3

Merral was up early the next morning, and after donning his jacket, slipped outside to look at the weather. Although the sun should have been rising there was only a dull glow in the east, and in the gloom he could faintly make out that during the night the wind had changed and was now coming out of the barren wastelands of the west. At least, he comforted himself, from that direction neither rain nor snow would come.

When Merral entered the kitchen he found Barrand sitting at the table. There was an unhappy look on his face, and after the briefest of greetings he blurted out, “Merral, I’m so sorry about yesterday! The whole thing was ridiculous! Zennia said you were worried because I seemed to have, well—contradicted—myself. It could, I suppose, seem like that. The fact is that . . . well . . . I did dream, it’s true. But I had—I suppose—pushed it out of my mind. When you spoke about having a dream, I began to remember it, but I was unsure about it.” Here he paused, as if uncertain what to say next. “I mean I was unsure about whether I had had a dream. If you follow my meaning.”

Uncertain how to respond, Merral just nodded, and his uncle went on in an unsteady fashion. “So, anyway it was just later on in the day that it all came flooding back. And when I said in the morning that I hadn’t dreamed, it was, well . . . true then. But I mean, it wasn’t a major dream anyway. So the whole thing is nothing serious. I wouldn’t want you to get it all out of proportion.”

I need to think about this, Merral thought, recognizing that his uncle seemed to be in serious difficulties.

“I think I understand, Uncle. But actually, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better have breakfast and be off—if that’s all right with you. Graceful and I have a long way to go today.”

A look of relief seemed to cross the gray-blue eyes. “Yes, yes. Now tell me your plans while I get some food out for you.”

Fifteen minutes later as he came down the stairs with his pack, ready to leave, Zennia was waiting at the outer door. She smiled rather distantly at him. “Your uncle has explained everything, has he? A sort of delay in recognizing that he had had a dream. It all makes sense now. Something about nothing.”

Merral hesitated. “Yes, I hope so. I’m glad you’ve got it all sorted out.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I must be away, Aunt. Give my love to the children. I’ll be back this way soon.”

There was the clatter of feet on the stairs and a slender figure in a fluffy pink robe with a straw-colored mop of hair bounced lightly down the stairs, ran over, and clutched his hand.

“Bye, Cousin Merral. Don’t get talking to the trees now.”

Merral gave Elana a hug, noticing as he did that she was already nearly up to his shoulder. “Bye, Elana.”

There was a heavy thudding on the stairs and Thomas leapt down, slid across the wood floor like a skater, and wrapped his arms around Merral.

“Cousin! You nearly left without saying good-bye.”

Laughing, Merral disentangled himself from Thomas’s clutches and lifted the boy high so that his head nearly touched the roof. “Owf! You are getting too heavy to do this.”

“Have a safe trip, Cousin Merral. Look after Graceful.” Thomas giggled as, with a playful tickle, Merral put him down.

“I will. And you look after the dogs!”

Merral turned to his aunt. “I’d best be off before the rest of the family comes down.”

He raised his hand. “A blessing on this house.” Then he pressed the door switch and, as it slid open, stepped out into the raw grayness of the dawn.

It was still little more than half-light when, ten minutes later, Merral rode Graceful southwest from the hamlet. The route he had planned was a long one. He intended to travel first west over Brigila’s Wastes, keeping south of the still-barren lava seas, then south along the Long Marshes before swinging back through the eastern tip of the Great Northern Forest. From there, a track should allow him to make Wilamall’s Farm, the most northerly forestry base, by midafternoon at the latest. There he would leave Graceful in the stables while he took the daily overland transporter down to Ynysmant. There were more rapid routes home from Herrandown, but Merral wanted to see as much as he could. Sampling and observer machines made regular survey trips across these lands, and drones flew overhead to monitor for changes, but he knew that there was no substitute for walking or riding the ground.

Fifteen minutes later, having carefully crossed the solid ice of the Lannar River on foot and ridden up the sparsely wooded western bank, Merral squinted across at the wastes before him and wondered why he had been so zealous.

