Piper, H. Beam - First Cycle (v1.0) (html)Scanned by Highroller and proofed more 
or less by Highroller.
 
Chapter One
For endless millenia the red dwarf, pulled from its home orbit by some random 
stellar happenstance, crossed the lonely void between the two galaxies of the 
near universe. Curving and twisting through the competing attraction—weak but 
inevitable—of the gravity wells of distant nebulae, it gradually swung around to 
head toward a particular medium-sized star cluster. Penetrating the cluster, it 
bore straight toward the eight-planet system of a yellow-white star thirty-eight 
light years from the cluster's gravitic center.
The eighth planet, and the seventh, and the sixth, were on the far sides of 
their orbits as the red dwarf approached; but the fifth, a methane giant with 
three major satellites, was in harm's way. As they closed together, the planet 
heated; its coating of frigid gasses flowed, and then vaporized. Great tidal 
forces tore at the planet's dense, solid core. Quakes and explosions shook the 
surface; the atmosphere burned.
For an instant, during which the great planet seemed to hesitate in its orbit, 
the seismic insult increased past endurance. Two of the three major moons were 
ripped away; they spiraled inward to the yellow star and disappeared as though 
they had never been. The third satellite, torn almost equally between its mother 
planet and the passing dwarf, slowed in its orbit, and then, as the red star 
passed, came crashing down on its primary. This final shock broke the giant 
planet into two almost equal halves, and a minor planet's worth of solar debris.
The red dwarf, dragging the broken halves after it, dived toward the yellow 
star. The fourth planet escaped with no more than superficial damage, the third 
passed unscathed. But the second was directly in the path of the destroyer. It 
swung from its orbit, spun madly for an instant, and then hurtled into the red 
star like a racing scull ramming a battleship.
Relatively, the planet's mass and impact were trivial; the sacrificial 
collision, however, prevented a greater catastrophe at the center of the system. 
The invader caromed slightly off course, lost momentum, and was trapped. The 
attraction of the yellow sun, the lesser attractions of the planet family, and 
the red dwarfs own new velocity combined to pin it to an orbit slightly greater 
than that of the planet it had just annihilated. Spinning around one another 
like a pair of bar-shot on an ever-shortening bar, the two fragments of the 
fifth planet followed it.
In time, as time is measured in the cosmos, the system stabilized. The frozen 
outer planets wheeled around their ancient orbits. The shattered fifth had left 
a wide gap. There was a thin belt of meteoric debris inside the orbit of the 
third. And, just beyond the orbit of the vanished second, the new comer and her 
own new satellite chain traced and re-traced the orbits imposed on them; yellow 
star, red dwarf, and attendant fragments forming a three-body system at the 
apexes of a one-hundred and fifty million kilometer equilateral triangle.
The two planet fragments slowly accommodated themselves to one another and to 
the rest of their violently re-formed solar system. They crumbled, pulled 
together, compressed into spheres. Stripped of all atmosphere in the cataclysm 
which had sundered them, they formed now gaseous envelopes, lost them as the 
heated gas molecules escaped, formed other atmospheres, and held them as their 
surfaces cooled. At first they rotated on their own axes as they revolved around 
a common center of gravity. As they drew closer together, this axial rotation 
slowed until, at a quarter-million kilometers, they faced each other as though 
on opposite sides of a merry-go-round mounted on the rim of a gigantic 
Ferris-wheel, each slightly bulging toward the other. At the center of their 
inner, or opposing, hemispheres-, high mountains had pushed outward, surrounded 
by concentric ranges of lower mountains raised by the tilt of the rock strata, 
sloping back into wide plains which extended to the terminator-zones, which were 
jumbled badlands of great, shattered boulders. On each, at the point antipodal 
to the other, the crust had sunk into a deep depression, around which chains of 
great mountains had been formed.
In the early stages of their formation, one of this pair had received most of 
the water available. Thus it differed from its twin in that it was covered by a 
vast ocean, broken only by the tops-of the mountain chain around the central 
depression on the outer hemisphere, which formed a circle of small island 
continents, the largest about three million square kilometers in area. The inner 
hemisphere, the side always facing the twin, had a permanent high tide, which 
just covered the top of the great peak at the center.
On the sister planet, the central depression of the outer hemisphere was a 
shallow, brackish sea; there was a chain of lakes and marshes encircling the 
terminator or Horizon Zone, and another circle of lakes around the central peaks 
of the inner hemisphere.
On both planets life emerged, quickly on the water world, more slowly on the 
arid one. Seaweed sprang up from the marshes, wind and spray borne spores 
invaded the land, and the green of plant life spread over the mineral reds and 
yellows and browns and grays. Animal life followed. The world-ocean of the water 
planet sent wave after wave of invaders ashore—sea-worms which evolved into 
earthworms, mollusks, crustaceans, and then a vertebrate fish which developed 
the ability to breathe air and became an amphibian. On the arid planet, 
vertebrate life never developed in the central sea; but a crawling slugoid, 
twenty-five centimeters long, which had invaded the land, developed some of its 
muscles into cartilage. After another million years, the cartilage hardened to 
bone.
With some superficial modification, this was the situation on the twin planets 
when, in the 572nd year of the Primary Dispersion, the Greater Terran Federation 
space-cruiser Franklin, G.T.F.H. 17649, Captain Absalom Carpenter, came out of 
hyperspace at the perimeter of the Canis Venatici star-cluster and picked up the 
binary system on her scanners.
By custom, commanders of G.T.F. Space Navy Exploration and Discovery vessels 
named newly discovered planetary systems either for themselves or for their 
ships, mistresses, wives, or pet dogs. Absalom Carpenter, G.T.F.S.N.E.&.D. 
Captain, Commanding, was, however, an odd number even in a service not noted for 
robot-like conformity. The breast of his dress tunic was polychromatic with 
decoration and campaign and battle ribbons, but he valued them, even the blue 
one with the silver stars, far less than the single Lit. D. which the University 
of Montevideo had awarded him for his Internal Clues to the Probable Dates and 
Identities of the Secondary and Tertiary Authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey. 
So, following some private association-path through the legends of ancient 
Hellas, he named the yellow star Elektra. The red dwarf, obviously, was named 
Rubra, and he called the watery planet on which the expedition first landed 
Thalassa, and its arid companion Hetaira.
Chapter Two
By the end of the first billion years, the coastal marshes of Equatorial 
Thalassa teemed with life. Pools and channels were clogged with water-grasses 
and water-ferns. Great banyan-like trees dipped their branches, sending out new 
roots to gain additional resistance to storms and floods. Fish-like and 
worm-like and snake-like things swarmed the waters; beasts ran and crawled on 
the silted floors, or flew or scampered among the branches.
Twice a year the sun would stand at zenith as it spiralled back and forth around 
the planet, briefly parching the treetops and driving the flying and scampering 
beasts down into the lower shadows. The winds would follow, with violent storms 
of lightning and down-sheeting rain; the rivers would rise, spreading over the 
whole jungle and driving the creatures of the ground up into the trees. 
Sometimes whole islands would disintegrate, and matted masses of trees would be 
swept out to sea. Then the storms would end; the air would grow colder; often 
there would be thin skims of ice on the ponds, and sometimes a few flakes of 
snow would sift down through the leaf-roof above. And then the air would warm 
again, there would be fresh vegetation on the flats where the silt had caught, 
and the jungles would vibrate with life again.
Eventually a small, mammal-like creature made its appearance among these swamps 
and jungles, living in the trees, sometimes dropping to the ground in search of 
food. It had four limbs, each terminating in handlike members with four fingers 
and two opposing thumbs. Its head was almost spherical, a little lopsided at the 
bottom from heavy jaws. It would eat almost anything—fruit, nuts, grubs, fish, 
smaller animals, leathery reptile eggs dug out of the mud, and mollusks which it 
would break out of their shells. At first it used its teeth for this, later it 
learned to lay the shellfish on a stone and hammer it open with another stone. 
It learned to use stones to break through the ice in cold weather to catch fish, 
and to throw when attacked. Eventually it learned to carry quite large stones 
into the trees and cache them in crotches to drop on larger animals.
The changes of temperature forced it to develop an efficient internal cooling 
system, and, in addition, its body was covered with a soft down, really 
microscopic feathers. During the hot season it would moult it away and sweat 
copiously; as the temperature dropped the down would grow out again. The 
creature built nests in the trees, lining them with soft grasses and with its 
own down.
As generations passed, it spent more and more of its time on the ground, taking 
to the trees only to escape the floods or dangerous carnivores; and its physical 
structure became more and more adapted to life out of the trees. It developed 
stronger muscles in its rear limbs, and came to rely upon them alone for 
loc&motion, using the hands of its forelimbs for food-gathering. Its posture 
became more erect; its body grew larger, until, where its little arboreal 
ancestor had massed eight to ten kilograms, the average mass was now around 
eighty kilos. It was still covered with greenish down, but it shed it more 
readily and grew it only in the coldest weather. Its legs became short and 
sturdy, its arms long. Its hands were well adapted to grasping and manipulating; 
its feet broad and webbed between the toes to give support in the soft mud and 
speed in the water.
Like its ancestors, it still built tree-nests, in which it slept. The chance 
cobbles which its ancestors had used for missiles or hammers no longer satisfied 
it; it chose stones discriminatingly and improved them by chipping. It 
manufactured hand-choppers and flake knives. It gained ability to control and 
produce fire, and, most important of all, it learned to communicate with its 
fellows by oral sounds which gradually acquired specific informational values 
and became words.
Among the ponds and salt-marshes of Hetaira's Horizon Zone another small animal 
looked up to face a mighty destiny. Its immediate ancestor had been a 
lizard-like rock-dweller which had enjoyed a brief prosperity when, as a result 
of a complex chain of ecological events, an order of beetle-like insects on 
which it had fed had suddenly multiplied in numbers. The increased food supply 
had caused an explosion in the population of the rock dwellers, which resulted 
in the rapid over-hunting and extermination of the food-insect. Facing a hungry 
future, the rock-dwellers were forced into readjustments. Some specialized 
themselves for feeding on another type of insect, developing a long snout and a 
beautifully efficient digging-paw. Some took to robbing the nests of an 
oviparous pterodactyl-thing among the high rocks. And some moved up into the 
woods above the marshes.
Gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years, the progeny of these last 
developed binocular vision and forepaws with digits—four fingers of unequal 
length and a thick, short, opposing thumb. Their bodies were covered with bright 
red fur; they looked, more than anything else, like cats with the limbs of 
monkeys. They would eat anything, animal or vegetable. They learned to use 
sticks for digging out roots and knocking down fruit. They would use long 
whip-like withes to kill low flying bat-birds and small animals. A couple of 
them wielding the long withes could even discourage attacks by fairly large 
animals. When cornered, they were vicious fighters, with nails and teeth but to 
escape the larger carnivora they relied chiefly upon agility, and developed 
longer legs for running and jumping, proportionally smaller torsos, and arms and 
hands more and more specialized for gathering food.
They were incredibly lecherous beasts; the males chased not only the females of 
their own species, but of any other even remotely similar. On some of these, not 
too distantly related, they begot hybrids which occasionally bred true and 
formed new subspecies; but the real importance of this sexual cath olicity was 
the competitive development of sex-attraction characteristics among their own 
females. Instead of passively awaiting the male, the female sought him out and 
flaunted her charms before him. Mating, among these monkey-cats of Hetaira, was 
not a matter of coy seduction—it was a head-on collision.
This pattern led to a certain tolerance and absence of jealousy among the males; 
each was quite willing to share his plural mates with another. Instead of the 
family, the social unit became the gang—a dozen or so males and females, the sex 
ratio changing with circumstance, and the randomly-begotten offspring cared for 
by all.
Such a gang was more than a match for any of the carnivora of Hetaira, and could 
pull down and kill any but the very largest herbivores. They learned to use 
stones for hammers and choppers and hand-weapons and missiles; they invented 
innumerable tricks of cooperative hunting and fighting, and since cooperation 
demands communication, they slowly developed the rudiments of speech. They made 
themselves feared; at the approach of one of their gangs, big meat-eaters that 
had hitherto been kings of the forest learned to slink away, or they did not 
live to learn.
So, when one such gang of red-furred scamperers rounded a bend in a game-trail 
and found themselves confronted by a big pink-and-maroon striped thing with 
vermillion jowl-tufts like Lord Dundreary whiskers and a single sabre-fang at 
the apex of a V-shaped jaw, one of them picked up a stone and threw it, hitting 
the tiger-thing in the face. Instead of fleeing, the beast roared in fury and 
charged. The gang scattered quickly out of the way. The one directly in front of 
the animal jumped behind a small bush, pulled it down, waited for an instant, 
and then released it. The bush lashed forward into the beast's face. Another 
snatched a ten-foot length of dead branch and shoved it between the animal's 
front legs. Three more jumped in to catch hold of the tiger-thing's tail; the 
others swarmed over it with stones and clubs. There was a brief howling, 
writhing convulsion in the brush, and then the one who had released the bush in 
the beast's face jumped in with a heavy stone raised in its two hands, and 
smashed in the thing's head. The others stoned it frantically while it twitched 
on the ground, and kept stoning it for quite a while after it had stopped 
twitching. Gradually they realized that the thing was really dead, and the 
stoning died off and stopped.
Then they saw that their victory had come at a price. One of the females, who 
had rushed in with a sharp stick when the others had caught the beast's tail, 
had been ripped from throat to belly by the back-raking claws. The gang stood 
looking at her for a while, and then first one, then another of them turned and 
began tearing gobbets of meat from the dead tiger-thing and stuffing them into 
their mouths.
All but one male, whose favorite mate she had been. He remained crouching beside 
her, clumsily trying to rearrange the mangled viscera, to close the wound, to 
somehow arouse her from her endless sleep. Some of the others left the feast to 
join him. One of the females, still chewing on a piece of tiger-thing flank, put 
a furry arm over his furry shoulder and tried to comfort him. Tearing the meat 
with her teeth, she offered him half of it. He sank his teeth into the bloody 
gobbet and chewed, at first mechanically and then with relish. When they finally 
left the dead female beside the striped body of the beast, he was chewing on a 
bone and walking beside the female who had comforted him. As he walked the 
memory of his dead mate began to fade. He liked this female too, and his was not 
a level of mental activity capable of much projection beyond the immediate.
But somewhere in the back of his mind there smouldered a murderous hatred for 
the big striped tiger-things. The next time he encountered one, after some 
twenty sleeps—each of which might have been anywhere from six to twelve hours, 
broken by waking periods of fifteen to thirty—he snatched up stones and began 
hurling them rapidly and accurately, gibbering in fury. The maroon-striped, 
Dundreary-whiskered monster snorted in surprise and fled.
Everything fled or fell before the roving gangs. The whole forest was their 
playground; they hunted and fed and romped through it for millennia. They might 
have stopped there, satisfied with the niche they had carved out for themselves, 
but for one thing. These little red-furred gangsters had begun to think, and to 
question, and to imagine.
Chapter Three
Upon Thalassa, too, the sun still spiralled up to zenith and back again; the 
seasons changed and recurred. Forests invaded open grasslands, and grasslands 
spread after retreating forests. Families and bands of families left the swamp 
and wandered into the uplands; sometimes other groups, trusting to the 
protection of their tree-nests, were swept out to sea in the biennial floods, 
occasionally to survive as castaways upon other shores. Race after race of these 
primordial humanoids appeared, wandered, vanished, left their scattered 
monuments of chipped stone weapons and fire-blackened caves and kitchen-middens.
On the large, roughly triangular continent which would someday be called Gvarda, 
a race finally appeared which had reached that point in the journey of physical 
evolution where they were ready to proceed from rudimentary socialization to 
true cultural advancement. They were short and stocky, but their feet were 
narrower and less pronouncedly webbed, and they could use their two-thumbed 
hands with equal facility in either direction and possessed considerable 
flexibility in the elbow joint. The body down had completely disappeared from 
their green-gray skins; there was still down on their heads, blue-green to green 
in color. They had large eyes, wide, jutting noses, heavy prognathous jaws, and 
pointed ears that could be moved independently.
The tree-nests of their ancestors had become tree-houses, flexibly but strongly 
built to withstand the high winds following the hot seasons. They had learned to 
twist ropes of bark-fiber and plant-fiber and rawhide and animal-gut, and to 
make cunning knots and lashings. They chipped stone expertly, making hafted axes 
and hammers from the cores, and knives and awls and spear-points from the 
flakes. They designed a wide variety of bone-tipped fish-spears. They learned to 
hollow out pirogues from logs, with fire and the stone adze. They wove baskets, 
and made garments of downy skins.
They called themselves the Navva. As with primitive peoples everywhere, this 
simply meant "The People."
At times, after the floods, small parties would go up the river in pirogues, to 
where the more open forests of the uplands began. Such parties would camp and 
then divide up to hunt and smoke meat, and quarry and chip stone, returning to 
the delta country before the next flood season with their spoils. Sometimes they 
would return again and again, bringing their families. Some groups decided to 
stay, building their tree-houses high and taking chances with the floods. And so 
permanent villages began to appear along the tributary streams of the big river.
The pirogues which had served so well in the coastal swamps were too clumsy for 
the smaller streams and too heavy to carry over frequent portages. Some of the 
upland forests were too open for building tree-houses, but there was no need for 
them on ground always above flood-level. A house on the ground could be built 
strong enough to resist all but the largest animals—and those were all 
herbivores. So they began to build huts of poles and bark, and fence them with 
pole stockades interwoven with thornbrush. They used their basket-weaving skills 
to construct lighter boats, covering them with skins treated with animal fats 
and tree-resins. And, while bending split wood for boat-frames, they invented 
the bow.
With these new skills in transportation and defense and hunting, they spread 
through the uplands, increasing in numbers as more of their young survived to 
reach maturity. Stockaded forest villages appeared at portage-places and the 
juncture of streams. Canoes and parties on foot pressed up the rivers and along 
the game-trails. These people no longer called themselves simply "the Navva." 
They were "Nawadrov," the Forest People, to distinguish themselves from 
"Nawa-zorf," the Swamp People.
Crossing mountain after mountain, they came at last to the High Ridge, with its 
drop in three bench-like stages to the plains two kilometers below. Here they 
found the blue-black Wahanawa, the Not-People. Survivors of one of the races of 
the past, these were cave-dwellers who had progressed no further than fire and 
crudely chipped stone hand-axes. At first, when they came swarming out of the 
rocks to attack, they were feared. When it was seen that they would just mill 
around stupidly while they were shot down with arrows, they came to be despised. 
But it was generations before they were exterminated and the Navvadrov could 
descend from the High Ridge into the open veldt beyond.
In the swamps, the Navvazorf had begun building their houses on piles, 
independent of the trees. They constructed silt-traps and levees of earth packed 
between woven brush fences, and thus filled in selected areas of the swamps. The 
mudflats widened, and on them were planted the wild grasses whose seeds they 
ground into flour, and tubers to roast along with their fish and meat. They 
found fruit trees and tended them and learned to prune them. Weapons and boats 
and fishing-tackle improved; the bark fibers of which they made ropes were woven 
into mats, and then cloth.
Hunting parties still went up the river; there they met and traded with their 
cousins the Navvadrov, bringing home the bow and the art of making pots from 
baked clay. In return the Navvadrov received skin bags of flour, and dried fish, 
and shell, and mats, and cloth. The Navvadrov themselves had made something of a 
beginning at agriculture; they cultivated certain plants to attract game to 
their area, and soon progressed from this to planting food-crops for themselves. 
After observing the effects of a few accidental fires on the wild grasslands, 
they learned to use fire as a tool to clear land for planting.
The introduction of pottery among the Navvazorf further speeded the progress of 
both peoples. Jars offish-oil and fermented grain beverages went up the river, 
along with flour, grain, dried fish, and cloth, to be exchanged for flint and 
obsidian and animal-skins. A regular trading-place came into being on the flat 
river-beach at the mouth of one of the larger tributaries; from a temporary camp 
it became a permanent village. Navvadrov families settled there, hunting and 
farming between visits of the down-river traders. Long sheds were erected to 
house trade-goods, storage paid for in kind. Bows and arrows were made there; 
traded skins were sewn into robes, and stone tools were finished and set and 
reset into wooden handles. The place came to be called Amarush—literally, Where 
We Sit and Barter.
Among the people of the coastal swamps, a sort of democratic socialism 
prevailed. Crops were planted and harvested in common, each family being 
responsible for its fair share of the work. Catches of fish were smoked and 
stored as common stock. The business of the villages was conducted in open 
conclave of all adult males who had "Walked the Walk," as the rite of passage 
for males was called. The women and children yelled assent or disapproval from 
the sidelines. So, when the trade with the people up the Gvaru became important, 
each Navvazorf village selected a family to move up to Amarush and deal with the 
uplanders.
Tammak, chief of the Darbba, sat on his pile of skin robes at the end of the 
village council-hut and looked across the fire at the dozen-odd tribal elders 
who had gathered with him. His throat was dry, and his hands clenched on the 
rawhide-wrapped grip of the stone mace that was both his personal weapon and his 
scepter of status. It was now, he realized, or never. The thing he was about to 
pro pose was frighteningly novel, and novelty, at best, was always frightening. 
A chieftain ruled only as far, and as long, as his people were willing to accept 
his rule, and this thing he had dreamed of would be hard for them to accept, or 
even comprehend.
"It is still two sun-trips until the hot season, and the trading will not start 
for another sun-trip after that," one of the elders said. "Why need we hurry? 
The longer we wait, the more skins we will have to trade."
"We will not take skins to trade," Tammak explained. "We will take only our 
weapons. The women and children, who will follow behind us, will carry the skins 
along with the rest of the household goods."
"But we cannot trade our weapons!" an elder objected. "And why must the women 
and children come? That has never been heard of. Trading journeys are for men!"
"It is so," Tammak agreed. "But we will not trade. We will go early to Amarush, 
before any of the trading groups arrive, and we will kill everybody in the 
village and take it for ourselves."
"A raid? A raid on Amarush? That has never been heard of. No one raids Amarush. 
Amarush is the place where we barter."
"And why are we to take our women and children on a raid? That has never been 
heard of. Let them wait here, where they will be safe!"
"It is not to be a raid. It is to be something-greater-than-a-raid, and we will 
not return. We will stay forever in Amarush."
"But our fields are here! And our village! Tammak, the gods have been spitting 
on you! The job of our chief is to lead us in defense of our fields and our 
village, not to lead us away from them!"
"Amarush is a better village than this, and there are good fields at Amarush. We 
will take Amarush, and trade with the people from down-river who come to 
Amarush, and the people from the woods, and the mountains. I have seen the 
traders of Amarush. They live in fine houses, much better than our poor huts. 
They have garments of thin cloth for the summers and of soft-downed skins and 
thick quilted cloth for the winters. They sit in the shade of their awnings; 
they feast, wasting enough food at a meal to feed two families. Why should we 
not take what they have and live easily, as they do?"
"But that is not proper, Tammak," one of the elders cried out. Gozzom, who was 
next eldest to Tammak, and by tribal custom his successor. Tammak shifted his 
grip slightly on the mace-handle. "We are not traders," Gozzom continued, "we 
are hunters and farmers. Our fathers were hunters and farmers, and our children 
will be hunters and farmers. It is what the gods have chosen for us; it is what 
the gods expect of us. It is not right for people who are one thing to try to be 
something else. It goes against the gods."
Tammak jumped to his feet, whirling his mace around his head, and smashed it 
down on Gozzom's skull. The bone crushed like eggshell, and blood and bits of 
brain splattered the mace and Tammak's arm and chest. Gozzom fell.
Tammak stood up straight. He pointed with the blood-splattered mace at Gozzom's 
body. "Look at that thing," he said as calmly as his heavy breathing would 
allow. The others stared at the lifeless lump that had been Gozzom, shock and 
amazement showing on their faces.
"A thing that was once a living man is now something else. And the gods do not 
speak! Is there anyone else in this circle who needs to be shown that it is 
possible to change from one thing to another?"
The elders shifted uncomfortably, but none of them spoke. Together they could 
have torn him to pieces, and they probably would have liked to at that moment, 
but the first one would have died in the attempt. None of them wished to be that 
sacrificial first.
"It is a hard life to be hunters and farmers," Tammak said. "We can be rich and 
well-fed at Amarush. I have given this much thought over many sleeps. We will 
take a part of everything that is brought there. We will no longer wear dirty 
skins. Our children will no longer be naked and hungry—"
There was less trouble with the rest of the tribe. Some of the women made a 
fearful outcry against leaving familiar homes for a trek into the unknown, but 
they were only women; the men let them squall or cuffed them into silence. They 
were soon too busy at the work of constructing the needed new canoes. The 
younger tribesmen were, without exception, enthusiastic.
When they were ready to start, Tammak had every hut in the village fired, and 
they paddled downstream with their village burning behind them. Now the Darbba 
must go on; they had nothing to return to.
It took almost a sun-trip to reach Amarush on the big river. There could, of 
course, be no night attack on this world of forever-daylight, and as a 
precaution against raids or forest-fires, the trees had been cleared for two 
bow-shots around Amarush. But Tammak had given this much thought. The best 
concealment, he had decided, would be the most open approach. Bundles stuffed 
with leaves were made of all the sleeping-robes. Chunks of stone were slung on 
poles and carried between two men. The larger pots and jars were suspended from 
shoulder-yokes, as though they contained lard or honey. Shouting and singing, 
the males of the Darbba marched across the cleared ground toward the 
barter-place at Amarush.
It was early, before the usual beginning of trading. The merchants of Amarush, 
expecting good bargains in the bundles and pots of these first-comers, flocked 
out to greet them. Almost all of the merchants were in the market-place when the 
Darbba flung aside their burdens, snatched up their weapons and set upon them. 
Within thirty minutes, Amarush and all it contained had fallen to the invaders.
It was then that Tammak showed the wisdom he had gained his years as chief. The 
houses of the Navvazorf trading representatives were left unmolested. There was 
no burning or indiscriminate looting. Women and children were spared and adopted 
into the Darbba tribe, as were the old skilled bowyers, fletchers, 
flint-knappers and other artisans who had stayed behind in the village. Knowing 
that what could be done once would probably be attempted again, Tammak 
immediately put everyone to work constructing a heavy pole stockade all around 
the village. His people and the Navvazorf traders lived inside the stockade; the 
trading was carried on at picked places around the outside. Between trading 
seasons the women cultivated crops and dressed skins, the men hunted and fished, 
and made tools and weapons.
The Darbba waxed rich after the conquest of Amarush. Tammak bought the products 
of both the coast and the uplands, and he allowed no trading in Amarush except 
through his own people. There was a wide variety of merchandise—wine and 
fish-oil and dried fruits and smoked fish and nuts and nut-oil, rough and shaped 
flint and quartz and obsidian, skins and baskets and mats and cloth. From the 
farther uplands a new trade-stone was beginning to trickle in—small pebbles of a 
soft, shining yellow stuff which could be pounded into sheets and drawn into 
wire as no stone could be, and which would, when heated in the hottest part of a 
charcoal fire, flow like melted tallow.
A large nugget of this stuff was among the loot which fell into Tammak's hands 
at the taking of Amarush. Laying it on a smooth rock, he beat it with a polished 
flint hammer, intending to make a cup or bowl of it. However, before he had 
mastered the technique he had pounded the yellow stuff too thin, so he shaped it 
into a rough cone. His woman lined it with a cap of downy skin, and Tammak wore 
it on his head. Years later, when he knew he was going to die, he gave it, and 
the rule of Amarush, to his eldest son, Vallak.
So Tammak I of Amarush was the first of the kings of Thalassa to wear a golden 
crown, and it was he who established the principle of royal succession by 
primogeniture.
Chapter Four
Generation after generation of the red-furred gangsters of Hetaira scampered 
among the forests, valleys and lakes of the Horizon Zone. The sounds by which 
they communicated with one another became more varied, the expressed meanings 
more exact. Their tools and weapons of stone underwent constant improvement, 
first discarded after use and then retained against future need. The gangs grew 
larger; splitting when hunting was poor, reuniting and merging in times of 
plenty. They raided each others' territory, tried to kidnap or entice each 
others' females, fought and made friends.
With each advance life became easier. More individuals survived to maturity; 
pregnant and nursing mothers, and growing young, were better and better 
nourished; each generation showed the effect. They grew taller, legs lengthening 
as their posture altered; shoulders widened and hips narrowed. The head became 
larger with increased brain capacity; the jaws lighter and narrower as the teeth 
ceased to be used for anything but chewing food. Because the females bore young 
at fairly long intervals, and because the young were, almost with out exception, 
single births and very small at birth, pregnancy and childbirth were negligible 
hardships, never curtailing other activity. There was little difference between 
the sexes in strength and endurance, hence the division of labor within the gang 
was by age and status rather than sex, and the race began its upward journey on 
a basis of sexual equality.
Over the centuries their artifacts were refined into greater efficiency. 
Delicately chipped hafted axes appeared, and flake knives with rawhide-wrapped 
grips, and spears with needle-sharp flint core heads. Fire early became their 
servant. They made garments of skins, and belts and pouches and packs to carry 
their multiplying possessions. A fire carrier—the skull of a large animal lined 
with clay and slung from a rawhide strap—was invented; and from this beginning, 
pottery was developed. The immemorial trick of springing branches or brush in 
the face of a pursuer suggested the sling, and eventually the bow. Hetaira was a 
world without feathers, as Thalassa was a hairless world, but there were stiff 
broad-bladed grasses which, when dried and split, made excellent vanes for 
arrows. They learned to make spear-throwers too, and bolas of rawhide rope 
weighted with round stones.
These little red gangsters had a vast curiosity about everything, a hunger to 
know and understand. Unless some immediate cause of hostility existed, gangs of 
strangers would meet and squat in a circle, exchanging information. They tested 
everything they found by smelling and tasting and pounding and cutting and 
burning. They practiced unthinking cruelties of investigation on every living 
thing they caught. They learned, sometimes by trial and error, and sometimes by 
accident. But once they had learned, they never forgot.
There was, for example, the contribution to gangster knowledge which cost Nwilt 
his life.
Nwilt had been squatting patiently, motionlessly, in the brush for almost an 
hour, his bow bent, waiting for the big blue-furred bat-bird to circle close 
enough for a shot. Finally the thing swooped within range, the bowstring 
twanged, and the bat-bird jerked convulsively and died, its wings extended. As 
it glided down, Nwilt jumped from his ambush and ran after it, coming to the 
edge of a pond in time to see it land fifty feet from the bank in the 
scum-covered water.
He growled in annoyance. This was one of the black-scum ponds his people ran 
across sometimes, its surface covered with a viscid stuff which had a nauseous 
smell and a worse taste. He looked at the bat-bird and wrinkled his nose in 
disgust. If he fished it out at once and washed it, it would be fit to eat. His 
gang had not done so well at hunting lately, and besides, one of his best arrows 
was sticking in the beast's side. He cut and trimmed a pole and, prodding it 
ahead of him, waded into the horrible stuff and recovered the bat-bird.
On the way back his foot slipped, and before he could right himself he had 
fallen sprawling. Picking himself up, he regained the bank, jabbering the 
inarticulate blasphemy of the godless and obscenity of the uninhibited, and set 
off toward the smoke-wisp that marked the gang's stopping-place. The air was 
cold—it was several sleep-periods since the sun had set, far to the north—and he 
was shivering from the ducking by the time he reached the fire, around which the 
twenty males and females and children of the gang were squatting.
In his absence someone had shot an animal, a medium sized thing like an 
antelope, with a single horn projecting straight forward from above and between 
its eyes. The blood-wet skin was draped over a bush; one of the gang had broken 
the horn out of the skull to fashion a dagger, and the unicorn, already gutted, 
was turning on a spit over the fire. Nwilt flung down his bedraggled trophy and 
crowded up to the fire to warm himself.
