The Longest Way Home

2

A wave of dizziness came over him in that same moment. Joseph could not tell whether it was born of relief or fatigue, or both. He knew that he had just about reached the end of his endurance. The pain in his leg was excruciating. He gripped his staff with both hands, leaned forward, fought to remain standing. After that everything took on a kind of red hallucinatory nimbus and he became uncertain of events for a while. Misty figures floated in the air before him, and at times he thought he heard his father’s voice, or his sister’s. When things were somewhat clear again he realized that he was lying atop a pile of furs within one of the Indigene houses, with a little ring of Indigenes sitting facing him in a circle, staring at him solemnly and with what appeared to be a show of deep interest.

“This will help your trouble,” a voice said, and one of the Indigenes handed him a cluster of green, succulent stems. One of their healing herbs, Joseph assumed. According to his father, the Indigenes had an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal remedies, and many of them were said to be great merit. Joseph took the stems without hesitation. They were full of a juice that stung his lips and tongue, but not in any unpleasant way. Almost at once, so it seemed, he felt his fever lessening and the turmoil in his damaged leg beginning to abate a little.

He had been inside an Indigene house only once before. There was a settlement of Indigenes just at the border of the Keilloran lands, and his father had taken him to visit them when he was ten. The strange claustrophobic architecture, the thick, rough-surfaced mud-and-wattle walls tapering to a narrow point high overhead, the elaborate crosshatched planking of the floors, the slitlike windows that admitted only enough light to create a shadowy gloom, had made a deep impression on him. It was all much the same here, down to the odd sickroom sweetness, something like the odor of boiled milk, of the stagnant air.

Indigenes were found everywhere on Homeworld, though their aggregate population was not large, and apparently never had been, even in the years before the arrival of the first human settlers. They lived in small scattered villages in the forested regions that were not utilized by humans and also at the periphery of the settled regions, and no friction existed between them and the humans who had come to occupy their planet. There was scarcely any interaction between humans and Indigenes at all. They were gentle creatures who kept apart from humans as much as possible, coming and going as they pleased but generally staying on the lands that were universally considered to be theirs. Quietly they went about their Indigenous business, whatever that might be, without ever betraying the slightest sign of resentment or dismay that their world had been invaded not once but twice by strangers from the stars—first the easy-going villagers known as the Folk today and then, much later, the turbulent, more intense people whom the Folk had come to accept under the name and authority of Masters. Whether the Indigenes saw the Masters as masters too was something that Joseph did not know. Perhaps no one did. Balbus had hinted that they had a philosophy of deep indifference to all outside power. But he had never elaborated on that, and now Balbus was dead.

Joseph was aware that some Masters of scholarly leanings took a special interest in these people. His father was among that group. He collected their artifacts, their mysterious little sculptures and somber ceramic vessels, and supposedly, so said Balbus, he had made a study at one time of those profound philosophical beliefs of theirs. Joseph had no idea what those beliefs might be. His father had never discussed them with him in detail, any more than Balbus had. It was his impression that his father’s interest in Indigenes was in no way reciprocated by the Indigenes themselves: on that one visit to the village near House Keilloran they had seemed as indifferent to his presence and Joseph’s among them as the day-noctambulo had been when they were in the forest together. When Joseph’s father made inquiries about certain Indigene artifacts that he had hoped to acquire they replied in subdued monotones, saying as little as necessary and never volunteering anything that was not a direct response to something Joseph’s father had asked.

But perhaps they had felt intimidated by the presence among them of the powerful Martin Master Keilloran of House Keilloran, or else the Indigenes of the north were of another sort of temperament from those of Helikis. Joseph sensed no indifference here. These people had offered him a medicine for his leg, unasked. Their intent stares seemed to be the sign of real curiosity about him. Though he could not say why, Joseph did not feel like in the slightest way like an intruder here. It was more like being a guest.

He returned their stares with curiosity of his own. They were strangely handsome people, though distinctly alien of form, with long, tubular heads that were flattened fore and aft, fleshy throats that pouted out in flamboyant extension in moments of excitement. Their eyes were little slits protected by bony arches that seemed almost like goggles, with peeps of scarlet showing through, the same vivid color as the eyes of noctambulos. Those red eyes were a clue: perhaps these races had been cousins somewhere far back on the evolutionary track, Joseph thought. And they walked upright, as noctambulos did. But the Indigenes were much smaller and slighter than noctambulos in build, closer to humans in general dimension. They had narrow ropy limbs that looked as though they had no muscular strength at all, though they could muster startling tensile force when needed: Joseph had seen Indigenes lift bundles of faggots that would break the back of a sturdy Folker. Their skins were a dull bronze, waxy-looking, with unsettling orange highlights glowing through. Their feet were splayed, long-toed. Their double-jointed seven-fingered hands were similarly rangy and pliant. Males and females looked identical to human eyes, although, Joseph supposed, not to other Indigenes.

The Indigenes sitting by his bedside, who were eight or nine in number, interrogated him, wanting to know who he was, where he was going. No one of them seemed to be in a position of leadership. Nor was there any special order in the way they questioned him. One would ask, and they would listen to his reply, and then another elsewhere in the group would ask something else.

The dialect they spoke was somewhat different from the version of Indigene that Joseph knew, but he had no particular difficulty understanding it or in shaping his own responses so that the pronunciation was closer to what seemed to be the norm here. He had studied the Indigene language since early childhood. It was something that all Masters were expected to learn, as a matter of courtesy toward the original inhabitants of the planet. You grew up speaking Folkish too—that was only common sense, in a world where nine humans out of ten were of the Folk—and of course the Masters had a language of their own, the language of the Great Houses. So every Master was trilingual. It had been Balbus’s idea that Joseph study the language of Old Earth, also: an extra little scholarly fillip. It was ancestral to Master, and, so said Balbus, the more deeply versed you were in the ancient language, the better command you would have of the modern one. Joseph had not yet had time to discover whether that was so.

He thought it would be obvious to these Indigenes that he was a Master, but he made a point of telling them anyway. It produced no discernible reaction. He explained that he was the eldest son of Martin Master Keilloran of House Keilloran, who was one of the great men of the southern continent. That too seemed to leave them unmoved. “I was sent north to spend the summer with my kinsmen at House Getfen,” he said. “It is our custom for the eldest son of every Great House to visit some distant House for a time just before he comes of age.”

“There has been trouble at Getfen House,” one of the Indigenes said gravely.

“Great trouble, yes. It was only by luck that I escaped.” Joseph could not bring himself to ask for details of the events at Getfen House. “I need to return to my home now. I ask your assistance in conveying me to the nearest Great House. The people there will be able to help me get home.” He was careful to use the supplicatory tense: he was not really asking, he was simply suggesting. Indigenes did not make direct requests of each other except under the most unusual of circumstances, let alone give each other orders: they merely indicated the existence of a need and awaited a confirmation that the need would be met. Whenever a human, even a Master, had reason to make a request of an Indigene, the same grammatical nicety was observed, not just because it was simple politeness to do so but because the Indigene ordinarily would not respond to, and perhaps would not even comprehend, anything that was couched in the mode reserved for a direct order. “Will you do that?” he asked. “I understand the closest Great House is House Ludbrek.”

“That is correct, Master Joseph.”

“Then that is where I must go.”

“We will take you there,” said another of the Indigenes. “But first you must rest and heal.”

“Yes. Yes. I understand that.”

They brought him food, a thick dark porridge and some stewed shredded meat that tasted like illimani and a cluster of small, juicy red berries: simple country stuff but a great improvement over raw mud-crawlers and half-cooked roots. Joseph’s father had a serious interest in fine food and wine, but Joseph himself, who had been growing swiftly over the past year and a half, had up until now generally been more concerned with the quantity of the food he ate than with its quality.

So he fell with great avidity upon the tray of Indigene food, but was surprised to find he could not eat very much of it despite the intensity of his appetite. The fever was returning, he realized. His head had begun to ache, his skin felt hot and dry to his own touch, his throat was constricted. He asked for and received a few more of the green succulent stems, which provided the same short-term relief as before, and then the Indigenes left him and he settled back on his bed of furs to get some sleep. The furs had a sour, tangy, insistent odor that he did not like, nor did he care for the unpleasant milky sweetness of the air itself in here, but despite those distractions he fell quickly into a deep, welcome sleep.

When he opened his eyes again daylight was coming through the slits in the walls. It had been late at night when he arrived here, practically morning; he wondered whether he had slept through an entire day and a night, and this was the second morning. Probably so. And just as well, he thought, considering the fragmentary nature of the sleep he had had in the forest.

For the first time since his arrival he thought of the noctambulo who had been his guide in the wilderness. He asked the Indigenes about it, but the only answer he got was a gesture of crossed arms, the Indigene equivalent of a shrug. The Indigenes knew nothing of the noctambulo. Perhaps they had not even noticed its presence, and it had simply wandered off after delivering him. Joseph realized that from first to last he had understood nothing of the noctambulo’s purposes and motives, if it had any. It had tracked him, it had fed him, it had brought him here, and now it was gone, and he never would know anything more.

The fever did not seem to be much of a problem this morning. It was easier for him to eat than before. Afterward he asked one of the Indigenes to help him rise. The Indigene extended one loose-jointed ropy arm and drew him to his feet, raising him in one smooth motion as though Joseph had no weight at all.

He leaned on his walking-stick and inspected himself. His left leg was purple and black with bruises and terribly swollen from mid-thigh to ankle. Even his toes seemed puffy. The leg looked grotesque, ghastly, a limb that belonged to a creature of another species entirely. Little arrows of pain traversed its length. Simply looking at the leg made it hurt.

Cautiously Joseph tried putting some weight on his foot, the merest bit of experimental pressure. That was a mistake. He touched just the tips of his toes to the floor and winced as an immediate stern warning came rocketing up toward his brain: Stop! Don’t! All right, he told himself. A bad idea. He would have to wait a little longer. How long would healing take, though? Three days? A week? A month? He had to get on his way. They would be worried sick about him at home. Surely word had reached Helikis by now of the uprising in the north. The interruption in combinant communication alone would be indication enough that something was wrong.

