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PART THREE:
1969

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Khemava system was an incredibly wealthy one, even though it consisted of only a few planets huddled around a heat-stingy orange sun.

In part, this was a matter of lucky breaks in planetary formation. The innermost world was like people back home still believed Mercury to be: tidally locked so that one hemisphere permanently faced its sun. It therefore had a "twilight zone" between its hot and cold sides, where mining of its abundant heavy elements was practical. (In reality, according to Dr. Fehrenbach, Mercury is "resonance-locked" into a day precisely two-thirds of its year, a consequence of having a highly eccentric orbit very close to the Sun. A lot of science fiction was due to become obsolete in a few years, when that fact became generally known.) Next outward was the Ekhemasu homeworld of Khemava. Then came a dense, mineral-rich asteroid belt where the Titius-Bode formulation said a third planet should orbit. That planet's gestation had been aborted by the proximity of the actual third planet: a gas giant more massive than Jupiter, glowing with the heat of its own gravitational compression. That heat, though insufficient to ignite the fusion fires of a sun, warmed the great planet's inner moons. One of those moons was bigger than Mars, big enough to hold an atmosphere (complete with an ozone layer to block the radiation that sleeted from the primary planet) and liquid water, in which life had arisen. Minimal planetary engineering had been required to turn that moon into a second home for the Ekhemasu race.

That last gives a hint as to why I said that the system's wealth was only partially a dispensation of cosmic chance. The Ekhemasu had never discovered the secret of interstellar flight; it wasn't the sort of thing their sciences tended toward. So they had remained in their own treasure-house system, and by now that system was as much their handiwork as an accidental by-product of the blind forces of astrophysics. They and their works pervaded it to a greater extent than I could imagine ever being possible for humanity in the Solar system.

This had something to do with their sheer numbers. The Ekhemasu were herbivores, descended from herd animals, and they tolerated—no, enjoyed—a degree of crowding that would have driven humans to the ugliest manifestations of mass psychosis. Planet II was a smaller world than Earth, only about six thousand miles in diameter, with seas rather than oceans, and vast expanses of desert. But it nonetheless held tens of billions of these large beings: a dense, orderly, incredibly productive hive, providing the foundation on which the Delkasu had erected their "Ekhemasu Empire."

But that was only part of it. The other part was the length of time they had been at it—a history stretching back over scores of thousands of years.

You can maybe get some inkling of it if you're an American who's been to the Mediterranean and seen a place like Rome where buildings have arisen on the foundations of earlier civilizations until it's more like a geological formation than a city, or the Greek islands which have been terraced and cultivated so long that they are as much artifacts as geographic features. In such places, the very ground seems to exude an aura of thousands and thousands of lives that have worked, loved, hated, given birth, killed and died for millennia, until every square inch must surely be psychically charged. Khemava is like that, only more so—much more so. Even I could feel it, despite belonging to a different species . . . indeed, to a species that had evolved in a different spiral arm. So long is their history that the giant satellite of Planet III is much the same as Khemava itself, for the Ekhemasu colonized it before the Sumerians dreamed up the idea of keeping records on clay tablets. (At least I'm told it's much the same; I've never been there.)

It wasn't until later that I learned all this. Chloe and I arrived in the Khemava system as concealed cargo aboard a ship belonging to a legitimate front corporation owned by Khorat's Tonkuztra buddies of the Osak gevroth. Reasonably comfortable cargo, I must admit, thanks to Khorat's arrangements. Granted, we had to eat computer-formulated human-type synthetic rations. And the ship's brain gradually altered the day/night cycle to the ninety-six-plus-hour one of Khemava—but that was actually a more convenient one for us, as it came to just about four Earth days. And otherwise, the environmental parameters of humanity and the Delkasu were so very similar that it was no worse than the time we'd previously spent in hiding on Antyova II under the sheltering Osak wing. That time had lasted for months, Earth time, and then the voyage to Khemava took weeks. For all that time we had a great deal of privacy, under the incurious care of aliens who were keeping us healthy as part of a business transaction.

So, astute reader, it's probably time to take up a subject about which I just know you've been wondering. . . .

"No, Bob!" Chloe gasped, coming up for air after kiss number something-or-other. She sat up abruptly, swung her legs over the side of the Delkasu-sized bunk, drew her smock (the only term I can think of for the sleeping garment our hosts had provided), and released a gust of breath.

