They turned back, left the beach, and crossed the seaside meadow to a forest path. After some distance the path forked; one branch sloped upward steeply, and when they turned into it they saw, far ahead of them, a young native couple walking along slowly in close embrace.
“Where are we?” Talitha asked.
Hort gestured toward the top of the slope. “This is a Bower Hill.”
“Bower Hill?” she echoed. “I never heard of such a thing.” She glanced about her. “I’ve never been this way before.”
“I should hope not!” Hort said with a grin.
“Now what do you mean by that?”
He shook his head and took a surreptitious backward glance. “We brought the whole flock with us,” he said disgustedly.
“Was that the experiment? Did you think they wouldn’t come here?”
“I hoped they wouldn’t, but they probably want to make certain where we’re going.”
“So where are we going?” she asked.
“To the Bower Hill.”
As they approached the crest she saw why the word “bower” was used—along each side of the path were openings into small forest glades. In one of them she saw the young couple they had. followed up the path lying in close embrace. She averted her eyes and then turned a puzzled gaze on Hort; he was looking behind them again, and they walked on for some distance. Then, before she quite knew what was happening, he had drawn her into a bower on the opposite side of the path.
She struggled furiously as he tried to embrace her. “So this is your idea of an experiment!” she snapped. She beat futilely against his face with her fists.
“Hush!” he whispered. “It’s the only way to get rid of the escort!”
She continued to struggle. “With you, a girl needs an escort!”
“Hush! If it isn’t a good act, they won’t leave!”
Then his lips found hers, and she stopped struggling.
A moment later, an hour, an eternity, she lay in his arms on the soft, springy blanket of pliable fronds, and she opened her eyes bewilderedly when he suddenly released her and raised himself up.
“I think they’re gone,” he whispered.
“Good for them,” she said, and pulled him back.
His beard caressed her face and his lips sealed her eyes, and she heard his whispered words with a wild surge of joy. “If we had only ourselves to think of—they call this world paradise, but it wasn’t, not until you came. But the natives—”
Her joy took flight, and reluctantly she pushed herself into a sitting position. “The natives are starving. What was it you wanted to find out?”
He got to his feet and helped her up. “There’s a path they keep concealed. I’d like to find out where it leads.” He went to the bower opening and cautiously looked down the path. Then he returned to her. “They’re gone. It was a magnificent act.”
She went willingly to his arms, and when they finally drew apart she said, “You’re rather convincing yourself, but was it necessary to climb up here for our acting?”
He smiled at her. “You really don’t know where you are?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a Bower Hill. There’s one for every two or three villages, and they’re the places where the young people do their courting. They’re the only locations on Langri where there’s a right to privacy. Come on—they’ll be waiting for us at the bottom of the hill, so we’ll have to sneak out the back way.”
A narrow path, only slightly worn, took them down the hill in another direction. After watching for a time to make certain they were unobserved, they sprinted across a meadow to the forest and cautiously skirted it until they came upon one of the main paths. They followed it in single file with Hort leading the way. So well camouflaged was the intersecting path that he missed it completely and had to fumble in the tall undergrowth searching for it, but finally he found the place. The opening was cunningly laced together with vines, and they parted it only enough to squeeze through.
They found themselves on a broad avenue—not only was this path wider than any other forest path Talitha could remember, but the undergrowth had been trimmed back from it. It had the appearance of a tidy roadway, and to aggravate the mystery, the path ran absolutely straight. Other forest paths meandered— around trees, away from thickets and bogs, along watercourses— but this one ran as straight as a survey. It turned aside for nothing, and no trace remained of the trees that must have been felled to make its course possible.
They had to get back to the Bower Hill before the children suspected their ruse, so they walked quickly. The wide path provided some consolation: they could walk side by side, and his arm encircled her warmly.
“Did you ever see a forest path that ran so straight?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nor one so wide.”
“What could be back here in the forest that attracts so much traffic?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
The only obstacle they encountered was a small stream. They waded across, and far up ahead of them the path seemed to end in a blaze of sunlight. A large forest clearing opened before them. It was roughly circular and carpeted with thick grass and flowers. They paused for a moment to look about, and then almost simultaneously they saw it: the rusting, overgrown, smashed hulk of an old survey ship. The forest growth of decades so obliterated its outline that had it not been for the open hatch and the rusting ramp they would have overlooked it.
They ran toward it, and Hort stopped at the foot of the ramp and whistled softly. “Someone came down rather hard. It happened a long, long time ago, but it probably explains a lot of things.”
Together they climbed the wobbly ramp and entered the ship. They felt their way cautiously along the dim corridor to the control room, where cracks in the hull permitted the jagged entry of light. There, on the chart table, atop the brittle remains of the charts, was an amazing clutter of objects: the ship’s log, a few books, a rusted pocket knife, a broken compass, a rosary.
In the center of the table was a heap of fresh flowers.
“It’s a shrine!” Talitha exclaimed.
Hort picked up the logbook. “The ship’s log. This may answer questions I’ve been asking myself ever since I arrived here. Let’s take it outside and have a look.”
They sat side by side at the top of the ramp and held the log between them. “It’s an old-fashioned script,” Hort said, leafing through the pages. “Can you make it out?”
“Just barely.”
“After the ship crashed, it seems to have been used as a diary, and also—” He stared at it. “Also I don’t know what. Let’s start at the beginning and see what we can make of it.”
So they read together, page after page after page.
His name was Cerne Obrien. He was a little freebooter who had somehow managed to buy or steal a junked government survey ship, and he went batting about the galaxy raising hell and generally having himself a grand puff of a good time. He also did a bit of illegal prospecting when he felt like it, which didn’t seem to be often. When the miracle occurred, and he did strike it rich, he actually seemed to resent the fact. He crashed on his way back to civilization, but he remained the freebooter, now lording it among unsophisticated natives. He explored, he prospected for metals, and he added an outrigger to the hunting boats to give them stability in the furious struggles with the koluf.
Cerne Obrien, the wanderer, finally remained in one place because he was unable to leave. He acquired a native wife, rose high in native councils, and became a leader. And down through the years, as they leafed the pages, a subtle change became more and more pronounced. Obrien increasingly identified with the natives, became one of them, and began to worry about their future. He penned in the logbook an astute summary of Langri’s potential as a resort planet that might have been written by Wembling, followed by a warning as to the probable fate of the natives. He added, “If I live, this won’t happen. If I don’t live, there must be a Plan for them to follow.”