She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.
“You wonder what it’s like, Evon?” she asked.
He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.
“To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean,” she added.
“Me? What are you thinking of, Letha?”
“Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad’s face. You remind me of an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens.”
“I don’t fiddle.”
“But your eyes are on the sky-fleet.”
Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. “It’s strange,” he murmured at last. “It’s as if I know them—the star-birds, I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at something I expected to happen … or … or. …”
“Something familiar?”
“Yes.”
“You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?” she asked the blonde girl who sat on the cool rock by the spring.
Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. “I don’t believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief.”
“How silly! What’s that to do with it?”
“He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I’d remember where he buried it, wouldn’t I?” She pouted, and went back to dabbling a club toe in the spring.
Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. “We lie around here like sleepy pigs!” he grumbled. “Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on the Geoark to make up its mind?”
“What do you think they’ll do?”
“The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?”
“Tell them to go away.”
“And suppose they chose not to go?”
The girl looked bewildered. “I can’t imagine anyone refusing the Geoark.”
“Maybe they’ve got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with ours?”
“Two Geoarks? What a strange idea.”
“Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware that I have one too?”
“Evon! What a strange idea.”
He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring, then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon’s laughter broke the gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to wander into the clearing from the pathways.
“I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark,” someone suggested.
“About the sky-fleet? And who knows what to say?”
“I’m afraid,” said a girl. “Somehow I’m suddenly afraid of them.”
“Our brothers from the Exodus? But they’re people—such as you and I.”
So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the glade to read another message received from the sky-fleet.
Propauth Earth from Commstrafefleet Three, Space, Klaeden Comm, presents greetings!
Having received no answer to our previous communication, we have no choice but to land at once. I am imposing an informational quarantine to avoid restimulating possible recessive kulturverlaengerung, but suggest you guard yourselves. Our cultures had a common origin. We come in arms, without enmity.
This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was going to land, without invitation.
Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans. “Can you revive the devices that speak across space?” they asked.
“They are revived,” answered the tech clans.
“Then let us speak to our brothers from space.”
And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out:
Brethren to brethren, present love love love.
We welcome you to our glades and to our places of feeding and our places of sleeping. We welcome you to the bosom of the world of beginning. After twenty thousand years, earth has not forgotten. Come amid rejoicing.
“I’m afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to,” growled Ernstli Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an atmospheric-braking orbit.
And there was thunder in a cloudless sky.
“O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
—Anonymous
Edward, Edward.
O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
And some other dule ye dree, O.”
“O I hae kill’d my ain father dear,
Mither, mither;
O I hae kill’d my ain father dear,
Alas and woe is me, O.”
In accordance with the rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and established an “orbital shell” of criscrossing orbits, timed and interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.
From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.
“No signs of the natives yet,” came the report. “No signs of technology. No evidence of hostility.”
A second ship descended to land a mile from
