V. R. T.

But don’t think .that I am at all interested in you. You
 have warmed me, and now I will go out again and
 listen to the dark voices.

Karel Capek

It was a brown box, a dispatch box, of decayed dark brown leather with brass reinforced corners. The brass had been painted a brownish green when the box was new; but most of the paint was gone, and the dying sunlight from the window showed dull green tarnish around the bright scars of recent gouges. The slave set this box carefully, almost soundlessly, beside the junior officer’s lamp.
       “Open it,” the officer said. The lock had been broken a long time ago; the box was tied shut with hard-reeved ropes twisted from reclaimed rags.
       The slave—a high-shouldered, sharp-chinned man with a shock of dark hair—looked at the officer and the officer nodded his close-cropped head, his chin moving a sixteenth of an inch. The slave drew the officer’s dagger from the belt over the back of his chair, cut the ropes, kissed the blade reverently and replaced it. When he had gone the officer rubbed his palms on the thighs of his knee-length uniform trousers, then lifted the lid and dumped the contents on to his table.
       Notebooks, spools and spools of tape. Reports, forms, letters. He saw a school composition book of cheap yellow paper, the cover half torn off, picked it up. An unskilled hand had monogramed it: V. R. T. The initials were ornate and very large but somehow wrongly formed, as though a savage had imitated them from letters indicated to him on a sign.

Birds I have seen today. I saw two birds today. One was a skull-shrike, and the other was a bird that the shrike had . . .

The officer tossed the composition book to the back of the table. His eyes, straying, had identified amid the clutter the precise, back-slanted writing favoured by the Civil Service.

SIR: The materials I send you . . .
. . . is my own opinion.
. . . from Earth.

The officer raised his eyebrows slightly, put down the letter, and picked up the composition book again. At the bottom of the cover, in smudged, dark letters, he read: Medallion Supplies, Frenchman’s Landing, Sainte. Anne. Inside the back cover:

       Taking up one of the spools of tape, he looked for a label, but there was none. The labels lay loose among the other materials, robbed by the humidity of their adhesion, though still neatly titled, dated and signed.
       Second Interrogation.
       Fifth Interrogation.
       Seventeenth Interrogation—Third Reel.
       The officer allowed them to sift between his fingers, then chose a spool at random and set it up on his recorder.

A:	Is it going now?
Q:	Yes. Your name, please.
A:	I have already given you my name, it is on all your records.
Q:	You have given us that name a number of times.
A:	Yes.
Q:	Who are you?
A:	I am the prisoner in cell 143.
Q:	Oh, you are a philosopher. We had thought you an anthropologist, and you don’t seem old enough for both.
A:
Q:	I am instructed to familiarize myself with your case. I could have done that without calling you from your cell—you realize that? I am subjecting myself to the danger of typhus and several other diseases for your sake. Do you want to return underground? You seemed to appreciate the cigarette a moment ago. Isn’t there anything else you’d like?
A:	(Eagerly) Another blanket. More paper! More paper, and something to write on. A table.

The officer smiled to himself and stopped the tape. He had enjoyed the eagerness in A’s voice, and he now found pleasure in speculating to himself about the answer A would receive. He rewound a few inches of tape, then touched the PLAY button again.

Q:	Do you want to return underground? You seemed to appreciate the cigarette a moment ago. Isn’t there anything else you’d like?
A:	(Eagerly) Another blanket. More paper! More paper, and something to write on. A table.
Q:	We’ve given you paper, a great deal of it. And look at the use you’ve made of it: filled it with scrawlings. Do you realize that if the records in your case are ever forwarded to higher authority it will be necessary to have them transcribed? That will be weeks of work for somebody.
A:	They could be photocopied.
Q:	Ah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?

The officer touched the volume control, reducing the voices to murmurs, and poked at the litter on his table. An unusual and exceptionally sturdy notebook caught his eye. He picked it up.
       It was perhaps fourteen inches by twelve, an inch thick, bound in stout canvas of a dun shade time and sun had turned to cream at the edges. The pages were heavy and stiff, ruled with faint blue lines, the first page beginning in the middle of a sentence. Looking more carefully, the officer saw that three leaves had been cut from the front of the book, as though with the blade of a razor or a very keen knife. He drew his dagger and tested its edge against the fourth. The dagger was sharp—the slave kept it so—but would not cut as cleanly as the edge someone had employed before him. He read:

. . . a deceptive quality even to daylight, feeding the imagination, so that I sometimes wonder how much of what I see here exists only in my own mind. It gives me an unbalanced feeling, which the too-long days and stretched nights don’t help. I wake up—I did even in Roncevaux—hours before dawn.
       Anyway it’s a cool climate, so the thermometer tells me; but it does not seem cool—the whole effect is of the tropics. The sun, this incredible pink sun, blazes down, all light and no heat, with so little output at the blue end of the spectrum that it leaves the sky behind it nearly black, and this very blackness is—or at least seems to me—tropical; like a sweating African face, or the green-black shadows at noon in a jungle; and the plants, the animals and insects, even this preposterous jerrybuilt city, all contribute to the feeling. It makes me think of the snow langur—the monkey that lives in the icy valleys of the Himalayas; or of those hairy elephants and rhinoceros that during the glaciations held on to the freezing edges of Europe and North America. In the same way, here they had bright-colored birds and wide-leaved, red- and yellow-blossomed plants (as if this were Martinique or Tumaco) in profusion wherever the ground is high enough to free it from the monotonous grasp of the salt reeds of the meadowmeres.
       Mankind collaborates. Our town (as you see, a few days in one of these new-built, falling-down metropolises makes you an old resident, and I was considered an Early Settler before I had transferred the contents of my bags to the splintering dresser in my room) is largely built of logs from the cypress-like trees that dot the lowlands around it and roofed with plastic sheet, corrugated—so that all we need is the throbbing of native drums in the distance. (And wouldn’t it make my job easier to hear a few! Actually some of the earliest explorers farther south are supposed to have reported signal drumming on the standing trunks of hollow trees by the Annese; they are said to have used no drum-sticks, striking the trunk with the open hand as if it were a tom-tom, and like all primitives they would presumably have been communicating by imitating, with the sound of their blows, their own speech—“talking drums.”)

The officer riffled the stiff leaves with his thumb. There were pages more of the same kind of material, and he tossed the notebook aside to take up a portion of a loose sheaf of papers bound at their point of origin (he glanced at the top of the cover letter—(Port-Mimizon) with a flimsy tin clasp which had now fallen off. These were in the neat writing of a professional clerk; the pages were numbered, but he did not trouble himself to find the first of them.

Now that I have paper again it has proved possible, just as I predicted, to decipher the tappings of my fellow prisoners. How? you ask. Very well, I will tell you. Not because I must, but in order that you may admire my intelligence. You should, you know, and I need it.
       By listening to the tapping it was not difficult to separate code groups which, as I realized, each represented a letter. I was greatly helped, I admit, by the knowledge that this code was meant to be understood, not to baffle, and that it must often be employed by uneducated men. By marking tallies I could determine the frequency of use of each group; so much was easy, and anyone could have done as well. But what were the frequencies of the letters? No one carries that information in his head except a cryptographer, and here is where I thought out a solution I flatter myself you would never have arrived at if you had had to sit in this cell, as it seems I must, until the walls crumble away to sand: I analyzed my own conversation. I have always had an excellent memory for what I have heard said, and it is even better for what I have said myself—I can still recall, for example, certain conversations I had with my mother when I was four, and the oddity is that I comprehend now things she said to me which were perfectly opaque at the time, either because I did not know even the simple words she used or because the ideas she expressed, and her emotions, were beyond the apprehension of a child.
       But I was telling you about the frequencies. I talked to myself—like this—sitting here on my mattress; but to prevent my unconscious favoring certain letters I wrote nothing down. Then I printed out the alphabet and went back, in my mind, over all that I had said, spelling the words and putting tallies beneath the letters.
       And now I can put my ear to the sewer pipe that runs down through my cell, and understand.
       At first it was hard, of course. I had to scribble down the taps, then work it out, and the fragment of message I had been able to record often conveyed no meaning: YOU HEARD WHAT THEY . . .
       Often I got less than that. And I wondered why so much of what was being said was in numbers: TWO TWELVE TO THE MOUNTAINS . . . Then I realized that they, we, call ourselves usually by our cell number, which gives the location and is the most important thing, I suppose, about a prisoner anyway.

The page ended. The officer did not look for the next in sequence, but stood up and pushed back his chair. After a moment he stepped through the open doorway; outside there was a faint breeze now, andSainte Anne, high over his head, steeped the world in sad green light; he could see, a mile or more away in the harbor, the masts of the ships. The air held the piercing sweet smell of the night-blooming flowers the previous commandant had ordered planted around the building. Fifty feet away under the shadow of a fever tree the slave squatted with his back to the trunk, sufficiently hidden to support the fiction that he was invisible when he was not wanted, sufficiently close to hear if the officer called or clapped his hands. The officer looked at him significantly and he came running across the dry, green-drenched lawn, bowing. “Cassilla,” the officer said.
       The slave ducked his head. “With the major . . . Perhaps, Mattre, agirlfrom the town—”
       Mechanically, the officer, who was younger than he, struck him, his open left hand smacking the slave’s right cheek. Equally mechanically, the slave dropped to his knees and began to sob. The officer pushed him with his foot until he sprawled on the half-dead grass, then went back into the small room that served him for an office. When he was gone the slave stood, brushed his threadbare clothing, and took up his station beneath the fever tree again. It would be two hours or more before the major was finished with Cassilla.

There was a native race. The stories are too widespread, too circumstantial, too well documented, for the whole thing to be a sort of overgrown new-planet myth. The absence of legitimate artefacts remains to be explained, but there must be some explanation.
       To this indigenous people, humankind and the technological culture must have proved more toxic than to any other aboriginal group in history. From rather ubiquitous if thinly scattered primitives they have become something Jess than memory in a period of not much more than a century—this without any specific catastrophe worse than the destruction of the records of the first French landing parties by the war.
       My problem, then, is to learn all there is to be learned about some very primitive people who have left almost no physical traces at all (as far as anyone knows) and some highly embroidered legends. I would be disheartened if it were not that the parallel with those paleolithic, Caucasoid Pygmies who came to be called the Good People (and who survived, as was eventually shown, in Scandinavia and Eire until the last years of the eighteenth century) were not almost exact.
       How late, then, did the Annese hang on? Though I have been questioning everyone who will stand still for it, and listening to every tale they wanted to tell (thirdhand, n^thhand, I always think I might pick up something, and there’s no use making an enemy of anyone who’might later direct me to better information), I have been especially alert for firsthand, datable accounts. I have everything on tape, but it may be wise to transcribe a few of the more typical, as well as some of the most interesting, here; tapes can be lost or ruined after all. I give all dates by local calendar to avoid confusion.
       March 13. Directed by Mr Judson, the hotelkeeper, and bearing a verbal introduction from him, I was able to talk to Mrs Mary Blount, a woman of eighty who lives with her granddaughter and the granddaughter’s husband on a farm about twenty miles from Frenchman’s Landing. The husband warned me before I was taken in to meet the old lady herself that her mind sometimes wandered, and instanced, to prove his point, that she at times claimed to have been born on Earth, but at others insisted that she had been born aboard one of the colonizing ships. I began the interview by asking her about this; her answer shows, I fear, how little elderly people are listened to in our culture.
Mrs Blount: “Where was I born. On the ship. Yes. I was the first that was born on the ship and the last born on the old world—how d’you like that, young man? Women that was expecting wasn’t to come on board, you see, though lots of them did as it turned out. My Ma, she wanted to go, and she decided not to say anything about her condition. She was a heavy woman, as you may imagine, and I guess I was a small little baby. Yes, they had physical examinations for all that was going, but that had been months and months before, because the blasting-off was delayed, you see. All the women was to wear these coveralls that they called space clothes, just like the men, and Ma felt I was coming and told them she wanted hers loose, and the Devil take style. So they didn’t know. She was having pains, she said, when she come up in the gantry, but the doctor on the ship was one of them and didn’t say nothing to anybody. I was born and he put her and me to sleep the way they did and when we woke up it was twenty-one years afterward. The ship we come on was the nine-eight-six, which was not the first one, but one of the more earlier of them. I’ve heard that before they used to have names for them, which I think would be prettier.
       “Yes, there was still quite a few French left here when we came, most all except the littlest children had their arms or legs gone or was scarred terrible. They knowed they had lost and we knowed we had won, and our men just took land and stock, whatever they wanted, that’s what Ma told me later. I was just small, you know, and didn’t realize nothing. When I was growing up those little French girls that had been too small to fight was growing up too, and weren’t they the cutest things? They got most of the handsome boys, you know, and all the rich ones. You could go to a dance in your prettiest dress, and one of those Frenchies would come in, just in rags you know, but with a ribbon and a flower in her hair, and every boy’s head would turn.
       “Annese? What’s the Annese?
       “Oh, them. We called them the abos or the wild people. They weren’t really people, you know, just animals shaped like people.
       “Of course I’ve seen them. Why when I was a child I used to play with the children, the little ones, you know. Ma didn’t want me to, but when I was out playing alone I’d go out to the back of our pasture and they’d come and play with me. Ma said they’d eat me,” (Laughs) “but I can’t say how they ever tried. Wouldn’t they steal, though! Anything to eat, they were always hungry. They got to taking out of our smokehouse, and one night Pa killed three, right between the smokehouse and the barn, with his gun. One was one I had played with sometimes, and I cried; that’s the way a child is.
       “No, I don’t know where he buried them or if he did; just dragged them out back for the wild animals, I’d suppose.”

A brother officer came in. The officer laid the notebook aside, and as he did so a puff of wind swayed the pages.
       “Feel that,” the brother officer said. “Why can’t we have that during the day when we need it?”
       The officer shrugged. “You’re up late.”
       “Not as late as you are—I’m going to bed now.”
       “You see what I’ve got.” The officer’s lips bent in a small, sour smile. He gestured at the jumble of papers and tapes on the table.
       The brother officer stirred them with one finger. “Political?”
       “Criminal.”
       “Tell them to knock the dust off their garrotte and get yourself some sleep.”
       “I have to find out what it’s all about first. You know the com- mandant.”
       “You’ll be ready for the spade tomorrow.”
       “I’ll sleep late. I’m off anyway.”
       “You always were an owl, weren’t you?”
       The brother officer left, yawning. The officer poured a glass of wine, no cooler now than the room, and began to read again where the wind had left the book.

“I don’t know. Might be fifteen years ago, or it might not. Our years are longer here—did you know that?”
Self: “Yes, you don’t have to explain that.”
Mr D: “Well, those Frenchmen used to have all kinds of stories about them; most of them I never believed.
       “What kinds of stories? Oh, just nonsense. They’re an ignorant people, the French are.”

I had been told that one of the last survivors of the first French settlers had been one Robert Culot, now dead about forty years. I inquired about him and learned that his grandson (also named Robert Culot) sometimes referred to stories he had heard Ms grandfather tell of the early days on Sainte Anne. He (Robert Culot the younger) appears to be about fifty-five (Earth) years of age. He operates a clothing store, the best in Frenchman’s Landing.

M. Culot: “Yes, the old one frequently told tales concerning those you call the Annese, Dr Marsch. He had many stories of them, of all the different sorts.
       “That is correct, he felt them to be of many races. Others, he said, might think them to be all one, but the other knew less than he. He would have said that to the blind, all cats are black. Do you speak French, Doctor? A pity.”
Self: “Can you tell me the approximate date on which your grandfather last saw a living Annese, Monsieur Culot?”
M. C: “A few years before he died. Let me think . . . Yes, three years I think before his death. He was confined to his bed the year following, and his death took him two years after.”
Self: “About forty-three years ago, then?”
M. C: “Ah, you do not believe an old man, do you? That is cruel! These French, you say to yourself, cannot be trusted.”
Self: “On the contrary, I am intrigued.”
M. C: “My grandfather had attended the funeral of a friend, and it had depressed his spirit; so he went for a walk. When he had been but a little younger he had walked a great deal, you comprehend. Then only a few years before the last illness he ceased to do so. But now because his heart troubled him he walked again. I was playing draughts with my father, his son, and was present when he returned.
       “What did he say his indigène looked like? Ah!” (Laughs) “I had hoped you would not ask that. You see, my father laughed at him as well, and that made him angry. For that to my father he spoke his bad English much, to make my father angry in return; and he said my father sat all day and consequently saw nothing. My father had both his legs gone in the war; it is fortunate for me, is it not, that he did not lose certain other things as well?
       “I asked then that question you have asked me—how did it appear? I will tell you what it was he responded, but it will cause you to distrust him.”
Self: “Do you think he may have been simply teasing you, or your father?”
M. C: “He was a most honest old man. He would not tell lies to anyone, you understand. But he might—speak the truth in such a way as to make it sound impertinent. I asked him how the creature appeared, and he said sometimes likes a man, but sometimes like the post of a fence.”
Self: “A fence post?”
M. C: “Or a dead tree—something of the sort. Let me recollect myself. It may have been that he said: ‘Sometimes like a man, sometimes like old wood.’ No, I cannot really tell what he meant by that.”

M. Culot directed me to several other members of the French community around Frenchman’s Landing who he said might be willing to cooperate with me. He also mentioned a Dr Hagsmith, a medical doctor, who he understood has made some effort to collect traditions regarding the Annese. I was able to arrange an interview with Dr Hagsmith the same evening. He is English-speaking, and told me that he considered himself an amateur folklorist.

Dr Hagsmith: “You and I, sir, we take opposite tacks. I don’t mean to disparage what you’re doing—but it isn’t what I’m doing. You wish to find what is true, and I’m afraid you’re going to find damned little; I want what is false, and I’ve found plenty. You see?”
Self: “You mean that your collection includes a great many accounts of the Annese?”
Dr H: “Thousands, sir. I came here as a young physician, twenty years ago. In those days we thought that by now this would be a great city; don’t ask me why we thought it, but we did. We planned everything: museums, parks, a stadium. We felt we had everything we needed, and so we did—except for people and money. We still have everything.” (Laughs)
       “I started writing down the stories in the course of my practice. I realized, you see, that these legends about the abos had an effect on people’s minds, and their minds affect their diseases.”
Self: “But you have never seen an aborigine yourself?”
Dr H: (Laughs) “No, sir. But I am probably the greatest living expert on them you’ll find. Ask me anything and I can quote chapter and verse.”
Self: “Very well. Do the Annese still exist?”
Dr H: “As much as they ever did.” (Laughs)
Self: “Then where do they live?”
Dr H: “What locality, you mean? Those that live in the back of beyond pursue a wandering existence. Those living about farms generally have their habitations in the farthest parts, but occasionally one or two may take up residence in a cowshed, or under the eaves of the house.”
Self: “Wouldn’t they be seen?”
Dr H: “Oh, it’s quite Unlucky to see one. Generally, though, they take the form of some homey household utensil if anyone looks—become a bundle of hay, or whatever.”
Self: “People really believe they can do that sort of thing?”
Dr H: “Don’t you? If they can’t, where’d they all go?” (Laughs)
Self: “You said most Annese live ‘in the back of beyond’?”
Dr H: “The wilderness, the wastelands. It’s a term we have here.”
Self: “And what do they look like?”
Dr H: “Like people; but the color of stones, with great shocks of wild hair—except for the ones that don’t have any. Some are taller than you or I, and very strong; some are smaller than children. Don’t ask me how small children are.”
Self: “Supposing for the moment that the Annese are real, if I were to go looking for them where would you advise me to look?”
Dr H: “You could go to the wharves.” (Laughs) “Or the sacred places, I suppose. Ah, that got you! You didn’t know they had sacred places, did you? They have several, sir, and a well-organized and very confusing religion too. When I first came I used to hear a great deal about a high priest as well—or a great chief, whichever you wanted to call him. At any rate, a more than usually magical abo. The railway had just been built then, and of course the game hereabouts wasn’t accustomed to it and a good many animals were killed. This fellow would be seen walking up and down the right-of-way at night, restoring them to life, so people called him Cinderwalker, and various names of that sort. No, not Cinderella, I know what you’re thinking—Cinderwalker. Once a cattle-drover’s woman had her arm cut off by the train—I suspect she was drunk, and lying on the tracks—and the drover rushed her to the infirmary here. Well, sir, they got a frozen arm out of the organ bank in the regular way and grafted it on to her; but Cinderwalker found the one she had lost and grew a new woman on that so that the drover had two wives. Naturally the second one, the one Cinderwalker made, was abo except for the one arm, so she used to steal with the abo part, and then the human part would put back what she’d taken. Well, finally, the Dominicans here got on the poor drover for having too many wives, and he decided that the one Cinderwalker made would have to go—not having two human arms she couldn’t chop firewood properly, you see . . .
       “Am I surprising you, sir? No, not being really human, you see, the abos can’t handle any sort of tool. They can pick them up and carry them about, but they can’t accomplish anything with them. They’re magical animals, if you like, but only animals. Really,” (Laughs) “for an anthropologist you’re hellishly ignorant of your subject. That’s the test the French are supposed to have applied at the ford called Running Blood—stopped every man that passed and made him dig with a shovel . . .”