He crowded too close. A moment later he was wrapped in flames, screaming in 
agony, and running frantically about. One of the others tangled his legs with a 
bolas and brought him down; in a second the whole gang was swarming over him 
with sleeping-robes, the wet unicorn-skin, the water pot. They got the fire out, 
but too late to help Nwilt, who was already dead.
The whole gang was considerably shocked by the incident. Not at the death of 
Nwilt; death was an old story and a constant companion to them. For for a person 
to burst into flames like a pitch-soaked faggot, that was frightening. It might 
happen without warning to any of them.
"We might have all caught fire from him," a woman said, "just as sticks catch 
fire from a burning stick." She rubbed a handful of mud on a spot where her fur 
was scorched.
"We didn't have time to think of that," a man said. "Besides, people don't just 
catch fire. If you get too close to the fire, you might get burned, but you 
won't burst into flames."
"He did," one of the women pointed out.
"I smelled black scum on him when he came up to the fire," another woman said. 
"I think he must have fallen into a scum-pond."
A man poked at the dead bat-bird with his spear point. "That thing is covered 
with black-scum," he said. "It was shot with an arrow. Maybe Nwilt shot it and 
it fell in a scum-pond, and he waded in after it." He gingerly picked up a 
burning brand from the fire, stepped back, and threw it on the bat-bird. "Let's 
see what happens now."
The bat-bird blazed up. When the fire went out, at last, it was badly charred.
"Well," one of the older men said. "It was the black-scum that caught fire. We 
must remember that."
An adolescent named Brilk looked at the body of Nwilt and then at the charred 
remains of the bat-bird. "If the black-scum makes people and bat-birds catch 
fire," he suggested, "maybe it makes other things catch fire. Maybe it would 
make wet wood catch fire."
The others turned and looked at him for a moment, and in that moment Brilk 
ceased to speak as a child and became one of the gang council.
"So it should, Brilk," one of the others agreed. "Let's try it."
The next time they met a strange gang, after they settled a hunting dispute and 
made ritualistic gestures toward stealing each others' women, they made the 
peace-sign, and both gangs squatted in a circle. The others listened intently 
while the gang reported the discovery of petroleum.
Then there was the time when a gang built a campfire against an outcropping of 
bituminous coal. That was a frightening experience, too, until it was realized 
that coal was a special kind of rock. The idea that the very rock they walked on 
might catch fire from any campfire was frightening. But from understanding that 
coal was different, although it looked like rock, came the understanding that 
things that look alike are not necessarily the same, and that things might 
possess properties not evident from outside appearance.
The gangs drifted north and south through the Horizon Zone. Thousands of years 
passed until two gangs met, half way around the planet, and found that neither 
could understand the language of the other. At times, from mountain tops, they 
would glimpse a thing of beauty on the far horizon: a faintly luminous ball, 
larger than a man's fist at arm's length. Now and then a gang would move toward 
it, leaving the zone of jumbled mountains and reaching open plains beyond. Some 
followed the rivers that fed the lakes of the Horizon Zone until they found 
their way barred by deserts. Then they might wander back and forth until, by 
chance, they would find another river flowing in the opposite direction and 
follow it between ever higher mountain ranges until at last they came to another 
land of lakes, and of mountains higher than they had ever seen before, pushing 
their snow-capped peaks miles into the air. And, almost at the zenith, the 
silvery globe.
The beauty of that thing in the sky fascinated them as the sun and the 
Star-Cluster and Rubra never did. They never tired of watching it, and they felt 
somehow attracted to it. But they made no myths about it; they did not worship 
it as a god. They had no gods, and the very concept of a supreme being was 
incomprehensible to them. They asked questions, and they accepted nothing on 
faith. They asked: What is it? What holds it up? How far away is it? What is it 
really like? They of Hetaira had escaped the two blind alleys of religion and 
magic; they had already learned that things of nature had natural causes, and 
that if one were smart enough to ask the proper questions, nature would not 
withhold its secrets.
There were many gods upon Thalassa, and magic ruled the lives of its people. 
When Amarush was still a huddle of temporary huts on a flat beach, a thriving 
trade in magical articles existed—colored or glittering stones, roots in animal 
or humanoid form, seashells valued as fertility charms—and the concept of pure 
magic had already become elaborated into belief in some supernatural power 
behind the magical influences.
The god of the Navvazorf was the sun. Of the three major sky-objects, only 
Elektra gave heat as well as light; it brought the storms and bloods, providing 
fresh silt to renew the land for planting. At first it was worshipped directly, 
and then as the god's abode, and finally as the god's visible manifestation. 
Rubra and the Star-Cluster were also venerated, but their cults gradually merged 
into the worship of Dindash, the Sun God. Altars rose; sacrifice-fires blazed; 
priests howled and chanted as they moved from orgiastic dance to ceremonial 
procession.
The Navvadrov, the Upland People, at first had a complex system of animal-totems 
and ancestor spirit cults. The priest remained half wizard, purveying charms 
even as he offered prayers. When agriculture and the breeding of domestic 
animals began to supplant hunting, the deities of the Navvadrov became fertility 
gods; a polytheism arose, with Mother-Goddess, Father-God, slain and risen 
Seed-God, and a host of field-gods and herd-gods and local and special deities.
Those of the Navvadrov who had crossed the High Ridge and gone down into the 
veldt beyond had carried with them their primitive totemisms and 
spirit-worships, but many of their totemic animals were not native to the veldt 
and were forgotten, and the ancestors whom they had venerated on the benches of 
the High Ridge were buried there and their spirits could not follow into the 
plains. They came to worship the spirits of the warriors and wizards who had led 
them onto the veldt, and a pantheon of gods and goddesses no longer remembered 
as having been mortals gradually arose. Their worshippers were no longer 
Navvadrov; they had split into many tribes, and, with the domestication of pack 
and riding animals, wandered far.
A temple of the Mother-Goddess and a temple of Dindash stood side by side at 
Amarush; both were respected by the conqueror. The priests of Dindash traded 
generously for gold to enrich their altars. The first bits of copper and silver 
to reach Amarush went into vessels for both temples. For as long as Tammak I 
reigned, and Vallak I, his son, and through the reigns of Tammak II and Tammak 
III and Vallak II, there was peace in Amarush, though there was much fighting 
elsewhere on the river.
It was in the reign of Tammak IV that a trading town was established a hundred 
miles down-river from Amarush. Colonists came from Gvazol, an important town at 
the mouth of the river, and settled the town they called Gvazopinath. Their 
clear intention was to anticipate the upbound trade from the coast and break the 
monopoly of Amarush.
Tammak IV led an expedition against Gvazopinath before the thongs were dry on 
the roof-poles of the trading huts, and razed it to the ground. Unlike his 
illustrious ancestor, he spared neither the lives of the Navvazorf traders nor 
the temple of Dindash.
The next season, no traders came to Amarush. Instead, a fleet of fifty pirogues 
and rafts came up from Gvazol and attacked, attempting to put Amarush under 
siege. The siege lasted less than two weeks before the warriors from Gvazol were 
beaten off in a ruthless and bloody battle. Tammak IV immediately demolished the 
temple of Dindash in Amarush, taking its riches for the crown. The priests and 
the Gvazolla traders hiding in the temple he burned alive on a pyre beside the 
river, in a burlesque of the sacrifice ceremony to Dindash.
The Gvazolla attack had been voted on by the Gvazol village council and acted 
upon immediately. The warriors were an undisciplined mob without a semblance of 
leadership. For some time the thought had been abroad in Gvazol and the other 
coastal villages that they had outgrown their village-council government and 
communal economy. This crushing defeat, from which only fifteen of the fifty 
boats returned, converted thought into certainty.
"At Amarush," the survivors said, "Tammak is king; all obey him. The Amarusholla 
fight as one, while we try to plan as one, but fight without a leader. Our 
fighting quickly becomes each-for-him-self. We too must have a leader whom all 
will obey."
Two hot-seasons later a second expedition was led by a veteran river-trader and 
pirate-fighter named Shishdosh; he had twenty boats of Gvazol and five each from 
the neighboring villages of Trashol and Murshol. His warriors carried a new 
weapon: a sort of sword made by inserting rows of sharp flint into a thin 
hardwood board. They did not capture Amarush; the stockades built by Tam-mak I 
and strengthened by each of his successors were too strong. But while ten of the 
boats engaged the defenders in an arrow-fight at the front gate of the town, the 
others landed their boats out of bowshot and attacked on the leeward side, 
burning the fields of ripe grain, looting and firing the storage-sheds outside 
the walls, and making off with much spoil, including tools and weapons of a new, 
hard, brown metal that had come to Amarush from a village in the far uplands. 
They also captured twenty prisoners to bring back to Gvazol and sacrifice to 
Dindash.
The credit of Shishdosh stood extravagantly high after this exploit. When he 
began talking about another expedition, he was unanimously voted its chieftain. 
He began by gathering a personal staff of a dozen or so veterajis of the 
previous expedition and appointing them sub-chieftains, responsible only to him. 
He further ingratiated himself with the priests of Dindash, imposed levies on 
the villagers, and put several dissenters to death in various showy manners; 
after which he effectively ruled Gvazol directly. The frightened, sycophantic 
village council was reduced to an advice-giving function, and Shishdosh seldom 
heeded its advice. On one pretext or another he managed to extend the period of 
preparation for the Great Raid for five flood-seasons.
Another village, Novzol, farther down the coast at the mouth of a smaller river, 
had begun trading with the Upland People several centuries before. A little 
below the head of pirogue navigation on their river they had found a Navvadrov 
village whose people had begun to mine and smelt copper. It was these people who 
learned to alloy it with other metals: silver, and tin, and zinc. By the time of 
Shishdosh's second expedition against Amarush, bronze tools and weapons were in 
limited use in the uplands and along the coast. Shishdosh himself carried a 
bronze sword with a double sawtooth edge, the appearance copied from the 
wood-and-flint weapons he had carried on his first campaign.
The Great Raid, five flood-seasons in the preparation, was successful. Shishdosh 
filled a number of captured Navvadrov canoes with his own warriors disguised in 
uplander skins and cloth caps. They raced ahead of his main fleet, simulating 
panic-stricken flight. Hastily beaching their canoes, this party rushed 
pell-mell for the gate, shouting that the Gvazolla war-party was behind them. 
Before the deception could be seen, the gate was opened for them and they 
swarmed in. The pirogues and rafts of Shishdosh's main fleet followed, landing 
their warriors directly in front of the gate. The disguised warriors kept the 
gate open until the main body could rush it and achieve a toehold inside the 
town itself. There was a desperate resistance, but in the end the defenders were 
wiped out or captured. Tammak IV himself was taken alive and then impaled on a 
great stake outside the front gate, where his body was left to swing in the wind 
for season after season until it finally disintegrated, and then the bones were 
gathered and mashed up, and the dust scattered.
Having tasted power, Shishdosh was loath to put aside the heady cup. Loading 
several pirogues with the richest loot, including bronze tools but no weapons, 
he sent them down the river in charge of a trusted henchman, inviting the 
priests of Dindash to come to Amarush and consecrate a new temple. While 
waiting, he strengthened the defences of the town, sent embassies to the 
adjoining upland chieftains, and recruited a company of Navvadrov archers. Then, 
after the consecration ceremony, he conferred the crown of Amarush upon 
Pinchidun, an old and trusted comrade, and returned to Gvazdol with his 
mercenaries and the Dindash priests. To keep order in Amarush, Pinchidun kept 
with him the warriors from the villages adjoining the Gvazol who had joined the 
expedition.
Back at Gvazol, Shishdosh entered the town triumphantly and immediately 
proclaimed himself king. The priests of Dindash annointed and crowned him, with 
the blessing of the Sun-God. Then, without even pausing to rest, he seized, one 
after the other, the three neighboring villages whose warriors were all still at 
Amarush keeping order, and added them to his kingdom.
Novzol, which had taken no part in the conquest of Amarush, was the main rival 
in prosperity of the new Gvazolla Kingdom. With bronze tools, the Novzolla had 
become skillful shipwrights. Their mariners learned to take advantage of the 
winds which rose after the hot season; instead of poling their small boats 
through the inland network of marshes and channels, they followed the coast, 
trading with other communities which were slowly changing from neolithic 
villages into mercantile cities. These, also, sent expeditions into the uplands 
in search of metals. Occasional wars broke out; alliances were formed and 
disintegrated. Finally, two centuries after the Shishdosh Dynasty came to power, 
Sharphad V of Novzol conquered Gvazol; shifting his capital to the city at the 
mouth of the Gvaru. Within a score of hot-seasons he had brought all the coastal 
cities into a single empire.
New methods were needed to handle increasing wealth and expanding trade. 
Gold—because it was universally valued, universally rare, and practically 
indestructible—became the standard of value. The art of writing and the science 
of mathematics were pressed into service in support of the empire, and were 
advanced and developed by the need for keeping increasingly complicated accounts 
and records. A new class grew up; humble scribes and bureaucrats, upon whose 
knowledge and administrative abilities the well-being of the empire depended.
Ships forced to sea by misadventure found the coasts of new continents: Dudak, 
to the north, and Zabash, to the south. Deliberate exploration followed 
accidental discovery; tribes of savages were encountered, with whom the 
explorers alternately fought and traded. The Coastal Empire grew, gradually and 
imperceptibly, into the first Sea Empire.
Chapter Five
The wandering gangs spread out across Hetaira, some to the Outer Hemisphere, but 
more toward the silver globe in the sky. They followed the game-herds in the 
plains beyond the Horizon Zone, first as foot-nomads, and then catching and 
breaking pack and riding animals, and driving game from one feeding ground to 
another. After generations in captivity, the descendants of these wild grazers 
and browsers had been selectively bred into domestic flocks and herds.
The larger and more prosperous gangs did not travel very far. They fought with 
one another over grass and water in the age-old manner of nomads, but tended to 
keep the peace when there was enough for all. They formed friendships and 
enmities and kept closely aware of one another by constantly meeting to trade 
and gossip. The smaller gangs, pushed out of the best grazing lands by their 
more numerous neighbors, invaded the mountain country around the Central Peak.
These displaced nomads found the country already peopled. Earlier gangs of 
paleolithic hunters had moved into the mountain valleys and up the rivers, and 
had discovered metals and something of how to use them. Little permanent 
communities, the first in the planet's history, had appeared at the richer 
ore-outcroppings; there would be houses around the mine-pits, and a furnace, and 
a forge. Hunting and food-gathering were still the chief occupation, but there 
would be some cultivation, and intermittent working of metal into tools and 
weapons.
Sometimes there would be bloody fights; more often the newcomers would trade 
cattle for metalware and carry it back to the plains, trading it for more 
cattle, and return then to the mountains to begin the cycle again. The miners 
and smiths came to depend less and less on hunting and farming, and more and 
more on being able to trade their work for foodstuffs.
There seems to have been no clearly defined demarcation between a Bronze and an 
Iron Age in Hetaira. As one community would learn to alloy copper, another would 
begin smelting and working iron. Even the carbonization of iron into steel came 
surprisingly early. The inquiring Hetairan mind, with its unceasing search for 
novelty, the ability to use existing knowledge to uncover new facts, all 
accelerated progress. Changes which might have taken millennia in another 
culture sometimes happened in decades on Hetaira. The wheel developed an axle 
shortly after it was first used as a roller under heavy objects. Almost at once 
it begot its numerous and varied progeny—the spinning-wheel, the potter's wheel, 
the water-wheel, the grindstone, the cart wheel. It gained spokes or teeth, and 
learned how to lift weights and turn corners; became the windmill, the 
bucket-chain, the windlass, the pulley, and a variety of devices for lifting or 
moving solids or liquids. Soon the cartwheel gained an iron tire, and the plow 
an iron plowshare; fields were cleared and roads were built.
The communities were still based on gangs. Sexual promiscuity and the basic 
equality of the sexes and lack of any sex-based division of labor prevented the 
development of anything like patriarchy or matriarchy. There was little 
authority of any sort, and no tyranny whatsoever. Once in a while some 
individual would, by virtue of superior strength or cunning, try to impose his 
will on others; such a one would invariably be found, in a short time, laying in 
some field with an arrow in his back. People deferred only to greater knowledge 
or experience or inventiveness; and they had an unerring ability to separate the 
gold from the dross.
What might be called capital property was usually owned in common by the gang; 
there were few fixed rules of distribution, but there was very little inequity 
or prolonged dissatisfaction with anything within their control.
There would be long static periods, when progress would slow down or stop its 
forward direction, allowing it to spread laterally among all the people, and 
allowing complete exploration of all the ramifications of some new discovery. 
Then some new fact would be discovered in a totally new direction, and there 
would be a frantic burst of invention to exploit it. The news of such 
discoveries fairly flew from gang to gang. There were those who made it their 
life's work to carry such news, and they were welcome wherever they journeyed.
Talato Isleeta—Blazehead the Wanderer—had received his first name in childhood, 
from the wedge-shaped splash of pink fur that began at a point between his eyes 
and widened to cover the top of his head. He had made the second for himself; in 
his thirty years he had travelled completely around the Central Peak and up into 
the valleys of most of the rivers that flowed into the chaplet of lakes 
surrounding them. Usually, as now, he rode alone; his red-and-yellow lance 
pennon marking him as a wanderer, and therefore the carrier of no grudges, 
friendly to all who would have him visit, a non-participant in local feuds. He 
was usually welcome as a trader, story-teller, exchanger of information and 
news. Occasionally he would have to fight some outcast or small gang of 
marauders, as had happened only two sleep-periods ago; more occasionally some 
gang, for a private reason, would indicate that he was not, then, welcome in 
their midsts; but these happenings were rare, and he had enjoyed the hospitality 
of many gangs.
At the brow of the ridge, he reined in his sorth; the two plodding pack-animals 
behind him stopped also. There was a village in the valley below, as he had 
known there must be; the road had been freshly mended with logs and broken 
stone.
It seemed to be a mining and iron-working village; the mountains on both sides 
of the white-flecked, rocky river were gashed by the red scars of ore-workings. 
There was a bridge over the stream, lifted above flood level on log piles, and 
at the far end of it the village huddled around an open square, houses on three 
sides, and on the fourth two stubby furnace-stacks and a long forging-shop. The 
stacks were smokeless now, and covered; the anvils were silent, but there was 
considerable banging and clattering from the long shed that projected to the 
river, the far end overhanging with a water-wheel projecting from below. He 
could see figures working on the slanting roofs of the houses. The sun was 
approaching zenith—in a little while it would be eclipsed by Shining Sister, 
which was now lost in its glare, and then it would pass over the top of 
Skystabber Mountain, and the hot time would come, and the storms would follow.
Shaking his reins, he whistled softly between his teeth. The sorth moved 
forward, and the two toulths followed obediently, placid under their loads of 
oilskin-wrapped packs. The bridge swayed gently as they passed slowly over it. A 
villager met him on the far side, as he passed between the houses and reined up 
in the open square. He wore a leather apron, a loincloth, and high buckskins, 
and his fur was smudged with soot and scorched in spots.
"I know you," the villager grinned. "I never saw you before, but I know your 
name."
Talito passed his lance through the holding-strap and slipped the butt into the 
socket on his stirrup before dismounting. "Yes, I carry it with me," he said, 
touching the pink blaze on his forehead.
"We have a couple of Talitos in our gang, too, but there's only one Talito 
Isleeta. It is our pleasure to meet and speak with you. There was a girl 
wanderer here a couple of hot-seasons ago who told us about you. She camped with 
you in a cave on Hornpeak through a storm."
Talito smiled. "Reeva Baleena," he said. "She plays a small harp and sings. She 
knows about medicines, and cures sick children. And she understands how animals 
must be bred for the qualities one wants."
"The same," the villager replied.
"A wonderful girl," Talito said. "I remember the three sleep-periods we were 
trapped by the storm with great fondness."
"We are the Tortromma Gang," the villager told him. "My name is Chwalvo. You 
want something to eat? We have a pot of stew on a fire in the forging shop. 
We're all staying there through the coming storm. It's the safest place, and we 
can make a fire without choking ourselves in the smoke. You can put your pack 
and things in there."
"Is there anything I can do to help you prepare?" Talito asked. "My sorth isn't 
any good for tethered work, but my toulths are broken to cart-harness."
Together they started for the long shed. "We have a lot of grain to cut and 
bring in," Chwalvo said. "It was late ripening this season. Our fields are as 
far up the road as you can drive a cart while you sing The Song of the Four 
Foolish Hunters."
Talito mentally ran through the song, with its twelve stanzas sandwiched between 
the three repeating verses. The field, he estimated, must be about ten hundreds 
of lance-lengths away. "You'll have your work cut out to get it all in before 
the storm," he said.
"Most of the children and old people are up there now," Chwalvo said, "cutting, 
threshing, and bagging. The pre-adults drive the grain carts."
Talito helped himself from the stew-pot on the fire and looked around the 
shadowy interior of the forge. A dozen or so able-bodied members of the gang had 
dismounted the water-wheel and were hoisting it above the anticipated flood 
level of the river. He saw something which interested him immediately—a 
framework of heavy beams supporting an iron hammer bigger than the body of a 
sorth, with a great log for a handle, pivoted more than halfway back, and set to 
be raised and released by a large, hooked cam operated by the water-wheel.
He gestured with his dagger, which had been halfway to his mouth with an impaled 
cube of meat. "That," he exclaimed. "That pounding contraption. I never saw 
anything like that before!"
Chwalvo grinned proudly. "I thought of it myself," he said proudly. "Ask any of 
the gang if I didn't. Are you going to make a picture of it? Reeva told us 
that's what you do when you find anything new; you make a picture of it with 
charcoal on skins and then tell people about it."
"I will probably do that," Talito said, going over to take a closer look at the 
apparatus. "It is very clever."
Chwalvo beamed. "Don't forget to say it was Chwalvo Tontrommo, at Red Gap 
Village, on Little Hoon River, who thought of making it. Are you going to make 
the picture now?"
"No, I'll have to see to my animals first. Then I'll take a cart out to the 
fields. Plenty of time for drawing after the work's done, when we're all in here 
together."
He helped the Tontrommo Gang get in their grain. When he was hungry, he ate from 
the big stewpot; when he was tired he spread his bedding on a pile of fresh 
straw and slept. The eclipse came while he was in the fields loading his cart 
with grain; the sun slid behind the disk of Shining Sister, the other world so 
like this one, so far away. The two worlds were flat plates, according to the 
best Hetairan theory, piled up with mountains in the middles. The sun went 
around them both, first one way and then the other. Shining Sister must be 
covered, at least on the bottom, with something bright, like silver. Talito 
wondered if there were people there too, and supposed that there probably were. 
They must be very different from his own kind; Shining Sister was so much closer 
to the sun that the heat there must be terrible.
The little river rose as the mountain glaciers began to melt. Everybody worked 
continuously until all the grain was harvested. The wind began blowing toward 
the advancing spot of heat as the sun slid over Skystabber; there was a period 
of calm while the sun was at zenith which lasted for a whole waking-period. Then 
the wind came howling down from the mountains. Broken branches and bits of 
debris rattled on the roof and hit the sides of the long forge-shop. Inside, it 
grew so dark that torches were lit. The children, frightened at the unaccustomed 
absence of light, whimpered and mewed, and the women and older youngsters 
comforted them. The rain came, first in wind-driven spattering, and then in a 
steady drumming, and finally in a continuous roar that drowned out even the 
thunder.
The rain continued for five sleep-periods. They sat around the fires, talking; 
they gathered to look at the things Talito produced from his trade-packs. Like 
all the sorth-riding wanderers, he carried only the lightest and most valuable 
wares, leaving the heavier and cheaper goods for the wagon-trains. There were 
several bolts of cloth he had gotten at a weavers' village across the ridge, but 
that was less than one waking-period's journey away, and the people of Tontrommo 
Village could get all of that sort of cloth they wanted.
They were fascinated, however, by the jars and cups and bowls of translucent, 
muddy-colored glass he had carefully packed in one of the oilskins. They had 
never seen glass before. They had never even heard of the village where the 
glassware had been made.
"Look, I'll show you." Talito took a roll of skin from a pack and opened it, 
spreading it before them. "Here, in the center, is Skystabber, with the other 
big mountains around it. The red arrow shows the direction the sun moves when 
the Bright Spot is in the sky with it; the black arrow shows the direction it 
moves when the Bright Spot appears as the sun sets. Here is where this village 
is." He took a small bottle and uncorked it, dipped a splinter into it, and made 
a few black marks on the map. '•'And here is Singing Trees Village, where I got 
that cloth. And Sand Hill Village, where they make vessels out of melted sand, 
is down here."
The Tontrommos stared at the map in happy surprise, exclaiming over it.
"Look, the squares are villages! And the wavy lines are streams, and the jagged 
lines are mountains. And these things, the circles with wavy lines in them—they 
must be lakes! Aren't they lakes, Talito? Why, this is wonderful! He has made a 
picture of the whole world, and whenever he finds a new place, he just marks it 
on; and he can see where everything is, and how to get from one place to 
another!"
"But what are all the strange squiggly marks that you have made all over the 
skin?" a girl asked, leaning over his shoulder.
"They're a kind of reminding-mark," Talito explained to her. "See what I made 
for this village? A tlinka-leaf. Tlinka leaves are red. And this notched mark is 
my reminder for a gap. And here, by the water-mark, a hoona with a line over it, 
to show that it's little. Red Gap Village, on Little Hoona River. And a hammer 
under the village-square to show that this is an iron-working village."
"Look, Singing Trees Village!" The girl pointed. "There's a ghinkeen, because 
ghinkeens sing, and two trees next to each other, and the square village-sign. 
Singing Trees Village. And a loom under it!"
"Let me see!" one of the youths said, pushing forward. "Let me see if I can 
figure it out." He put his finger down on the map. "There's a village sign, with 
a sorth next to it—how clever; just three lines, and you can still tell it's a 
sorth—and wavy lines next to the sorth. Let's see; the wavy lines are water. The 
sorth is—what is a sorth? Green. Green Water Village?"
Talito smiled. "Nice try," he said. "And very close. You have the process right, 
you just guessed wrong about what a sorth means to me. Many things are green. 
What a sorth is, in my mind, is fast. That is Fast Waters Village, next to Fast 
Waters River. The river is very shallow, and the water in it moves very 
rapidly."
"Talito!" an elder toward the rear of the group cried out. "You must make us a 
world picture like this. If you do, we'll make something fine for you. What do 
you want in return? We could make you a dagger and a lance of a fine carbon-iron 
we have developed; many times stronger and a little lighter than the ones you 
now carry."
"The weight of my dagger is not excessive," Talito told him, "and my lance is of 
a strong, light wood and does not need to be of metal. But there is a weapon 
that I have wanted for some time, if it could be built."
"Well, if it can be built," the elder said, "we are the gang that can build it. 
What does it look like?"
"A long knife," Talito said, "with a blade as long as my leg from hip-joint to 
heel, double-edged, ridged in the middle to keep it stiff, and pointed. And a 
grip long enough so that I can swing it with both hands if I want to."
"For fighting on sorthback?" someone asked. "That sounds like a good idea. And 
you could use it with both hands on foot."
"But it would be too unwieldy," someone else objected. "It would be much too 
blade-heavy to move quickly."
"Why not lengthen the handle?" another Ton-trommo suggested eagerly. "That would 
put weight at the rear to balance the blade."
"But the handle can't stick out too far in back." the first person said. "You'd 
have to hold your arms too far out to use the thing."
"A weight!" Chwalvo said, thumping his left hand into his right. "A ball of iron 
at the end of the handle to counterbalance the blade!"
"Copper instead of iron," the elder suggested. "It's heavier, so you'd need a 
smaller ball; and when it's polished, it's prettier."
Talito watched and listened curiously as this dialogue went on. It was rewarding 
to listen to such craftsmen as they went about solving problems. It was a 
pleasure to hear competent people display their competence. "I hadn't thought of 
that," he admitted. "The balance would be a serious problem. But now you've 
thought of it and solved it all in the space of time it takes a sorth to run ten 
lance-lengths. That is exactly what I'd like: a long iron knife counterweighted 
with a copper weight at the handle-end."
"We shall go to work on it right after the storm," the elder said. "We'll do a 
model in wood first, and weight it with lead to get the right balance. That way 
we can see how the shape should be for the best handling. And we'll find you a 
nice smooth white skin to make the world-picture on."
Talito dug into his pack and pulled out a big jar. "Here's something else I 
have," he said, taking the leather cover off. "Look at this."
He took out a pinch of white powder and mixed it carefully with about an equal 
amount of charcoal-dust. Then he scraped a flint along the roughened flat of his 
dagger to strike a spark. The mixture caught the spark about the third or fourth 
time he did it, and it sputtered, and then burned with a sputtery, smoky flame 
for four or five seconds.
"What do you think of that?" he asked.
"Will the flame catch dried grass?" a townsman asked.
"It will."
"Amazing! Tinder that blows itself on. Talito, where did you find such stuff?"
Talito pointed with his dagger to the map. "Down here on the Big Arrowwood 
River. It's found on the walls of caves. Do you want some?"
Chwalvo picked up a hammer from beside a small anvil. "Here, Talito, give us the 
weight of this, and we'll give you ten weights in worked steel: arrowheads, 
spear-heads, knife-blades, whatever you think you can use," he said. "This will 
be something to show people!"
"Well, don't eat any of it," Talito advised. "The Gobbilene Gang, who scrape 
this stuff off the cave walls and trade it, claim that if you eat it the girls 
will be disappointed in you for a while."
The girl beside Talito snuggled closer. "You haven't been eating any of it, have 
you, Wanderer?" she asked.
So the sword and the alphabet came to Hetaira, too. Talito's reminding-marks 
became ideographs; from them developed phonetic symbols. Talito's rolled skins 
were scraped down to parchments and vellums. Vegetable pulp was mashed up and 
spread on frames of finely-woven cloth for paper, and a variety of pens and inks 
were devised. And Talito's sword changed as it journeyed across Hetaira; the 
simple cross hilt became an elaborate basket-guard to protect the hand; and the 
blade assumed many different forms in different places, as the use of it and the 
method of handling it evolved. And then somebody added powdered sulfur to 
Talito's saltpeter and charcoal, and the sword became obsolete.
Chapter Six
The Bronze Age came more slowly to the Uplands of Thalassa, and to the veldt 
beyond the High Ridge. Forests gave way to fields; flocks and herds increased. 
Houses of adobe and kiln-hardened brick replaced log huts, behind walls of mud 
and stone. The nomads came in through the gaps of the High Ridge, driving herds 
of cattle and riding stock and pack animals to trade for tools and weapons of 
bronze, or slipped in small bands into the Navvadrov country to raid. They found 
deposits of copper and tin in the mountains of the second range, beyond the 
plains, and raiders brought back kidnapped Navvadrov miners and smiths, and in 
the process discovered and institutionalized slavery.
The Upland villages became towns and small cities, and the Upland tribes grew, 
slowly and without planning, into nations. As the nomad raids increased, 
permanent war-chiefs were appointed in each area, and patrols of warriors drawn 
from levies among the tribes. After a while the warriors were permanent also, 
supported by taxes paid to the war-chiefs. And so the war-chiefs became kings, 
and the warriors became a feudal nobility, each given a small area to live in 
and off of. These new kings quarreled bitterly with each other. Mud-walled towns 
were besieged, defended, taken, and retaken. The farmers sank into peasantry 
and, in some areas, to serfdom. The nomad raiders, growing more numerous, and 
thus stronger and more impudent, raided deeper and longer into the Upland while 
the kings and nobles fought among themselves.
Beyond the High Ridge, the nomad bands and tribes were combining, forming 
alliances and confederations. It remained for Krushpan the Shebb to unite them 
all under his leadership. He skillfully played tribe loyalty against tribe 
loyalty, and promises of loot from the Uplands, and position in his new 
federation of tribes, to get all the tribal sheiks to agree to come together 
under his supreme leadership. When he had assembled an army of twenty thousand, 
he led them through the passes of the High Ridge.