I gave a sigh of my own as I sat up beside her. A bunk the size of a love seat (ouch!) made intimacy unavoidable. Soon I had slid an arm around her shoulders and was nuzzling her neck. She started to respond, then stiffened.

"No!" she repeated, and stood up abruptly, shivering. "You know we can't. And you know why."

I fell back on the bunk with a groan of frustration. "Yeah, I know . . . I think."

At first we'd been restrained by the presence of aliens, but our inhibitions had gradually dissolved in the face of those aliens' obvious disinterest in our behavior. They'd finally acceded to our request for separate rooms, without really understanding it. (Social customs designed to protect females—and, more importantly in some societies, their reputations—from the sexual aggressiveness of physically stronger males were foreign to the Delkasu.) But that, too, had been insufficient. In the end, nature had taken its course . . . but not to its logical conclusion.

It had been difficult for both of us—probably more so for me than for her. In the end, she'd granted me physical release in ways that only made the longing for the ultimate consummation worse, but which at least did not run the risk which she was adamantly unwilling to take. And in truth, I really did understand.

Now, standing with her back turned, she explained once again, speaking as much to herself as to me.

"I will not bring a child into the kind of life we're looking at. We don't know how long we're going to be on Khemava, where we're going to be the only two humans. We don't know if we'll ever get back to Earth. In which case, when we die our child would be alone among aliens. We have no right to make that kind of decision in the name of an unborn human being who never asked for such a life."

"And the nearest human contraceptives are umpty-ump thousand light-years away," I nodded, staring at the overhead. "So where does that leave us?"

"I don't know," she said in a voice that could barely be heard.

I know what you're thinking. Forget it. In those days, abortion had yet to achieve the legal and social acceptance you take for granted. Chloe wasn't Catholic, nor even noticeably religious; she was perfectly willing to prevent conception, had we possessed the means. But terminating pregnancy afterwards was something else again—something she would not and could not contemplate. And I wonder how many women of the oh-so-liberated later generations would have been willing to put their bodies—and the fetuses carried in their bodies—at the disposal of aliens for such a purpose. Especially considering that there was no assurance that the aliens would know what they were doing . . .

So as usual I stood up and quietly left for my own room, pretending I didn't hear her muffled sobs.

So matters stood when we landed on Khemava.

Khorat was as good as his word. He met our freighter at the vast spaceport outside Khemava's imperial capital of Sakandreoun.

It was a completely clandestine meeting, of course. For the purpose of getting us through the bureaucratic rituals of landing, we'd been transferred to a large modular transport unit—the interstellar equivalent of the cargo containers that you take for granted but which in those days were still causing the longshoremen's union to get its undies in a bunch. It had been secretly equipped with life support, but there was no more nonsense about separate rooms. Fortunately, we weren't in it for long. And for part of that time we stayed strapped into the well-padded (but, of course, uncomfortably small) couches that had been provided, sparing ourselves bruises or worse as our container was shunted about, finally coming to rest in a warehouse along with the rest of whatever it was that was being shipped from Antyova to Khemava.

It was only then that a signal light flashed over our heads, and the access hatch clamshelled open to admit a harsh artificial lighting.

Two beings stood silhouetted in the glare. One was a Delkar—presumably an Osak operative, fidgeting with what I took to be eagerness to wash his hands of us. Beside him loomed an Ekhemar.

"Hi, Khorat," I said, even though I couldn't make out individual features.

"Greetings." My earpiece produced the voice the software had assigned to Khorat. "No discourtesy intended, but we are rather in a hurry. So if you will come this way . . ."

Khorat took his leave of the Delkar and hustled us through the warehouse, which was of enormous extent. He was in a hurry, and only the low gravity enabled us to keep up with him despite chronic shortness of breath in the thin dry air. We boarded an aircar whose ports were closed up lest anyone should observe the likes of us. The cabin held furnishings designed to accommodate both Delksau and Ekhemasu. We sort of fell between the two extremes, and there was no seating that really suited us. So we stood up, held on to stanchions, and watched the viewscreens as the aircar rose from the warehouse floor and soared through hangarlike doors into the protracted late afternoon of the orange Khemava sun, under a royal blue sky.