Ahead was a desolate and empty landscape across which a cutting wind whistled hungrily around him. Facing into it, he found that there was little escape even with the glare goggles on and the face baffle of his jacket up round his nose. As he rode on, with Graceful picking her way across the frozen tussocks, he decided that there was little to choose between the west and the north wind. While lacking the polar chill of the wind from the north, the west wind had its own cruel character. Here every turbulent gust that struck carried a reminder that it was drawn across five thousand kilometers of treeless waste, much of it a dry, salty, and sandy desert. At least, he reminded himself, in winter there was still enough moisture to remove the dust. In summer, the dry and baking west wind was filled with dust, silt, and static, and became the scourge of machinery and men’s lungs.

Merral, trying to keep his face averted from the wind as much as he could, found little compensation in his route. Here only the thinnest skins of frozen soil and turf covered hard black volcanic rock. There were patches of powdery snow and, every so often, dangerous stretches of colorless ice over which dismounting was necessary. The only vegetation was clumps of rough tussocky grass with occasional straggly bushes of hazel and willow. Given the scarcity of the vegetation and the harsh weather, Merral found no surprise in the fact that he saw little life in the wastes. Every so often he put to flight a party of migrating tundra hares, pale in their winter coats, and once he came across a herd of grazing reindeer, which stared at him stupidly before turning away and shuffling off to resume their foraging. Once a pair of great Gyrfalcons circled above him, ghostly below the clouds, then drifted away southward. But that was all he saw.

Soon he found that he was in a featureless landscape where the gray of the ground faded into the softer grayness of the sky to give an elusive and unchanging horizon. Merral decided that here he could not afford to be lost and set his diary to check the route: a thing he rarely did. So his progress was marked by periodic noises from the diary, a deep long beep for a deviation to the left, a short high one for one to the right, and a bell-like chime for a correct course. Like all Forestry horses Graceful understood the signals enough to steer herself. So together, horse and man progressed slowly over Brigila’s Wastes, the silence broken only by the whistles of the wind, the clip-clop of Graceful’s hooves, and the occasional interruption from the diary.

For the first half hour or so, Merral was preoccupied by what had happened at Herrandown. He was unsatisfied by what both his uncle and aunt had said this morning. Something odd, alarming, and even wrong had happened yesterday. But what? No hypothesis he could invent would make any sense. In the end, Merral reluctantly decided that Zennia and Barrand must be right: It was some sort of psychological oddity that they had mishandled between them so that it had become completely distorted. After all, human beings were complex. On that basis, Merral pushed the affair out of his mind.

Yet as he rode on, he felt a strange feeling of disquiet that seemed to have nothing to do with the weather. More than once, he found himself looking around or even over his shoulder, as if some invisible shadow had fallen upon him. But, other than the gently undulating bleak surface under him and the gray billowy sky above, there was nothing to see.

Eventually, Merral forced himself to concentrate on studying the ground and trying to get a feel for these barren lands. He found himself pondering over the wastes, aware of how widespread this sort of landscape was in Menaya. Here, I can believe this is a half-finished world, with this ripped veneer of soil and scrub over lava and rock outwash supporting, at best, a handful of species. But that thought came to him as more of a challenge than a criticism. God willing, within a few years there would be trees over much of this area, and with them, a much greater diversity of plants and animals. The issue was how to do it.

As the brown reeds of the marsh’s edge came into sight, Merral checked his location from the diary and ordered the active navigation off. He would swing southward down the flanks of the marshes up to the edge of the Great Northern Forest. Not only was there no danger of losing his way here, but the presence of patches of marsh and swamp made such an automated navigation worse than useless.

Merral picked his way along the slope just above where the reed beds started, watching carefully for patches of thin ice. As he rode down along the marsh’s edge his journey became easier. The wind blew now at his side rather than into his face, and the sky lightened overhead so that there was enough sunlight to cast a faint shadow. Here there was life: birdsong from within the reed beds, the whistling of the dwarf swans on the lake, and the piercing cries of the gulls. A reed heron scuttled away in front of him. In the distance he saw a herd of gray deer, a pair of otters slithered away into an ice-free patch of water at the sound of Graceful’s hooves, and a Raymont’s musk ox lurched across his path.