The moment was propitious. The army of Liapur had just taken, and was sacking, 
the town of Prehipur. Falling upon Liapur in the absence of its prince and its 
army, Krushpan's nomads looted it and enslaved its people. Then, rushing ahead 
of the news, his hard-riding warriors fell upon the victorious army of Liapur 
while it was still within the walls of Prehipur and still occupied with 
executing the last of Prehipur's defenders. Krushpan captured both the city of 
Prehipur and the army of Liapur without a struggle, his surprise was so 
complete, and annihilated both.
In the three years that followed, the nomads made themselves masters of the 
Uplands on both sides of the Gvaru. Amarush, the now long-neglected outpost of 
the Sea Empire, fell with the rest.
The extinction of this foothold in the Uplands passed almost unnoticed by the 
people of the coast, whose eyes had long ago turned from the hinterland of 
Gvarda to the new lands across the sea. For the past century their colonies had 
been springing up everywhere—on Zabash, and Dudak, and Nimsh, and Vashtur. There 
was gold and silver on Zabash, and grain and wine-fruits. There was tin on 
Vashtur, and an animal with great teeth of ivory. There were oil-nuts on Nimsh, 
and copper, and in the mountains a reddish rock from which a new metal, gray and 
hard, was being smelted. And on Dudak were natives who made good slaves and were 
sold in herds in the markets of every city of the Empire.
The parent cities on Gvarda prospered. Their streets were paved with stone, and 
through them passed carts of merchandise, and gold-flashing chariots, and inlaid 
litters borne by slaves. The goods of every land piled the docks and crammed the 
warehouses. Merchants and nobles took their ease in the tapestried rooms of 
marble palaces, sipping the wines of Zabash and the fiery drink that the Dudak 
colony had learned to pot-still from the native beer. Music tinkled as harem 
beauties danced. Scholars in white robes sat surrounded by their disciples; 
statesmen met in council, and lords feasted. It was a good time; the sun of the 
Empire stood high.
The bright day ended with a thunderclap when twelve ships of Novzol came foaming 
into Trashol harbor, oars stroking to the double-beat of hortators' drums, and 
brought the news that Novzol had fallen to an invasion of the barbarians of the 
Uplands. Panic raced through the streets of Trashol. Whips cracked as slaves 
toiled to raise earthworks. Merchants and scribes and artisans who had never 
shouldered a spear or cocked a crossbow in their lives jostled into ill-formed 
ranks under cursing decarians of the small professional army. Altars smoked with 
sacrifices in the temples of Dindash.
It was Gvazol itself, however, which fell next, before a boat-borne army from 
Amarush. There were soldiers in Gvazol who could fight skillfully, and citizens 
who fought bravely. The Emperor, Ghrazhad IX, died at the head of his troops; 
the High Priest of Dindash was cut down before his altar. At the last, there was 
a frenzied stampede to board the ships in the harbor. Some of them got away, but 
many were capsized in the panic of the crazed fugitives. Between one hot season 
and the next, all the coastal cities of Gvarda were in barbarian hands. The 
Uplanders looted and burned them, hauled off their riches, drove the people 
before them in slave-yokes, and returned to the Uplands.
Ships, escaping from each coastal city as it fell, brought a continuing rain of 
bad news to the orphaned colonies. Although the Empire, by any practical 
standard, was still great, this blow produced a wound that would be centuries 
healing and would never be forgotten. For the first time in Thalassa's history, 
a fixed system of time-reckon ing was established by mutual consent, and a 
standard chronology emerged from the jumble of dates marking the reigns of 
kings. This was henceforth known as the Year One of the Downfall.
Vashtur had been colonized and was ruled by the hierarchy of Dindash; before the 
end of the Year One, the theocracy was split by sectarian schisms. On Dudak, the 
coast tribes who had been raiding the interior for captives to sell to the 
slavers, turned on their former customers. There were slave insurrections in the 
iron mines of Nimsh; escaped slaves, taking to the hills, taught the art of iron 
working to the 'ocal savages, and after a while these hill tribes, armed with 
weapons every bit as good as the colonists', became a serious threat to the 
peace. And everywhere spread, as though from some malevolent cloud, misfortune, 
poverty, and lethargic dispair.
After the conquest by Krushpan I, who had been born Krushpan the Shebb, and died 
Krushpan the Despoiler, the new masters of the Uplands had gradually forsaken 
their nomadic life, taking the towns and farmlands for their own. To the serfs 
and peasants, the conquest was merely an exchange of one tyrant for another. 
Krushpan's son, Tarask I, was a nomad shiek in a stone tent that could not be 
moved. His son, Krushpan II, was a king, with a brawling, disorderly nobility 
and a slave-holding aristocracy imposed on a still-alien population. There were 
intrigues and feuds. When Krushpan IV embarked upon the conquest of the coastal 
cities, it was less for the spoils than to divert his nobles from cutting each 
others throats and plot ting to cut his. The new prosperity which came from this 
grandiose brigand-raid kept the Uplands quiet through the rest of his reign and 
through the reign of his son, Krushpan V. Then the fratricidal bickering began 
again.
Within a century the Upland Empire split along the line of the Gvaru River. 
Rapidly, even before war could break out between the two halves, both were 
convulsed by internal strife, and cracked into fractional kingdoms. Rowdy bands 
of nobles and their mercenaries burned, looted, and harried each others' lands 
and towns. The nomads from beyond the High Ridge—descendants of the stay-at-home 
cousins of Krushpan the Shebb—began raiding again. The mercenary companies, 
unpaid, deserted and pillaged the estates of their former employers until there 
was nothing left to take. Gradually peace—the peace of universal poverty and 
ignorance and apathy—came to the Uplands.
Slowly, the overseas colonies of the vanished Sea Empire dragged themselves up 
out of their dejection and began to re-build and look outward. The slave-trade 
from Dudak was revitalized, and ships began plying almong all the new states 
that had risen out of the debris of the Empire. With the renewal of commerce, 
piracy spread, and cities that had begun to trade with one another built 
war-fleets to protect their commerce.
In the year 783 of the Downfall, a ship from Tullon, on Nimsh, nosed into the 
silted harbor of Gvazol and found a berth beside an ancient wharf. She was one 
of a new class of men-of-war; probably the finest ships on the Central Sea. She 
had two banks of oars, and three masts with square-rigged sails, and could be 
sailed with reasonable confidence through the roughest weather. She had two 
decks, and a cargo hold below the oar-benches, and inclosed fore- and 
stern-castles. She had a sharp bronze ramming-prow, which was more for show than 
utility, and carried two big mangonels and a dozen deck-mounted catapults, 
constructed like giant crossbows.
Her captain went ashore, with his first officer and a scribe and a priest, 
followed by fifty sailors in steel caps and quilted jackets sewn with steel 
plates, who carried spears, crossbows, and short swords. They clanked through 
empty streets, between the ruined piles of great palaces; they came across broad 
squares filled with brush and tumbled statues; they stood among the vast ruins 
of the Temple of Dindash and looked up at the mutilated idol.
"What god did these people worship, Norgon?" the captain asked the priest.
"Probably the same one we do, under some other name, Zethron," the priest 
replied. "But whatever name it was is long forgotten. The gods have had so many 
names since the Empire fell. But under whatever name, the gods are still the 
gods."
So they made a fire on the tumbled altar and burned incense, and spilled wine, 
as one gives disguised alms to some impoverished nobleman, and went out.
Around Gvazol they found a wretched peasantry, huddled in mud huts or camped in 
ruined castles, scratching the ground with stone hoes. They had been citizens of 
the Empire once, and then slaves of the Uplanders, and now they owned themselves 
and their families, and some almost-useless stone tools, and nothing else. Going 
up river, the Tullonians found, at the mouth of a large tributary, a great mound 
of earth, with bits of rubble breaking through here and there, and more starving 
peasants. They did not know that they were looking at their world's first city, 
the capital in which had ruled their world's first king.
Returning to Tullon, Captain Zethron reported that he had found Gvarda worthless 
for conquest, colonization, or trade. The Council of Twelve accepted the report, 
but ignored the conclusion. There was much arable land, much grazing land, and a 
weak and docile population. Three years later, a fleet of twenty ships was 
fitted out, and the conquest of Gvarda was begun.
The Year 953 of the Downfall became the Year One of the Tullonian Empire. In 
that year, a fleet of six hundred ships, built in Tullonian and 
Tullonian-satellite yards, and carrying fifty thousand Tullonian and Gvardan 
soldiers, officered by Tullonian nobles, descended upon the coast of Zabash. 
Unlike the hordes of Krushpan I and Krushpan IV, they did not loot and burn and 
massacre indiscriminately. They seized the temples and treasure-houses; they put 
to death the Zabashan princes and installed puppets under Tullonian Viceroys; 
they levied taxes and imposed tributes, and conscripted soldiers.
The city-states of Vashtur and Dudak were frightened; ambassadors were exchanged 
and an alliance was formed. War flamed around the Central Sea; fleets of 
sailing-galleys smashed into one another, hurling missiles and fireballs. 
Vashtur and
Dudak made peace with the Empire, broke it, and went to war again. Vashtur was 
conquered; an army from Dudak invaded Gvarda.
By the fifth century of the Empire, the breakup had begun. In spite of the 
furious wars of the first and second centuries, the population had more than 
doubled. The Empire had engulfed three island-continents beside Nimsh, two of 
them rather large, and yet the sailing-galley and the wagon-train were still the 
best and most reliable means of transportation. The Empire, unable to police or 
protect or supply the area over which it had spread, simply began to come apart.
There was another Dudakan invasion of Gvarda; the provinces north of the Gvaru 
revolted and welcomed the invaders. At Tullon, an adventurer named Sarthon 
organized a conspiracy which resulted in the massacre of the Council of Twelve 
and his own seizure of power as dictator. Immediately Zabash rebelled and set up 
a Council of Twelve of its own as the true authority of the Empire. All Gvarda 
revolted a year later, and Gvarda and Dudak began a furious undeclared war 
against Zabash.
By the year of the Tullonian Empire 684, the second empire was as moribund as 
the first.
The Year 684 in the reckening of the Tullonian Empire would henceforth, over a 
large part of the inhabited globe, be counted as the Year One of The Books of 
Tisse".
Tiss6 was a shoemaker at Urava, on the continent of Dudak. He was frequently in 
trouble with the police, and his shop was a known gathering place of the 
politically and socially disaffected. In addition, he was a violent dissenter 
from the locally established religion, and railed against the gods of Dudak and 
their priests, and against all polytheism and idolatry. There was but one god, 
Vran. Vran, and only Vran, had real existance, and all else existed only in the 
mind of Vran; in the memory of Vran the dead lived perpetually. One of Tisse's 
cronies was an unfrocked priest of Dudak. It is supposed that he contributed a 
great deal to this new religion. This ex-priest, Puzza, did the actual writing 
of The Books, taking them down as Tisse dictated, sitting on one end of the 
cobbler's bench while Tiss£ worked at the other, with a pot of beer between 
them. Subsequent scholars claimed to be able to judge how nearly empty the pot 
was at the writing of any passage.
Although Puzza later re-wrote The Books almost completely, they remained an 
ill-organized mass of moral preachments and mystical balderdash, written on so 
high an order of abstraction as to say all things to anyone who sought within 
their pages for Higher Enlightenment, and very little to anyone seeking logic, 
order, or common sense.
Heretofore, religious bigotry had been one evil from which Thalassa had been 
spared. Tisseism, with its doctrine of the one and only god, the true god, ended 
the old religious indifferentism and comparative tolerance. Any god but Vran was 
but a false idol; and therefore, any other worship was sinful, and imperiled the 
soul, not only of the idolater but of all those around him. Thus, persecution of 
the infidel became a religious duty.
* * *
In the beginning, the religion of Tisse marked a definite break with the old 
traditions; men's minds were wrenched from accustomed ruts and forced into new 
channels. There was, during the first four centuries of the Tissean Era, a burst 
of invention and progress. Water and wind power were harnessed; a water-turbine 
was invented, and mountain streams were dammed to furnish the pressure to 
operate it. On Zabash, a crude steam turbine was invented.
Savagely persecuted at first, the followers of Tisse and his successor, Puzza, 
involved themselves in politics out of self-defense. They entered into 
conspiracies to overthrow local governments. Where they failed, they were put to 
death in savagely spectacular fashion; where they succeeded, they were a 
powerful faction in the new government, if they did not control it outright. In 
some countries the worship of Vran was declared the only acceptable religion by 
the state.
These centuries were crowded with violence and tumult. Civil wars blazed; mobs 
howled in the streets and crossbow-bolts sleeted down on them; daggers were 
reddened in palace coups; partisan feuds smoldered and flamed. Kings were 
overthrown by dictators, dictators were toppled by popular revolt; democracies 
hardened into dictatorships or disintegrated into anarchy. And in every pot of 
violence that bubbled around the Central Sea, the religion of Tisse" was always 
an ingredient.
Four centuries later, the social system solidified again. With the exception of 
heretical splinter sects, the Creed of Puzza was the universal form of Tisseism. 
Its priests turned ever sterner faces upon innovation; they themselves had 
become the conservators of tradition. The bourgeoisie who had come into secular 
power during the previous four hundred years had become no less reactionary. 
Powerful guilds had sprung up in all the mercantile cities around the Central 
Sea; having gained wealth by the skills and inventiveness of their fathers, they 
were loath to encourage any sort of innovation which might threaten their own 
status. Technical improvements were suppressed or shrouded in guild secrecy. The 
great slave-holding nobles saw the new machinery as replacing the slave-labor in 
which their wealth was invested. For another seven centuries the city-states and 
kingdoms, which were the remnants of the old Tullonian Empire, lived in the 
glotfm of stultifying rigidity in social conditions, actions, and thought. New 
ideas were ruthlessly suppressed, and the only change was in the names of the 
overlords.
Then, in the year 1275 of The Books of Tisse, another book was published on 
Dudak—and it was called The Confessions of Zaithu.
Chapter Seven
The little villages of the craftsmen-gangs around Hetaira's Central Peaks were 
visited regularly by the wagons and pack trains of traders, and by the 
occasional lone wanderer. The traders adopted the custom of establishing 
permanent base-camps at which they could store goods, and these in time grew 
into market towns. The wanderers had their rendezvous places too, where they met 
and exchanged news, and left messages for one another. At first such places were 
caves or other natural shelters, or merely stone cairns in which messages could 
be left. Occasionally a wanderer, crippled or immobilized by age, would make his 
home by one of these rendezvous-points in order to keep in touch with his 
life-long friends, and perhaps perform a useful service for them. The wanderers, 
glad of a warm place to stay, and a secure depository for their messages, and 
perhaps even some of their goods, happily supported these way-stations.
It became customary in many gangs for a few of their youngsters to wander for a 
time, meeting new people and learning new things. It was soon discovered that 
more could be learned by the young people going to the nearest of the wanderers' 
rendezvous, to stay with the resident and meet the lifelong wanderers passing 
through. The youths would pay for their keep by hunting, and farming, and doing 
housekeeping chores. Soon every young Hetairan of the Central Mountain country 
was spending at least the time between two hot-seasons at some rendezvous. The 
rendezvous grew, some of them arranging with wanderers to visit at periodic 
intervals especially to teach. These places became libraries, museums, 
institutes of technology, and eventually universities. It was at one of them 
that a steam-engine for propelling barges on the lakes was invented; at another, 
firearms were developed.
Civilization spread more slowly on the plains between the mountains and the 
Horizon Zone. The nomadic herders became settled ranchers, trading livestock and 
hides for manufactured goods through the wagon-traders. Unsuccessful ranching 
gangs became bandits and cattle-rustlers; the plains country was full of violent 
crime, and violent justice.
The Horizon Zone developed a culture similar in pattern to that of the Central 
Mountains, although always a few score years behind. Communities were isolated, 
dispersed in a narrow ribbon forty thousand kilometers around the planet. There 
were wanderers and wanderers' rendezvous there, too; but news travelled more 
slowly and less certainly.
In the Outer Hemisphere there were more nomads; the mountains and uplands were 
thinly peopled by gangs of hunters and farmers, and a few gangs roved around the 
shores of the Central Sea.
When the Central Mountain people of the Inner Hemisphere were working steel, the 
Horizon Zone had barely progressed to the use of metals, and the whole Outer 
Hemisphere was still paleolithic. When the Central Mountain country had the 
musket in common use, and was investigating the advantages of rifling the 
barrels, the bow was still widely used in the Horizon Zone. As for the people of 
the Outer Hemisphere, it was not until the railroads were extended into their 
country that they emerged from the Bronze and Early Iron Age.
The first railroad was the Red Lake To Sulfur River; it was seven hundred and 
twenty kilometers in length, single-track. Its rolling stock consisted of two 
wood-burning locomotives and about forty cars. There was a daily train in each 
direction; cannon were fired as they passed signal-points, to warn the oncoming 
train to back to the nearest switch-out.
There had been no system of historical reckoning on Hetaira until then, and no 
need for any; but the gang that built the Red Lake To Sulfur River realized that 
now some method of accounting for the passage of time, both sleeping-period to 
sleeping-period and season to season, would be needed. And so, with proper pomp 
and ceremony, when the first train left the steamboat landing at Nardavo's Town 
for the headwaters of the river, they proclaimed the Year One of the Railroad. 
[As nearly as can be determined, this corresponded with the year 2264 of the 
vanished Tullonian Empire, or the year 1522 of The Books of Tisse.]
Standing at the foot of the gangplank with the other passengers who had 
disembarked at Nardavo's Town, Dwallo Dammando looked around the wharf 
curiously, examining the piles of cargo waiting to be loaded for the return trip 
across Red Lake. Bagged grain, and kegs of spirits; bales of furs from the 
mountains; barrels of refined sulfur; bales of cloth; bar iron and steel; crates 
of straw-packed glassware. No wonder the wagon-train gangs were cursing the 
Bollardo Gang and their railroad.
The luggage-wagon, drawn by a pair of toulths, came down the ramp; along with 
the fifty-odd other passengers, he fell in behind it. The driver was one of the 
Brancanno Gang, who ran the steamboat, but he couldn't be expected to know the 
ownership or look after the safety of every box and bag and bed-roll on the 
wagon. It was a good idea to keep a close watch on your own belongings.
"I'm going to the market first," the driver told them. "Wagons there for 
Sweetwater, across the isthmus, and up Crooked River. If you're taking the 
railroad, leave your things on the wagon; I'll take them to the platform next. 
Train leaves in about an hour."
The market was an open square, surrounded by buildings of stone and brick and 
plank. A few were old, most of theni were new, and several were still being 
built. There were warehouses, and a tavern, and trading markets with open fronts 
and plank marquees which could be lowered on chains during the rains. Fifteen or 
twenty big transport wagons, with double-rows of passenger-seats atop their 
cargo bays, stood in the middle; some seemed to have arrived only recently, for 
their freight was piled beside them, and the traders were dickering over it. One 
wagon had attracted a number of dickerers; its load consisted of square wooden 
boxes, all painted with the glyph of the Sambro Gang, and lettered, in phonetic 
alphabet, Rifle Number 2, Rifle Number 3, Revolving-chambered Handgun Number 3.
"No, we won't take grain," one of the wagon gang was saying, as Dwallo came 
within hearing. "By the time we got to Sweetwater, the toulths would have the 
whole load eaten. Besides, one case of cartridges is worth a whole bin-load of 
grain."
"Well, will you take an order on the Yavanno Gang for twenty loads of grain for 
twenty cases of cartridges?" one of the local merchants asked. "You can trade 
that for anything you want, either here at Nardavo's, or at Sweetwater."
"Three barrels of brandy for two cases of Rifle Number Three!" another merchant 
shouted.
The baggage-wagon rolled past and stopped. Men and women from different 
transport gangs detached themselves from their wagons and ran over, shouting:
"Raldarro Gang for Sweetwater!"
"Luilloro Gang, up Crooked River; what'll you trade for a ride?"
"For Sweetwater, Kalvanno Gang. Padded seats and good springs on the wagon! 
Leaving in an hour!"
The steamboat passengers who were taking wagons began to pull their bags and 
bedrolls out of the pile on the wagon. Dwallo, watching the rectangular 
leather-covered case and the bed-roll with his name painted on them, did not 
notice the shabby little fellow in the sorth-skin trunks and tattered canvas 
vest dart away. Suddenly, from the other side of the wagon, a voice shouted:
"Drop that bag, you thieving rogel, or I'll drop you with it!"
As the fellow broke into a run, Dwallo noticed him, and saw that his third piece 
of luggage, the shoulder-bag that contained his trading items, was in the 
thief's hand. He grabbed for the heavy revolver at his hip, but before he could 
draw it, a rifle cracked, and the thief leaped into the air and fell dead. As he 
went around the tail of the wagon, another man appeared from the far side, a 
heavy rifle smoking in his hands. They both reached the body at the same time.
"A good shot, my friend," Dwallo said. "My thanks." He stooped and retrieved the 
bag. "I should have kept hold of this in the first place."
The stranger, a man in white hoomi-leather trousers and vest, worked the lever 
on his rifle, picked up the empty cartridge and pocketed it, and smiled. "For 
nothing, your thanks. You would have shot anyone you saw stealing my belongings. 
Anybody would. See a thief and fail to shoot him, and you only encourage the 
breed."
"Nevertheless, my thanks for it," Dwallo said. "And my hand. Dwallo Dammando," 
he introduced himself.
"Koshtro Evarro," the other said. "You're going on the railroad? So am I."
They fell into step, following the wagon to the railroad platform. An old man 
who walked with a limp, and a slender, rather tall girl came over while the 
luggage was being unloaded. Both wore canvas coveralls to keep their fur clean, 
and carried revolvers on their hips.
"It's all right to leave your stuff here," the limping man said. "The Bollardo 
Gang's responsible for it until you leave the train."
The girl took their destinations and chalked them on the luggage, then she led 
the passengers over to a table and sat down.
"Four prime toulth-hides for the trip to Nandrovvo's for the two of us?" a man 
asked.
When the girl agreed, he showed her a warehouse receipt, and wrote out an order 
on a local brokerage and storage gang. Another passenger produced a jug of 
brandy; the girl uncorked it, smelled it, and accepted it for passage. Dwallo 
pulled a book out of his shoulder-bag and handed it to her.
"How about this, for a trip to Vallado's Village?" he asked.
"Oh, that's too much," she protested, "we're not robbers!" Then she looked at 
the title-page. "I thought I recognized your name when I saw it on your things. 
You can ride with us for nothing; we're all proud of the book your gang printed 
about our railroad."
"No, take the book," Dwallo insisted. "I don't think you have it; we just 
printed it."
She looked at it again. "The New Steam Engine Which Re-condenses Water More 
Efficiently, Designed by Johas Mandorgo at Needle Rock Rendezvous, as Described 
by the Designer," she read. "No, I've never heard of it. Thank you, Dwallo."
"And here; here's a list of the new books our gang has printed this past 
season," Dwallo added. "Take it and show it to your gang. Maybe you'll want to 
order some of them."
"I'm sure we would. How long are you staying at
Vallado? We'll have a list of what we want ready for you when you pass through 
here again."
With his new-found friend Koshtro, Dwallo examined the train which was waiting 
at the platform. Although he had made the cuts of the drawings to illustrate the 
book his gang had published, Dwallo had never seen the actual locomotive and 
cars before. The locomotive was like a miniature steamboat engine, with a brick 
furnace and a sheet-iron boiler, mounted on a wheeled platform of iron-plated 
timbers, with the stack and the two cylinders in front. Behind it was the fuel 
wagon, which could hold either wood or coal, and the freight wagons, and the two 
passenger wagons at the rear. The wheels had wide flanged iron tires; the track 
was built of squared timbers, faced with angle-iron on the inside. While Dwallo 
was examining the train, the little cannon on the platform boomed. He and Koshto 
hastened to get seats in one of the passenger wagons.
"I'm from the Sky Lake country," Koshto told him. "I have the book your gang 
printed about the railroad. My gang and a couple of other farming gangs are 
teaming together to build a railroad of our own. We have a wonderful country for 
grain, but we've no place to trade it close enough for the wagon-trains. We make 
a little whiskey, but we can only trade so much of that; they raise sugar-roots 
on one side of us, and make rum, and they make fruit-brandy on the other side of 
us. So we decided to build a railroad, and I was sent up here to study this one.
"I've been here at Nardavo's three days," he continued. "I don't like this town. 
That fellow who tried to steal your bag was the fifth thief I've seen shot in 
these three days. The first one I've shot myself, but still—
"I've also seen maybe a dozen brawls, three or four of them serious enough to 
kill a person or two. There are too many gangs in this town, and none of them 
willing to see to it that things are kept peaceful. I'm going to recommend that 
the gangs in our railroad, when we get it built, see to keeping order in our 
railhead town. Any other gangs who want to come in can do so like trading-gangs 
in a craftsmen's village, on the understanding that they're guests, and have to 
behave themselves."
The locomotive made a series of whooshing sounds, and then the train gave a 
couple of jerks, a jolt or two, and started creeping forward. "I noticed that 
there was a big crowd in town, seemed to be just standing around fingering their 
rifles and waiting for something to happen," Dwallo said as the train picked up 
speed.
"Oh, that. That's on account of the Thurkkas," Koshtro told him. "You've heard 
about that?" Dwallo shook his head. "Savages from over on the other side of the 
Rim Country," Koshtro went on to enlighten him. "There's been bad times over 
there—drought, cattle-plagues, gang-wars—and thousands of those people have 
migrated. They went through the Rim Country and onto the plains on this side. 
The ranching gangs wouldn't let them settle there; pushed them on, and they've 
come on into the Central Mountain country. About a thousand of them came down 
Crooked River; the gangs upstream didn't try to stop them, so they're camped 
below the lowest village on Crooked
River, and starting to move into the isthmus. The gangs up Sulfur River are 
determined not to let them through; all the gangs have sent people to ride 
patrol and stop them."
Koshtro was riding to the end of the line, to get a look at the Bollardo Gang's 
repair shops. Dwallo bid him goodbye at Vallado's Village and got off. The 
Vallado Gang lived in a number of big barn-like houses against the side of the 
mountain; their furnaces and forge and rolling-mill were a kilometer up the 
river; there was a trestle-bridge carrying a track to and from the ore-pits. The 
furnace-stacks were blazing, and a couple of heavy drop-hammers boomed 
intermittently. A half-grown youngster helped him up the path to the houses with 
his box and bedroll.
A girl met him on the wide veranda as he climbed the front steps. He introduced 
himself and asked if Kursallo Vallado were about.
"He's up at the works," she said. "He'll be coming down in a few hours. I'm 
Sharra; Kursallo's mother and mine are sisters. He's told us about you, from the 
time you were at Mirror Lake Rendezvous with him. And we have a lot of books 
your gang printed."
She and the youngster helped him in with his things. She showed him the room 
where he could sleep, and the bath, where fifteen or twenty of the gang, who had 
just come from the furnaces, were washing the soot out of each other's fur with 
a fresh-smelling soap. He ate with this group, and later Sharra and several 
others showed him around the living quarters and the works, and the mines across 
the river.
"My gang needs a new printing-machine," Dwallo told his friend Kursallo, as they 
and a dozen others sat on the west veranda, out of the glare of the sun. "We 
decided to contract your gang to make it because we like your work on heavy 
machinery, and because we could get it quicker and safer from you over the 
railroad. This will be a big machine; it's to be run by steam instead of by 
hand."
"I never heard of a printing-machine run by steam," one of the older Vallados 
said. "Something that's just been invented?"
"Yes, we invented it ourselves. You see, the paper-making gang we trade with has 
invented a way of making paper in long rolls instead of sheets. They can make, 
in one strip, enough paper to reach from here to the railroad station," Dwallo 
said.
There were exclamations of surprise, but not of incredulity. If Dwallo had said 
that somebody could make a strip of paper long enough to reach to Shining 
Sister, it would have been accepted. People simply did not make statements that 
were contrary to fact.
One of the younger men nodded thoughtfully. "So, if you have a long strip of 
paper, on a roll, you'd run it between two rollers with the type on them. How 
wide is this roll of paper?"
"About two arms-widths," Dwallo said, holding his arms wide apart.
The young man nodded again. "Yes," he said. "For that you'd need steam-power. It 
would take the strength of fifty toulths, at least. What sort of steam-engine 
are you going to use? We have a nice design that might be appropriate. Do you 
want us to build one for you?"
"No. We have a used engine from a steamboat that wrecked itself below 
Klamdammo's Landing. The Kwissato Gang salvaged it for us. Very clever job, too. 
We're doing a book about their methods. But we will need the printing machine 
built entirely." He picked up a leather tube he had brought out onto the veranda 
with him; pulling off the cap, he withdrew a roll of thin paper. "Here are the 
plans for it."
They were passed from hand to hand, among much murmuring and continuous 
appreciative exclamations.
"This is good designing, Dwallo," Kursallo approved. "With a machine like this, 
you could print more books in one waking-period than you could make by hand in a 
sun-trip!"
"We anticipate a problem in keeping up with the job of binding all the books we 
expect to print with this new machine," Dwallo said. "But that's the sort of 
problem we like."
"There's only one thing, Dwallo," one of the older women said. "I don't know 
whether we can make this printing machine or not. Not that we lack the 
skill—I'll take a bath in the blood of whoever claims that! But we lack the time 
and the hands. It's getting harder every year to work the ore pits, and if we 
put enough of our people to mining, we don't have enough to work the furnaces. 
And about a third of our gang are carrying rifles on the isthmus, riding patrol 
against the Thurkkas."
"And then the Bollardos are going to build another line, from Red Lake to 
Sweetwater," another said. "They're going to need facing for seventy-five 
thousand lances of track, and two new engines, and a lot of wagons. They want to 
do that in three years, too—"
Dwallo took back his plans and spread them out in front of him. "I'm sorry to 
hear all of this," he said. "We've really planned on having this new 
printing-machine, and I would be happier with your gang doing it. Now let me 
see; we can use timber for some of this, and we have a few of our own good 
blacksmiths who can forge most of the smaller parts. I'll go over these plans 
again and cut the work for you down to what we just cannot do ourselves… 
Incidentally, I have some new books in that leather box. Why don't you look 
through it while I make some preliminary notes."
As soon as the box was opened, Kursallo snatched a copy of the steam-engine 
book, leafing through it very rapidly. "I want one of these,-Dwallo!" he 
exclaimed.
"Oh, here's something I want!" Sharra cried, taking another book. "I never 
imagined there was such a book!"
Dwallo glanced up to look at the cover: A History of the Different Attempts to 
Scale the Peak of Skystabber, he read. "Yes, that was printed only three 
sun-trips ago. Are you interested in mountain climbing?"
"In climbing Skystabber, yes. The highest place in the world, right under 
Shining Sister." She looked up at the pale silver globe in the sky, and then to 
the distant horizon. "You can see Skystabber from here—there, in the notch at 
the head of the valley. Some day I'm going to climb it."
During the next two waking periods, Dwallo made other trips around the Vallado 
Gang's ore-pits, smelters, and steel-works. The ore-pits, worked continuously 
for centuries, had gone deep into the mountains; they were becoming 
progressively harder to mine. The Vallados were working hard, by any standard 
acceptable to any craftsmen's gang—at least a quarter of the time-sleep periods 
included. And of the two-hundred-odd members of the gang, at least seventy were 
out riding patrol on the isthmus against the Thurkka menace.
The second train in from Red Lake after Dwallo's arrival brought news of 
fighting. The Thurkkas had made a mass drive toward a thinly-guarded stretch of 
open country on the left of Crooked River. Only the arrival of a large party 
from Nardavo's Town, with the cannon from the railroad station, had stopped 
them; and at that one band of several hundred had broken through and were camped 
on a rocky hill inside the isthmus.
There was a mass-meeting of the Vallados to decide whether they should send 
reinforcements, and whom they could spare. As he listened to the arguments, an 
idea suddenly struck Dwallo.
