“If you seek the Star Masters—” said the dark, gentle man who housed them one night. “Yes, they keep an outpost nigh. But surely some are in your land.”

“We are curious to see if the Star Masters here are like those we know at home,” Havig replied. “I have heard they number many kinds.”

“Correct. Correct.”

“It does not add undue kilometers to our journey.”

“You need not walk there. A call will do.” Havig’s host indicated the holographic communicator which stood in a corner of a room whose proportions were as alien — and as satisfying — to his guests as a Japanese temple would have been to a medieval European or a Gothic church to a Japanese.

“Though I doubt their station is manned at present,” he continued. “They do not come often, you know.”

“At least we can touch it,” Havig said.

The dark man nodded. “Aye. A full-sense savoring … aye, you do well. Go in God, then, and be God, happily.”

In the morning, after an hour’s chanting and meditation, the family returned to their daily round. Father hand-cultivated his vegetable garden; the reason for that seemed more likely depth-psychological than economic. Mother continued her work upon a paramathematical theorem too esoteric for Havig to grasp. Children immersed themselves in an electronic educational network which might be planetwide and might involve a kind of artificial telepathy. Yet the house was small, unpretentious except for the usual scrimshaw and Oriental sweep of roof, nearly alone in a great tawny hillscape.

Trudging down a dirt road, where dust whoofed around her boots while a many-armed automaton whispered through the sky overhead, Leonce sighed: “You’re right. I do not understand these people.”

“That could take a lifetime,” Havig agreed. “Something new has entered history. It needn’t be bad, but it’s surely new.”

After a space he added: “Has happened before. Could your paleolithic hunter really understand your neolithic farmer? How much alike were a man who lived under the divine right of kings and a man who lived under the welfare state? I don’t always follow your mind, Leonce.”

“Nor I yours.” She caught his hand. “Let’s keep tryin’.”

“It seems—” Havig said, “I repeat, it seems — these Star Masters occupy the ultra-mechanized, energy-flashing bases and the enormous flying craft and everything else we’ve glimpsed which contrasts so sharply with the rest of Earth. They come irregularly. Otherwise their outposts lie empty; does sound like time travelers, hey?”

“But they’re kind o’, well, good. Aren’t they?”

“Therefore they can’t be Eyrie? Why not? In origin, anyhow. The grandson of a conquering pirate may be an enlightened king.” Havig marshaled his thoughts. “True, the Star Masters act differently from what one would expect. As near as I can make out — remember, I don’t follow this modern language any more closely than you do, and besides, there are a million taken-for-granted concepts behind it — as near as I can make out, they come to trade: ideas and knowledge more than material goods. Their influence on Earth is subtle but pervasive. My trips beyond this year suggest their influence will grow, till a new civilization — or post-civilization — has arisen which I cannot fathom.”

“Don’t the locals describe ’em as bein’ sometimes human an’ sometimes not?”

“I have that impression too. Maybe we’ve garbled a figure of speech.”

“You’ll make it out,” she said.

He glanced at her. The glance lingered. Sunlight lay on her hair and the tiny drops of sweat across her face. He caught the friendly odor of her flesh. The pilgrim’s robe molded itself to long limbs. Timeless above a cornfield, a red-winged blackbird whistled.

“We’ll see if we can,” he said.

She smiled.

Clustered spires and subtly curved domes were deserted when they arrived. An invisible barrier held them off. They moved uptime. When they glimpsed a ship among the shadows, they halted.

At that point, the vessel had made groundfall. The crew were coming down an immaterial ramp. Havig saw men and women in close-fitting garments which sparkled as if with constellations. And he saw shapes which Earth could never have brought forth, not in the age of the dinosaurs nor in the last age when a swollen red sun would burn her barren.

A shellbacked thing which bore claws and nothing identifiable as a head conversed with a man in notes of music. The man was laughing.

Leonce screamed. Havig barely grabbed her before she was gone, fleeing downtime.

“But don’t you see?” he told her, over and over. “Don’t you realize the marvel of it?”

And at last he got her to seek night. They stood on a high ridge. Uncountable stars gleamed from horizon to zenith to horizon. Often a meteor flashed. The air was cold, their breath smoked wan, she huddled in his embrace. Quietness enclosed them: “the eternal silence of yonder infinite spaces.”

“Look up,” he said. “Each of those lights is a sun. Did you think ours is the single living planet in the universe?”

She shuddered. “What we saw—”

“What we saw was different. Magnificently different.” He searched for words. His whole youth had borne a vision which hers had known only as a legend. The fact that it was not forever lost sang in his blood. “Where else can newness, adventure, rebirth of spirit, where else can they come from except difference? The age beyond the Maurai is not turned inward on itself. No, it’s begun to turn further outward than ever men did before!”

“Tell me,” she begged. “Help me.”

He found himself kissing her. And they sought a place of their own and were one.

But there are no happy endings. There are no endings of any kind. At most, we are given happy moments.

The morning came when Havig awakened beside Leonce. She slept, warm and silky and musky, an arm thrown across his breast. This time his body did not desert her. His thinking did.

“Doc,” he was to tell me, his voice harsh with desperation, “I could not stay where we were — in a kind of Renaissance Eden — I couldn’t stay there, or anywhere else, and let destiny happen.”

“I believe the future has taken a hopeful direction. But how can I be sure? Yes, yes, the name is Jack, not Jesus; my responsibility must end somewhere; but exactly where?”

“And even if that was a good eon to be alive in, by what route did men arrive there? Maybe you remember, I once gave you my opinion, Napoleon ought to have succeeded in bringing Europe together. This does not mean Hitler ought to have. The chimney stacks of Belsen say different. What about the Eyrie?”

He roused Leonce. She girded herself to fare beside her man.

They might have visited Carelo Keajimu. But he was, in a way, too innocent. Though he lived in a century of disintegration, the Maurai rule had always been mild, had never provoked our organized unpity. Furthermore, he was too prominent, his lifetime too likely to be watched.

It was insignificant me whom Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn sought out.