He was confident that once he reached Ludbrek House he would be able to send some sort of message to his family, even if the Ludbreks could not arrange transportation to Helikis for him right away, because of the present troubles. But first he had to get to Ludbrek House. Joseph could not guess how far from here that might be. The Great Houses of Helikis were set at considerable distances from one another, and probably that was true up here, too. Still, it should be no more than three days’ journey, or four by wagon. Unless these Indigenes had more interest in the machines of the Masters than those of the Southland did, they would not have cars or trucks of any sort, but they should, at least, have wagons, drawn by teams of bandars or more likely, he supposed, yaramirs, that could get them there. He would inquire about that later in the day. But also he had to recover to a point where he would be able to withstand the rigors of the journey.

Joseph hunted through the utility case to see if it contained medicines of any sort, something to control fever, or to reduce inflammation. There did not seem to be. An odd omission, he thought. He did find a couple of small devices that perhaps were medical instruments: one that looked as if it could be used for stitching up minor wounds, and another that apparently provided a way of testing water for bacterial contamination. Neither of those, though, would do him any good at present.

He asked for and got more of the succulent herb. That eased things a little. Then, when it occurred to him that bandaging his leg might speed the process of healing, he suggested to one of the Indigenes who seemed to be in virtually constant attendance on him that it would be helpful if the Indigene were to bring him a bolt or two of the light cottony fabric out of which they fashioned their own clothing.

“I will do that,” the Indigene replied.

But there was a problem. The leg was so stiff and swollen that he could not flex it. There was no way Joseph could reach down as far as his ankle to do the wrapping himself.

“What is your name?” he said to the Indigene who had brought the cloth. It was time to start making an attempt to look upon these people as individuals.

“I am Ulvas.”

“Ulvas, I need your help in this,” Joseph said. As always, he employed the supplicatory tense. It was becoming quite natural for him to frame his sentences that way, which Joseph took as a sign that he was not just translating his thoughts from the Master tongue to Indigene, but actually thinking in the language of the Indigenes.

“I will help you,” Ulvas replied, the customary response to almost any supplication. But the Indigene gave Joseph a look of unmistakable perplexity. “Is it that you wish to do something with the cloth? Then it is needful that you tell me what is it is that you wish me to do.”

“To bind my leg,” Joseph said, gesturing. “From here to here.”

The Indigene did not seem to have any very clear concept of what binding Joseph’s leg would involve. On its first attempt it merely draped a useless loose shroud of cloth around his ankle. Carefully, using the most courteous mode of instruction he could find, Joseph explained that that was not what he had in mind. Other Indigenes gathered in the room. They murmured to one another. Ulvas turned away from Joseph and consulted them. A lengthy discussion ensued, all of it too softly and swiftly spoken for Joseph to be able to follow. Then the Indigene began again, turning to Joseph for approval at every step of the way. This time it wound the cloth more tightly, beginning with the arch of Joseph’s foot, going around the ankle, up along his calf. Whenever Ulvas allowed the binding to slacken, Joseph offered mild correction.

The whole group of Indigenes crowded around, staring with unusual wide-eyed intensity. Joseph had had little experience in deciphering the facial expressions of Indigenes, but it seemed quite apparent that they were watching as though something extraordinary were under way.

From time to time during the process Joseph gasped as the tightening bandage, in the course of bringing things back into alignment, struck a lode of pain in the battered limb. But he knew that he was doing the right thing in having his leg bandaged like this. Immobilize the damned leg: that way, at least, he would not constantly be putting stress on the torn or twisted parts whenever he made the slightest movement, and it would begin to heal. Already he could feel the bandage’s beneficial effects. The thick binding gripped and held his leg firmly, though not so firmly, he hoped, as to cut off circulation, just tightly enough to constrain it into the proper position.

When the wrapping had reached as far as his knee, Joseph released the Indigene from its task and finished the job himself, winding the bandage upward and upward until it terminated at the fleshiest part of his thigh. He fastened it there to keep it from unraveling and looked up in satisfaction. “That should do it, I think,” he said.

The entire group of Indigenes was still staring at him in the same wonderstruck way.

He wondered what could arouse such curiosity in them. Was it the fact that his body was bare from the waist down? Very likely that was it. Joseph smiled. These people would never have had reason to see a naked human before. This was something quite new to them. Having no external genitalia of their own, they must be fascinated by those strange organs dangling between his legs. That had to be the explanation, he thought. It was hard to imagine that they would get so worked up over a simple thing like the bandaging of a leg.

But he was wrong. It was the bandage, not the unfamiliarities of his anatomy, that was the focus of their attention.

He found that out a few hours later, after he had spent some time hobbling about his room with the aid of his stick, and had had a midday meal of stewed vegetables and braised illimani meat brought to him. He was experimenting with the still useless combinant once again, his first attempt with it in days, when there came a sound of reed-flute music from the corridor, the breathy, toneless music that had some special significance for the Indigenes, and then an Indigene of obvious grandeur and rank entered the room, a personage who very likely was the chieftain of the village, or perhaps the high priest, if they had such things as high priests. It was clad not in simple cotton robes but in a brightly painted leather cape and a knee-length leather skirt much bedecked with strings of seashells, and it carried itself with unusual dignity and majesty. Signalling to the musicians to be still, it looked toward Joseph and said, “I am the Ardardin. I give the visiting Master good greeting and grant him the favor of our village.”

Ardardinwas not a word in Joseph’s vocabulary, but he took it to be a title among these people. The Ardardin asked Joseph briefly about the uprising at Getfen House and his own flight through the forest. Then, indicating Joseph’s bandaged leg, it said, “Will that wrapping cause your injuries to heal more quickly?”

“So I expect, yes.”

“The matagava of the Masters is a powerful thing.”

Matagava, Joseph knew, was a word that meant something like “magic,” “supernatural power,” “spiritual force.” But he suspected that in this context it had other meanings too: “scientific skill,” “technical prowess.” The Indigenes were known to have great respect for such abilities in that area as the humans who lived on their world manifested—their technology, their engineering achievements, their capacity to fly through the air from continent to continent and through space from world to world. They did not seem to covet such powers themselves, not in the slightest, but they clearly admired them. And now he was being hailed as a person of great matagava himself. Why, though, should a simple thing like bandaging an injured leg qualify as a display of matagava? Joseph wanted to protest that the Ardardin did him too much honor. But he was fearful of giving offense, and said nothing.

“Can you walk a short distance?” the Ardardin asked. “There is something I would like to show you nearby, if you will come.”

Since he had already discovered that a certain amount of walking was, though difficult, not impossible for him, Joseph said that he would. He used his stick as a crutch, so that he would not have to touch his sore foot to the ground. Two Indigenes, the one named Ulvas and another one, walked close beside him so that they could steady him if he began to fall.

The Ardardin led Joseph along a spiral corridor that opened unexpectedly into fresh air, and thence to a second building behind the one where he had been staying. Within its gloomy central hall were three Indigenes lying on fur mats. Joseph could see at first glance that all three were sick, that this must be an infirmary of some sort.

“Will you examine them?” the Ardardin asked.

The request took Joseph by surprise. Examine them? Had they somehow decided that he must be a skilled physician, simply because he had been able to manage something as elementary as bandaging a sprained knee?

But he could hardly refuse the request. He looked down at the trio of Indigenes. One, he saw, had a nasty ulcerated wound in its thigh, seemingly not deep but badly infected. Its forehead was bright with the glow of a high fever. Another had apparently broken its arm: no bone was showing, but the way the arm was bent argued for a fracture. There was nothing outwardly wrong with the third Indigene, but it held both its hands pressed tight against its abdomen, making what had to be an indication of severe pain.

The Ardardin stared at Joseph in an unambiguously expectant way. Its fleshy throat-pouch was pouting in and out at great speed. Joseph felt mounting uneasiness.

It began to occur to him that the medical techniques of the Indigenes might go no farther than the use of simple herbal remedies. Anything more complicated than the brewing of potions might be beyond them. Closing a wound, say, or setting a broken bone. Getting a pregnant woman through a difficult childbirth. And any kind of surgery, certainly. You needed very great matagava to perform such feats, greater matagava than had been granted to these people.

And the human Masters had that kind of matagava, yes. With the greatest of ease they could perform feats that to the Indigenes must seem like miracles.

Joseph knew that if his father were here right now, he would deal swiftly enough with the problems of these three—do something about the infected thigh, set the broken arm, arrive at an explanation of the third one’s pain and cope with its cause. At home he had many times seen Martin, in the course of his circuits around the estate, handle cases far more challenging than these seemed to be. His father’s matagava was a powerful thing, yes: or, to put it another way, it was his father’s responsibility to look after the lives and welfare of all those who lived on the lands of House Keilloran and he accepted that responsibility fully, and so he had taken the trouble to learn at least certain basic techniques of medicine in order that he could meet an emergency in the fields.

But Joseph was not the lord of House Keilloran, and he had had no formal medical training. He was only a boy of fifteen, who might one day inherit his father’s title and his father’s responsibilities, and he was a long way just now from being prepared to undertake any sort of adult tasks. Did the Ardardin not realize how young he was? Probably not. Indigenes might be no better able to distinguish an adolescent human from an adult one than humans were when it came to distinguishing a male Indigene from a female one. The Ardardin perceived him as a human, that was all, and very likely as a full-grown one. His height and the new beard he had grown would help in fostering that belief. And humans had great matagava; this Joseph Master Keilloran who had come among them was a human; therefore—

“Will you do it?” the Ardardin said, using not just the supplicatory tense but a form that Joseph thought might be known to grammarians as the intensive supplicatory. The Indigene—the chieftain, the high priest—was begging him.

He could not bear to disappoint them. He hated doing anything under false pretenses, and he did not want to arouse any false hopes, either. But he could not resist an abject plea, either. These people had willingly taken him in, and they had cared for him these two days past, and they had promised to transport him to Ludbrek House when he was strong enough to leave their village. Now they wanted something from him in return. And he did have at least some common-sense notions of first aid. There was no way he could refuse this request.

“Can you raise them up a little higher?” he asked. “I’m not able to bend, because of my leg.”

The Ardardin gestured, and several Indigenes piled up a tall stack of furs and placed the one with the wound in its thigh on top. Bending forward a little, Joseph inspected the cut. It was three or four inches long, perhaps half an inch wide, fairly shallow. There was swelling all around, and reddening of the bronze-colored skin. Hesitantly Joseph placed his fingertips against the ragged edges of the opening. The texture of the alien skin was smooth, unyielding, almost slippery, oddly unreal. A small sighing sound came from the Indigene at Joseph’s touch, but nothing more. That did not sound like an indicator of severe pain. Gently Joseph drew the sides of the wound apart and peered in.

