All of the high-altitude-tolerant individuals had gone, via Enforcement, to Authority. After eating everything organic that the soldiers had left edible on Authority, the Porsa had explored the moon and had found a convenient route left open to a Door marked Noxious Waste. It was known that Porsa could read. The words “noxious waste” had evidently been most attractive to them. All of them had gone away by that route.
Some persons were left alive upon Authority—those who had shut their doors, who had locked themselves in, who had kept quiet so the soldiers didn’t find them before the soldiers were stopped. For the soldiers had stopped, eventually. A woman had stopped them. She had shut herself into the robing room just off the Authority Chambers, where she was found sitting quietly behind a painted panel, reciting a phrase over and over before a red grill.
“The key for the last lock,” she said, again and again, not ceasing to do so even when the medical techs took her in charge.
Her name was Lurilile. She was the daughter of the Chief Counselor to the Queen of Ahabar, and she had shut the army down. She had done it alone because the two old men she had sent through the Door had emerged unconscious at the other end and had stayed that way for some little time. Partly because of her fortitude—and partly because no one had returned to Enforcement to send them—the soldiers who were to have killed everyone on Ahabar and Phansure and Thyker were still on Enforcement, immobilized for the foreseeable future and perhaps, so hoped Rasiel Plum to his old friend Notadamdirabong Cringh, forever.
• It came to be called the Greater Invasion of Hobbs Land. When it ended, the Baidee prisoners took up their labors once more. Most Hobbs Landians ignored them insofar as was possible, though some seemed inclined, in the emotional aftermath of their survival, to regard them more as misled accomplices than as instigators of violence. Within thirty or forty days, a few of the Baidee considered less culpable, or perhaps merely more personable, were recruited to sing in the CM choir, which they agreed to out of boredom as much as for any other reason. The choir, augmented by its Baidee members, sang when the new Horgy Endure was raised.
“Tell me about it,” Shan demanded from a Baidee who had sung on the occasion.
“Nothing to tell,” the man said. “They dug it up and brushed it off and put it in the temple, and then we sang ‘Rise Up, Ye Stones’ for awhile, and I came back here.”
Shan shook his head in disbelief. Here on Hobbs Land, he was a murderer. No one wanted to be his friend, or even his acquaintance. Churry’s men resented him. Except for Churry himself, who saw no point in blaming someone else for his own stupidity, Shan had no one to talk with about what he saw, what it meant, to have a God that grew underground, like a radish.
“What does it mean?” snarled Churry. “It means in primitive times men worshipped trees, or stones, or volcanoes. It means in Phansure men worship idols. It means on Thyker we worship the Overmind, of which no image exists. It means on Hobbs Land, men worship something that grows like a radish! That’s what it means!”
That wasn’t what it meant, as Shan had already puzzled out for himself, but he did not argue the matter. The work he was doing was so laborious that he was worn out by the time his shift ended. He had no energy left for argument, or for dreams. He didn’t care anymore whether he had been swallowed or not.
One evening, when their shift was over, Shan and Howdabeen were visited by Samasnier Girat.
“Tell me about your prophetess,” said Sam, to their astonishment and considerable discomfiture. “Tell me all about this Baidee prophetess.”
They told him about Morgori Oestrydingh, describing the advent of the old woman and the dragon as they had seen it in the temple a thousand times since childhood, reciting her words from memory. Sam listened, and went away, and came back again, asking them to repeat themselves.
“Your understanding is that the prophetess was seeking this lost race of beings, the Arbai, but she had not yet found them?”
Shan said that was true.
“And she was very old?”
“Very old. Her hair was white and wispy. It flew around her head like smoke.”
“One would think she would have taken someone younger with her,” said Sam. “To continue the search.”
Howdabeen Churry shook his head. He had never thought of that.
“This Door,” Sam said. “The one she came through, is it still there on Thyker?”
Oh, yes, they assured him. It was a holy shrine. No one would dream of touching it. However, it didn’t work. Or, more accurately, no one knew whether it did or not.
“Have the Phansuris ever looked at it?” Sam asked.
They replied, somewhat embarrassed, that no Baidee would allow a non-Baidee to have access to the holiest shrine of the Overmind. Sam smiled his thanks and went away again. He had a high regard for the genius of Theor Close and Betrun Jun. He believed they could figure out anything they set their minds to.
Subsequently he spoke to Dern Blass and to certain other of the people at CM and the settlers concerning the prisoners. They had been misled, he said. Mistaken and misled, and could that not be true of anyone? After a little thought, everyone agreed with him.
When the new Door reached Hobbs Land and was installed, there was general agreement that the prisoners should be sent home. By that time, Shan had been well and truly swallowed. By that time, Shan was also a member of the CM choir. When he went back to