As he drew near the edge of the forest, he crossed the distinctive tracks of a half-ton hexapod surveyor. They were fresh and going south with a purpose rare in surveying machines, and Merral wondered if it had been programmed to return to base before Nativity so that the samples could be unloaded before the break. Wilamall’s Farm would probably be busy today.

An hour or so later Merral stopped and took another bearing. He wanted to be certain of striking the forest edge south of the limits of the rough lava flows. At the ragged edge of the forest, he reined Graceful in and took a last look over the Long Marshes, a great sea of tan reeds swaying gently in the wind as far as the eye could see, broken only by snaking waterways clogged with brittle ice. He would, he decided, come by again in summer and camp and linger.

Today, though, there was something about the wastes that he found peculiarly unwelcoming, and as he entered under the shadows of the trees, Merral found himself rejoicing even more than usual. He had always loved woods, even in winter when the rowans and gray alders were bare and only the pines were green, and even these impoverished and marginal forests with their gale-tumbled trunks. So he didn’t mind that, with the branches low to the ground and the land rough, his journey was a slow one. It took well over an hour’s skillful riding to reach the support road, as he skirted around areas of impenetrable scrub and avoided the deeper streams while trying not to depart from his compass bearing. Even so, he was wondering about taking a location check when suddenly he was out of the trees, and the track—a rift of dead, yellow bleached grass between the high trees—lay before him. The road had been made two centuries or so earlier to ease the passage of the ground transporters bringing in the first trees for this part of the forest. Since then, it had been cleared periodically to maintain a line of access into the forest.

Merral dismounted, letting Graceful graze on the remains of the grass. Then, listening to the wind whistling through the treetops, he looked at the track for signs of recent passage of men or machines but found nothing. Any woodland sampling and observer machines were too delicate on their feet to leave traces on hard ground, and if any humans had come through here lately, they had used some zero-impact machine such as a gravity-modifying sled, a hoverer, or, like him, a horse. He was not surprised; he was too far away from any homes for stray visitors and he knew that the current schedule of the Forestry Development Team did not include any visits in this area. No, today the woods were his and he was glad of it. He loved the solitude and was always glad of the opportunity to sing his heart out to heaven’s King.

He remounted and set off southward, starting to sing as he went. Today, though, for some strange reason, he found a lack of spontaneity in his singing, and it was only by dint of discipline and effort that he kept himself going. But for the next three hours, as he rode slowly along the old track as it wound its way down and round a succession of valley flanks and ridges, Merral sang, working his way twice through the entire Nativity section of the Assembly songbook. It was not, he knew, the greatest singing, and there was little in it of the quality that Barrand’s re-created voices would have, but it was genuine and, with a deep gratitude, he offered it up to the One who was the Light above lights.

But even in the singing Merral was keeping a careful eye on the forest. In general he was pleased with what he saw, finding almost all the trees, apart from those felled or beheaded by ice storms or wind gusts, in a satisfactory state. No, he concluded, after its two centuries of history this wood would pass—at least at first glance—the highest test of a Made World woodland and be taken as an original forest of Ancient Earth, albeit one with some unfamiliar species. A closer inspection would, of course, show a much more limited diversity of plants and animals, and some oddities as species adapted rapidly into the new and unoccupied environmental niches. Everything took time, and you couldn’t just throw a world together and hope it would work. Everything had to be checked, its every possible interaction with everything else modeled and predicted. And even then things went wrong; like the fungal species that digested dead wood on one hundred and sixty worlds but which, on the hundred and sixty-first, suddenly became one that digested living pine trees. But as they said, “every world sown was new lessons reaped.” What had taken a thousand years on the first Made Worlds now took under half that. But there was always room for improvement and no world was ever truly Earth.