The cityscape that unfolded beneath us was an interesting contrast to the one we'd observed on Antyova II. Sakandreoun—a Delkasu name—had been founded alongside an immemorially ancient Ehkemasu city with which it had gradually merged, supplanting the original name . . . which, however, could still be heard in certain old districts where the alien rulers seldom ventured. So the gleaming towers favored by the Delkasu reigned unchallenged only in the quarter they themselves had founded. Elsewhere, their works formed a glittery, brittle-seeming encrustation atop an architecture that was difficult to tell apart from mountain ranges until one got close enough to observe its symmetry. Come to think of it, that architecture was greater than the relatively wimpy mountain ranges to which this planet (only about forty percent Earth's mass, hence a smaller molten core and less in the way of plate tectonics) had given birth. It was the kind of monumental masonry we humans think of in connection with our earliest civilizations—pyramids, ziggurats, and colossal sculpture—only on a scale beyond belief. It was as much a part of the planet's structure as anything produced by geology.

Any day, it seemed, the Delkasu additions—artificial, evanescent, irrelevant—might melt away, or crack apart and shiver into a cloud of crystalline dust, and vanish like the rapidly fading memory of a dream.

We flew on, and the works of the Delkasu grew sparser, until our aircar seemed to have taken us backwards in time and we were flying over the Old Khemava. Eventually, even that thinned out, and we entered the outermost outskirts I could now recognize as having provided the inspiration for the holo projection I'd seen on Antyova II, complete with the canals stretching away into the desert.

We followed one of those canals westward out into regions of tawny and ochre desolation, broken only by the canal itself and occasional oases from whose foliage peered buildings of unguessable antiquity, often fashioned into the forms of gigantic stylized Ekhemasu. Then even those grew fewer, and the long afternoon wore on toward dusk. Eventually, we glimpsed a range of mountains against the bloated, slowly westering sun . . . and one mountain in particular.

As I've mentioned, this low-gravity planet possessed relatively few of the mountain-building forces that convulsed Earth and similar worlds. But the mountains it did give birth to occasionally reared skyward to great altitudes, by grace of that same low gravity. Such a specimen grew slowly in the forward viewscreen. It had the look of age and weathering typical on that world, where mountain-formation took place only at very long intervals. But the eons had been powerless to diminish such a titan by very much; it still towered over its fellows in lonely pride.

As we approached, it became clear that the great mountain was part of a spur of the main range, rising above foothills whose bleakness was relieved only by wind-stunted trees very different from this world's tall, willowy norm. The aircar banked to starboard, and we proceeded over that desolation of low hills and rock outcrops, drawing closer to the mountain that was the monarch of this austere realm.

Then we rounded a curving ridge, and with startling suddenness a vista opened up before us which was clearly the work of conscious intelligence but which, like so much of this world's architecture, blended with the landscape in a continuum rendered seamless by the passage of millennia.

It was a kind of box canyon that had been sculpted into colonnaded terraces, rising to the base of the great mountain. Wide ramps led gently up from one terrace to another. We landed on the uppermost terrace, before a facade that had, it seemed, been carved out of the stone of the mountain whose cliff walls reared up above it to the zenith. That facade's architectural motif could not speak to us across the chasm of alienness. We could only stand in awed silence before its soul-shaking monumentality.

"Khorat," Chloe finally said, "you're not going to tell us that you've kept this place concealed from the Delkasu, are you?"

"Of course not. They are quite well aware of its existence, and of what it is: the headquarters of the organization I have mentioned to you before."

I forced myself to ignore the surroundings and think straight. "But in that case, how can this organization be a secret?"

"I never said it was." Khorat was at his most maddeningly bland.

"I don't suppose you could tell us the name of this organization of yours."

Khorat paused. "The name in my own language would mean nothing to you . . . as it means nothing to the Delkasu, who therefore simply use a form of it in their own language." He spoke a word which my unaided ears heard as Medjavar. My earpiece was silent, for it was untranslatable.

"But what is it?" Chloe persisted. "You've told us it isn't a revolutionary cabal."

