space academy and then in endless starships with brief worldfalls, he felt as though he had found friends and a home when he found Lyllin.
He was surprised when a laughing girl told him, “We're all going up to a Varn festival. They're being held up in the western pass villages tonight. Don't you love them?'
'I've heard of them, but I've never seen one,” Birrel said.
'They're very old, and a bit foolish, but they're fun,” she promised.
He had indeed heard of the Varn festivals that the Vegan folk of the high mountain villages held and had held for centuries, but somehow Lyllin had never wanted to go to them. He had had the feeling that because these folk- festivals were vestigial survivals from the old, wild past of her people, she did not want him to see them. He looked now for her to excuse them from going, but instead Lyllin smilingly took his hand and went along with the others to the flitters.
The flitters took them up into the bright starlight and away from Old Town toward the northern mountains. They landed in a chill, misty high pass, where one of the old stone villages showed in the starlight, vague against the swirling fog of the great, deep valley beyond. There were many other flitters here, and the party Birrel was with walked along the gritty, stone road to a point where the village street began and where quite a number of Vegan folk were standing, laughing and chattering and looking expectantly toward the village.
The village lay dark and silent beneath the stars. It was as though every soul in it was asleep, but Birrel knew this could not be so on the night of the ancient festival. He knew that the people in these lofty, isolated little communities had not taken so completely to the new civilization the starships had brought as those in the lowlands. These were small landholders, miners, metalworkers, who held faster to old Vegan ways. He supposed they were all inside their houses, and he wondered what kind of a festival this was.
The chattering folk around him quieted, an expectant hush came over them. They stood in the cold mist, looking down the silent street to where it dipped out of sight into the vast valley beyond the pass. They, and the silent dark houses, all seemed waiting for something. Then a whisper of excitement, and a nervous titter, passed through them as something appeared at the far end of the street.
A figure had come up out of the valley and stood, vague in the curling mists. Blurred as it was by fog and distance, it was a figure of nightmares man-high, erect shape that was like a hideous travesty of humanity, a lizard-thing walking upright on bowed, powerful legs, the scaly hide glittering in the starlight, the flat head turning this way and that, the filmy eyes staring.
'Varn,” said the whisper among the people around Birrel, and some of them laughed again, but the laughter was nervous.
Birrel knew that the thing was, of course, one of the villagers here masked and suited in a clever costume. But the costume was so cunningly perfect that the illusion was horrifyingly real.
There had been no Varn living on this world for hundreds of years. Long before the starships came the Vegans had fought to its end their age-long struggle against the brainless, ferocious lizard-folk who lived in the deep mists of the vaster chasms and came over the ranges to raid and rob and slay. But the memory of that terrible struggle was still strong and he could understand why a silence and a shiver ran through his companions when a second hideous figure appeared in the mist, and then a third and fourth.
Eight of the pseudo-Varn in all came into the street, ran from locked door to locked door, scrabbling and mewing. There was a hideous realism about their capering, and Birrel felt Lyllin's small band tighten on his fingers. Then, suddenly, the doors of houses opened.
Men emerged, dressed in the ancient Vegan style and carrying whips. They rushed upon the pseudo-Varn. They swung the whips and the long lashes whistled and cracked, and the pseudo-monsters screeched and made mock charges and recoiled again from the whips. From inside the houses came now the fierce and rhythmic sound of the old battle-song.
Birrel felt the reaction of the people around him. There was no amused chattering, no tittering now. They leaned forward, eyes glittering, as the whips rose and fell, as the men beat back the charges of the mewing not- men. They began to shout themselves, fragmentary, half-forgotten phrases of the fierce, old anthem. They were shaking, shivering, sweating with fierce excitement, no longer at all the pleasant, gay companions of an hour before. Lyllin was shivering and her eyes were bright as the stars she watched, her lips moving.
Birrel thought he understood now. He did not know people the way Ferdias knew them. He knew men of his own sort pretty well, but women not at all. However, you could not live with a wife without at least partly understanding one woman.
He bent to Lyllin and said quietly in her ear. “That's enough for now. It's late.'
She made no objection as they went back to the flitter. But all the way back home she said nothing, but hummed the fierce old rhythm under her breath.
In the, house, she turned and smiled brightly and spoke rapidly. “Did you enjoy it? It's a little uncivilized, I know, but then we're not a very civilized people, really.'
Birrel knew then he had been right. He said nothing, but stood looking at her, and in the face of his silence she rushed on, with an edge of desperation in her brittleness.
'In fact, I'm such an incurable savage underneath that I'd better stay home and wait for you. I wouldn't fit in on Earth. I'd be—'
He stepped forward and took hold of her. “No matter where we go, you'll be Lyllin. And I'll love you.'
Her mouth became soft and uncertain, like a child's, and her eyes had tears in the corners of them now. And when he kissed her, her lips were bitter with those sudden tears. She said nothing more but he knew that she was still afraid, afraid of what Earth might do to them. In the depths of his soul, Birrel cursed Solleremos and his ambitious schemes.
CHAPTER 6
The squadron took off and the blue flare of Vega dropped behind it. The cruisers and scouts and auxiliaries and transports, eighty-three in all, dwindled suddenly in scale from great ships to mere metal motes that huddled together in their flight through infinity. For two hundred years, humanity had been pressing outward through the stars. Now some thousands of men and women and children were taking the road back.
The course was familiar, at first. Straightaway from Vega to the Triple Crown, three white suns which were a famous starmark in Lyra Sector. Then the Fifth bore westward and nadir, taking its sights on a dying red star to make the so-called Dark Passage between two vast dust-clouds that looked down like frowning cosmic mountains at the tiny passing ships. And now Lyra space began to narrow into a long salient between Orion and Perseus Sectors. Far away upon their left marched a distant bastion of clotted clusters and nebular mists that was like a great rampart guarding Perseus. They went on past that, and drew closer to the vague boundary between Lyra and Orion, and ahead there lay to the left the cemetery of dead suns and to the right that vast sprawl of tangled filamentary nebulae.
Birrel studied the vista on the big radar-screen. The cinder-cemetery to the left was fuzzy from minute particles of drift, so fuzzy that ships could indeed hide from long-range radar in there. The other region, that of the filamentaries, was an absolutely blind area on the screen, its terrific radio-emissions blanking out long-range radar completely.
'I think,” said Garstang, frowning down at the screen, “that they'd be hiding in the drift, not the filamentaries. Those would foul up their own communications pretty badly.'
'Not if they held a tight enough formation,” said Birrel. “But it's no good guessing. I've got to send in scouts.'
He called Grenard, the leader of the scout division. Those swift midgets were far out in front of and on either side of the big cruisers and transports.
Grenard, a comparatively young man, was as reckless and restless as a good scout-commander had to be.
'Fine,” he said instantly. “I'll go into the filamentaries and send Nearing into the drift. If they're in there, we'll find them.'
'Just a minute,” Birrel said hastily. “You may find them but you won't be able to call all the way back here