"Will you let an outsider offer a word?" he asked. "Then, instead of trying to 
wipe these Thurkkas out, why don't you bring a couple of hundred of them here, 
and put them to work in your ore-pits? Feed them, and let them earn their food 
by digging ore for you. They were probably hard workers until the drought forced 
them out of their homes."
"You mean take these savages into our gang?" somebody shouted in horror.
"Certainly not! Let them form a gang of their own to work for you. Trade them 
for their work under a definite contract. Furnish them tools, and give them so 
much in trade for every cartload of ore they dig. And you could let them do 
shovel-work around the furnaces, too. That way your own gang would be free to do 
the real work at the mill and the forges."
There was silence for a moment. "Maybe it would work, at that," one of the older 
men considered. "Digging ore and shoveling coal is nothing but toulth work. Why, 
if we had a couple of hundred of those people in the ore-pits and on the 
coal-pile, we could build another furnace and put in a couple more hammers."
"We'd need a few of our people to show them what to do, and fire the 
blasting-shots, of course—
Dwallo said nothing else. His suggestion had caught the imagination of the 
Vallados. Now they'd be able to build his power-driven printing-machine, and his 
gang would be trading books all around the Central Mountains.
It never occurred to him that he had just invented the wage system.
Chapter Eight
Zaithu was an apostate Puzzan priest, as Puzza himself had been a renegade from 
the earlier polytheism. It was his thesis that Puzza had been an impudent and 
sacrilegious pretender and that his self-styled Successors were blasphemers and 
perverters of the Sacred Truth. That truth, Zaithu held, was found only in The 
Books of Tisse, and the individual, equal in the Mind of Vran with all others, 
must interpret them according to his own conscience. Instead of solemn 
liturgies, the religious services of Zaithu's followers consisted simply of 
readings from and discussions of The Books; whenever disagreement grew too 
passionate over some obscure passage, the service-leader—elected by the 
congregation; there were no separate priests—would call for prayer and 
meditation.
The new religion took liberty-loving Dudak by storm, in spite of all that the 
Puzzan hierarchy could do. A series of bitter religious wars blazed up; in the 
end the Successor, Glavrad XXII, and his council of Archpriests, were expelled 
and sought refuge at Tullon, the now-decayed seat of the ancient Empire. Freed 
from the strangling toils of religious absolutism, and lacking any powerful 
feudal nobility or any strong guild tradition, Dudak plunged into a cultural and 
technological renaissance.
The two smaller continents of Gir-Zashon and Thurv, screened by Nimsh and 
Vashtur from the Central Sea, had been discovered in the third century of the 
Tissen Era; the discoverers had been pirates, interested only in a safe base of 
depredations. They had made friends, and finally amalgamated with, the natives, 
a barbarian race calling themselves the Hoz-Hozgaz, and had taught them the arts 
of civilization. In time, the descendants of the Hoz-Hozgaz and their pirate 
mentors turned from the sea and began exploiting the interior of Gir-Zashon and 
exploring the neighboring continent of Thurv, forgotten by the busy world around 
the Central Sea.
If they were forgotten, they were nonetheless not allowed to forget that world. 
Refugees trickled across the straits, seeking a haven from war and persecution, 
bringing news. One of these refugees described the steam-turbine engine which 
had been built on Zabash. He had been foreman in a construction crew which built 
a few of them. Within his lifetime, he saw hundreds of them in operation on 
Gir-Zashon, and died rich and honored as a result. One of the Hoz-Hozgaz who had 
become interested in this new source of power began using briquettes of charcoal 
mixed with fish-oil for fuel; another discovered a method of refining fish-oil 
and invented a burner for it.
On Dudak, too, the steam-turbine found favor. There the fuel problem—the turbine 
is a hungry beast—was solved in the dense jungles along the inner coast, where 
two growing-seasons a year provided unlimited fermentable vegetable matter. The 
Dudakans invented an alcohol-burner and became distillers instead of fishermen. 
They also invented a steam-jet engine for ship propulsion.
The old rigid world of feudal estates and mercantile guilds shattered like glass 
all around the Central Sea. Merchants fumed, lords and kings stormed, priests 
thundered anathemas—but the ships of Dudak could outsail the merchantmen and 
outfight the war-galleys of Zabash and Vashtur and Nimsh. They could only be met 
by imitation and improvement. And so, in every kingdom and city-state, for 
self-preserVation, steam-turbines and steam-jet engines and ships of the new 
pattern were being built.
The search for sources of fuel became frantic. Dudak and Gvarda, now 
co-religionists and allies, controlled the alcohol-producing jungles. Zabash 
took to the sea with a fleet of trawlers, and, unable to get sufficient fish-oil 
from the Central Sea, pushed out into the unknown waters beyond the ring of 
continents. Some ships, venturing far beyond the accepted limits of safety, 
found a chain of reefs and islands encircling the Horizon Zone. It was these 
venturesome seamen, first of all Thalassans, who sighted the globe of Hetaira on 
the distant skyline.
On Vashtur, in search of new fuels, the properties of potassium nitrate were 
discovered, as Talito Isleeta had demonstrated them almost two thousand years 
before and a quarter of a million kilometers away on Hetaira. On Vashtur, too, 
some body tried a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. Unfortunately, a 
fairly large batch was mixed in a fairly deep vessel. One of the survivors, 
fleeing an accusation of sorcery, carried an account of the experiment to 
Gir-Zashon. The Hoz-Hozgaz were deeply interested; they had access to large 
deposits of both sulfur and nitrates. In a short time they developed a really 
reliable black powder mixture. It was first used in bombs, to be thrown from 
mangonels; somebody found out how to make rockets, and shortly after somebody 
else deduced the principle of the gun.
By this time the ships of Zabash were making regular trips to the Outward 
Islands. On several of the larger, where there was fresh water and vegetation, 
they established fishing bases and oil refineries. Their ships began venturing 
beyond the islands and into the Ocean Sea, where they discovered sea-monsters of 
a size hitherto undreamed of; things bigger than the largest ship, against which 
skippers sometimes were forced to use their mangonels and catapults, when the 
beasts got too inquisitive. Many ships never came back from such encounters, but 
a few returned towing gigantic corpses from which enough oil would be tried and 
refined to load the largest tanker.
The people of Gir-Zashon and Thurv, too, built steam-jet ships; they established 
bases and refineries in the Outward Islands. Word had reached them of the 
monsters of the Ocean Sea, and they fitted out ships to hunt them and kill them 
with rockets and gunfire. It was some time before the Zabashans learned of the 
new weapons developed on Gir-Zashon, but in time they were compound ing 
gunpowder and arming their ships with cannon.
Collisions between fishing fleets occurred. For the first time in Thalassan 
history, guns thundered back and forth in sea-battles, and rockets left their 
fiery trails. Armored warships appeared, hunting fishermen instead of fish. A 
flotilla of gunboats from Zabash caught and destroyed a fishing fleet of 
Gir-Zashon; a Hoz-Hozgaz fleet, striking at a Zabashan base while the 
fishing-boats and gunboats were away, massacred the inhabitants, filled their 
tanks with oil, and blew up or burned the installations. When the news of this 
action got back to Karkasha, the capital of Gir-Zashon, another fleet was sent 
to forestall retalliation by attacking the Zabashan naval base of Harsh. The 
Fish Oil War had finally reached the Central Sea.
Chapter Nine
With the labor of two hundred hired Thurkkas, the Vallado Gang was so able to 
increase production that the Bollardo Gang finished the Sweet-water branch of 
the Red Lake To Sulfur Hiver Railroad by the year 14, using another eight 
hundred Thurkkas as track-laborers. These, on completion of the work, migrated 
to Sky Lake in time to help complete the railroad Koshtro Evarro and his 
associates were building. The Sky Lake Line was finished in the Year 16.
In the Year 22, a combination of wagon-trading gangs, discerning the shape of 
the future, built a railroad to connect the Sky Lake Line with the Bollardos' 
Sweetwater Branch. Halfway around the Central Mountains, three more railroads 
began building, sending to the Rim Country for more laborers. A line was built 
in the Rim Country in 54, extending almost fifteen hundred kilometers; in 78, 
the Central Mountains had been almost completely girdled, and the old tracks of 
iron-faced timbers were being rapidly replaced by steel rails. In 84, the Short 
Circle Line was built by a combination of railroad gangs; three thousand 
kilometers in length, it went completely around the great peaks at the middle of 
the mountain country, connecting with all the lines running in from the lake 
country.
As railroads and lake steamboats multiplied, outlets were provided for more and 
more goods. The Vallado Gang, for example, were forced to invent and build 
steam-shovels to facilitate mining, and to construct a railroad of their own to 
the source of Sulfur River to open new ore-pits. By this time, they had come to 
concentrate almost entirely upon rails, engines, and heavy machinery.
Small manufacturing gangs, depending upon local trade, began to vanish. Some 
merged with other gangs; some, unable to keep abreast of the changing industrial 
pattern, went out of business, their members going to work for wages for other 
gangs. A few concentrated upon quality handcrafts for a growing luxury trade; 
the artist as distinct from the artisan began to come into his own.
Wage-employment became more and more common, although the working out of 
barter-wages sometimes became incredibly complex in this society without money. 
The cleavage between labor and ownership grew sharper with the growing 
importance of the industrial plant, and the member of a hired gang watched, with 
each year, the increase of wealth which he had produced but in which he did not 
share. Resentment smouldered; for the first time Hetaira was experiencing what 
might be called a genuine class-struggle. There was even job-competition; gangs 
of migratory workers in the agricultural and construction trades fought over 
employment, sometimes so bitterly that the survivors of two contending gangs 
would be barely enough for the available jobs. By the end of the Second Century 
of the Railroad, almost every industry was employing hired workers.
Among these, the idea began to spread that anybody who did work, at least on a 
permanent basis, for a gang, should be allowed to join that gang. There were 
demands for larger and larger shares in the profits, and refusals to work when 
these demands were not met. There was fighting when gangs of migratory workers 
were hired to replace the strikers. There were campaigns of sabotage, pilferage 
and shirking. There were strikes in which the workers occupied their places of 
employment and refused admittance to their employers; and when the employing 
gangs tried to prevent workers from bringing food and arms with them to work, 
there was more trouble. Occasionally a band of dissatisfied workers would form 
around the nucleus of a small manufacturing gang being forced out of business 
and organize a gang in competition with their former employers; then there would 
be shootings and raids and bombings and arson.
The apex of violence was reached in 206, in the Sugar Valley Massacre. A fairly 
small but wealthy gang of sugar-root planters, the Halzorro Gang, employed over 
a thousand workers, having cleared an entire valley and planted it in 
sugar-root. They had refineries and a distillery, and a railroad of their own to 
get their sugar and rum to market. While there had never been a page of Hetairan 
history defaced by any record of actual chattel slavery, conditions on the 
Halzorro plantations came nastily close to it. The Halzorros had even hired a 
gang of bandits to help them bully their workers into submission. They 
overreached themselves, however, when they tried to disarm the workers. Nothing 
of the sort had ever been heard of before; on Hetaira, the right to keep and 
bear arms was equivalent to the right to breathe.
Rebellion exploded instantly; inside half a waking-period the workers had killed 
all the Halzorros, to the youngest child, and all their hired bravos, and had 
taken the plantation. There was no destruction or looting or needless brutality; 
when the last Halzorro was dead, the workers returned quietly to their tasks, 
this time as owners. No authority existed to which anybody could appeal, were 
there anybody left to appeal; each gang was sovereign, and the sovereign 
Halzorros had been overthrown by revolution. The victors adopted the style of 
the Halzorro Gang and continued doing business under it.
Less violently, the same process had been going on everywhere. The Vallado Gang, 
a quarter of a century before, had admitted all their workers to gang 
membership. Neither the railroad gangs nor the Telegraph Gang had ever used 
wage-workers except on temporary construction jobs, and construction gangs had 
long ago become contractors, with their own tools, carts, toulths, and even 
steam-shovels, steam-rollers, and steam-tractors. The wage system, having served 
its purpose in the industrialization of Hetaira, decayed and vanished even 
before the invention of money.
Sharra Vallado joined in an attempt to scale Skystabber in the Year of the 
Railroad 17. It was a well-equipped expedition, all veteran climbers, but it was 
brought to a stop on the north wall, at the second bench from the top. Four 
years later she made another attempt; of a party of eight, only she and two 
others returned alive. She made her final attempt in 27, accompanied only by two 
novice climbers. None of the three was seen again alive. The bodies of her 
companions were found two years later after a snow-slide; in 122, the Paldonno 
Expedition found Sharra Vallado's remains on a ledge, within a thousand feet of 
the summit, identifying her by her rusted ice-axe and a silver belt-buckle. 
They, themselves, could climb no higher. They cut her name and gang-symbol into 
the rock, left her bones where she had stopped using them, and carried down her 
axe, buckle, and rusted dirk, and deposited them in the museum at the Climbers' 
Rendezvous.
It was the Kalgravno Expedition, in 277, which finally reached the summit. Eight 
students and two instructors from the Kalgravno Rendezvous, in Traplino Valley, 
made their climb along the south face and crawled up a slanting knife-edged 
ridge until they found a crack extending all the way to the top of the highest 
spire. From below, the spire had seemed as sharp as a needle, but when they 
reached it they found, at the very tip, a cuplike depression almost fifty lances 
across.
They cut their names and gang-symbols into the rock, and the date. One of the 
boys opened a tin of petroleum jelly and lit it under a snow-filled pot; after 
they drank tea and ate dehydrated stew, they lay on their backs, looking 
straight up at Shining Sister.
"This is the closest anybody has ever gotten to her," a girl said, putting her 
binoculars to her eyes and staring at the pale silver globe. "I can see some of 
the little islands along the Horizon Zone. I wonder what the other side's like. 
Do you suppose there's any land on the other side?"
"Very likely," Dirven Kalgravno, the party-leader, said. "She and our planet 
were both parts of a big planet beyond the orbit of Varri, that was broken up 
when the Red One entered our system, according to Dibbilo Stonyo. The chemical 
compositions of our planet and Shining Sister must be pretty much the same, so 
the surface conditions are probably pretty similar. Except, of course, that 
Shining Sister seems to have a surplus of water. But I'd say there's a good 
chance that most of the other side is dry land. Those islands must correspond to 
our Rim Country mountains."
"Why would that be?"
"Well, Dibbilo's theory of how gravitic attraction works shows that the water on 
Shining Sister would bunch up on the side of the planet attracted by us. And, 
since Shining Sister always keeps the same side turned toward us, the other side 
would always have less water. So it all depends on the depth of the 
planet-ocean. If it is as we think it is, then there must be a fair amount of 
land on the far side."
"But we'll never really know, will we?" the girl asked.
Dirven shook his head. "No. Shining Sister will always keep that side turned 
toward us. If there are people on the other side, they may not even know we 
exist."
"But why do you think we'll never know?" one of the boys, Kartho Alvarrarro, 
spoke up. "Halli Zarrono got her glider off the ground with a charge of ordinary 
rifle-powder. One of these days, somebody will invent a special rocket explosive 
that will lift some kind of glider free of gravitation, and then—"
"It's theoretically possible," Vandro Kalgravno, the other instructor, said, 
rummaging under his fur coveralls for a pressed-food ration bar. "But there's 
one great problem that we cannot, at the present time, overcome."
Dirven turned to his fellow instructor. "One problem?" he asked. "I see a 
toulth-load of problems. The acceleration of a vehicle shot into space might 
crush the passengers. In space there is no air; a space-glider would have to 
carry its own air supply. Steering a glider in space would take new methods, 
since there's no air to work against. And those are just the problems that come 
to mind without trying. What is this overwhelming single problem?"
"You've just said it," Vandro said. "The sheer magnitude of the undertaking. All 
of the things you have mentioned, and any others you can think of, can be 
solved. But think of the planning, the materials needed, the different gangs 
that would have to work together. Probably hundreds of gangs before the project 
succeeded. How would anybody be able to organize such a thing? How would anybody 
be able to trade for everything that would be needed?"
Dirvan shook his head. "I don't know."
To be an efficient trading medium, money must either be something which 
compresses enormous worth into small bulk and weight, or it must be something 
generally accepted as redeemable in valuable commodities, or it must be 
guaranteed by a private group of known wealth and honesty, or a government of 
such power as to make it valuable by fiat.
There was nothing of such value to a Hetairan that a few pounds of it were 
worth, say, a steamboat-load of grain or a trainload of steel. There were 
warehouse certificates, showing that the bearer had in storage so much grain or 
hides or whiskey or steel, but over a hundred gangs in and around Arrowwood 
Valley had been impoverished in 267, when a steamboat loaded with blasting-paste 
had blown up at the dock of Balsambo Town, destroying the warehouses and the 
merchandise for which they held script. And there was nothing on Hetaira with 
any of the powers and attributes of a central government; the mere idea of any 
government mechanism outside of the gang was alien to the Hetairan mind.
Not that the existence of any organization larger than the gang was, any longer, 
inconceivable. There had been many activities requiring the close cooperation of 
several gangs, and combinations had been formed to carry on many undertakings. 
There was the Rendezvous Combine, dating back to the Sixth Century Before the 
Railroad, for the purpose of exchanging and preserving scientific and 
technological information. It had been the Rendezvous Combine which had made 
possible the general use of breech-loading firearms by setting standards for 
chamber dimensions and barrel width to which all gunmaking and 
cartridge-manufacturing gangs had conformed. After that success, they had 
established screw-thread standards, and had taken the old, inexact and varying 
linear measure, the lance-length, and set up a standard lance, divisible into 
hundred-thousandths.
There were the Music Combines, and the Rifle and Revolver combine, which now set 
standards for manufacturing gangs and held annual matches, and the Climbers' 
Combine. Perhaps most successful was the Railroad Combine, which insured uniform 
track gauges, set standards for load limits and wheel-and-axle construction and 
track grades and curves, traced cars which had been shunted from one road to 
another, and handled matters of inter-road fares and freight-bill tolls. There 
were even local protection combines, an early example of which was the force 
which had been raised at the time of the Thurkka invasion.
So Hetaira was not unready for the proposal of Kartho Alvararro when he called 
the meeting at Stockade Point, overlooking Timber Lake, in 307.
Singly and in groups, they came into the big gathering-room of the Alvararro 
gang-house, shaking hands with Kartho as they entered. Among them were some of 
the most important people in the Central Mountain country—Taldo Kunninzo, the 
chairman of the board of advisors of the Telegraph Gangs Combine; Brammo 
Linzartho and Feerk Evarro, of the Railroad Combine; Reeda Sambro, of the 
Munitions Combine; and Urlik Slidertho, head advisor of the Slidertho Weaving 
Gang.
Lyssa Grassano, the advisor of advisors of the Grassano Gang, stopped short, 
halfway to her host, on seeing Dwallo Vallado already in the room. She lowered 
her glance to the Vallado advisor's belt to make sure that he, too, had divested 
himself of hit hand-weapon. The Grassanos and the Vallados were currently 
feuding about a rich ore-field inside the Short Circle Line, in the mountains.
They all sat at the long table, but when the toast of friendship was drunk, the 
Vallado and Grassano representatives ostentatiously looked in opposite 
directions. Then Kartho Alvararro tapped on the rim of his glass with his gold 
fountain pen.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he began. "Combine advisors, and gang representatives 
and advisors, I welcome you each to Timber Lake. You all have a pretty good idea 
of what I want to propose, since I outlined it as well as possible in the 
letters inviting you here. And I assume you're all interested, or, at least, 
curious, or you wouldn't have come. To put it briefly, I propose to set up, with 
your cooperation, a system of exchange that will partly supplant the present 
barter-system, and will avoid or eliminate many of its problems. Are there any 
comments or suggestions from anyone before we get down to the in-depth 
dissection of the idea?"
"Well, something is certainly needed," Taldo Kunninzo said. "The Telegraph 
Combine prefers to take copper in exchange for sending a message, and we've 
worked out a regular scale of rates in copper, and a changing scale of values 
against copper for things like grain, that vary in worth from season to season, 
or coal, that vary in worth from location to location. But, of course, we cannot 
refuse to send a message if someone has something besides copper or the 
regular-scale items to barter. Some of the stuff we accumulate! And we never 
know, from one time to the next, what we're going to have to give some 
construction-gang for stringing a new line, or how to make an honest and 
equitable division of the profits each year."
"We can't ever seem to get any kind of a reasonable division of the profits, 
either," Lyssa Grassano said. "There's always someone who's left unhappy. And so 
much skill is needed by the gang's traders, to know the value of every possible 
barter-item relative to every other item, that an unskillful trader can cost the 
gang on every transaction that's the least bit out of the ordinary; or, what's 
worse, inadvertantly cheat the customer. Maybe this business of trading goods 
for goods was all right a thousand years ago, when the gangs were little and 
everybody lived in the same house or the same village; and at the beginning it's 
certainly the most natural way. But it certainly does get complex if you keep at 
it long enough. How are you going to take two thousand people, all working at 
different jobs, and give everybody what they want out of fifty carloads of grain 
and five hundred bales of hides and a steamboat-load of lumber?"
"And suppose somebody halfway around the mountains needs a shipment of 
structural steel, or rails, and all he has to trade for it is grain, and you 
already have grain running out of your ears as it is, and what you want is 
electrical fittings and ceramics and small-arms ammo?" Dwallo Vallado threw in.
"Well, if a Vallado and a Grassano think it's a good idea, I, for one, won't 
argue," a representative of a coal-mining and coke-burning combine laughed. "I 
do business with both of them. They know what they're talking about, and 7 know 
what they're talking about."
"Kartho, suppose you explain your scheme," one of the railroad advisors said. 
"It is evident that some way of handling the transfer of goods must be found 
that is an improvement on the one in use, but you're going to have to show us 
how your system is anything better than one of those old warehouse-script 
schemes. That's a good idea in principle, too; but since the Balsambo blowup, 
everybody's been afraid to have anything to do with warehouse script."
"The warehouse script system wouldn't solve the problem even if the warehouses 
didn't blow up," Kartho said. "A receipt for a bale of hides or a bin of grain 
still represents only the receipted object; it won't do you any good if what you 
want is a box of cartridges. You'd still have to find someone with the 
cartridges who happens to need grain."
"How is your system better?" Dwallo Vallado asked.
"I propose to have a trading combine, which will include everybody here and as 
many more gangs as we can get to join. The combine will issue script, but it 
won't be for a specific object like a bale of hides; it will be for some 
arbitrarily agreed upon unit of value. These will be some kind of special 
certificates that can be used to trade for anything within the combine. And, 
since the combine will be so big and powerful, most gangs outside the com bine, 
even if they don't come in, should be willing to take the certificates in trade. 
They'll be assured that whatever they need from within the combine can be traded 
for these certificates whenever they wish to use them. People with small items 
to trade, who wish to get .a big item, like someone who makes rogel-leather 
belts and needs to get a stamping machine, can save up the certificates until 
they have enough to trade for the machine."
"It sounds good," an advisor from a farming gang said. "That way, if you have a 
boatload of grain, you won't have to wait around for somebody who wants it and 
has just what you want, or work out one of those complex 
around-the-corner-and-under-the-hedge deals, where fifteen people criss-cross 
receipts until everyone is happy. You could just trade your goods for the 
certificates, and then use them for whatever you wanted."
"That's the idea," Kartho agreed.
"Well now, wait a minute," Urlik Slidertho objected. "This idea of having 
something that can be traded for anything sounds fine, but how are you going to 
set the value of your certificates? Look, we make fifty different kinds of 
cloth. Each one's of a different weave, with different yarns, and has a 
different value. What's your standard going to be?"
"Grain," somebody suggested. "Everybody has to eat. Say a cubic tenth-lance of 
grain—"
"Grain's never worth the same from one year to the next!" someone yelled out. "I 
should know, I deal in it!"
"Lead!" Reeda Sambro piped up. "There isn't a man, woman, or child who doesn't 
carry a gun, and a gun's no use without bullets."
"A unit of value will have to be decided upon," Kartho Alvararro said. "We'll 
find one that we can all mutually agree on. It doesn't really matter what it is, 
you see; as long as it's the same for each certificate, any place within the 
combine territory, at any time. There are things to be said for a number of 
possible standards. It might be a good idea, for example, to use grain. If we 
made it the standard of value, that in itself might have a stabilizing effect on 
the trading of grain. But, on the other hand, if it doesn't, then the 
fluctuating value of grain would affect the worth of the certificates in a way 
that people might find unacceptable."
"We could use a sort of 'box of commodities,'  one of the farmers suggested. 
"Say we pick out the ten or twenty most important commodities and take an 
average of their relative values for the last ten years, and work out some kind 
of common denominator. Then everyone can figure out the value of his own goods 
or services accordingly; the prices of other commodities will naturally adjust 
themselves according to demand."
"That sounds more complex than the system we're using," Reeda Sambro called out, 
"I would have thought it impossible!"
"There's another, completely separate problem," Dwallo Vallado said. "When these 
certificates are in use, what's to stop some unscrupulous person—or gang—from 
imitating them? At least with a bale of hides, you have the bale of hides. With 
an imitation certificate, what would you have?"
"That is a very real problem," Kartho Alvararro admitted.
"We'd have to make the certificates on some kind of fancy paper—special paper 
that nobody else could get hold of," Lyssa Grassano suggested. "And make them as 
intricate as possible; all over little curlicues, pictures by master engravers, 
very hard to duplicate. And make only one set of plates to print them, and keep 
them under reliable guard."
"We could organize a special gang to go after imitators," Taldo Kunnizo, the 
Telegraph Gangs Combine man said. "Hunt down the makers of false certificates 
and kill them. If this special gang is efficient, it should discourage the 
practice."
"If the gang is efficient enough," Kartho commented, "it will eliminate the 
practice entirely."
"Your notion is good, Lyssa," Dwallo Vallado said. "If we add a few little 
hidden mistakes in the engraving, things that only those who regularly handle 
the script would notice, it might help."
Kartho Alvararro noted that the representatives of the two feuding steel-gangs 
seemed to have put aside their shoot-on-sight enmity, and both seemed 
enthusiastically in favor of the proposal. "Do you two think that you can work 
on that idea together without jumping at each other's throats over the Painted 
Hills business?" he asked. "Lyssa, I know you're good with drafting tools, you 
can work up a design, with Dwallo to help you."
"You know, if we can make a go of this scheme, our gangs could probably get 
together on the Painted Hills mines. There's enough ore there for both of us, if 
we could figure out some fair way to divide it."
"Well, how would this Trading Combine sup port itself?" somebody asked. "And how 
about possible disasters, like the cattle-plague of 274, or the Balsambo 
explosion? Wouldn't something like that still put the Combine out of business?"
"To the first question," Kartho said, "the Combine will take a percentage, like 
a milling or distilling gang takes a percentage of the grain. It can be a very 
small percentage. As to the second, destruction of any kind of product will not 
affect the value of the script, because it will carry its own value when it 
trades for the products. Any script destroyed by fire or flood can be replaced 
if the holder can prove the destruction. We do have to guard against theft, but 
that is true of any valuable goods. I think we'll probably have to have a few 
special strong-rooms in different areas, and keep them well guarded. Small 
losses, even ones that would be major to any one gang, will simply even 
themselves out.
"Look, Feerk; you remember reading about how the old Hoona River Railroad was 
put out of business in 65, when their only two locomotives and thirty of their 
cars were wrecked in a collision? Well, what would happen if somebody had a 
wreck like that now?"
Feerk considered. "If they belonged to the Railroad Combine," he said, "they'd 
borrow an engine here and an engine there, and cars from all around, and the 
combine would get them new rolling stock as soon as possible, and let them trade 
for it as soon as they were able. A thing like that wouldn't interrupt service 
for more than a sleep-period or two. And besides, most of the railroad gangs 
have enough of a reserve—" He stopped. "I think I see what you're getting at. A 
combine like you're proposing would be too big to be hurt by any local disaster; 
Skystabber's too big to be knocked down with a cannon."
The meeting continued, with only short interruptions for food and rest, while 
the sun crawled thirty degrees across the sky. They hammered out compromises, 
raised and disposed of objections, convinced each other that the idea would, 
indeed, work. Finally Brammo Lazanthro rose to his feet. "Ladies and gentlemen, 
we've been at this for the last two sleep-periods—and none of us have taken much 
time out to do the sleeping. I think we have the basic idea straight in our 
minds. Let's take a vote on it now, as to whether or not we want to commit our 
gangs and combines to the scheme. After that we can work out the little details. 
Personally, I'm getting sleepy, and I wouldn't mind having a decent meal instead 
of arguing with a cup of tea in one hand and a meat-roll pastry in the other."
"Yes, let's vote already," Reeda Sambro, the advisor of the Munitions Combine 
agreed. "Here, this will do!"
She was sitting on Kartho Alvararro's right. She picked up a sheet of paper, 
wrote on it, and passed it to the man on her right. When the paper had gone once 
around the table, it ended at Kartho.
He looked at it and smiled. "Well, out of forty-two of you, everybody has voted 
for the new combine but Ranna Satallano, who thinks the plan isn't fully enough 
developed to vote on yet, and Bordo Rakkajoro, who thinks such a combine would 
subject the members to compulsion which might end up infringing upon their 
individual rights. I take it, then, that the rest of you speak for your gangs or 
combines, and will bring them into the Trading Combine. Ranna, will you go along 
with the majority?"
The representative of the Chemicals Combine shrugged. "I only thought we ought 
to work it out in detail before we positively adopt it," she said, "but we can 
finish it from the inside as easily as from the outside. So, if the rest of you 
are determined to start the Combine here and now, then my group is in."
"You, Bordo?"
"It's going to mean that this Trading Combine will get too much power," Bordo 
Rakkajoro, who represented a combine of traders from the other side of the 
Central Mountains, said. "But, if my crowd doesn't join, the rest of you just 
might squeeze us out of business. All right, my combine's in—under protest!"
"You won't regret it, Bordo. And I suggest that we put you to the task of 
drawing up a set of rules for us that will prevent that from happening. Now, 
let's all get some sleep. After we're all awake we can get down to the business 
of organizing this."
Chairs scraped as the conference broke up. Dwallo Vallado and Lyssa Grassano 
were going out of the room arm in arm; if their new friendship rubbed off on 
their two gangs, the meeting would have been worthwhile for that alone. Reeda 
Sam-bro fell into step with Kartho as they went out.
"Where did you get this idea from, anyhow, Kartho?" she asked.
"On top of Skystabber," he told her seriously.
He related the conversation among the victorious climbers as they rested at the 
summit, that time thirty years ago. "I've always wanted to see the other side of 
Shining Sister. I probably shan't live long enough to, but I'm going to do what 
I can toward starting the process. That was why I organized a gang to get into 
the aircraft business, back when the only aircraft were rocket-assisted gliders, 
and everyone thought I had eaten too much fungus, and was seeing 
that-which-was-not."
They stepped out onto the veranda and looked up at their world's 
companion-planet.
"Another thing more immediate," he continued. "My gang is working on a new 
engine; one that burns a volatile fluid refined from petroleum. It works like 
the present coal-gas engines, but has more power. Before we can get it into 
general use, though, we'll have to have a large and dependable fuel supply. 
There isn't enough petroleum in the Central Mountains, but it's fairly sloshing 
around a few hundred lance-lengths under the ground everywhere in the Rim 
Country. If we can get a railroad out there, we'll have thousands of aircraft 
flying all over the planet in the next ten years."
At first the world was cautious in accepting the new trading certificates, but 
by the middle of the Fourth Century, when Kartho Alvararro was dead and Reeda 
Sambro was an old woman, they had so revolutionized the economy of Hetaira that 
the barter system, in use for so many thousands of years, had just about faded 
away. It seemed fantastically remote, even to those old enough to remember 
having done business under it. Heretofore, technological progress had been a 
slow, steady push; now it became a torrent after the breaking of an ice-gorge.
By the Year of the Railroad 416, there were railroads across the plains to the 
Rim Country, and a four-track line completely circling the planet along the 
Horizon Zone, and lines into the Outer Hemisphere clear to the Central Sea. 
