The stage showed the technicians putting the Door together, leaping about like fleas. The newly assembled Door glittered with blue fire as construction materials, men, and machines began coming through on a continuous belt. Time-jump holography showed men and machines creating the Central Management structures—administration tower, equipment and repair, warehouses, staff and visitor housing blocks, and recreation complex—all of them sprouting from the ground like mushrooms. At the top of the Admin building, a sign flashed red and yellow: HOBBS LAND, a Farm Settlement World of TRANSYSTEM FOODS.
Horgy went on, “Construction of the Central Management complex was already well underway when on-planet surveyors discovered that the world, which had been thought to be uninhabited, was actually the home of the Owlbrit people, a presumably ancient race, only twelve of whom were still living at the time of first contact.”
Visuals of tiny villages, tiny round houses, fat, turnip-shaped creatures dragging laboriously about on their fragile legs.
“Only twelve of them?” asked Theor Close, the older of the two Phansuri engineers, “Were there really only twelve?”
“Only twelve,” said Horgy, firmly. “That is, only twelve anybody could find. Plus three or four of their Gods, and all but one of them died immediately.”
“That’s sad,” said one of the female assistants, a willowy blonde with impossible eyelashes. “Even though they’re not very pretty.”
Horgy smiled at her, his meltingly adoring smile, the smile that had convinced whole legions of female assistants—Horgy never had anything else—that each of them was the most wonderful woman in the universe. “It was sad,” he admitted, his voice throbbing. “Though, you’re right, they weren’t pretty.”
“So,” said the other engineer, Betrun Jun. “What happened to the twelve survivors?”
“Ah …” Horgy reviewed what he had said and found his place again. “Through the immediate efforts of topflight philologists and xenolinguists, it was learned that, far from resenting the presence of humans upon their world, the Owlbrit people welcomed settlement. Such had been foreseen, they said. Such had been promised by their Gods, in order that the will of the Gods could be accomplished.”
“Nice for us humans,” said Betrun Jun, with a wink at his companion.
Horgy acknowledged this with a nod and went on. “The last of the Owlbrit people died about five years after settlement, though the last of their Gods remained in the condition which has been called ‘alive’ until just recently.”
“Why didn’t I ever hear about the Owlbrits?” asked the brunette member of Horgy’s trio, a young person of astonishing endowments. “I never heard a word about them.”
“It seems they didn’t build anything,” said Theor Close, thoughtfully. “No roads, no monuments, no cities.”
“They didn’t create anything,” added the other Phansuri. “No art, no literature, no inventions, What did they leave, Endure? A few ruined villages?”
Horgy, badly off his track but grateful for their interest, regrouped with his charming smile once more. “That’s about all. From space, the clusters of little structures look much like multiple meteor strikes, which is probably why they were missed on first look-see. The onsite surveyors found ten live Owlbrit, in ones and twos, among the ruins on the escarpment. They found one mostly ruined village down on the plain containing two Owlbrit who said they’d been waiting for us. ‘Waiting for somebody to show up,’ is the way the linguists translated it. That’s where Settlement One was put. A couple of xenologists were housed there until the last Owlbrit died. I recall reading that the last Owlbrit told one of the linguists that watching the humans had interested him so much that he stayed alive longer than he would have otherwise.”
“So there’s really nothing left of them,” Theor Close said, his voice conveying both wonder and regret.
“The ruins and a few words and phrases of their language we’ve adopted as localisms,” admitted Horgy. “Names for places and things. Creely, that’s a kind of local fish. Bondru, that means noon. We can make only an approximation of their sounds I’m afraid. We can’t really duplicate their language vocally.”
“That’s why I never heard of them, then,” said the brunette with satisfaction. “They were all gone before I was even born.” Her tone conveyed the unimportance of anything that might have happened, anywhere, before she came upon the scene. Horgy’s assistants tended to be self-approving.
However self-absorbed, she was right. The Owlbrit, an enigmatic people, less than legendary, were indeed gone, as the people of Hobbs Land knew. Xenologists in various places read books about them, or wrote books about them, but in the last analysis there seemed very little to say about the Owlbrit except they had lived once but were no more.
Turning to the engineers, Horgy said, “Before you go out to talk to Sam Girat at Settlement One, a few brief words about the geography of Hobbs Land. …” And he summoned up pictures of undulating and remarkably dull plains to get himself on track once more.
• When Samasnier Girat, his sister, Saluniel, and their mother, Maire, had arrived on Hobbs Land, when they had first set foot upon the glassy sand beyond the Door, with the wind of a strange world riffling their hair, Sam’s mam had knelt down to touch the soil.
“Thanks be to God!” Maire had cried. “There are no legends here.”
She had uttered the words with a certain fatalistic satisfaction, in the manner of a woman who is packing up house and has resolved to abandon some troublesome possession even though she knows she may miss it later. Her words, uttered coincident with their arrival, had carried the weight of prophecy, and the whole event had seemed so pregnant with intent that Sam never forgot it. Even when he was grown he could recall the feel of the wind, the smell of the air—an empty smell, he had thought then and often since—his mother’s haggard but beautiful face under the dark kerchief she wore, her heavy shoes beside his small ones on the soil, the very sack she had set down, the one that