There was a long silence in the earpieces before Khorat responded. "We go back rather a long way . . . approximately thirty thousand of your years. At that time," he continued into our stunned silence, "our industrial revolution had reached about the point yours has reached at present, with the first computers making their harmless-seeming debut. Certain of our thinkers recognized with great clarity that specific trends, projected to their logical conclusions, held the potential to transform society into something unrecognizable—and repellent. They organized for the purpose of combating these trends and preserving the world in a natural state—broadly defined to include the natural accretions produced over time by a tool-using race. To a great extent, we have succeeded."

"And thereby made possible that world's conquest by the Delkasu, who observed no such limitations," I said quietly.

Chloe drew a breath and shot me a glare. But Khorat's equanimity was unruffled. "Actually, that would almost certainly have happened anyway. Advanced technology does not, in itself, guarantee military victory. As descendants of herbivorous herd animals, we have no aptitude for war. But even if you are correct, an ephemeral alien overlordship is a small price to pay for averting the future we foresaw." The old Ekhemar's voice took on a tone that sent a tingle up my spine even in cybernetic rendition. "And in the realm of such forecastings, our science is far more advanced than yours, or even that of the Delkasu."

"And the Delkasu permit you to continue to function?" Chloe queried.

"Oh, yes. You see, they have a well-established policy of noninterference with the social patterns of a world which provides the economic underpinnings of their 'Ekhemasu Empire.' It is a case of—"

"—Not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs," I supplied.

I have no idea how the translator software rendered that. But after a brief pause, Khorat resumed. "Precisely. They think of us as a local religious sect. In this they are mistaken. But it is hardly our responsibility to correct their misconception."

"You mean," said Chloe, in tones of undisguised incredulity, "that they don't even keep tabs on this place? Not even from orbit?"

"No. Oh, naturally their security agencies' satellites maintain a surveillance of the planet's surface. But except when they are actually engaged in an investigation with a specific target, the imagery is merely scanned from time to time as a matter of perfunctory bureaucratic routine. This place receives no special attention. As a matter of fact, our arrival here was planned with some care to coincide with a time period when no such satellite would be overhead to observe the disembarkation of beings with your rather distinctive appearance. That time period is about to draw to a close. So if we may proceed inside . . ."

We passed through colonnades and archways that were vast even on the Ekhemasu scale, and entered a new world.

o

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Framed

Back | Next
Contents

PART THREE:
1969

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Khemava system was an incredibly wealthy one, even though it consisted of only a few planets huddled around a heat-stingy orange sun.

In part, this was a matter of lucky breaks in planetary formation. The innermost world was like people back home still believed Mercury to be: tidally locked so that one hemisphere permanently faced its sun. It therefore had a "twilight zone" between its hot and cold sides, where mining of its abundant heavy elements was practical. (In reality, according to Dr. Fehrenbach, Mercury is "resonance-locked" into a day precisely two-thirds of its year, a consequence of having a highly eccentric orbit very close to the Sun. A lot of science fiction was due to become obsolete in a few years, when that fact became generally known.) Next outward was the Ekhemasu homeworld of Khemava. Then came a dense, mineral-rich asteroid belt where the Titius-Bode formulation said a third planet should orbit. That planet's gestation had been aborted by the proximity of the actual third planet: a gas giant more massive than Jupiter, glowing with the heat of its own gravitational compression. That heat, though insufficient to ignite the fusion fires of a sun, warmed the great planet's inner moons. One of those moons was bigger than Mars, big enough to hold an atmosphere (complete with an ozone layer to block the radiation that sleeted from the primary planet) and liquid water, in which life had arisen. Minimal planetary engineering had been required to turn that moon into a second home for the Ekhemasu race.

That last gives a hint as to why I said that the system's wealth was only partially a dispensation of cosmic chance. The Ekhemasu had never discovered the secret of interstellar flight; it wasn't the sort of thing their sciences tended toward. So they had remained in their own treasure-house system, and by now that system was as much their handiwork as an accidental by-product of the blind forces of astrophysics. They and their works pervaded it to a greater extent than I could imagine ever being possible for humanity in the Solar system.

This had something to do with their sheer numbers. The Ekhemasu were herbivores, descended from herd animals, and they tolerated—no, enjoyed—a degree of crowding that would have driven humans to the ugliest manifestations of mass psychosis. Planet II was a smaller world than Earth, only about six thousand miles in diameter, with seas rather than oceans, and vast expanses of desert. But it nonetheless held tens of billions of these large beings: a dense, orderly, incredibly productive hive, providing the foundation on which the Delkasu had erected their "Ekhemasu Empire."

