."

But Spearman seemed older by far, appearing abruptly in the doorway, arms spread against its frame, face thrust intently forward and eyes squinting as if they troubled him. He wore a black loincloth of bark fabric, nothing else. His sparse hair was wholly gray with streaks of white at the temples, his cheeks, leathery, deeply grooved, and flushed. "I didn't believe her," he said. Seeing him, the guards held their spears as if they were Earth-born soldiers presenting arms, then grounded the butts; they remained rigidly at attention when Spearman paid them no heed. "I didn't suppose...." Spearman hiccuped; he rubbed both hands across his face.

Seeing tormented uncertainty in Christopher Wright, Paul stepped forward. "Sears died, long ago. Doc and I got through, with--some of our friends." He paused, short of the guards, and held out his hand, and Spearman stared at it, communing somehow with himself, approaching at last, clumsily, to take hold of it in the old Earth gesture. There was alcohol on his breath; his bloodshot eyes fought an open struggle with bewilderment; his handclasp was damp, unsteady, quickly withdrawn.

"Sorry," he said, "not well. Hard to get it through my head. Well--Christ, I'm a bit drunk. Not strange, is it...? Mijok." His glance traveled over Pakriaa and Nisana without recognition; it lingered at Arek, but he did not speak her name. There was the beginning of a stiff smile, unreadable, as his eyes fixed on Christopher Wright.

"Ann--reached us," Wright said, hardly audible. "She--"

"Why don't you speak up, man?"

"She came along the coast," Wright said, not much more clearly. "The baby died--a little while before she reached us."

Spearman blinked, glanced at his hands, let them drop. He noticed the tight soldiers; in the antique military manner of Earth he said, "At ease...." The spearwomen relaxed part way, eyes front. "Maybe," Spearman said, "maybe you came too soon."

"What do you mean?" Paul asked. "We had to come as soon as we knew you were alive.... Are your other children well, Ed? Are they here?"

"Oh...? Yes, I see.... You came too soon. I still have a little town of seven or eight thousand and some very loyal followers."

Wright struck his fist into his palm. "We are not your enemies. We never were. There was a place for you at Adelphi. There is now."

"Oh...? I can imagine it. So--Ann--"

"Ann came back to us. It took her a hundred days, she says. She was--is--skin and bone--"

Paul said, "She'll recover, Ed. Only needs rest and food. She wants John and David--naturally. They're her children too, Ed."

Spearman said almost absently, "Are they?"

"What!"

"I don't exactly believe your story, you know.... You must have been--watching--for a long time."

Behind him Paul heard Nisana's miserable whisper: "What is it? What is it?" And Wright's muffled answer: "A sickness."

"There's no truth in that, Ed," Paul said. "Five days ago we still supposed that you and Ann were lost when the lifeboat went down in the channel."

Spearman shrugged. "Yes--I think you've come too soon. You should have worked longer in the dark. We had an epidemic here. Many died. And another trouble--mental--well, you've kept track of that, of course: the way they've fallen away from me, gone back to the forest and the old life, when I could have given them a golden age. A prophet without honor." He coughed and straightened heavy shoulders. "My God, I can't blame the poor fools--now that I know how it was done." His voice did not rise. "Without the conspiracy and interference, I could soon have started them in building a ship that--Never mind that now. I have the designs, of course. That what you came for?"

Mijok broke in, utterly bewildered: "What are you saying?"

Spearman dismissed the giant with a stare and a voice of cold politeness: "I don't blame you either. I remember you well. I suppose you had to do whatever your god ordered, without question...."

The twin boys had appeared in the doorway, dressed like their father in bark fabric: slim, well-knit children, thin-faced like Ann, nine Earth years old. They halted uncertainly, perhaps driven by curiosity to violate an order of their father's. Paul tried to smile at them, and one responded but then blushed and looked worriedly away with a hand over his mouth; the other stared like a pygmy without expression. Spearman did not appear to notice them, though Paul's smile must have told him of their presence. Elis broke the silence: "Mijok and the others of my people do not create gods. We live by our own light so far as it reaches, without fear of the mysteries beyond it." His voice, so seldom loud in anything but laughter, boomed and echoed back from the thatched walls. "At Adelphi, orders derive from the laws, which are made by all of us and understood by all of us."

"Yes," Spearman nodded, upper lip drawn in, as one who saw his saddest predictions verified. "Yes, he would teach you to say that."

Arek said disgustedly, "There's no conversation here. He listens to his own mind, no other's. As it was on the beach, years ago--I remember--"

Spearman said sharply, "Wright, be careful! You've brought your bullies here, but I ought to warn you, this is the country where I still rule. There are some left who love me and understand me."

Dunin muttered to Paul, "Bullies--what word is that?" Paul squeezed her wrist, a warning to be silent.

Speaking with care and difficulty, Wright said, "Ed, your boys are about nine, Earth time. Would you say that is old enough to make certain decisions? Would you be willing, Ed, to ask them whether they want to go to Adelphi and see their mother again?"

Spearman glanced back at them. He would be seeing, Paul knew, how the boy who had smiled was staring at Wright with his mouth fallen open, how the other's blank look had crumpled into a grimace foretelling tears. "Now I really understand it!" Spearman said softly. "So it was a kidnaping--a real kidnaping. I simply would not believe it when my messengers came from Spearman City--but I should have known, I should have known. You stole Ann in order to get my children too, for your--"

There was a murmuring among the guard and in the crowd of pygmy spectators who had gathered at a safe distance. Uncomprehendingly, Paul saw a few wildly pointing arms, saw one of the guards throw away her spear and run blindly down the street. Others were doing the same. The swelling murmur was broken by thin screams. Those of the guard who remained were staring into the northeast quarter of the sky, where a break in the trees permitted a view of it, and they were transfixed--the guard and Spearman's boys and now Spearman himself, glaring at that blue patch of morning heaven with total unbelief. But then Spearman did believe it, was perhaps the first to believe it, tears starting from his gray eyes and running unregarded down the hard channels of his face. "From home! Home--oh, my God, so long a time...!"

The spot seemed small and slow in its descent, riding on a cushion of flame brighter than sunlight....

The Vestoian pygmies were all running now. Not into their houses, nor the palace, but away down the tree-sheltered streets, a mindless stampede, weapons tossed away with an agonized crying of tiny voices.

Paul's eyes found it, held it, saw the white flame change to a vast outpouring of brilliant green like the burning of copper. "Charlesite!" Spearman cried. "They've found how to use charlesite for braking! No radioactivity."