As he rode south, Merral noticed, with faint surprise, that his spirits seemed to lift. He put it down to the gentle lifting of the temperature and to getting away from the bleak emptiness of Brigila’s Wastes. Yet it was funny, he reflected, that he had never felt such a change in mood before. But he soon shrugged off his puzzlement; introspection was not something that he, or any of his world, ever indulged in for long. He stopped once for food in a clearing overlooking a stream, setting Graceful free to find what she could to eat among the blanched and withered grasses. Then, mindful of the short winter days, he set off again. Yet as he did so, a strange, fleeting thought came to him that he had an anxiousness to be home he had never had before. It was still another oddity for him to consider.

By four in the afternoon he had approached Wilamall’s Farm and other tracks joined his. At one junction, Merral waited while a woodland surveyor, six smaller undergrowth analyzers docked onto its back, ambled past on its eight long, metallic legs. As it passed him the machine stopped and turned its slender head toward him. The two large glassy eyes looked at him without expression. Merral raised his right hand vertically to reassure the surveyor that he needed no assistance. The machine raised a front paw in dumb mechanical acknowledgement and continued on its way south.

The sun was hanging low on the western hills as Merral came out of the forest and saw below him the fences, roofs, and domes of Wilamall’s Farm. Down by the labs a line of gray samplers full of plant fragments for testing waited with perfect patience to be unloaded, and over by the transport offices, other machines were being garaged. As he watched, a pale long-winged survey drone descended gently through the air overhead, extruded legs, and with a smooth glide, came to rest on the small landing strip.

Merral was met at the gate by Teracy, the assistant manager, who, after warmest greetings and high praise for a recent project he’d undertaken, told Merral that he had a place booked on a freighter going south in half an hour. Wasting no time, Merral took Graceful over to the stables.

A large, stooped figure in a dark gray jacket walked over awkwardly from the small office by the stables. His left foot dragged behind him.

“If you please, Mister Merral!” the man sang out loudly in a voice as rough as broken wood.

“Jorgio!” Merral replied, delighted at seeing the broad, tanned, and twisted face of his old friend, who served as gardener and stable hand at Wilamall’s Farm. “Greetings! It’s good to see you.”

“Greetings indeed.” Then, careful to avoid crushing a bloodred cyclamen sticking out of his breast pocket, he squeezed Merral in a forceful embrace. Returning the embrace, Merral caught the faint odor of animals, stable, and gardens, and suddenly his earliest memories of meeting Jorgio came back to him. He had been five or six, and he had been taken one cold spring day to see the new lambs near the edge of the cottages where Jorgio lived. At first, he had found the man’s large and deformed figure intimidating. Yet, within minutes, Jorgio had put him at ease and they had been friends ever since. Merral had no idea exactly how old Jorgio was; he assumed he was in his sixties but found it hard to tell.

They released each other, and Jorgio, his amber-brown eyes gleaming softly, gave Merral a thick-lipped and skewed grin and then turned his large, bald head toward Graceful. He whistled to her in a strangely out-of-tune way. As she trotted over to Jorgio, it came to Merral again that everything about Jorgio, from his legs to his misshapen shoulders, was asymmetrical. Occasionally he felt his logic was unusual as well; Jorgio seemed to have an odd perspective, almost as if the childhood accident that had damaged his body had also curved his way of thinking.

“Graceful, let’s have a look at you,” Jorgio said with a surprising softness of tone. “There’s long miles you have covered.”

He bent down and ran his rough, veined hands over the mare’s flanks. Watching him as he made soft whispering noises, Merral knew that it was not just affection that he had for this man; it was also respect. He had long felt that, as if in some form of compensation for his distorted body, the Most High had given Jorgio special gifts. He was an excellent gardener, capable of making things flower in the poorest of soils, and had a deep affinity with animals. His curved logic wasn’t wrong; it was just different.

“It’s a real blessing to see you, Mister Merral,” Jorgio said, glancing up at him. “It really is.”

“And for me to see you.”