But that was only part of it. The other part was the length of time they had been at it—a history stretching back over scores of thousands of years.

You can maybe get some inkling of it if you're an American who's been to the Mediterranean and seen a place like Rome where buildings have arisen on the foundations of earlier civilizations until it's more like a geological formation than a city, or the Greek islands which have been terraced and cultivated so long that they are as much artifacts as geographic features. In such places, the very ground seems to exude an aura of thousands and thousands of lives that have worked, loved, hated, given birth, killed and died for millennia, until every square inch must surely be psychically charged. Khemava is like that, only more so—much more so. Even I could feel it, despite belonging to a different species . . . indeed, to a species that had evolved in a different spiral arm. So long is their history that the giant satellite of Planet III is much the same as Khemava itself, for the Ekhemasu colonized it before the Sumerians dreamed up the idea of keeping records on clay tablets. (At least I'm told it's much the same; I've never been there.)

It wasn't until later that I learned all this. Chloe and I arrived in the Khemava system as concealed cargo aboard a ship belonging to a legitimate front corporation owned by Khorat's Tonkuztra buddies of the Osak gevroth. Reasonably comfortable cargo, I must admit, thanks to Khorat's arrangements. Granted, we had to eat computer-formulated human-type synthetic rations. And the ship's brain gradually altered the day/night cycle to the ninety-six-plus-hour one of Khemava—but that was actually a more convenient one for us, as it came to just about four Earth days. And otherwise, the environmental parameters of humanity and the Delkasu were so very similar that it was no worse than the time we'd previously spent in hiding on Antyova II under the sheltering Osak wing. That time had lasted for months, Earth time, and then the voyage to Khemava took weeks. For all that time we had a great deal of privacy, under the incurious care of aliens who were keeping us healthy as part of a business transaction.

So, astute reader, it's probably time to take up a subject about which I just know you've been wondering. . . .

"No, Bob!" Chloe gasped, coming up for air after kiss number something-or-other. She sat up abruptly, swung her legs over the side of the Delkasu-sized bunk, drew her smock (the only term I can think of for the sleeping garment our hosts had provided), and released a gust of breath.

I gave a sigh of my own as I sat up beside her. A bunk the size of a love seat (ouch!) made intimacy unavoidable. Soon I had slid an arm around her shoulders and was nuzzling her neck. She started to respond, then stiffened.

"No!" she repeated, and stood up abruptly, shivering. "You know we can't. And you know why."

I fell back on the bunk with a groan of frustration. "Yeah, I know . . . I think."

At first we'd been restrained by the presence of aliens, but our inhibitions had gradually dissolved in the face of those aliens' obvious disinterest in our behavior. They'd finally acceded to our request for separate rooms, without really understanding it. (Social customs designed to protect females—and, more importantly in some societies, their reputations—from the sexual aggressiveness of physically stronger males were foreign to the Delkasu.) But that, too, had been insufficient. In the end, nature had taken its course . . . but not to its logical conclusion.

It had been difficult for both of us—probably more so for me than for her. In the end, she'd granted me physical release in ways that only made the longing for the ultimate consummation worse, but which at least did not run the risk which she was adamantly unwilling to take. And in truth, I really did understand.

Now, standing with her back turned, she explained once again, speaking as much to herself as to me.

"I will not bring a child into the kind of life we're looking at. We don't know how long we're going to be on Khemava, where we're going to be the only two humans. We don't know if we'll ever get back to Earth. In which case, when we die our child would be alone among aliens. We have no right to make that kind of decision in the name of an unborn human being who never asked for such a life."

"And the nearest human contraceptives are umpty-ump thousand light-years away," I nodded, staring at the overhead. "So where does that leave us?"

"I don't know," she said in a voice that could barely be heard.

I know what you're thinking. Forget it. In those days, abortion had yet to achieve the legal and social acceptance you take for granted. Chloe wasn't Catholic, nor even noticeably religious; she was perfectly willing to prevent conception, had we possessed the means. But terminating pregnancy afterwards was something else again—something she would not and could not contemplate. And I wonder how many women of the oh-so-liberated later generations would have been willing to put their bodies—and the fetuses carried in their bodies—at the disposal of aliens for such a purpose. Especially considering that there was no assurance that the aliens would know what they were doing . . .

