I will not be fooled again, Falk thought bitterly. Yes you will, another part of his mind retorted; you will be fooled if they want to fool you, and there is no way you can prevent it. If you ask no questions of this boy lest the answer be a lie, then the lie prevails entirely, and nothing comes of all your journey here but silence and mockery and disgust. You came to learn your name. He gives you a name: accept it.

"Will you tell me who…who we are?" The boy eagerly began again in his gibberish, then checked himself at Falk's uncomprehending gaze. "You don't remember how to speak Kelshak, prech Ramarren?" He was almost plaintive.

Falk shook his head.В "KelshakВ isВ yourВ nativeВ language?"

The boy said, "Yes," adding timidly, "And yours, prech Ramarren."

"What is the word for 'father' in Kelshak?"

"Hiowech. Or wawa—for babies." A flicker of an ingenuous grin passed over Orry's face.

"What would you call an old man whom you respected?"

"There are a lot of words like that—kinship words—Prevwa, kioinap, ska n-gehoy…Let me think, prechna. I haven't spoken Kelshak for so long…A prechnoweg—a higher-level non-relative could be tiokioi, or pre-Viotio—"

"Tiokioi. I said the word once, not…knowing where I learned it…"

It was no real test. There was no test here. He had never told Estrel much about his stay with the old Listener in the Forest, but they might have learned every memory in his brain, everything he had ever said or done or thought, while he was drugged in their hands this past night or nights. There was no knowing what they had done; there was no knowing what they could do, or would. Least of all could he know what they wanted. All he could do was go ahead trying to get at what he wanted.

"Are you free to come and go here?"

"Oh, yes, prech Ramarren. The Lords have been very kind. They have long been seeking for any…other survivors of the Expedition. Do you know, prechna, if any of the others…"

"I do not know."

"All that Kradgy had time to tell me, when I got here a few minutes ago, was that you had been living in the forest in the eastern part of this continent, with some wild tribe."

"I'll tell you of that if you want to know. But tell me some things first. I do not know who I am, who you are, what the Expedition was, what Werel is."

"We are Kelshy," the boy said with constraint, evidently embarrassed at explaining on so low a level to one he considered his superior, in age of course, but also in more than age. "Of the Kelshak Nation, on Werel—we came here on the ship Alterra —"

"Why did we come here?" Falk asked, leaning forward.

And slowly, with digressions and backtrackings and a thousand question-interruptions, Orry went on, till he was worn out with talking and Falk with hearing, and the veil-like walls of the room were glowing with evening light; then they were silent for a while, and dumb servants brought in food and drink for them. And all the time he ate and drank Falk kept gazing in his mind at the jewel that might be false and might be priceless, the story, the pattern, the glimpse—true vision or not—of the world he had lost.

VII

A SUN LIKE a dragon's eye, orange-yellow, like a fire-opal with seven glittering pendants swinging slowly through their long ellipses. The green third planet took sixty of Earth's years to complete its year: Lucky the man who sees his second spring, Orry translated a proverb of that world. The winters of the northern hemisphere, tilted by the angle of the ecliptic away from the sun while the planet was at its farthest from the sun, were cold, dark, terrible: the vast summers, half a lifetime long, were measurelessly opulent. Giant tides of the planet's deep seas obeyed a giant moon that took four hundred days to wax and wane; the world was rife with earthquakes, volcanoes, plants that walked, animals that sang, men who spoke and built cities: a catalogue of wonders. To this miraculous though not unusual world had come, twenty years ago, a ship from outer space. Twenty of its great years, Orry meant: something over twelve hundred Ter-ran years.

Colonists and hilfers of the League of All Worlds, the people on that ship were committing their work and lives to the new-found planet, remote from the ancient central worlds of the League, in the hope of bringing its native intelligent species eventually into the League, a new ally in the War To Come. Such had been the policy of the League ever since, generations before, warnings had come from beyond the Hyades of a great wave of conquerors that moved from world to world, from century to century, closer toward the farflung cluster of eighty planets that so proudly called itself the League of All Worlds. Terra, near the edge of the League heart-zone and the nearest League planet to the new-found planet Werel, had supplied all the colonists on this first ship. There were to have been other ships from other worlds of the League, but none ever came: the War came first.

The colonists' only communications with Earth, with the Prime World Davenant, and the rest of the League, was by the ansible, the instantaneous transmitter, aboard their ship. No ship, said Orry, had ever flown faster than light—here Falk corrected him. Warships had indeed been built on the ansible principle, but they had been only automatic death-machines, incredibly costly and carrying no living creatures. Lightspeed, with its foreshortening of time for the voyager, was the limit of human voyaging, then and now. So the colonists of. Werel were a very long way from home and wholly dependent on their ansible for news. They had only been on Werel five years when they were informed that the Enemy had come, and immediately after that the communications grew confused, contradictory, intermittent, and soon ceased altogether. About a third of the colonists chose to take the ship and fly back across the great gap of years to Earth, to rejoin their people. The rest stayed on Werel, self-marooned. In their lifetimes they could never know what had become of their home world and the League they served, or who the Enemy was, and whether he ruled the League or had been vanquished. Without ship or communicator, isolated, they stayed, a small colony surrounded by curious and hostile High Intelligence Life Forms of a culture inferior, but an intelligence equal, to their own. And they waited, and their sons' sons waited, while the stars stayed silent over them. No ship ever came, no word. Their own ship must have been destroyed, the records of the new planet lost. Among all the stars the little orange-yellow opal was forgotten.

The colony thrived, spreading up a pleasant sea-coast land from its first town, which was named Alterra. Then after several years—Orry stopped and corrected himself, "Nearly six centuries, Earth-style, I mean. It was the Tenth Year of the Colony, I think. I was just beginning to learn history; but Father and…and you, prech Ramarren, used to tell me these things, before we made the Voyage, to explain it all to me…" After several centuries, then, the colony had come onto hard days. Few children were conceived, still fewer born alive. Here again the boy paused, explaining finally, "I remember your telling me that the Alterrans didn't know what was happening to them, they thought it was some bad effect of inbreeding, but actually it was a sort of selection. The Lords, here, say it couldn't have been that, that no matter how long an alien colony is established on a planet they remain alien. With gene-manipulation they can breed with natives, but the children will always be sterile. So I don't know what it was that happened to the Alterrans—I was only a child when you and Father were trying to tell me the story—I do remember you spoke of selection towards a…viable type…Anyhow, the colonists were getting near extinction when what was left of them finally managed to make an alliance with a native Werelian nation, Tevar. They wintered-through together, and when the Spring breeding season came, they found that Tevarans and Alterrans could reproduce. Enough of them, at least, to found a hybrid race. The Lords say that is not possible. But I remember you telling it to me." The boy looked worried and a little vague.