A cat leaped on to the splintering sill of the officer’s window. It was a large black torn with only one eye and double claws—the cemetery cat from Vienne. The officer cursed it, and when it did not go away, began reaching, very slowly and carefully so as not to disturb it, toward his pistol; but the instant the fingers touched the butt the cat hissed like a hot iron dropped into oil and leaped away.

M. d’F: “Sacred places, Monsieur? Yes, they had many sacred places, so it was said—anywhere a tree grew in the mountains was sacred to them, for example; especially if water stood at the roots, as it usually did. Where the river here—the Tempus—enters the sea, that was a very sacred spot to them.”
Self: “Where were some others?”
M. d’F: “There was a cave, far up the river, in the cliffs. I don’t know that anyone has ever seen that. And close to the mouth of the river, a ring of great trees. Most of them have been cut now, but the stumps are there still; Trenchard, the beggar who pretends to be one of them, will show you the place for a few sous, or have his son do it.
       “Did you not know of him, Monsieur? Oh, yes, near to the docks. Everyone here knows him; he is a fraud, you comprehend, a joke. His hands” (Holds up his own hands) “are crippled by the arthritis so that he cannot work, and so he says he is an abo, and acts like a madman. It is thought to bring luck to give him a few coins.
       “No, he is a man like you and me. He is married to a poor wretched woman one hardly ever sees, and they have a son of fifteen or so.”

The officer turned twenty or thirty pages and began to read again where an alteration in the format of the entries indicated some change in the nature of the material recorded.

          One heavy rifle (.35 cal.) for defense against large animals. To be carried by myself. 200 cartridges.
          One light rifle (.225 cal.) for securing small game for the pot. To be carried by the boy. 500 cartridges.
          One shotgun (20 gauge) for small game and birds. Packed on the lead mule. 160 shells.
          One case (200 boxes in all) of matches.
          Forty lb. of flour.
          Yeast.
          Two lb. tea (local).
          Ten lb. sugar.
          Ten lb. salt.
          Kitchen gear.
          Multivitamins.
          Aid kit.
          Wall tent, with repair kit for, and extra pegs and rope.
          Two sleeping bags.
          Utility tarp to use as ground cloth.
          Spare pair of boots (for myself).
          Extra clothing, shave kit, etc.
          Box of books—some I brought from Earth, most bought in Roncevaux.
          Tape recorder, three cameras, film, and this notebook. Pens.
          Only two canteens, but we will be traveling with the Tempus all the way.

And that’s everything I can think of. No doubt there are a great many things we’ll wish we had brought, and next time I’ll know better, but there has to be a first time. When I was a student at Columbia I used to read the accounts of the pith helmet and puttee expeditions of the Victorians, when they used hundreds of bearers and diggers and what not, and, filled with Gutenberg courage, dream of leading such a thing myself. So here I am, sleeping under a roof for the last time, and tomorrow we set out: three mules, the boy (in rags), and me (in my blue slacks and the sport shirt from Culot’s). At least I won’t have to worry about a mutiny among my subordinates, unless a mule kicks me or the boy cuts my throat while I sleep!

April 6. Our first night out. I am sitting in front of our little fire, on which the boy cooked our dinner. He is a capital camp cook (delightful discovery!) though very sparing of firewood, as I gather from my reading that frontiersmen always are. I would find him quite likeable if it were not for something of a sly look in those big eyes.
       Now he is already asleep, but I intend to sit up and detail this first day’s leg of our trip and watch alien stars. He has been pointing out the constellations to me, and I think I may already be more familiar with Sainte Anne’s night sky than I ever was with Earth’s—which wouldn’t take much doing. At any rate the boy claims to know all the Annese names, and though there’s a good chance they’re just inventions of his father’s, I shall record them here anyway and hope for independent confirmation later. There is Thousand Feelers and The Fish (a Nebula which seems to be trying to grasp a single bright star), Burning Hair Woman, The Fighting Lizard (with Sol one of the stars in The Lizard’s tail), The Shadow Children. I can’t find The Shadow Children now, but I’m sure the boy pointed them out to me—two pairs of bright eyes. There were others but I’ve forgotten them already; I’m going to have to start recording these conversations with the boy.
       But to begin at the beginning. We started early this morning, the boy helping me load the mules, or rather, me helping him. He is very clever with rop.es, and ties large, complicated-looking knots that seem to hold securely until he wants them loose, then fall apart under his hand. His father came down to see us off (which surprised me) and treated me to a great deal of untenanted rhetoric designed to pry me loose from a little more money to compensate him for the boy’s absence. Eventually, I gave him a bit for luck.
       The mules led well, and all seem so far to be good sturdy animals and no more vicious than could be reasonably expected. They are bigger than horses and much stronger, with heads longer than my arm and great square yellow teeth that show when they skin back then- thick lips to eat the thorn beside the road. Two grays and one black. The boy hobbled them when we stopped, and I can hear them all around the camp now, and occasionally see the smoke of their breath hanging like a pale spirit in the cold air.

April 7. Yesterday I thought we were well begun on our trip, but today I realize that we were merely trekking through the settled—or at least half-settled—farmland around Frenchman’s Landing, and might, almost certainly, if we had climbed one of the little hills near last night’s campsite, have seen the lights of a farmhouse. This morning we even passed through a tiny settlement the boy called “Frogtown”, a name I suppose would not much recommend itself to the inhabitants. I asked if he weren’t ashamed to use a name like that when he is of French descent himself, and he told me with great seriousness that, no, he was half of the blood of the Free People (his name for the Annese) and that it was with them that his loyalties lie. He believes his father, in short, though he is perhaps the only person in the world who does. Yet he is a bright boy; such is the power of parental teaching.
       Once we were beyond “Frogtown“, the road simply disappeared. We had come to the edge of “the back of beyond”, and the mules sensed it at once, becoming less obstinate and more skittish, in other words less like people and more like animals. We are cutting west as well as north, I should explain, on a long diagonal toward the river instead of directly toward it. In this way we hope to avoid most of the meadowmeres (at the hands of the old beggar I have already seen enough of them not to want to try and walk across them!), and strike the little streams that feed it often enough to satisfy our needs for water. In any event the Tempus, or so I am told, is too brackish to drink for a long way back from the coast.
       I should have mentioned yesterday (but forgot) that when we set up the tent I discovered we had not brought an ax, or any other sort of implement with which to drive the tent pegs. I chided the boy about this a little, but he only laughed and soon set the matter straight by pounding them in with a stone. He finds plenty of dead wood for the fire and snaps it over his knee with surprising strength. To build the fire he makes a sort of little house or bower of dead twigs, which he fills with dry grass and leaves, doing the whole construction in less time than it has already taken me to write this. He always (that is, last night and tonight) asks me to light it for him, apparently considering this a superior function to be performed only by no less a person than the leader of the expedition. I suppose there is something sacred about a campfire, if God’s writ runs so far from Sol; but, perhaps so as not to overwhelm us with the holy mystery of smoke, he piously keeps ours so small that I am amazed that he is able to cook over it. Even so, he burns his fingers pretty often, I notice, and each time boylike thrusts them into his mouth and hops around the fire, muttering to himself.

April 8. The boy is the worst shot I have ever seen; it is almost the only thing I have found thus far he doesn’t do well. I have been having him carry the light rifle, but after watching him trying to shoot for three days I have taken it away from him—his whole idea seems to be to point the gun in the general direction of whatever animal I indicate to him, shut his eyes, and pull the trigger. I honestly think that in his heart of hearts (if the boy has such a thing) he believes it is the noise that kills. Such game as we’ve gotten so far I have shot myself, either snatching the light rifle away from him after he had fired once and making a second (running) shot before whatever he had missed was out of sight, or by using the heavy rifle, which is a waste of expensive ammunition as well as of meat.
       On the other hand, the boy (I don’t really know why I call him that, except that his father did; he is nearly a man, and now that I come to think of it, only eight or nine years younger, physiologically at least, than I am) has the best eye for wounded game I have ever seen He ij. better than a good dog, both at locating and retrieving—which is saying a good deal—and has traveled often in the “back of beyond”, though he’s never been as far upriver as the (I hope not mystical) sacred cave we’re looking for. At any rate he seems to have lived in the wilderness with his mother for long periods—I get the impression she didn’t care much for the kind of life her husband made for them in Frenchman’s Landing, for which I can’t say I much blame her. However that may be, with the boy’s nose for blood and my shooting, I don’t think we’ll run short of meat.
       What else today? Oh yes, the cat. One had been following us, apparently at least since we passed through Frogtown. I caught a glimpse of it today about noon, and (the sun-shimmer reinforcing the deceptive and fantastic quality extension has in the green landscape under this black-sky) thought for an instant that it was a tire-tiger. My bullet went high, naturally, and when I saw it kick up dust, everything snapped back into perspective: my “scrub trees” were bushes, and the distance which I had thought at least 250 yards away was less than a third of that—making my “tire-tiger” only a big domestic cat of Terrestrial stock, no doubt a stray from some farm. It seems to follow us quite deliberately, staying, now, about a quarter mile behind us. This afternoon I took a couple of rather long-ranged (200 to 300 yards) shots at it, which upset the boy so much that I regretted my felicidal intentions and told him that if he could get the animal into camp he could keep it as a pet. I suppose it is following us for the scraps of food we leave behind. There will be plenty for it tomorrow—I got a dew-deer today.

April 10. Two days of uninterrupted hiking during which we have seen a good deal of game but no sign of any still-extant Annese. We have crossed three small streams which the boy calls the Yellow Snake, the Girl Running, and the End-of-Days; but which my map tells me are Fifty Mile Creek, the Johnson River, and the Rougette. No trouble with any of them—the first two we are able to ford where we struck them, the Rougette (which painted my boots and the legs of the boy and the mules), a few hundred yards upstream. I expect to see the Tempus (which the boy calls simply “The River”) tomorrow, and the boy assures me that the Annese sacred cave must lie a good deal farther up; he says, indeed, that the banks we have bypassed by our route are mud, not stone, and could not hold a cave.
       It finally occurred to me that if the boy has lived (as he says) a good part of his life in the wild Country, he may be—despite the corrupting influence of his father and his own consequent belief that he is himself partly Annese—an excellent source of information. I have the interview on tape, but as I have tried to make it a practice to do with the more interesting material, I transcribe it here.

Self: “You’ve told me that you and your mother have often lived, you say in spring and summer particularly, “in back of beyond”—sometimes for months at a stretch. I have been informed that fifty or more years ago Annese children often came to play with human children on the remote stock farms. Did anything of that sort ever happen to you? Did you ever see anyone out here besides your mother and yourself? After all, we’ve seen no one in four days.”
V. R. T.: “We saw a great many people almost every day, many animals and birds, trees that were alive, just as you and I have traveling, as you say for these four days—though this is still not the back of beyond where one sees gods come floating down the river on logs, and trees gone traveling, the gods with large and small heads, and blossoms of the water hydrangea in their hair; or the elk-men whose heads and hair and beards and arms and bodies were like those of men, whose legs were the bodies of red elk so that they needed to mate with the cow-women once as beasts and once as men do, and fought shouting all spring on the hillsides, then when the black mereskimmers flew back from the south were at once friends again and went away with their arms around each other and stole- eggs from the pine-thrashers or kicked stones at me; and The Shadow Children of course came to steal by evening, riding up in the bubbles and the foam from the springs—then my mother would not let me go out from beneath her hair—this was when I was very small—after the sun set, but when I was larger I would go out and shout and make them run!—they believe—they always believe—that they’ll get all around, and then they’ll all run in at once, biting; but if you turn quickly and shout, they never do, and there are never as many of them as they think, because some are only in the minds of the others so that at the time to fight they fade back into each other and become one lonely.”
Self: “Why haven’t you and I seen any of these strange things?”
V. R. T.: “I have.”
Self: “What have you seen—I mean, while you’ve been with me.”
V. R. T.: “Birds and animals and trees living, and The Shadow Children.”
Self: “You mean the stars. If you see anything extraordinary you’ll tell me, won’t you?”
V. R. T.: (Nods)
Self: “You’re an unusual boy. Do you ever go to school when you’re with your father in Frenchman’s Landing?”
V. R. T.: “Sometimes.”
Self: “You’re almost a man now. Have you given any thought to what you’re going to do in a few years?”
V. R. T.: (Weeps)

There was no reply to that last question; the boy broke into tears, embarrassing me so acutely that after putting my arm around his shoulders for a moment, I had to walk away from the fire, leaving him there sobbing for half an hour or more while I blundered around in the brush where huge worms, luminous but of the livid color of a dead man’s lips, writhe underfoot at night. I confess it was a miserably stupid question; what is he going to do, a beggar’s son, no better than half-educated? He does read well—he’s borrowed some of my anthropology texts, and I’ve asked him questions and gotten better answers than I would have expected from the average university student; but his hand-writing is miserable, as I’ve seen from an old school notebook (one of his very few pieces of personal baggage).

April 11. An eventful day. Let me see if I can cure my habit of skipping back and forth and give everything of interest in the order in which it occurred. When I came back into camp last night (I see that at the close of yesterday’s entry I left myself blundering about in bushes), the boy was asleep in his bag. I put more wood on the fire and played back the.tape and wrote the stuff on the last page, then turned in. About an hour before dawn we were both roused by a commotion among the mules and went running out to see what the trouble was, myself with a flashlight and the heavy rifle, the boy with two burning sticks from the fire. Didn’t see anything, but smelled a stink like rotten meat and heard some big animal, which I really don’t believe could have been one of the mules, making off. The mules, when we found them, were covered with sweat, and one had broken its hobble—fortunately it didn’t go far, and as soon as it got light the boy was able to catch it, though it took him the best part of an hour—and the two that were still with us seemed very glad to claim the protection due domestic animals.
       By the time we had thrashed around long enough to decide there was nothing to find, further sleep was out of the question. We struck the tent, loaded the mules, and then at my insistence spent the first hour in backtracking our path of the day before to see if we could turn up the spoor of any large predatory animal. We saw the cat (which growing bolder now that I’ve stopped shooting at it) and some tracks of what the boy calls a fire-fox and which, by comparing his description with my Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne, I have decided is most probably Hutchesson’s fennec, a fox or coyote-like creature with immense ears and a liking for poultry and carrion.
       After this little interlude of backtracking we made good progress, and about an hour before noon I made the best shot of the trip to date, dropping a huge brute—not described in the Field Guide—similar to the carabao of Asian Earth; this with a single brain shot from the heavy rifle. I paced the distance when the animal was down and found it to be a full three hundred yards!
       Naturally I was proud as hell and carefully examined the result of my shot, which had struck the big fellow just in back of the right ear. Even there the skull was so massive that the bullet had failed to penetrate completely; so that the animal had probably been alive for a good part of the time while I was pacing off the distance to it; there seemed to have been a heavy flow of lachrymal fluid that left broad wet streaks in the dust beneath each eye. I lifted one of the eyelids with my fingers after I had looked at the wound and noticed that the eyes were double-pupiled, like those of certain Terrestrial fish; the lower segments of one eye moved slightly when I touched it with my finger, indicating that the animal may have been hanging on a bit even then. The double pupils don’t seem characteristic of most life here; so I suppose they must be an adaptation induced by the creature’s largely aquatic habits.
       I longed to have the head mounted, but that was out of the question; as it was the boy was almost in tears (his own eyes, which are large, are a startling green), imagining that I would want to load the entire carcass, which must have weighed a good fifteen pounds, on to the mules, and assuring me that they could not be expected to carry so much. Eventually I was able to convince him that I intended to leave behind the entrails, the head (though how I regretted those horns!) and the hide and hoofs, as well as the ribs and, in fact, all but the choicest meat. The mules, even so, appreciated neither the added weight nor the smell of blood, and we had more difficulty with them than I had anticipated.
       About an hour after we got them going again, we reached the bank of the Tempus. It is a very different river from the one I saw when the boy’s father showed me the Annese“temple”. There it was nearly a mile wide, brackish, and had hardly a trace of current, the mouth itself being not a single river but a serpent cluster of dull streams meandering through a choking delta of mud and reeds. Here everything is changed: the water has hardly any yellow coloration, and flows fast enough to whisk a stick out of sight in a few seconds.
       The meadowmeres are entirely behind us now, and this new, swift, clear Tempus runs among rolling hills covered with emerald grass and dotted with trees and thickets. I see now that my original plan of ascending the river by boat was—as my acquaintances in Frenchman’s Landing warned me—completely impractical, no matter how convenient it would have been to search for riverbank caves that way. Not only is the water so swift even here that we would be spending most of our fuel just to fight the current, but the river shows every sign of falls and rapids farther up in the mountains. A hovercraft would perhaps be ideal, but with Sainte Anne’s small industrial capacity there are probably not more than two dozen on the whole planet, and they are (typically) the sacred prerogative of the military.
       But I will not complain. In a hovercraft we might already have found the cave, but with what chance of making contact with any Annese who may yet survive? With our small and I hope not frightening party moving slowly and living off the country, we can hope for contact, if any Annese remain.
       Besides, let me confess now, I enjoy it. When we had struck the river and gone a mile or so upstream the boy became very excited and told me we had reached an important point which he had often visited with his mother. It seemed to me to be in no way unusual—a slight bend with a few (very large) overhanging trees and a somewhat oddly shaped stone—but he insisted that it was a beautiful and special locality, showing me how comfortable the stone was, on which one could sit or lie in various positions, how the trees shaded the sun and would give protection from rain and even, covered with snow, form a sort of hut in winter. There were deep pools at the foot of the stone that always had fish—we could find mussels and edible snails (that French mother!)—along the bank here, and in short it was a veritable garden spot. (After listening to him talk in this way for a few minutes I realized that he looks upon the outdoors—at least on certain special areas or parts of it such as this—in the way that most people are accustomed to looking at buildings or rooms, which is an odd idea.) I had been wanting to be alone for a few minutes anyway; so I decided to pamper his harmless enthusiasm, and asked him to take the mules on ahead while I remained behind to contemplate the beauty of the wonderful place to which he had introduced me. He was delighted, and in a few minutes I was more utterly alone than it is ever given most of us born on Earth to be, with only the wind and the sun and the sighing of the great trees that trailed their roots in the murmuring water before me.
       Alone I should say except for our camp-follower cat, who came meowing up and had to be chased after the mules with rocks. It gave me time to think—about that carabao-like animal I got this morning (which would surely be a record trophy of some sort if only I had been able to take the skull back to civilization) and about this entire trip. Not that I am not as eager as I was before to show that the Annese are not yet extinct, and to record as much as I can of their customs and mode of thought before they fade from humanity’s knowledge altogether. I am, but for new reasons. When I landed here on Sainte Anne, all I really cared about was acquiring by field work enough reputation to get a decent faculty post on Earth. Now I know that field work can be, and should be, an end in itself; that those highly distinguished old professors I used to envy for their reputations were not seeking (as I thought) to go back into the field—even if it were just to work over poor old played-out Melanesia once more—to enhance their academic dignity; but rather that their standing was a tool they employed to secure backing for their field work. And they were right! Each of us finds his way, his place; we rattle around the universe until everything fits; this is life; this is science, or something better than science.