It is interesting, Merral thought, as Jorgio looked over the mare, how we deal with people like Jorgio, these accidents of life. We always seem to find them something in which they can fulfill themselves, whether it is tending gardens, painting our houses, or minding our horses. He and I do a job, get the same food and housing, have the same stipend to give away or use, and only the Judge of all the Worlds knows which—if either—of us is the more valuable. Jorgio looked up, his mouth skewed open in a smile. “It is north you’ve been, eh?”

“Indeed so. As far as there are farms, Jorgio.”

“Thought so.”

In an uneven singsong Jorgio whispered words to the horse. Then he gave Merral a clumsy wink. “Let me stable Graceful here and you and I’ll take some tea together.”

“Ah, I’m sorry, old friend. I’m afraid I shall have to skip the tea. I’ve been put on the next freighter out. Twenty minutes. But I’ll help you stable her.”

“Tut, tut! No tea with me? If you please, you youngsters are too busy by far. Here, lass, give me a hoof. I’ll talk to your horse instead.” He stroked a flank. “Good girl, good girl.”

Suddenly, as if caught by a thought, Jorgio lifted his face up briefly, his brown eyes showing puzzlement. “Do you know, Mister Merral, as I’ve been praying for you lately?”

“You have?” Merral replied, struck by the intensity in his friend’s face. “Well, I value that. I truly do.”

Jorgio was now peering at the hoof. “Tut, tut. Ice and sharp rock are nasty things for a hoof. Even with dura-polymer coatings. If they’re all like this I’ll get new coatings put on ’em. But after Nativity.”

He looked up again at Merral, the angle making his face seem even more distorted. “Funny, it was. I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Restless. For two weeks now. The other night, last night, I think. Anyway, I’m lying awake in my bed. You’ve seen my room, haven’t you? Nice it is. Cozy; you can see it now. Oh no, you’re off away, aren’t you? Anyway, middle of the night the King just says to me, ‘Jorgio Aneld Serter.’ Full name like. So I sits up in bed and says, ‘Your Majesty, present and correct!’ Well, there’s not a lot else to say, is there?”

Sometimes Merral found it hard to know whether Jorgio was trying to make a joke, but this didn’t sound like one. “I suppose so,” he said, patting his friend on the back. “Not much else indeed. But go on.”

Jorgio let the hoof drop to the ground and stood up, screwing his face up as he struggled to remember something.

“So, well, the King, he says, ‘That Merral Stefan D’Avanos, he’s in a spot of bother right now. I think you ought to pray for him.’

“ ‘Well, right you are, Your Majesty,’ I says, and then he’s gone. So I starts asking the Most High to look after you. Half an hour I reckon I prayed. Hard work it was, like wrestling with a bear. Not that I’ve done that, but you takes my meaning. I was in a regular sweat when I finished. I don’t know what the bother was.” He scratched a crumpled ear. “Never had that happen. You know what it was about?”

“Last night? I was safely asleep indoors last night at the Antalfers. But wait. . . .” Something like ice seemed to run up his spine. “When was this? Last night?” Merral stared into Jorgio’s eyes.

“Aye, last night. . . .”

“You’re sure?”

The old man wrinkled his weathered face and bit his bottom lip in puzzlement. Then he grunted. “Tut. No! I’m sorry. It wasn’t. It was the night before.”

Merral stepped back, feeling as if a chill hand had touched him. “No, it wasn’t a bear,” he said, suddenly both chastened and grateful. “But it was something. I don’t know what it was. And I’m very glad you prayed. Very glad.”

For a moment, Jorgio stared at him, as if waiting for an explanation. Merral found himself oddly disinclined to say anything about his dream and suggested instead that they stable Graceful.

Ten minutes later, having said farewell to Jorgio, Merral was still oscillating between puzzlement and thankfulness as he made his way down to the loading bay. There, floodlit beneath the weather shelter, he could see the brick red, faceted bulk of the six-wheeled Light Groundfreighter with the code F-28 stamped on its side by the Lamb and Stars emblem.