He saw pus, plenty of it. But the wound was filthy, besides, covered with a myriad of black spots, the dirt of whatever object had caused it. Joseph doubted that it had ever been cleaned. Did these people not even have enough sense to wash a gash like this out?

“I need a bowl of hot water,” Joseph said. “And clean cloth of the kind I used for bandaging my leg.”

This was like being an actor in a play, he thought. He was playing the role of The Doctor.

But that was no actor lying on the pile of furs before him, and that wound was no artifact of stage makeup. He felt a little queasy as he swabbed it clean. The Indigene stirred, moaned a little, made a small shuddering movement.

“The juice that you gave me, to make my fever go down: give some of that to him too.”

“To her,” someone behind him corrected.

“To her,” said Joseph, searching for and not finding any indication that his patient was female. Doubtless the Indigenes did have two sexes, because there were both male and female pronouns in their language, but all of them, male and female both, had the same kind of narrow transverse slit at the base of the abdomen, and whatever sort of transformation came over that slit during the sexual process, what organs of intromission or reception might emerge at that time, was not anything that the Indigenes had ever thought necessary to explain to any human.

He cleaned the wound of as much superficial dirt as he could, and expressed a good deal of pus, and laved the opening several times with warm water. The queasiness he had felt at first while handling the wound quickly vanished. He grew very calm, almost detached: after a while all that mattered to him was the task itself, the process of undoing the damage that neglect and infection had caused. Not only was he able to steel himself against whatever incidental pain he might be causing the patient in the course of the work, but he realized a little while further on that he was concentrating so profoundly on the enterprise that he had begun to forget to notice the pain of his own injury.

He wished he had some kind of antiseptic ointment to apply, but his command of the Indigene language did not extend as far as any word for antisepsis, and when he asked if their herbal remedies included anything for reducing the inflammation of an open wound, they did not seem to understand what he was saying. No antisepsis, then. He hoped that the Indigene’s natural healing processes were up to the task of fighting off such infection as had already taken hold.

When he had done all that he could to clean the wound Joseph instructed Ulvas in the art of bandaging it to hold it closed. He did not want to experiment with using the device from his utility case that seemed to be designed for stitching wounds, partly because he was not certain that that was what it was for, and partly because he doubted that he had cleaned the wound sufficiently to make stitching it up at this point a wise thing to do. Later, he thought, he would ask Ulvas to bring him a chunk of raw meat and he would practice using the device to close an incision, and then, perhaps, he could wash the wound out a second time and close it. But he dared not attempt to use the instrument now, not with everyone watching.

Dealing with the broken arm was a more straightforward business. The field-hands of House Keilloran broke limbs all the time, and it was a routine thing for them to be brought to his father for repairs. Joseph had watched the process often enough. A compound fracture would have been beyond him, but this looked like nothing more than a simple break. What you did, he knew, was manipulate the limb to make the fractured bone drop back into its proper alignment, and bind it up to keep the broken ends from moving around, and do what was necessary to reduce inflammation. Time would take care of the rest. At least, that was how it worked with Folkish fractures. But there was no reason to think that Indigene bones were very different in basic physiology.

Joseph wanted to be gentle as he went about the work. But what he discovered very quickly was that in working on an unanaesthetized patient the key lay in getting the job over with as fast as possible, rather than moving with tiny circumspect steps in an attempt to avoid inflicting pain. That would only draw things out and make it worse. You had to take hold, pull, push, hope for the best. The patient—this one was male, they told him—made one sharp grunting sound as Joseph, acting out an imitation of the things he had seen his father do, grasped his limply dangling forearm with one hand and the upper part of his arm with the other and exerted sudden swift inward pressure. After the grunt came a gasp, and then a sigh, and then a kind of exhalation that seemed to be entirely one of relief.

There, Joseph thought, with a hot burst of satisfaction. He had done it. Matagava, indeed! “Bind the arm the way you bound my leg,” he told Ulvas, no supplication this time, simple instruction, and moved to the next patient.

But the third case was a baffling one. What was he supposed to do about a swollen abdomen? He had no way of making a rational diagnosis. Perhaps there was a tumor in there, perhaps it was an intestinal blockage, or perhaps—this patient was another female—the problem was a complication of pregnancy. But, though he had blithely enough talked himself into going through with this medical masquerade, Joseph’s audacity did not begin to extend to a willingness to perform a surgical exploration of the patient’s interior. He had no notion of how to go about such a thing, for one—the thought of trying to make an incision in living flesh brought terrifying images to his mind—nor would there be any purpose in it, anyway, for he had no inkling of internal Indigene anatomy, would not be able to tell one organ from another, let alone detect any abnormality. So he did nothing more than solemnly pass his hands up and down over the patient’s taut skin with a kind of stagy solemnity, feeling the strangeness again, that cool dry inorganic unreality, lightly pressing here and there, as though seeking by touch alone some understanding of the malady within. He thought he should at least seem to be making an attempt of some kind at performing an examination, however empty and foolish he knew it to be, and since he did not dare do anything real this would have to suffice. He was, at any rate, unable to feel anything unusual within the abdominal cavity by these palpations, no convulsive heavings of troubled organs, no sign of some massive cancerous growth. But then, thinking he should do something more and obeying a sudden stab of inspiration, Joseph found himself making broad sweeping gestures in the air above the Indigene and intoning a nonsensical little rhythmic chant, as primitive witch-doctors were known to do in old adventure stories that he had read. It was sheer play-acting, and a surge of contempt for his own childishness went sweeping through him even as he did it, but for the moment he was unable to resist his own silly impulse.

Only for a moment. Then he could no longer go on with the game.

Joseph looked away, embarrassed. “For this one I am unable to do anything further,” he told the Ardardin. “And you must allow me to lie down now. I am not well myself, and very tired.”

“Yes. Of course. But we thank you deeply, Master Joseph.”

He felt bitter shame for the fraud he had just perpetrated. Not just the preposterous business at the end, but the entire cruel charade. What would his father say, he wondered? A boy of fifteen, posing as a doctor? Piously laying claim to skills he did not in any way possess? The proper thing to do, he knew, would have been to say, “I’m sorry, I’m just a boy, the truth is that I have no right to be doing this.” But they had wanted so badly for him to heal these three people with the shining omnipotent human matagava that they knew he must have within him. The very grammar of the Ardardin’s request had revealed the intensity of their desire. And he had done no real harm, had he? Surely it was better to wash and bind a gash like that than to leave it open to fester. He felt confident that he had actually set that broken arm properly, too. He could not forgive himself, though, for that last bit of disgraceful chicanery.

His leg was hurting again, too. They had left a beaker of the succulent-juice by his bedside. He took enough of it to ease the pain and slipped off into a fitful sleep.

When he awoke the next day he found that they had set out inviting-looking bowls of fruit at his side and had put festive bundles of flowers all around his chamber, long-tubed reddish blossoms that had a peppery aroma. It all looked celebratory. They had not brought him flowers before. Several Indigenes were kneeling beside him, waiting for him to open his eyes. Joseph was beginning to recognize the distinct features of different individuals, now. He saw Ulvas nearby, and another who had told him yesterday that its name was Cuithal, and a third whom he did not know. Then the Ardardin entered, bearing an additional armload of flowers: plainly an offering. It laid them at Joseph’s feet and made an intricate gesture that seemed certainly, alien though it was, to be one of honor and respect.

The Ardardin earnestly inquired after the state of Joseph’s health. It seemed to Joseph that his leg was giving him less discomfort this morning, and he said so. To this the Ardardin replied that his three patients were greatly improved also, and were waiting just outside in the hallway to express their thanks.

So this will go on and on, Joseph thought, abashed. But he could hardly refuse to see them. They came in one by one, each bearing little gifts to add to those already filling Joseph’s room: more flowers, more fruit, smooth-sided ceramic vessels that his father would gladly have owned, brightly colored weavings. Their eyes were gleaming with gratitude, awe, perhaps even love. The one who had had the infected wound in her thigh looked plainly less feverish. The one with the broken arm—it had been very nicely bound by Ulvas, Joseph saw—seemed absolutely cheerful. Joseph was relieved and considerably gratified to see that his amateur ministrations had not only done no harm but seemed actually to have been beneficial.

But the great surprise was the third patient, the one with the swollen abdomen, over whom Joseph had made those shameful witch-doctor conjurations. She appeared to be in a state of transcendental well-being, wholly aglow with radiant emanations of health. Throwing herself at Joseph’s feet, she burst forth with a gushing, barely coherent expression of thankfulness that was almost impossible for him to follow in any detailed way, but was clear enough in general meaning.

Joseph hardly knew how to react. The code of honor by which he had been raised left no room for taking credit for something you had not done. Certainly it would be even worse to accept credit for something achieved accidentally, something you had brought about in the most cynical and flippant manner.

Yet he could not deny that this woman had risen from her bed of pain just hours after he had made those foolish conjurations above her body. A purely coincidental recovery, he thought. Or else his idiotic mumblings had engendered in her such a powerful wave of faith in his great matagava that she had expelled the demon of torment from her body on her own. What could he say? “No, you are mistaken to thank me, I did nothing of any value for you, this is all an illusion?” He did not have the heart to say any such things. There was the risk of shattering her fragile recovery by doing so, if indeed faith alone had healed her. Nor did he want to reject ungraciously the gratitude of these people for what they thought he had done for them. He remained aware that he was still dependent on them himself. If a little inward embarrassment was the price of getting himself from here to Ludbrek House, so be it. Let them think he had worked miracles, then. Perhaps he had. In any event let them feel obligated to him, because he needed help from them. Even the honor of a Master must sometimes be subordinated to the needs of sheer survival, eh, Balbus? Eh?

Besides—no question about this part of it—there was real satisfaction in doing something useful for others, no matter how muddledly he had accomplished it. The one thing that had been dinned into him from childhood, as the heir to House Keilloran, is that Masters did not simply rule, they also served. The two concepts were inextricably intertwined. You had the good luck to be born a Master instead of one of the Folk, yes, and that meant you lived a privileged life of comfort and power. But it was not merely a life of casual taking, of living cheerfully at one’s ease at the expense of hardworking humbler people. Only a fool would think that that was what a Master’s life was like. A Master lived daily in a sense of duty and obligation to all those around him.

Thus far Joseph had not had much opportunity to discharge those duties and obligations. At this stage of his life he was expected mainly to observe and learn. He would not be given any actual administrative tasks at the House until his sixteenth birthday. For now his job was only to prepare himself for his ultimate responsibilities. And there always were servants on all sides of him to take care of the things that ordinary people had to do for themselves, making things easy for him while he was doing his observing and learning.