There was no place left on the planet to which motor-truck caravans or huge 
transport and passenger airplanes did not go. The telegraph had been superceded 
by the telephone, and the telephone would have been generally superceded by the 
radio except that Hetaifa, like Thalassa, possessed only the slightest trace of 
an ionosphere. Radio waves had nothing to bounce off of, and headed in straight 
lines to outer space.
Line-of-sight broadcasting was possible, and in some areas chains of relay 
stations were set up on mountain tops. There was a powerful station on the very 
summit of Skystabber, reached by a series of cable-lifts that were of themselves 
an engineering project of the first magnitude. There was also an observatory 
there, and a great telescope was kept aimed at Shining Sister, even though all 
that could be seen was the unbroken expanse of the Ocean Sea, the few small 
islands of the Horizon Zone, and an occasional cloud bank.
Then, in the year 416, a black smudge was seen to obscure one group of islands. 
It was not a cloud, and through it the observers were sure they could make out 
glimpses of orange flame. At first it was supposed that a volcano had broken 
into activity, but when the smoke cleared, in less than one waking-period, there 
was no discernable alteration in the shape of the islands.
This was the first date which could be fixed in both Hetairan and Thalassan 
history; it was the day of the burning of the Zabashan fishing-fleet by the 
ships of Gir-Zashon.
Chapter Ten
However scrupulously the historian may shun value-judgments, the Thalassan Fish 
Oil War can only be characterized as a senseless and barbarous folly. The Ocean 
Sea was so vast, and its marine life so prolific, that the whole population of 
Thalassa might have exploited its resources for all eternity without having 
occasion for conflict. The war began without legitimate reason or necessity, and 
it ended in the ruin of every participant. Only the kingdoms and city-states of 
Dudak remained neutral, carrying on trade with both Gir-Zashon and Thurv, and 
with the Sabashan-Vashturan-Nimshan-Gvardan allies.
The war ended in the year 1950 of the Tissean Era, with the defeat of 
Gir-Zashonan and Thurv. The whole of Thurv was overrun and conquered by 
Vashturan and Gvardan armies; several powerful Gir-Zashonan fleets were 
destroyed in naval battles on the Central Sea; two of the three semi-autonomous 
states of Gir-Zashon became embroiled in a civil war growing out of mutual 
accusations of cowardice and treachery. The war itself, begun without formal 
declaration, ended without formal peace. Everybody was tired of it; even the 
nominal victors were glad to see its end. The credit for finally halting the war 
goes to the then Successor of Puzza, and Interpreter of The Books of Tisse, 
Avaraff XVI, who finally managed to get an agreement from all parties; 
negotiating with the states of Gir-Zashon and Thurv through one Horv-Had-drov, a 
Gir-Zashonan general who had been taken prisoner several years before and 
converted to the Puzzan creed at Tullon.
Although the peace obviously saved the Gir-Zashonan states from extinction, 
there was bitter dissatisfaction within Gir-Zashon. All three of the 
semi-autonomous governments were overthrown, the people accusing them of having 
stabbed the armies and fleets of Gir-Zashon in the back. Horv-Haddrov, returning 
to Karkasha, was dragged from the rostrum while attempting to explain the terms 
of the peace and lynched with shocking brutality. Other members of the peace 
party, especially the clergy of Puzzanism, were the victims of savage pogroms. 
In the century which followed, at least fifty governments were toppled from 
power in the three states of Gir-Zashon; their political backgrounds ranging 
from absolute monarchy to total anarchy.
It was at Karkasha, near the mid-mark of this century of disorder, that 
Dov-Soglov wrote his brief thesis, The Organic State. Dov-Soglov was no 
superstitious and subliterate Tisse, dictating his random thoughts over a pot of 
beer to a drinking-crony while he pegged the soles of peasants' sandals. His 
portraits, admittedly idealized, show a serious and intelligent face, with much 
darker head down than was usual among the Hoz-Hozgaz race, and the close-set 
eyes, small ears, and pointed nose of the mountain people of the interior. He 
was for some time a student in one of the secular universities at Karkasha, and, 
simultaneously, held some minor clerical post in one of the 
kaleidoscopically-shifting governments of the period. His studies seem to have 
been in the field of anatomy and what passed, in his culture, for biology.
The state, according to his book, was analogous to a living organism, and obeyed 
laws parallel to the laws of organic growth and evolution. Each individual was 
therefore a part of the organism, and could have no function or duty save the 
service of the organism-as-a-whole. Not "no higher duty" than service to the 
state, but no other duty at all. Individualism was a species of social cancer. 
As the body is directed by a central nervous system, the state must be directed 
by a governing elite, to whom the "body-cells" must give absolute obedience for 
their own good.
Dov-Soglov lived only eight years after the publication of his book, but in that 
time he saw it become a subject of hot discussion all over the planet. The 
hierarchy of Puzzan Tisse'ism and the Zaithuan Congregations outdid one another 
in denouncing it; the latter because it was revolting to their individualistic 
principles, and the former because it proposed a rival authoritarianism too much 
like their own. Absolute monarchs and dictators approved it—with much suspicion 
and with reservations—and quoted or misquoted from it to support their 
authority. The workers and peasants, slave and free, hailed it as a promise of 
equality and fraternity for all. Workers and peasants tend to be out of touch 
with their own best interests. And adventurers saw in it a ladder to power.
Within twenty years of Dov-Soglov's death, there was a strong, if clandestine, 
Organicist movement on every continent around the Central Sea. Everywhere its 
existence was illegal and secret, its advocates slinking among the poor and 
oppressed with glowing promises of freedom and prosperity for all. There were 
governments, even formally democratic republics, which adopted parts of 
Dov-Soglov's political gospel and grasped more and more authority in the name of 
such meaningless abstractions as "the common welfare," or "the greatest good for 
the greatest number." Whenever possible, Organicists managed to infiltrate as 
many of their supporters as possible into such governments. This even happened 
in states which looked for spiritual guidance to the Puzzan Creed.
The end of the Fish Oil War had brought peace, but not prosperity to Thalassa. 
With the exception of the Confederacy of Dudak, which had stayed out of it, 
every nation around the Central Sea either stood on the crumbling edge of 
bankruptcy, or had gathered skirt in hand and leapt headlong over it. The 
introduction of new weapons had forced all of them into rearmament programs far 
beyond their financial or technological capacities. The fishing fleets were 
devastated; merchant ships, the red corpuscles of trade, were mostly sunk or 
burned in port. Blockades and commerce-raiding had forced every continent into a 
shabby self-sufficiency based on a make-do or do-without philosophy. Everybody 
was poor, and almost everybody went to bed hungry nine times out of ten. 
Gir-Zashon was the first to go completely Or-ganicist. Conditions there were 
worse than on any other continent, with the exception of Thurv, still occupied 
after a century by Zabashan troops. The last of a long series of progressively 
weaker governments could no longer suppress the hungry rioters, and collapsed 
into a shambles of blood and destruction. The Organicists, organized, 
disciplined, armed with secretly accumulated stores of weapons and ammunition, 
and reenforced by comrades from overseas, waited until the whole continent was 
in anarchy and then took over in a series of almost bloodless coups. The 
bloodshed would come later.
Hetairan history had not been without its bloody pages. There had been no 
national wars, for there were no nations; but as gangs grew larger, conflicts 
between them approached the ferocity and intensity of wars. There had been the 
Sugar Valley Massacre; people still talked of the wiping out of the Halzorros 
and their bandit mercenaries. There had been fights between migratory 
labor-gangs. There had been the Painted Hills War, between the Vallados and the 
Grassanos, which ended after the first Timber Lake Conference as a result of the 
friendship and collaboration between Dwallo Vallado and Lyssa Grassano. This 
collaboration may have resulted in more than that—it was rumored that Dwallo may 
have been the father of Lyssa's next child. This was somewhat shocking. Liaisons 
with wanderers were acceptable, but with that one exception, sex outside of the 
gang was dis couraged by an ancient, unspoken taboo. After all, the gang had to 
raise the offspring of any such liaison. The rumor itself was regarded as almost 
indecent, the only form of indecency existing in any Hetairan language, although 
the mere act of attempting to trace the paternity of a child was, in itself, 
regarded as in extremely poor taste.
In one way the Trading Combine was a force for peace: gang wars were definitely 
bad for business. When, however, such clashes could not be averted, they were 
apt to be far more extensive, sanguinary, and destructive, as inter-gang 
connections grew. In the Fifth Century there was an oil-war in the Rim Country 
which lasted for five years; both sides used armored trucks and dropped bombs of 
blasting-paste from transport planes. The Trading Combine tried to stop it by 
cutting off credit to the two warring oil-gangs, but this only hurt business 
even more, and both gangs were able to borrow from independent banking groups. 
It proved, at least, that the Trading Combine was not the all-powerful monster 
that so many small gangs had feared.
No gang or combine, however, was ever able to so completely dominate any 
geographical area as to resemble, even remotely, a national state; and such a 
thing as government was an idea that never developed. Armed individuals 
protected themselves. Hetairans of good will were always willing to band 
together to put down brigandage. Roads were built out of common need, and paid 
for by the users. Fire protection was supplied by a gang, and paid for like an 
insurance policy. Police protection could be supplied the same way, if anyone 
felt the need.
Hetaira was a world of order in the absence of law; if violence between 
individuals was common, and violence between gangs possible, at least the 
greater violence that was possible between nations was completely unknown. The 
individual's rifle or revolver was less of a burden to him than a nation's 
armies and air-fleets would have been, and far less of a danger to his 
neighbors. There was very little incentive for an arms-race.
The day after the smoke-smudge was observed on Shining Sister, the newspapers 
all over the planet carried the story; and for years to come they were filled 
with the continuing controversy as to just what this signified. There had never, 
since the establishment of the observatory on Skystabber, been any trace of 
volcanic activity on Shining Sister. While this proved nothing, it gave support 
to the view that the smoke was the result of some artificial process caused by 
intelligent beings.
The radio station began beaming signals toward the other planet. They went 
unanswered for the excellent reason that there was not, on Thalassa, at that 
time, a single radio to receive them or reply. A closer watch was kept through 
the big telescope. Occasionally smaller smudges were detected on the open water. 
Some optimists were of the firm opinion that these were signal-fires, but the 
prevalent—and correct—opinion was that these were burning ships. One scientists 
approached absolute truth when he opined that it was probably the sign of a 
great gang-war in progress.
The interest in Shining Sister was powerful and universal, deeply involving the 
emotions of everybody. For over a thousand years it had been known that she was 
a duplicate world, formed, along with their own, from the wreckage of a single 
planet in a great stellar cataclysm. In the Hetairan social organization the 
family, as such, was non-existant. The only blood relationship commonly 
recognized was that of mother and child, and between children of the same 
mother. The binary planetary system they were a part of was, perhaps inevitably, 
conceived of as—in poetic terms—the two children of a single mother, who gave 
her life in their birth.
For thousands of years they had looked toward the unmoving globe in the sky, 
first with wonder, then as a reliable landmark, and finally, when their 
astronomers established the relationship, with familial love. And now it seemed 
strongly probable that Shining Sister had children with whom they could 
communicate.
An attitude of something less—or something more—than logic, perhaps? Though 
extremely logical, the Hetairan was not exclusively logical. About some things 
he could be passionately emotional. And so, compelled by the two poles of logic 
and emotion, the Shining Sister Combine was formed by the scientists of the 
Rendezvous Combine, and, almost immediately, heavily subscribed by the general 
public.
The six who sat in the ornate-shabby room were variously clad. Yev-Lorov, paring 
an apple-like fruit with his knife, wore the leather smock of a carpenter, but 
there was a heavy pistol thrust through the loop in which a carpenter usually 
carried his square, a powder-flask in one side pocket and a book in the other. 
Tav-Jarkthov and Olv-Yakkov wore military uniforms, one of cavalry and the other 
of the Brigade of Naval Infantry; they were playing cards at one end of the 
table. Thav-Thabov, in the sleeveless jerkin of a merchant's clerk, had one of 
his pistols apart and was cleaning it. Rav-Razkov, in his student's gown, with 
an artillery private's carbine slung from his shoulder, was peering at the 
titles of the books on the shelves across the room. And Zov-Zolkov lounged, 
seemingly asleep, in the armchair once occupied by the High Courts judge whose 
private chamber this room had been; except for the tip of one ear, which would 
twitch occasionally, he was utterly motionless.
The group shared two things in common: they each had a white armband bearing, in 
black, a cubist humanoid figure, stylized to the point of inhumanity; and they 
each had the bitter, hate-filled, utterly humorless expression of the complete 
fanatic.
"Cattle!" Thav-Thabov said contemptuously. "They riot for bread—and they begin 
by destroying the bakeries!"
"'And on the farm,'" Raz-Razkov quoted, "'there are the cattle, and the 
herdsmen, and there are those who tell the herdsmen where to drive the cattle, 
and what to feed them, and which are to be milked, and which bred, and which 
slaughtered."
"You can quote the Citizen-Originator about anything at all," Yev-Lorov admired. 
"Me, I have to carry The Organic State in my pocket, but you have it all in your 
head."
"If you'd spent five years in prison as I did," Raz-Razkov said, "you'd know it 
all by heart, too."
There was a sound outside the door; the faint rattle of a musket-sling, as the 
sentinel brought his weapon to the ready. Only the apparently somnolent 
Zov-Zolkov heard it; his hand went to the pistol inside his jacket, and then he 
relaxed as the door opened and a man in the trousers of a workman, the coat of 
an infantry captain, and a steel helmet, entered.
"Obedience, Citizen First Controller," he greeted Zov-Zolkov. "All the gates of 
the city are in our hands. Citizen-Lieutenant Niv-Hazrov's force controls the 
warehouse district, and Citizen-Captain Yav-Novrov sends word from the rural 
districts that the seizure of grain and meat-animals is progressing, and what 
little resistance he had encountered has been dealt with according to The Words 
of Instruction."
Zov-Zolkov smiled—not a pleasant smile. "Excellent, Citizen. Have you notified 
Citizen Trav-Vasov? Then do so at once; he has his instructions."
"Obedient to your will, Citizen First Controller!" The messenger turned and went 
out, closing the door behind him.
"The cattle will be lowing to be fed, soon," Zov-Zolkov said. "The herdsmen have 
been told under what conditions to feed them… Citizens, we will now proceed to 
construct the Organic State."
The construction was neither swift nor nice. Peasants and workers who had gulped 
the doc trines of Dov-Soglov whole, without pausing to savor the taste or 
texture, which is to say without examining the details or understanding just 
what their position in the Organic hierarchy was to be, had to be made to 
understand that they were cattle on the farm of Zov-Zolkov; bone-cells and 
muscle-cells in the body of the State, of which the Party was the brain and 
Zov-Zolkov the First Controller. The understanding usually came painfully. There 
were certain brain-cells, too, which had to be excised when they began 
disagreeing among themselves. Yav-Lorov was one of these; he was put on trial 
for contra-organicism, convicted without dissent, and brained with an iron mace. 
Execution by shooting was a useless expenditure of ammunition, and therefore a 
criminal waste of the resources of the State. His crime appears to have been 
disagreement with the Citizen First Controller about agrarian policy, again a 
matter of conservation of the resources of the State.
The resources of the State were the first concern of all; they had to be 
husbanded and multiplied. Every one of the humanoid resources—the body-cells, in 
the Citizen-Originator's metaphor—must perform precisely as much work as 
possible; they must be asked for no more, and they must deliver not one tap 
less. They must eat and wear and use what was barely necessary for the work they 
must do. They must reproduce themselves with the same machine-like efficiency 
with which they produced food and clothing and tools and weapons. After all, 
their children would be, in a very real sense, the tools and weapons of the 
State.
They were shifted from job to job, from place to place, from mate to mate, at 
the dictates of the First Controller and the Board of Deputy Control and the 
Board of Planning. They owned nothing, not even themselves. It must be said that 
Zov-Zolkov and his Deputy-Controllers drove themselves as hard as they drove the 
"body-cells," but that merely made the enslavement of Gir-Zashon complete.
In the earlier phases of the Organic State, technological advancement had top 
priority. Dov-Soglov, when his thinking had not been distorted by too-rigid 
adherence to anatomical analogies, had been a keen student of political history. 
He had realized that from the days of the First Sea Empire on Gvarda, the 
limiting factor upon the growth and survival of every state had been its level 
of technology, and he had postulated that the state can only grow numerically 
and geographically to the extent that it has the tools for supplying its 
subjects, communicating with the edges of its domain, and waging successful war 
upon its enemies. With this dictum Zov-Zolkov agreed wholeheartedly, not only 
because it would have been unthinkable for him not to do so, but because, if 
Dov-Soglov had not said so, he would have thought of it himself.
He established research and development centers; he selected the most 
intelligent "body-cells" and trained them to be "brain-cells"; he collected 
books on every scientific subject from all around the Central Sea; he imported 
scientists and technicians from every country on the globe and devised methods 
to encourage them to work for the State. Steam-turbine engines were improved, 
and gas-turbine engines designed. Electricity, long a classroom 
demonstration-toy in other lands, was studied and applied to industry and 
communication; electric lighting and power and the telephone were developed, and 
eventually the principles of radio were discovered.
Raz-Razkov was Zov-Zolkov's designated successor; after fifteen years as 
Second-Controller, he began to observe that the Citizen First Controller was 
growing absent-minded. If the director of the State Brain was beginning to fail, 
it was Rav-Razkov's clear Organicist duty to amputate him. The amputation was 
performed with a pinch of fast-acting poison in Citizen Zov-Zolkov's breakfast 
porridge; thereafter Rav-Razkov was Citizen First Controller.
The Organic State, in Raz-Razkov's hitherto scrupulously private opinion, had 
become too static. The body should grow; growth was an inescapable function of 
organic survival. The growing-pains began to be felt immediately on the 
neighboring continent of Thurv, still occupied by Zabashan troops. An intense 
infiltration of Organicist agents was carried on; incidents of conflict between 
Thurvans and Zabashan soldiers were provoked; atrocity-stories were manufactured 
and circulated wholesale; old songs and stories of Thurvan nationalism were 
rummaged out of the rag-bag of the past.
The Thurvan revolution, when it came, was organized and led from the start by 
Organicists; the Thurvan nationalists had been convinced that the Organic State 
was only interested in establishing a friendly independent government on Thurv. 
A series of apparently spontaneous riots and uprisings was engineered, there 
were a number of sensational assassinations, and the Thurvan Civil War was off 
to a galloping start.
Naturally, as soon as the Zabashans on Thurv were all either massacred or 
expelled, the Organicists took over; the pattern of their conquest of Gir-Zashon 
was repeated in detail, and Thurv became the second member of what was now being 
called the World Organic State. The orders, of course, came from Karkasha, and 
were transmitted through the "herdsmen" to the "cattle" in heavily Gir-Zashonan 
accents.
Even before the amputation of the former First Controller, a project had been 
forming in Rav-Razkov's mind. Now that he was in absolute and unquestioned 
authority, he began to give it his full attention.
Since the institution bf the Organic State, in 2052, there had existed between 
it and the Puzzan version of Tisseism a mutually implacable hostility. 
"Religion," Dov-Soglov had written, "is a dangerous hypnotic. It deadens the 
body-cells and prevents their obedience to the brain; it numbs the brain-cells 
and interferes with their control of the body." However, Rav-Razkov considered, 
even the most dangerous drugs have their uses; no surgeon would care to be 
without certain hypnotics and anaesthetics, for example. And he had noticed that 
the organism of Puzzaism had been functioning quite efficiently for a long time; 
its body-cells, the laity, were entirely submissive to the hierarchial 
brain-cells. If, in some way, the Organic State could only get control of this 
marvelous engine of intellectual domination…
He established a select group of young, competent, aggressive "brain-cells" and 
put them to conducting an intensive study of Puzzan Tisseism. The secret police 
discovered a number of underground Puzzan congregations on Gir-Zashon, and were 
even aware of the identity of a Puzzan archpriest, a Nimshan named Varthad, who 
was hiding at a farming-center along the coast, and who was in regular 
communication with the hierarchy at Tullon. Rav-Razkov ordered the police to 
pick up this archpriest and bring him in.
The prelate, when he was arrested, resigned himself to being brained with the 
state amputation mace, and took what solace he could from the martyr's crown 
that would be his in the Memory of Vran. Instead, he was conveyed in a fast car 
to Karkasha and taken directly to the private chambers of Rav-Razkov, where he 
was courteously invited to sit, and offered wine. Rav-Razkov even performed the 
supreme courtesy to his guest of drinking first from the bottle.
"Citizen Archpriest," the First Controller said, "I have to confess to you; I 
have been in grievous error."
Archpriest Varshad started; these were the ritual words of a penitent. The 
unorthodox mode of address, however, warned him to move cautiously; a warning 
that was echoed and reinforced by every item of his surroundings.
"Brother First Controller, it is my duty to counsel all those who find 
themselves in error," he replied. "If you will tell me—"
"The writings of the Citizen Originator, Dov Soglov, were the beginning, not the 
end, of the Organic State," Rav-Razkov said. "Man is indeed a body, and the 
State must govern and direct its citizens as the brain directs the body. But man 
is also a soul, and the State is a part of the Mind of Vran, as the individual 
is a part of the State. To govern , the soul, there must be religion, and as 
there must be agreement between the body and the soul, so must there be 
agreement between the State and the religion."
"But the soul is more than the body, Brother First Controller," Varthad reminded 
him timidly. "It is eternal in the Memory of Vran, and the body perishes."
"True," Rav-Razkov agreed. "So the State must be constructed according to 
religious principles… the principles of the true religion," he added with 
feeling.
Varthad-caught his breath. Was it possible, he wondered, that a miracle had 
opened the heart of this wicked—no, this spiritually blind—man?
"As I am the First Controller of the State, I must be instructed in the 
principles of your religion, Citizen Archpriest, If you will stay here, with me—
So Varthad was lodged in an apartment in the great building, the former palace 
of the Princes of Karkasha and now known as the Skull of the State; he was 
furnished a tailor to make his vestments, and given a dozen servants, all 
Puzzans. He spent his time teaching Rav-Razkov and his henchmen, and, of course, 
was in constant communication with Tullon.
Rav-Razkov's only fear was that things were going too well.
The Successor of Puzza, Avaraff XXI, was delighted with the reports which 
reached him from Varthad at Karkasha. His first glowing hopes of an immediate 
conversion to the Creed of all Or-ganicist heathendom proved premature; 
Rav-Razkov was stubborn about relinquishing some of his un-Vranly errors. He 
did, however, proclaim freedom of worship to the followers of Puzza, and, what 
was almost as good, this grant of freedom was not extended to the Zaithuan 
heresy; Zaithuans were persecuted with even sterner rigor.
When Rav-Razkov estimated that things had gone about as far as they should, he 
took his next step, the incitement of war with the Continental Republic of 
Zabash. Some two or three thousand Zabashan troops had escaped from Thurv after 
the Civil War; they had carried home with them frightening stories of the new 
Gir-Zashonah weapons, and of the discipline and ferocity of the "volunteers" 
from Gir-Zashon. The rather loosely organized government of Zabath had fallen; 
the new government, assuming extra-ordinary powers, had begun a frantic 
rearmament program, endeavoring to arm and train an army on the Gir-Zashonan 
pattern.
After a series of provocations and incidents intended to make Zabash appear to 
be the aggressor, war broke out. There were several spectacular but inconclusive 
naval battles, and a landing of Gir-Zashonan troops on the coast of Zabash, 
carefully staged to assume the appearance of a dangerous invasion. Avaraff XXI, 
the Successor of Puzza, fell neatly into the trap. He sent an offer of mediation 
to both the Premier of the Zabashan Re public and the Citizen First Controller. 
Rav-Razkov accepted at once, with protestations of his deep love of peace. 
Premier Moganna of Zabash, a pious Puzzan, could do nothing but follow suit. The 
peace-conference was held at Tullon, under the auspices of the Successor of 
Puzza and Interpreter of The Books of Tisse.
Rav-Razkov and the puppet First Controller of the Autonomous Organic State of 
Thurv, the latter a Thurvan Organicist educated at Karkasha. were all sweet 
conciliation. Freedom of Puzzan worship, which, to maintain the fiction of 
Thurvan autonomy, had not been established on that continent, was promptly 
decreed, and religious education of children was ordered on both Organicist 
continents. On Gir-Zashon and Thurv, the heretical Zaithan Confession was 
formally outlawed. The invasion force was withdrawn from Zabash, but in its 
place an army of secret agents was infiltrated into the country. There was a 
long dicker over indemnities, both sides magnanimously claiming to owe the most. 
In his ecclesiastical quality, Avariff proclaimed that there was nothing in the 
political principles of Organicism which conflicted with the tenets of Puzzanism 
or The Books of Tisse. The Organicist Party was given legal recognition in the 
Zabashan Republic. Rav-Razkov and his followers all announced their conversion 
to the creed of Puzza.
In the years following Rav-Razkov's rise to power, the technological program 
instituted by Zov-Zolkov had been pushing forward rapidly. Turbojet aircraft 
engines were devised, and high-altitude, high-performance airplanes were 
developed to use them. The Organicist State possessed quite a few of them, 
including some specifically designed as heavy bombers, at the time of the 
Zabashan War. A few aircraft, mostly light fighters and reconaissance planes, 
had been built elsewhere. After the peace of Tullon, Rav-Razkov expanded his 
plane-production enormously.
In 2078, five years after the Peace of Tullon, war broke out between the Organic 
States of Gir-Zashon and Thurv and the Kingdoms of Dudak; ostensibly as a result 
of a dispute over fishing rights in the Outward Islands. The Dudakans had 
managed to build a few aircraft on their own, but by this time the Organic 
States possessed great fleets of them. They had also built large numbers of 
gas-turbine armored trucks, which carried cannon, rocket-launchers, and 
flame-projectors. Their standards blessed by Puzzan priests, the armies of 
Gir-Zashon and Thurv overran Dudak. Between one hot-season and the next, the 
whole continent was conquered, its cities blasted to rubble by Organicist 
aircraft.
One exception was the city of Urava, which was spared from bombardment and taken 
virtually intact by ground-troops. In Urava, Tisse had dictated his Books to 
Puzza; the building in which he had had his shop was still claimed to be in 
existence, even though the city had been totally destroyed several times in the 
twenty intervening centuries. The Shop of the Cobbler was supposed to have been 
miraculously spared, and was now reverently preserved. It still contained a 
shoemaker's bench, rather chipped up with the passage of time, claimed to be the 
original. Devout pilgrims often fainted at the sight of it; all sorts of 
miraculous cures were reported. Little slivers of the original bench were sold 
to devout pilgrims at a nearby shop run by the Brothers of the Holy Order of The 
Books of Tisse. It was said that if all the slivers were put together, they 
would form a bench ten leagues long, two leagues wide, and half a league high.
That the Shop had, for so long, been in heretical hands had always been a 
burning sorrow to the Successors of Puzza. Now, by the arms of the Tissean 
Organic State, it was restored to the True Faith.
Raz-Razkov razed everything for blocks around the shop. Thousands of enslaved 
Dudakans toiled to build a shrine over it, and a huge temple of the Puzzan 
Creed, and a palace. Then Raz-Razkov sent a battle-fleet to Tullon to escort the 
Successor to the Holy City, which became both the center of Puzzan Tisseism and 
the capital of the World Organic State.
Two years later, an election on Zabash, marked by considerable 
pistol-and-truncheon campaigning, brought the Organicists into power. The 
conquest of Gvarda, the next year, was more a military parade than a war. 
Raz-Razkov now felt that his digression into Puzzan Tisseism had served its 
purpose. The hypnotic of religion could not be phased out, and slowly replaced 
with a completely secular form of Organicism.
Raz-Razkov's death came as a complete surprise to everyone, and especially 
Raz-Razkov himself. "It is not time," he was heard to murmur with his last 
breath. His funeral rites were conducted by the new Successor of Puzza, Varthad 
I, who always held that his deepest satisfaction was that he, personally, had 
converted the Citizen First Controller to Puzzanism. He was almost as proud of 
the fact that it was Raz-Razkov who had introduced him to the satisfying logic 
and inescapable beauty of Or-ganicism. Varthad I lived to see the two become 
indistinguishable. Raz-Razkov's title and position was taken by Tov-Varsor, 
Puzzan priest as well as a political disciple of Raz-Razkov; he assumed, on the 
death of Varthad, the title of Successor of Puzza and Dov-Soglov, and Spiritual 
and Organic Controller. The title was eventually shortened to 
Successor-Controller.
There was a radio receiver at Skystabber Observatory, with its antenna directed 
to receive any possible signal from Shining Sister. Through the years it had 
been carefully maintained, its speaker kept turned up. It automatically tuned 
through the radio spectrum, shifting back and forth from one possible frequency 
to another. It produced, for almost a century and a half, an uninterrupted 
gabble of static, which the observatory staff quickly learned to ignore.
So, half a sun-trip after the west-to-east hot season of the year of the 
Railroad 556, it was some moments before anybody realized that the usual 
cacaphony of whistling, squealing, crackling, and buzzing had briefly been 
interrupted by indisputable spoken words.
Whoever was nearest the radio jumped for it, tuning back to recapture the signal 
and then stabbing the frequency-shift lock button. More voices were coming in, 
jabbering excitedly, and there were noises that sounded more like 
automatic-weapons fire than like any kind of static. One of the observers 
grabbed a telephone and began calling all the stations on the lower peaks around 
Skystabber. Others were yelling the news to the living-quarters. The head 
observer came running out of his bath, his fur white with soap-lather.
"Should we try to answer it?" a girl asked.
He listened for a minute, and then shook his head. "No, they're not trying to 
communicate with us. Those background noises sound like gunfire; probably a 
gang-fight going on. If we did manage to cut in on their conversation, we'd only 
mess things up for them, maybe get somebody killed."
"It certainly does sound like firing," Kama Tessaro, the Chief Analyser, said. 
"Mondro Salgarvo was right in his theory about the cause of that black smoke 
that was sighted back in 416. ,Gavro, do you think we can determine which part 
of the planet these signals are coming from?"
"We'll play with the directional antenna," Gavro Kanzalgo said, "and see what 
happens."
"Good," Kama said, her eyes sparkling. "If we can pinpoint the signal, or even 
come close, we can aim the telescope at that point on the Planet's rim. Maybe we 
can make out something."
"Gavro! Gavro!" one of the junior assistants called. "The head adviser of 
Shining Sister Combine is on the phone! Can you talk to him?"
"Of course; give me the phone! Why, this is the most wonderful thing ever! Our 
lovely Sister's children!" There was a hint of tears in Gavro's eyes, and his 
hand shook as he took the phone from the boy. "Brando, old friend! Isn't this 
marvelous!"
The Shining Sister Combine, relatively dormant after the excitement of a hundred 
and forty years before, became the center of public attention again. Fresh 
contributions poured in. The Skystabber Observatory bubbled with activity.
The first message to be beamed toward Shining Sister went out several 
sleep-periods later, after Brando Lanorgo, the head adviser of Shining Sister 
Combine, landed in his vertical-horizontal aircraft outside the observatory. It 
was cobbled together, a compromise between several conflicting notions, and 
consisted of a bar of music, followed by the words: "Sister's Children, we send 
you our love. Can you hear us?" and then a second bar of music. For the 
equivalent of thirty sleep-periods it was repeated. There was nothing that could 
be considered an answer, even by the most enthusiastic, although other messages 
were picked up from time to time. Then there came an unbroken radio silence from 
Shining Sister.
There had been some air and sea fighting in the Outward Islands during the 
earlier phases of the Conquest of Dudak, and some of the aircraft, equipped with 
radio, had reported hearing mysterious signals, of unknown origin, consisting of 
what sounded like harp-music mixed with unintelligible gibberish. The 
origin-point must have been somewhere along the line-of-sight, because of the 
well-known behavior of radio waves on a planet with no effective ionosphere. But 
no possible origin-point could be found. Eventually, after prolonged enquiry, 
the thick report folder was relegated to the inactive files. An archival clerk 
with a passion for the odd and inexplicable saved it .when the seat of 
government was moved from
Karkasha to Urava in 2080.