He was striding toward it when his attention was caught by a slender female figure with long black hair tied back walking ahead of him with a strangely familiar pace.

“Ingrida Hallet!” Merral called out.

The woman spun round smoothly and gave a little cry of recognition. “Why! Merral D’Avanos!”

They hugged each other affectionately. Ingrida had been a year above Merral at college, but they had been close friends. Separating himself from her embrace, Merral stepped back and they looked at each other.

“I heard you were here,” she said. “I gather you’ve been riding around up north. Going all right?”

“Fine, but no room to relax. The winters could be warmer, the summers cooler. But what brings you here?”

“Ah.” She smiled brightly. “You don’t know? Of course, you’ve been out of touch and it’s not been posted yet. I’ve been asked to work here. Forestry Assistant and so on. So I decided to come and look round on my Nativity break.”

“Oh, but I thought I’d heard that you were going south. That you’d got the rainforest assignment they have been wanting to fill. I was wrong?”

She shook her head in an amused way and grinned at him mischievously. “Oh, we talked it through. The board thinks this is more suitable. I’m inclined to agree, although this—”she gestured to the farm complex—“will be a bit of a backwater when the enlarged Herrandown village is up and running and the new Northern Forest extension is the front line. No, I think the tropics job requires more than I have got. There’s a better candidate.”

“I’d be surprised; tropical systems are tough. But I’m sure you’ll get on fine here. I like it up north myself.”

She gave him the grin again, only this time he felt laughter was just below the surface. “Not too much, I hope.”

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Oh, Merral, you haven’t changed. Not a bit! You are the last person to recognize your gifting. You are the one they want for the tropical assignment.”

In his astonishment, Merral struggled for words, aware that a man in rust-red overalls was waving at him from the side of the freighter.

“Me? This is all news to me. I’ve always seen it as your job.”

“No. You are outgrowing here. Ask anybody.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Anyway, take it with my blessing, Merral. Do a really great job. Look, that’s your driver, you’d better go. Swing by sometime. Love. . . .”

Then Ingrida was gone and the hatch door on the freighter was opening.

The six-wheeler took four hours to cover the one hundred and eighty kilometers to Ynysmant, slowed down by patches of ice on some of the ridges, a track washout, and a herd of golden deer that refused to move. Merral spent most of the time in conversation with the driver, Arent, who was an enthusiast for this particular Mark Nine Groundfreighter, which he’d driven for thirty years. Merral liked enthusiasts of any sort, even if wheeled, winged, or finned engines of transport were not a personal interest.

Yet, in a strange way, Merral was glad of being forced to concentrate on Arent’s lengthy discourse on the advantages of the Mark Nine over the old Mark Eight. There was too much crowding into his tired brain now and he was glad of a relatively simple distraction. The prospect of the tropical forestry posting was staggering. When, a few months ago, he had originally heard about it, he had expressed regret that it hadn’t come up two years later when he felt he might have been ready for it. Tropical forestry was held up as the great challenge in his profession, and only those who had proved themselves in temperate or cold realms were asked to serve in it. The saying was that cold or temperate forest work was like juggling with three balls; but with tropical, it was eight. The many more species gave a multitude of interactions, and everything happened so fast. He wondered whether Ingrida had made a mistake. In the meantime, he forced himself to follow Arent’s explanation of why it would take at least another twenty years of careful design before it was worthwhile producing the Mark Ten Light Groundfreighter.

They were winding through the beech woods on what Merral knew was the last ridge before Ynysmere Lake when Arent looked upward through the transparent roof panel. “Tell you what, the clouds have cleared and we are ahead of schedule. Let me put her on nonvisual waveband sensing and slow the speed.”

The rapid flickering of the tree trunks in the headlights eased. “Now we cut the lights. We should get a great view of the stars and the town.”

Merral had seen it done before, but found it as impressive as ever. For a moment everything outside was total darkness and then gradually his adapting eyes made out the stars, high, sharp, and diamond brilliant above the rushing black smear of branches, and ahead over the ridge, the golden beacons of the Gate and the sharp, clear pinpoint that was the gas giant planet Fenniran were clearly visible.

