"Think about tomorrow, Jason. What are you going to say to him? Think about your parents--"

Jay Allison wondered what they would think when they found a stranger here. He felt like a stranger. Yet he must have come, tonight, into this house and spoken--he rummaged desperately in his mind for some fragments of the trailmen's language. He had spoken it as a child. He must recall enough to speak to the woman who had been a kind foster-mother to her alien son. He tried to form his lips to the unfamiliar shapes of words...

Jay covered his face with his hands again. Jason was the part of himself that remembered the trailmen. _That_ was what he had to remember--Jason was not a hostile stranger, not an alien intruder in his body. Jason was a lost part of himself and at the moment a d.a.m.n necessary part. If there were only some way to get back the Jason memories, skills, without losing _himself_ ... he said to the girl, "Let me think. Let me--" to his surprise and horror his voice broke into an alien tongue, "Let me alone, will you?"

Maybe, Jay thought, I could stay myself if I could remember the rest.

Dr. Forth said: Jason would remember the trailmen with kindness, not dislike.

Jay searched his memory and found nothing but familiar frustration; years spent in an alien land, apart from a human heritage, stranded and abandoned. _My father left me. He crashed the plane and I never saw him again and I hate him for leaving me ..._

But his father had not abandoned him. He had crashed the plane trying to save them both. It was no one's fault--

_Except my father's. For trying to fly over the h.e.l.lers into a country where no man belongs ..._

He hadn't belonged. And yet the trailmen, whom he considered little better than roaming beasts, had taken the alien child into their city, their homes, their hearts. They had loved him. And he ...

"And I loved them," I found myself saying half aloud, then realized that Kyla was gripping my arm, looking up imploringly into my face. I shook my head rather groggily. "What's the matter?"

"You frightened me," she said in a shaky little voice, and I suddenly knew what had happened. I tensed with savage rage against Jay Allison.

He couldn't even give me the splinter of life I'd won for myself, but had to come sneaking out of my mind, how he must hate me! Not half as much as I hated him, d.a.m.n him! Along with everything else, he'd scared Kyla half to death!

She was kneeling very close to me, and I realized that there was one way to fight that cold austere fish of a Jay Allison, send him shrieking down into h.e.l.l again. He was a man who hated everything except the cold world he'd made his life. Kyla's face was lifted, soft and intent and pleading, and suddenly I reached out and pulled her to me and kissed her, hard.

"Could a ghost do this?" I demanded, "or this?"

She whispered, "No--oh, no," and her arms went up to lock around my neck. As I pulled her down on the sweet-smelling moss that carpeted the chamber, I felt the dark ghost of my other self thin out, vanish and disappear.

Regis had been right. It had been the only way ...

The Old One was not old at all; the t.i.tle was purely ceremonial. This one was young--not much older than I--but he had poise and dignity and the same strange indefinable quality I had recognized in Regis Hastur.

It was something, I supposed, that the Terran Empire had lost in spreading from star to star. A feeling of knowing one's own place, a dignity that didn't demand recognition because it had never lacked for it.

Like all trailmen he had the chinless face and lobeless ears, the heavy-haired body which looked slightly less than human. He spoke very low--the trailmen have very acute hearing--and I had to strain my ears to listen, and remember to keep my own voice down.

He stretched his hand to me, and I lowered my head over it and murmured, "I take submission, Old One."

"Never mind that," he said in his gentle twittering voice, "sit down, my son. You are welcome here, but I feel you have abused our trust in you.

We dismissed you to your own kind because we felt you would be happier so. Did we show you anything but kindness, that after so many years you return with armed men?"

The reproof in his red eyes was hardly an auspicious beginning. I said helplessly, "Old One, the men with me are not armed. A band of those-who-may-not-enter-cities attacked us, and we defended ourselves. I travelled with so many men only because I feared to travel the pa.s.ses alone."

"But does that explain why you have returned at all?" The reason and reproach in his voice made sense.

Finally I said, "Old One, we come as suppliants. My people appeal to your people in the hope that you will be--" I started to say, _as human_, stopped and amended "--that you will deal as kindly with them as with me."

His face betrayed nothing. "What do you ask?"

I explained. I told it badly, stumbling, not knowing the technical terms, knowing they had no equivalents anyway in the trailmen's language. He listened, asking a penetrating question now and again. When I mentioned the Terran Legate's offer to recognize the trailmen as a separate and independent government, he frowned and rebuked me:

"We of the Sky People have no dealings with the Terrans, and care nothing for their recognition--or its lack."