In the years of peace which followed the conquest of Dudak and Gvarda and the 
political victory in Zabash, the technique of sea-monster hunting was improved 
by the introduction of aircraft-carrying hunter-ships and the use of 
tethered-balloons and radio for spotting and directing. Consequently, 
considerable radio-communication was going on among the islands and on the Ocean 
Sea beyond. There were scattered reports, only gradually consolidated, of 
mysterious signals being picked up. The brain-cell in the Fish-Oil Production 
Bureau who first noted the relationship between the reports did some checking 
first on his own. Then he flew directly to Urava from Valkor Island, where he 
was in charge of the refinery complex, and requested an immediate audience with 
the Successor-Controller, Torv-Varsov.
"I am Skalv-Dalkov, Citizen Successor-Controller," he announced, when led into 
the simple, austere workroom from which Torv-Varsov controlled the affairs of 
the planet.
Tov-Varsov put down the report, which he had read before admitting the 
brain-cell. "Fascinating," he said, "fascinating! You are sure about all of 
this, I suppose?"
"We made cross-checks from two killer-boats, twelve degrees of the planet's 
circumference apart. Citizen Successor-Controller," the fish-oil brain-cell 
said. "There can be no question about it. The signals come from the Horizon 
Object."
"Which, of course, means that the Horizon Object must be a world like our own, 
inhabited by intelligent creatures who have attained a high degree of 
civilization." Tov-Varsov frowned. "You appreciate the implications of this, 
Citizen Skalv-Dalkov?"
"I have tried not to. Citizen Successor-Controller," the other replied. "I am 
familiar with the position taken by The Books of Tisse on this issue. This world 
is the center of the Mind of Vran; the objects in the sky are all trivial, and 
of small size."
"Yet now we have the direct evidence of instruments far less fallable than the 
senses," Tov-Varsov replied. "Come now, Citizen, you have been trained as a 
brainLcell. You should know that, for all He was inspired by Vran, the Blessed 
Tisse was a scientifically illiterate, semi-skilled body-cell in the anarchic 
State of his time. Furthermore, his writing, for all that it is the Revealed 
Word of Vran, was written to be understood by ignorant semi-barbarians."
"But the centricity of this world in the Mind of Vran is a fundamental—" 
Skalv-Dalkov suddenly remembered just whom he was starting to lecture on 
theology, and abruptly stopped and closed his mouth, hoping he didn't look as 
foolish as he felt.
"My son, you are suffering from a lack of faith," Tov-Varsov said, assuming his 
religious mantle, "coupled with a lack of imagination. Because science has now 
discovered that the Horizon Object, based upon irrefutable evidence, must be a 
world like our own, and is probably inhabited with people more or less like 
ourselves, you feel that the religious doctrine of centricity is somehow 
threatened. Is that not so?"
Skalv-Dalkov nodded humbly. "That was my thought, Successor-Controller," he 
admitted.
"Do you not think that Vran can hold all objects, of whatever size, in his 
mind?"
"Yes, of course."
"Then size is, clearly, irrelevant in this context. The distinction is clear. 
Religion is of the spirit, therefore non-physical. Physical measurements, such 
as size, weight, or distance, are of no relevance. Science is of the body, 
therefore physical. There can be no possible conflict; each represents truth of 
a different category."
"I see that now, Successor-Controller."
Tov-Varsov picked up a phone and ordered all his deputies to assemble at once in 
the conference chamber, and then turned back to Skalv-Dalkov. "This, of course, 
is a matter to be kept inside the Brain. The body-cells can function only as 
long as they do not question the doctrines of the Citizen-Originator, or The 
Books of Tisse. We must suppress any report of this, and amputate any body-cells 
who may have learned the origin of these signals. We must prepare to gradually 
change perceptions to coincide with the facts. From now on, there must be no 
more use of radio in or beyond the Outward Islands."
Chapter Eleven
The radio signals detected on Shining Sister ceased suddenly. For what would 
have been twenty sleep periods, if anyone had done much sleeping, the giant 
transmitter beamed its message across space without response. Finally, everyone 
gave up hope and the effort was halted.
"It's the same thing that happened back in 556," Arlla Hannaro, the head adviser 
of the Shining Sister Combine, said wearily. "We pick up their signals, and we 
get very excited over them; we transmit a carefully-designed response back, and 
then they all stop broadcasting."
They must not know it's coming from us," Karlo Sankangro, the Newspaper Gangs' 
Combine representative, said. "Although you'd think they'd almost have to. Don't 
you suppose they have any sort of direction-finders?"
"Yes, I do," Arlla told him. "And I think that's precisely why they go off the 
air as soon as they pick up our signals. I think they know where the signals are 
coming from, and I think they're frightened."
"Frightened? In the name of reason, why would anybody be frightened by a radio 
message from another planet, a hundred and twenty-five thousand kilo-lances 
away?" one of the representatives of a big, independent newspaper gang demanded.
Arlla shrugged. "What do any of us know about their mental processes? All we 
know is that there are people of some kind there, and they've invented radio 
recently, so that they are somewhere around our own cultural level. But we know 
nothing of what they call culture. We don't know what they're interested in, 
what they think of the universe, what they think of the large object that's 
always in their sky. We don't even know what they look like. They might have 
three heads, or be covered with scales like a pterinnal, instead of fur. And as 
far as their not returning our signal—Frasko Kanganno, the head observer at 
Skystabber, has a theory that Shining Sister may be surrounded by some sort of 
an electrified atmosphere-layer, as a result of all that water, which would have 
the effect of increasing the frequency of radio waves passing through it. Which 
would mean that they can't receive a message sent on the same apparent 
wave-length as the messages we receive. And if they did receive it, by some 
fluke, we wouldn't be listening for the response on the wavelength they'd send 
it."
"What do you think about that?" one of the reporters asked.
"I'm not much impressed with this theory, as a theory, and to tell the truth, 
neither is Frasko. Don't quote me as saying this, but I think he's merely 
offering it as an alternative to my own theory because he is emotionally 
repelled by the idea that Our Sister's Children are afraid to talk to us.
But you can quote me on this—and Frasko, too, he agrees with me: The only way 
we're going to find out what Shining Sister is really like, and what sort of 
people our cousins really are, will be to build ourselves a rocket and go 
there!"
The Shining Sister Combine, at the Storm Valley Rendezvous, was already 
experimenting in that direction. They had developed a liquid-fuel rocket engine 
that would burn liquid oxygen and alcohol, and had used it to send a test rocket 
to an altitude of over fifty thousand lances. One of their scientists had done a 
workup to demonstrate that a two-stage rocket with that as the first stage could 
easily put a substantial payload in a low orbit around the planet. A two-stage 
rocket with that as the second stage could achieve escape velocity with a 
reasonable payload. By multiplexing the engines, and using a common fuel supply, 
they could create a massive enough first-stage to be able to lift a manned 
rocket completely clear of Hetaira, and land a specially designed pod on the 
surface (or in the water) of Shining Sister.
But nobody could think of a way to carry enough fuel to allow a return flight.
The Balkadranna Gang, at Fall River Rendezvous, inadvertantly opened the door to 
space-travel—among many other things. They were a scientific-research gang, 
specializing in Physics. Two of their researchers, Voldro and Yanna Balkadranna, 
had isolated microscopic amounts of the 235-weight isotope of uranium, and 
established that it could be fissioned, with considerable energy release. They 
published their findings, and tried to get the necessary mathematical assistance 
to design a controllable-fission device. It was clear that uncontrolled fission 
would not be a desirable effect unless one wanted to remove a mountain.
There was a brief flurry of public excitement about this, due to prematurely 
optimistic statements in the public press. It soon became clear that the 
harnessing of atomic energy was going to be a long, and expensive, process; it 
would be a good while before the state of the art would permit of atomic rocket 
engines. And so interest began to wane in Shining Sister again.
Arlla Hannaro, considering the chemical-fuel rocket problem, decided that it 
might be feasible to send a manned rocket to Shining Sister which would orbit 
around it and return and land on her own world. If such a rocket were sent out 
and returned, with even the poorest high-altitude photographs of the hidden side 
of the planet, the scientific gain would be enormous, and the public enthusiasm 
would be incalculably great. With only the slightest urging, the people of 
Hetaira could develop the sort of mania for Shining Sister that is, in other 
places, reserved for wars or sporting events. The board of advisers of the 
Combine decided to allocate funds to make the attempt. There were a series of 
sedate news-releases, emphasizing the fact that success in this venture would be 
years coming. Nonetheless the trickle of contributions increased, and kept at a 
slightly higher level.
The years passed. The Balkadranna Gang, at Fall River Rendezvous, succeeded in 
separating enough U-235 to build a graphite-moderated reactor which would not 
only sustain a chain reaction, but would generate enough steam to heat the 
Rendezvous's buildings and run its power plant. Seeing commercial possibilities 
in the new power-source, a gang in the Horizon Zone began mining uranite and 
floated a loan from the Trading Combine to build an extraction and 
isotope-separation plant.
Arlla Hannaro was killed, in 610, in an explosion at the rocket-engine testing 
site; her son, Vandro Hannaro, took her place as adviser of advisers. In 614, 
after an extensive testing program, a multi-step rocket was launched from a 
firing stand on the north side of Skystabber, aimed to land in the middle of 
Shining Sister's vast ocean. It was radar tracked as it lofted out of the 
atmosphere, circled the planet twice, and then headed across the void separating 
the sister worlds. Unfortunately, a component failure caused the small rocket 
motor in the last stage to fire its mid-course correction at the wrong time, and 
to expend its fuel entirely in that one shot. The radar-trackers then had the 
pleasure of watching the spacecraft miss Shining Sister and pass out of contact, 
going in the direction of the Star-Cluster.
The contributions to support the work of the Combine dwindled off after that. 
Most of the loose money was being invested in nuclear-power projects. Vandro 
Hannaro and his associates were not particularly displeased about this last; 
they had long felt that the development of nuclear power and the necessary 
improvement in nuclear technology that it would foster would be of great utility 
in the eventual conquest of space. Less pleasant was the outburst of uranium 
wars, reminiscent of the oil-wars of the previous century.
Finally a three-stage, unmanned rocket was launched that successfully dumped the 
final stage into the great ocean of Shining Sister's near side. Two years later 
the rocket that was to circle Shining Sister and photograph the hidden side was 
built; it left the treasury of the Combine empty, and a staggering total of 
unpaid debts hanging over the advisers' heads. The excitement that was generated 
by the project, however, was tremendous; it was impossible to hear anything else 
talked of.
"A lot of public interest, yes," Vandro said, rubbing the fur of his head 
nervously, as though he had fleas. "But everybody thinks the job is just about 
done, now, and there's no need for further contributions. If we had some way of 
raising a little more money—"
"A lot more money," his chief assistant said.
"Look, Vandro," an old man who had been one of Arlla's assistants, and who 
might, for all either of them knew, have been Vandro's father, said. "The rocket 
is designed to carry three: pilot, in-strumenter, and relief. Well, the first 
two have to be well trained professionals, so they will be able to react 
correctly in case anything, no matter how unlikely, goes wrong. But couldn't you 
send a relief up with just perfunctory training—say, half a year—if you had to?"
"We could, I suppose," Vandro agreed, "but what would be the point?"
"Look, suppose we sell the third place on the rocket. There must be thousands of 
people who'd pay well for a chance to go on that trip!"
"No individual could pay well enough," Vandro said, "not even if his gang 
financed him. It would only be a drop in the bucket. Have you any idea—" He 
paused, a strange look on his face.
"What is it, Vandro?" his assistant demanded.
"I have an idea."
"Thank goodness. From the way you looked, I thought you had an attack of 
stomach-pain."
"No, seriously, I have what might be quite an idea," Vandro said. He turned to 
the old man. "And it's your idea, Zalgo."
"My idea?"
"That's right. Chance, you said. Well, that's it! Chance! We'll have a lottery!"
Vandro was right. The idea caught the popular imagination. It was understood, of 
course, that the winner would be required to meet certain physical and mental 
standards; but it was also realized that if the individual failed, he or she 
would have no trouble selling the winning ticket for many times its original 
cost. Gangs of speculators bought blocks of tickets, intending to do just that. 
Vandro began to worry, as the money poured in, that there was something he 
hadn't thought of, something that was going to go wrong, causing the whole idea 
to blow up in their—his—face. He could, for example, imagine the outburst of 
murderous fury which would rock the planet at the slightest suspicion of fraud. 
He had a recurrent dream, in which the numbering machine on the press had 
jammed, turning out thousands of tickets with the same number, which then 
happened to win.
The drawing was held at the headquarters of the Trading Combine, at Timber Lake, 
with the entire board of advisers watching over it. The winning number was 
flashed by telephone and radio around the world, which then held its collective 
breath to see who held the ticket.
It was three sleep-periods before the winner, a girl named Lylla Rovodorro, 
called in to claim her prize. A member of a small ranching gang on the plains, 
Lylla had been up-country at the time of the drawing, and had taken three 
sleep-periods to get back to somewhere with a telephone. Her arrival at Storm 
Valley Rendezvous, two sleep-periods later, was televised and relayed 
everywhere.
It was almost three years before the rocket was ready, during which time Lylla 
became a proficient pilot. A huge crowd, some coming all the way from the Outer 
Hemisphere, began gathering near the firing-point a few sleep-periods before the 
launch time. The rocket was hauled up onto the launching-track; the crew 
entered, closing the airlock behind them, and strapped in. They did a quick 
pre-flight check, and signalled ready. In the firing bunker, Vandro closed the 
switch. The roar of the rockets could be heard for five thousand lances in all 
directions. Slowly at first, and then with ever-increasing speed, the rocket 
made its run along the launch-track, and then majestically rose into the 
atmosphere, and away.
Tov-Varsov was no longer Successor-Controller. Krav-Torov, the Controller of 
Spiritual and Political Orthodoxy, had eliminated him in a lightning coup twelve 
years before, along with his designated successor, Lev-Lonov. The body-cells and 
lower brain-cells were satisfied with the official explanation that Lev-Lonov 
had murdered the Citizen Successor-Controller, and then had been amputated by 
the patriotic and loyal Krav-Torov, who had saved the Organic State from 
criminal usurpation. It was noted that Krav-Torov never appointed a successor to 
his own previous position, but kept the machinery of the temporal and spiritual 
secret police tightly in his own hand.
Like everybody else on the upper policy level, he had been thoroughly 
familiarized with the case of the mysterious radio signals believed to originate 
from the Horizon Object, and with the possible dangers of allowing radio to be 
used on the Outward Islands. However, radio was too useful a tool, both for 
communication and for the continuous propaganda with which the brain-cells 
bar-raged the body-cells, to just give it up. On the continents safely shadowed 
from the neighboring planet, the broadcasting and relay stations multiplied. 
Every Temple of Tisse reared its antenna-spire; every village and town and 
agricultural center had its tower. Every citizen had a cheap, fixed-frequency 
receiver. The Creed of Puzza and the doctrines of Dov-Soglov, and the will of 
Successor-Controller Krav-Torov, were reiterated incessantly.
On the twelfth anniversary of the Martyrdom of Tov-Varsov and the frustration of 
the Treason of Lev-Lonov, every radio was turned on, all the variable-frequency 
radios of the higher brain-cells were tuned to the same wavelength. Priests 
intoned thanks to Vran for the deliverance of the True Faith and the 
scientifically organized State. An official historian read the carefully edited 
account of the courage and patriotism of the Citizen Successor-Controller.
Then, in the midst of the festivities, a strange signal intruded: a bar of 
music, a voice in an alien tongue, and a second bar of music. The reaction was 
clear and swift, but due to the complications of the day, it was some time 
before the rebroadcast stations could be ordered off the air. Even then, it was 
found that the mysterious signal, repeated over and over, and occasionally 
varied by what sounded like more unintelligible language, was being received by 
public radio in one sector after another across the face of the planet.
The detection stations, maintained against possible subversive use of the radio, 
quickly swung into action. At first their readings did not appear to make any 
sense; but the technicians quickly figured out how to interpret them. What they 
were listening to was a signal being broadcast from a moving body, travelling 
considerably faster than the speed of sound, and about a thousand leagues 
straight up. Its path, they soon established, was a great loop inward from the 
Horizon Zone, around the planet, and then back out again.
Orv-Gorov, the Dean of Archpriests, met with Karv-Torov and the top deputies of 
the State on the upper terrace of the huge building which had been constructed 
by Rav-Razkov around the Shop of the Cobbler. The Citizen Successor-Controller 
drummed on the table-top with his long middle fingers.
"You all heard this thing," he said, "either directly or in recordings. It would 
seem to be identical with the signals heard in the time of the late Citizen 
Tov-Varsov, and, for that matter, those received during the war against the 
Zaithuan heretics."
"It would seem so," Yorrov-Voppov, the Deputy for Technological Conformity said.
"And what are we to conclude from this?" Karv-Torov asked, using a formula from 
the Questions of Faith section in The Books of Tisse.
"Well, Citizen," Yorrov-Voppov said, "the present signals are clearly coming 
from an upper-atmosphere vehicle which is circumnavigating the planet. The 
question is, undoubtedly, where did this vehicle come from?
"As I see it, there are only two possibilities; either it came from somewhere on 
this planet, or it came from somewhere out there." He gestured in a vaguely 
upward direction.
"Continue," Karv-Torov said, not visibly impressed by the analysis so far.
"If it came from somewhere on this planet, then we have to assume that there are 
secret laboratories and workshops of some group unknown to us, and that they 
have a higher level of technology than we, ourselves. This presents two 
questions to which there are no rational answers: first, if this group exists, 
why does it choose now to reveal itself, and why by this means; and second, if 
it is as superior technologically as one would have to assume from this ship 
circling the planet, why bother hiding itself at all? Unless someone can come up 
with an answer to these two questions, then I think we must assume the vehicle, 
and thus the transmissions, to be extra-planet in origin. This hypothesis is 
supported by the evidence of the earlier transmissions, which seemed to 
originate on the Horizon Object. This would seem to establish beyond conjecture 
that the Horizon Object is a planet like our own, and is inhabited by some form 
of intelligent life."
"But it's all absurd!" the Dean of Archpriests declared. "There are clear 
statements in The Books as to what the heavens are like, and nowhere is there 
mentioned other planets like onto this one. And then to assume that, not only is 
the Horizon Object a planet with living beings on it, but that these beings can 
build a vehicle which can carry them across hundreds of thousands of leagues of 
empty space, something which, as I understand, we ourselves cannot do—"
"Citizen-Priest Orv-Gorov, it is you who speak absurdities," Krav-Torov rebuked. 
"We have the evidence of observations based on the best scientific instruments. 
You, on the other hand, are calling something absurd merely because you do not 
wish to believe in it. It goes against something you read in a book. One of The 
Books, perhaps, but still only a book. On the other hand, balanced against your 
book, is the presence of a very real object circling our planet, sending 
radio-signals to everything it passes over. Music! No, Citizen-Priest; despite 
The Books, the Horizon Object is a world like our own. And its people would seem 
to have been trying to communicate with us for years, and they now have built a 
machine enabling them to cross space and drop in.
"This is the situation which confronts us, whatever The Books say. Now let us 
consider realistically what we are going to do about it."
"We must consider the effect on the body-cells," one of the deputies said. "This 
thing is going to destroy their faith in The Books, which is fun damental to 
everything else."
"Not necessarily," Krav-Torov said. "Not if it's handled right. After all, the 
body-cells are not encouraged to read The Books of Tisse for themselves, even 
those few who can read by themselves. We must now begin to prepare them. 
Discover, for the greater glory of Vran, that there is a possibility that the 
Horizon Object is a world like our own, and that those signals that everybody is 
talking about must have come from there. The Citizen-Priest can find an 
appropriate chapter in The Books of Tisse that predicts that such a discovery 
will be made at this time. Can't you. Priest?"
Orv-Gorov bent his head. "Unfathomable are the ways of Vran," he said.
"There's a great mission and a great opportunity for you, Dean of Archpriests," 
Krav-Torov said. "Consider: the inhabitants of other worlds, now that we admit 
to the existence of other worlds, may well be ignorant of the sacred truths of 
The Books of Tisse, and all else concerning Vran. It will be our duty to 
instruct them. You must start preparing brain-cells for this function."
"That is so," Orv-Gorov said, thoughtfully.
"And we must make plans to acquaint them with the advantages of the scientific 
structure of the Organic State."
"I wonder if these people—things—whatever they are—in the circling vessel have 
landed anywhere," Tav-Frakov, the Deputy Controller of Food Production said. 
"Perhaps, if they have, we could find them and amputate them. Then we could take 
their ship for study, and get rid of all other signs of their presence, and pass 
the whole thing off as a miracle. Within a few years the event will be 
forgotten."
Several of the others murmured agreement. Krav-Torov grimaced and slammed both 
hands down on the table-top. "Great Vran, pity me, who am advised by imbeciles!" 
he cried. "Do you think those who circle our world are the only inhabitants of 
their world, or that their vehicle of space is unique?"
"No, Citizen Successor-Controller. That is why I advised amputating those who 
may have landed here."
"Yes? And have you thought beyond your nose? Have you considered what would 
happen then? Has it occurred to you that those who sent this space-vehicle will 
miss it when it fails to return? That they -will send further vehicles to find 
out what happened? That if they discover that their representatives have been 
amputated, they might not be pleased?" He glared at all those around him. "Have 
we the technology to build such a machine? No! Therefore it is clear that the 
residents of the Horizon Object are scientifically and technically in advance of 
us. What sort of weapons do you suppose such people would have, knives and 
clubs?"
"But then, if they are our technological superiors, they may conquer us if we 
allow them a foothold here."
Krav-Torov shook his head. "If they don't hear from this expedition, then 
they'll only send a bigger expedition—one big enough to land in force and start 
operations against us. But if we receive the first party in friendship, we may 
postpone hostilities at least long enough to learn just what we have to deal 
with. If we're careful and clever, we can keep them off guard. They will be able 
to tell, without much dispute, that they are our technological superiors. This 
may lull them into thinking that they are also our superiors in other ways. They 
will not feel threatened, and will remain friendly. It will be to their 
advantage to be friendly at first. Although our technological superiors, they 
will be vastly outnumbered."
"That is so," someone agreed.
"We will, therefore, keep them friendly as long as possible, and at least long 
enough to learn their science before a war starts. And, Citizens, I have enough 
faith in the holy religion of Tisse and the Organic State to believe that, given 
time, we will outstrip them. Then we shall see whose planet is conquered by 
whom!"
Vandro Hannaro, waiting at Storm Valley Rendezvous, watched the disc of Shining 
Sister grow in his television screen, as the camera in the nose of the rocket 
sped toward it. The voices of Dantro Fanzagarro, the pilot, and Karnna 
Lassantro, the instrumenter, and Lylla Rovorrido, came through, describing the 
effects of the acceleration they had endured—much less serious than had been 
predicted—and laughing about their misadventures in the unfamiliar 
weightlessness.
Time passed. The watchers worked in shifts, staring at the screen and discussing 
the problems that came up with the crew. The Horizon Islands grew larger and 
plainer, and many of the smaller islands of the Central Sea became visible. Then 
the spacecraft skipped by the rim of the planet, and passed it, and the gravity 
of Shining Sister checked it in its arrow-straight path, reached out and pulled 
it into a parabolic orbit. For the first time the watchers saw the seven 
continents of Shining Sister surrounding the Central Sea, and the great, shallow 
expanse of ocean that was the invisible side.
"We have picked up radio signals from below," Karnna reported. "I don't know 
what it means, but every radio transmitter on the planet is sending the same 
thing—voices speaking, and what sounds like chanting in regular poetic meter."
"Maybe they have picked you up on radar, if they have radar, and are welcoming 
you," Vandro suggested.
"That could be. At any rate, we have started broadcasting our friendship message 
on the same wave-length; so they'll certainly pick it up. We're going to be 
passing behind the planet in a few seconds, so it will be a while before you 
hear from us again. Think good thoughts."
"All right. We'll be waiting to hear from you when you come around. Be careful 
with your fuel; don't get carried away and try to go too low. You'll need it for 
maneuvering your way back here."
The screen went gray, and a second later the carrier wave of the radio vanished. 
Vandro rose stiffly and went to a couch. The others turned from the screens, 
some to lie down, some for food and tea, and some of the less weary just to sit 
around and talk.
Somebody shook Vandro awake when the screens came to life again, with a 
beautiful view of their own planet as seen around the crescent arm of Shining 
Sister. A short time later Dantro
Fanzagarro's voice came over the speakers.
"Vandro, your mother was right; they are afraid of us. I don't know what all the 
chanting and yelling was about, but it certainly wasn't to welcome us. Almost as 
soon as we began sending on their wavelength, everything stopped. We haven't 
been able to raise anything since."
"Maybe they are keeping radio silence to better receive you."
"I don't believe it. We varied the recorded message with our own voices. We sent 
them number-series signals. We tapped things out with a buzzer. We tried 
everything. It just wasn't any use. As soon as we began sending, their stations 
all went off the air. We did get some great pictures of the surface with the 
telephoto cameras. We saw cities, towns, ships, even a few aircraft flying below 
us. The aircraft seemed fairly primitive, to my eyes."
The return trip took six sleep-periods. The watchers at Storm Valley and on 
Skystabber, and at thousands of stations around the Outer Hemisphere slept only 
in fitful snatches, and not at all when the rocket entered its series of braking 
elipses. The whole planet held its breath until the ram-jet engines on the 
wingtips gulped in enough air and flamed into life. And when it bellied down for 
a perfect landing along the ten-kilolance runway prepared in the middle of the 
Burning Desert, telephone bells jangled in the editorial offices of a thousand 
newspaper gangs, whistles and bells and cannon proclaimed that the first 
voyagers to Shining Sister had returned safely.
The photographs taken on the spiral sweep over the Outer Hemisphere were 
carefully developed, enlarged, and examined. They were able to confirm Dantro's 
opinion that he had seen cities and towns down below. Under high resolution, 
they were' even able to make out individual houses, squares, some roads and 
other artifacts. It was clearly a densely-populated, and apparently a 
highly-civilized world. Imagination supplied innumerable details; arguments grew 
heated. Maps were made. And all Hetaira resolved as one that someday, as soon as 
possible, a landing must be made.
The Alvararro Gang had already developed a nuclear-power rocket engine which 
could be used as an out-of-atmosphere auxiliary drive for space ships. Because 
its exhaust was poisonously radioactive, it could not be used to supply power 
for takeoffs and landings. After considering many possibilities, it was decided 
to build a large nuclear-powered ship to go into orbit around Shining Sister, 
and chemical shuttle-rockets for planetary landings. The amount of fuel 
necessary to rise to a low orbit and intersect a waiting mother-ship was much 
less than the amount needed for a high orbit, or for free flight in space.
The work took years. A whole technology had to be created to build a large 
object in space. The shuttle-rockets themselves were perfected during this 
period, by the simple expedient of building them at a rate sufficient to put one 
into orbit about every ten sleep-periods. The rockets lifted structural 
materials and supplies and oxygen and fuel and water and food and workers. And 
slowly, with many a change in detail as new things were learned along the way, 
the spaceship grew in low orbit around the planet.
When finished, the ship was a huge globe, which could carry a crew of fifty; it 
could stay in space, fully manned, for a number of years. She carried six long 
shuttle-rockets, each twice the size of the one which had made the circuit 
around Shining Sister ten years before. Her captain was the man who had given 
the project his single-minded devotion from his mother's breast, Vandro Hannaro.
Chapter Twelve
Two hundred hours after she had blasted out of her orbit around the home planet, 
the Sister's Visitor was in orbit above her destination. This time there was no 
attempt at contact by radio. Shuttle Rocket Number One was launched even as the 
ship's orbit was being stabilized. It spiraled over the Outer Hemisphere inside 
the atmosphere, using ramjet power to pull it quite close to the surface several 
times, and rocket-assisted jet to take it back out again. By the time Sister's 
Visitor began its second orbit, two planetary diameters from the surface, the 
shuttle rocket was locked back in its pad, and the film from its 
specially-designed cameras was already on the drying-racks.
As the photographs were studied and analyzed, the space ship slowly spiraled 
closer to the planet, to take up an orbit a mere one-third of a planetary 
diameter off. A primary landing site was picked for the delta-winged shuttle 
craft, and four of them dropped free of the ship and jetted in toward the 
planet.
Vandro Hannaro piloted the lead shuttle; his copilot was Lylla Rovorrido, the 
girl who had won a place on the first expedition ten years before. With them 
were a physicist from the Balkadranna Gang, named Yssa, and Zandro Garvanno", 
the biologist. The two shuttle-craft that followed him down were piloted by 
Dantro Fanzagarro and Karnna Lassantro, the other members of the first 
expedition; they carried only pilot and copilot, and were loaded with enough 
fuel to enable at least one of the three to return to the mother ship. The 
fourth shuttle-craft, instead of landing with the other three, used its ramjet 
engines to explore the planet from the upper atmosphere.
They had selected the long, narrow continent, which, as they would learn, was 
named Dudak; and they had picked an area of what looked like open farmland, 
cross-gridded with roads, some thirty kilolances south of a large town. There 
were, Vandro saw, a small clump of buildings with flat roofs, and several tall 
smokestacks. It could be the village of a sugar-planting gang. He glanced back 
and forth between the map made from the aerial photographs to the screen 
connected with the pickups on the wing-tips, which gave a binocular view of the 
ground ahead, clear of the retro-fire jet-flames.
If it was a sugar plantation, they got their sugar from something entirely 
different from the tubers grown on his own world; the crop seemed to be high 
stuff, for there was a distinct shadow-line between the standing and harvested 
areas. There was a section already harvested, big enough to set down all three 
rockets, using the short-field stall-and-drop landing techniques that had been 
worked out and practiced time after time over the past three years. It was about 
five hundred lances from the clump of flat-roofed buildings. They were down to 
two hundred lances, now, with the ramjet engines firing at full thrust. Below, 
they had been seen. There were vehicles on the roads, and small dots that must 
be people in the fields; and all were hurrying frantically away from where the 
shuttle craft were going to come down. As they dropped a bit further, Vandro 
could see that the people were reassuringly humanoid—erect bipeds, with two 
visible arms.
"Take control, Lylla. Put her down so that our triangle apex will point toward 
that village. Over about there," he indicated on the screen. "That should give 
you enough room."
Lylla glanced critically at the indicated area. "With a whole lance to spare, 
I'd say," she said.
"I have confidence in you," Vandro told her. He picked up the hand-phone and 
called the two shuttles behind him. "Follow us in. Maintain the fifty-lance 
triangle. Kwalvo, do you hear me? Where are you?"
The pilot of the shuttle that wasn't landing called in, "Kwalvo to Vandro. I 
hear you easily. I am about three hundred kilolances away now, doing a photo run 
over what looks like a small industrial city. I'll be over your landing-site in 
about ten minutes, when you need me for the fireworks."
"Good. Stay about four thousand lances up, when you come in. Be ready to drop 
lower if the natives prove too hostile for the display, as planned. If it turns 
out that we need a bombing run, I'll want extreme precision."
"You'll get it," Kwalvo promised.
Yssa Balkadranna flipped the switch on the big screen in front of them to show 
the feed from the rotating scanner in the nose of the shuttle. "Take a look, 
Vandro," she called, "There's some kind of aircraft headed toward us from the 
direction of the village. I'm not sure, but I think it just took off from there. 
Can't tell yet whether it intends to be hostile."
"Okay, Yssa. Lylla, put us down." He studied the image on the screen. The plane 
was a big thing, a low-wing monoplane with twin jets on pods above each wing. It 
looked like a transport.
Lylla brought the shuttle down, cutting the jets. It bumped along the field for 
a few seconds, as the great flaps extended and killed the remaining speed. The 
other shuttles came in right behind it, taking their places on the ground in an 
equilateral triangle.
