I went to my horse, a huge, stupid beast with all the instincts of a hog but with a price I could afford, and unloaded the saddlebags, selecting as much as I could carry, and taking anything that might give a hint as to my identity. There was little enough of that-- I had never been one for embroidered kerchiefs or blazoned leather. Then, carrying the bags, I slipped out a back door into the corral.

When Mwabao Mawa didn't find me quickly, she would forget. the search and figure she had only seen someone who reminded her of me. I didn't think I had made myself so remarkable that anyone would remember me, except perhaps the innkeeper, and he had reasons of his own for not cooperating with the Nkumai.

I tossed the bags over the fence of the corral, climbed after them and walked off down a side street. I'd have to stay in quicktime for several days, which irritated me, because in quicktime, of course, I aged more quickly relative to the real world. I wouldn't end up like Man-Who-Fell-on-His-Ass, but I resented losing days or weeks off my life. How old was I now, anyway? I had gained days and weeks when I was with Saranna in slowtime; I had lost many more days and weeks in quicktime among the Ku Kuei. Was I anywhere near my calendar age of eighteen? Hardly, even if my body seemed that young and strong. I had been through enough, I figured, to have a middle-aged man's memories. As I strode off through the back roads and started on my way to Robles in the south, I decided that quicktime didn't matter anyway. I had no particular desire to live to be old.

Still, I had no intention of letting the Nkumai catch me and realize who I was.

The worst thing about quicktime was the lonehness. No one is safer than a man who moves so quickly that he can't be seen. But it's a bit tough to carry on a conversation with someone who won't even know you're there unless you stand in the same place for a half hour.

I crossed the Rio de Janeiro into Cummings before I let myself back into realtime. No matter how alarmed Mwabao Mawa was, she wouldn't send troops more than a thousand kilometers to look for someone she had seen only a few meters off that very day.

Why did I go south? I had no particular object in mind. Except that I had lived in a dozen towns under Nkumai control in Jones and Bird during the past six months, and I wanted to get to a place where the enlightened empire of the physicists didn't rule. I didn't want to link up with any rebels gathering in Huss, so I went southeast over the da Silva pass.

There I found that there was no escape from the imperial committees. A few dozen scientists in Gill ruled from Tellerman to Britton, and no one was free.

I might have given up and gone right back to Schwartz then. Or, had my despair been even deeper, I might have gone back to Mueller and faced down Dinte. But I hadn't the weariness yet for retirement from the world, and I hadn't the passion for a dramatic death, and so both Schwartz and Mueller I reserved for the future. Instead I wandered from da Silva to Wood, from Wood to Hanks, from Hanks across the sea to Holt, and finally to Britton, where I found my true home, my true people, and learned what I had to do to keep them.

Chapter 10 -- Britton

The district of Humping was wild country on the borders of a calm sea. In good weather the steep cliffs and jumbled rocks of the coast were met, not by crashing waves, but by ripples that lapped against the stone as gently as aging dogs greet their master. Stones sprouted from the earth, it seemed, on the steep hills and narrow valleys of Humping. A river hunted for a way to the sea, and found it over a forty-foot fall; sheep looked nervous as they picked a safe way to unshorn pastures; and here, a few thousand Humpers tended their sheep and scratched vegetables from the stony ground and lived as independent a life as human beings can live when they still need human company and still must eat.

I didn't need to eat, but the human company was good, for the Humpers asked no questions and gave no answers. It was hard even to find a town in this most isolated section of Britton, for the people tended to congregate in family groups of two or three simple sod houses with thatched roofs. I never found a gathering of more than twenty families within a kilometer of each other.

The isolation was forced by nature, for the meager land could not support many; only the uniformity of want made the people think they were not poor.

Despite the distances between them, however, they clung to each other's company grimly, wordlessly coming to the help of the family whose house was blown over by the storm, anonymously leaving a young he-goat among the herd whose sire died the day before, and occasionally gathering at each other's homes for a night of tall and terrible tales or songs of loneliness and silent longing.

I also had another impression, subtle but strong: when I came to Humping, as I had come to so many other places in the past year, I immediately felt comfortable there. Or if not comfortable, at least willing to bear the discomforts because they fit the awkward places in my heart.

The people viewed me with suspicion, of course, for I came over the hills from the west, where more civilized folk in easier farms had nothing but contempt for the Humpers, using the name as a mockery for slow-witted children. But I lived in these hills for a week, speaking to no one, until at last my loneliness struck a sympathetic chord. I was standing on the crest of a steep hill, watching as a shepherd far below tried to get his sheep to climb a slope to a saddle that led over to an uncropped valley. The man had no dogs, which was unusual, and the sheep kept breaking to left or right rather than climbing. When the man finally stopped and sat on a rock to watch his victorious sheep hunt for forage in an already overgrazed valley, I came down the hill and stood a few meters off from him, watching the sheep. I didn't speak because I had nothing to say; my offer was intrinsic in my presence.

The shepherd accepted. He stood and began prodding the sheep and uttering, the low, guttural cried that the sheep could hear clearly but that were inaudible from a good distance off. The sheep began to move, but this time when they broke left I was crying them onward; when they broke right, there was the shepherd, grunting. Finally the sheep gave in and shambled up the slope and over the saddle, rushing downhill to graze in the thick grass.

I stayed in the valley with the shepherd all the rest of the afternoon, staying pretty much on the other side of the valley from him, but watching his sheep, and sending back the few that strayed in my direction. He seemed not to notice me and said nothing, so that I wondered if by ill-fortune I had stumbled on a Humper who couldn't talk, but when the sun came close to the horizon he stood and began herding the sheep along a fairly easy route home. I did not follow, but when the shepherd crested a rise, after making it plain he didn't need my help on this journey, he turned and watched me for a moment, then beckoned. I was to come home with him.

I followed him for several kilometers before we came to a cluster of three low, thatched houses. They looked like small hills, the roofs the color of the summer-yellowed grass, but inside they were warm against the cold night. The sea wind came heavily from the north, even during the summer nights, and the deep current that flowed through the Humping Sea was icy-- though Britton was as far south as Wong, which sweltered in the summer, no night in Humping was ever warm, and the winters, while usually snowless, killed any fool who was caught out of doors after sunset. Except, of course, someone like me, who could sink into the earth if I desired; or just as easily draw heat from the air around me, no matter how cold it was. They could not have known this about me, however; to them I was a man alone, inviting death each night I spent in the open.