By the time I caught up to the boy he had already made camp (early), and I think was rather concerned about me. Tonight he has been trying to dry a part of the carabao meat over the fire to preserve it, though I have told him we can simply throw aside any that spoils before we can eat it.
       Forgot to mention that I got two deer while I was catching up to the boy.

The officer laid the canvas-bound notebook aside, and after a moment, rose and stretched. A bird had blundered into the room and he now noticed it for the first time, perched silent and bewildered on the frame of a picture high on the wall opposite the door. He shouted at it, and when it did not move, tried to strike it with a broom the slave had left standing in a corner. It flew, but instead of going out the open door it struck the lintel, fell half-stunned to the floor, then flopped past his face to resume its perch on the picture frame, brushing his cheek with the dark feathers of one wing as it passed. The officer cursed and sat down, picking up a handful of loose pages, these at least decently transcribed in good clerical script.

I should have an attorney—that much is clear. I mean, in addition to the one the court will assign. I feel certain the university will advance me funds to fee a private attorney, and I have asked my court-appointed one to contact the university and arrange the thing for me. That is, I will ask him.
       It seems to me that the following questions are involved in my own case. I will write them down here and discuss the possible interpretations, and this will prepare me for the trial. First, then, is the question of the concept of guilt which is central to any criminal proceeding. Is the concept broadly valid?
       If it is not broadly valid, then there will exist certain classes of persons who cannot under any circumstance be punished by reason of guilt, and a little reflection convinces me that such classes do in fact exist, viz.: children, the weak of intellect, the very rich, the disturbed of mind, animals, the near relations of persons in high positions, the persons themselves, and so on.
       The next question, then, Your Honor, is whether I, the prisoner at the bar, do not in fact belong to one (or more) of the exempted classes. It is clear to me that I do in fact belong to all the classes I have designated above, but I will here—in order to conserve the court’s valuable time—concentrate on two: I am exempt by reason of being a child and by reason of being an animal; that is to say, by reason of belonging to the first and fifth of the classes to which you have just consented.
       This leads us to the third question: what is meant (in terms of the exempted classes already outlined) by the designation “child”. Clearly we must rule out in the beginning any question of mere age. Nothing could be more absurd than to suppose a defendant innocent though he committed some abominable act on Tuesday, but guilty were he to have committed it Wednesday. No, no, Your Honor, though I myself am only a few years past twenty, I confess that to think in that way is to invite a carnival of death just prior to each young man’s or woman’s reaching whatever age you determine shall be deciding. Nor can childhood be based on internal and subjective evidence, since it would be impractical to determine whether such interior disposition existed or not. No, the fact of childhood must be established by the way society itself has treated the individual. In my own case:
       I own no real property, and have never owned such property.
       I have never taken part in, or even witnessed, a legally binding contract.
       I have never been called upon to give evidence in a court of law.
       I have never entered into marriage or adopted another child.
       I have never held a remunerative position on the basis of work performed. (You object, Your Honor? You cite my own testimony with regard to my connection with Columbia against me? The prosecution cites it? No, Your Honor, it is a clever sophistry, but invalid; my tutorial position at Columbia was a manifest sinecure given me to enable me to complete my graduate work, and for my expedition to Sainte Anne I received my expenses only. You see? And who would know better than I?)
       Then surely, Your Honor, it is clear from all these points—and I could make a thousand more—that at the time of the crime, if in fact I am charged with any crime, which I doubt, I was a child; and by these proofs I am a child still, for I have still not done any of these things.
       As for my being an animal—I mean an animal as opposed to being a human being, an animal as a mere beast—the proof is so simple that you may laugh at me for troubling to present it. Are those who are permitted to run free in our society the animals? Or are they human beings? Who are confined in stalls, sties, kennels, and hutches? Which of the two great divisions sleeps upon bedding thrown upon the floor? Which upon a bed standing above the floor? Which is given bathing facilities and a heated sleeping compartment, and which is expected to warm itself with its own breath and clean itself by licking?
       I beg your pardon, Your Honor; I did not intend to offend the court.

Forty-seven has been knocking on the pipe—shall I tell you what he said? Very well.

ONE FORTY-THREE, ONE FORTY-THREE, IS THAT YOU? ARE YOU LISTENING? WHO IS THE NEW MAN ON YOUR FLOOR?
       I have filled in the punctuation myself. Forty-seven does not use punctuation, and if I have misrepresented his intention, I hope he will forgive me.
       I sent: WHAT NEW? It would be very useful to have a stone—or a metal object as Forty-seven does (he says he uses the frames of his glasses) with which to tap the pipe. It hurts my knuckles.
       I SAW HIM THIS MORNING THROUGH MY DOOR. OLD, LONG WHITE HAIR. DOWNSTAIRS TO YOU. WHICH CELL?
       DON“T KNOW.

If I had a stone I could rap on the walls of my cell loudly enough for those on either side to hear. As it is, the prisoner to my left raps to me—I do not know with what, but it makes every sort of strange noise, not just a rapping or ticking—but does not know the code. The wall on my right is silent; possibly there is no one there, or, like me, he may have nothing with which to speak.
       Shall I tell you how I was arrested? I was very tired. I had been to the Cave Canem, and as a result was up very late—it was nearly four. At noon I had an appointment with the president, and I felt quite certain I would be officially placed at the head of a department, and on very favorable terms. I intended to go to bed, and left a note for Madame Duclose, the woman at whose house I was lodging, to wake me at ten.

Forty-seven sends: ONE FORTY-THREE, ARE YOU CRIMINAL OR POLITICAL?
       POLITICAL. (I wish to hear what he will say.)
       WHICH SIDE?
       YOU?
       POLITICAL.
       WHICH SIDE?
       ONE FORTY-THREE, THIS IS RIDICULOUS. ARE YOU AFRAID TO ANSWER MY QUESTION? WHAT MORE CAN THEY DO TO YOU? YOU ARE ALREADY HERE.
       I rap: WHY SHOULD I TRUST YOU IF YOU DO NOT TRUST ME? YOU BEGAN. (Hurting my knuckles.)
       OF THE FIFTH OF SEPTEMBER.
       WHEN I GET ROCK. HAND HURTS.
       COWARD! (So sends Forty-seven, very loudly. He will break his glasses.)

Where was I? Yes, my arrest. The whole house was quiet—I thought this was only because of the lateness of the hour, but I now realize that most of them must have been awake, knowing that they were waiting in my room for me, lying in their beds hardly daring to breathe while they waited for the shots or screams, Madame Duclose, particularly, must have been concerned for the large, gilt-framed mirror in my room, which she had cautioned me about repeatedly. (Mirrors, I have found—I mean good ones of silvered glass, not polished bits of metal—are quite expensive in Port-Mimizon.) And thus there was no snoring, no one stumbling down the corridor to the lavatory, no muffled sighs of passion from Mlle Etienne’s room while she entertained herself with the fruits of imagination and a tallow candle.
       I did not notice. I scrawled my note (others think my hand very bad, but I do not think so; when I receive my appointment I will—if I have to teach classes at all—have my students write on the chalkboard for me, or distribute notes for my classes already printed in purple ink on yellow paper) for Mme Duclose and went up, as I thought, to bed.
       They were quite confident. They had a light burning in my room, and I saw the stripe of radiance at the bottom of my door. Surely if I had in fact committed some crime I would have turned and fled on tiptoe when I saw that light. As it was, I thought only that there had been some letter or message for me—perhaps from the president of the university, or possibly from the brothelkeeper at the Cave Canem who had earlier that evening asked my help in dealing with his “son”; and I decided that if it were he, I would not answer until the evening following; I was very tired and had drunk enough brandy to feel let down now when it was flickering out, and I was conscious of the inefficiency of my motions as I got out my key and then discovered that my door was not locked.
       There were three of them, all seated, all waiting for me. Two were uniformed; the third wore a dark suit which had once been good but was now worn and stained with food grease and the oil from lamps and, moreover, was a little too small for him, so that he had the appearance of the valet of a miser. He sat in my best chair, the chair with the needlepoint seat, with one arm hanging quite carelessly over the back of it, and the lamp with the globe painted with roses and the fringed shade at his elbow as though he had been reading. Mme Duclose’s mirror was behind him, and I could see that his hair was cut short and that he had a scarred head, as though he had been tortured or had had an operation on his brain or had fought with someone armed with some tearing weapon. Over his shoulder I could see myself in the tall hat I had bought here in Port-Mimizon after landing, and my second best cape and my stupid, surprised face.
       One of the uniformed men got up and shut the door behind me, throwing the night bolt. He wore a gray jacket and gray trousers and a peaked cap, and around his waist a broad brown pistol belt with a very large, old-fashioned looking revolver in a holster. When he sat again, I noticed that his shoes were ordinary workmen’s shoes, not of much quality and already quite worn. The second uniformed man said, “You may hang up your hat and coat, if you like.”
       I said, “Of course,” hanging them, as I usually did, on the hooks on the back of the door.
       “It will be necessary for us to search your person.” (This was still the second uniformed man, who wore a short-sleeved green jacket with many pockets and loose green trousers with straps about the ankles, as though he were intended to ride a bicycle as part of his duties.) “We will do this in either of two ways, depending on your own preference. You may, if you like, disrobe; we will then search your clothing and allow you to dress yourself again—however, you must disrobe before us so that you have no opportunity to secrete anything you may have on your person. Or we will search you here and now, as you are. Which do you prefer?”
       I asked if I were under arrest and if they were the police. The man in the needlepoint chair answered, “No, Professor, certainly not.”
       “I am not a professor, at least, not at present as far as I know. If I am not under arrest, why am I being searched? What am I supposed to have done?”
       The man who had shut the door said, “We’re going to search you to see if there’s any reason to arrest you,” and looked at the man in the black suit for confirmation. The other uniformed man said: “You must choose. How will you be searched?”
       “And if I will not submit to being searched?”
       The man in black said: “Then we will have to take you to the citadel. They will search you there.”
       “You mean that you will arrest me?”
       “Monsieur . . .”
       “I am not French. I am from North America, on Earth.”
       “Professor, I urge you—as a friend—not to force us to arrest you. It is a serious matter here, to have been arrested; but it is possible to be searched to be questioned, to be—as it may be—even held for a time—”
       “Perhaps even to be tried and executed,” the man in the green jacket finished for him.
       “—without having been arrested. Do not, I beg you, force us to arrest you.”
       “But I must be searched.”
       “Yes,” said both the uniformed men.
       “Then I prefer to be searched as I am, without undressing.”
       The two uniformed men looked at one another as though this were significant. The man in black looked bored and picked up the book he had been reading, which I saw was one of my own—A Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne.
       The man with the pistol belt came over, half-apologetically, to search me, and I noticed for the first time that his uniform was that of the City Transit Authority. I said: “You’re a horsecar driver, aren’t you? Why are you carrying that gun?”
       The man in black said: “Because it is his duty to carry it. I might ask why you yourself are armed.”
       “I’m not.”
       “On the contrary, I have just been examining this book of yours—there are tables of figures penciled on the flyleaves in the back, you see? Can you tell me what they are?”
       “They were left there by some former owner,” I told him, “and I have no idea what they are. Are you accusing me of being some sort of spy? If you’ll look at them you’ll see they’re nearly as old as the book and badly faded.”
       “They are interesting figures; pairs of numbers of which the first is given in yards and the second in inches.”
       “I’ve seen them,” I said. The man in the City Transit uniform was patting my pocjcets; whenever he found anything—my watch, my money, my pocket notebook—he handed it with an obsequious little gesture to the man in black.
       “I am of the mathematical turn of mind.”
       “How fortunate for you.”
       “I have analyzed these figures—they approximate quite well the conic section called a parabola.”
       “That means nothing to me. As an anthropologist I am more often concerned with the normal distribution curve.”
       “How fortunate for you,” the man in black said, repaying me for my sarcasm of a moment before. He motioned to the two uniformed men, who came to him. For a moment the three whispered together, and I noticed how similar their faces were, all three with pointed chins, black brows and narrow eyes, so that they might have been brothers, the man in black the eldest and probably the cleverest as well, the City Transit man the least imaginative, but all three of a family.
       “What are you talking about?” I said.
       “We were speaking of your case,” the man in black said. The City Transit man left the room, shutting the door behind him.
       “And what were you saying?”
       “That you are ignorant of the law here. That you should have an attorney.”
       “That’s probably true, but I don’t believe you were saying that.”
       “You see? An attorney would advise you against contradicting us in that tone.”
       “Listen, are you from the police? Or the prosecutor’s office?”
       The man in black laughed. “No, not at all. I am a civil engineer from the department of public works. My friend here,” he indicated the man in green, “is an army signalman. My other friend as you divined, is a horsecar driver.”
       “Then why have you come to arrest me as though you were police?”
       “You see how ignorant you are of our ways here. On Earth, as I understand, it is different; but here all public employees are of one fraternity, if you follow me. Tomorrow my friend the horse-car driver may be picking up garbage—”
       The man in green interrupted to snicker, “You may say he’s doing that tonight.”
       “—my friend here may be a crewman on one of the patrol boats and I may be an inspector of cats. Tonight we have been sent to get you.”
       “With a warrant for my arrest?”
       “I must tell you again that it is best for you if you are not arrested. I say to you frankly that if you are arrested it is very improbable that you will ever be released.”
       As he completed this sentence the door opened behind me, and I saw in the mirror Mme Duclose and Mlle Etienne, with the horsecar driver standing behind them. “Come in, ladies,” the man in black said, and the horsecar driver herded them into the room, where they stood side by side in front of the washstand, looking frightened and confused. Mme Duclose, an old, gray-haired woman with a fat stomach, wore a faded cotton dress with a long skirt (whether because the horsecar driver had allowed her to put it on before summoning her or because she had been using it for a night-gown, I do not know). Mlle Etienne—a very tall girl of twenty-seven or -eight—might have been not the sister, but possibly the half-sister or cousin of the three men. She had the sharply pointed face and the black eyebrows, but hers had been plucked thin to form arches over her eyes, which were, mercifully, not the dark, narrow eyes of the men but large and blue-purple like the dots of paint on the face of a doll. Her hair was a mop of brown curls, and she was, as I have said, exceedingly tall, her legs stiltlike in their elongation, rising on thin, straight bones to hips broader than seemed consonant with the remainder of her physique, after which her body contracted again abruptly to a small waist, small breasts, and narrow shoulders. She boasted tonight a negligee of some gossamer fabric like a very thin cheesecloth, but this was gathered in so many layers and foldings and wraps as to be quite opaque.
       “You are Mme Duclose?” the man in black asked that lady. “The owner of this house? You rent the room we presently occupy to this gentleman here?”
       She nodded.
       “It will be necessary for him to accompany us to the citadel, where he will converse with various officials. You will close this room and lock the door when we leave, do you understand? You will disturb nothing.”
       Mme Duclose nodded, wisps of gray hair bobbing.
       “In the event that the gentleman has not returned within one week, you will apply to the Department of Parks, which will dispatch a reputable man to this address. In his company you will be permitted to enter this room to inspect it for rodent damage and to open, the windows for the period of one hour, at the close of which you will be required to relock the room, and he will leave. Do you understand what I have just said?”
       Mme Duclose nodded again.
       “In the event that the gentleman has not returned by Christmas, you will apply to the Department of Parks as before. On the day following Christmas—or in the event that Christmas falls on a Saturday, on the following Monday—a reputable man will be dispatched as previously. In his company you will be permitted to change the bedding and, if you wish, air the mattress.”
       “On the day after Christmas?” Mme Duclose asked in bewilderment.
       “Or in the event that Christmas falls on Saturday, on the Monday following. In the event that the gentleman has not returned by one year from this date—which you may compute, for your convenience, as being the first of the current month, should you so choose—you may again apply to the Department of Parks. You may at that time—if you wish—place the gentleman’s belongings in storage at your expense, or you may store them elsewhere in your home if you wish. They will be inventoried by the Department of Parks at that time. You may then use this room for other purposes. In the event that the gentleman has still not returned at a date fifty years distant from the date whose calculation I have just explained to you, you—or your heirs or assigns—may again apply to the Department of Parks. At that time the government will claim any article falling under the following categories: articles made wholly or in part of gold, silver, or any other precious metal; moneys in the currencies of Sainte Croix, Sainte Anne, or Earth, or other worlds; antiques; scientific appliances; blueprints, plans, and documents of all sorts; jewelry; body linen; clothing. Any article not falling under these categories shall become the property of you, your heirs, and assigns. If tomorrow you find you do not clearly recall what I have just told you, apply to me at the Department of Public Works, Subdepartment of Sewers and Drains, and I will explain to you again. Ask for the assistant to the General Inspector of Sewers and Drains. You understand?”
       Mme Duclose nodded.
       “And now you, Mademoiselle,” the man in black continued, turning his attention to Mlle Etienne. “Observe; I hand the gentleman a visiting pass.” He took a stiff card, perhaps six inches long and two wide, from the breast pocket of his greasy coat and handed it to me. “He will write your name thereupon and give it to you, and with it you will be admitted on your own recognizance to the citadel on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month between the hours of nine and eleven p.m.”
       “Wait a moment,” I said. “I don’t even know this young lady.”
       “But you are not married?”
       “No.”
       “So your dossier informed me. In cases where the prisoner is unmarried it is the rule to give the card to the closest resident single woman of suitable age. It is, you will understand, based upon statistical probabities. The young woman may transfer the card to whomever you wish, who may then use it in her name. That will be something for you to discuss—” (he paused a moment in thought) “—ten days from now. Not now. Write down her name.”
       I was forced to ask Mlle Etienne’s first name, which proved to be Celestine.
       “Give her the card,” the man in black said.
       I did so, and he laid one hand heavily on my shoulder and said, “I hereby place you under arrest.”

I have been moved. I continue this record of my thoughts—if that is what it may be said to be—in a new cell. I am no longer my old self, one forty-three, but some new, unknown 143; this because that old number was chalked upon the door of this new cell. The transition must seem very abrupt to you, reading this; but I was not actually interrupted in the task of writing, as it must seem. The truth is that I grew tired of detailing my arrest. I scratched. I slept. I ate some bread and soup the warder brought me and found a small bone—the rib bone, I suspect, of a goat—in my soup and with this held long conversations with my neighbor upstairs, forty-seven. I listened to the madman on my left until it almost seemed to me that among his idiot scratching and scrapings I could discern my own name.
       Then there was a rattling of keys at the door of my cell, and I thought that perhaps Mlle Etienne was to be permitted to see me after all. I tried insofar as I could to make myself clean, smoothing my hair and beard with my fingers. Alas, it was only the guard, and with him a powerfully built man wearing a black hood which concealed his face. Naturally I thought I was going to be killed, and though I tried to be courageous—and really felt that I was not especially fearful—I found that my knees had become so weak that I could only stand with great difficulty. I thought of escape (as I always do when they take me to be questioned; it’s the only chance, because there’s no escaping from these cells), but there was only the narrow corridor to run in, as always, without windows and with a guard posted at every stair. The hooded man took my arm and, without speaking, led me through passageways and up and down steps until I was completely confused; we must have walked for hours. I saw any number of miserable dirty faces like my own staring at me through the tiny glassed Judas windows in the doors of the cells. Several times we passed through courtyards, and I thought I was to be shot in each; it was about noon, and the bright sunlight made me blink and my eyes water. Then in a corridor much like all the others we halted before a door marked 143, and the hooded man raised a concrete slab from the center of the floor, showing me a narrow hole from which a steep iron stair descended. I went down and he followed me; the distance must have been fifty meters or more, and at the bottom it was only with a flashlight that we were able to grope our way down a corridor stinking of stale urine, until we reached the door of this cell into which a push from him sent me sprawling.
       At the time I was happy enough to sprawl, for I thought, as I have said, that I was about to be executed. I still do not know that it is not true; the man was certainly dressed as an executioner though that may have been merely to frighten me, and perhaps he has other duties.