Vandro unstrapped himself from his seat, taking his pistol belt and putting it 
on. The others were freeing themselves; Yssa slung a belt of hand-grenades, and 
Zandro checked the clip on an auto-carbine and then slung it over his shoulder.
At the last second, Vandro picked up the microphone. "Okay, we're going out," he 
said. "Now, excuse me for repeating this, but I'd rather be neurotically 
redundant than miss something. We simply can't have this first contact with Our 
Sister's Children ruined by bloodshed. So I must go beyond 'don't start 
anything' to 'don't use your weapons unless it looks like they're going to 
massacre us,' and then, let me add, shoot to disable rather than kill."
The native aircraft, a broad-winged, coppery gleaming contraption, was circling 
over them at about a hundred and fifty lances. As Vandro watched it on his 
screen, it opened a pair of doors in its belly; a maneuver that reminded him of 
the explosive-dropping aircraft of the Rim Country oil wars of the Fifth 
Century. He wondered what sort of explosives these people used, and how badly it 
could damage the titanium skin of the shuttle-craft. If it damaged the exterior 
heat-shield, it would not prevent the shuttles from taking off and rejoining the 
mother ship in orbit, so that wasn't an immediate worry. Although the 
carbon-filament skin would have to be repaired before they could come back down 
again.
"Dantro, Karnna; cancel that instruction to exit now. Keep your airlocks 
closed," he yelled into the microphone. "Kwalvo! Hurry on over here. I think we 
need your demonstration of moral superiority about now. There's a plane buzzing 
us that needs impressing."
"Kwalvo to Vandro; on our way. Watch for us at about two hundred lances over 
that airplane."
Rylla was operating the lateral pickup manually, and now she rotated it to keep 
the circling airplane centered. It seemed undecided as to what to do. Either 
waiting for some first move by them, Vandro thought, or waiting for some word 
from a distant decision-maker. Vandro switched on the exterior microphones, and 
from them came two distinct noises; the sound of the big four-jet aircraft 
overhead, and a high, intermittent screaming that might be some sort of alarm 
siren from the village.
Then, suddenly, came a third sound that drowned out everything else—a deafening, 
ear-battering roar, like a great waterfall, a huge blast furnace, and a 
continuous thunderstorm combined. A wide ribbon of red smoke appeared in the 
cloud-fleeced blue sky, curving in a full circle around the three grounded 
shuttlecraft. The copper-glistening aircraft banked to the left, turned quickly, 
and shot away out of the circle.
"Smart boy," Vandro commented. "He's never seen anything like that before, and 
has no idea of what it is. And, whatever it turns out to be, he doesn't want any 
part of it. All right, let's open her up and go outside."
They rotated the airlock open and extended the elevator. The other two 
shuttle-craft were also unbuttoning; they could see Dantro and Karnna and their 
co-pilots, also armed and laden with equipment, come dropping down the 
seven-lance descent to the ground. "That ought to impress any native who's 
watching," Vandro said, climbing sedately into the elevator. "It impresses me."
High overhead, Kwalvo Yarragarro was making another circle, a hundred lances 
higher, and five hundred wider; but this time without the noise. When he had 
finished that, he changed his smoke from red to blue and slashed a straight line 
across, and then bisected it directly overhead with another. From the mother 
ship, far off in orbit, it would be visible telescopically as two smears of red 
with a smear of blue sandwiched between. But to an observer directly at zenith, 
it would be a pair of red circles center-crossed in blue. That was the 
impression Vandro wanted to create—that the observer, with a whole space-fleet, 
was directly overhead.
The earth had been blackened and burned in patches around the three 
landing-craft, where the down-thrusting ramjets had scorched a landing-path. The 
ground under the ships was littered with bits of vegetable-matter and covered 
with the stubble of the thick, pulpy plants that had recently been harvested 
from it. Some patches were still burning. Vandro and those with him stomped over 
to these patches, breathing thanks for their ankle-high boots and leather 
trousers. They used portable fire extinguishers on the burning places, and then 
stamped and kicked out any places that looked like they might be still 
smoldering. Then the crews of the three ships met at the center of the triangle 
and set down their cases of equipment.
There was a piece of native farm machinery sitting just about in the center—a 
wheeled thing with a big fork, which looked as though it had been used to gather 
and bundle whatever the crop was. Vandro made up a few inventive new cursewords, 
when he suddenly realized that he had completely missed seeing the gadget from 
the air, and they must have missed it by no more than a couple of arm-widths.
A strip a hundred lances wide had already been cut through the field, extending 
from a distant clump of tall, tree-like fauna, past the ships, to the clump of 
buildings and smokestacks some three hundred lances in front of them. On either 
side, the crops were still standing. The plant looked like giant club-mosses, 
stalks two lances high and thick as a man's leg at the knee. Karnna picked up a 
half-burned bit of plant-detritus from the ground and sniffed at it. "Doesn't 
smell as though it had a very high sugar content” she said. "Obviously 
carbon-oxygen-hydrogen, though. They might use the stuff for roughage for 
whatever kinds of herbivorous animals they raise, or—"
"Here they come!" Yssa said, pointing across the fields, then raising her 
binoculars.
There were four large trucks with boxy bodies, that looked like they were 
probably armed and armored, and ahead of them came two small open cars, each 
carrying half a dozen humanoid figures. One of the cars came on toward the 
grounded shuttle-craft, the other, and the trucks, began circling slowly around, 
at about two hundred lances. They didn't make any attempt to preserve any of the 
crop, but just plowed it under their wide wheels as they went.
Yssa had her glasses trained on the approaching open car. "Oh! They're 
horrible!" she cried. "They have no fur; just some hideous stuff like grass on 
their heads. And they're covered with clothing, all over, from what I can tell. 
The little bits of skin that are sticking out are green-gray, like a 
swamp-eel's."
"Restrain yourself, Yssa," Karnna said. "Remember, we probably look just as 
hideous to them."
"Ridiculous, Karnna," Yssa said. "Why, just look at them, and then look at us. 
Any unbiased person would have to admit that we're rather handsome people, and 
they're monsters."
The open car came to a stop just outside the triangle of the landing-craft. Four 
of the six occupants got out and stood talking for a moment. The driver remained 
in his seat, as did the one who sat beside him (her? Yssa wondered; she couldn't 
tell—all the ones she could see seemed to be of the same sex. They looked male, 
but she'd like to have seen a female for comparison), who was crouched behind 
something that looked like a heavy, rapid-fire gun.
The four who descended took off their belts and put them on the seats of the 
vehicle, and then advanced toward the Hetairans, their arms extended in front of 
them. Vandro nodded to himself, pleased. To lay aside weapons and approach with 
plainly empty hands seemed like an obvious peace-gesture to him; the fact that 
these natives thought so too was a sign that their mental processes were not 
totally unsimilar.
They had six fingers, the two outside ones thumbs, he noted, and made a small 
bet with himself that their mathematics would be based on a duodecimal system. 
Their faces were broad, with wide mouths and heavy jaws, bulging eyes and erect, 
pointed ears; but all the parts seemed to be in the right places. The most 
alien-looking thing about them was their body baldness—assuming it carried 
through under their clothing—and the strange stuff on their heads, which was 
definitely not fur. Yssa was right, despite—or, perhaps, because of—the great 
similarities in what one might call gross appearance, they did look pretty 
horrible.
The circling shuttle-craft came roaring down for one more pass, with the 
sound-maker on again, and the newcomers ducked their heads as one, although the 
puff of red smoke it released was a good five hundred lances over their heads. 
Dantro Fanzagarro, kneeling beside the radio transmitter, began reporting into 
it, and Lylla kept the television camera aimed at the delegation of Shining 
Sister's unpleasant-looking children.
Chapter Thirteen
It was three sleep-periods later when the Successor-Controller and his entourage 
arrived at the Doroda Alcohol Center on Dudak. Before going out to look at the 
great ships that had landed in the narga-field, they paused to refresh 
themselves after the journey—Krav-Torov didn't want to look tired or worn when 
meeting the aliens; probably the most important confrontation he'd have during 
his whole ministry.
His car headed the small convoy that left the distillery buildings and headed 
for the field of narga-stubble. "Slower, Citizen Driver," he instructed as they 
entered the field, "and a little to the left; when we get closer, half-circle 
around them to give me a look at them."
"Obedience, Citizen Controller-Successor."
The car slowed, and Krav-Torov leaned across Harv-Sarov, on his right. The three 
space vehicles were ahead; great streamlined shapes in black and silver, larger 
than any aircraft ever built by the Organic State, at least three times as large 
as anything currently flying. They had huge jet engine pods on their triangular 
wings, with great air-intake scoops that looked as though they closed up for 
streamlining when they weren't in use. A cluster of rocket nozzles came out of 
the rear of the strange craft.
Much as their size impressed him, it didn't seem that they were large enough to 
carry sufficient fuel for the return trip. They could have had disposable tanks 
for the trip across, but if so they were obviously disposed of already. 
Scientists working on the problem for him had hypothesized that the reason why 
the earlier ship had not landed was that it could not have carried enough fuel 
to lift itself out of the gravity well and crossed space to its home planet 
again.
But a ship could carry enough fuel to reach a low orbit and return to the ground 
several times. Which meant that these ships had probably been launched from some 
gigantic space-travelling vehicle, which must even now be orbiting around his 
planet. If these, then, were indeed mere landing-craft, the thought of what the 
ship that carried them must be like awed him, as did the scientific and 
organizational abilities of its builders. These beings must certainly have some 
sort of an Organic State, probably one more highly developed than his own.
He had been worrying about the inadequacy of the troops available, and wishing 
that the Organie State, after the bloody extinction of its last rival, had not 
allowed its armed forces to deteriorate. But now he realized that no army that 
had ever been fielded on his planet, not even the forces which had marched to 
the conquest of Dudak in 2078, would have been of any use to him against the 
beings who had built these ships. The only hope for the survival of the Organic 
State lay in conciliation and avoidance of conflict—at least until the science 
of these aliens could be appropriated and applied.
The cars stopped at the edge of the triangle bounded by the three shuttle-craft, 
and everybody, even the drivers, got out and stared at the group around the 
tables that had been set up at the center. Krav-Torov spared a hasty glance at 
Skrov-Rogov, the supervisor of the Doroda Alcohol Center, and his assistants, 
and then turned his full attention to examining the aliens.
He had expected to find beings different from himself, but he was shocked at the 
extent of the difference. These creatures were at least a head taller than any 
of his own race, and red in color. They wore leather trousers and vests, and 
short boots, and carried what looked like weapons at their belts. One of his 
race dressed that way would have looked scantily-clad, but these beings didn't. 
It was, perhaps, because of the body-covering of some kind of fine down which 
extended to every visible part of their anatomy. No, not down, he corrected 
himself as he approached the tables; it was finer, as fine as the nap of velvet. 
The color was not uniform. One of them had a pinkish splash across its 
flat-nosed, triangular-eared face; another, scarlet elsewhere, was almost white 
under its chin.
They were, he was suddenly startled to notice, missing a thumb on each hand. It 
would have been the under-thumb when the two hands were extended and clasping 
each other. He also noted differences between the aliens in physical structure, 
which were almost certainly secondary sexual characteristics. Like his own race, 
these aliens would seem to be gamogenetically-reproducing mammals. That was 
reassuring; it promised a common psychological base. Although, he reminded 
himself, the ability to understand another's psychology did not necessarily 
equate with the ability to get along. The svarps were gamogenetically-reproduced 
mammals, of whom there was a folk-saying, "As dirty and disgusting as a svarp."
This party seemed to consist of four males and four females. He wondered, idly, 
which was the dominant sex.
The aliens had set up quite a bit of apparatus around the field, and Krav-Torov 
examined it as best he could as he strode toward the central tables. There was 
what looked like a portable radio. One of the males was beside it, talking into 
the hand-phone. A large, angular, plastic or painted-metal box with a wide lens 
in its face sat on a heavy tripod. A female was keeping it pointed toward him 
and his party. Some sort of camera, he supposed, and then realized with a start 
that, for all he knew, it could be a deadly weapon. There were a few more metal 
or plastic boxes, studded with dials, levers, and knobs; two of them had large 
screens which glowed with bluish light and on which pictures shifted.
The tops of the two tables were littered with pads of paper and books, and what 
looked like oversized photograph-folios. To the left of the tables was a big, 
white plastic board, on its own stand something like an artist's easel. There 
were drawings on it; diagrams of some sort "done in colored grease-pencil. One 
of Skrov-Rogov's subordinates and one of the alien females seemed to have been 
using it to explain something to each other.
When Citizen Successor-Controller Krav-Torov reached the tables in the middle of 
the triangle, Supervisor Skrov-Rogov and the rest of his party rose from their 
seats, and the one who had been trying to converse with the alien female put 
down his grease-pencil. They all gave him the Organicist salute and bowed 
deeply, holding the bow for perhaps an exaggerated length of time, following 
Skrov-Rogov's lead, to show the aliens the importance of their visitor. The 
aliens stared at this happening, and then spoke to each other in queer, 
high-pitched voices. No doubt, Krav-Torov thought, they were trying to decide 
just how important he was among his own kind.
"Tell them, Skrov-Rogov," he said, "tell them who I am."
Skrov-Rogov turned to the alien male he had been talking to. "Name Krav-Torov," 
he said, indicating the Successor-Controller. "Big high man for all people this 
world."
The alien advanced toward Krav-Torov, grimacing in what was probably his version 
of a friendly smile. Krav-Torov resisted the urge to take a step backward with 
each step the alien took forward.
"Name Vandro Hannaro," the alien said, slowly and carefully, and only slightly 
squeaky. "People my world friends people your world. Your world, my world, 
sisters; your people, my people, sisters' children."
Krav-Torov looked at Skrov-Rogov with respectful surprise. To have taught these 
aliens so much of the language in the few days since their arrival had been a 
considerable feat. He made a mental note to have Citizen Skrov-Rogov's 
brain-cell category revised upward very sharply.
He tapped himself on the chest. "Name Krav-Torov. My world glad people your 
world come," he said. "Your world, my world, good friends always. Learn much 
from each other. Welcome."
"We learn much, your world. We want know all, your world. We work much time, 
come your world," the alien said. He gestured toward the screens with the 
glowing pictures. "Learn much, much to learn."
Krav-Torov turned toward the screens and stepped closer, so he could make out 
the pictures. 'One was a view of the country around Doroda Alcohol Center, as 
seen from about three kilometers overhead; the point-of-view was shifting 
slowly, circling around the complex. The other screen showed a magnification of 
the scene in the first. In it he could see the three great shuttle-craft, and 
the grouped tables and chairs, and the equipment, and the people and aliens 
inside the triangle. He could even make himself out, staring at the screen. Then 
the scene in the magnified image drifted, and the cars in which he had arrived 
came into view on one side, to move off the other, followed by the armored 
trucks, the stand of unharvested nerga-plants, and then the massed infantry and 
combat-vehicles and artillery deployed a league and a half away, waiting on his 
word. All of this, in plain sight on this strange screen!"
"Citizen Skrov-Rogov," he said, working to keep his voice calm, casual. "What 
sort of devices are those screens!"
"It seems to be a thing like radio, Citizen Successor-Controller," Skrov-Rogov 
answered, "except that it transmits pictures instead of sound. We don't know 
enough of each other's languages yet for them to explain it in any technical 
way, but that's the basic idea: That box over there, with the lens set into the 
front, is picking up what's happening here and sending the pictures, in 
continuous motion, to another spacecraft circling overhead. And that one, in 
turn, is sending views of the, ah, countryside."
Wonderful! Krav-Torov thought. If we make one hostile move, every alien on the 
planet not only knows about it, but sees pictures of it. Then the bombs begin to 
fall. He wondered what sort of bombs they'd be—explosive, fire, poison gas, 
strange disintegrating rays, little puffs of smoke that turn us into vegetables? 
Vran only knew which of the endless possibilities.
Krav-Torov took a deep breath. "You have done well, Citizen Skrov-Rogov," he 
said. "You will turn the management of your farms and distillery over to your 
immediate subordinate. I'm ordering you immediately re-classified to Category 
Four. From now on, you'll maintain contact with these beings, and coordinate the 
work of exchanging linguistic and other information with them. You will follow 
such directives as you are from time to time given, always keeping in mind that 
your prime directive is to gain and hold the friendship of these beings at any 
cost. Have you got that?"
"Yes, Citizen Successor-Controller."
"Remember," Krav-Torov said, stepping close to Skrov-Rogov and dropping his 
voice to a whisper. "Gain their trust. Make friends with them.
Learn their language. Learn their technology. Call on what expert help you need. 
The resources of the State are yours. Steady increasing success will be 
rewarded."
"Yes, Citizen Successor-Controller."
"There is a corollary that I don't think we need discuss," Krav-Torov continued. 
"And that is the price of failure."
"I understand, Citizen Successor-Controller."
Mysterious and deep is the Mind of Vran! Strange and secret are the thoughts of 
Vran! Incomprehensible are the ways of Vran! Skrov-Rogov repeated this litany to 
himself piously. How had the Hand of Vran worked to single him out this way! His 
transfer to Doroda Alcohol Center had actually been a demotion. He had held a 
much better position at Urava, in the central office of the Bureau of Agrarian 
Industry Control, until a superior had made an outrageous blunder and had needed 
a scapegoat. At the time Skrov-Rogov had thought himself lucky not to have been 
amputated; it never occurred to him to harbor any bitterness about what was 
plainly a legitimate act of bureaucratic self-defense. He would have done the 
same, had their positions been reversed.
Now, having tried his loyalty to the machinery of the State, behold how Vran had 
rewarded him! That he should be given the credit for the fact that these aliens 
had developed a superb system for teaching and learning languages seemed every 
bit as just as that he should bear the blame for his superior's idiocy.
Skrov-Rogov soon found himself as the Deputy-Controller in charge of the Agency 
for Communications With and Technological Studies Of the Visitors from the 
Horizon Object. It was set up as a regular Control Bureau in miniature. Using 
the authority given him by the Citizen Successor-Controller, he took over what 
had been the country estate of one of the wealthy landowners of the old Dudakan 
Confederacy, now a rest-resort for upper-category brain-cells, and converted it 
into lodgings for the aliens and headquarters for himself and his assistants. A 
landing-field for the aliens' shuttlecraft was provided, and the entire company 
of the orbiting mother-ship, at one time or another, came down to visit.
There were bitter power.-struggles with brain-cells of greater tenure or higher 
category than his own, but Skrov-Rogov had a good grounding in bureaucratic 
infighting, and he managed to keep control of his agency. With the Citizen 
Successor-Controller solidly behind him, he had his own brain-cell category 
revised upward twice, getting a special waiver of time-in-category from the 
Committee on Grants and Waivers. This was deemed necessary, not only for his own 
status, but so that he might have authority over the high-category specialists 
that were assigned to his agency.
He contrived that everything learned from the Outsiders must pass over his desk, 
that the different specialists were kept in ignorance of the details of each 
other's work, and that the extent to which Vandro Hannaro and the other aliens 
participated in the work was kept to a minimum. The Outsiders were, to the 
greatest extent possible, to be amused rather than informed; and they were to 
teach rather than be taught.
He also made sure that the area was surrounded by a high fence, and kept under 
constant guard. Whenever any of the Outsiders left it, they were always attended 
by members of the Organic State Police—to protect them from embarrassment and 
annoyance, he explained, because there was considerable fear of them and 
resentment of them among the more ignorant people. This, of course, would pass 
away in time; but for the present—
The only trouble with this explanation was that the Outsiders refused to 
understand. The concept of the ignorant public was one Skrov-Rogov was weaned 
on: the body-cells, the working mass, the serfs. But the Outsiders persisted in 
thinking he was referring to feeble-minded or organically brain-damaged people, 
and wondering why they were allowed to roam around. Won't they hurt themselves? 
And this problem did not lessen as time passed. It almost seemed as if, as 
communication between the races improved, mutual incomprehension increased.
Skrov-Rogov almost collided with Harv-Sarov, a priest and professor at the 
Sacred University of Urava, as he emerged from the main doorway of the 
Outsiders' Guest House. They snarled angrily at one another, and then, as mutual 
recognition dawned, apologized, laughing ruefully.
"It's no wonder that our tempers are short, Citizen," Harv-Sarov said. "The 
wonder is that we aren't biting one another. Dealing with those animals is 
surely a case of Vran testing our patience, our faith, and our fortitude. They 
are lying to us, those Outsider animals, and laughing in our faces, and we have 
to smile and pretend to believe them."
"You think so. Citizen?" Skrov-Rogoy asked, taking the priest's arm and guiding 
him to a nearby bench. "I wish I could believe that."
Harv-Sarov looked at him in surprise. "Explain, Citizen Skrov-Rogov."
"Look at it this way, Citizen Priest-Professor; if they're lying, they must have 
a reason for lying, and we should be able to figure out what it is. If they're 
not lying, if they're telling the truth, it would invalidate everything we have 
been taught to believe in all our lives. It's like one of those problems in 
truth-telling you get in school: three people are locked in a room; one of them 
can only lie, one can either lie or tell the truth, and the third can only tell 
the truth. What question can you ask any one of them to instantly know which he 
is, and which the other two are?' Well, in real life the problem is invalid, 
because nobody always lies or always tells the truth. But with these Outsiders, 
we are faced with just that problem."
"How do you mean. Citizen?"
"Let me put it this way. Reverend Citizen; these beings claim not to understand 
what we're talking about when we tell them about the Organic State, because they 
don't have such a thing. Well, that's all right. There was a time when we had 
not evolved to the high point we're now at. So what sort of government do they 
have? We haven't been able to find out. Why? Because they have no word for the 
very concept of 'government.' They don't know what we're talking about."
The priest nodded. "Their language, if we are to believe what they tell us, 
lacks terms for the fundamental social relationships of authority, or 
regulation, or even law."
"And yet," Skrov-Rogov said, gesturing toward the landing field, from which one 
of the shuttles was thrusting itself into the atmosphere, climbing its ladder of 
flame, "they have developed a culture which has produced that. What sort of 
culture had we before the Citizen-Originator Dov-Soglov and the 
Citizen-First-Controller Zov-Zolkov? Guns that loaded at the muzzle with loose 
powder; wretchedly inefficient steam-turbines; no telephones or radio or 
electric power. Why, all that we have accomplished was accomplished under the 
Organic State, and yet these creatures, far in advance of our science, claim 
that they have no equivalent to the Organic State. Worse; they claim they 
possess no equivalent to the state! Their condition, they would have us think, 
is more anarchic than any in recorded history." He used an oath at which the 
priest frowned. "Can we believe them? And, more to the point, Citizen-Priest, 
dare we believe them?"
Harv-Sarov tied his two hands together with his fingers and stared glumly at the 
rough concrete walk. "I see what you mean, Citizen Director. But their problem 
goes much deeper for one of the Shoe, like myself. Their pretended ignorance of 
the very concepts of religion strike me to my soul. What are we to do with a 
race like this? How can they have achieved a high state of civilization, and not 
come to any awareness of the Glory of Vran?
How would He have permitted such a thing? Could it be that He is testing us?"
"Would that not be a reassuring answer, Reverend Citizen?"
"For you, perhaps, but not for me. If we are being tested by Vran, then what are 
the right answers to the test? What is it that Vran would have us do?" He turned 
to Skrov-Rogov and spread his hands wide, a gesture of bafflement. "Why, the 
most degraded savage in the darkest corner of the globe before the 
Englightenment had some concept, dim and barbarous though it might have been, of 
Vran. Yet you should have heard that female Outsider, the one called Leel-lah 
Something-Or-Other, with the bright red fuzz on her body and the white splash 
under her chin. She laughed at me when I tried to explain the existence of the 
Universe in the Mind of Vran. I tell you, I could hear that laugh echoing in the 
convolutions of the Mind itself. You know what she asked me? She asked me to 
tell her whose mind Vran existed in!"
"I saw a peasant on Vashtur hanged by the wrists over a slow fire and roasted to 
death for such blasphemous talk," Skrov-Rogov said.
"May he find forgiveness in the Memory of Vran," the priest mumbled, making the 
Holy Sign. "But that's not the worst of it. Disbelief we can handle, even from 
aliens. The Successor-Controller has authorized the Office of the Stabilization 
of the Faith to start a new Bench. It will be called the Bench for the 
Propagation of the Word of Vran Among the Outsiders. Of course, we are not to do 
any propagating now; nothing to annoy the fuzzy beasts yet. But when we have the 
upper hand—we'll convert them, or we'll eliminate the race trying!"
"That's the idea," Skrov-Rogov approved.
"But their attitude, and their behavior; I don't know how long I can stand it. 
They have no sense of shame or morality. They degrade women by letting them do 
men's work."
"They do seem to have complete equality of the sexes," Skrov-Rogov said.
"Disgusting!" the priest said. "And have you seen how they behave toward each 
other? Running around naked; both sexes bathing together. And they certainly 
like to bathe—they're the cleanest beasts I ever saw. And the other day I came 
across two of them under a tree—a male and a female. And they 
were—openly—fornicating. And when they saw me watching, it didn't seem to bother 
them at all. Not at all. Just like animals."
"And yet—" Skrov-Rogov looked toward the landing field. "The problem is real. If 
they're lying to us—in word, deed, and behavior—they are not only impeccably 
schooled in the lie, but they must have a powerful motive. What could it be? And 
if they are not lying, if their every word and every action reflects what they 
truly believe, who they truly are—" He paused, thoughtfully. "Why?" he asked, of 
the air in front of him, not of the priest. "Why would the universe look thus to 
them and thus to us? And who is right?"
"Citizen Skrov-Rogov!" the priest said, the shock evident in his voice.
Yssa Balkadranna looked up from the writing machine and her stack of notes as 
Lylla Rovorrido came into the room and laid her notebook on the table in front 
of Vandro.
"Anything new?" Vandro asked.
Lylla shrugged. "I'm afraid I horrified one of them, again. Harv-Sarov, the one 
who always wears that blue smock with the gold trimmings, and the shoes with the 
gold buckles. Just asked him a simple question, too. These people are so 
sensitive, and about the silliest things."
Dantro Fanzagarro, who had been dozing on a couch across the room, opened one 
eye. "What was it this time, Lylla?" he asked. "Tizzy and Puzzy and Vran; or the 
mind-cells and the body-cells and everybody in his place?"
"It was Tizzy and Puzzy this time. It seems you mustn't ask questions about 
that. What kind of a civilization can you develop if you can't ask questions? 
How did they get as advanced as they are without asking questions? And how did 
they ever get a system of beliefs like that?"
"Don't ask me," Dantro said. "Ask them."
"I have done so," Lylla said. "I asked why I shouldn't ask, and he told me not 
to ask that. And I then asked him how we could learn if we didn't ask."
"What did he say to that?" Vandro asked.
"He said I was only to ask the approved questions, that that was the only way to 
learn."
Yssa leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms over her head. "I hate to 
say this," she said, "but I'm beginning to suspect that Our Sister's Children 
are crazy. All of them."
"Yssa," Vandro said, looking up from the notebook, "that's not fair, really. 
Different from us, even very different, is not necessarily crazy."
"I don't mean different from us," Yssa said. "I mean crazy. Not sane."
"The whole planet? All the people?"
"If this is a representative sample, yes. Of course there's always the 
possibility that we've landed in an insane asylum. I spent some time working in 
an insane asylum in my youth. There are certain similarities in behavior between 
the poor unfortunates in there, and the people of this planet."
"Well, they don't run around frothing at the mouth and biting people, and they 
don't go off and sit in dark corners with blankets over their heads, mumbling to 
themselves. That's how all the crazy people I've ever seen acted," Vandro said.
"You never saw that poor woman at Salgrazzo's Town, did you?" Lylla asked. "The 
one whose child burned to death in the grainery fire? She refuses to believe the 
child is dead, and goes all around town hunting for it and calling its name. She 
isn't sane, is she?"
. "Thank you, Lylla," Yssa said. "That's the sort of thing I mean. I think we 
have a whole planet here that suffers from what that poor woman suffers-from. 
It's a systematic rejection of reality and substitution of delusion-belief. That 
woman couldn't endure the reality of her baby's death, and so she rejected it. 
She substituted the fiction that the child was alive somewhere out of her sight. 
No one can convince her of the truth; for her, the delusion has become the 
truth."
"So?" Vandro asked. "I sympathize with the poor woman, but what has that to do 
with Our Sister's Children?"
"That woman and these people have the same sort of non-sanity. Sanity, in this 
context, consists of thinking-patterns that are in agreement with perceptible 
reality. What that woman did, and what these people are doing, is rejecting 
reality and setting up a consistent system of delusion-beliefs."
"But that woman was under a tremendous stress," Vandro said. "You can't think 
every person on this planet has had a loved-one burn to death?"
"That woman," Yssa said, "was under a tremen: dous stress for a very short 
period of time. What would happen to someone who was put under a smaller stress, 
but over a much longer period of time?"
"I don't know," Vandro said.
"Neither do I," Yssa admitted, "but I think there's a pretty good chance that 
it's the explanation of what's happened here."
Dantro swung his legs over the edge of the couch and sat up. "Now, there's an 
idea we want to kick around for a while," he said. "I'm glad it occurred to 
Yssa, for it wouldn't have occurred to any of the rest of us. We don't have many 
really non-sane people at home; and those we have are cared for out of common 
funds in special asylums. We've never found any way to cure these people, 
although sometimes they get well spontaneously. Is that right, Yssa?"
"That's right," she said.
"So," Dantro continued, "we don't understand deviations from sanity too well. 
Most of us tend to think of frothing at the mouth, or other obvious symptoms. 
But you can't tell that delusional people are crazy; not unless you happen to 
know the truth about whatever their delusion is. I mean, if you were a stranger 
in Salgrazzo's Town, and ran across that poor woman, you'd have no reason to 
think she wasn't looking for a perfectly real, living child, that just happened 
to be out of sight."
"That's true," Vandro agreed. "So, what's the point?"
"The point is that if these people are really non-sane, we'll have to stop 
trying to deal with them as though they were sane. It won't do any good."
"Maybe it's just a question of different kinds of sanity," Vandro suggested.
"Oh, no!" Dantro expostulated. "Didn't we just define sanity as thinking in a 
manner in agreement with objective reality? How many kinds of reality are there, 
anyhow? I mean, it's not insane to believe that your child is missing if you 
have no evidence to the contrary. But if you have perfectly objective evidence 
that your child is dead, such as having seen the body, then continuing to 
believe that it is merely missing, while unfortunate and pathetic, is also 
insane."
"Well, while we're on the subject, how about this Tizzy-Puzzy-Vran business?" 
Lylla asked. "Is that sanity, now? We have a universe which we know-not just 
assume; know from actual physical-structure examination—to be composed of quanta 
of energy, grouped into atoms, which are grouped into molecules, which are 
grouped into macroscopic masses. Yssa, you're the physicist; do we or don't we 
know that?"
"Well—" Yssa looked up at the ceiling, wrinkling the fur between her eyes. "When 
I perform an experiment, and check the results with my senses, and check my 
senses against one another and against instruments, and somebody else performs 
the same experiment and our results agree; and then another researcher uses 
those results to set up a second-stage experiment and predicts the results 
accurately based on our data… Yes, without getting onto any 
ontological-epistemological merry-go-round, I'd say we know that."
"All right. Now then, what about this universe-in-the-Mind-of-Vran? Without 
cracking wise about what would happen if Vran ever got seriously absent-minded, 
I say that the whole thing is systematized delusion and rejection of reality; 
and if that isn't a description of non-sanity, I'd like to hear one. The very 
fact that they won't allow themselves to ask questions ought to be proof enough. 
You try to convince that woman we were talking about that her child isn't alive, 
and see what happens."
"That's the sort of thing I mean," Yssa said. "But what I was thinking about, 
more than Tizzy and Puzzy, was this big animal that they all think they're parts 
of. Now, if that's an example of sanity, then I'll kiss the man who calls me 
crazy!"