He felt a little guilty about that. He was quite aware that up till now, up till the moment of his flight into the woods with Getfen House ablaze behind him, his life had been one of much privilege and little responsibility. He was not a doer yet, only someone for whom things were done. There had been no real tests for him, neither of his abilities nor of his innate character.

Was he, then, truly a good person? That remained open to question. Since he had never been tested, he had no way of knowing. He had done things he should not have done. He had rebelled sometimes, at least inwardly, against his father’s absolute authority. He had been guilty of little blasphemies and minor acts of wickedness. He had been needlessly harsh with his younger brothers, enjoying the power that his age and strength gave him over them, and he knew that that was wrong. He had gone through a phase of wanting to torment his sometimes irritating sister Cailin, mocking her little frailties of logic and hiding or even destroying her cherished things, and had felt real pleasure mingled with the guilt of that. All these things, he knew, were things that most boys did and would outgrow, and he could not really condemn himself for doing them, but even so they left him with some uncertainty about whether he had been living on the path of virtue, as by definition a good person must do. He understood how to imitate being a good person, yes, how to do the kind of things that good persons did, but how sincere was it, really, to do that? Was it not the case that good people did good things through natural innate virtue, rather than consciously working up some flurry of good-deed-doing on special demand?

Well, there had been special demand just now, and, responding to it, he had wantonly allowed himself to pose as a doctor, which, considering that he had no real medical knowledge, could only be considered a bad thing, or at least morally questionable. But he had managed, all the same, to heal or at least improve the condition of three suffering people, and that was beyond doubt a good thing. What did that say about his own goodness, that he had achieved something virtuous by morally questionable means? He still did not know. But at least, for this murky reason or that one, this shabby motive or that, he had accomplished something that was undeniably good. He tried to cling to that awareness. Perhaps there were no innately good people, only people who made it their conscious task, for whatever reason, to do things that would be deemed good. Time alone would give him the answer to that. But still Joseph found himself hoping that he would discover, as he entered adulthood, that in fact he was fundamentally good, not simply pretending to goodness, and that everything he did would be for the best, not just for himself but for others.

Having done indisputably good deeds here in this village, the one thing Joseph feared more than anything else now was that they would not want to let such a powerful healer out of their grasp. But that was not how the minds of these people worked, evidently. In another few days his own healing had progressed to the point where he was able to walk with only a slight limp. Removing the bandage, he saw that the swelling was greatly reduced and the discoloration of his flesh was beginning to fade. Shortly Ulvas came to him and said they had a wagon ready to take him, now, to Ludbrek House.

It was a simple vehicle of the kind they used for hauling farm produce from place to place: big wooden wheels set on a wooden axle, an open cabin in back, a seat up front for the driver, a team of squat broad-shouldered yaramirs tethered to the shafts. The planked floor of the cabin in which Joseph rode had borne a cargo of vegetables not long before, and the scent of dark moist soil was still on the wood, and subtle smells of rotting leaves and stems. Two Indigenes whose names Joseph did not know sat up front to guide the team; another two, Ulvas and Cuithal, who seemed to have been appointed his special attendants, sat with him in back. They had given him a pile of furs to sit on, but the cart was not built for pleasure-riding and he felt every movement of the creaking irregular wheels against the ancient uneven road below.

This was no longer forest country, here, the ruggedly beautiful north country that was, or had been, the domain of House Getfen. This was farmland. Perhaps it was shared by Indigenes of several villages who came out from their settlements to work it. Most of it was perfectly flat, though it was broken in places by rolling meadows and fields, and Joseph could see low hills in the distance that were covered with stiff, close-set ranks of slender trees with purplish leaves.

His geography textbook might tell him something about the part of the country that he was entering. But since leaving Getfen House he had not so much as glanced at the little hand-held reader on which all his textbooks were stored, and he could not bring himself to take it out now. He was supposed to study every day, of course, even while he was up there in High Manza on holiday among his Getfen cousins: his science, his mathematics, his philosophy, his studies in languages and literature, and most particularly his history and geography lessons, designed to prepare him for his eventual role as a Master among Masters. The geography book described Homeworld from pole to pole, including things that he had never expected to experience at the close range he was seeing them now. The history of Homeworld was mainly the history of its great families and the regime that they had imposed on the Folk who had come here before them, although his lessons told him also of the first Homeworld, the ancient one called Earth, from which all humans had come once upon a time, and whose own history must never be forgotten, shadowy and remote though it was to its descendants here, because there were sorry aspects of that history that those descendants must take care never to recapitulate. And then there were all the other subjects that he knew he should be reading, even without Balbus here to direct him. Especially without Balbus here to direct him.

His energies had been focused on sheer survival during the days that had just gone by, though, and while he was wandering in the forest it seemed almost comically incongruous to sit huddled under some shelter of boughs reading about the distant past or the niceties of philosophy when at any moment some band of rebellious Folk might come upon him and put an end to his life. And then, later, when he was safe at the Indigene village, any thought of resuming his studies immediately brought to Joseph’s mind the image of his tutor Balbus lying sprawled on his back in the courtyard of Getfen House with his throat cut, and it became too painful for him to proceed. Now, jolting and bumping along through this Manza farm country, reading seemed impossible for other reasons. Joseph simply wanted to reach Ludbrek House as quickly as possible and return at long last to the company of his own people.

But Ludbrek House, when they came to it after a three-day journey, stood devastated atop its hilltop ridge. What was left of it was no more than a desolate scar across the green land. The burned roofless walls of the estate house stood out above cold dark heaps of rubble. Its mighty structural members were laid bare, charred and blackened timbers, spars, joists, beams, like the great skeleton of some giant prehistoric beast rising in a haunting fragmentary way from the matrix that enclosed it. There was the bitter ugly smell of smoke everywhere, old smoke, dead smoke, the smoke of fierce fires that had cooled many days ago.

The rest of the huge estate, so far as Joseph was able to see from where he stood, was in equally sorry condition. House Ludbrek, like House Getfen and House Keilloran, like any of the Great Houses of Homeworld, was the center of an immense sphere of productive activity. Radiating outward from the manor-house and its fields and gardens and parks were zone after zone of agricultural and industrial compounds, the farms and the homes of the farmers over here, the factories over there, the mills and millponds, the barns, the stables, the workers’ quarters and the commercial sectors that served them, and everything else that went to make up the virtually self-sufficient economic unit that was a Great House. It seemed to Joseph from where he stood looking out over the Ludbrek lands from his vantage point atop this hill that all of that had been given over to ruination. It was a sickening sight. The landscape was a nightmarish scene of wholesale destruction, long stretches of burned buildings, trucks and carts overturned, machinery smashed, farm animals slain, roads cut, dams broken, fields flooded. An oppressive stillness prevailed. Nothing moved; no sound could be heard.

Through him as he scanned the devastation from east to west and then from west to east again, gradually coming to terms with the reality of it, ran a storm of emotion: shock, horror, fear, sadness, and then, moments later, disgust and anger, a burst of fury at the stupidity of it all. There was no way at that moment for Joseph to step away from his own identity as a Master: and, as a Master, he raged at the idiotic wastefulness of the thing that had been done here.

What had these people believed they were accomplishing when they put not only Ludbrek House but House Ludbrek itself to the torch? Did they imagine they were striking a blow for freedom? Liberating themselves finally, after thousands of years of slavery, from the cruel grasp of the tyrannical overlords who had dropped down out of the stars to thrust their rule on them?

Well, yes, Joseph thought, that was surely what they believed they were doing. But what the Folk here had actually achieved was to destroy their own livelihoods: to wipe out in one brief orgy of blood and flame the fruits of centuries of careful planning and building. How would they support themselves now that the factories and mills were gone? Would they go back to tilling the soil as their ancestors had done before the first Masters arrived? If that was too much for them, they could simply scrabble in the woods for mud-crawlers and roots, as he himself had done not long before. Or would they just wander from province to province, begging their food from those who had not been so foolish as to torch their estates, or possibly just taking it from them? They had not given any thought to any of that. They had wanted only to overthrow their Masters, no doubt, but then when that was done they had been unable to halt their own juggernaut of destructiveness, and they had allowed it to go mindlessly on and on and on beyond that until they had completely broken, surely beyond any hope of repair, the very system that sustained their lives.

His four Indigenes stood to one side, silently watching him. Their slitted eyes and thin expressionless lips gave Joseph no clue to what they might be thinking. Perhaps they were thinking nothing at all: he had asked them to take him to this place, and they had done so, and here they were, and what one group of humans seemed to have done to the property of the other group of humans was no affair of theirs. They were waiting, he assumed, to find out what he wished them to do for him now, since it was plain that he would find nothing of any use to him here.

What did he want them to do for him now? What could they do for him now?

He moistened his lips and said, “What is the name of the next Great House to the south? How far is it from here?”

They made no reply. None of them reacted to Joseph’s question in any way. It was almost as though they had not understood his words.

“Ulvas? Cuithal?” He shot a direct glance at them this time, a Master’s glance, and put a slight sharpness in his tone this time. For whatever that might be worth, a Master speaking to Indigenes, for whom his status as a Master very likely had no very important significance. Especially now, here, amid these ruins. But probably not under any other circumstances, either. Whatever respect for him they might have was founded on his deeds as a healer, not on the rank he might hold among humans.

This time, though, he got an answer, though not a satisfying one. It was Ulvas who spoke. “Master Joseph, we are not able to say.”

“And why is that?”

“Because we do not know.” This time the response came from Cuithal. “We know House Getfen to the north of us, beyond the forest. We know House Ludbrek to the south of us. Other than those two, we know nothing about the Great Houses. There has never been need for us to know.”

That seemed plausible enough. Joseph could not claim any real skill in interpreting the shades of meaning in an Indigene’s tone of voice, but there was no reason to think they would lie to him about a matter of mere fact, or, indeed, about anything whatever. And it might well be that if he got back into the wagon and asked them to take him on toward the south until they came to the domain of another Great House, they would do so.

The next House, though, might be hundreds of miles away. And might well turn out to be in the same sorry shape as this one. Joseph could not ask these Indigenes, however devoted to him they might be, to travel on and on and on with him indefinitely, taking him some unstipulated distance beyond from their own village in the pursuit of so dubious a quest. But the only other alternative, short of his continuing on alone through this wrecked and probably dangerous province, was to return to the village of the Indigenes, and what use was there in that? He had to keep on moving southward. He did not want to end his days serving as tribal witch-doctor to a village of Indigenes somewhere in High Manza.

