'You expected too much when you left, that's all. Your disappointment shows. But don't let 'em get you, Jakob. They're just hilfs.'
Seeing the others were listening, Agat said aloud, 'I told the old man what I'd planned to; he said he'd tell their Council. How much he understood and how much he believed, I don't know.'
'If he listened at all it's better than I'd hoped,' said Alia Pasfal, sharp and frail, with blueblack skin, and white hair crowning her worn face. 'Wold's been around as long as I have—longer. Don't expect him to welcome wars and changes.'
'But he should be well disposed—he married a human,' Dermat said.
'Yes, my cousin Arilia, Jakob's aunt—the exotic one in Wold's female zoo. I remember the courtship,' Alia Pasfal said with such bitter sarcasm that Dermat wilted.
'He didn't make any decision about helping us? Did you tell him your plan about going up to the border to meet the Gaal?' Jonkendy Li stammered, hasty and disappointed. He was very young, and had been hoping for a fine war with marchings-forth and trumpets. So had they all. It beat being starved to death or burned alive.
'Give them time. They'll decide,' Agat said gravely to the boy.
'How did Wold receive you?' asked Seiko Esmit. She was the last of a great family. Only the sons of the first leader of the Colony had borne that name Esmit. With her it would die. She was Agat's age, a beautiful and delicate woman, nervous, rancorous, repressed. When the Alter-rans met, her eyes were always on Agat. No matter who spoke she watched Agat.
'He received me as an equal.'
Alia Pasfal nodded approvingly and said, 'He always had more sense than the rest of their males.'
But Seiko went on, 'What about the others? Could you just walk through their camp?' Seiko could always dig up his humiliation no matter how well he had buried and forgotten it. His cousin ten times over, his sister-playmate- lover-companion, she possessed an immediate understanding of any weakness in him and any pain he felt, and her sympathy, her compassion closed in on him like a trap. They were too close. Too close, Hum, old Alia, Seiko, all of them. The isolation that had unnerved him today had also given him a glimpse of distance, of solitude, had perhaps waked a craving in him. Seiko gazed at him, watching him with clear, soft, dark eyes, sensitive to his every mood and word. The hilf girl, Rolery, had never yet looked at him, never met his gaze. Her look always was aside, away, glancing, golden, alien.
'They didn't stop me,' he answered Seiko briefly. 'Well, tomorrow maybe they'll decide on our suggestion. Or the next day. How's the provisioning of the Stack been going this afternoon?' The talk became general, though it tended always to center around and be referred back to Jakob Agat.
He was younger than several of them, and all ten Al-terrans were elected equal in their ten-year terms on the council, but he was evidently and acknowledgedly their leader, their center. No especial reason for this was visible unless it was the vigor with which he moved and spoke; is authority noticeable in the man, or in the men about him? The effects of it, however, showed in him as a certain tension and somberness, the results of a heavy load of responsibility that he had borne for a long time, and that got daily heavier.
'I made one slip,' he said to Pilotson, while Seiko and the other women of the council brewed and served the little, hot, ceremonial eupfuls of steeped basuk leaves called ti. 'I was trying so hard to convince the old fellow that there really is danger from the Gall, that I think I sent for a moment. Not verbally; but he looked like he'd seen a ghost.'
'You've got very powerful sense-projection, and lousy control when you're under strain. He probably did see a ghost.'
'We've been out of touch with the hilfs so long—and we're so ingrown here, so damned isolated, I can't trust my control. First I bespeak that girl down on the beach, then I project to Wold—they'll be turning on us as witches if this goes on, the way they did in the first Years...
. And we've got to get them to trust us. In so short a time. If only we'd known about the Gaal earlier!'
'Well,' Pilotson said in his careful way, 'since there are no more human settlements up the coast, it's purely due to your foresight in sending scouts up north that we have any warning at all. Your health, Seiko,' he added, accepting the tiny, steaming cup she presented.
Agat took the last cup from her tray, and drained it. There was a slight sense-stimulant hi freshly brewed ti, so that he was vividly aware of its astringent, clean heat hi his throat, of Seiko's intense gaze, of the bare, large firelit room, of the twilight outside the windows. The cup in his hand, blue porcelain, was very old, a work of the Fifth Year. The handpress books hi cases under the windows were old. Even the glass in the windowframes was old. All their luxuries, all that made them civilized, all that kept them Alterran, was old. In Agat's lifetime and for long before there had been no energy or leisure for subtle and complex affirmations of man's skill and spirit. They did well by now merely to preserve, to endure.
Gradually, Year by Year for at least ten generations, their numbers had been dwindling; very gradually, but always there were fewer children born. They retrenched, they drew together. Old dreams of domination were forgotten utterly. They came back—if the Winters and hostile hilf tribes did not take advantage of their weakness first—to the old center, the first colony, Landin. They taught then: children the old knowledge and the old ways, but nothing new. They lived always a little more humbly, coming to value the simple over the elaborate, calm over strife, courage over success. They withdrew.
Agat, gazing into the tiny cup hi his hand, saw in its clear, pure translucency, the perfect skill of its making and the fragility of its substance, a kind of epitome of the spirit of his people.
Outside the high windows the air was the same translucent blue. But cold: a blue twilight, immense and cold. The old terror of his childhood came over Agat, the terror which, as he became adult, he had reasoned thus: this world on which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three generations had been born, was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly, they were always aware of it. They were the Farborn. And little by little, with the majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution, this world was killing them—rejecting the graft.
They were perhaps too submissive to this process, too willing to die out. But a kind of submission—their iron adherence to the League Laws—had been their strength from the very beginning; and they were still strong, each one of them. But they had not the knowledge or the skill to combat the sterility and early abortion that reduced then' generations. For not all wisdom was written in the League Books, and from day to day and Year to Year a little knowledge would always be lost, supplanted by some more immediately useful bit of information concerning daily existence here and now. And in the end, they could not even understand much of what the books told them. What truly remained of their Heritage, by now? If ever the ship, as in the old hopes and tales, soared down in fire from the stars, would the men who stepped from it know them to be men?
But no ship had come, or would come. They would die; their presence here, their long exile and struggle on this world, would be done with, broken like a bit of clay.
He put the cup very carefully down on the tray, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Seiko was watching him. He turned from her abruptly and began to listen to Jon-kendy, Dermat and Pilotson.
Across his bleak rush of foreboding he had recalled briefly, irrelevant and yet seeming both an explanation and a sign, the light, lithe, frightened figure of the girl Rolery, reaching up her hand to him from the dark, sea-besieged stones.
CHAPTER FOUR: The Tall Young Men
THE SOUND OF rock pounded on rock, hard and unrever-berant, rang out among the roofs and unfinished walls of the Winter City to the high red tents pitched all around it. Ak ak ak ak, the sound we.nt on for a long tune, until suddenly a second pounding joined it in counterpoint, kadak ak ak kadak. Another came in on a higher note, giving a tripping rhythm, then another, another, more, until any measure was lost in the clatter of constant sound, an avalanche of the high dry whack of rock hitting rock in which each individual pounding rhythm was submerged, indistinguishable.
As the sound-avalanche went ceaselessly and stupefying-ly on, the Eldest Man of the Men of Askatevar walked slowly from his tent and between the aisles of tents and cookfires from which smoke rose through slanting late- afternoon, late-autumn light. Stiff and ponderous the old man went alone through the camp of his people and