"But, Yssa," Vandro objected, "they don't really believe that they're cells in 
the body of some big animal. That's just a sort of figure of speech. They mean 
that they have constituted their society so that it resembles a living 
organism—"
"I know perfectly well what they mean. They mean that a little gang that call 
themselves the brain-cells can tell everybody else what to do and what not to 
do, and what to wear and eat, and who to mate with, and where to work, and what 
house to live in; and everybody thinks it's for their own good, and it's the way 
Vran intended for them to live. And if you don't happen to think so, why then 
'you're too afraid to mention it to anyone. You know what would happen at home 
if anybody tried any trash like that? You know how long the Halzorro Gang 
lasted, after they tried to do about one-millionth of what this Organic State 
thing gets away with? Why, as nearly as I can see, the whole and sole purpose of 
this Organic State thing is to make everybody as wretched as possible. Beside 
that, the Tizzy-Puzzy-Vran thing is practically sane. You know what I think? I 
think we ought to go home, all of us, and blow up the ship, and dismantle the 
radio station on Skystabber, and forget all about this place. The way these 
beings behave isn't just non-sane; it's anti-sane!"
Chapter Fourteen
As he sat by the window just forward of the edge of the plane's wing, waiting 
for Valla Alvararro to get the transport into the air, Vandro Hannaro thought, 
for the thousandth time, of what Yssa had said twenty years before, and found 
himself wishing devoutedly that her advice had been followed. When it came to 
that, he wished that his mother had interested herself in anything besides 
contacting Shining Sister, that he had found his mother's interests boring, that 
Kartho Alvararro had broken his neck halfway up Skystabber. But it was too late, 
now, even for regrets. The destinies of the twin planets were inextricably 
tangled, and could only get more so.
The plane shuddered slightly as Valla fed more fuel into her jets to keep them 
hot. Opening his eyes, Vandro saw that they were still motionless in the same 
place.
"Valla!" he called. "What's the delay?"
"It's the plane ahead of us," she replied. "A big Zemnovarro Gang transport. It 
should be taxi-ing over to the edge of the runway for the take-off run, but the 
Zemnovarro's are having some kind of a hassle with some passengers. They look 
like greenies. Probably claiming that their luggage has been searched, judging 
by my experience with the breed."
Vandro twisted in his seat and looked forward along the direction his plane was 
pointing. The big six-jet transport ahead of them was in the next slot for the 
runway, but instead of the gangway stairs being pulled away, there were fifteen 
green-skinned, green-downed natives of Shining Sister gathered around the foot 
of the gangway. While the transport rumbled in place, alternately puffing its 
jets, two of the green-skins were gesticulating angrily as they argued with a 
couple of members of the Zemnovarro Gang, while the rest stood in a clump. Only 
three of them were armed; they would be members of the Organic State Police, 
each watching the other two while all of them watched the rest.
This was typical of relations between the two planets and their races. He 
remembered the first of Shining Sister's Children to visit his world. There had 
been twelve, including Skrov-Rogov. He and two others, members of the Organic 
State Police, had brought weapons, the peculiarly-shaped automatics designed for 
a two-thumbed hand, and had gone to considerable trouble to secrete them. They 
probably thought they were succeeding, too, despite the tell-tale bulges in 
their clothing, until one of their guides asked them why the others were not 
also armed. None of them would go anywhere or do anything without the permission 
of Skrov-Rogov. None of them would talk to any Hetairan alone. As a result, they 
did everything in a clump.
They were given a tremendous ovation everywhere they went, and taken to see 
everything of interest. They would go to tremendous lengths to learn, in 
strange, sneaky ways, all sorts of things that they could have found out simply 
by asking. When they were about to go back, one of their pieces of luggage had 
broken open and it was revealed stuffed with notes and books of all sorts of 
scientific and technical information. They went into a panic of discovery, which 
amazed the Hetairans, who, in turn tried to convince them that they didn't care; 
that the Thalassans were free to take back whatever they wished. Which amazed 
the Thalassans even more.
"They're always screaming that we're searching their luggage," the girl sitting 
beside Vandro said. "They never have gotten it inside their heads that we don't 
care where they come or go, or what they take—as long as they pay for it."
"Maybe it would be a good idea to search their luggage occasionally," Vandro 
said. "We'd find out what they're so afraid of, and give more of an air of 
reality to their fears."
"That's the lot from Zagannos' Landing," another of his companions said. "Four 
of them wouldn't go back; said they'd rather stay on a decent world and dig 
ditches for a living. So the Zagannos took them in, of course. That's what the 
rest are so sore about."
That had started early in the course of interplanetary relations, too. A member 
of the second group of visitors from Shining Sister had eluded the Organic State 
Police guards and taken refuge with a lumbering gang in the mountains.
When his absence was discovered, the others had demanded the right to go back 
and get him. They were amazed when they were told that they were free to go 
wherever they liked, including back after their wandering planet-mate. They were 
never able to quite believe that, and always behaved as though they thought it 
was some kind of trap. And then when they went back to the lumbering gang and 
demanded their man, they were turned away at rifle point. Krav-Torov himself 
demanded the fugitive's return, and was quite incredulous when informed that, if 
he couldn't get him out, then nobody else could.
By this time the attitude of the Organic State was becoming more understandable. 
Krav-Torov and his government feared that contact with the Hetairans would 
spread dissatisfaction with the Organic State and doubt of the Puzzan Creed 
among his people. Sanity, it would appear, was a dangerously contagious disease. 
The whole situation, and the behavior of Krav-Torov, became most understandable 
when viewed by analogy to the quarantines established by the ranching gangs of 
the plains during the recurring cattle-plagues.
Trade, of course, was difficult under such circumstances. On Thalassa, only the 
Organic State was allowed to buy or sell, or even own, commodities in bulk. And 
the Organic State had to be watched with two unblinking eyes if you were going 
to deal with it. Every grain of cereal had to be counted, every bag of produce 
weighed and smelled before it could be accepted. Business ethics, it seemed, 
were not a part of the Organic State.
For a long time Krav-Torov believed, in spite of repeated denials and extensive 
explanations, that the Shining Sister Combine was a government like his own. It 
was not until the Zaganno Gang built a space-ship of their own and began trading 
in direct competition with the Shining Sister Combine that he learned otherwise.
Then he got the bright idea of having his agents try to foment trouble between 
the Zagannos and the Combine, but they couldn't seem to get a handle on it. The 
charges that they whispered in appropriate ears were so ridiculous that, instead 
of believing them, one gang would call the other to chortle, "Say, what do you 
suppose a green-skin told me you boys were up to today?"
Then the agents of the Organic State got the bright idea of trying to break the 
Trading Combine with floods of counterfeit trade certificates. Those who were 
caught at it were summarily shot, which did nothing to improve interplanetary 
feelings. The ether was hot for a while with radio-beamed threats of reprisal 
and counter-reprisal. Both sides were bluffing, the one because they didn't dare 
start anything, and the other because there was no sort of supra-gang government 
to do any reprising if they had wanted to. Of course, any gang or combine would 
have been free to take on the Organic State all by itself.
By then, thanks to the almost ineradicable Hetairan belief that scientific 
information should be freely shared and exchanged, the Thalassans had nuclear 
power-reactors all over their planet, buying uranium and plutonium from Hetaira. 
Within a short time after this, they had built a space-ship of their own.
The Zaganno Gang, unable to compete profitably with the Shining Sister Combine, 
sent their ship on a voyage of exploration to the tiny first planet of the 
system. It was airless, blazingly hot on the hemisphere facing the sun, and 
space-cold on the far side; but there was a narrow twilight-ribbon where, if 
they were canny, they could put their air-locked dome in the shade and extend 
low-pressure heat collectors into the sunlight for warmth and power. They were 
able to find oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water locked in the rocks of the far 
side, and in a pocket in the twilight zone they found fabulously rich deposits 
of pitchblende and uranite.
By this time the first emotional love for Shining Sister's Children had 
evaporated, and along with it the willingness to share information. The Zaganno 
Gang kept their operations on the First Planet a secret for a very long time.
Vandro felt the plane vibrating under him as it moved into position for the 
take-off run. The Zem-novarro transport was already airborne; the Zem-novarros 
had probably given the grass-heads the choice of getting on or being left 
behind.
"The Zagannos probably caught that bunch snooping, and booted them out," the 
girl said. "Which, in my opinion, was a dumb trick. What they should have done 
was shot the lot of them!"
"And give the grass-heads an excuse to massacre our people on Shining Sister?" 
another of the party asked.
"They wouldn't dare do that; we have four space-ships to their one, and they 
know it. We'd have all four of them over there launching their shuttles and 
dumping explosives down on them before one of their missionaries could recite 
ten stanzas from That Book!"
The missionaries had been one of Krav-Torov's bigger mistakes. They had come 
over in groups, two-by-two, to convert the heathen Outsiders, bringing with them 
thousands of copies of The Books of Tisse to be distributed freely among the 
furry people. Well, the furry people took the books; they had an innate love of 
books of any description. They also listened to the missionaries. But, try as 
they would, the missionaries made no converts. None.
What it took Krav-Torov almost two years to figure out was that the people of 
the Horizon Object thought the missionaries were funny. When he realized this, 
he decided to make the best use of the missionaries he could. The problem of 
converting the heathens was put to one side, and the missionaries were converted 
into spies. They were not very effective spies. The Hetairans had no secrets, a 
fact that Krav-Torov never understood, but they did believe in safeguarding 
their possessions. So, when missionaries were found snooping around in places 
they shouldn't be, they were shot. Just like anyone else would have been.
Which, of course, convinced Krag-Torov that the Outsiders did, indeed, have 
secrets. So he sent more missionaries. Pretty soon the Hetairans longer thought 
they were funny.
Vandro turned to the girl at his side. "I hope it doesn't come to that, Janna," 
he said. "But it looks like it will eventually come to something. We can't put 
up with their slimy tricks forever. Maybe if we gave them a good banging around, 
we might knock some civilized manners into them."
Thirty years after the coming of the Outsiders, Skrov-Rogov sat in the chair 
that had been Krav-Torov's before him, and Tov-Varsov's, and Rav-Razkov's, and 
Zov-Zolkov's at Karkasha. He had played well the cards Vran had dealt him. His 
liaison agency had, after his return from the first trip to the Horizon Object, 
become a full Control Bureau, with himself elevated to first brain-cell category 
and placed at its head; and, because of the paramount importance of the Horizon 
Object and its strange, fuzzy people in the affairs of the Organic State, he had 
come to stand second only to the Successor-Controller in the councils of the 
State. When Krav-Torov died, it had been only natural for him to be elected to 
the Successor-Con-trollership.
"Why didn't they attack us at the very beginning?" Nov-Borsov, the 
Deputy-Controller of the Armed Forces, wondered. "That's what I should have done 
in their place. And why did they let us learn so much from them? After all these 
years we still can't understand the way they think. It's unreasonable!"
"It was the Will of Vran," Harv-Sarov, the Dean of Archpriests, declared. "Vran 
was testing us with these Outsiders, but Vran would not suffer His people to be 
overwhelmed by the infidel."
The others looked at him in deprecation. That sort of talk was all right to give 
to the body-cells and the lower category brain-cells, but entirely out of place 
at a meeting of the First Category.
"How could those anarchists, with no> internal organization and nobody in 
command, ever hope to coordinate their forces well enough to wage a successful 
war of conquest against the Organic State?" Morv-Gorov, the Deputy Controller of 
Security, demanded scornfully.
"They could have. You should know that, Citizen. With their weapons, it would 
have taken very little organization to have defeated us utterly," Skrov-Rogov 
said. Had anyone else uttered those words, it could have been considered 
treason. "But they were too crafty. They had other weapons with which to subdue 
us. They could, and did, make us dependent upon them for power-metals. They 
could, and did, make us dependent upon them for technological goods that we are 
incapable of making. And they could, and I regret to say that in the cases of 
some of the weak and degenerate among us, they did, corrupt us."
"Yes!" The Dean of Archpriests nodded and slapped his hand sharply down on the 
conference table. "Their abominable atheism; their lawless and anarchic way of 
life; their beastly immorality and lack of shame!"
"And now we find out," the Successor-Controller said, "that they have seized the 
First Planet, and planted a colony there. This colony is where their steady 
supply of the power-metals is coming from. And when, quite by accident, one of 
our spies finds this out, and we demand a just share of these interplanetary 
riches—which, by rights, should belong to everybody equally—they refuse us 
utterly."
"They laugh at us," Morv-Grov put in, angrily.
"And, with the exception of insignificant deposits of low-grade fissionable ores 
on Thurv, we are without any uranium whatever that we do not buy from them." The 
Successor-Controller shifted in his chair. "This is an intolerable position for 
the Organic State, and one which we are no longer prepared to bear. Nov-Borsov?"
The Deputy-Controller of the Armed Forces rose. "Two new-model space-ships are 
ready," he said. "Secretly built over the past two years; these are fighting 
ships, armed with rocket-bombs, and carrying two hundred and eighty-eight 
fighting men each. These men have been equipped with space-suits, and trained to 
fight on a low-gravity, airless world."
"How were they trained?" asked the Deputy-Controller of Agriculture.
"In special large tanks, under water," Nov-Borsov replied. "Our experts have 
concluded that such an environment closely approximates conditions on the 
surface of the First Planet."
"They will depart shortly from the side of the planet out of sight of the 
Horizon Object," Skrov-Rogov said. "It will take some six hundred hours for them 
to reach the First Planet. Our agents have located the mining colony to within a 
few hundred leagues, so there should be no trouble finding the domes on the 
surface. Our fighters should have little trouble overwhelming the colony."
"It is the Will of Vran," the Dean of Archpriests said firmly.
Errba Zaganno, defensive screen observer for the Third Shift Watch, observed the 
two little blips on the radar screens as two mysterious ships rounded the curve 
of the First Planet, headed toward the Zaganno mining colony. They were not 
coming in from the right direction for Zaganno ships, they did not show the 
automatic identification code of Zaganno ships, and there were no Zaganno ships 
expected. She hit the general alarm button, and flipped the missile delivery 
radar onto automatic tracking. "Visitors!" she yelled.
The head of the communications section, Dan-dro Zaganno, came running into the 
screen room from the general mess, a soup spoon still forgotten in his hand. 
"What have you got?"
"I think they're unfriendlies," Errba said. "I'm trying the spaceship 
general-hailing frequencies now, and they don't respond."
"What are they aiming for?" Dandro asked, glaring into the screen.
Errba flicked a couple of switches and tapped a tune into the small keyboard 
below the screen complex. A dotted line appeared on the big screen, predicting 
where the objects would go with no further rocket burn.
"They're coming jn low, directly over our heads," she said.
Dandro stared at the screen for a few more seconds, and then shook his head. 
"Any gang would know better than that," he said. "They're greenies, and they 
mean us no good. Blast them."
Errba Zaganno rotated a guard free of a large black button labeled LAUNCH, which 
had a row of twenty switches under it. She flipped the first and second switches 
up, and then pushed the button.
"Don't look at me like that!" Nov-Borsov barked, glaring defensively around the 
table. "My spacemen died fighting heroically against a cowardly ambush! They 
must have the whole terminator-zone of the First Planet honeycombed with 
launching sites. Our intelligence was faulty." He glanced sidewise at 
Morv-Gorov. "How does it happen that we didn't know about their missiles in 
advance—or even that the Outsiders had fission-bombs? What kind of espionage are 
those missionaries accomplishing anyway?"
"And how soon is it going to be before their ships are in orbit off this planet, 
launching fission-bombs into our cities?" somebody else demanded. "We all know 
how little fission-fuel we have available; they must have five bombs for every 
one we could build."
Skrov-Rogov held up a hand. "Citizens!" he reproved. "These recriminations are 
unbecoming to our dignity; they are useless as well. No one is at fault. If any 
were, you may all be sure that Organic Justice would have been done before this. 
The purpose of this meeting is to decide future actions, not to cry about the 
past. We were surprised, that's all. We lost two ships and many good body-cells. 
They can be replaced. Our situation is far from hopeless, despite our lack of 
adequate fissionable material. Citizen Tav-Jarov, it is now time to reveal the 
details of your secret project. Speak, and receive the thanks of the Organic 
State for what you have done."
"Inspired by the Will of Vran, and by the patterns of correct thinking imbued by 
the words of the departed Dov-Soglov, Citizen Successor-Controller," Jav-Tarov, 
the Deputy Controller of Scientific Advancement and Display, added, rising to 
his feet.
"Well, Citizens, I assume that everyone around this table knows enough of the 
principles of the Fission-bomb that I need not go into that. If I am wrong, see 
me after the meeting and I will recommend some rudimentary reading. You also 
know that, despite the exaggerated idea of some of our lower-category 
brain-cells, the amount of fissionable material on this planet is quite limited. 
Even by stripping our existing fission-power plants of their fuel to make bombs, 
an action that would be undesirable anyway, we would not be able to create 
sufficient fission weapons to decisively defeat and conquer the Horizon Object. 
And we dare not contemplate any war that falls short of immediate and decisive 
defeat.
"However, we have developed a radically new type of nuclear weapon. Instead of 
releasing energy by the chain-reaction of fissionable heavy nuclei, such as 
those of uranium or plutonium, we have found that an even greater energy release 
can be gained by the fusion of light nuclei, such as those of hydrogen or 
lithium. The ideal substance in which to produce such an energy-release is a 
combination of the two; lithium hydride. Weight for weight, fusion of lithium 
hydride will release three times the energy released by the fission of 
plutonium. Furthermore, the size of such a bomb will not be limited by any 
critical-mass factor; tons of lithium hydride can be packed around the small 
fission bomb which is necessary to furnish the intense heat to initiate the 
fusion reaction."
"Thank you, Citizen Tav-Jarov," Skrov-Rogov said. "You and your scientists have 
done well, and will be rewarded." He turned to the table. "Our rocket 
technicians assure me that it will be quite possible to build remote-controlled 
space rockets which can deliver, on the Horizon Object, bombs several thousand 
times more destructive than the conventional fission bomb. It is well within the 
power of the Organic State to create enough such rockets, with the fusion 
warheads devised by Tav-Jarov, to totally depopulate the Horizon Object. 
Furthermore, the lingering radiation will be of extremely short duration. In a 
matter of several years we will be able to go there and find a world, intact, 
but burned clean of the vile life which now infests it."
"And how long is it estimated that it will take to build this quantity of 
remote-controlled rockets and fusion bombs?" somebody asked.
"The rockets are the responsibility of Citizen Shev-Yorov's Bureau," Skrov-Rogov 
said. "He will be given everything he needs. Citizen Tav-Jor-ov assures me that 
his Bureau will be able to produce the actual bombs in three years at the most. 
Isn't that right?"
Tav-Jorov nodded. "That is so, Citizen Successor-Controller," he said.
Skrov-Rogov stood up. "Then we will proceed with this plan," he said. "The 
Horizon Object must be wiped clean! But all of you keep in mind that, until the 
moment comes, we must do everything to avoid open conflict with the Outsiders."
Vandro Hannaro, grimly sad, looked down the long table. Everybody who would be 
taking part in the conference was seated: the whole board of advisers of Shining 
Sister Combine, the leading advisers of the Trading Combine, the Board of the 
Banking Combine, the big industrial and ranching and agricultural combines, the 
Rendezvous Combine. Less than a hundred men and women were gathered here, and 
they were prepared to speak for the entire world. This was a moment unique in 
the history of his people, and Vandro Hannaro didn't like it. What was worse, 
any decision reached around this table would affect every gang and individual on 
the planet. The thing that a few conservatives had feared back when the Trading 
Combine was formed, three centuries before, was now coming to pass.
"Well, that's the situation," Arvo Zaganno, the spokesman for his gang, told the 
group. "We beat off the first attack on our mining outpost quite easily; 
probably because they didn't expect any resistance. They certainly weren't 
prepared to face remote-control rockets with nuclear warheads. But they'll be 
back; and we won't be able to face another attack alone. We can't put a radar 
screen around the whole planet; and we can't site missile launchers every twenty 
kilolances in every direction. They could land an army on the planet, once they 
build enough space-suits, and deploy and attack from several directions. Nuclear 
rockets designed to take out space ships aren't much use against a ground army, 
especially on an airless planet. We need your help to form a Grand Combine, and 
we believe it's in your interest."
"How does this affect us?" one of the Trading Combine demanded.
"If the grass-heads get onto the First Planet," Arvo said, "the fissionables 
monopoly is smashed. If they control the planet, they won't sell us any 
fissionables. They'll just build weapons with the surplus from their 
power-stations. And when they have enough nuclear weapons—does anyone want to 
guess what they'll do with them?"
"That might be a bit alarmist," one of the Banking Combine people said. "But 
he's right about the rest of it. All the fissionable ore on Shining Sister comes 
from those low-grade uranite mines on Thurv. If they get a foothold on the First 
Planet, we can close the books on any trade with them."
"Would that be such a bad thing?" an elderly representative of the Rendezvous 
Combine asked. "It seems to me, judging from past experiences, that we'd be 
better off without any dealings with them."
"Don't fool yourself, Zalgo," a woman from the Trading Combine said. "We'd have 
dealings with them—a kind we wouldn't like. If they get hold of the fissionables 
on the First Planet, they'd be invading us inside of ten years. I'm absolutely 
sure of that."
"Oh, rubbish, Nalla! They have a planet of their own—"
"With one-tenth our land-surface and ten times our population. This lovely 
planet of ours is just right to siphon off their surplus population to. And you 
don't know those snakes the way I do, Zalgo. When we make a deal, we try to come 
out even; everybody happy. They can't do that, can't stand the thought of it. 
They can't be even with anyone, they have to dominate. And, since they've 
brought their own world under a single tyranny, we're all they have left to 
conquer."
"Why? Why would they do that? Why would anyone want to—control—anybody else?"
"Some of them seem to thrive on controlling other people; it's a kind of 
sickness, I suppose. As for the others, it is their duty to Vran and the Organic 
State."
"That's what I've been trying to get across for the past thirty years," Yssa 
Balkadranna said. She was an old woman now, almost as old as Vandro himself; her 
dark red fur was beginning to assume the uniform whitish surface tinge of age, 
and her voice was sharp and petulant. "They're all crazy, every last one of 
them. And the ones who run the Organic State are the craziest of all. They hate 
and fear us; they can't even conceive that we came to them in love and 
friendship thirty years ago. Since they want so badly to dominate us, they have 
to believe that we want to dominate them. If we don't do something to stop them, 
they will be here; with guns and bombs and armored trucks, and all the weapons 
they can build with all the technology they learned from us!"
"Yes," Nalla took up the argument. "And if they get a foot-hold on the First 
Planet, they'll have all the fissionables they need; they can start building an 
invasion fleet and stockpiling fission bombs. This idea of a Grand Combine is 
all right as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. We need a World 
Combine; with every gang in the world in it, to build a big enough space-fleet 
to pro tect both this and the First Planet against any attack. If we cut off 
trade with them, they'll attack us. Maybe not at once, but sooner or later, and 
I'd bet on sooner. They have plenty of fissionables now, that we were fools 
enough to sell them."
Yssa stood up silently, and waited until the cross-talk had died away, and 
everyone had turned to look at her. "We can do better than that," she said, 
clearly and firmly. "We can solve their population problem for them, by a 
one-hundred percent reduction—and then we can stop worrying about a raid on the 
First Planet, or an attack on us here. And, I tell you, it's the only way to 
prevent them from attacking us, as Nalla says, sooner or later."
"That would take quite a little doing, Yssa," Vandro said.
"Not too much. We can bombard their planet with radio-guided rockets from here," 
she said. "And we can case the bombs in cobalt."
"Cobalt? What would that do?" Zalgo asked.
"The energy-release of an ordinary fission-bomb would be enough to convert a 
cobalt casing—of ordinary cobalt-5&—into radioactive cobalt-60. That's a 
gamma-emitter, with a five-year half-life. A thousand or so of them would drench 
that planet with lingering radiation for the next five centuries; the whole 
planet would be literally sterilized, as far as any air-breathing life was 
concerned. And that would be the end of Tizzy-Puzzy and the Organic State, and 
lying and cheating and trying to Halzorro the whole planet; and we could go back 
to living like civilized people."
There was a stir about the table; everybody, even the Zaganno representatives, 
looked at her aghast.
"You're not serious about that, Yssa?" Vandro asked. Then he nodded. "Yes, you 
are."
"But if we were to do anything like that—could we go on as before?" Zalgo asked. 
"Bearing the guilt of a billion murders?"
"I suppose," Yssa said, sadly, "what I'm offering you is a choice of guilt. 
Doing this would not be easy; none of us would ever forget it. We would have to 
bear it with us all the rest of our lives. But, if we don't, what do we then 
have to live with? The knowledge that our children will surely be born into a 
world of fear and tyranny. Fear of the grass-heads, and tyranny of the World 
Combine we'll have to organize in self-protection. And the ever-present 
possibility that the grass-heads might break through whatever protective ring we 
form; and then our children would either be slaves or dead."
She looked slowly around the group. "There are very few of us here who haven't 
been forced, at one time or another, to kill somebody in self-defense, or 
defense of our property. None of us think of that as murder. Well, neither is 
this. It's a matter of our whole world defending itself against murderers and 
thieves and tyrants."
"But…after all, Yssa,"the old man said, "they are Our Sister's Children."
"Tisse and Puzza and Vran!" Yssa fairly screamed the obscenities. "After all 
these years, and all that's happened in them, are we still tangling ourselves in 
that silly metaphor? Our Sister's Vermin, you mean. Shining Sister has bugs in 
her fur. And I think we should scrub them out for her! And, speaking of that, 
there's an old saying: If you sleep with dirty people, you'll wake with your fur 
full of bugs. Well, look at what's crawling on us! Here we are talking about 
setting up a World Combine—eighty or ninety of us, making plans for everybody on 
the planet. And, since everybody never goes along with anything, no matter how 
good for them it's supposed to be, the plans will take coercion to carry out. 
The next thing, we'll be setting up orders and regulations, telling people what 
they must do, and what they can't do, and organizing a world-wide police gang to 
enforce our decisions. Why don't we just call it an organic state and be done 
with it?"
There was a long silence, while those about the table stared at each other. Then 
Yssa continued:
"Well, Citizen brain-cells? What do you see when you look at each other? What 
have these vermin of Shining Sister done to us even without attacking?"
"Yssa's right," Vandro said. "I'd sooner see our planet depopulated than see our 
children enslaved to a government. What an obscene concept this 'government' 
business is. When one person has power over another, he is corrupted by it. On 
Shining Sister both the power and the corruption are total. We must never let 
the filthiness of one person dominating another by some kind of hereditary 
bondage—called 'government'—come to this world. And the best—the only—way to 
prevent it is to sterilize the source of the infection."
Zalgo took a deep breath, and then nodded. "It's a decision that will be hard to 
live with," he said, "but it's the right decision. I vote for—sterilization."
Vandro turned to Yssa. "How long will it take to produce the bombs, and the 
rockets to carry them."
Yssa sat down, suddenly looking very old and vulnerable. "About two years for 
the bombs," she said. "But, even if we start work at the same time on the 
rockets and launching sites, they'll take longer. I'd say about three years, 
total. Three years…"
Chapter Fifteen
Captain Absalom Carpenter consolidated some of his hand-written notes and spoke 
some more of his report into the expedition log, and then fixed himself another 
cold drink. From somewhere near at hand came the steady chuck, chuck, chuck, of 
machetes and the intermittent howl of a chain-saw as a working-party cleared the 
jungle away from the main entrance of the big temple, or palace, or whatever it 
was. The giant ruined structure was in better condition than anything else 
they'd found on the planet so far, and even it didn't look too promising.
"Man, this isn't anything!" Benedict Sokolov, the sociographer, declared, 
gulping a slug of rum and waving his cigar. He was short and fat, and 
aggressively unshaven and rumpled to advertise his civilian status. "Wait until 
you see Hetaira; that planet really got clobbered! There isn't a city, or even a 
really big town anywhere. But every place where a city or town ought to be, 
there's one of those great goddam big puddles of fused glass."
The captain nodded. "Most of the bombs that came down on this planet must have 
burst in the water. We've found surprisingly few craters on land. Of course, the 
Hetairans were using cobalt fission-bombs; a water burst would spread more 
radioactivity around, which must have been what they had in mind. There must 
have been some pretty impressive tidal waves; probably swept right across all 
but the biggest land-masses."
"What this crowd, here, used on Hetaira was thermonuclears," Kent Pickering, the 
physicist, said. He was slender and gray; and as foppishly neat and well-groomed 
as Sokolov was untidy. "Lithium-Hydrides; real king-size jobs. The fusion-mass 
of each one must have been on the order of four or five tons."
"I'll bet they made something to see, when they went off," Gert van Zyl, the 
biologist, said.
"From a long, long distance," Pickering told him. "I was on Beta Hydrae II when 
Carlos von Schlichten bombed Keegark; fact is, I was aboard the gun-cutter that 
dropped the bomb. To give you some sense of comparison, a round of pistol 
ammunition is to the Keegark bomb as the Keegark bomb is to one of the ones used 
on Hetaira. I haven't even tried to estimate the temperature at the center of 
one of those blasts, but the entire planet must have been swept by storms of 
incandescent gas, at from five hundred to a thousand degrees Centigrade."
"How does the isotope-decay dating compare with the dating here on Thalassa?" 
Carpenter asked.
"As we expected," Pickering said. "Some six hundred years, give or take ten 
percent. It's obvious that the rockets must have been launched si multaneously 
from both planets. The two flights must have passed each other in space. Neither 
planet would have had a chance to do anything more after they started landing. 
You know, that wasn't really a war. That was a suicide pact. Like a duel with 
submachine guns at two paces."
"These two peoples must have really loved each other," Carpenter said. He turned 
his attention to the biologist. "What's the life situation?" he asked. "I only 
glanced at your report; I got it a couple of hours ago."
"Well," van Zyle said, "there's a variety of invertebrate life in some of the 
larger bodies of water. And, surprisingly, we found quite a few insects. I 
should imagine their eggs are highly cold-resistant and were protected by having 
been frozen into deep ice, maybe hundreds or thousands of years before the 
blast. There is a wide variety of plant life, all deep-rooted perennials. At a 
hasty guess, I'd say that they had spread from no more than five or six places 
on the planet, which escaped the worst of the heat-storms by some fluke. And we 
found one form of mobile land-life—a nasty crawling thing like a ten-centimeter 
leech, in the mud flats around the small sea on the outside hemisphere. It seems 
to be the highest form of life on the planet. Has Ozukami made any progress on 
the first planet since I left?"
"Why, yes," Carpenter said, picking up his glass. "It's really quite 
extraordinary. It's been—what?—four days, and they can already communicate to 
some extent. Seem to be a really intelligent people. Look a lot like 
us—humanoid, I mean—but covered with fur. It was a mining colony from what we've 
called Hetaira. Been stranded there for six hundred years. They've been quite 
clever about surviving under those conditions, but they're slowly dying off. 
Probably lowered reproduction rates due to the natural radioactivity in the 
rocks they're surrounded by."
The Captain paused for another pull at his drink. "They have no real idea of 
what's happened here," he said. "They're out of sight of either planet. All they 
know for sure is that, six hundred years ago, their space-ships stopped coming. 
They surmise that there was an atomic war, and that their people's technological 
base was so knocked out that they could no longer build space-ships. They're 
wondering what's taking the re-building so long."
"How did they react when Ozukami told them?"
"He hasn't told them yet," Carpenter said. "They want to go home. How do you 
tell them that their home-planet is now a sheet of glass? Or that their nearest 
living relative is now a ten-centimeter leech?"
"I certainly don't know," van Zyle said. "I would say that's Zucker's job. He's 
the ship psychologist. Where is he?"
Carpenter indicated the sleeping-shelter behind him with his thumb. "In there," 
he said. "He's been drinking, which he is not used to, so I had to put him to 
bed. He doesn't know, either."