The ship must be aiming for the open ground twenty miles away. They could hear the roaring now, almost gentle with distance.

Arek's red arm became a warmth over Paul's shoulders. She said, "I'm afraid."

3

The gap in the leaves was blank, the green flame gone. Edmund Spearman gazed at the spot where the descending ship had been, unaware of his sons, unaware that his pygmy followers had been scattered by fear as swallows are scattered by a storm; unaware, Paul guessed, of the two men who had been friends and now were strangers--but these he presently saw again. His gray eyes measured Paul and Wright, the unspeaking giants, the small shaken figures of Pakriaa and Nisana and Miniaan, as if they were rocks or tree stumps and his only problem how to step around them. Addressing Wright and Arek, whose big arm was still warm around his shoulders, Paul said carefully, "It will come down on the meadow ground about twenty miles from here. They must have seen Vestoia from the air; they probably made sure there was no settlement in the open land."

Wright whispered, "It may not even have been from Earth."

"Oh!" Mijok's black lips smiled. "It is, Doc. I forget our eyes are better at distance. You didn't see the letters? Black on silver, reaching halfway up the body of the ship. J-E-N-S-E-N."

"So?" In Wright's face was a sudden blaze of belief.

Spearman stared. He said, "Quite an imagination. Glad it was you who made it up, and not one of the men who knew the real Jensen--a name that ought not to be taken in vain."

"I have good eyes," said Mijok gently. "I made up nothing."

Spearman's eyebrows lifted, a fury of mimic politeness. He stepped around the group as if they were not rocks but dangerous animals. He passed down the street in long strides, not looking back even for his sons. Paul stupidly watched him go, saw him reach the turning by the meat-slave stockade and break into a loping run. Stout Muson muttered, "So changed! What sickness could make such a change?"

Wright said, "It is not likely to pass. In the old days of Earth they sometimes ruled nations. Or they were put away in institutions, usually after others had been injured. Or they were fanatics of one sort and another, ridden by the devil of one idea. My profession learned a little about them--never enough. The law met them more often and learned less." He watched Paul, perhaps needing contact with a Charin mind, since the innocence of the others gave them no frame of reference. "I dare say Ed is paranoid only on the one point, technically: all his troubles are caused by me and my--what did he say?--conspiracy. A means to help him believe that only he is right and virtuous and the universe wrong.... It is not so much a sickness, Muson, as the sum of years of mental bad habits. Vanity and dislike of one's own kind make most of the seed, and this is the fruit."

Elis said, "We can overtake him. Six of us giants--we can carry you, overtake him in a walk, if you think best."

"Yes." Wright watched the empty street and Spearman's palace that already seemed haunted and forlorn. "I believe there's no need for haste. Twenty miles...." The Vestoian pygmies were not returning; the street was a desolation of rubbish and loneliness with the dull smell of neglect. One of Spearman's boys was whimpering; the other watched the place where his father had disappeared, a tension in his small face, without forgiveness. Wright said, "Who's John and who's David?"

The crying one muttered, "I'm John."

David spoke as if the words had been shaken out: "He said she wouldn't ever come back. Where is she?"

"At our island," Paul told him. "She's all right, David, and we're going to take you to her. You want that, don't you?"

"Is _he_ going there?"

"We don't know, David. You want to go with us, don't you?"

"He hit her face. When she said it was his fault that they were all giving up the city. He always had the guards. Six sat around his bed every night. John and me, we tried. We made a grass picture like the priest Kona told us to do, and did things with it and burned it. It was no good."

Arek said, "Let's forget that for now. We're going to the new ship and then the island. Shall I carry you? I've got two boys your age."

"Who're you? I never saw anybody like you."

She dropped on one knee, not too close to him. "I'm like you, David. Just big and furry, that's all."

"Your mother, David"--said Wright, and swallowed--"your mother is living in my house now. She was our friend long before you were born, you know. She came from Earth with us.... You're with us, aren't you?"

The boy scuffed his bare feet in the dust. John was still crying. David slapped him savagely. "You stop yakking, y'son of a bitch." The words could have no meaning for him, Paul thought, beyond the generalized stink of profanity. John stopped and rubbed his cheek without apparent anger, gulping and then nodding. When Arek reached, David let her pick him up, and he relaxed and buried his face in her fur....

The giants made little of the miles. Mijok had Pakriaa and Nisana in his arms and Miniaan perched on his shoulder. They had traveled often that way on the troublesome journey to Vestoia. Elis carried Wright's trifling 140 pounds, and Muson had John, her slow voice establishing cautious friendship. Paul preferred to walk on his own feet, but before long Sears-Danik stole up behind and swept him into a living cradle. "Slow legs. Don't mind, do you, Pop?"

"Pop, huh? No, I don't mind, Danny. I was getting fifty-year-old cramps and too dumb to admit it."

Dunin chuckled. "That's Danny: knows all, sees all, says nuf'n'. I'd live with him awhile when he grows up if only he wasn't so lazy."

"What's wrong with being lazy?"

"Not a thing, rockhead. Only if you're going to explore, the way I am, you can't be lazy, the way you are." She twisted a branch into a leaf crown and walked backward before them, trying the crown on the boy's head at different angles. "Ah, wonderful! Charging asonis--whuff whuff--and now you look just like the kink that chewed up my diary to make a nest."

"Which was your fault for leaving it on a shelf and not writing in it. Explorers have to keep diaries. Doc said so--didn't he, Paul?"

"I'm strictly neutral, to avoid bouncing."

"So anyway, Dunin, when you trip over a root and smack your fanny, I'm going to laugh."

She did. He did....

It was an hour before they overtook Spearman, who glanced back without expression, without halting his powerful strides, his tanned body gleaming with sweat and effort. Dunin sobered; she caught Paul's eyes. She said, "May I carry you, Spearman? Then we can all reach the ship at the same time."

Spearman gave no sign of hearing her. He drew up at the side of the trail, staring at the ground, arms folded. David's face was hidden again at Arek's breast; John seemed to be asleep. Dunin said, "Please? Why should we leave you behind?"

Remote and desolate, Spearman watched the ground. Dunin moved on, reluctantly, no more laughter in her. "What _is_ he thinking?"

Wright said, "At this moment he's probably thinking it's brutally unfair that we should go on ahead of him."

"But I asked--"

"You did. What's more he hasn't anything against you. All the same, that's about what he'll be thinking. Don't try too hard to understand it, Dunin--I'm not sure it's worth it. Let's think about the ship. Paul, is it possible, what he said about charlesite?"

