Sam moved gently through the hesitant group and took his father’s arm. “You should go tell the Awateh, shouldn’t you? Isn’t he up there ahead somewhere? Let’s go tell him, Dad.”
They began walking, arm in arm, Phaed stumbling from time to time. The dust fell endlessly from a green sky.
“Sing me a song, Dad,” said Sam. “Sing to me about the Gharm contract.”
Behind him the prophets sank to the ground, brushing fruitlessly at their eyes, at the corners of their mouths and nostrils. There was dust everywhere. Sam shook himself like a wet cat, arm by arm, leg by leg, and the dust flew away. Phaed trembled and brushed at himself, but the dust stayed, seemingly rooted into his skin, making him furry all over, as though he were covered in velvet.
“Sing to me about the Gharm contract, Dad?”
“Can’t remember,” said Phaed, wonderingly.
“Oh, but you sang it to Maire when you were courting. She told me. Maybe you and Mugal Pye sang it when you were making the gadgets that killed Stenta Thilion. Surely you remember the song?”
“No breath to sing.” Petulant now. “Can’t remember.”
“Tell it to me then, Dad. Tell me the story.”
“Stories like that aren’t for children.”
“But I’m grown now, Dad. I’m a man.”
“Not a free man. A man who does what other people tell him isn’t a free man.”
“But you do what the Awateh tells you.”
“That’s different. He speaks for God.”
“Tell me about your God, Dad. What kind of a thing is your God?”
“Demands … Obedience … From his sons … All his sons …”
“Does your god care about anything but men, Dad? Does he care about trees and birds and fish in the streams? Does he care about womenfolk? What about planets? Like that one the Gharmfolk had? The one Voorstod destroyed?”
“Demands …” said Phaed. It was all he said.
They walked on eastward. All around them the soldiers of Enforcement stood still, like monuments to a war which was not to be fought. Well, Sam had longed for monuments, and here they were. Lines of them, like standing stones. Towers of them. Menhirs. Dolmen. And among their immobile forms the shuffling prophets, still moving toward the east.
“Let’s tell them they can stop, Dad.”
Sam told them they could stop, and they did stop, falling to the ground in heaps, suddenly looking less manlike than plantlike, strange convoluted shapes, which took their outlines from natural things. Rocks. Brush. Low trees.
And at last, the final ones. Three figures moving as in a dream, slowly, almost floating.
“There’s the Awateh, Dad. He has two of his sons with him. I think we ought to tell him about the people all being dead, don’t you?”
They came up to the Awateh where he pushed forward like the prow of a boat, breasting the falling dust, tiny step after tiny step. “My son says,” said Phaed. “Already killing on Ahabar. On Phansure. On Thyker. Already dead, families, flocks, none left but us.”
The prophet’s sons dropped, unspeaking. The Awateh leaned forward. Only the white of his eyes showed clean in the enveloping growth, his eyes and his teeth when he opened his lips and said, “Done? All done? All dead?”
“All dead,” said Phaed. “All but us.”
“Not!” cried the Awateh. “Not! This one, here …” he turned the white orbs on Sam and raised one hand as though to strike. It stayed there like a stout branch, swaying but unbending. The eyes went. The teeth went. The shape grunted for a time, and then was silent.
Sam turned to his father and saw another stumpy and contorted thing with an eye and a mouth.
“Tricked us,” said Phaed Girat, the one clean eyeball gleaming in the starlight. “Didn’t you?”
“Not I, Dad,” said Sam, weeping. “God did it. He was waiting for you, not I. We were the bait in God’s trap, Saturday and I, sent to catch all Voorstod, Dad.”
The mouth went away. Wood grew over the eye. Sam sat down and cried, clinging to the harsh trunk, hearing for a time the breathing that went on.
“My father died, too,” whispered Theseus. “I went to find him, but because of me, he died. Some things … some things are better let alone. A man may not face both ways at once. If he looks back, he cannot look forward …” The voice faded into remote distance and was gone.
“Come home, Sam,” a voice in his ear. “Come home.”
He looked up to see her standing there, leaning forward, offering him her hands. “How did you find me, China Wilm?”
“China couldn’t come just now, but she thought you might be lonely,” the Tchenka said. “She sent me to tell you she has a new girl child, up on the escarpment. And she thought you might need some company—leaving these legends behind.”
He took the Tchenka by the hand, his eyes still filled with tears of grief for a man he had never known, could never have known, had only longed to have, as a man longs for dreams.
“I sought the wondrous thing,” he complained, like a sleepy child. “I did.”
“Well, Sam, didn’t you find it?” asked the Tchenka. “Maire knew what it was. Remember?”
He remembered. Maire had found it before him, long ago, when he was a child. She knew that ancient evils could be left behind. One could choose not to remember. One did not have to dig into the slime pits of old anger and old hate. Forgetting was possible. The Hobbs Land Gods would allow it. Would make it easy. The pits beneath the stone could be left empty forever, if he so chose.
“There are no legends here,” said Sam.
“That’s it,” said the Tchenka. “Come home, Sam.”
• When the Royal Marines reached Ninfadel, they found that the Porsa had overrun the heights and swallowed all the Voorstod families and flocks, as well as the Ahabarian guards and the Native Matters staff members, before deciding (in what passes among Porsa for decision) to go through the Door the prophets had
