When Sam was about twenty, he sometimes lay on his bed looking out at unnamed constellations, thinking deep thoughts about who he was and what Hobbs Land was and whether he belonged there. The settlers talked about all kinds of worlds, real ones and ones they had only imagined. Hobbs Land had to be real, for who would bother to dream up a world like this? No one. Hobbs Land was dull and bland, and not worth the effort. Except for a few blotches (scarcely more than pimples, really), a few thousand square miles of field and farm and vineyard and orchard where the people were, there was no human history or adventure in this place. No human-built walls staggered across the shallow hills; no menhirs squatted broodingly upon the escarpment; no painted animals pranced at the edge of the torchlight in chambered caves, full of wonder and mystery and danger, evoking visions of terrible, primitive times.
Of course, men had never been primitives on Hobbs Land. They had come through the Door already stuffed with histories and memories and technologies from other places. They had come from troubled Ahabar and sea-girt Phansure and brazen Thyker and this moon or that moon. They had arrived as civilized peoples—though not as a civilized people, which might have given them the sense of common identity Sam thought he wanted.
And so far as monuments were concerned, it made no difference what kind of people had come there. Hobbs Land had no monuments of any kind, civilized or not. No battles had been fought here, no enemies defeated. The landscape was bland as pudding, unstained by human struggle, empty of triumph. so he told himself, lying on his bed, longing for something more. Something nameless.
A few years later, Sam kissed China Wilm out by the poultry-bird coops on a starlit evening and thought he might have found what he wanted. He sought among unfamiliar emotions to tell her how he felt. He couldn’t find the words, and he blamed Hobbs Land for that. He told himself he wanted similes for the feel of her lips, which were silken and possessed of an unsuspected power; he wanted wonderful words for the turmoil in his belly and groin and mind as well, but nothing on Hobbs Land was at all tumultuous or marvelous.
“Sam, she’s a child!” Mam had exclaimed, not so much horrified as embarrassed for him. China Wilm was only twelve and Sam was twenty-two.
Sam knew that! But Sam was willing to wait for her! Sam had watched her grow from a glance-eyed toddler; he had picked her out! He had no intention of despoiling a child, but she was his, he had decided, no matter whether she knew it yet or not. Even at twenty-two, he was an ardent and articulate lover who loved as much in his head as in his body. So he kissed her chastely, said only enough, he hoped, to be intriguing, and let her go—for a time—while telling himself it must be those missing legends that frustrated him. Among them, he was sure, he could have found all the similarities and examples he needed. Surely if he’d had a chance to talk with his dad, Dad could have made it clear how it all fit together.
Unthinkingly, Sam said as much to Maire Girat the words left his mouth and he knew in that instant they should never have been spoken. She turned away from him, and after a time he realized she was crying. Her tears made him uncomfortable, and he tried to remedy matters.
“But there were good things on Voorstod! You were important there, weren’t you, Mam. People used to ask me if I wasn’t proud of you, you were so famous.”
‘To some I was famous,” she said, wiping her eyes. “To a few.”
“Because of your singing,” he went on, keeping the conversation going with an effort and wondering—oddly, it was the first time he had wondered that—why she no longer sang.
“Yes. That,” she said in a dismissive tone, her mouth knotted uncomfortably.
“Did you sing of love, Mam?”
Surprised, she laughed harshly. “Love, Sammy? Oh, yes, I sang of love. Out of love. For love.”
“Were there legends of love then, there in Voorstod?”
Her lips twisted at one corner. “It was said by the prophets in Voorstod that what men call love is merely lust, to be controlled at all costs. We women were said to provoke this unholy lust unless we covered our faces and bodies and stayed well hidden. Men were too valuable to be exposed to such feelings. What we felt was of no matter. They could walk with their faces showing, but we were instructed to hide ours. Such teaching leaves little room for songs of love.”
His expression told her this wasn’t what he had meant.
“What is it, Sammy?” she had asked him.
“I need to know about it,” he cried, though he had not planned to do any such thing. “I need to know about … where we came from.” He had almost said “Who I am,” and had caught himself just in time. He was twenty-two then, and a man of twenty-two should certainly know who he was. The truth was, he did not. He had tried on this mask and that, but none of them had suited him, quite. Maire did not understand him well enough to tell him. “Where we come from,” he repeated, thinking this was what he had really meant.
So, Maire had told him of her own life in Voorstod and of the little dark Gharmish people who were slaves in Voorstod and of her marriage to his Dad and why she had left. Before she was well started, that peculiar expression had settled on his face and he had stopped listening. What she had said was not what he had wanted to hear. Her words had slipped from his preconceptions like rain from a leaf. She had spoken of Fess, and Bitty, the