The officer groped among the materials on his desk for the next page, but before he could locate it the brother officer entered the room a second time. “Hello,” the officer said, “I thought you were turning in.”
       “I was,” said the brother officer. “I have; I did. I slept for a while, then woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s the heat.”
       The officer shrugged.
       “How are you coming with your case?”
       “Still trying to catalogue the facts.”
       “Didn’t they send a summary? They’re supposed to.”
       “Probably, but I haven’t found it in this mess yet. There’s a letter, and a fuller summary may be on one of these tapes’
       “What’s this?” The brother officer had picked up the canvas-bound notebook.
       “A notebook.”
       “The accused’s?”
       “I think so.”
       The brother officer raised his eyebrows. “You don’t know?”
       “I’m not sure. Sometimes I think that notebook . . .”
       The brother officer waited for him to continue, but he did not. After a moment the brother officer said, “ Well, I see you’re busy. Think I’ll wake up the surgeon and see if he won’t give me something that will let me sleep.”
       “Try a bottle,” the officer said as the brother officer went out. When he had gone he picked up the canvas-bound notebook again and opened it at random.

“No, he is a man like you and me. He is married to a poor wretched woman one hardly ever sees, and they have a son of fifteen or so.”

Self: “But he claims to be Annese?”
M. d’F: “He is a fraud, you understand. Much of what he says of the abos is from his own head—oh, he will tell you wonderful tales, Monsieur.”

Dr Hagsmith had also mentioned this beggar, and I have decided to find him. Even though his claim to be Annese is false—as I have no doubt it is—he may have picked up some real information in the course of his impersonations. Besides, the idea of finding even a counterfeit Annese appeals to me.

March 21. I have had a talk with the beggar, who calls himself Twelvewalker and claims to be a direct descendant of the last Annese shaman, and thus rightfully a king—or whatever distinction he may happen to covet at the moment. In my opinion his actual descent is Irish, very probably through one of those Irish adventurers who left their island for France at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. At any rate, his culture seems clearly French, his face certainly Irish—the red hair, blue eyes, and long upper lip are unmistakable.
       Apparently even counterfeit Annese are elusive, and turning him up was more of a problem than I had anticipated; everyone seemed to know him and told me I could rind him in such and such a tavern, but no one seemed to know where he lived—and, naturally, he was not to be found in any of the taverns where he “always” was. When I discovered his hut at last (I cannot call it a house), I realized that I had passed it several times without realizing it was a human dwelling.
       Frenchman’s Landing, as perhaps I should mention here, is built on the banks of the Tempus about ten miles upstream of the sea itself. The waterfront is thus the muddy shore of the river, looking across the yellowish, salt-tinged flood toward a huddle of even less presentable buildings—La Fange—on the bank opposite. Sainte Anne’s twin world of Sainte Croix creates fifteen-foot tides all over the planet, and these affect the river far upstream of Frenchman’s Landing. At high tide the water is completely undrmkable and marine fish—so I am told—may be caught from the ends of the docks. Then the decking of these docks is only a few feet above the water, the air is fresh and pure, and the meadowmeres surrounding the somewhat higher ground on which the town stands have the appearance of an endless lacework of clear pools fringed with the brilliant green salt rushes. But in a few hours the tide is gone, and all vitality seems drained from the river and the country around it. The docks stand twelve-feet high on stilts of rotting timbers; the river shows a thousand islands of muck, and the meadowmeres are desolate salt flats of stinking mud over which, at night, wisps of luminous gas hover like the ghosts of the dead Annese.
       The waterfront itself is not too different, I suppose, from the waterfront of a similar rivertown on Earth, except perhaps for the absence of the robot cranes one expects to see and the use of native building materials in place of Earth’s all-pervasive compressed waste walls. Twelve years ago, I understand, old-fashioned thermonuclear ships were commonplace at the piers here, but now that the planet has been ringed with an adequate network of weather satellites, safe, modern sailing vessels are in use here as on Earth.
       The beggar’s hut, when I located it at last, was an old boat turned upside down and propped above the ground with every sort of rubbish. Still doubting that anyone could actually live there, I rapped on the hull with the handle of my pocketknife, and a dark-haired boy of fifteen or sixteen thrust his head out almost at once. When he saw me he ducked under the edge of the boat, but then, instead of standing, remained on his knees with both hands outstretched and began a sort of beggar’s whine in which I could make out only occasional words. I assumed that he was mentally retarded, and it seemed possible that he could not even walk, since when I stepped away from him he followed me, still on his knees, with a sort of agile shuffle that seemed to imply that this was his normal gait. After half a minute of this I gave him a few coins in the hope of quieting him enough to ask him some questions, but the coins were no sooner out of my hand than the head of an older man, the red-haired beggar, as it turned out, appeared from under the boat (from where, I feel sure, he had been observing his son’s technique).
       “Bless you, Monsieur!” he said. “I am not, you comprehend, a Christian, but may your generosity to my poor boy be blessed by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, or in the eventuality that you are Protestant, Monsieur, by Jesus only and by God the Father and the Holy Ghost. As my own ten-times decimated people would say, may the Mountains bless you and the River and the Trees and the Oceansea and all the stars of Heaven and the gods. I speak as their religious leader.”
       I thanked him, and for some reason I cannot quite explain, gave him one of my cards, which he accepted with such a flourish that I felt for a moment that he had accepted with it the duty to second me in a duel or assist me in my love affairs. After glancing at it he exclaimed, “Ah, you are a doctor! Look, Victor, our visitor is a doctor of philosophy!” and held the card for an instant in front of the boy’s eyes, which were as large and sea green as his own were tiny and blue.
       “Doctor, Doctor Marsch, I am not an educated man—you see that—but I yield to none in my respect for education, for scholarship. My house,” he waved toward the inverted boat as though it had been a palace and a quarter-mile distant, “is yours! My son and I are entirely at your service for the remainder of the day—or the remainder of the month, should you wish it. And should you be disposed to tender some small emolument for our services, let me assure you in advance of any possible embarrassment that we do not expect from the temple of learning the golden munificence of commerce triumphant; and we are well aware of that blessed natural law by which the townsman’s gilt buys more—more, haven’t I said, (giving the boy a push)”—than the merchant’s gold. How may we serve you?”
       I explained that I understood that he sometimes guided visitors to locations nearby that were supposed to have been important to the prediscovery Annese, and he immediately invited me into his home.
       There were no chairs under the inverted boat, there being insufficient headroom for them; but old flotation cushions and folded squares of sailcloth served for seats, and they had a tiny table (such as might have served a poor Japanese family) whose top was hardly more than a double-hand’s width above the tarpaulin that covered the ground. The older man lit a lamp—a mere wick floating in a shallow dish of oil—and ceremoniously poured me a small glass of what proved to be hundred-proof rum. When I had accepted it he said: “You wish to see the sacred places of my fathers, the lords of this planet! I can show them to you, Doctor—indeed no one but I can show them to you properly or explain their significations and enter you yourself into the very spirit of that departed age! But it is already too late today, Doctor; the tide is already past the flood. If you could come tomorrow, in the middle of the morning—not too late—then we will skim across the meadowmeres as cheerfully as a gondola. With no effort at all on your part, Doctor, for my son and I will paddle and pole you wherever you may wish to go and show you everything worth seeing. You may take photographs—or do whatever you please—my son and I will be glad to pose.”
       I asked him what the cost would be, and he named a sum which seemed reasonable enough, adding quickly, “Remember, Doctor, you will be receiving the labor of two men for five hours—and the use of our boat. For a unique experience!—no one but myself can properly show you what you wish to see.” I agreed to the price, and he said: “There is one other thing—the lunch. We must have food for three. If you wish to leave funds with me, I will procure it.” I frowned at him, and he added at once, “Or you may bring it yourself—but remember, it is to be a lunch for three. Perhaps a bottle of wine and a bird.
       “But now, Doctor, I have some very choice things to show you. Wait a moment.” He reached into a packing box which lay beside his seat and took out a tin tray, with its surface covered with red flock. On it were two dozen or so projectile points chipped and ground from every sort of stone, and several which I am fairly sure had been made from common colored glass, probably from pieces of broken whisky bottles. They were new, as was shown by their razor-sharp edges (genuinely old flint or volcanic glass implements have always lost their keenness by friction with soil grit); and from their fantastic shapes—extremely broad, doubly or triply barbed—as well as their general crudeness, it seemed certain they had been made for display rather than use.
       “Weapons of the abos, Doctor,” the beggar said. “My son and I go looking for them when there’s no one will hire us and our boat. Irreplaceable, and genuine souvenirs of the Frenchman’s Landing country, where as you know the abos was found more thickly than anywhere else on this world, as it was my forefathers’ sacred place like Rome or Boston would be to you, and a paradise of fish and animals and all sorts of things to eat, which you will hear me tell about tomorrow when we go out upon the meadowmeres, and if we have luck, the boy will even demonstrate the catching of fish or animals in the abo manner, without even using such delicate and now valuable implements as these I offer for sale to you here.”
       I told him that I wasn’t interested in buying any such things, and he said: “You really should not be missing any such opportunity, Doctor. These have been bought by the museum at Roncevaux, and castings made from them so they could be sent all over the world, and even to Sainte Croix, so that you might say they’re universally respected, at least as far as this system goes. Look at this one!” He held up the largest, a chipped flint core that might have been more effective if it were used to club the animal to death. “I could put a pin on the back for you, so that a lady could wear it for a brooch. Make a nice conversation piece.”
       I had seen the points at Roncevaux; I said: “No thank you. But I have to admit that I admire your industry—since you obviously make these yourself.”
       “Oh, no! Look,” he held up his hands, “we abos can’t do that kind of work, Doctor. See my hands.”
       “I thought you just said the abos made these.”
       The boy, who had been sitting quietly listening to us, said in an undertone, “With their teeth.” The first words I had heard from him except for the unintelligible beggar’s litany earlier.
       “My hands is worse even than the others,” his father protested. “You mock me—I who can scarcely tie his own shoes. It is all I can do, Doctor, to handle the boat pole.”
       “Then your son makes them,” I said, but I saw as soon as I had said it that I had made a mistake. The boy’s face showed the kind of pain so easily evoked in a sensitive adolescent, and the older man crowded with mirth.
       “He! Doctor, he is worse even than I am myself, and good for nothing but to fight with the other boys, who always beat him, and to read his books from the library. He can’t even remember the way to twist open the top of a jar.”
       “Then I was right the first time—you make them yourself. Knapping flint requires a certain dexterity, but not of the same order as playing a violin. One hand holds the striker, the other the mallet, and it’s a matter of where the point of the striker is placed and how hardJt’s hit.”
       “From your sound, you have done it yourself, Doctor.”
       “I have, and I’ve made better points than those.”
       Unexpectedly the boy said: “The Free People didn’t use those things. They made nets by knotting vines and grasses, but if they wanted to cut something they used their teeth.”
       “He is correct, you know,” the older man said in a new voice. “But you will not give me away, Doctor?”
       I told him that if the museum at Roncevaux asked my opinion I would give it to them, but that I didn’t think he was an important enough fraud to waste time denouncing him otherwise.
       “We must have something, you know,” he said, and for the first time I got the impression that he was not talking to wheedle money. “Something we can sell, something they can hold in their hands. You can’t sell the truth—that’s what I used to tell my wife. That’s what I tell my son.”
       A few minutes after this I excused myself, promising again to meet the pair tomorrow morning. My impression of them both—impostors though they undoubtedly are—is somewhat better than I had anticipated. The older man certainly is not, as I had been led to expect, an alcoholic; no alcoholic would be sober, as he was, with a bottle of hundred-proof rum in his possession. No doubt he begs in taverns because he finds money freest there and drinks what is offered him. The boy seemed intelligent when he was no longer feigning imbecility for profit, and is handsome in a rather sensitive way, with his green eyes, pale complexion, and dark hair.

March 22. Met the two beggars, father and son, a few minutes before ten, this time remembering to bring my tape recorder, which I had neglected on the previous visit. (The account of our conversation I gave yesterday is true and correct to the best of my memory and was written immediately after the event, but I can promise no more.) Also a shotgun, bought locally yesterday, in case the meadowmeres afforded any edible waterfowl; it is a twenty gauge and thus rather too small for the purpose, but the only thing available except some poorly finished single-shots intended for sale to farmers. My landlord here recommended getting the gun and promised to cook anything I bagged in return for a half share of the meat.
       (To anticipate slightly, I was fortunate and killed three good- sized specimen of a bird called the reed-hen, which the beggar pointed out to me as good to eat. It is slightly smaller than a goose and of a beautiful green color like a parrot or a parakeet; he claims they were a favorite article of diet among the Annese, and from my dinner tonight I believe him, though I am sure he knows no more about it than I do.)
       All traces of the boat-hut were gone when I arrived, and the spot where it had stood was a mere corner of waste ground. The boy, bare-chested and barefooted, was leaning against a building nearby, and explained that his father was taking care of our vessel; he at once relieved me of the basket lunch I was carrying (which my landlord had prepared for us) and would have carried my tape recorder and gun as well if I had been willing to let him.
       He led me some distance along the waterfront to a little floating jetty (which he called a stage), where I saw his father, in a blue shirt and an old red scarf, waiting in the boat that had been our roof the day before. The older man at once demanded the payment we had agreed upon, but settled, after an argument, for half—the remaining amount to be paid on the termination of our tour. I then clambered (rather cautiously, I admit) into the boa the boy jumped in after me, and we were off, father and son each pulling an oar.
       For five minutes or so we picked our way among the ships in the harbor, following an almost imperceptible curve in the river; then between the hulls of two big four-masters I saw, as though I were looking through a cleft rock into a valley of incredible green, the open, wild meadowmeres of Sainte Anne, which had been, before the coming of the first starcrossers from Earth (as the older man had truly said), the paradise of the Annese. Father and son laid harder to the oars; a sailor on one of the big ships gave us a few halfhearted curses, and we shot between them and out on to the broad water of the Tempus, now swollen by a high tide still making.
       “Five kilometers farther to the Oceansea,” the beggar explained, “and if the Doctor agrees—”
       He was interrupted, as I saw, by something he had seen behind me. I twisted in my seat in the stern to look, but at first could see nothing.
       “Just by the t’gallant yard of the ship on our left,” the boy told me softly. I saw it then, a silvery object in the sky that seemed no bigger than a blown leaf. In three minutes it was overhead, a shark-shaped military craft perhaps a mile and a half long. It was not really silver, but the color of a knife, and I could make out tiny dots lining the sides that might have been observation ports or laser muzzles or both. The beggar said, “Do not wave,” then whispered something to the boy of which I caught only the beginning and end: “Faîtes attention . . . français!” I think the meaning must have been, “Remember that you are French.” The boy answered something I could not hear and shook his head.

First we visited the ocean, which the beggar claimed was itself a sacred object in the Annese religion, wending our way through one of the serpentine throats of the Tempus. Our little boat behaved better than I would have expected in the choppy surf, and we landed a mile or so north of the northernmost mouth on a sandy beach. “Here,” the old man said, “is the actual spot.” He showed me a small stone marker with an inscription in French attesting to the fact that the first human party to reach Saint Anne had splashed down twenty-five kilometers out to sea and landed their boats where we stood. On this stretch of beach I think I was more conscious than I have ever been before of being on a world foreign to my own; the sand was littered everywhere with seashells, with something alien about them all, so that I believe that even if I had found one on a Terrestrial beach I would have known that it had never been washed up by any ocean of Earth’s.
       “Here,” the older man said, “they landed—the first French. You say, Doctor, that many do not believe the abos ever to have existed, but I tell you that when the boats came ashore they found a man—”
       “One of the people of the meadowmeres,” his son put in.
       “Found him floating on his face in the Oceansea. He had been beaten until dead with scourges of little shells tied together—such was their custom, to sometimes so sacrifice men. They found him here, and that great ancestor of mine who is sometimes called The Eastwind came down to make a peace with them. You do not know, and the log of that first ship was burned in the fusing of Saint-Dizier, but I have talked to a man, an old man, who sixty years ago knew well one of them who was in that first little air-filled boat, and I know.”
       We walked inland and visited the great sinkhole in the sand, which is now called the Hourglass, and where the beggar told me the Annese sometimes imprisoned their fellows. The boy slid down into it to show me that a man could not escape unaided, but I thought he was exaggerating the difficulty and scrambled in myself, so that his father had to rescue us both by throwing down the end of a rope he had carried from the boat for the purpose. The sides are not at all steep, but the sand is so soft that they cannot be climbed by an unaided man.

After seeing the Hourglass we returned to our boat, and reentering the river by a different mouth, moved out on to the meadowmeres proper, my guides poling us through still tidal pools among waving clumps of salt reeds. I got my three reed-hens here, the boy swimming after the birds for me—I was about to write “as well as any retriever”, but the truth is that he swam better than that, almost like a seal; so that I was ready to believe his father when he told me he sometimes caught unwounded birds by swimming beneath them and seizing their feet. He (the boy) told me there was good fishing here when the tide was out, and his father added, “But you cannot get anything for them in the town, Doctor—too many there fish for themselves.” The boy said, “Not fish to sell, fish to eat.”
       The Annese temple (or observatory) has now been ruined by the settlers’ need for timber, all the trees cut except a few half-rotten ones. From the stumps, however, it is fairly easy to reconstruct the way it must have appeared in prediscovery times. There were four hundred and two trees (the number of days in Sainte Anne’s year) spaced approximately a hundred and ten feet apart so that they formed a circle about three miles in diameter. The stumps show that the trunks of most were more than twelve feet in thickness, thus at the time they were destroyed, the foliage of each tree may almost have touched the next; certainly from a distance they must have appeared to form a continuous wall except for the portion immediately ahead of the observer. The interior of this ring seems to have been cleared of any further planting or other object. I would conjecture that the Annese used the trees to keep count of days, perhaps by moving some sort of marker from tree to tree, hanging it on the limbs; but it seems doubtful that any more sophisticated astronomy was carried out here. (To say, however, as some scholars on Earth do, that the Annese “temple” is possibly of natural growth is absurd. It was certainly .intelligently planned, and undoubtedly predated the splashdown of the first French ship by a century or more. I counted the rings of four stumps and found the average age to be a hundred and twenty-seven Annese years.)
       I have made a sketclwnap showing the locations of the stumps and the approximate size of each; they are decaying rapidly now, and in a decade more, it will be impossible to trace their position.
       Though the tide was ebbing by the time I completed my map we made our way up the river for a few miles and stopped to look at a stone outcrop—one of the very few to be found in the meadowmeres—which the beggar claimed was originally in the form of a seated man. There is, so he told me, a superstition current among the people of Frenchman’s Landing and La Fange that indecent and perverse acts committed while sitting or lying in the lap of this natural statue are invisible to God. The belief is supposed to be of Annese origin, though the boy denied this. The stone is now almost completely worn away.
       As we made our way back to town I reflected on the rumors I have heard of a sacred cave a hundred miles or more up the river. It is one of the failures of science here—at least, to date—that, though a native Annese race surely, existed and perhaps still exists, no skull or positively identifiable bone has ever been described. To some like me, raised on accounts of Windmill Hill Cave and the rock shelter of Les Eyzies, the grottoes of the Périgord and the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux, the idea of an Annese sacred cave is irresistible. A swamp like the meadowmeres will, except maybe in one case out often thousand, completely destroy the skeleton of any creature that dies there; but a cave will, again except in one case out of ten thousand, preserve it. And why shouldn’t the Annese have used the depths of such a cave for burials, as primitive people did all over Earth? It is even possible that there may be paintings, though the Annese do not seem to have reached the tool-making stage. Tonight, even as I write this, I find myself making plans to search for the cave, which is supposed to have its opening in the rocky walls rising above the Tempus. We will need a boat (or perhaps more than one), light enough for portage around any falls or rapids and equipped with an engine with enough power to make good time against the current. We should have enough people to allow one man to stay with the boat (or boats) while at least three (for safety) enter the cave. One of us besides myself ought to be an educated man, capable of appreciating the importance of what we may find; and, if possible, one or more should be familiar with the mountain country we’ll be going into. Where I can find people like that—or if I can afford them if I find them—I don’t know; but I will keep the possibility in mind as I conduct my interviews.
       Nearly forgot to mention a conversation I had with the beggar and his son while they rowed me back to Frenchman’s Landing. Because of the man’s claim to be Annese (unquestionably spurious), any information from that source must be regarded as tainted, but I thought it was interesting, and I am glad I taped it.