"I reckon so, Doc. The flame certainly did change to green. I think I remember, long ago, hearing some engineers discuss the possibility of stepping up charlesite enough so it could be used in braking a big ship for descent, instead of keeping the atomics on all the way down. It would char everything over a wide area, but at least it wouldn't make radioactive desert...."

"I can't feel it," Wright mumbled. "Mirage...."

It was no mirage. The ship _Jensen_ stood high above blackened ground half a mile away; even here at the edge of forest there was a lingering smell, anciently familiar. Paul felt himself grinning stupidly. "Plain carbon tet or something like it. Must have shot it out to kill any grass fires. No mirage."

Towering silver-white above a hundred-foot tripod, it flaunted the letters of a great name, and David Spearman rubbed his eyes at it, leaning against Arek's knee, accepting the protective touch of her hand. Arek said, "What--Oh Paul, what will they be like?"

Wright shook his head, plainly feeling it now--the thought, the memories, the pleasure, and something far from pleasure. Paul answered, "They will--look like us, Arek."

Pakriaa pointed up. "There! That we remember. Oh, the beautiful--"

"A boat out already?" Paul searched and found the silver flight.

Wright chattered: "Have we anything, anything white? No--you and I out in the open, Paul--rest of you keep back. They need to recognize what we are--" He was shaking, and Paul embraced his shoulders to steady him as they moved into the open ground. Wright giggled hysterically. "Damn white flag myself--my whiskers--"

The boat swooped, swelling from a dot to keen familiar lines; it circled above them twice and came to earth in a perfect landing a hundred feet away. A blank pallor in the pilot's window would be a human face; there would be a human brain shocked into new wonder. It was still necessary for Paul to help his teacher through the grass, for Wright was swaying and stumbling. Paul reminded him: "They'll be sealed up, afraid of the air."

"Ah, yes. I say they needn't be--we have good air on Lucifer...."

Paul was aware of his own struggle for sanity, for clarity in the beginning of this impossible joy which was not pure joy. He heard himself shout at the top of his strong lungs: "'Ahoy the _Jensen_!' No, they won't hear it. Yes--they did, they did."

The door slid open for a meeting of two worlds. A square little bald man, a tall gray-haired woman who fussed at her ears, troubled by the change in atmospheric pressure. Faded overalls, the human look, incredulous stares changing to belief. The bald man gulped and stumbled; he grinned and held out his hand. "Dr. Christopher Wright, I presume?"

Wright could neither speak nor let go the hand. The woman said, "You must be--well, who could forget the photographs?--you're Paul Mason."

"Yes, We never--for years we haven't even thought--" "Mark Slade," said the bald man, "Captain Slade. This is Dr. Nora Stern.... Sir, I--you are well? You look well--"

"We are well," said Wright.

"I'm afraid to ask--the others? Dr. Oliphant? Captain Jensen? The--the little girls? And there was a young engineer--Edmund Spearman...."

Paul managed to say, "Both little girls are mothers. Dr. Oliphant and Captain Jensen died--Jensen on the ship, in the last acceleration. Spearman is--will be here before long, I think. You may find him somewhat changed--" Wright said, "We must let Ed speak for himself, Paul." In spite of the shock, the newness, Dr. Stern was sensitive to nuances. She said too loudly, "Beautiful country." She pressed both hands to her ears and took them away and spoke in a normal voice: "There...! Oh, what strange steep hills...!"

"N-not like any rock of Earth," Paul stammered. "Defies erosion." _And I am speaking with the pride of a home lover...._ "The open ground is a little dangerous--flying carnivores. Come and meet our friends."

Captain Slade had already seen the giants and pygmies at the edge of the woods; his small monkey face was ablaze with friendly curiosity and the startled amusement that will wake at anything new, but he said, "In just a moment. Let me take this in. If I can.... We've done it, Nora." He filled his lungs deeply, blinking at a few tears of pleasure. "A world like ours--a new world. Oh, Nora, it'll be a long time before we can believe this, you and I.... High oxygen, we noticed--feels like it. Sir, your ship--"

"Lost," said Wright, tranquilly now, no longer shaking from head to foot. "Out of control in descent, fell in a lake"--he motioned over his shoulder--"a few miles over there. We call it Lake Argo. Too deep even to think of salvage. One of the lifeboats cracked up; we used the other for about a year. Our friends, Captain--you'll like our friends--"

Slade murmured, "Speculation on parallel evolution seems to have been sound--here anyway. Humanoid, I see. Two species?"

"Human," said Wright. "Their English, by the way, is better than mine. They are close to us, Captain--very dear to us."

"I--see," said Captain Slade kindly. Paul thought: _He can't see--it's too new. But maybe he will try to see_.

"How many in your party, Captain?"

Slade grinned. "Only four, Mr. Mason." _Heavens! Mister? That's me._ "A smaller crew, bigger ship. Federation thought best. We left thirteen years after you. Twelve years on the journey. Of course we've had to double in brass considerably. The other two are a young couple--Jimmy Mukerji; he's from Calcutta--Oh, and by the way, Dr. Wright, his mother was Sigrid Hoch, anthropologist, one of your students."

"Sigrid--" Wright groped in the past. "Of course. I remember." But Paul guessed that he did not.

"Jimmy's a botanist _and_ engineer _and_--oh, general technician, good anywhere. Sally Marino--another good technician. Frankly I didn't want specialists--wanted kids who could turn a hand to anything, and I got 'em." Slade's friendly face saddened; he and Dr. Stern were walking clumsily to the woods, feeling the change in gravity. "Ours was to be the last interstellar ship, Dr. Wright, until either you or we came home. There'll be no building going on now. A Federation decision--matter of public opinion as well as economics. Well, the old lady over there did cost twice as much as your _Argo_, upped the Federation poll tax three per cent just to pay for her on paper. Could have got around that, maybe, but there was a beginning of public hysteria, protest--resentment at the idea of throwing lives and billions into space with nothing to show for it for many years. Fanatics on both sides, and both noisy, plus the war scare of course. Short-term thinking. Human."

"You can't blame them," said Nora Stern.

"I do blame them, Nora, now that we know it can be done...."