They stood perfectly still, waiting for him to speak. But he did not know what to tell them. Suddenly he could not bear their silent stares. Perhaps he would do better going a short distance off to collect his thoughts. Their proximity was distracting. “Stay here,” Joseph said, after a long uncomfortable moment. “I want to look around a bit.”

“You do not want us to accompany you, Master Joseph?”

“No. Not now. Just stay here until I come back.”

He turned away from them. The burned-out manor-house lay about a hundred yards in front of him. He walked slowly toward it. It was a frightful thing to see. Was this what Getfen House looked like this morning? Keilloran House, even? It was painful just to draw a breath here. That bleak, stale, sour stink of extinct combustion, of ashes turned cold but still imbued with the sharp chemical odor of fast oxidation, jabbed at his nostrils with palpable force. Joseph imagined it coating his lungs with dark specks. He went past the gaping faзade and found himself in the ash-choked ruins of a grand vestibule, with a series of even grander rooms opening before him, though they were only the jagged crusts of rooms now. He stood at the lip of a vast crater that might once have been a ballroom or a festival-hall. There was no way to proceed here, for the floor was mostly gone, and where it still remained the fallen timbers of the roof jutted upward before him, blocking the way. He had to move carefully, on account of his injured leg. Going around to the left, Joseph entered what might have been a servants’ station, leading to a low-roofed room that from the looks of it had probably been a way-kitchen for the reheating of dishes brought up from the main kitchens below. A hallway behind that took him to rooms of a grander nature, where blackened stone sculptures stood in alcoves and tattered tapestries dangled from the walls.

The splendor and richness of Ludbrek House was evident in every inch of the place, even now. This chamber might have been a music room; this, a library; this long hall, a gallery of paintings. The destruction had been so monstrously thorough that very little was left of any of that. But also the very monstrosity of it numbed Joseph’s mind to what he was seeing. One could not continue endlessly to react in shock to this. The capacity to react soon was exhausted. One could only, after a while, absorb it in a state of calm acceptance and even with a certain cool fascination, the sort of reaction one might have while visiting the excavated ruins of some city that had been buried by a flood of volcanic lava five thousand years before.

By one route and another, bypassing places where there had been serious structural collapses, Joseph came out at last on a broad flagstone terrace that looked down into the main garden of the estate. The garden had been laid out in a broad bowl-shaped depression that sloped gradually away toward a wooded zone beyond, and, to Joseph’s surprise, it bore scarcely any trace of damage. The velvety lawns were green and unmarked. The avenues of shrubbery were intact. The marble fountains that flanked the long string of reflecting pools still were spouting, and the pools themselves gleamed like newly polished mirrors in the midday light. The winding pathways of crushed white stone were as neat as if gardeners had come out this very morning to tidy them. Perhaps, he thought, surprised at himself for being able to summon even an atom of playfulness amidst these terrible surroundings, it was the estate’s gardeners who had organized the uprising here, and they had taken care to have the attack bypass the grounds to which they had devoted so much of their energy. But more probably it had simply been more effective to break into the manor-house from the opposite side.

He stood for a time clutching the cool marble rail of the terrace, looking out into the immaculate garden and trying to focus on the problems that now confronted him. But no answers came. He had come up north to Getfen House for what was supposed to be a happy coming-of-age trip, a southern boy learning new ways far from home, making new friends, subtly forging alliances that would stand him in good stead in his adult life ahead. It had all gone so well. The Getfens had gathered him in as though he were one of their own. Joseph had even quietly fallen in love, although he had kept all that very much to himself, with his beautiful gentle golden-haired cousin Kesti. Now Kesti and all the Getfens were dead; and here he was at Ludbrek House, where he had hoped he would find an exit from the tumult that had engulfed this land, and everything was ruined here too, and no exit was in sight. Truly a coming-of-age trip, Joseph thought. But not in any way that he had imagined it would be.

And then as he stood there pondering these things he thought he heard a sound down toward his left, a creaking board, perhaps, a thump or two, as if someone were moving around in one of the lower levels of the shattered building. Another thump. Another.

Joseph stiffened. Those unexpected creaks and thumps rose up over the icy deathly silence that prevailed here as conspicuously as though what he was hearing was the pounding of drums.

“Who is it?” he called instantly. “Who’s there?” And regretted that at once. He realized that he had unthinkingly spoken in Master: an addlepated mistake, possibly a fatal one if that happened to be a rebel sentry who was marching around down there.

Quickly all was silent again.

Not a sentry, no. A straggler, he thought. A survivor. Perhaps even a fugitive like himself. It had to be. There were no rebels left here, or he would have caught sight of them by this time. They had done their work and they had moved on. If they were still here they would be openly patrolling the grounds, not skulking around in the cellars like that, and they would not recoil into instant wary silence at the sound of a human voice, either. A Master’s voice at that. Rebels would be up here in a moment to see who was speaking.

So who was it, then? Joseph wondered if that could be one of the Ludbreks down there, someone who had managed to survive the massacre of his House and had been hiding here ever since. Was that too wild a thing to consider? He had to know.

Checking it out alone and unarmed, though, was a crazy thing to do. Moving faster than was really good for his injured leg, he doubled back toward the front of the gutted house, following his own trail in the ashes. As he emerged from the vestibule he beckoned to the Indigenes, who were waiting where he had left them and did not seem to have moved at all in his absence. They were unarmed also, of course, and inherently peaceful people as well, but they had great physical strength and he was sure they would protect him if any kind of trouble should manifest itself.

“There’s someone alive here, hidden away below the building,” Joseph told them. “I heard the sounds he was making. Come help me find him.”

They followed unquestioningly. He led them back through the dark immensities of the ruined house and out onto the terrace, and jabbed a pointing finger downward. “There,” Joseph said. “Under the terrace.”

A curving stone staircase linked the terrace to the garden. Joseph descended, with the Indigenes close behind. There was a whole warren of subterranean chambers beneath the terrace, he saw, that opened out onto the garden. Perhaps these rooms had been used for the storage of tables and utensils for the lawn parties that the Masters of Ludbrek House had enjoyed in days gone by. They were mostly empty now. Joseph stared in.

“Over there, Master Joseph,” Ulvas said.

The Indigene’s eyesight was better adapted to darkness than his. Joseph saw nothing. But as he moved cautiously inward he heard a sound—a little shuffling sound, perhaps—and then a cough, and then a quavering voice was addressing him in a muddled mixture of Folkish and Master, imploring him to be merciful with a poor old man, begging him to show compassion: “I have committed no crimes. I have done nothing wrong, I promise you that. Do not hurt me, please. Please. Do not hurt me.”

“Come out where I can see you,” Joseph said, in Master.

Out of the musty darkness came a stooped slow-moving figure, an old man indeed, sixty or perhaps even seventy years old, dressed in rags, with coarse matted hair that had cobwebs in it, and great smudges of dirt on his face. Plainly he was of the Folk. He had the thick shoulders and deep chest of the Folk, and the broad wide-nostrilled nose, and the heavy jaw. He must have been very strong, once. A field-serf, Joseph supposed. His frame was still powerful. But now he looked haggard and feeble, his face grayish beneath all the dirt, his cheeks hanging in loose folds as though he had eaten nothing in days, dark shadows below his haunted red-streaked eyes. Blinking, trembling, terrified-looking, he advanced with uncertain wavering steps toward Joseph, halted a few feet away, sank slowly to his knees before him.

“Spare me!” he cried, looking down at Joseph’s feet. “I am guilty of nothing! Nothing!”

“You are in no danger, old man. Look up at me. Yes, that’s right. —I tell you, no harm will come to you.”

“You are truly a Master?” the man asked, as though fearing that Joseph were some sort of apparition.

“Truly I am.”

“You do not look like other Masters I have seen. But yet you speak their language. You have the bearing of a Master. Of which House are you, Master?”

“House Keilloran.”

“House Keilloran,” the old man repeated. He had obviously never heard the name before.

“It is in Helikis,” said Joseph, still speaking in Master. “That is in the south.” Then, this time using Folkish, he said: “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“I am Waerna of Ludbrek. This is my home.”

“This is nobody’s home now.”

“Not now, no. Not any more. But I have never known any other. My home is here, Master. When the others left, I stayed behind, for where would I go? What would I do?” A distraught look came into the bloodshot brown eyes. “They killed all the Masters, do you know that, Master? I saw it happen. It was in the night. Master Vennek was the first to die, and then Master Huist, Master Seebod, Master Graene, and all the wives, and the children also. All of them. And even their dogs. The wives and children had to watch while they killed the men, and then they were killed too. It was Vaniye who did it. I heard him say, ‘Kill them all, leave no Master alive.’ Vaniye who was practically like a son to Master Vennek. They killed everyone with knives, and then they burned the bodies, and they burned the house also. And then they went away, but I stayed, for where would I go? This is my place. My wife is long dead. My daughter as well. I have no one. I could not leave. I am of Ludbrek House.”

“Indeed you are all that remains of Ludbrek House,” said Joseph, barely able to contain the sadness he felt.

The old man’s teeth were chattering. He huddled miserably into himself and a great convulsive quiver went rippling through him. He must be right at the edge of starvation, Joseph thought. He asked the Indigenes to fetch some food for him. One of the two drivers went back to the wagon and returned with smoked meat, dried berries, a little flask of the milky-colored Indigene wine. Waerna contemplated the food with interest but also with a certain show of hesitation. Joseph thought it might be because Indigene food was unfamiliar to him, but that was not it at all: it was only that he had not eaten anything in so long that his stomach was rebelling at the mere idea of food. The old man nibbled at the fruit and took a tentative sip of the wine. After that it was easier, and he ate steadily, though not greedily, one bite after another until everything before him was gone.

Some color was returning to his cheeks, now. He seemed already to be regaining his strength. He looked up at Joseph and said, almost tearfully, “You are very kind, Master. I have never known Masters to be anything but kind. When they killed the Masters here, I felt as though they were ripping my own heart out of my body.” And then, in a different tone, a new thought suddenly occurring: “But why are you here, Master? This is no place for you to visit. It is not safe for you, here.”

“I am only passing through these parts. Traveling south, to my home in Helikis.”

“But how will you do that? If they find you, they will kill you. They are killing Masters everywhere.”

“Everywhere?” said Joseph, thinking of Keilloran.