R. T.: “Speaking of the abos as you was, Doctor, I hope you’ll mention to any of your friends who wish to come here that we gave you satisfaction showing you the sacred places.”
Self: “Certainly. Is this much of a source of income for you?”
R. T.: “Not as much as we would like, you may be sure. To tell you the truth, Doctor, it used to be better than at present. Then there was more trees standing, and the statue was more presentable. My family—we did not, you comprehend, live always as you saw yesterday. We do not now, not in winter when the wolf-snow blows from the mountains. We could not.”
V. R. T.: “When my mother was here, we had a house, sometimes.”
Self: “Has your wife passed on, Trenchard?”
V. R. T.: “She isn’t dead.”
R. T.: “What do you know, imbécile? You have not seen her.”
V. R. T.: “My mother and I used to go, when I was small, into the hills in summer, Monsieur. There we lived as the Free People did, and only came back here when it began to be too cold for me. My mother used to say that among the Free People many children died each winter, and she did not wish for me to die, and so we came back.”
R. T.: “She was a useless woman, you understand, Doctor. Ha! She could not even cook. She was a—” (Spits over side of boat).

The boy flushed at this, and for a few minutes nothing more was said. Then I asked him if it were while he was living in the hills with his mother that he had learned to swim so well.

V. R. T.: “Yes, in the back of beyond. I would swim in the river, and my mother also.”
R. T.: “We abos all swim well, Doctor. I could myself before I grew old.”

I laughed at the old-faker and said that I understood that he was an abo but that I’d have to find another before my search was over. Since we talked about the projectile points he has known that he is not really deceiving me, so he simply grinned back at me (showing a good many missing teeth) and said that in that case it was half complete, since his son was half abo.

V. R. T.: “You believe nothing, Doctor, but it is true. And it is not true what he says of my mother, who was his wife. She was an actress, a very fine one.”
Self: “Did she teach you to behave like an Annese, to get money from people? I’ll have to admit, when I first met you I thought you were retarded mentally.”
R. T.: (Laughing) “Sometimes I think so still.”
V. R. T.: “She taught me a great many things. Yes, to behave like those you call abos.”
R. T.: “I cursed her a moment ago, Doctor, you comprehend, because she left me, though I drove her away. But what my son says is true, she was a fine actress. We used to go about performing, she and I. You would not believe the things she could do! She could talk to a man, and he would believe her a girl, a virgin, hardly out of school. But then if she did not like him she would become an old woman—a matter of the voice, you understand, and the musclesof the face, the wayshe walked andheldher hands—”
V. R. T.: “Everything!”
R. T.: “When I married her, Doctor, she was a fine woman. And you may forget what you have heard! My son is legitimate; we were married by the priest at the church of St Madeleine. Then she was truly beautiful, magnificent.” (Kisses his fingers, releasing the oar with one hand) “That was not acting. But later when she slept, she could not conceal; every woman is her true age when she sleeps. You are not married? Remember that.”
Self: (To the boy) “But if she taught you how to behave like an Annese she must have seen some.”
V. R. T.: “Oh, yes.”
R. T.: “You comprehend that they must remain hidden, the abos.”
Self: “Then you seriously believe, Trenchard, that living Annese still exist.”
R. T.: “Why should they not, Doctor? Tn the back of beyond there is still land, thousands of hectares, where no one ever goes. And there are animals to eat, and fish there, as before. The abos can no longer come to the sacred places in the meadowmeres, it is true; but there are other sacred places.”
V. R. T.: “The wetland people were never the Free People of the mountains. These places were not sacred to the Free People.”
R. T.: “That may be. We say ‘the abos’, Doctor. But the truth is that they were many people. Now you say, ‘Where are they?’ but would they be wise to show themselves? Once all this world of Sainte Anne was theirs. A farmer thinks: ‘Suppose they are men like me after all? That Dupont, he is a clever lawyer. What if they engage him, eh? What if he spoke to the judge—the judge who has no French and hates us—and said, This man you call abo has nothing, but Augier’s farm was his family’s—you make Augier to show the bill of sale?’ What do you think the farmer does then if he sees an abo on his land, Doctor? Will he tell anyone? Or will he shoot?”

So it comes to that. The Annese, if there are any left, are hiding because they are afraid, no doubt with good reason; and many people who have seen them or know where they might be are not likely to report it or even admit it under questioning.
       As for their being “many people,” it reminds me of the man who said what he saw was sometimes like a man and sometimes like old wood. The truth is, in fact, that the reports are very contradictory. Even in the interviews I have, it’s often difficult to believe that two subjects are talking about the same thing, and the reports of the early explorers—such of them as have survived—show even less agreement. Certainly some of the more fantastic must be pure myth, but there remain a great many reports of a native race so similar to human beings that they might almost have been the descendants of an earlier wave of colonization. So similar, in fact, that old Trenchard can deceive the credulous with his claim to be Annese, and on a planet where we find plants, birds, and mammals so near the Terrestrial types, a form strikingly like man is surely not impossible—the manlike form may be optimal for this biosphere.

The officer laid the notebook on his table once more, and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. As he straightened up, the slave said softly from the doorway, “Maître . . .”
       “Yes, what is it?”
       “Cassilla . . . Does Maître still wish—” At the officer’s look he hurried away, returning a few seconds later with a girl whom he pushed into the room. She was tall and slender amd peculiarly graceful, with a long neck and a round head; she wore a faded gingham work-dress much too small for her, with (as the officer knew) nothing beneath it; and she looked tired.
       “Come in here,” he said. “Sit down. There is wine if you wish it.”
       “Maître . . .”
       “Yes, what is it?”
       “It’s already very late, Maître. I must rise an hour before the soldier’s reveille to help with breakfast—”
       The officer was not listening to her. He had picked up one of the spools of tape and was fitting it into the machine. “Duty,” he said. “We shall listen while we enjoy ourselves. Put out the lamp, Cassilla.”

Q:	Do you understand why you have been brought here?
A:	To this prison?
Q:	You know quite well what you have done. To this interrogation.
A:	I do not even know the charges against me.
Q:	Don’t think you are going to misdirect us with that sort of thing. Why did you come to Sainte Croix?
A:	I am an anthropologist. I wished to discuss certain findings I had made on Sainte Anne with others of my profession.
Q:	Are you trying to tell me that there are no anthropologists on Sainte Anne?
A:	No good ones.
Q:	You think that you know what we want, don’t you? You believe yourself clever. It is your opinion that the political situation vis-à-vis the sister planet is such that your hostility to it will buy your freedom; is that correct?
A:	I have been in your prison long enough to learn that nothing I can say will buy my freedom.
Q:	Is that so?
A:	What are you writing?
Q:	It does not concern you. If you believe that, why do you answer my questions?
A:	It would be equally valid to ask why you ask them, if you plan never to release me.
Q:	You forget that I might answer, “You may have accomplices!” Would you like a cigarette?
A:	I thought you didn’t do that anymore.
Q:	I am not teasing you—look, here is my cigarette case. The offer is made in good faith.
A:	Thank you.
Q:	And a light from my lighter. I would advise you not to inhale too deeply—you have not smoked in some time.
A:	Thank you. I’ll be careful.
Q:	You are always careful, are you not?
A:	I don’t know what you mean.
Q:	I had understood it was a trait of the scientific mind.
A:	I’m careful in taking data, yes.
Q:	But you leaped to a conclusion concerning your relations with the government of Sainte Anne.
A:	No.
Q:	You came from Sainte Anne only a year or so ago, and you believe war is at the loading point.
A:	No.
Q:	Do you also believe their victory will release you?
A:	You think I’m a spy.
Q:	You are a scientist—at least for the moment I will assume you are. Is that agreeable?
A:	I’m accustomed to the assumption.
Q:	I have examined your papers, and letters follow your name. I shall call you: “A Polish Count, a Knight Grand Cross, Rx. and Q.E.D.; Grand Master of the Blood Red Dirk, and R.O.G.U.E.” You seem to me very young.
A:	It was thought that there was no use sending an old man out from Earth.
Q:	I propose to your young and elastic but scientific mind a hypothesis in political science: that a murderer would make an excellent spy and that a spy might find many occasions to murder. You would find that difficult to contradict?
A:	I am an anthropologist, not a political scientist.
Q:	So you never tire of telling us; but an anthropologist is concerned with the folkways of the less complex societies. Do they never spy upon one another?
A:	Most primitive people only make war to show their courage. That’s why they lose.
Q:	You are wasting my time.
A:	May I have another cigarette?
Q:	Finished already? Certainly. And a light
A:	Thank you.
Q:	Whom had you planned to assassinate here? Not the man you killed—that has the look of spur-of-the-moment necessity. Someone you could not get close to; someone well guarded.
A:	Whom am I supposed to have killed here?
Q:	I have told you that I am not here to answer your questions. To answer would imply that we conceded some slight possibility of truth to your assertions of innocence, and we do not concede that. Truth is something which is to be had from us, not from you. Ours is the most remarkable government in the history of mankind; because we, and only we, have accepted as a working principle what every sage has taught and every government has feigned to accept; the power of the truth. And because we do, we rule as no other government has ever ruled. You have often asked me what your crime is, why we detain you. It is because we know you are lying—do you understand what I am telling you?
A:	When I was arrested a certain girl, a Mlle Etienne, was given a card which was to have admitted her to see me on certain specific days. You say you honor your promises, but she has not been admitted.
Q:	Because she has not applied:
A:	Do you know that?
Q:	Yes! Don’t you understand? That is our secret, that is truth. You tell me she was given the card, which is always given to someone in any event. Therefore I know that if you have not seen her it is because she has not made application. You realize that she may later—when we had come to understand your obstinacy and the full seriousness of your case—have been warned of unpleasant consequences which might follow her visit, but if she had applied she would have been admitted.        We are the only government upon whose word every man may rely absolutely, and because of that we command infinite credit, infinite obedience, infinite respect. If we say to anyone, “Do this and your reward will be such and such,” there is no doubt in his mind that he will be rewarded. If we say villages breaking a certain ordinance will be burned to the ground, there is no doubt. We speak little, but every word drops like a weight of iron—”

The girl, Cassilla, asked,” What’s the matter?”
       “The tape broke,” the officer said. “Never mind. I’m going to start another one—remember what I told you I wanted you to do.”
       “Yes, Maître.”

Q:	Sit down. You are DrMarsch?
A:	Yes.
Q:	My name is Constant. You are newly come from the mother world by way of Sainte Anne; is that correct?
A:	From Sainte Anne, a matter of a year and a few months.
Q:	Precisely.
A:	May I ask why I have been arrested?
Q:	The time has not yet come to discuss that. We have only—thus far—established your name, the identity under which you have traveled. Where were you born, Doctor?
A:	In New York City, on Earth.
Q:	Can you prove that?
A:	You have taken my papers.
Q:	You are telling me you cannot prove it.
A:	My papers prove it. The university here will vouch for me,
Q:	We have already spoken to them; unfortunately I am not permitted to disclose the results of other investigations. I can only say, Doctor, that you should expect no more help there than you have already received. They have been contacted, and you are where you find yourself. You left Earth how long ago?
A:	Newtonian time?
Q:	I will rephrase my question. How long has it been since—according to your claim—you came to Sainte Anne?
A:	About five years.
Q:	Sainte Croix years?
A:	Sainte Anne years.
Q:	They are the same for practical purposes. In the future in our discussions you will use Sainte Croix years. Describe your activities after arriving on Sainte Anne.
A:	I splashed down at Roncevaux—that is to say, out to sea about fifty kilometres from Roncevaux. We were towed into the port in the usual way, and I went through customs.
Q:	Continue.
A:	When I had cleared customs I was questioned by the military police. That was strictly a formality—it lasted about ten minutes as I recall. I was then issued visitor’s papers. I checked into a hotel—
Q:	Name the hotel.
A:	Let me think . . . the Splendide.
Q:	Go on.
A:	I then visited the university, and the museum, which is attached to it. The university has no Department of Anthropology. Natural History tries to cover the area, and on the whole does a poor job of it. The anthropology displays in the museum—of which they are quite proud—are a mixture of secondhand information, fraud, and pure imagination. I required their support, of course, so I was as polite as I could honestly be. May I ask why that man went out of the room?
Q:	Because he is a fool. You then left Roncevaux?
A:	Yes.
Q:	How?
A:	By train. I took the train to Frenchman’s Landing, which lies about five hundred kilometers up the coast from Roncevaux, north and west. I might have gone by ship as easily—more easily—but I wished to see the countryside, and I am somewhat subject to motion sickness. I chose Frenchman’s Landing to begin my work because what little is known about the aboriginal people of Sainte Anne indicates that they were most numerous in the meadowmeres there.
Q:	I am told it is a city set in a swamp.
A:	Hardly a city. The ground to the south rises after twenty kilometers or so, and there is agricultural land there—Frenchman’s Landing exists because it is a port for the farmers and stock-raisers.
Q:	You spent a great deal of time in that area?
A:	In the farming area? No. I went upriver. The land rises there too, but there aren’t many settlers.
Q:	One would think there would be; they could send their produce to market by water.
A:	The river is very shallow through the meadowmeres, and there are sandbars and mudbanks. A channel is kept dredged from the sea to Frenchman’s Landing, but that is as far as it goes. Besides, as soon as the hills rise above the meadowmeres there are rapids.
Q:	You have a fine eye for geography, Doctor, which is what I wished to ascertain by these questions. No doubt you could tell me a great deal about Port-Mimizon as well.
A:	The way in which a population supports itself is basic to anthropology. A fishing culture, for example, will be quite different from a hunting culture, and both different from an agricultural culture. Noticing that sort of thing becomes second nature.
Q:	A useful second nature it must be; a wise general might send you ahead of his army. Tell me—
Q:	Here you are, sir.
Q:	Ah! Do you know what my colleague has brought me, Doctor?
A:	How could I?
Q:	It is a file on the Hôtel Splendide. He wishes me to ask you questions concerning the hotel, not realizing that nearly any lapse of memory might be excused by five years’ absence, and that a spy might have lodged there as easily as a scientist. But we will exert ourselves to make him happy. Do you recall, for example, the name of your bellman?
A:	No. But I remember one thing about him.
Q:	Oh?
A:	I remember that he was free. Most of the menials I’ve seen here have been slaves.
Q:	So. You are not only a spy, but an ideologically motivated spy—is that it, Doctor?
A:	Of course I’m not a spy. And I am from Earth; if I am motivated by any ideology it is hers.
Q:	Doctor, Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne are called planetary twins; the phrase refers to more than their rotation about a common center. Both our worlds remained unknown when planets more distant from Earth had been colonized for decades. Both were originally found and settled by the French.
A:	Who lost the war.
Q:	Precisely. But now we had done with similarities; we begin to deal with differences. Do you know, Doctor, why we on Sainte Croix possess slaves while Sainte Anne does not?
A:	No.
Q:	When the fighting was over, the military commander here—to our good fortune—made a decision which proved to have great consequences. Perhaps I should say he made two. First, he decreed that every conquered Frenchman and Frenchwoman was subject to compulsory labor to rebuild the installations destroyed by the war—but he allowed those who could raise the money to purchase exemptions, and he set the price sufficiently low for most to do so.
A:	That was generous of him.
Q:	Not at all; the price was calculated to produce the maximum revenue. After all, a banker and his wife can stack cement bags—and will, under the whip—but what is their labor worth? Not a great deal. And, secondly, he ordered that continuity be maintained in all civilian administration below the central planetary government. That meant that many provinces, cities, and towns retained their French governors, mayors, and councils for years after the end of the war.
A:	I know. I saw a play about it last summer.
Q:	In the park? Yes, so did I; just children, of course, but they were charming. But the point of that play, Doctor, though you did not realize it and perhaps even the young actors did not, was that after losing the war it was still possible for the better French elements to retain a measure of power. They were never wholly stripped of authority, and now they are an influential element once more in the life of our world. At the same time they were regaining lost ground it became customary to increase the number of unremunerated workers from other sources, principally criminals and orphaned children, so that the slave caste lost its exclusively French character. On Sainte Anne every man of French descent is the bitter enemy of the government, with the result that Sainte Anne has become a camp armed against itself, where a colossal military establishment threatens citizens of every class. Here on Sainte Croix the French community is not hostile to the government—its leaders are a part of that government.
A:	Possibly my views are influenced by the fact that that government is holding me a prisoner.
Q:	It is a dilemma, is it not? You are hostile to us because you are a prisoner. But if you were no longer hostile, if you were willing to tender your full cooperation, you would be a prisoner no longer.
A:	You have my full cooperation. I’ve answered every question you’ve asked.
Q:	You are willing to confess? To name your contacts here?
A:	I haven’t done anything wrong.
Q:	Perhaps we had better talk some more then. Forgive me, Doctor, but I have lost my place; what was it we were discussing?
A:	I believe you were telling me that it was better to be a slave on Sainte Croix than free on Sainte Anne.
Q:	Oh, no. I would never tell you that, Doctor—it is not true. No, I must have been telling you that on Sainte Croix some men are free—in fact, most men are free. While on Sainte Anne and, for that matter, Earth, most are slaves. They are not called by that title, possibly because they are worse off. A slave’s owner has a sum of money tied up in him, and is obliged to take care of him—if he becomes ill, for example, to see that he receives treatment. On Sainte Anne and on Earth, if he does not have sufficient cash to pay for his own treatment he is left to recover or die.
A:	I believe that most of the nations of Earth have government programs to provide medical care for the people.
Q:	Then you see who their owners are. But aren’t you certain, Doctor? We thought you came from Earth.
A:	I was never ill there.
Q:	No doubt that explains it. But we have left our subject far behind. You journeyed by rail to Frenchman’s Landing. Did you remain there long?
A:	Two or three months. I interviewed people concerning the aborigines—the Annese.
Q:	You recorded these conversations.
A:	Yes. Unfortunately I lost the tapes while I was in the field.
Q:	But you had transcribed the more interesting interviews into your notebook.
A:	Yes.
Q:	Continue.
A:	While I was at Frenchman’s Landing I visited the sites actually or supposedly associated with the Annese. Then, with a local man I employed to assist me, I went into the field; specifically, into the hills above the meadowmeres and the mountains from which the Tempus rises. I found—
Q:	I don’t think we are much interested in your supposed discoveries on Sainte Anne, Doctor. In any case I have full reports on the talks you gave at the university. For how long did you remain, as you call it, “in the field”?
A:	For three years. That was in my talks.
Q:	Yes, but I wished to have it confirmed by your own lips. You are telling us that for three years you lived in the Temporal Mountains, winter and summer?
A:	No, in winter we—I, after my assistant died—came down into the foothills. Many of the Free People did as well.
Q:	But you remained isolated from civilization for three years? I find that difficult to believe. And when you returned you did not go back to Frenchman’s Landing, from which you had set out. You appeared instead—I believe appeared is the right word—at Laon, much farther down the coast.
A:	By going south I covered a good deal of ground that had been unfamiliar to me. If I had returned to Frenchman’s Landing I would have been passing over the same country I had seen on my way up.
Q:	Let us concentrate on the time between your appearance at Laon and the present; but I will make one last digression to point out that had you returned to Frenchman’s Landing, you could have notified the family of your late assistant in person of his death. As it was,” you merely sent a radiogram.
A:	That happens to be true, but I would like to know how you know it.
Q:	We have—shall I call him a correspondent?—in Laon. You have not commented on my digression.
A:	My assistant’s family, for which you feel this tender concern, consisted exclusively of his father—a dirty, drunken beggar. His mother had fought free of her husband years before.
Q:	There is no need to become angry, Doctor. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news. In addition to sending the radiogram, what did you do in Laon?
A:	Sold the one pack mule that had survived, and such of my equipment as was still serviceable. Bought new clothes.
Q:	And left for Roncevaux, this time by ship?
A:	Exactly.
Q:	And at Roncevaux?
A:	I audited several courses in the graduate school and attempted to interest the faculty in the results of my three years’ work. Since you will ask, I will tell you that I had little success; at Roncevaux they are convinced that the Free People are extinct, and so are uninterested in preserving those that remain, and much less in securing for them the minimum human rights; I wasn’t helped by the fact that they believe them to have had a paleolithic culture, which is also incorrect—the aboriginal culture was, and is, dendritic, the stage preceding the paleolithic. One might almost say predendritic.        I also took up smoking, put on eight kilos—mostly fat—and had my beard trimmed by the only man I’ve ever found who could do it correctly.
Q:	How long did you remain at Roncevaux?
A:	About a year; a little less.
Q:	Then you came here.
A:	Yes. At Roncevaux I had had the opportunity to catch up on the literature of my profession. I was anxious to talk to anyone in this system who was interested by its anthropological puzzles. The situation there was hopeless, so I boarded the starcrosser. We splashed down, out beyond the Fingers.
Q:	And you have remained here in Port-Mimizon ever since. I am surprised you did not proceed to the capital.
A:	I have found a great deal here to interest me.
Q:	Partly at six sixty-six Saltimbanque Street?
A:	Partly there, yes. As you are so fond of pointing out, I am young, and a scientist has desires like other men.
Q:	You found its proprietor remarkable?
A:	He is an unusual man, yes. Most medical men seem to employ their skill mostly to prolong the lives of ugly women, but he has found better things to do.
Q:	I am aware of his activities.
A:	Then perhaps you are also aware that his sister is an amateur anthropologist. That was what originally attracted me to the house.
Q:	Really.
A:	Yes, really. Why do you ask me questions if you don’t believe anything I tell you?
Q:	Because experience has taught me that you must occasionally let slip some fragment of truth. Here, do you recognize this?
A:	It looks like a book of mine.
Q:	It is a book of yours: A Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne. You carried it with you even when you left Sainte Anne and came here, although the rates for baggage in excess often pounds are quite high.
A:	The rates from Earth are much higher.
Q:	I doubt that you know that from experience. I suggest to you that the reason you carried this book with you had nothing to do with the book itself—that is, the printed matter and the illustrations. I suggest to you that you brought it for the sake of the numbers written on the last flyleaf.
A:	I suppose you’re about to tell me you’ve broken the code.
Q:	Don’t make jokes. Yes, we’ve broken the code, in a sense. These numbers describe the trajectory of a rifle bullet—the number of inches above or below the point of aim the bullet will strike when the rifle is sighted for three hundred yards. The table covers distances from fifty to six hundred yards—an impressive range. Shall I show you? See, at six hundred yards your bullet would strike eight inches below the place you aim at. It seemslike quite a lot, but if you had this table you could still rely on shooting your man in the head at six hundred yards.
A:	I could, possibly, if I were a good shot. I’m not.
Q:	Our ballisticians are even able to calculate, simply from examining this table, what sort of rifle it was intended for. You planned to use a .35 caliber rifle of high velocity, a type commonly employed here by those hunting wild boars. It is not difficult for a reputable person here to secure a permit for such a rifle if he has an interest in hunting.
A:	I had a rifle like that on Sainte Anne. I lost it in a deep pool of the Tempus.
Q:	Most unfortunate—but then you were planning to come here in the event, and it would have been impossible to ship. No matter, you could replace it after you landed.
A:	I have not applied for a permit.
Q:	We apprehended you too soon—do you expect to quote our own efficiency against us? You have referred to your notebook, to your supposed profession of anthropology.
A:	Yes.
Q:	I have read your notebook.
A:	You must be a fast reader.
Q:	I am. It is a tissue of fabrications. You speak of a haberdasher named Culot—do you think we do not know that culotte is the French for short trousers? It is an obsession of yours that physicians serve merely to keep ugly women alive—you referred to it only a moment ago. And in your notebook you give us a Dr Hagsmith. You appeared two years ago at Laon, where our agent saw you. You wore a heavy beard, as you do now, which would serve to conceal your real identity from any chance acquaintance you might meet. You said you had been living in the mountains for three years; and yet some of the equipment you sold was suspiciously new, including a pair of boots that had never been worn. Never in three years.        And here you sit, and tell me lies about Earth, where you have clearly never been, and pretend you do not understand that it is only by possessing slaves that any man can be truly free. All this, the captivity, the deceptions, the questionings, are new to you now; but they are old to me. Do you know what is going to happen to you? You will be returned to your cell, and afterward you will be brought here again, and I will talk to you again as I am doing now, and when I am finished I will go home and have dinner with my wife, and you will go back to your cell. In this way the months will go past, and the years. My wife and my children and I will go to the islands next June, but when we return you will be here still, more pallid and dirty and thin than ever. And in time, when the best part of your life is over and your health is ruined, we will have the truth, and no more lies.        Take him. Bring in the next.

