“No, I don’t know. What other answer?”
“maybe not all the Departed died. Hobbs Land has been surveyed, but nobody claims it’s been thoroughly explored. Maybe some of them have shown up here at Settlement One, and the first thing they did was restore a temple for one of their Gods.”
“Farfetched, but possible.”
“Maybe the Departed didn’t show up here. Maybe they’re back in the hills, and some of the settlers have restored the temple to bait them in.”
“Bait them in?”
“To use as forced labor.”
“Equally farfetched. Have you seen the Owlbrit? You might as well try to get labor out of a cabbage.”
“That may be true. But it seems to me that restoring a Departed temple for no special reason is also farfetched, especially when I’m told children did it! There’s something else going on here, Spiggy. Count on it!”
“So what are you going to do about it.”
She shrugged again, widely, both arms out as wide as she could reach, as though some solution lay just beyond her fingertips. “What can I do? Make recordings. Ask the Native Matters Advisory for an engineer to do a structural study, or maybe even ask for an Ancient Monuments survey. There’s never been a survey done here.” She became thoughtful. “Actually, that’s a pretty good idea. It would at least tell us what we’re dealing with. They can’t survey the monuments without getting around most of the planet. There are ruins of villages scattered all over the escarpment.”
He sighed, shaking his head. She was being fairly reasonable, for Zilia. “So, do it then, and consider you’ve done your duty! Come on, Zilia. Let’s not waste a pleasant evening. If you’re afraid to go out among the beasts, let’s take a walk around the settlement.”
• The game was a doubleheader, the Settlement One first- and second-level teams against the first- and second-level teams of Settlement Three. Settlement One, with several very young players—including Willum R., who had just turned fifteen—on its first-level team, did not expect to do very well and was pleasantly surprised at ending with a tie score.
“You wouldn’t have if you hadn’t cheated,” sneered a frustrated Settlement Three player to Willum R. in the changing room. Settlements didn’t lean toward frills, and there was only one changing room for each sex, share and share alike, visitors and the home team.
“We didn’t cheat!” cried Willum R., stung by the accusation. “That’s a rotten thing to say.”
“Vernor Soamses,” snapped the Settlement Three coach, “that’s not sportsmanlike. You owe the player an apology.”
“Well they do something,” whined Vernor. “Settlement One always wins more than they ought to. They’ve always had that God-thing around, kind of a good luck charm. The rest of us don’t have one.” So his Uncle Jamel had always said, though nobody had seen Uncle Jamel for a good while now.
“The God died!” retorted Willum R. “It died a long time ago.”
“So you say,” sneered Vernor, almost silently.
“Vernor,” growled his coach.
“I apologize,” said Vernor, covertly displaying a bent index finger to turn around what he said, showing he didn’t mean the apology.
From the nearby toilets, Horgy heard the conversation and made mental note of it. So the other settlements thought Settlement One had an unfair advantage. Interesting. Perhaps Sam knew that. Undoubtedly, he knew that. Perhaps the pressure of being on top, and staying there, had cracked him. Thus far during the trip, Horgy had heard nothing but praise for Sam, but that could be loyalty talking. Now that Settlement One was doing no better than some of the other settlements, that loyalty might change.
And then, too, there was this odd business about this thing that had attacked Sam? Had anything really attacked him? Had he killed something, or seriously wounded something. Or someone. Horgy sat, ruminating. There was that man who had disappeared from Settlement Three. What had his name been?
Well, tomorrow they’d go look at the place the attack had taken place. They’d collect the bones. Then they’d go back to CM. Dern would be most interested. He’d keep it quiet, of course. Dern wouldn’t want biologists and zoologists from System flocking onto Hobbs Land to investigate this possible new life-form. It would upset production. No, Dern would keep it quiet. But Horgy himself intended to find out as much as he could.
• Technically speaking, Authority consisted of twenty-one members, appointed for life, who had final and irrevocable power over all the worlds and moons in System. Unofficially, however, the word Authority was used to mean the moon upon which these members were housed, as well as all the rest of its inhabitants, whether or not they were members of any official committee or Panel or Advisory. The official bodies included the Advisories of Defense, Intelligence, Science, Religion, and so forth, as well as the Native Matters Advisory with its four subordinate panels: Ancient Monuments, Linguistics, Interspecies Relations, and Advanced Studies. The latter was a catchall panel to which all matters were referred which pertained to indigenes and seemed to fit nowhere else.
The staff of the Native Matters Advisory was relatively small, inbred, almost incestuous. Great-great-grandchildren of early members now occupied offices their forebears had built and sat at desks their great-grandparents had ordered made by Phansuri craftsmen. Inbred though they were, Native Matters persons were sincere. When Phansure, Thyker, and Ahabar, worlds without native peoples, had filled up and spilled colonists into the Belt, where there were native peoples, the citizens of the sister worlds had reviewed their history, ancient and recent, and determined with rare unanimity that genocide and slavery, which had stained the skirts of humanity for millennia, would not take place in System. They had resolved that the prior inhabitants of the system were to be compensated for, or protected against, all human damages or harms which might already have taken place, which might be anticipated, or which might eventually and inadvertently occur.
The purity of mankind’s vision could be determined by the fact that included in the protectorate with the