“Everywhere. It was the plan, and now they have done it. The Masters of House Ludbrek and those of House Getfen and those of House Siembri for certain, and I heard House Fyelk also, and House Odum, and House Garn. It was the plan to rise up against all the Great Houses of Manza, and burn the buildings, and kill all the Masters. As I saw done here. And they have done it, this I know. Dead, dead, everyone dead in all the Houses, or nearly so. Roads have been closed. Rebel patrols search for those who escaped the slaughter.” Waerna was trembling again. He seemed on the verge of tears.

Joseph felt a sudden terrifying flood of despair himself. He had not left room in his spirit for this disappointment. Having from the beginning of his flight into the woods expected to find succor at Ludbrek House, an end to his solitary travail and the beginning of his return to his home and family, and discovering instead nothing but ashes and ruination and this shattered old man, he found himself struggling to maintain equilibrium in his soul. It was not easy. A vision rose before him of a chain of charred and desolate manor-houses stretching all the way south to the Isthmus, triumphant Folkish rebels controlling the roads everywhere, the last few surviving Masters hunted down one by one and given over to death.

He looked toward Ulvas and said, speaking in Indigene, “He tells me that all the Houses everywhere in Manza have been destroyed.”

“Perhaps that is not so, Master Joseph,” said the Indigene gently.

“But what if it is? What am I to do, if it is?” Joseph’s voice sounded weirdly shrill in his own ears. For the moment he felt as helpless and forlorn as old Waerna. This was new to him, this weakness, this fear. He had not known that he was capable of such feelings. But of course he had never been tested in this way. “How will I manage? Where will I go?”

As soon as the shameful words had escaped his lips, Joseph wanted passionately to call them back. It was the first time since the night of the massacre at Getfen House that he had allowed any show of uncertainty over the ultimate success of his journey to break through into the open. “You must never deceive yourself about the difficulties you face,” Balbus had often told him, “but neither should you let yourself be taken prisoner by fear.” Joseph had known from the start that it would be no easy thing to find his way alone across this unfamiliar continent to safety, but he had been taught to meet each day’s challenges as they arose, and so he had. Whenever doubts had begun to come drifting up out of the depths of his mind he had been able to shove them back. This time, confronted with the harsh reality of the gutted Ludbrek House, he had allowed them to master him, if only for a moment. But, he told himself sternly, he should never have let such thoughts take form in his mind in the first place, let alone voice them before Indigenes and a man of the Folk.

The moment passed. His outburst drew no response from the Indigenes. Perhaps they took his anguished questions as rhetorical ones, or else they simply had no answers for them.

Quickly Joseph felt his usual calmness and self-assurance return. All this, he thought, is part of my education, even when I let myself give way to the weakness that is within me. Everyone has some area of weakness within him somewhere. You must not let it rule you, that is all. What is happening here is that I am learning who I am.

But he understood now that he had to abandon hope, at least for the time being, of continuing onward to the south. Maybe Waerna was correct that all the Great Houses of Manza had fallen, maybe not; but either way he could not ask Ulvas and his companions to risk their lives transporting him any farther, nor did it seem to make much sense to set out from here by himself. Aside from all the other problems he might face as he made his way through the rebel-held territory to the south, his leg was not well enough healed yet for him to attempt the journey on his own. The only rational choice that was open to him was to go back to the Indigene village and use that as his base while trying to work out his next move.

He offered to take Waerna along with him. But the old man would not be removed from this place. Ludbrek House, or what was left of it, was his home. He had been born here, he said, and he would die here. There could be no life for him anywhere else.

Probably that was so, Joseph thought. He tried to imagine Waerna living among the rebels who had killed the Masters of this House, those Masters whom Waerna had so loved, and brought destruction to their properties, to the upkeep of which Waerna had dedicated his whole life. No, he thought, no, Waerna had done the right thing in separating himself from those people. He was Folk to the core, a loyal member of a system that did not seem to exist anymore. Thustin had been like that too. There was no place for the Waernas and the Thustins in the strange new world that the rebels were creating here in Manza.

Joseph gave Waerna as much food as Ulvas thought they could spare, and embraced him with such warmth and tenderness that the old man looked up at him in disbelief. Then he set out on his way back north. He would not let himself dwell on the fact that every rotation of the wagon-wheels was taking him farther from his home. Probably it had been folly all along to imagine that his journey from Getfen House to Keilloran would be a simple straight-line affair down the heart of Manza to Helikis.

The weather was starting to change, he saw, as he headed back to the village: a coolish wind was blowing out of the south, a sign that the rainy season was on its way.

Joseph wished he knew more of what to expect of the weather of High Manza, now that there was a real possibility that he might still be here as winter arrived. How cold would it get? Would it snow? He had never seen snow, only pictures of it, and he was not particularly eager to make its acquaintance just now. Well, he would find out, he supposed.

The Ardardin did not seem greatly surprised to see Joseph returning to the village. Surprise did not appear to be a characteristic that played a very important role in the emotional makeup of the Indigenes, or else Joseph simply did not know how they normally expressed it. But the matter-of-fact greeting that Joseph received from the Ardardin led him to think that the tribal leader might well have expected from the beginning to be seeing him again before long. He wondered just how much the Ardardin actually knew about the reach and success of the Folkish uprising.

The Ardardin did not ask him for details of his expedition to Ludbrek House. Nor did Joseph volunteer any, other than to say that he had found no one at Ludbrek House who could give him any assistance. He did not feel like being more specific with the Indigene chieftain. For the moment it was all too painful to speak about. Ulvas and the others who had accompanied him would surely provide the Ardardin with details of the destruction.

Once he was established again in the room that had been his before, Joseph tried once more to make contact via combinant with Keilloran. He had no more hope of success than before, but the sight of devastated Ludbrek had kindled a fierce desire in him to discover what, if anything, had been taking place on the other continent and to let his family know that he had not perished in the uprising that had broken out in Manza.

This time the device produced a strange sputtering sound and a dim pink glow. Neither of these was in any way a normal effect. But at least the combinant was producing something, now, whereas it had done nothing whatever since the night of the burning of Getfen House. Perhaps some part of the system was working again.

He said, “I am Joseph Master Keilloran, and I am calling my father, Martin Master Keilloran of House Keilloran in Helikis.” If the combinant was working properly, that statement alone would suffice to connect him instantly. He stared urgently into the pink glow, wishing that he were seeing the familiar blue of a functioning combinant instead. “Father, can you hear me? This is Joseph. I am somewhere in High Manza, Father, a hundred miles or so south of Getfen House.”

He paused, hoping for a reply.

Nothing. Nothing.

“They have killed everyone in Getfen House, and in other Houses too. I have been to Ludbrek House, which is south of the Getfen lands, and everything is in ruins there. An old serf told me that all the Ludbreks are dead. —Do you hear me, Father?”

Useless pink glow. Sputtering hissing sound.

“I want to tell you, Father, that I am all right. I hurt my leg in the forest but it’s healing nicely now, and the Indigenes are looking after me. I’m staying in the first Indigene village due south of the Getfens. When my leg is better, I’m going to start out for home again, and I hope to see you very soon. Please try to reply to me. Please keep trying every day.”

The thought came to him then that what he had just said could have been very rash, that perhaps the combinant system of Manza was in rebel hands, in which case they might have intercepted his call and possibly could trace it to this very village. In that case he could very well have doomed himself just now.

That was a chilling thought. It was becoming a bad habit of his, he saw, to speak without fully thinking through all consequences of his words. But, once again, there was no way he could unsay what he had just said. And maybe this enterprise of his, this immense trek across Manza, was doomed to end in failure sooner or later anyway, in which case what difference did it make that he might have just called the rebels down upon himself? At least there was a chance that the call would go through to Keilloran, that his words would reach his father and provide him with some comfort. The message might even set in motion the forces of rescue. It was a risk worth taking, he decided.

He undid his bandages and examined his leg. It still looked bad. The swelling had gone down, and the bruises had diminished considerably, the angry zones of purplish-black now a milder mottling of brownish-yellow. But when he sat on the edge of his bed of furs and swung the leg carefully back and forth, his knee made a disagreeable little clicking sound and hot billows of pain went shooting along his thigh. Perhaps there was no permanent damage but he was scarcely in shape for a long trek on his own yet.

Joseph asked for a basin of water and washed the leg thoroughly. Ulvas provided him with a fresh length of cloth so that he could bandage it again.

For the next few days they left him largely to his own devices. The faithful Ulvas brought him food regularly, but he had no other visitors. Now and then village children gathered in the hall outside the open door of his room and studied him intently, as though he were some museum exhibit or perhaps a sideshow freak. They never said a word. There was a flinty steadfast intensity to their little slitted eyes. When Joseph tried to speak with them, they turned and ran.

He resumed his studies, finally, after the long interruption, calling up his geography text and searching it for information about the climate and landscape of the continent of Manza, and then going into his history book to read once again the account of the Conquest. It was important to him now to understand why the Folk had suddenly turned with such violence against their overlords, after so many centuries of years of quiescent acceptance of Master rule.

But the textbook offered him no real guidance. All it contained was the traditional account, telling how the Folk had come to Homeworld in the early days of the colonization of the worlds of space and taken up a simple life of farming, which had degenerated after a couple of centuries into a bare subsistence existence because they were a dull, backward people who lacked the technical skills to exploit the soil and water of their adopted world properly. At least they were intelligent enough to understand that they needed help, though, and after a time they had invited people of the Master stock here to show them how to do things better, just a few Masters at first, but those had summoned others, and then, as the steadily increasing Masters began to explain to the Folk that there could be no real prosperity here unless the Folk allowed the Masters to take control of the means of production and put everything on a properly businesslike basis, a couple of hotheaded leaders appeared among the Folk and resistance broke out against Master influence, which led to the brief, bloody war known as the Conquest. That was the only instance in all of Homeworld’s history, said the textbook, of friction between Folk and Masters. Once it was over the relationship between the two peoples settled into a stable and harmonious rhythm, each group understanding its place and playing its proper role in the life of the planet, and that was how things had remained for a very long time. Until, in fact, the outbreak of the current uprising.

Joseph understood why a truly dynamic, ambitious race would object to being conquered that way. He could not imagine the Masters, say, ever accepting the rule of invaders from space: they would fight on and on until all Homeworld was stained with blood, as it was said had happened in the time of the empires of Old Earth. But the Folk were in no way dynamic or ambitious. Before the Masters came, they had been slipping back into an almost prehistoric kind of life here. Under the rule of the Masters they were far more prosperous than they could ever have become on their own. And it was not as though they were slaves, after all. They had full rights and privileges. No one forced them to do anything. It was to their great benefit, as well as the Masters’, for them to perform the tasks that were allotted them in the farms and factories. Master and Folk worked together for the common good: Joseph had heard his father say that a thousand times. He believed it. Every Master did. So far as Joseph knew, the Folk believed it too.