There was nothing more on the tape. It spun in silence while the officer washed himself. He always washed when he had had a woman, not just his genitals, but beneath his arms and up and down his legs. He used a perfumed soap he reserved only for that purpose, but the same common enameled basin that would hold his morning shaving water. The washing was not only a prophylactic precaution, but a sensual experience. Cassilla’s saliva had streaked his body; now he felt pleasure in removing it.

Now they have brought me more paper, a whole thick pad of cheap paper and a bundle of candles. The first time they gave me paper, and the second, I felt certain they would read whatever I wrote, so I was very careful and wrote only what I believed would help my case. Now, I wonder. I have, in the past, put out little feelers, little tests. But they are never referred to in the interrogations. My handwriting is abominable I know, and I write so very much. It is, possible that someone is simply too lazy to decipher it all.
       Why is my hand so poor? My teachers, those ugly old women with their crabbed minds, had an immediate explanation: I held (and still hold) my pen incorrectly. But this, of course, is an explanation that does not explain. Why do I hold my pen badly? I remember very well the first day we were taught to write in school. The teacher showed us just how the pencil should be, then went to each seat and placed our own fingers on our own pencils. Holding mine as she showed me I could do nothing except draw—by dragging my whole arm across the page—weak and wiggling lines. I was paddled for it repeatedly, of course. When I came home my mother would take my trousers to the river, walking upstream for hours to get away from the sewers, and wash the blood out of them, leaving me ashamed and afraid, with an old blanket or a torn piece of sail wrapped around me. Eventually, by experimentation, I learned to hold the pencil as I now do this pen, clamped between my second and third fingers with my thumb quite free to do whatever it wishes. I was no longer the boy who could not write, but merely the boy whose penmanship was worst, and since there must be one such boy (it is never a girl) in each class I was no longer beaten.
       The answer, then, to why I hold the pen badly is that I cannot write if I hold it well. I have just been trying that system, for the first time in years, and find I still cannot do it.
       Do you know Dollo’s Law? From his studies of the carapaces of fossil turtles, the great Belgian formulated the Law of the Irreversibility of Evolution: An organ which degenerates during evolution never reacquires its original size, and an organ which disappears never reappears; if the offspring return to a mode of life in which the vestigial organ had an important function, the organ does not return to its original state, but the organism develops a substitute.

       I have been thinking about the location of this underground cell. I have often passed the citadel, both on foot and in a chase, and though it is large, it is not large enough to allow of any such straight underground passage as that we traversed. My cell, then, is technically outside the walls. Where then? The citadel fronts what is called the Old Square. To its right is a canal; I cannot be there because this cell, however chill, is dry. Behind it is a clutter of shops and tenements. (I bought a brass implement in one of the shops there once, because it fascinated me; a thing of clamps and toothed jaws and cruel little hooks. I am still unable to guess its use unless it was employed in the practice of veterinary medicine; I imagine it in the opened belly of a great dray horse, pushing away the liver, thrusting down the small intestine, and cramping the spleen to the spine while it gnaws at a diseased pancreas.) It seems highly unlikely that they would build cells under these, since it would make it far too easy for the prisoner’s friends (I am assuming a prisoner possessed of friends) to release him.
       To the left, however, is a complex of government offices; a tunnel connecting these with the citadel would seem a very reasonable construction and would allow the clerks and bureaucrats there to take refuge in the event of a civil disturbance without exposing themselves to attack on the streets. Once such a tunnel had been built it would surely seem logical—if more facilities or more secret facilities were needed for prisoners—to excavate cells in its side walls. I am almost surely, then, beneath one of those brick government buildings—possibly the Ministry of Records.

I have been asleep and had all sorts of dreams and let my candle burn out. I must be more careful; that they gave me candles and matches this time is no guarantee that they will be replaced when the present supply is gone. Inventory: eleven candles, thirty-two matches, a hundred and four sheets of still unused paper, and this pen which manufacturers its ink by drawing moisture from the air and with which a patient man so-minded could paint black the four walls of this cell. Fortunately I have never been a patient man.
       What did I dream of? The howling of beasts, the ringing of bells, women (when I can remember what I have dreamed I have nearly always dreamed of women, which I suppose makes me unusually blessed), the sounds of shuffling feet, and my own execution, which I dreamed of as having taken place in a vast deserted courtyard surrounded by colonnades. Five of the stalking robots used as guards in the prison camps above the city, which I have sometimes observed overseeing labor gangs at work on the roads, were my executioners. A crisp command from invisible lips—blinding blue-white light from the lasers—myself falling, my hair and beard on fire.
       But the dream of women—actually, of a woman, a girl—has set my mind again upon a theory I formulated when I was living in the mountains. It is so simple a theory, so obviously true, so self-evident that it seemed to me at that time that everyone must have thought of it; but I mentioned it several times to various people at the university at Roncevaux, and most of them looked at me as if I were mad. It is simply this: that all the things we consider beautiful in a woman are merely criteria for her own survival and thus the survival of the children we shall father in her. In the main (ah, Darwin!) those who followed these criteria in their ambushes of the female (for we do not really pursue them, do we? We are not swift enough. We leap upon them from cover, having lulled their suspicions) populated the worlds—we are their descendants; while those who flouted them saw, in the long prehistory of man, thejr children torn by bears and wolves.
       And so we seek long-legged girls, because a long-legged girl is swift to fly danger; and for the same reason a girl who is tall, but not too tall—a girl will be swiftest at a height of about a hundred and eighty centimeters, or a little more. Thus, men will crowd around a girl as tall as an ordinary tall man (and her shorter sisters will lengthen the heels of their shoes and thicken the soles to seem like her). But a girl too tall will run clumsily, and one of, say, two hundred and twenty centimeters will almost never find a husband.
       In the same way the femal pelvis must be wide enough to pass living infants (but not too wide or, again, she will be slow) and every man gauges the width of those bones when the girl has passed. Breasts there must be or our children will starve as babes—so our instincts tell us still, and though a thin girl can run well, one too thin will have no milk when there is no food.
       And the face. It has troubled artists ever since the fading of superstition allowed human portraiture—they decide what shall be beautiful, then marry a woman with crooked teeth in a wide mouth. When we look at their pictures of the great beauties of history, the idols of the populace, the mistresses of kings, the great courtesans, what do we see? That one has mismatched eyes and another a large nose. The truth is that men care nothing for any of these things, and want vivacity and a smile. (Will she see the danger, will she kill the son of my loins in her rage?)
       The girl in my dream, you ask, what of her? Shadowy, but as I have described. Naked. No woman arouses me who wears even a wisp of clothing; and once at Roncevaux when I tried to slake my passion with a girl who did not divest herself .of a sort of halter, I was a sad failure. I wanted to tell her what was wrong, but was afraid she would laugh, then at last I did and she laughed, but not as I had feared, and told me of a man who made her wear a ring—which he brought in his pocket, and took from her finger as soon as possible, since it was a valuable one—and could do nothing without it; (and since I have been here on Sainte Croix I have heard of a man who, being unable to penetrate the walls of a convent, clothes a girl in the habit of a nun and then dis- robes her). When we had both made fun of that, she did as I asked, and I found she wore her halter to conceal a scar, which I kissed.
       As for the girl in my dream, I will write only that we did nothing which, recounted here, would excite passion at all—in dreams a look, or the vision of a thought, is enough.

So. I have candles now, and matches, a pen and paper. Does that mean a relaxation in the official attitude toward me? This cell does not indicate it—it is worse than the 143 where I was before, and I know that that 143 was not a good cell. In fact, from what Forty-seven (who used to tap messages to me when I was in that cell) told me, his was a better cell than mine; it was larger, and had a cover for the sanitary pail; and he said there were other cells that had glass windows inside the bars to keep out the cold and a few with curtains and chairs. When I had the rib bone I found in my soup one day, I could converse very well with Forty-seven. Once he asked me about my political beliefs—because I had told him I was a political prisoner—and I told him I belonged to the Laissez-Faire Party.

YOU MEAN THAT YOU BELIEVE BUSINESS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO OPERATE WITHOUT INTERFERENCE? I SEE—YOU ARE AN INDUSTRIALIST.
       NOT AT ALL. I BELIEVE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE LET ALONE. WE OF THE LAISSEZ-FAIRE TREAT OFFICIALS AS DANGEROUS REPTILES: THAT IS, WE GIVE THEM GREAT RESPECT, BUT AS WE CANNOT KILL THEM, WE HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM. WE NEVER ATTEMPT TO OBTAIN A CIVIL SERVICE POST, OR TELL THE POLICE ANYTHING UNLESS WE ARE CERTAIN OUR NEIGHBORS HAVE TOLD THEM ALREADY.
       THEN IT IS YOUR FATE TO BE TYRANNIZED.
       I rapped: IF WE LIVE ON THE SAME WORLD, CAN THERE BE TYRANNY OVER YOU AND NOT OVER ME?
       BUT I RESIST.
       IT IS ENERGY WE RESERVE FOR OTHER PURPOSES.
       AND LOOK WHERE . . .

Poor Forty-seven.
       This cell. Let me describe this cell, now full of yellow candle-light. It is only a trifle over a meter high—say, one meter, ten centimeters. When I lie on this gritty floor (which I do a great deal, as you may imagine), I can almost touch the ceiling with my feet without raising my hips. This ceiling, as I should have said before, is concrete; also the walls (no tapping here, not even the scrapings and creakings of the poor madman next to me when I was above ground; it may be that the ceils to either side of mine are empty; or possibly the builders left a thickness of earth between the wails to muffle sound) and my floor are concrete, My door is iron.
       But my eel) is larger than you might think. It is wider than I can spread my arms, and longer than I am when I lie with my arms stretched over my head; so it is no torture box, though it would be nice to be able to stand up. There is a sanitary pail (with no lid), but no bedding; there are no windows, of course—wait, I retract that—the door has a little Judas, though since it is always dark in the corridor outside, it does ma no good, and it may be that I was given the candles only so they could observe me, and the paper only so that I would burn them. There is an opening at the bottom of the door like a very large letter slot, through which I pass my food bowl. I have my matches and candles, paper and pen; the candle flame is making a black spot on the ceiling.
       What is the progress of my case? That is the question. That I have been put in this cell suggests that it is going badly, that I have been given candles and writing materials leads me to hope. It may be that there are two opinions about me on that level (whatever it is) where opinions matter: one thinks me innocent, wishes me well, sends the candles; the other, thinking me guilty, orders me confined here.
       Or possibly it is the one who thinks me guilty who wishes me well. Or the candles and paper (and this is what I fear) may be only a mistake; soon the guard may come to take them away.

I have made a discovery! A real discovery. I know where I am. After writing that last, I blew out my candle and lay down and tried to sleep again, and with my ear against the floor I could hear the sound of bells. If I took my ear from the floor I could not hear them at all, but if I pressed against it they were there, for as long as the ringing lasted. The corridor outside my door, then, runs under the Old Square toward the cathedral; and I must be near its foundations with the sound transmitted by the stones of the bell tower. Every few minutes now, I press my ear to the wall and listen again. For all the time I lived in the city I cannot remember how often the cathedral bells rang, except that I know they did not strike the hours like a clock.
       At home there was no cathedral, but several churches, and for a time we lived close to that of St Madeleine. I remember the bells ringing at night—I suppose for a midnight mass—but it did not frighten me as other sounds did. Often the ringing did not wake me, but if it did I would sit up in my bed and look for my mother, who would also be sitting up, her beautiful eyes shining like shards of green glass in the dark. Any sound woke her, but when my father came stumbling home she would pretend to be asleep and make herself as unattractive as possible, something she could do without your noticing—even if you were watching her—with the muscles of her face. I have the same ability, though not to the extent she did; but I chose to cover everything with this beard instead, because I was afraid of it—frightened of myself—and needed only to make my voice like his and look older. But it does not do to be too clever, and I suppose I have been here more than long enough to have a beard now even if it had been clean-shaven when I was arrested.
       I suppose, too, I grew my beard for my mother, to show her—if I were ever to find her again (and there seemed to be some reason to think, at Roncevaux, that she had come here)—that I am now a man. She never told me, but I know now that among the Free People a boy remains a boy until his beard sprouts. When he has enough to protect his throat from the teeth of the other men he is a man. (What a fool I was. I thought when she left, and for many years after, that she had gone because she was shamed by me, having found me with that girl; I know now that she had only been waiting until the milk-task was done. I had wondered why she smiled at me then.)

I had thought she would go into the hills and so went there myself when the chance came, but she did not. She should have, and I, when I found myself there, should have stayed. But it is terribly hard; half the children die, and no one lives to be old. And so we—my mother and I come down to the town, together or separately, when winter is coming. So see where I am, I who laughed at poor Forty-seven.

Much later. A meal, tea and soup, the soup in the old battered tin bowl they gave me here (above ground, utensils came with the meal and had to be returned afterward) and the tea, black tea with sugar in it, in the same bowl after I had emptied it, with the thin grease from the soup floating on top. When he gave me my soup the guard said: “There’s tea. Let’s have your cup.” I told him I didn’t have one, and he just grunted and went on, but when he came back from feeding the cells farther along, he asked me if I had finished my soup, and when I said I had, he told me to put out my bowl again and I got the tea.
       Is it this guard who, acting on his own initiative, gave me the candles and paper? If so, it may be only that he feels sorry for me, and that must be because I am going to be executed.