So as usual I stood up and quietly left for my own room, pretending I didn't hear her muffled sobs.

So matters stood when we landed on Khemava.

Khorat was as good as his word. He met our freighter at the vast spaceport outside Khemava's imperial capital of Sakandreoun.

It was a completely clandestine meeting, of course. For the purpose of getting us through the bureaucratic rituals of landing, we'd been transferred to a large modular transport unit—the interstellar equivalent of the cargo containers that you take for granted but which in those days were still causing the longshoremen's union to get its undies in a bunch. It had been secretly equipped with life support, but there was no more nonsense about separate rooms. Fortunately, we weren't in it for long. And for part of that time we stayed strapped into the well-padded (but, of course, uncomfortably small) couches that had been provided, sparing ourselves bruises or worse as our container was shunted about, finally coming to rest in a warehouse along with the rest of whatever it was that was being shipped from Antyova to Khemava.

It was only then that a signal light flashed over our heads, and the access hatch clamshelled open to admit a harsh artificial lighting.

Two beings stood silhouetted in the glare. One was a Delkar—presumably an Osak operative, fidgeting with what I took to be eagerness to wash his hands of us. Beside him loomed an Ekhemar.

"Hi, Khorat," I said, even though I couldn't make out individual features.

"Greetings." My earpiece produced the voice the software had assigned to Khorat. "No discourtesy intended, but we are rather in a hurry. So if you will come this way . . ."

Khorat took his leave of the Delkar and hustled us through the warehouse, which was of enormous extent. He was in a hurry, and only the low gravity enabled us to keep up with him despite chronic shortness of breath in the thin dry air. We boarded an aircar whose ports were closed up lest anyone should observe the likes of us. The cabin held furnishings designed to accommodate both Delksau and Ekhemasu. We sort of fell between the two extremes, and there was no seating that really suited us. So we stood up, held on to stanchions, and watched the viewscreens as the aircar rose from the warehouse floor and soared through hangarlike doors into the protracted late afternoon of the orange Khemava sun, under a royal blue sky.

The cityscape that unfolded beneath us was an interesting contrast to the one we'd observed on Antyova II. Sakandreoun—a Delkasu name—had been founded alongside an immemorially ancient Ehkemasu city with which it had gradually merged, supplanting the original name . . . which, however, could still be heard in certain old districts where the alien rulers seldom ventured. So the gleaming towers favored by the Delkasu reigned unchallenged only in the quarter they themselves had founded. Elsewhere, their works formed a glittery, brittle-seeming encrustation atop an architecture that was difficult to tell apart from mountain ranges until one got close enough to observe its symmetry. Come to think of it, that architecture was greater than the relatively wimpy mountain ranges to which this planet (only about forty percent Earth's mass, hence a smaller molten core and less in the way of plate tectonics) had given birth. It was the kind of monumental masonry we humans think of in connection with our earliest civilizations—pyramids, ziggurats, and colossal sculpture—only on a scale beyond belief. It was as much a part of the planet's structure as anything produced by geology.

Any day, it seemed, the Delkasu additions—artificial, evanescent, irrelevant—might melt away, or crack apart and shiver into a cloud of crystalline dust, and vanish like the rapidly fading memory of a dream.

We flew on, and the works of the Delkasu grew sparser, until our aircar seemed to have taken us backwards in time and we were flying over the Old Khemava. Eventually, even that thinned out, and we entered the outermost outskirts I could now recognize as having provided the inspiration for the holo projection I'd seen on Antyova II, complete with the canals stretching away into the desert.

We followed one of those canals westward out into regions of tawny and ochre desolation, broken only by the canal itself and occasional oases from whose foliage peered buildings of unguessable antiquity, often fashioned into the forms of gigantic stylized Ekhemasu. Then even those grew fewer, and the long afternoon wore on toward dusk. Eventually, we glimpsed a range of mountains against the bloated, slowly westering sun . . . and one mountain in particular.

As I've mentioned, this low-gravity planet possessed relatively few of the mountain-building forces that convulsed Earth and similar worlds. But the mountains it did give birth to occasionally reared skyward to great altitudes, by grace of that same low gravity. Such a specimen grew slowly in the forward viewscreen. It had the look of age and weathering typical on that world, where mountain-formation took place only at very long intervals. But the eons had been powerless to diminish such a titan by very much; it still towered over its fellows in lonely pride.