Elis had tried to be ready with a little speech of welcome, but shyness made him stiff with dignity, and it was evident that Dunin would break loose in nervous giggling. Elis said only, "You're very welcome. We hope you'll enjoy it here." Pakriaa might have been back in the days of tribal grandeur, but her control too was only a result of shyness and wonder as she echoed the Governor's words. It was unfairly difficult for the newcomers, Paul could see--the giants' furry nakedness and majesty, the pygmies' tininess and wrinkled baldness; even the Charin-like beauty of Miniaan's features might be invisible to new Charin eyes. But Slade and Dr. Stern behaved well, with a natural friendliness. "Why," said Slade, "these boys--"

"John and David Spearman," Paul explained. "Ann's boys. Spearman--we think he'll be here shortly."

Arek asked evenly, "You've come to stay, I hope?"

"To--stay?" Slade shot a startled glance at Wright, who avoided it, giving him no help.

Paul said quickly, "Captain, we ought to have warned you, but neither Doc nor I could get our wits together until you'd opened the door. About thirteen or fourteen hours from now you'll have a fever and a period of unconsciousness. Not too much discomfort and, so far as we know, no danger--anyhow all of us recovered in fine shape and we've had excellent health ever since. We decided it's just a part of acclimation to--we call this planet Lucifer. But if you think the two others should stay in the ship till you recover--"

Dr. Stern was measuring him shrewdly. "You look very healthy, both of you, and I know we can take your word for anything. Jimmy and Sally are pretty rugged. They'll be wild to join us. Sally will be at the intercom right now, tearing her pretty hair out in handfuls. They might as well chance it with us.... Where do you people live? We saw a--settlement? Over there south of the lake."

Wright glanced at Paul with vague entreaty. It was Miniaan who spoke, the small silver of her voice a music in the sun-streaked shadow: "The settlement below the lake is a thing of the past, an empire that died. We live on a warm island over yonder, the other side of those mountains, the island Adelphi. We are returning there now, after a--journey with some trouble in it."

"Adelphi," said Dr. Stern, savoring the name. "Mark--our two boats could fly them all there with us, couldn't they? Take out the emergency stuff to make room."

"It would be wise," said Paul. "We could take better care of you during the illness, at Adelphi. We have houses there. Here it's not very safe--biting flies and some dangerous animals."

Slade was doubtful. "Anything here that could interfere with the ship if we leave it unguarded?"

Miniaan laughed. "Certainly the people of Vestoia will not go near it."

"Nothing could harm it," said Wright. "Too big. How in hell do you get down out of it?"

Slade chuckled and made up his mind. "Electronic lock. Can work it from a transmitter in the lifeboat; only other way's from inside. Lets down a ladder. Automatic derricks in the side blisters to hoist the lifeboats if, as, and when. They thought of--_nearly_ everything." He hugged the gray-haired woman. "Even briefing on how to get along with each other for ten-plus years."

"Learning love can be difficult," said Pakriaa. Dr. Stern stared at the tiny woman with new intentness. Pakriaa's seamed face had taken on its dreamy look. "You must see our island. Last year Mashana Dorothy was Governor of our island. This year it is this man." She touched Elis' knee.

"A sinecure," Elis chuckled. "A sinecure, ladies'n' gentlemen."

Captain Slade laughed, standing five feet five, peering up at the Governor's eight feet seven--half a head more than Mijok's height. Paul thought he saw there the raw materials of friendship. Dr. Stern said, "And you call this planet Lucifer?"

"Light-bringer," said Nisana; there was grief in her face not evident in any of the others. "Son of the morning," Paul moved toward her, wondering.

Slade had missed the overtone, and cocked a dark eyebrow. "Industries?"

Wright shrugged. "A few, sir. All we seem to need at present in such a small community."

"Oh." Slade touched the old man's jacket. "This is fine fabric. I couldn't tell it from linen. Is it?"

"Very similar." Wright took Nisana's hand on his palm. "This lady is our best weaver because her hands are so small and sure. Our loom is clumsy because, of course, our metalworking is not far advanced. But it does good work for Nisana."

"I like to weave," Nisana whispered, looking here and there and not at Paul. "I like to make new things."

Paul glimpsed the twitch of Mijok's ears, the beckoning curve of a gray finger; Mijok whispered, "He's coming, Paul. A few hundred yards away in the woods, breathing hard and limping. Is there nothing we can do for him?"

"I don't know, Mijok. I'm afraid whatever is done he must do for himself, and it's late for that, very late." He saw that Mijok was trying to understand and could not. "His mind is--living in another country...."

But outwardly at least, Edmund Spearman was changed. He even searched out Dunin's worried face and apologized. "Should have accepted your offer--stupid of me." He smiled. "Wanted to show what a walker I was, I guess." John and David slipped behind Muson's back, tense and cold. Spearman shook Slade's hand, and Dr. Stern's. "My God, it doesn't seem possible. I can't take it in. Slade, you said? And Dr. Stern. We've wondered, dreamed, prayed for it. I can't tell you--I don't know what to say.... Good trip?"

"Excellent." Slade hugged himself. "Excellent beyond description. Ah, all the Federation needed was proof. They've got it now! Rather, they will have it in twelve years. Lordy! I'll be fifty-one." He pounded Paul on the back, and Spearman, giving way to a bubbling overflow of good nature. "There'll be a new President, whole new Council I guess--and they won't be looking for us either, man." He danced a few steps and jabbed Paul in the ribs. "Think of it! Why, it's a Tom Sawyer job. You know? You remember? When you and I walk up the middle aisle in the Federation Hall--oh, man, man...."

Paul had to find Nisana's face again, and the devastation of sorrow in it, before he understood. He stooped quickly to whisper, "I am not going back to Earth." The radiance in the aging red face was like a Charin girl's.

And he heard Dr. Stern remark dryly, "Mark, I believe we've got some nearer bridges to cross."

4

One of the soft lizard-oil lamps gleamed in Kajana's room, though it was late and the house was hushed. Paul had not been able to find sleep; Dorothy would be watching at the bedsides of the four unconscious newcomers from Earth for another hour, until Tejron relieved her. Paul tapped at Kajana's never-closed doorway. "May I come in?"

"Yes, please do." The little man smiled up from his pillows: they were filled with a stuff like dandelion down, almost as good as feathers. "Will you lift me a little?" Paul fussed over him, glad of something to do. "I was not sleepy. I finished transcribing from the shorthand, but my thought remains with it."

"Shorthand--"

"The talk of this afternoon. You didn't know I was recording it. You were all speaking somewhat beyond yourselves, in a way I wanted to preserve. I wish we had better pencils. These last are not bad, blue clay mixed with the graphite, but they still crumble too easily and the wood is big for my hand. I used the brown ink for the transcription." He shuffled the gray marsh-reed pages together. "You might like to look at it."