The bells have rung three times since I wrote last. Vespers? Nones? The Angelus? I don’t know. I have slept again, and dreamed. I was very small and my mother—at least I think the girl was my mother—was holding me on her lap. My father was rowing us on the river, as he often did then, while he was still fond of fishing; I saw the reeds bowing to the wind all about us, and there were yellow flowers floating around the boat, but the odd thing about my dream was that I knew everything that I was to learn later, and I looked at my father, who seemed a red-bearded giant, and knew what would happen to his hands so that he could no longer follow his trade. My mother—yes, I am sure it was she, though I never understood how one of the Free People could bear a child to my father—had been buttoned into her yellow dress by him, and had the happy, tumbled look of a woman who had been dressed by a man; she smiled when he spoke, and I laughed; we all smiled. I suppose it was only some memory come back in the dream, and in those days he must have seemed an ordinary man, possibly a little more fond of talk than most, who lived on bread and meat and coffee and wine; it was only when he hadn’t them anymore, not for himself or to give to us, that we found he lived on words.

No, I have not been sleeping. I have been lying here for hours in the dark, listening to the cathedral bells and polishing my bowl, in the dark, with my poor torn trousers.
       They were very good trousers once. I bought them last spring, not having brought any summer clothes—or any clothes at all except the ones I had on ­ from Sainte Anne. It is not economical to do so, and it would be more sensible if everyone crossed naked and bought all new on Sainte Croix. As it is, the clothing worn on board is free weight, and so everyone (at least in winter, when I came) buys the heaviest possible winter suit for the crossing. There is also a small allowance of free baggage weight, but I used that to bring the books I had had with me in the back of beyond.
       But these were very good summer trousers, part of a good summer suit, with silk from the southern continent blended with linen in the weave. This silk is a native product (as opposed to the linen, which is grown from seed brought from Earth), and we do not have it on Sainte Anne. It is produced by the young of a kind of mite which, when they have hatched from the egg sac, wait on blades of grass until they sense an updraft, then spin an invisibly slender thread which, rising like a fakir’s rope, eventually lifts them high into the air. Those who light elsewhere in the grasslands are safe and begin new lives, but every year a great many are blown out to sea, where these tangled threads, like lost memories floating on time past, form great mats as much as five kilometers long and covering hundreds of hectares. The mats are collected by boats and brought to factories ashore where they are fumigated, carded, and spun into thread for the textile industry. Since the mites are extremely resistant to fumigation—I have been told that they can survive for as long as five days without oxygen—and live as parasites in the cardiovascular systems of warm-blooded hosts, the slaves who do the work are not long-lived. Once when I was at the university here, I was shown films of a new model housing area for them. A cemetery dating from French times had been destroyed to make way for it, and the whitewashed walls were all of rammed earth and bones.
       My object in polishing my bowl was not cleanliness but the hope of seeing my own reflection. I have called it tin, but it is (I think) actually pewter, and although no one is more helpless with tools than I, I can hold a rag and scrub something with it; and so I have been doing that, up until a short while ago, as I lay here in the dark, shivering and listening to the bells. I polished it inside and out, very hard. Of course I couldn’t see how shiny it was getting, or if it was getting shiny at all, and I didn’t want to waste the candle looking—besides, I had plenty of time. Once the guard brought some boiled barley and I ate it quickly, both because I hoped there might be tea afterward if I did (there was not) and because I wanted to get back to my polishing. Finally I became tired and wanted to write instead, and so I set the bowl down and struck a match to light my candle. I thought, theiy that my mother was somehow in my cell with me, for I saw her eyes in the dark. I dropped the match and sat hugging my knees and crying while all the bells rang, until the guard came kicking my door and asking what the trouble was.
       When he had gone I lit the candle. The eyes, of course, were the reflections of my own in my polished bowl, which shines now like dull silver. I should not have cried, but I really think that in some way I am still a child. This is a terrible thing, and I have sat here and thought about it for a long time since I wrote the last sentence.
       How could my mother have taught me to become a man? She knew nothing, nothing. It may be that my father never allowed her to learn. She did not think it wrong to steal, I remember; but I believe she seldom took anything unless he told her—occasionally food. If she had eaten she wanted nothing, and then if someone wanted her to go with him, my father had to force her. She tried to teach me all I would need to know to live where I was not living and am not living now. How am I to know what there was of this place and that place I did not learn? I do not even know what human maturity is, except that I do not possess it and find myself among men (smaller, many of them, than I) who do.
       At least half of me is animal. The Free People are wonderful, wonderful as the deer are or the birds or the tire-tiger as I have seen her, head up, loping as a lilac shadow on the path of her prey; but they are animals. I have been looking in the bowl at my face, pulling my beard back as much as I could with my hands, wetting it from the sanitary pail so that I could see the structure of myself, and it is an animal’s mask I see, with a muzzle and blazing animal eyes. I can’t speak; I have always known that I do not really speak like others, but only make certain sounds in my mouth—sounds enough like human speech to pass the Running Blood ears that hear me; sometimes I do not even know what I have said, only that I have dug my hole and passed to run singing into the hills. Now I cannot speak at all, but only growl and retch.
       Later. It is colder, and I can hear the bells even when I drive my hands against my ears. If I press my ear to the stone I hear shovels scraping, and the shuffling of feet; and so I know where it is I am. This cell is beneath the cathedral floor itself, and since they bury the dead in that floor, with their gravestones paving the aisles and pews, the graves are above me, and it may be my own that they are digging; there, once I am safely dead, they will say masses for me, the distinguished scientist from the mother world. It is an honor to be buried in the cathedral, but I would wish instead a certain dry cave high in one of the cliffs that overlook the river. Let the birds build their nests in the front of my cave, and I will lie in mine at the back, until the pink sun is always red, with dark scars across her face like the coal of a cigarette going out.

April 12. A very disturbing thing has happened, and one of the most disturbing elements . . .
       Never mind. Let me describe the day. We followed the riverbank, as planned, for most of the day, although it was plain that we were unlikely to find any sort of cave among the sandbanks of its margin, and the boy insists that we are still much too far downstream. About the middle of the afternoon the weather began to look bad, the first bad weather we have had on the trip. I oiled the guns as we walked along, and buttoned them into their covers; ahead we could see the great black thunderheads building up, and it was obvious that the course of the storm would be east and south—that is, straight down the valley of the Tempus toward us. At the boy’s suggestion we left the river and went a mile or more at right angles to the channel, since he felt there was the possibility of a flash flood. When we reached the top of a knoll we stopped and set up the tent, I not relishing the idea of doing it later in the rain. We had no more than gotten everything staked down when the first howling wind came, then pelting rain and hail. I told the boy that we would cook after the storm was over, got into my bag, and for God knows how long lay there wondering if the tent was going to hold. I have never in my life heard another wind that howled like that one, but eventually it died down until there was just the rain pounding the fabric of the tent, and I went to sleep.
       When I woke the rain had stopped; everything seemed very quiet, and the air had that fresh, washed smell that follows a storm. I got up and discovered that the boy was gone.
       I called once or twice, but there was no answer. After casting about for a few minutes it occurred to me that the most probable explanation was that when he had begun to prepare our supper he had missed some article of kitchen gear and had decided to retrace a few miles of our route in the hope of finding it. Accordingly I took a flashlight and (don’t ask me why, except that I was in a hurry) the light rifle, and went looking for him myself. The sun was low, but not yet down.
       Ten minutes’ hard walking brought me to the river, and I saw the boy standing there with the water a little past his waist, scrubbing himself with sand. I called to him and he called back, superficially very innocent, but with an underlying confusion I could sense. I asked him why he had left camp without telling ­me, and he said simply that he felt dirty and wanted a bath, and besides, he needed more water for cooking than we had in the canteens, and had not wanted to waken me. It all sounded reasonable enough, and I still cannot show that that is not exactly what happened and, in fact, all that happened; but I am certain in my own mind that he is lying, and that someone—other than the two of us—was in camp while I slept; the boy has, transparently, been with a woman. It shows in everything he says and does. I believe that twenty pounds or so of our smoked meat is missing, and while I have no objection to his giving it to his maidenlove—we have plenty after all—it is properly mine and not his. I intend to get to the bottom of this.
       At any rate, after I had questioned the boy for five minutes or so without getting anything more satisfactory from him than the answers I have outlined above, we began to make our way back to camp, the boy carrying a kitchen pot full of water. The sun had set by this time, though there was still some light. We were almost within sight of the tent when I heard one of the mules scream—a horrible noise, as though a big powerful man were being flayed alive and had broken completely under the pain.
       I ran toward the sound, while the boy (very sensibly) made for the tent to get the other rifle. As nearly as I could make out, the mule was on the far side of clump of brush near the base of the knoll. Instead of running around the brush—as no doubt I should have—I went crashing through it, and came face to face with the most hideous animal I have ever seen, a creature patched of hyena, bear, ape, and man, with short, extremely powerful jaws and human eyes that looked straight at me with precisely the savage, stupid, skid row murder expression of a fighting mad, broken-bottle-swinging derelict. It had huge, high-hunched shoulders; forelegs as thick as a man’s body, ending in stubby fingers studded with claws like tenpenny nails, and the whole animal reeked of filth and rotting flesh.
       I fired three times with the light rifle without bothering to bring it to my shoulder, and the brute spun away from me and made off through the brush with great bounding leaps like an ape. By the time the boy came running up with the heavy rifle, it was gone. I feel certain I hit it, and more than once, but how much damage the little high-velocity bullets may have done to a beast like that, I can’t guess—I’m afraid not much.
       My Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne leaves no doubt as to what our marauder was—a ghoul-bear (interestingly, the boy knows this animal under the same name). The Field Guide calls it a scavenger, but one paragraph of the description indicates that it is more than willing to destroy livestock if the opportunity offers:

. . . so called because of its habit of despoiling any recent burial not protected by a metal casket. It is a powerful digger, and will move large stones in order to reach a body. If confronted boldly it will usually flee, often carrying the disinterred corpse under one foreleg. It may enter farmyards where animals have been recently butchered, at which time it is likely to attack cattle or sheep.

I had to shoot the mule (one of the grays), which had been too badly mauled to survive. We have redistributed its load among the other two, over which the boy and I will stand alternate guards with the heavy rifle.

April 15. We are far up into the hills now. No more disasters since I wrote last, but no discoveries either. We now have a tire-tiger following us as well as the wounded ghoul-bear (which we have seen twice since I shot it). We hear the tiger screaming, usually an hour or two after midnight, and the boy positively identifies it. The day after the mule was killed (the thirteenth) I backtracked two hours in the hope of catching the ghoul-bear over the body. I was too late; the dead mule had been torn to bits, and everything but the hoofs and the largest bones consumed, also some of the carabao meat we had abandoned to lighten the animals. Wfiere the mule’s carcass had been I saw hundreds of footprints left by a number of species. Some very small tracks might have been those of human children, but I cannot be sure. No more signs of the girl who (I am still certain) visited the boy, and he will say nothing about her.

April 16. We have lost one camp follower at least—this by converting her into an expedition member. The boy has succeeded in luring the eat into camp and more or less taming her with scraps of food; and with little fish, which he catches very dextrously with his hands. She is still too shy to allow me to come close, but I wish we could take care of the tire-tiger as easily.

An interview with the boy:
Self: “You say that yon have often met living Annese—other than yourself—when you and your mother were staying in the back of beyond. Do you think that if we met any they would show themselves to us? Or would they run away?”
V. R. T.: “They are afraid.”
Self: “Of us?”
V. R. T.: (Silent)
Self: “Is it because the settlers have killed so many?”
V. R. T.: (Very quickly) “The Free People are good—they do not steal unless others have plenty—they will work—they can herd cattle—find horses—scare away the fire-fox.”
Self: “You know I wouldn’t shoot one of the Free People, don’t you? I only want to ask them .questions, to study them. You’ve read Miller’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Didn’t you notice that the anthropologists never harm the people they’re studying?”
V. R. T.: (Stares at me)
Self: “Do you think the Free People are frightened of us just because I shoot game to eat? That doesn’t mean I would shoot one of them.”
V. R. T.: “You leave the meat on the ground; you could hang it in the trees so that the Free People and the Shadow children could climb and get it. Instead you leave it on the ground and the ghoul-bear and tire-tiger follow us.”
Self: “Oh, is that what’s bothering you? If there is any more meat and I give you some rope, will you hang it up for me? For them?”
V. R. T.: “Yes. Dr Marsch . . .”
Self: “Yes, what is it?”
V. R. T.: “Do you think I could ever become an anthropologist?”
Self: “Why yes, you’re an intelligent young man, but it would take a great deal of study, and you would have to go to college. How old are you?”
V. R. T.: “Sixteen now. I know about college.”
Self: “You seem older than that—would say seventeen at least. Are you counting in Earth years?”
V. R. T.: “No, Sainte Anne years. They are longer here, and besides we of the Free People grow up very fast. I can look older than this if I want to, but I didn’t want to change too much from when you first saw me and hired our boat. You don’t really mink I could go to college though, do you?”
Self: “Yes, I do. I didn’t say I thought you could go directly into college; your preparatory work probably hasn’t been good enough, and you would have to study for several years first, and learn at least the rudiments of a foreign language—but I forgot, you already have some French.”
V. R. T.: “Yes, I already know French. Would it be mostly reading?”
Self: (Nods) “Mostly reading.”
V. R. T.: “I know you think I’m uneducated because I talk strangely, but I only do it because it’s the way my father taught me—to get money from people; but I can talk any way I wish. You don’t believe me, do you?”
Self: “You’re talking very well now—I think you’re imitating me, aren’t you?”
V. R. T.: “Yes, I’ve taught myself to speak as you do. Now listen; do you know Dr Hagsmith? I’ll do Dr Hagsmith.” (In an excellent imitation of Hagsmith’s voice:) “ ‘It’s all falsity; everything Is false, Dr Marsch. Wait, let me tell you a story. Once in the iong dreaming days when Trackwalker was shaman of the abos, there was a girl called Three Faces. An abo girl, you see, and she used the colored clays the abos found by the river to paint a face on each breast—one face, sir, forever saying No!—that was the left breast—and the other, the right, painted to say Yes! She met a cattle-drover in the back of beyond who fell very much in love with her, and she turned her right breast toward him! Well, sir, they lay together all night in the pitch darkness that you find at night in the back of beyond, and he asked her to come and live with him and she said she would, and learn to cook and keep house and do all the things human women do. But when the sun rose he was still asleep, and when he got up later she had gone and washed herself in the river—that’s for forgetfulness in the tales, you see—and had only her one, natural face; and when he reminded her of all the things she had promised in the dark, she stood and stared at him and wouldn’t talk, and when he tried to take hold of her, she ran away.’ ”
Self: “That’s an interesting bit of folklore, Dr Hagsmith. Is that the end of the story?”
V. R. T.: “ ‘No. When the drover began to dress himself—after the girl was gone—he found he had the images of the two faces on his own chest, the Yes! face on his left side and the No! face on his right. He put his shirt on over them and rode into Frenchman’s Landing where there was a man who did tattoos and had him trace them with the tattoo needle. People say that when the drover died the undertaker skinned his chest inside the coat, and that he has the two faces of Three Faces preserved, rolled with cardamom in his desk drawer in the mortuary and tied with a black ribbon; but don’t ask me if it’s true—I haven’t seen them.’ ”

April 21. The strain of staying up half the night to protect our animals has become unbearable. Tonight—now—I am going to kill at least one of the predators who have been following us for the last ten days. I have shot a prance-pony—not killing it, but just breaking one leg; it is tethered in the clearing below me. As I write this, I am sitting in the fork of a tree, thirty feet or so above the ground, with the heavy rifle and this notebook to keep me company; the night is very clear; Sainte Croix hangs in the sky like a great blue light.

Now about two hours later. Nothing except a glimpse of a H. fennec. The thing that bothers me is that I know, I feel absolutely certain—call it telepathy or whatever you like—that while I am up here, the boy is with the woman who visited him before. He is supposed to be guarding the mules. That girl is Annese; I suspected it before and now I know it; he told that story to rub my nose in it, and no one else would live in these God-forsaken hills anyway. All that he would have to do would be to tell her that I wouldn’t harm her, and the expedition would be a success and I would be famous. I could climb down and catch them together (I know she is with him, I can almost hear them), except that I can smell the ghoul-bear somewhere near. They would tie, the two of them—when the boy was washing I noticed he wasn’t circumcised. If they were like that when I came, I think I would shoot them both.

Later. There is a new prisoner, I think about five cells down from mine. Seeing him brought in, has, I think, saved me from losing my mind; for that I do not thank him—sanity, after all, is only reason applied to human affairs, and when this reason, applied over years, has resulted in disaster, destruction, despair, misery, starvation, and rot, the mind is correct to abandon it. This decision to discard reason, I see now, is not the last but the first reasonable act; and this insanity we are taught to fear consists in nothing but responding naturally and instinctively rather than with the culturally acquired, mannered thing called reason; an insane man talks nonsense because like a bird or a cat he is too sensible to talk sense.
       Our new prisoner is a middle-aged fat man, very probably a businessman of the kind who works for others. My candle had burned out, and I was sitting here with my head on my knees when the faint sounds—we don’t have the soundproof, shatter-proof glass in the spy holes down here that all the doors had on the upper floors, but only a wire grille—reached me through the Judas. I thought it was the guard with food, and knelt at the door to watch him coming: there were two guards this time, the usual one with his flashlight and a uniformed stranger who might have been a soldier, the two of them holding our gross, frightened man between them and going crabwise in the narrow corridor, with him looking so white I laughed at him (which frightened him more); because the Judas is so small I could only show my eyes or my lips, not both together; but I let them have them alternately, less than waist-high to him as they took him past my door, and I shouted to him, “What have you done? What have you done?” and he sobbed, “Nothing, nothing!” which made me laugh more, not only at him but at myself because I could speak again, and most of all because I knew he had nothing to do with me, was not a part of me in any way, not of Sainte Anne, not of the university or fHe lodginghouse here or the Cave Canem or the dusty shop where I bought my brass implement, but simply a gross, frightened man who meant nothing and would be my neighbor now but nothing else at all to me.

I have been interrogated again. Not the usual thing. Something different was in the air, and I don’t know what. He began with the regular bullying, then became friendly, offered me a cigarette - something he has not done in weeks—and even unbent so far as to recite a satirical little verse ridiculing academic degrees, which for him meant it was a party. I decided to take advantage of the jollity and asked for another cigarette; to my own astonishment I got it, and after that instead of more questions, a long lecture on the wonders of government on Sainte Croix, as though I had applied for citizenship Then a short lecture pointing out that they had neither tortured me nor drugged me, both perfectly true. He attributed this to the nobility and humanity native to all sharp-chinned, hunch-shouldered Croix-codiles, but my own opinion is that it is due to a sort of arrogance, a feeling that they don’t need those things and can break me, or anyone, without them.
       He said one thing in this connection that interested me: that a certain doctor whom they knew and who cooperated with them when they required him could have gotten everything they wanted from me in a few minutes. He seemed to expect me to react in some way to this remark. It might have meant they were no longer interested in my case, but this seemed unlikely since certain indirect questions had been scattered throughout the interview; or that they have already gotten information from some other source, but this also seems improbable since there is none to get. The best interpretation seemed to me to be that this doctor is no longer available, and since I thought, or at least suspected (whether by a flash of insight or because of something said earlier, I’m not certain now) that I knew who he was, I commented that it was too bad they hadn’t questioned me under drugs while they could, since it would have proved my innocence, but that I was sure they’d find someone just as good soon.
       “No. He was unique—an artist. We could find someone else, surely. But for someone half as skilled we have to send to the capital.”
       I said: “I know someone who might be able to help you. The man who operates a place called the Maison du Chien. He certainly doesn’t seem too particular about what he does if he’s paid well, and he has a great reputation.”
       The look he gave me was answer enough. The whoremaster is dead.
       I could have told him—though he would not have believed me—that he would have been dealing with the same man if he employed the son in his place; but no doubt the young one is under arrest by now; he might even be in another part of this building. His aunt—biologically his daughter, but I will use the same designation the family does to save confusion—will by this time be trying to get him out.
       Perhaps (this is the first time I have thought of it) she is trying to secure my release as well; she possessed real intelligence as well as a fascinating mind, and we had a number of long talks—often with one or more of her “girls”, as she called them, for audience. Where are you now, Tante Jeannine? Do you even know they have me?
       She believed, though she pretended not to, that the Annese have devoured and replaced homo sapiens—Veil’s Hypothesis, and she is Veil; it has been used for years to discredit other heterodox theories about the original population of Sainte Anne. But who, then, Tante Jeannine, are the Free People? Conservatives who would not desert the old ways? The question is not, as I once thought, how much the thoughts of the Shadow children influence reality; but how much our own do. I have read the interview with Mrs Blount—a hundred times while I was in the hills—and I know who I believe the Free People to be: I call it Liev’s Postpostulate. I am Liev and I have left.