As we approached, it became clear that the great mountain was part of a spur of the main range, rising above foothills whose bleakness was relieved only by wind-stunted trees very different from this world's tall, willowy norm. The aircar banked to starboard, and we proceeded over that desolation of low hills and rock outcrops, drawing closer to the mountain that was the monarch of this austere realm.

Then we rounded a curving ridge, and with startling suddenness a vista opened up before us which was clearly the work of conscious intelligence but which, like so much of this world's architecture, blended with the landscape in a continuum rendered seamless by the passage of millennia.

It was a kind of box canyon that had been sculpted into colonnaded terraces, rising to the base of the great mountain. Wide ramps led gently up from one terrace to another. We landed on the uppermost terrace, before a facade that had, it seemed, been carved out of the stone of the mountain whose cliff walls reared up above it to the zenith. That facade's architectural motif could not speak to us across the chasm of alienness. We could only stand in awed silence before its soul-shaking monumentality.

"Khorat," Chloe finally said, "you're not going to tell us that you've kept this place concealed from the Delkasu, are you?"

"Of course not. They are quite well aware of its existence, and of what it is: the headquarters of the organization I have mentioned to you before."

I forced myself to ignore the surroundings and think straight. "But in that case, how can this organization be a secret?"

"I never said it was." Khorat was at his most maddeningly bland.

"I don't suppose you could tell us the name of this organization of yours."

Khorat paused. "The name in my own language would mean nothing to you . . . as it means nothing to the Delkasu, who therefore simply use a form of it in their own language." He spoke a word which my unaided ears heard as Medjavar. My earpiece was silent, for it was untranslatable.

"But what is it?" Chloe persisted. "You've told us it isn't a revolutionary cabal."

There was a long silence in the earpieces before Khorat responded. "We go back rather a long way . . . approximately thirty thousand of your years. At that time," he continued into our stunned silence, "our industrial revolution had reached about the point yours has reached at present, with the first computers making their harmless-seeming debut. Certain of our thinkers recognized with great clarity that specific trends, projected to their logical conclusions, held the potential to transform society into something unrecognizable—and repellent. They organized for the purpose of combating these trends and preserving the world in a natural state—broadly defined to include the natural accretions produced over time by a tool-using race. To a great extent, we have succeeded."

"And thereby made possible that world's conquest by the Delkasu, who observed no such limitations," I said quietly.

Chloe drew a breath and shot me a glare. But Khorat's equanimity was unruffled. "Actually, that would almost certainly have happened anyway. Advanced technology does not, in itself, guarantee military victory. As descendants of herbivorous herd animals, we have no aptitude for war. But even if you are correct, an ephemeral alien overlordship is a small price to pay for averting the future we foresaw." The old Ekhemar's voice took on a tone that sent a tingle up my spine even in cybernetic rendition. "And in the realm of such forecastings, our science is far more advanced than yours, or even that of the Delkasu."

"And the Delkasu permit you to continue to function?" Chloe queried.

"Oh, yes. You see, they have a well-established policy of noninterference with the social patterns of a world which provides the economic underpinnings of their 'Ekhemasu Empire.' It is a case of—"

"—Not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs," I supplied.

I have no idea how the translator software rendered that. But after a brief pause, Khorat resumed. "Precisely. They think of us as a local religious sect. In this they are mistaken. But it is hardly our responsibility to correct their misconception."

"You mean," said Chloe, in tones of undisguised incredulity, "that they don't even keep tabs on this place? Not even from orbit?"

"No. Oh, naturally their security agencies' satellites maintain a surveillance of the planet's surface. But except when they are actually engaged in an investigation with a specific target, the imagery is merely scanned from time to time as a matter of perfunctory bureaucratic routine. This place receives no special attention. As a matter of fact, our arrival here was planned with some care to coincide with a time period when no such satellite would be overhead to observe the disembarkation of beings with your rather distinctive appearance. That time period is about to draw to a close. So if we may proceed inside . . ."

We passed through colonnades and archways that were vast even on the Ekhemasu scale, and entered a new world.

o

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