Chapter VII: Part 7

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 _roti a 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?"