"Yes. Tonight, I think. Doc did say some things worth remembering."

Kajana smiled. "So did you."

"Did I...? Pencils are one thing they must have had on the ship in abundance. The library too. Poor Doc, he'd have given anything for the books--so would I...."

Kajana patted his hand. "Maybe it doesn't matter too much, Paul? We have our own books to make.... Besides--don't you think Spearman may have unloaded some things for us before he took off?"

"Not a chance. His mind wouldn't work that way."

"No? Well, you knew him better. Still, he had time, Paul. He knew we couldn't go after him: you told me he drained the fuel out of one lifeboat before he stole the other. And it was three hours, after you found he was gone, before you saw the big ship go up over the range."

"And down," Paul said, still physically shaken with the memory, the sound, the sight of it. "Down into the sea forever."

"What happened, do you think?"

"We'll never know. It was a new type of ship. His knowledge of such things was ten years old, Lucifer years. Likely the take-off was too complex for one man to handle it. After we saw it climb past the range, we stayed there--Doc and Dorothy and Miniaan and I--near the temple, just stayed there mind-sick and wondering. We saw it reappear--a dot, then a flame. He never quit trying. He had the atomics blazing all the way down. Sometimes they'd lift the ship a little, and we--I suppose we weren't breathing--we'd think yes--no, yes--no. I even thought: is he going to crash it _here_? But he was really many miles to the west, only seemed near, so bright in that darkness. A meteor--yes, call him a meteor--burned out and lost. Up to the very end, until we saw it strike the water near the western horizon, he was still trying, a mad insect heaving against the web of gravity. And we'll never know what he really wanted, either. I have an idea he may not have meant to go back to Earth. I think perhaps he wanted another star--one that never was."

And Paul wondered: _Should I tell Kajana what Doc said when it was all over? No, not now--not till I understand it myself._ ("I consider myself to blame." "What do you mean?" "Remember when Arek noticed he was gone? I saw him slip away ten minutes before she spoke. He looked at me, too. I think I may have known what he meant to do: I said nothing. Earth is a very distant place, Paul. The Federation is building no more interstellar ships, for a while--for a while." "But you--" "I may therefore be to blame. I look within and am confused, as so often. But all the same, here in our world I have helped to establish a few practical certainties." During that murmured interchange by the temple, Dorothy had been quite silent, as if she needed no question and answer, and Miniaan had ended it, saying, "Let's go back, and tell the others that something has ended.")

Kajana's old mind was roving after other matters, to him more important than Spearman or the beautiful lost ship from Earth. "Teddy," he said, "do you know, Paul, when the two silver boats came slipping down out of the sky Teddy only glanced at them once, and came running to carry me outdoors so that I could see them too. It was her first thought. Her father and mother in her, and what a new self too...!" Kajana was having pain, from the old hip-joint injury that would never heal. "That transcription, Paul--it's quite verbatim, even to a little hemming and hawing."

"Good." Paul studied the wizened red face, regretful that his painter's power could never record what was really Kajana--too much that must escape, even if the portrait were faithful to the small patient hands, the groove in the left fingers caused by years of effort with makeshift writing materials. Sears--and Paul could think it now without too much distress--Sears could have understood Kajana better. "Can I get you anything?"

"No, thank you, Paul. I'm very well tonight." But some other thought stirred in him, and Paul lingered, knowing what it was: a need for a particular reassurance, Kajana's only outward concession to his frailty. "Paul, what do you really think? When the time comes, will it be something like a sleep?"

"I believe so, Kajana. But not soon. We need you."

The mild face showed gratitude, then calm; it glanced beyond him. "Why, Abara--you should be snoring."

Abara followed his comfortable potbelly into the room; his fluty voice was indignant: "I never snore." He sank cross-legged by the bed, rocking lightly with a foot in each hand.

"I've heard you, old man."

"Lizard-fur!" said Abara. "Hear yourself snoring, of course."

Paul stretched. "You gentlemen settle down to a good soothing quarrel. I'll take off." Abara's left eyelid lowered and lifted gravely. "Good night." "Good night," said the little voices. Leaving the room, Paul heard Abara murmur, "Do you remember...."

Paul carried a taper from the permanent fire in the common room to relight the lamp in his and Dorothy's bedroom. It was late indeed, near to the time of the rising of the red moon, seen only the night before from the jungle west of Vestoia--what had been Vestoia. Here in the long room there was still a friendly disorder from the impromptu banquet of the evening. Because of the disturbance when Spearman's flight was discovered and preoccupation with the illness of the newcomers, the common room had received only a few housekeeping flurries. Mats were still scattered in the center of the floor; earthen wine cups stood about. Carrying the taper, Paul saw by his foot a graded series of round faces drawn on the earth with a twig. Helen was apt to do that when most of her mind was elsewhere: the faces were made of neat circles, even nose and mouth. Subject to a pinch on the bottom from her half-sister, Helen called them teddies. Paul smiled sleepily and stepped around.

Kajana took pride in the sharp printlike quality of his writing; under lamplight, the brown ink shifted into gold. Kajana had not recorded the casual beginning of the banquet: the idea had evidently come to him after some remark of Kamon's. Paul could not remember it clearly, but the old giantess had been roused to it by a thing the rather sad-faced, brown-haired girl Sally Marino had mentioned: the prospect of war on the planet Earth. Kajana had taken down what followed as direct dialogue; riffling through the gray pages, Paul noticed that Kajana had inserted no comment of his own at all. The phonetic shorthand, Paul knew, was Kajana's invention--ideal for his own use, but he had not been able to teach it even to Nisana. Too intricate, she said, needing the hyperacute ear which was a gift Kajana could not share.

SLADE: There seems never to be a single cause of war, only a group of causes coming to a particular focus in time. Our world, madam--

WRIGHT: Just Kamon. Somehow we've never formed the habit of courtesy titles, Captain. Names, nicknames, and a few titles of function--as for instance, if Elis were conducting one of our meetings, we'd address him as Governor.

SLADE: Oh. Pleasant, I should think. Our world, Kamon, is still divided in two parts. An ideological division. There is the Asian Empire of Jenga. Let me show you--the map--

DUNIN: Here. I grabbed it. And what a map! If only we could make such things!

DOROTHY: In time, sugar. Takes mighty complex machinery to make such a map.

SLADE: One of the things that must come on the next trip from Earth. Well--here is the Asian Empire. You can see the vastness of it, one land mass, almost all of a continent--

MUKERJI: Except my country.