The new prisoner has been talking. He asked if there was anyone in the other cells and what their names were and when we would be fed and if it were possible to get bedding and a hundred other things. Of course no one answered him—anyone caught talking is beaten. After a while, when I realized the guard was away, I warned him. He was silent then for a long time, then asked me in a voice he thought very soft and secret, “Who was the madman who laughed at me when they brought me here?” By that time the guard had returned, and that great fat man screamed like a rose-rabbit in a noose when they pulled him out of his cell for the whips. Poor bastard.

Incredible! You will never guess where I am! Go on—you may have as many guesses as you want.
       That is foolishness, of course, but I feel foolish, so why not out with it. I am back in the other 143, my old place above ground, with a mattress and a blanket, and light that comes in through the window—even if there’s no glass and the chill comes in, too, at night. It looks like a palace.
       Forty-seven started tapping the pipe about an hour after I got here; he had heard some sort of gossip about my return and sent his greetings. He says this cell was empty while I was gone. I have lost the soupbone I used to use, but I replied as well as I could with my knuckles. The prisoner next to me knew I was back, too, and began tapping and scraping the wall between us in the old way, but still has not learned the code or is using a different one I cannot decipher. The \sounds are so various I think sometimes he must be trying to talk with his noises.

Next day. Does this mean they are going to release me? The best meal last night since being arrested—bean soup, thick, with real pieces of pork in it. Tea with lemon and sugar. They gave me a big tin mug of it, and there was milk with the bread this morning. Then out of my cell for a bath in the shower room with five others, and insect powder for my hair, beard, and groin. I have a different blanket, fairly new and almost clean—better than the one I had before. I am writing now with it wrapped around my shoulders. Not because I am cold, but just to feel it

Another interrogation, this one not by Constant but by a man I have never seen before who introduced himself as Mr Jabez. Fairly young, good civilian clothing. He gave me a cigarette and told me he was risking typhus by talking to me—he should have seen me before they let me wash. When I asked him for another blanket and more paper he showed me that he had some of the pages I had written earlier in his file, and complained about the work it would take to have them transcribed. Since I knew there was nothing harmful in them I suggested he have them photocopied instead if he wanted (as he implied he might) to send them to someone of higher rank; but I don’t think T should let them take what I have here now. I let my imagination range pretty freely about my life with my parents on Earth—to tell the truth, I was thinking of doing a novel, a great many books have been written in prisons—and it would only confuse my case. I will destroy the pages at the first opportunity.

Midnight or past. Fortunately they let me keep my candles and matches, or I could not write this. I had gone to sleep when a guard came in, took me by the shoulder, and told me I was “wanted”. My first thought was that I was to die; but he was grinning in a way that made that seem improbable, and I thought then that it was to be some nasty but half-funny indignity like getting my head shaved.
       He took me to a room just at the edge of the cell area and shoved me in, and there waiting for me was Celestine Etienne, the girl from Mme Duclose’s lodginghouse. It must be the height of summer outside now, for she was dressed as if to attend an evening mass on a summer Sunday—a pink dress without sleeves, white gloves, and a hat. I know I used to think her tall as a stork, but the truth is that she looked a pretty creature there, with her big, frightened, blue-violet eyes. She stood when I came in, and said, “Oh, Doctor, how thin you look.”
       There was one chair, a light we could not turn off, a wall mirror (which meant, I feel sure, that we were being observed from the next room) and an old, sagging bed with clean sheets stretched over a mattress it was probably better not to see.
       And, surprisingly, a bolt on the inside of the door. We talked for a time afterward, and she told me that the day after I was arrested a man from the city treasurer’s office had come to see her and told her that on Thursday of the following week—the day she was to see me—at eight p.m. precisely, she was to report herself to the Bureau of Licences. She had, and had been kept waiting until eleven, when an official told her she could see no one that night as they w,ere closing the office, but to come back in two weeks. She had known very well, she said, what was being done, but had been afraid not to go every two weeks as they told her. Tonight she had no sooner sat down on the bench in the waiting room than the same official who had always dismissed her at eleven appeared and suggested that she go here to the citadel instead, adding that her presence at the Bureau of Licences would not be required again in the foreseeable future. She had stopped by Mme Duclose’s to put on scent and changed her frock, and come here.

And that is enough. It has been a pleasure writing all this, seeing my pen leave its weeks’-long spidery trail of black, but the sight of my earlier writings in the new interrogator’s file folder was somewhat disturbing. I am fairly certain the guard is asleep in the corridor outside, and I intend to burn everything, page by page, in the flame of my candle.

The transcription ended in the middle of a sheet with a notation giving the place, time, and date on which the originals had been confiscated from the prisoner.

You must excuse my writing in this entry, and I suppose some of the subsequent entries as well. An absurd accident has occurred which I will explain when the time comes. I have killed the tire-tiger and the ghoul-bear, the latter over the tire-tiger’s body the night after. The tiger sprang at me when I climbed down from the tree, where I had waited for it all night. I suppose I should have been badly mauled, but I got nothing more than a few scratches from the thorns when the animal’s body knocked me down.

The officer laid down the canvas-bound journal and rummaged for the tattered school composition book with the note about the shrike. When he found the book he glanced at the first few pages, nodded to himself, and picked up the journal again.

April 23. Came back to camp after shooting the tire-tiger as I described above and found no one with the boy except the cat that had been following us. The boy had enticed it into his lap and was sitting—as he always used to when he wasn’t cooking—with his back to the fire and the cat on his knees. I was very excited about the tire-tiger, of course, and began talking about it, and went over and picked up the cat to show him where my shots had hit. The cat twisted her head around and sank her teeth into my hand. It wasn’t bad yesterday when I got the ghoul-bear, but is sore today. I have bandaged it and applied an antibiotic powder.

April 24. Hand still bad, as you see from the writing. Without the boy I don’t know what I’d do. He has done everything, most of the work, for the entire trip. We talked today about whether we should break camp and go on upstream, and ended deciding to stay here today and leave tomorrow unless my hand is worse. It is a good spot. There is a tree, which is always lucky, and a long grassy slope running down to the river; the river flows quickly here, with sweet, cold water. There is plenty of meat—we are eating the prance-pony and have hung a haunch from another tree two kilometers off for those who hunger. Farther upstream the river will be sunk into a gorge—that can be seen from here.

April 25. Broke camp today, the boy doing most of the work as usual. He has been reading my books and asks me questions, some of which I cannot well answer.

April 26. The boy is dead. I have buried him where he will never be found, because I find, looking at the dead face, that I do not believe in strangers looking into graves. It happened this way. About noon today we were leading the mules along a path that ran along the south rim of the gorge. It was about two hundred meters deep there, and narrow, with the water running swiftly in a deep channel at the bottom, bordered with red sand and broken stones. I reminded him that he had said we were still too far downstream to find the sacred cave of the Free People, but he said that there might be other such caves and climbed among the rocks anyway. I saw him fall. He tried to grasp a rock, then screamed and dropped down. I hobbled the mules and went back looking for him, hoping that in quieter water he would have been able to swim out. Downstream a long way, a big tree stood grasping the rock, with water at his feet, and had thrust out a root to catch my friend.
       Let me confess now that I lied. The dates on this page and the one before are not correct. Today is the first of June. For a long time I did not write anything in this notebook, and then, tonight, I thought that I would keep it again and write down what had happened. As you see, my hand is still bad; I do not think it will ever be right again, although it looks healthy and there is no scar. I have trouble holding on to things.
       I hid the dead boy’s body in the cave in a sheer cliff beside the river. I think he would have liked that, and the ghoul-bears will not get it there; they can move big stones aside, but they cannot climb like a man. It took me three days to find the cave, with him strapped to one of the mules. Thecat I killed and laid at his feet.
       I find I am unused to writing like this—not just my hand, but writing down my thoughts. I wrote down the interviews, of course, and about seeing the sacred places, but not my thoughts. It has a fascination, and now there is no one else to talk to. No one else will read this anyway.
       We—the two mules and I—move much more slowly than when he was alive. We walk only for three or four hours in the morning, and there is always something to stop for in these hills, a beautiful spot with shady trees and ferns or a place to look for the cave or a deep hole with fish in it. I have not killed any large animals since -he died, only eating fish and a few small creatures for which I set nooses I make of the tail hair I comb from the mules. Several times these snares have been robbed, but I am not angry; I believe I know who steals.
       There are many things to eat here besides fish and animals, though it is still too soon for fruits or all but the first berries. I believe that the Wetlanders, I should say the Annese.of the meadowmeres, ate the roots of the salt reeds; I have tried them (you must first strip away the black underbark which is bitter and will kill fish if you pound a great deal of it between two stones), and they are good, though I think not very nourishing; it is best to eat them by Ocean so the white part can be dipped into the salt water after each bite.
       There, in the meadowmeres, if you want to eat the roots you have only to pull some up, but there is very little else to eat besides fish and clams, or snails in the spring, unless you catch a bird. Here things are quite different and there are many foods, but all are hard to find. The shoots of certain plants are good, and worms you find in rotten wood. There is a fungus that grows only where no light comes that is very good.
       As I said, I have not killed any large animals, though once I was very tempted. But the rifle makes so much noise—and the shotgun even more—that I am certain it would frighten away those I wish to find.

June 3. (This is the real date.) Higher up into the hills—the two mules and I. More stones and less grass. The deer do not look like cattle here.

June 4. No fire tonight. I have been making one every night since he died, more than a month. Tonight I began to collect the sticks as I always did, then wondered why. The dead boy used to, because there was meat to cook and tea to make; I like tea, but it is gone now, and I have already eaten, and had nothing that had to be cooked. Soon., though, the sun will set; and then until sisterworld is above the hills I will not be able to write. Sometimes I wonder who will read this and I think no one, and decide to put in all my innermost thoughts. Then I remember that I am supposed to be keeping a scientific notebook; and that even if no one reads it, it will be good practice.
       But what is there to tell? I have stopped shaving. I sit here with the book in my lap and try to think about the life of the Free People here before men came from Earth. These hills are hard and bare, no one would live here if there were better land. It may be that the mountains—the Temporals, as they are called—are better, but for the present I have no way of knowing; certainly the low hills through which we have come were better, and even the meadowmeres. Why then did the Free People live in the mountains, as they surely did if the old stories are to be trusted? Did they ever come here? Do they come now? I believe they do, but that is another subject.
       If ever they came here it was not often, because the stories always speak of the people of the mountains (the Free People) and the Wetlanders, the people of the meadowmeres. It is true that when the Wetlanders are made to speak in the stories they sometimes call the Free People “hill-men”, but only they do that, and these hills, I think, are empty as the marshes are not; there are no dead here, or few.
       And the Marshmen. Why didn’t they come here?
       Let us begin with them; we know more about them. We know they were ever eager for meat, for the stories tell that they howled for the meat of sacrifice, even those who did not believe. Living in the meadowmeres they must have eaten the roots of the salt reeds, as I have said, and fish and waterfowl. Surely sometimes, wishing meat, they went into the low green hills above the marshes to hunt; but fishers and snarers of waterfowl cannot have hunted well. Then they would come (How many? ten? twenty and thirty?) into these hills to find victims for the river. I see them walking, one behind another, thickset men, stump-legged, splay-footed, white-skinned. Ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. The Free People are better hunters, no doubt better fighters, long of leg and narrow of foot, but there cannot be so many together or they would starve—there is not enough game. Possibly no more than ten together all told, women and children; and not more than three or four could be men of fighting age. How many must have been driven back across these empty, rocky hills toward the Hourglass and the Observatory and the River. How many? How long was human prehistory on Mother Earth? A million years? Some would say ten million. (Bones of my fathers.)

Later. Sisterworld is queen of the night sky now, and covers this page with her blue light, save where the shadow of my pen hand falls. Half dark and half light she is now, and in the region between I can see the Hand reaching out into the sea, and what must be Porr-Mimizon, a tiny spark, where the thumb joins the palm; I have heard it called the worst city on either world.

Later. For a moment I thought I saw my cat flying like a shadow in the dark, and I wondered if she were really dead, though I broke her neck. The day before I found the burial cave for him, she brought me a little animal and laid it at my feet. I told her that she was a good cat and could eat it herself, but she only said, “My master, the Marquis of Carabas, sends you greetings.” And disappeared again. The little animal had a pointed snout and round ears, but its teeth were the even, biting teeth of a human being, and it smiled in its agony.

Later. By sisterworld’s light I have been looking among the rocks for implements—eoliths. I have found none.

June 6. We have behaved like explorers today, marched all day. On our right the river roars through walls of stone; ahead of us the mountains lift their blue wall. I will follow the river in; I know it rises in their heart.

June 7. Today a small stone came tumbling down the slope ahead of us. Dislodged by some animal, I am sure, but I could not see the animal. I thought that we were no longer followed since I have not been shooting game; my snares are seldom robbed now, and when they are there is often sign of the fire-fox. How strange I must look to them, with the mules. I wear no clothing except my shoes, which I need for the stones, but the mules must frighten them.
       Much later. I do not know what time it is. Far after midnight, I think; sisterworld is half down the sky in the west, but she grows brighter and I can see far, far down the valley, and the great cliffs ahead glow with her blue light.
       I will not say Later, for I only left this book for a few seconds to gather brush and dead grass for a fire. This is the first fire I have had in several days, but now that I am out of my sleeping bag I am cold, and I do not want to go back to sleep. I dreamed that naked people were crowding all around me as I slept. Children, twisted Shadow children that are neither children nor men, and a tall girl with long, straight hair that hung almost in my face when she bent over me.

It was the last entry in the canvas-bound journal. The officer closed it, tossed it aside, then for a moment tapped the stiff cover with his fingers. Dawn had come while he had been reading; he put out the feeble flame of his lamp, pushed back his chair, stood up and stretched. There was already a feeling of humidity and heat in the morning air. Outside, as he could see through the open door, the slave had left his post beneath the fever tree and no doubt was asleep in a corner somewhere. For a moment the officer considered looking for him and kicking him awake; then turned back to his table and, still standing, read for the second time the cover letter which had accompanied the file. It was dated almost a year past.

SIR: The materials I send you relate to prisoner #143, currently detained at this installation and purporting to be a citizen of Earth. The prisoner, whose passport (which may have been tampered with) states his identity as John V. Marsch, Ph.D., arrived here April 2nd last year and was arrested June 5th of the current year in connection with the murder of a GSPB Class AA Correspondent Espion. in this city. The son of the man referred to has since been convicted, but there is considerable evidence, as you will see from the material I enclose, that #143 may be an agent of junta currently in power on the sisterworld; this is, in fact, my own opinion.
       I call your attention to the circumstance that the execution of an agent of Sainte Anne would, at this time, have an excellent effect on public opinion here. On the other hand, if we are willing to accept the prisoner’s claim that he is in fact from the mother world, his release, at least until he further incriminates himself, might have an equally favourable effect. People here, particularly the intellectual class, were very ready to welcome him when he came as a scientist from Earth.

“Maître . . .”
       The officer looked up. Cassilla, yawning, stood at his elbow with a tray, the slave behind her. “Coffee, Maître,” she said. In the bright daylight he could see fine wrinkles near her eyes; the girl was ageing. A pity. He took the cup she proffered, and as she poured, asked how old she was.
       “Twenty-one, Maître.” The pot was one of the silver ones with Divisional decorations, which meant the slave had insisted on it in the kitchen; otherwise they would have given him one of the plain ones from the junior officer’s tables.
       “You should take better care of yourself.” The coffee was hot, and had been lightly scented with vanilla. He added a dollop of heavy cream.
       “Yes, Maître. Will that be all?”
       “You may go.
       “You,” he gestured to the slave. “What is the next ship sailing for Port-Mimizan?”
       “The Evenstar, Maître. At high tide today. But it will put in at Coldmouth before it reaches the Hand, Maître, and perhaps do some trading in the islands. The Slpugh Desmond won’t sail until next week, but it should make Port-Mimizon about a month sooner.”
       The officer nodded, sipped coffee, and went back to the letter.

Although a number of items in the prisoner’s private papers appear significant, he has thus far admitted nothing. We are pursuing the usual policy of alternately lenient and severe treatment to produce a breakdown. Shortly after he was placed in the favorable cell, #47 on the floor above began a communication with him by means of coded knocks upon a pipe passing through both cells. As soon as the prisoner replied we persuaded #47 (who is political, and soft like all our home-grown politicals) to keep records of the conversations. He has done so (File #181) and checks have shown it to be accurate, but the subject matter appears unimportant. The prisoner in an adjacent cell, an illiterate woman who is a habitual petty thief, also appears to attempt to communicate with the prisoner by knocking, but the pattern is unintelligible and he does not reply.
       Since there is a certain amount of pressure from the university for #143’s release we would appreciate a prompt disposition of this case.

The officer opened the top of the dispatch box and dropped the letter back inside, following it with handfuls of loose pages in official transcript, the spools of tape, the canvas-bound journal, the school composition book. Then taking a few sheets of official stationery and a pen from the drawer of his table he began to write.

Director, GSPB
Citadei,
Port-Mimizon,
Department de la Main.
Sir: We have considered at length the case enclosed. Though this prisoner is of no importance, both the courses you propose appear to us completely untenable. If he were to be publicly executed it would be thought by many that he was in fact a citizen of the mother world as claimed, and had been burned as a scape-goat. Alternately, if he were to be released as cleared and subsequently re-arrested, the credibility of the government would be gravely damaged.
       We are not concerned about the state of public opinion in Port-Mimizon, but since it is the only importance this case possesses we direct you to continue yout efforts to secure complete cooperation; in passing we would warn you not to place a premature reliance upon his developing attachment to the girl C.E. Until complete cooperation is achieved we direct you to continue to detain the prisoner.

Adding his signature below, the officer dropped this, too, into the dispatch box and, calling the slave, instructed him to bind it closed as it had been before. When he had finished, the officer said: “You are to put this aboard the Evenstar. For Port-Mimizon.”
       “Yes, Maître.”
       “You will be serving the commandant today?”
       “Yes, Maître. From twelve. For the dinner, you know, Maître, for the general.”
       “Possibly an opportunity—a graceful opportunity—to speak to him will occur. Most probably when he asks you to convey his thanks to me for the loan of your services’
       “Yes, Maître.”
       “At that time you might contrive to inform him that I remained awake all night to deal with this case, and that I sent it off this morning by the first ship sailing for Port-Mimizon. Do you understand?”
       “Yes, Maître. Ida, Maître.”
       For an instant the slave let slip his normal look of deference and smiled; and the officer, seeing that smile, understood that he would carry out the instruction if he could, that some secret love of intrigue and duplicity in him delighted in it. And the slave, seeing the officer’s expression, knew that he would never have to return to the carding rooms and the looms, understanding that the officer knew that he would do everything he could, for the sheer love of it. He put the dispatch box on his shoulder to carry it to the wharf and the ship Evenstar, and they parted, both quite happy. When he had gone, the officer found a spool of tape where it had rolled behind the lamp on his table; he dropped it ffttt the window into one of the neglected flower beds, among the sprawling angels’-trumpets.