For that I had no answer, and the Old One continued, kindly but indifferently, "We do not like to think that the fever which is a children's little sickness with us shall kill so many of your kind. But you cannot in all honesty blame us. You cannot say that we spread the disease; we never go beyond the mountains. Are we to blame that the winds change or the moons come together in the sky? When the time has come for men to die, they die." He stretched his hand in dismissal. "I will give your men safe-conduct to the river, Jason. Do not return."

Regis Hastur rose suddenly and faced him. "Will you hear me, Father?" He used the ceremonial t.i.tle without hesitation, and the Old One said in distress, "The son of Hastur need never speak as a suppliant to the Sky People!"

"Nevertheless, hear me as a suppliant, Father," Regis said quietly. "It is not the strangers and aliens of Terra who are pleading. We have learned one thing from the strangers of Terra, which you have not yet learned. I am young and it is not fitting that I should teach you, but you have said; are we to blame that the moons come together in the sky?

No. But we have learned from the Terrans not to blame the moons in the sky for our own ignorance of the ways of the G.o.ds--by which I mean the ways of sickness or poverty or misery."

"These are strange words for a Hastur," said the Old One, displeased.

"These are strange times for a Hastur," said Regis loudly. The Old One winced, and Regis moderated his tone, but continued vehemently, "You blame the moons in the sky. _I_ say the moons are not to blame--nor the winds--nor the G.o.ds. The G.o.ds send these things to men to test their wits and to find if they have the will to master them!"

The Old One's forehead ridged vertically and he said with stinging contempt, "Is this the breed of king which men call Hastur now?"

"Man or G.o.d or Hastur, I am not too proud to plead for my people,"

retorted Regis, flushing with anger. "Never in all the history of Darkover has a Hastur stood before one of you and begged--"

"--for the men from another world."

"--for all men on our world! Old One, I could sit and keep state in the House of the Hasturs, and even death could not touch me until I grew weary of living! But I preferred to learn new lives from new men. The Terrans have something to teach even the Hasturs, and they can learn a remedy against the trailmen's fever." He looked round at me, turning the discussion over to me again, and I said:

"I am no alien from another world, Old One. I have been a son in your house. Perhaps I was sent to teach you to fight destiny. I cannot believe you are indifferent to death."

Suddenly, hardly knowing what I was going to do until I found myself on my knees, I knelt and looked up into the quiet stern remote face of the nonhuman:

"My father," I said, "you took a dying man and a dying child from a burning plane. Even those of their own kind might have stripped their corpses and left them to die. You saved the child, fostered him and treated him as a son. When he reached an age to be unhappy with you, you let a dozen of your people risk their lives to take him to his own. You cannot ask me to believe that you are indifferent to the death of a million of my people, when the fate of one could stir your pity!"

There was a moment's silence. Finally the Old One said, "Indifferent--no. But helpless. My people die when they leave the mountains. The air is too rich for them. The food is wrong. The light blinds and tortures them. Can I send them to suffer and die, those people who call me father?"

And a memory, buried all my life, suddenly surfaced. I said urgently, "Father, listen. In the world I live in now, I am called a wise man. You need not believe me, but listen; I know your people, they are my people.

I remember when I left you, more than a dozen of my foster-parents'

friends offered, knowing they risked death, to go with me. I was a child; I did not realize the sacrifice they made. But I watched them suffer, as we went lower in the mountains, and I resolved ... I resolved ..." I spoke with difficulty, forcing the words through a reluctant barricade, "... that since others had suffered so for me ... I would spend my life in curing the sufferings of others. Father, the Terrans call me a wise doctor, a man of healing. Among the Terrans I can see that my people, if they will come to us and help us, have air they can breathe and food which will suit them and that they are guarded from the light. I don't ask you to send anyone, father. I ask only--tell your sons what I have told you. If I know your people--who are my people forever--hundreds of them will offer to return with me. And you may witness what your foster-son has sworn here; if one of your sons dies, your alien son will answer for it with his own life."

The words had poured from me in a flood. They were not all mine; some unconscious thing had recalled in me that Jay Allison had power to make these promises. For the first time I began to see what force, what guilt, what dedication working in Jay Allison had turned him aside from me. I remained at the Old One's feet, kneeling, overcome, ashamed of the thing I had become. Jay Allison was worth ten of me. Irresponsible, Forth had said. Lacking purpose, lacking balance. What right had I to despise my soberer self?

At last I felt the Old One touch my head lightly.

"Get up, my son," he said, "I will answer for my people. And forgive me for my doubts and my delays."