NORA STERN: Well, naturally, Jimmy--

MUKERJI: I tend to be sensitive on the point since we joined the Federation somewhat belatedly.

SLADE: That's the Asian Empire. And there they believe, and have long believed, that individual man is nothing--an ant in a colony--the state is everything, a sole reason for existence. The state--

WRIGHT: Which exists only in the minds of individual men.

SLADE: Ye-es.... For them the state takes the place of God, of reason, of ethics, of--Oh, it's be-all and end-all, so far as an individualist like myself can understand their doctrine. A hundred years ago this empire was two great states; they had the same doctrine then but called it by a less honest name, communism, derived from certain naïve social theories of about a hundred years earlier--

SPEARMAN: Naïve?

SLADE: Before I went in for engineering, sir, I majored in history at McGill. With the help of a great deal of coffee, I even read _Das Kapital_. It is not logical even from its own dogmatic premises. Incidentally I think it can still be found in secondhand bookstores.

SPEARMAN: As a matter of fact, when I left Earth, it was quite readily available in up-to-date editions from the Collectivist Press.

SLADE: Oh. Yes, I dare say it was.... Well, Kamon, about a hundred years ago those two Asian states, still paying lip service to the--debatable doctrine of communism (satisfactory, Mr. Spearman?)--attacked each other in a long war, making use of recently discovered atomic weapons as well as man-made pestilence and other devices. It was not actually a doctrinal war, but simply a power struggle between two tyrannies. It was hideous, incredibly destructive, and the only saving thing about it was that it prevented them from visiting the same disaster on the rest of the world. Neither side won, of course; a few decades later a new dictator--a little one-eyed zealot from Mongolia--inherited the desolation and built on the ruins a new monolithic state, which still exists.

AREK: But what actually was this theory--this communism?

SLADE: Oh, the theory. Originally an appeal to the dispossessed. In the nineteenth century and earlier there were masses of poor, widespread suffering and injustice, too much economic and political power in the hands of a few, who abused their power with stupidity and cruelty. Marx and other theorists imagined, or said they imagined, that the situation could be remedied by reversal--give power to the dispossessed (the proletariat, as they called them) and injustice would right itself. Why they imagined that the proletariat was any more fitted to rule than its oppressors--why they supposed it would not abuse power quite as viciously--they never bothered to explain. Naturally the realists among them weren't concerned with any Utopian outcome: they simply saw the doctrine as a means to personal power for themselves and used it accordingly. The first important one of these was a furious little man named Lenin. He may have believed his own theories for a while--there seems to have been some short-lived experimentation with the contradictions of actual communism when he first won power in Russia--but absolute power corrupts absolutely, as somebody said. The foundations of an old-new despotism were well established before he died--and was unofficially deified and kept in a glass case for the consolation of the atheist faithful. Matter of fact, Arek, a good many things in Earth history would make a cat laugh.... The actual cure for the ugly situation that existed turned out to be a gradual economic leveling combined with the (very slow and difficult) growth of representative government--so that there would be no swollen fortunes, no severe poverty, and no heavy concentrations of unchecked political power. But that was most undramatic procedure: it needed the work of centuries. No bloody revolution could ever achieve such an end, nor could any other evil means ever bring it any nearer. In the Federation we begin to have--an approximation of it. The Asian Empire is merely despotism, old and stale, old as the Pharaohs, committed to the policy of violence and carrying the burden of slavery under modern names: the natural product of fanatic doctrine after the power-hungry have taken it over and made use of it.

SPEARMAN: Jenga's empire is not collectivism. It is a perversion of it.

ANN: If you'll excuse me--

DOROTHY: Honey, of course! I think you got up too soon. The boys are in bed. Come on--let me tuck you in and fuss at you....

STERN: She's been ill?

WRIGHT: Yes. For a long time. But now I think she--

SPEARMAN: What--

AREK: Captain, tell us about the other part of Earth, the part you come from.

SLADE: Canada? Oh, you mean the Federation itself. It's very great, miss--I mean, Arek. Let's have the map again, my dear. All of North America--here--parts of South America, the United States of Europe, Union of Islam, Japan, India, parts of Africa outside of Islam--then over here there's Australia and New Zealand, and here's the Republic of Oceania. Almost all the rest of the world, you see. Here's Federal City. Find it? Follow my finger east of Winnipeg--lake country, and very lovely: I was born near there. The city was planned and built new in 1985; seems long ago, isn't really. And then, Arek, there are some small countries which have preferred to keep their national unity outside of the Federation instead of inside it, although they're affiliated with us and there aren't any barriers to travel and other intercourse. A somewhat technical distinction, since local sovereignties are well enough preserved within the Federation.

WRIGHT: Not entirely a technicality. At the time we left Earth, there were some tendencies in the Federation that could lead to overcentralization, even with the recognition of limited powers. And too much emphasis on the admitted glories of machine civilization. I think it's an excellent thing that some parts of the world should be a little insulated from the enthusiasms of material progress. The Federation itself will be the better for it.

SLADE: Perhaps. I think I know what you mean, Doctor. I was always a small-government man, myself. Still, under the threat of Jenga--

STERN: I can't see it as much of a threat.

SALLY MARINO: I don't know....

STERN: The empire will break down sooner or later, of its own rigidity.

SLADE: But while we wait for that, the Federation has to be strong, in the military as well as other senses.

MUKERJI: If we do just wait for it.

STERN: Preventive war is an absurdity, Jimmy.

MUKERJI: Yes, but--

STERN: Gradualist methods. The Federation can afford to wait. The same gradualist methods that made the Union of Islam possible, so long ago.

PAUL: I don't think the leadership of Turkey was gradualist exactly, Dr. Stem. It took thirty years after 1960, but considering the problem, that was great speed. Only a people with immense moral courage and good sense would have dared to undertake it at all. They weren't fanatics; they weren't ridden by the devil of one idea; they had to work with intelligent compromise, temperate adjustments, yielding here and sternness there and patience all the time--but once they took up the task they didn't rest or let go, and by 1990 there was a healthy union ready for full membership in the Federation.

SLADE: Yes, that was speed. I expect you've given your friends here a pretty good account of Earth history?

PAUL: We've tried. I don't know if we can allow ourselves more than a B-plus. The subject is too enormous, and all we had were imperfect memories. In the midst of our own work for Lucifer, which is--paramount.

WRIGHT: Not even books. Captain, when you showed us over the ship, it was very difficult for my fingers not to steal a lens and a pocketful of those microtexts....