Because the system had always seemed to work so well, Joseph had never had any reason to look upon his own people as oppressors, or on the Folk as victims of aggression. Now, though, the system was not working at all. Joseph wished he could discuss the recent events in Manza with Balbus. Were the rebels mere brutal killers, or could there be some substance to their resentments? Joseph could see no justification, ever, for killing and burning, but from the rebels’ point of view those things might well have seemed necessary. He did not know. He had lived too sheltered a life; he had never had occasion to question any of its basic assumptions. But now, suddenly, everything was called into question. Everything . He was too young and inexperienced to wrestle with these problems on his own. He needed someone older, someone with more perspective, with whom to discuss them. Someone like Balbus, yes. But Balbus was gone.

Unexpectedly Joseph found himself drifting, a few days later, into a series of conversations with the Ardardin that reminded him of his discussions with his late tutor. The Ardardin had taken to visiting him often in the afternoons. Now that Joseph had taken up residence in the village once more, his services as a healer were needed again, and the Ardardin would come to him and conduct him to the village infirmary, where some villager with a running sore, or a throbbing pain in his head, or a mysterious swelling on his thigh would be waiting for Joseph to cure him.

Joseph did not even try to struggle against his unwanted role as a healer now. It no longer embarrassed him to be engaging in such pretense. If that was the role they wanted him to play, why, he would play it as well as he could, and do it with a straight face. For one thing, his ministrations often seemed to bring about cures, even though he had only the most rudimentary of medical technique and no real notion of how to cope with most of the ailments that were presented to him. These Indigenes appeared to be a suggestible people. They had such faith in his skills that a mere laying on of hands, a mere murmuring of words, frequently did the job. He became accustomed to seeing such inexplicable things happen. That did not instill in him any belief in his own magical powers, only an awareness that faith could sometimes work miracles regardless of the cynicism of the miracle-worker. And his magical cures justified his presence among them in his own eyes. He was eating these people’s food and taking up space in their village as he hobbled around waiting for his leg to heal. The least he could do for them was to give them succor for their ills, so long as they felt that such succor was within his power to give. What he had to watch out for was beginning to believe in the reality of his own powers.

Another thing that troubled him occasionally was the possibility that his medical services were becoming of such value to the villagers that they would keep him among them even after he was strong enough to get on his way. They had no reason to care whether he ever returned to his home or not, and every reason to want to maintain him in their midst forever.

That was not a problem he needed to deal with now. Meanwhile he was making himself of use here; he was performing a worthwhile function, and that was no trivial thing. The whole purpose of this trip to the northern continent had been to prepare him for the tasks that someday would be his as Master of House Keilloran, and, though his father certainly had not ever imagined that ministering to the medical needs of a village of Indigenes would be part of that preparation, it was clear enough to Joseph that that was something entirely appropriate for a Master-in-the-making to undertake. He would not shirk his responsibilities here. Especially not for such an unworthy reason. The Indigenes would let him go, he was sure, when the time came.

The more doctoring he did, the more adventuresome he became about the things he would try that could be regarded by him as genuine medicine, and not just mere faith-healing. Joseph did not feel ready to perform any kind of major surgery, and did not ever think he would be; but, using the few simple tools he found in his utility case, he started stitching up minor wounds, now, and lancing infections, and pulling decayed teeth. One thing he feared was that they would ask him to deliver a child, a task for which he lacked even the most basic knowledge. But they never did. Whatever process it was by which these people brought their young in the world continued to be a mystery to him.

He began to learn something about Indigene herbal medicine, also, and used it to supplement the kind of work he was already doing. It puzzled him that the Indigenes should have developed the use of such a wide range of drugs and potions without also having managed to invent even the simplest of mechanical medical techniques. They could not do surgery, they could not suture a wound, they could not set a fracture. But they had succeeded in finding natural medicines capable of reducing fever, of easing pain, of unblocking a jammed digestive tract, and much more of that sort. Their ignorance of the mechanical side of medicine, amounting almost to indifference, was one more example, Joseph thought, of their alien nature. They are simply not like us. Not just their bodies are different, but their minds.

His instructor in the use of Indigene herbs was a certain Thiyu, the village’s master in this art. Joseph never found out whether Thiyu was male or female, but it was certain, at least, that Thiyu was old . You could see that in the faded tone of Thiyu’s bronze skin, from which all the orange highlights had disappeared, and from the slack, puffy look of Thiyu’s throat-pouch, which seemed to have lost the capacity to inflate. And Thiyu’s voice was thin and frayed, like a delicate cord just at the verge of snapping in two.

In Thiyu’s hut behind the infirmary were a hundred different identical-looking ceramic jars, all of them unmarked, each containing a different powder or juice that Thiyu had extracted from some native plant. How the Indigene knew what drug was contained in which jar was something Joseph never understood. He would describe to Thiyu the case he was currently working on, and Thiyu would go to the collection of jars and locate an appropriate medicine for him, and that was that.

Aware that knowledge of these drugs was valuable, Joseph made a point of asking Thiyu the name of each one used, and its properties, and a description of the plant from which it was derived. He carefully wrote all these things down. Bringing this information to his fellow Masters, if ever he returned to his own people again, would be part of the service that a Master must render to the world. Had any Master ever bothered, he wondered, to study Indigene medicine before?

He and Thiyu never spoke of anything but herbs and potions, and that only in the briefest possible terms. There was no conversation between them. Nor was there with any of the others, not even Ulvas. The Ardardin was the only Indigene in the village with whom Joseph had anything like a friendship. After Joseph had done his day’s work in the infirmary the Ardardin often would accompany him back to his room, and gradually it fell into the habit of remaining for a while to talk with him.

The themes were wide-ranging, though always superficial. They would speak of Helikis, a place about which the Ardardin seemed to know almost nothing, or about the problems the Ardardin’s people had had this summer with their crops, or the work Joseph was doing in the infirmary, or the improving condition of his leg, or the weather, or the sighting of some rarely seen wild animal in the vicinity of the village, but never about anything that had to do with Indigene-human relationships, or the civil war now going on between Masters and Folk. The Ardardin set the pace, and Joseph very swiftly saw which kinds of topics were appropriate and which were out of bounds.

The Ardardin seemed to enjoy these talks, to get definite pleasure from them, as though it had long been starved for intelligent company in this village before Joseph’s arrival. Joseph was surprised to find that they were talking as equals, in a sense, sitting face to face and exchanging ideas and information on a one-to-one basis, although he was only a half-grown fugitive boy and the Ardardin was a person of stature and authority, the leader of the village. But maybe the Ardardin did not realize how young Joseph really was. Of course, Joseph was a Master, a person of rank among his own people, the heir to a great estate somewhere far away. But there was no reason why the Ardardin would be impressed by that. Was it that he was functioning as the tribal doctor? Maybe. More likely, though, the Ardardin was simply extending to him the courtesy that it felt one adult intelligent creature owed another. There was, at any rate, a certain sense of equality for Joseph in their talks. He found it flattering. No one had ever spoken to Joseph in that way before. He took it as a high compliment.

Then the nature of his conversations with the Ardardin began to change. It was an almost imperceptible transformation. Joseph could not say how the change began, nor why the talks now became fixed on a single daily subject, which was the religious beliefs of the Indigenes and the light that those beliefs cast on the ultimate destiny of all the creatures of Homeworld. The result was a distinct alteration of the parity of the meetings. Now, once more, Joseph was back in the familiar role of the student listening to the master. Though the Ardardin seemed to be treating him as a scholar seeking information, not as a novice stumbling about in the darkness of his own ignorance, Joseph had no illusions about the modification of their relationship.

Perhaps it was a reference that the Ardardin made one afternoon to “the visible sky” and “the real sky” that had started it.

“But the visible sky is the real sky,” said Joseph, mystified. “Is that not so?”

“Ah,” said the Ardardin. “The sky that we see is a trivial simple thing. What has true meaning is the sky beyond it, the sky of the gods, the celestial sky.”

Joseph had problems in following this. He was fluent enough in Indigene, but the abstract concepts that the Ardardin was dealing in now involved him in a lot of new terminology, ideas that he had never had to deal with before, and as the discussion unfolded he had to ask for frequent clarifications. Bit by bit he grasped the distinction that the Ardardin was making: the universe of visible phenomena on the one hand, and the much more significant universe of celestial forces, where the gods dwelled, on the other. It was the gods who dwelled in the real sky, the one that could not be seen by mortal eyes, but that generated the power by which the universe was held together.

That the Indigenes should have gods came as no surprise to Joseph. All peoples had gods of some sort. But he knew nothing whatever about theirs. No texts of Indigene mythology had ever come his way. In Keilloran there were Indigenes living all around; you constantly encountered them; and yet, Joseph saw now, they were so much taken for granted as part of the landscape that he had never paid any real attention to them, other than to learn the language, which was something that every Master was required to do. His father collected their artifacts, yes. But you could fill entire storehouses with pots and sculptures and weavings and still not know anything about a people’ssoul. And though Balbus had said that Martin had studied Indigene philosophy as well, he had never shared a syllable of his findings with his son.

Joseph strained to penetrate the mysteries that the Ardardin was expounding now, wondering whether these were the things that his father supposedly had studied. Perhaps not. Perhaps they had never been shared with a person of human blood before.

The world that surrounds us, the Ardardin said, its mountains and seas and rivers and forests, its cities and fields, its every tangible aspect, is the terrestrial counterpart of the celestial world in the sky. That world is the world of the gods, the true world, of which the world of living beings was a mere pallid imitation. Everything we see about us, said the Ardardin, represents the crude attempts of mortal beings to replicate the gods’ own primordial act of creating their own world.

“Do you follow?” the Ardardin said.

“Not exactly,” said Joseph.

The Ardardin did not appear troubled by that. It went on speaking of things that were completely new to Joseph, the sacred mountain at the center of the world where the visible world and the invisible one come together, the axis upon which all things spin, the place where mundane time and mythical time meet, which is the navel of the world. The distinction between the time-scheme of living things and the time-scheme of the gods, worldly time and godly time, was obviously very important to the Indigenes. The Ardardin made it seem as though the world of ordinary phenomena was a mere film, an overlay, a stencil, a shallow and trivial thing although linked by the most powerful bonds to the divine world where fundamental reality dwelled.

