purpose, no goal, no necessity, no wishing, questing, hoping … no curiosity. All would pass. All was passing even now; perhaps already it was gone.

Rynason shifted where he sat, reaching for the feeling of the stone bench beneath him for equilibrium, pulling out of Horng’s thoughts and going back in almost immediately.

A chaos of mind enveloped him, but he was beginning to familiarize himself with it now. He probed slowly for the memories, down through Horng’s own personal memories of three centuries, dry feet on the dust and low winds, down to the racial pool. And he found it.

Even knowing the outlines of the race’s history did not help Rynason to place and correlate those impressions which came to him one on top of another, overlapping, merging, blending. He saw buildings which towered over him, masses of his people moving quietly around him, and thoughts came to him from their minds. He was Norhib, artisan, working slowly day by … he was Rashanah, approaching the Gate of the Wall and looking … he was Lohreen discussing the site where … he was digging the ground, pushing the heavy cart, lying on the pelt of animals, demolishing the building which would soon fall, instructing a child in balance.

A dirt-caked street stretched before him by night, the stones individually cut and smooth with the passage of heavy feet. “Tomorrow we will set out for the Region of Chalk while there is still time.” A mind-voice from a Hirlaji hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, dead but alive in the race-memory. Rynason could feel the whole personality there, in the memories, but he passed on.

“Murba has said that the priests will take him.”

“There is no need for planting this year … the soil is dry. There is no purpose.”

“The child’s mind is ready for war.”

He felt Horng himself watching him, beside him or behind him … nearby, anyway. The alien heard and saw with him, and stayed with him like a protector. Rynason felt his presence warmly: the calm of the alien continued to relax him. Old leather mother-hen, he thought, and Horng beside him seemed almost amused.

Suddenly he was Tebron.

Tebron Marl, prince in the Region of Mines, young and strong and ambitious. Rynason caught and held those impressions; he felt the muscles ripple strangely through his body as Tebron stretched, felt the cold wind of the flat cut through his loose garment. It was night, 

 Prev. P 23/80 next