SLADE: My dear friend! Why didn't you say so? All you want. That's for your friends here, entirely. No need to take any of our library back to Earth if they can use it.

WRIGHT: I--excuse me--I don't know what to say.

SLADE: And by the way, Doctor, before I forget again to mention it: after you left--I think it was in 2060--they perfected a new drug which actually makes the accelerations quite bearable. I don't know too much about it. Muscular relaxation is a factor, and Nora can tell you more about it. But I understand that even for persons past the--optimum age--

WRIGHT: A moment, please.... I cannot go back to Earth, Captain Slade. You mean it with the greatest kindness but it is impossible.

SLADE: Why, forgive me, I supposed--I took it for granted--

WRIGHT: My place is here. This is my work. These are my people.

TEJRON: I knew--I knew--

WRIGHT: What, my dear? I don't understand.

TEJRON: Oh, I should keep silent: this is for you to decide. But you've said it. You won't leave us.

WRIGHT: No. No, I won't ever leave you. This is my home.

SLADE: But--

SPEARMAN: Can't argue with the passion of an expatriate. The grass is always greener--

PAUL: It could be no other way, Captain, at least for Dr. Wright and me, and I'm certain my wife will say the same when she comes back.

WRIGHT: In some ways, Captain, the distance between Earth and Lucifer is greater than the simple light years between our two stars.

SLADE: I'm--sorry. Wasn't expecting it, that's all. Let me get used to the idea a little.

SPEARMAN: You can consider me neutral, Captain Slade. I have no place on Lucifer. One more utopia. Idealism running contrary to obvious facts. It will break up--fine-spun intellectual quarrels--no central control.

PAUL: Until, sometime, a strong man takes over and makes an empire out of it...?

WRIGHT: Please--

SPEARMAN: No comment....

STERN: If I might differ with you, Mr. Spearman, it seems to me--after being shown over this lovely island--the domesticated cattle and those wonderful white beasts--the plantations and the houses--the perfect English and adult thinking of our new friends--above all, the school--it seems to me that Dr. Wright and his colleagues are realists of the first water. Of course I'm strongly prejudiced in their favor, because--well, during the twelve years of our journey I dreamed constantly of some such achievement as this myself. So it's like coming home. I'm a doctor, Mr. Spearman; before I was chosen for the journey, I ran a clinic. As an intern, I had a lot of ambulance and emergency service at one of the big hospitals in Melbourne; I saw a superabundance of--let's call them obvious facts. Now I think the sunny quiet here, the good health and intelligence of the children, the gardens, the devotion of these people to each other and to their work, the searching thought they've given to their laws and their future--I fancy those are obvious facts too...?

WRIGHT: Man is neither good nor bad, but both. But he can swing the balance.

STERN: Too right. I think I understand you, Doctor--why you want to stay here. I think I understand it very well.

SLADE: I wouldn't urge you. It's only that I--took something else for granted. Foolishly. Let me be just a listener.

ELIS: And let me fill your cup. You're behind us, Captain.

MINIAAN: The big jug is empty. How'd'at happen?

MUSON: Portrait of a fat woman going away with another big jug.

PAUL: Bless you, lady.

MUSON: It was you that finished emptying it. I think.

NISANA: Couldn't have been me....

STERN: Are there any important physiological differences?

WRIGHT: Nothing of first importance. Minor differences in blood chemistry, shape of hands and feet. Our friends have the hind brain in the spinal column, which may be the reason for their better muscular co-ordination and--you know, Doctor, I have often wished that the human race of Earth, which we call Charin, had more room in its head for the expansion of the frontal lobes.

ELIS: I have a very high opinion of your frontal lobes, Christopher Wright. I have noticed that sometimes a large skull merely rattles.

STERN: Just the same the point is well taken.

PAUL: Might call it the miracle of the lobes and wishes.

PAKRIAA: Why don't you wait till Muson comes back...?

SALLY MARINO: Don't you--now, maybe this is a foolish question--don't you have to work awfully hard--I mean, with so few technical aids? The--oh, oil lamps, the necessarily primitive--of course, you've done miracles to have as much as you do have, starting from almost nothing. What I'm trying to say, doesn't mere survival take up so much time and effort that it--well, wears you down?

PAUL: We have shelter, clothing, enough to eat--

MINIAAN: And drink.

PAUL: What we call a family, Sally, is made up of members of all three races. Such a unit may have seven or eight adults or more. Shelter, food--the basic needs are supplied by each family working for itself; the large family unit distributes the labor pretty well; and, if any family was stricken with misfortune (none has been so far) the others would all help as a matter of course. Now, we do have the germs of beginning industries in textiles, sugar--

MINIAAN: Wine making.

ABARA: The lady is pied.

MINIAAN: The lady is not pied. Only very happy, and Vestoia is a dead city, and the little illuama will be making their nests where--Oh, Abara, you venerable ruin, I love you, I love you....

ABARA: Well, not right here in front of all these nice people....

MUKERJI: Beautiful way of life. Oh, here's Muson. Have we drunk to everybody? Seems as though we must have overlooked somebody, earlier.

NISANA: I don't think so. Yes, we have. Let's drink to the olifants.

WRIGHT: And their seven calves....

PAUL: In textiles, for instance--Nisana does no housework because her worktime is at the loom; each household sends somebody over to work in the fiber and sugar plantations across the lake. The system works, Sally, in this very tiny community where everyone knows and respects everyone else, where all the laws and customs encourage the ironing out of differences before they become serious. And so far, work has never become oppressive. Most of it we enjoy; the boring, unpleasing jobs are shared because we know they have to be done and we don't want anyone to have to carry too much of their weight. And so far, we don't hunger for the complex and fascinating possessions we knew on Earth. Such hungers will come. Communities will grow. The best laws will fail sometimes; there will be disputes, mistakes, injustices. But we are forewarned by memories of Earth. Doc, I'm trying to say things you could say better--

WRIGHT: No. Go on.

PAUL: Well.... We plan, tentatively, a hundred family units here at Jensen City, a population of maybe a thousand adults, no larger. When that point is reached (several years away) then we must plan and build another town, probably here on the island. At that point we add new problems and perplexities. We may not need a monetary system until there are several towns; when we do, it will not develop haphazardly, but with the aid of all past knowledge we possess, for safeguard and guidance.

SLADE: And when there are fifteen or twenty such communities?

