Redlaw nodded vigorously, the bright beard bobbing. "Go soon now, two hundred breaths," the Pmal rattled. "Travel long, hard. You become ready."
Get ready? Pertin looked around him, almost smiling. What was there to do to get ready? What to pack, what to miss? He was ready to go anywhere anytime . . .
But for Ben Yale Pertin where was there to go?
They did not dare fly, and Org Rider's muscles began to ache very soon with the unaccustomed strain of trying to move at ground level, under the cover of the trees. The young org—he called it "Babe," lovingly— wanted desperately to fly, and so Org Rider's task was twice as hard, for sometimes he carried the fledgling, and sometimes kept up a running stream of talk with it, encouraging it to keep hopping along on its wobbly legs, cajoling it back when it attempted to fly. That was what his mother had taught him to do: talk to the infant org, let it know always that you were there. She swore that the orgs could even understand words after a while, like human children. And indeed Babe had already seemed to know what words like "fish" and "water" and "meat" meant.
That was more than the dumpy stranger knew. Org Rider did not like him. He had gotten over the superstitious fear he had felt when he first saw him bending over Babe's unhatched egg; he could not understand how this man could be alive when a dozen sleeps before he had seen him dead. But the puzzle had receded into the back of his mind and lost its power to instill fear. He wanted desperately to ask the man about it, but the clacking machine the stranger talked through did not seem to work well with him, and Redlaw only shrugged and reported that he could not understand what the man had said to him. "The words are clear enough," Redlaw rumbled. "He says it was another him. How can there be another? He could not say."
When they had eaten four times they decided to sleep. They were a good distance from the last place they had seen either orgs or Watchers, and so they risked building another fire and roasting more of the green nuts that hung all about them. The stranger moved a little way apart from them and flung himself on the ground; in a moment he began to snore.
Org Rider stroked Babe softly along the gently squirming length of its trunk and listened to what Red- law was saying about the stranger: "He says he comes from another world. He knows arts the Watchers don't—arts that I think are strange and frightening to them. But he only speaks of these things, he does not have the weapons to prove them." Redlaw scowled at the fire.
"What is 'another world'?" Org Rider asked.
Redlaw shrugged morosely. "What he says about his world is not to be believed. He says it is not flat."
"Not flat? You mean mountainous?"
"No, not mountainous. Round. A little ball, so tiny that men have gone all the way around it."
"That is unlikely," Org Rider agreed.
"What is even more unlikely," continued Redlaw, glowering across the fire at the sleeping stranger, "is that he says our world is also curved like a ball. This is clearly false, but he holds to it. He says that in his place everything is very heavy. A man can't jump much above his own height. And he says, let me see—oh, yes. He says that although there are trees and plants and clouds on his world, they do not glow of their own light. None of them."
"How strange! It must be a gloomy place. How does one see?"
"There is one cloud," Redlaw said. "He does not call it a cloud, but it is in the sky, so what else could it be? It is so bright that its light hurts your eyes, and so high that it looks quite small."
"I have never seen such a thing," Org Rider declared. He peered around, squinting through the leaves at the great flank of Knife-in-the-Sky rising above them. "Where is the way to such a place? Over the mountain?"
"Farther! He says you climb beyond the rain clouds and beyond the flying rocks. He says you come up into a darkness where there is nothing at all. The darkness is bigger than you can imagine—so big that, when you begin to cross it, our flatworld shrinks to a point you can't even see, like an org flying out of sight toward the top of the mountain."
"It is all too strange for me," Org Rider said uneasily, stroking Babe. "If his world is so far away, how is it that he is just a man?"
"He does not know, he says," Redlaw growled. "He says he and his friends came here for learning, and that is one of the things they wish to learn: how it is that he is so like a human person, though from so far away."
"I wish him luck," Org Rider said dubiously. "I saw the machine he came in. It made a great noise in the sky, like slam-bang-bang, slam-bang-bang. But in spite of all the noise, it was slower than the orgs. They ripped the wings off it and tore it apart in the sky. And when the Watchers caught him, he died." Org Rider added thoughtfully, "I do not understand how that can be, either. But I have seen it, so it is so."
Redlaw rumbled impatiently, "It was another like him, he says. Part of that is nonsense, for he says it is him and says it isn't him, both.
"What is not nonsense," he added somberly, "is that he has something the Watchers fear. I must have that from him, or he must die."
They traveled fast and far, and the strain began to tell on all of them. Even Redlaw grew short-tempered and gaunt-faced. In some ways his was the most difficult job of all. Ben Yale Pertin was ill and injured; Org Rider had Babe to care for and often to carry; so it fell to Redlaw to keep alert for Watchers or for wild orgs, and there was never a moment while they were moving when he could relax. When they rested over the campfire they no longer talked amiably, they bickered. It troubled Org Rider that Redlaw seemed sometimes to believe in the stranger's insane stories, and other times to hate and mistrust him. He could not hear the stranger directly; whatever the machine was that Ben Yale Pertin had worn on his armbands, it seemed to respond only to the squeals and whistles of the language of the Watchers, not to normal human speech. So Org Rider could only communicate with him through Redlaw's imperfect understanding, and he was not sine how much was getting across.
Conscience made him try to correct some of the stranger's errors. "I have thought," he told Redlaw gravely, "and Ben Yale Pertin is wrong about our flat- world. It is not round; my mother has told me this. And also I understand how he looks so like us."
Redlaw scowled at him, then guffawed. When he was done laughing he chirped for a moment in the language of the Watchers, and then turned to Org Rider. "Ben Yale wishes to be enlightened, young one," he said, his tone half laughing but not pleasantly. "So do I. Please tell us what your mother has to contribute."
The boy said stubbornly, "It is truth, all people in my tribe agreed to that. The flatworld was made by the makers." He peered into the fire, trying to remember exactly. "My mother used to say they were terrible beings, taller than people, shining with light of their own. They sang death songs, and the songs themselves killed those who displeased them."
He waited for Redlaw to finish translating, chuckling, then went on:
"My_ people came from seven eggs the makers had made, in a cave down under the bottom of the world. The eggs were guarded by seven keepers, but still they were stolen by the Watchers. The evil creatures first blinded the keepers with death-weed dust, and then stole the eggs for a feast. As our guest would have done with my org," he added carefully.
Redlaw chocked, but managed to translate and receive a reply. "He apologizes again for that," he reported. "He says he was hungry and did not know better."
Org Rider nodded and went on: "The feast was to be at the top of the Watchman's tower, where the blinded keepers couldn't climb. But the makers were angry, when they found the keepers blinded and the eggs gone. They did not sing their death song, but they sang a special song for the wild orgs. And the orgs heard it as they flew over Knife-in-the-Sky.