Arent looked upward and spoke in hushed, reverent tones. “Nativity’s Eve, Merral. I always feel somehow that high heaven is that bit nearer tonight. But I suppose that’d be the sort of thing you learned folk would smile at?”

“Oh, ‘learned folk’ indeed, Arent!” Merral laughed. “This night of all reminds us of the folly of that idea. I recollect that it was to shepherds in the fields the angels appeared, not to the wise in Jerusalem. Anyway, I’m not as learned as you are on your F-28.”

“True enough.”

“And you may well be right, I suppose, Arent. High heaven may be nearer to us tonight—but we have no instruments to measure its proximity.” Then, without thinking, he added, “Or that of hell either.”

He sensed Arent’s face, looking curiously at him in the darkness. “Sorry, Merral. Did you say something?”

“Sort of. . . .” He paused, puzzled at where the words had come from. “But I didn’t mean to.”

There was a long silence as the road flattened, and then they crested the hill. Ahead and below them in a sea of blackness appeared a cone of tiny twinkling points of silver light, as if some sort of faint human echo of the glory above.

And as he looked carefully at the town of Ynysmant perched on its steep island in the lake, Merral could see how the reflection of the lights shimmered as the lake’s dark waters stirred in the wind.

Home, he thought, and the word had a peculiar taste of welcome to it that he felt it had never had before.

Merral left the freighter at the island end of the causeway, thanked Arent, and half walked and half ran up the winding steps into the town. With it being Nativity’s Eve there were many groups on their way to parties and concerts, and Merral picked up a sense of excitement in the air.

The lights were on at his house, a narrow three-story unit in the middle of a sinuous terrace with overhanging eaves. Merral pushed open the door, vaguely surprised to find the hall and kitchen empty. There was ample evidence of recent cooking with a tray of small jam cakes on the side table, and the smell made him realize suddenly how hungry he was. Putting his bag down, he took off his jacket and slung it on a chair. He was suddenly aware of feeling tired and sweaty. It had, he decided, been a long day. Eventually the smell of the cakes was too much for him and he helped himself to one, putting it whole in his mouth and finding it as delicious as he had expected. As he stood there, he heard talking in the general room beyond and, swallowing the last cake fragments, pushed the door open.

His mother, dressed in a skirt and blouse patterned with flowers, rose from her chair suddenly at his entry. She gave a little cry of “Merral,” came over, and kissed him warmly. As they broke free from each other, he saw behind her a thinly built, dark-skinned man of medium height wearing a neat blue formal suit rising from a chair.

His mother took his arm and stretched it out.

“I’m so glad you’re back. Merral, let me introduce you to—I think I have the name right—Mr. Verofaza Laertes Enand.”

The young man smiled gravely and gave a slight bow. “Indeed,” he said. “Verofaza Laertes Enand, sentinel. A pleasure.”

Merral stared at him, hurriedly trying to wipe crumbs off his lips with his left hand. The name made no sense. There was only one sentinel on Farholme, an old man, and this was not him. Besides which the man’s accent was out of the ordinary, but somehow familiar. Merral felt he had always known it.

“Merral Stefan D’Avanos,” he said, awkwardly swallowing the last fragments of cake as he shook hands. Then he looked at the guest. “Sentinel? Here?” he asked. “But have you replaced old Brenito? He’s not . . .?”

The man stood back, his smile slightly awkward, even shy. He’s young, Merral thought, probably my age—midtwenties.

“No, he is alive and well. I have traveled farther than your capital.”

Merral realized that he had answered in Communal, not the Farholmen dialect. He was suddenly aware of his mother tugging his arm and speaking to him in a quiet intensity of excitement. But even as she spoke he knew what she was going to say, for he had understood why the accent was familiar and why he had known it since childhood.

“Merral,” she said in an awed voice, “he’s come from Ancient Earth.”