PAUL: They will want an over-all government; a miniature of a federal system, we suppose. A republic, with fully functional representative procedures, checked and safeguarded against every abuse of power. Because in all our study and memories of history, we've found no other type of government that can operate with fairness to majorities and minorities alike and leave men as free as any social animal can ever be free. For that matter, Captain, we sometimes glance ahead to a time when there will be hundreds or thousands of towns: a time when our great-grandchildren of all three races may want to experiment with large cities, elaborate industries. Such things will bring their own heavy difficulties, but we have reason to hope that our great-grandchildren will have the patience and courage to solve them as they arise. Brodaa, tell them about the school.

BRODAA: I am not good in exposition, Paul.... We are--strict, Captain, that the children should learn all the tested factual knowledge we can give them. They must read, speak, write--clearly, precisely, honestly. We do not allow them to leave a method half learned, a task half done. If there is a question, they must search for an answer; if there is no sufficient answer known, they must learn to test the insufficient answers and wait judgment. My own language has flaws--I am an old woman--I still go to school, to Paul, Mashana Dorothy, Dr. Wright, to learn more for my own sake and for the little ones I teach. They must learn the fundamental methods and facts as soon as they can start to think at all. We are never afraid of teaching any child too much or too soon--we respect them. Oh, Mashana, I was wishing you would return.

DOROTHY: Need has arisen for the Dope? What goes on more or less?

ELIS: Education.

PAUL: How is--

SPEARMAN: How is she?

DOROTHY: She is asleep, Ed. Nothing to worry about.

PAKRIAA: She will be healed.

MIJOK: Education on Lucifer. Pakriaa and I have the pleasantest part of the teaching, I think. We show them the ways of the forest and the open ground, the plants and other living things, how to hunt without cruelty or waste, how to be safe and happy alone in the woods at night, when to fear and not to fear. As Samis shows them the care of the tame beasts, and the work in the plantations....

WRIGHT: I'll add a little too, though Brodaa could do it better--

MUKERJI: Come here, kink.

DOROTHY: Why, he loves you! That one won't usually go to anybody but Muson. His wife is due to have kittens and he's blue about it.

MUKERJI: Kittens--kinkens--

DOROTHY: Just kittens. Seven at one whack. Oof--shet ma mouf.

HELEN: Mother, if you looked at seven kittens now they'd be fourteen.

DOROTHY: Such comment, from a lady allowed to sit up late. Such, I might add, perfectly accurate comment. Sleepy, baby?

HELEN: Not a bit.

DOROTHY: You are too. You snuggle like a kitten half full of milk. Half an hour, huh?

HELEN: Mm.

WRIGHT: We see to it, Captain, that our children are not stuffed with inflated words, equivocal words. When you talk with them, they won't be chattering to you about freedom, democracy, truth, justice. They learn these words closely; we see to it that they learn them with caution. When they use them we say--define, define. Democracy by what means, within what limits, toward what end? Freedom from what, for what? For what's the profit if I rattle on about freedom in a semantic vacuum? I am free to speak, not free to kill and wound; I must be free from slavery to the whims of others. I can never be free from the bonds of a hundred duties, responsibilities, loyalties to persons I love and principles I cherish. Words without definition are sheer noise, and noise never drummed any race into Paradise. Oh, the thing's obvious as a child's building blocks--but I recall how on Earth men tended to forget it twenty-four hours a day, and here on Lucifer we forget it often enough--myself included. But we do not forget it when we teach our children.... One other thing--before this wine takes me back to second childhood--as soon, Captain, as their minds are old enough--

AREK: Where did Spearman go?

WRIGHT: Oh, he--he just stepped out, I think. Stretch his legs or something. As soon as their minds are old enough to think with some independence and explore, we insist that they start the lifetime struggle with man's primary dilemma--

ELIS: I hoped you would speak of that, my brother.

WRIGHT: That he is an individual, his self-hood precious and inviolate, yet he must live in harmony with other individuals whose right to life and welfare is as certain as his own. Approach the study of society from any direction you will, that problem is at the heart of it, and must be a thousand generations from now, because it must be met anew with every infant born. We think, here, that the most rewarding answer is in the old virtues of self-knowledge, charity, honesty, forbearance, patience. Now, those are all words that demand definition and multiple definition; on that basis we have our children study them, search the depth and height of them, in the not so simple problems of childhood through the tougher ones of adolescence and maturity. We make them understand that lip service will not do: if one is to make himself honest he must eat honesty with breakfast, sweat with it in the sun, laugh and play and suffer with it and lie down with it at night until it's near as the oxygen in his blood. Yes, we aim high. Cruelly high, would you say? We don't think so. Perfection is a cold spot on top of a mountain, and nobody ever climbed there. We have trouble and fun and arguments; sometimes the garden weeds grow until tomorrow or the day after, but we sleep well.

DOROTHY: Speaking of perfection and goodness and things and stuff--I know it was Paul who put those violin strings by Nan's bed, but which one of you supplied them?

SLADE: Well, he told me--

DOROTHY: Will it be all right if I reach over this daughter of mine and kiss you?

SLADE: They did brief us, back on Earth, that we must respect local customs--

MIJOK: And perhaps even another drink could do him no harm.

PAKRIAA: He's pied.

ELIS: I would not say that. Speaking as Governor, I say that the local wine industry deserves every encouragement it can get--and has, ever since Samis' favorite kink had kittens in the bottom of the vest bat.

SAMIS: Correction.

MIJOK: Best vat. Speaking as Lieutenant Governor. Just elected--did it myself.

MUSON: The toastmistress has been quiet lately.

NISANA: Who, me?

PAUL: By acclamation, yes.

NISANA: Le'me think. We did drink to the children--those in bed and those who ought to be--

HELEN: 'Ception.

DOROTHY: Great big woman. You weigh a ton, sweet stuff, 'n' so do your eyelids, they do.

NISANA: And we drank to the olifants. No no--I am too happy--my mind is a lake without a breeze. You propose the toast, Pakriaa.

SALLY: Matter of fact I'm already sort of whooliollicky--I think--

DOROTHY: Hey--maybe it's not just the wine. Paul--Doc--it must be almost thirteen hours--

PAUL: Yes--yes, almost. Maybe you'd better--

SALLY: No, let's have one more toast. At least one more, Pakriaa?

WRIGHT: I'll drink with you, Pakriaa.

PAKRIAA: Oh--let us be happy. Friends, I give you the wine itself and the earth that made it. I give you birth and death and the journey of our days and nights between them, the shining of green fields, the patience of the forest, the little stars, the great stars, the love and the thought, the labor and the laughter, the good morning sky.

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