All this was fascinating in its way, though Joseph’s mind did not ordinarily tend to go in these metaphysical directions. There was a certain strange beauty to it, the way a mathematical theorem has great beauty even if you could not see any way of putting it to practical use. After each conversation with the Ardardin he would dictate notes into his recorder, setting down all that he had been told while it was still fresh in his mind. By so doing he reinforced in his own mind the belief that he would somehow get out of Manza alive, that he would return to Helikis and share with others the remarkable fund of alien knowledge that he had brought back with him.

Even the most abstruse mathematical theorem, Joseph knew, represents one valid way of describing the universe, at least to those capable of comprehending it. But Joseph could not help looking upon what the Ardardin was telling him as a mere collection of fables, quaint primitive myths. One could admire them but on a fundamental level one could not believe them, certainly not in the way one believes that seven and six are thirteen, or that the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Those things were inherently, incontrovertibly true. The tales the Ardardin told were metaphors, ingenious inventions. They described nothing real. That did not make them any the less interesting, Joseph felt. But they had no relevance to him, so far as he could see, other than as curiosities of an alien civilization.

His talks with the Ardardin had gone on nearly a week before the Indigene abruptly stepped behind the legends and drew the astonished Joseph into the entirely unexpected realm of political reality.

“Your people call yourselves Masters,” the Ardardin said. “Why is that? What is it that you are masters of?”

Joseph hesitated. “Why, the world,” he replied. “This world, I mean. To use your terms, the visible world.”

“Very good, yes. Masters of the visible world. Do you see, though, that to be masters of the visible world is a thing that has very little actual importance?”

“To us it does,” said Joseph.

“To you, yes. But not to us, for the visible world itself is nothing, so what value is there in being masters of it? I mean no discourtesy here. I wish only to put before you something that I believe you should consider, which is that your people do not hold possession of anything real. You call yourself Masters, but in truth you are masters of nothing. Certainly not our masters; and from the way things seem, perhaps not even the masters of the people you call the Folk, any more. I cannot speak of those people. But to us, Master Joseph, you Masters have never had any significant existence at all.”

Joseph was lost. “Our cities—our roads—”

“Visible things. Temporary things. Not godly things. Not truly real.”

“What about the work I do in the infirmary? People are sick. Their pain is real, would you not say? I touch a sick person with my hands, and that person gets better. Isn’t that real? Is it only some kind of illusion?”

“It is a secondary kind of reality,” said the Ardardin. “We live in the true reality here. The reality of the gods.”

Joseph’s head was swimming. He remembered Balbus telling him that there was something in the Indigene religion that had allowed them to regard the presence of human settlers among them as completely unimportant—as though Masters and Folk had never come here in the first place. They simply shrugged it off. It seemed clear that the Ardardin was approaching that area of discourse now. But without Balbus, he was lost. These abstractions were beyond him.

The Ardardin said, “I do not mean to minimize the things you have done for us since your arrival in our village. As for your people, it is true that they seem to have the powers of gods. You fly between the stars like gods. You came down like gods among us out of the heavens. You talk across great distances, which seems magical to us. You build cities and roads with the greatest of ease. You have ways of healing that are unknown to us. Yes, the things that you Masters have achieved on our world are great things indeed, in their way. You could have every reason to think of yourselves as gods. But even if you do—and I don’t say that that is so—do you think that this is the first time that gods, or beings like gods, have come among us?”

Bewildered, Joseph said, “Other visitors from space, you mean?”

“From the heavens,” said the Ardardin. “From the sky beyond the sky, the celestial sky, the true sky that is forever beyond our reach. In the early days of time they came down to us, minor gods, teaching-gods, the ones who showed us how to construct our houses and plant our crops and make tools and utensils.”

“Yes. Culture-heroes, we call them.”

“They did their work, and then they went away. They were only temporary gods, subordinate gods. The true gods of the celestial sky are the only enduring gods, and they do not allow us to see them. Whenever it is necessary to do so, the high gods send these subordinate gods to us to reveal godly ways to us. We do not confuse these gods with the real ones. What these lesser gods do is imitate the things the high gods do in the world that we are unable to see, and, where it is suitable, we learn those things themselves by imitating the lesser gods that imitate the greater ones. You who call yourselves Masters: you are just the latest of these emissaries from the high gods. Not the first. Not the last.”

Joseph’s eyes widened. “You see us as no more than a short-term phenomenon, then?”

“How can you be anything else? It is the way of the world. You will be here for a time and then you will pass from the scene, as other gods like you have done before you. For only the true gods are eternal. Do you begin to see, Master Joseph? Do you start to understand?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I do.”

It was like a great door swinging open before him.

Now he comprehended the passivity of the Indigenes, their seeming indifference to the arrival of the Masters, and of the Folk before them. We do not matter to them, except insofar as we reflect the will of the gods. We are only shadows of the true reality, he thought. We are only transient reflections of the true gods. This is our little moment on this planet, and when it is over we will pass from the scene, and the Indigenes will remain, and the eternal gods in their heaven will remain as well.

Our time may be passing already, Joseph thought, seeing the blackened ruins of Ludbrek House rising before him in his mind. And he shivered.

“So the fact that we came down among you and took control of great sectors of your world and built our dams and our highways and all the rest is entirely unimportant to you,” he said. “We don’t matter to you in any way. Is that it?”

“You misunderstand, Master Joseph. Whatever the gods see fit to do is important to us. They have sent you to us for a purpose, though what that purpose is has not yet been made clear. You have done many good things, you have done some bad things, and it is up to us to discern the meaning of your presence on our world. Which we will do. We watch; we wait; we learn. And one day we will know why it was that you were sent to us.”

“But we’ll be gone by then.”

“Surely so. Your cycle will have ended.”

“Our cycle?”

“The world passes through a series of cycles. Each follows the last in a predetermined order. We are living now in a period of destruction, of disintegration. It will grow worse. We see the signs already. As the end of the cycle comes upon us, the year will be shortened, the month will diminish, and the day will contract. There will be darkness and fire; and then will come rebirth, a new dawn, the start of the new cycle.”

This was more than indifference, Joseph realized.

This was a supremely confident dismissal of all the little petty pretensions of his people. Masters, indeed! To the Indigenes, Joseph saw, nothing mattered on this world except the Indigenes themselves, whose gods lay hidden in an invisible sky and comported themselves in altogether mysterious ways. The humans who had taken so much of this people’s land were just one more passing nuisance, a kind of annoying natural phenomenon, comparable to a sandstorm, a flood, a shower of hail. We think we have been building a new civilization here, he thought. We try to behave kindly toward the Indigenes, but we look upon this planet as ours, now, no longer theirs: our Homeworld, we call it. Wrong. In the eyes of the Ardardin and his race we are a mere short-term phenomenon. We are instruments of their unknown gods, sent here to serve their needs, not our own.

Strange. Strange. Joseph wondered whether he would be able to explain any of this to his father, if ever he saw Keilloran House again.

He could not allow himself the luxury of these discursive conversations much longer, though. It was time to begin thinking seriously again of moving on toward the south. His leg was nearly back to normal. And, though it was pleasant enough to be living in this friendly village and engaging in fine philosophical discussions with its chieftain, he knew he must not let himself be deflected from his essential purpose, which was to get home.

The situation beyond the boundaries of the Ardardin’s village was continuing to worsen, apparently. Indigenes from other villages passed through here often, bringing reports on the troubles outside. Joseph never had the opportunity to speak with these visitors himself, but from the Ardardin he learned that all Manza had by now turned into a war zone: a great many Houses of the Masters throughout the northern continent had been destroyed, roads were closed, rebel troops were on the march everywhere. It appeared also that in certain parts of the continent the Masters were counterattacking, although that was still unclear. Joseph got the impression that fighting was going on between different groups of Folk, too, some loyal to the Masters, others sworn to uphold the rebellion. And bands of refugees were straggling south in an attempt to reach the Isthmus of Helikis and the safety that lay beyond. These must be surviving Masters, Joseph thought. But the Ardardin could not say. It had not seen a need to go into such a degree of detail with its informants.

None of this chaos seemed to cause much of a problem for the Indigenes themselves. By now Joseph had come to see how completely their lives were bound up in their villages, and in the tenuous ties that linked one village to the next. So long as nobody’s troops came swarming across their fields and their harvests went well, the struggles of Masters and Folk were matters of little import to them. His discussions with the Ardardin had made it clear to him why they had that attitude.

Commerce between the Indigene villages, therefore, still was proceeding as though nothing unusual were going on. The Ardardin proposed to turn that fact to Joseph’s benefit. Other villages down the line would surely have need of Joseph’s services as a healer. Now that he was capable of traveling, they would convey him to one of the nearby villages, where he could take care of whatever medical problems might need his attention there, and then those villagers would take him on to the next village, and so on and so on until he had reached a point from which he could cross over into the safety of Helikis.

Joseph, remembering his fears that the Ardardin’s people might not allow him to leave at all, felt a burst of chagrin, and gratitude also for the Ardardin’s kind willingness to help him along his way like this.

But it occurred to him that it might be just as wrong to imagine kindness here as it had been to fear enslavement earlier. It was a mistake, he realized, to ascribe conventional human feelings—altruism, selfishness, whatever—to Indigenes, indeed to interpret their motivations in any way analogous to human thinking. He had been guilty of that again and again in his dealings with the Ardardin and the villagers, but he knew by this time that it was something to avoid. They were alien beings. They had followed a wholly different evolutionary path for millions of years. They walk on their hind legs like us, he thought, and they have a language with nouns and verbs in it, and they know how to plant and harvest crops and fashion pottery, but that did not make them human in any essential way, and one had best take them on their own terms or else not try to take them at all.

He had another taste of that when it was time for him to go. He had imagined that there might be a fairly emotional farewell, but the silliness of that bit of self-deception quickly became evident. The Ardardin expressed no regret whatever at Joseph’s departure and no hint that any sort of friendship had sprung up between the two of them: not a syllable of thanks for his work in the infirmary, none for their afternoon conversations. It simply stood looking on in silence while Joseph climbed into the wagon that would take him once again toward the south, and when the wagon pulled out of the village compound the Ardardin turned and went inside, and that was as much of a farewell as Joseph had.

They are not like us, Joseph thought. To them we are mere transient phenomena.