And then I saw her quelling the emotions of her charges, and urging them to their feet, and pointing out over the slopes of the mountains to the north. For they were to go one way into the forests, for safety, and she and I another. When they had gone off, some fifty or so, turning to smile and hold up their arms to her in thankfulness and farewell, she came to me and, rummaging in the folds of her garments again, produced the ornaments and told me to put them on. As I did so, first the band on my thigh, then the girdle of cool starstones, and then the bracelets, and lastly the necklace, it was as if my mind cleared, my thoughts steadied, and even a short moment after my old state of mind had been banished by the secret strengths of the ornaments, it seemed as dreadful and inconceivable a place or state of being as the dungeons of the city now seemed. I looked at Rhodia with clarity and steadiness of thought and saw her straight. Again, my thought was that she was suffering from some horrible disease, like a leprosy. She had a faded, drained look, as if she had been dusted with ashes. I not seen anything like it before. The face, the hands, what was visible of her arms and legs, were all dried up, and had a shrivelled look, as a corpse sometimes does. And the hair on her head, which by race was a vigorous glossy black, had white in it.
She saw how I stared, and she said: “Sirius, you are looking at the physical aspect of the Shikastan Degenerative Disease.”
“Rohanda has become so decadent?”
“Now, by halfway through their lives, sometimes even sooner, they start to show signs of decay. This is a process that accelerates generation by generation. They have even forgotten that this is recent thing with them.”
I could not at once recover from the horror of it. I was trying to imagine what it must be like for these unfortunates, trapped inside their enfeebled defective bodies, and I was wondering if it was not possible for Canopus, with their knowledge of the techniques of how to discard bodies at will, to aid the poor creatures.
She sighed, and then gave her short characteristic Nasar-laugh. “There are other priorities. Believe me. We have other, and most urgent, things to do.”
“Necessities,” I said, meaning to joke with her.
And she acknowledged my intention with a smile, but said, “Yes, indeed, Sirius—necessities!”
And on this familiar note we began our journey eastwards through the alleys and passes of the mountain chains along the coast. We went up and we went down, but it was without haste. We were not in danger, she said. This was because “our greatest danger is also our protection. On this occasion.” And when I pressed her to elucidate she gave me a long strong look from eyes that I saw had around their black pupils colourless edges, the tax of Rohandan age—a look that made me think of the whisper: Sirius, be careful!—which seemed to sound, now, all the time, somewhere in my deepest self. She said only: Your greatest danger. Yours, Sirius.” And would not say any more on the subject. Though she talked willingly and at length about the city we were going to.
We walked for several days through thick and pleasant forests. We did not hurry. I got the impression that this pace was for my benefit. So I could absorb—instruction. From her. From Nasar. From Canopus. I did not mind. I was in her, their, hands. Very different was my state of mind now from my angered self-esteem when I had had the chance to be with Canopus, in the person of Klorathy, in those faraway days of the unfortunate “events.” I was trying to listen. To adjust. But now, looking back, I see that I was trying over and over again in every way I knew to find out about Canopus itself, its organisations, its ways of managing itself, its planets—and while I did this Rhodia patiently returned the subject to Grakconkranpatl, to Shammat, and, several times, to the eighth man of those priests. It was not, I see now, that she repeated his name, which was Tafta, so that Tafta recurred through our talk, but that she kept bringing me to points and places where I had to think of him. He was strongly in my mind. I could feel his presence there. Just as, wrapped shivering in my stone cell, Nasar had rung in my mind, so that the name could not help but come to tongue, so, now, as we walked through those magnificent forests, the great snowy mountains at our backs, the feeling or sense of that man kept coming back. I found myself thinking of him, and what he was, when I recognised his particular and unique pulse in my mind: disturbing, harsh, yet nothing near the cold evil of the priests.
And when she brought me back to this point, Tafta, the smiling, handsome, and enigmatic savage, it was always with the long dark stare of warning that I recognised.
We able to look down on Lelanos from a height—and what a difference from the other city! The same bluish-grey stone was used, but lightened with a glistening white quartz and thin bands of red, so that the place had a lively charm about it. As I moved about Lelanos in the days that followed, I often thought I had glimpsed a pattern or even several interlocking patterns in the way the buildings were set out, but I never grasped it wholly, and this was one of the things that I omitted to ask Rhodia, and then it was too late. At any rate, to view it from above, there was variation, and informality; there were no frowningly dominant buildings; no temples; no threat of stone, and rock, and earth being used to imprison or weight the tender—and so brief—flesh of Rohanda.
And from what I had heard from Rhodia of its governance, there was nothing to fear from it.
This was its history. On this site, a small plain ringed by low and friendly mountains, had been several tribes of creatures at that level where their physical needs ordered their lives, and these needs had not been given a religious or “higher purpose” recognition. In other words, they were considerably lower even than the Lombis before their culture was disturbed by our use of them. They fished, hunted, ate, mated, slept.
Nasar caused himself to be born into a family that retained enough of the remnants of “an ancient and high knowledge,” as they put it, to see in this girl something superior. The family was a well-regarded one among a dwindling people living far to the north in the narrow peninsula that separated the Isolated Northern and Isolated Southern Continents—this land bridge, or channel, had often been under water, completely cutting off the Southern Continent, but the “events” had lifted it high above the ocean, and subsequent minor “events” had not succeeded in submerging it. There had flourished a Canopus-inspired culture that had degenerated, and these fast-vanishing people were all that remained. Their memories of the “ancient knowledge” were equated with female dominance, for a variety of reasons extraneous to this account. Rhodia was well treated, and when she told her parents of her needs, was given a company of the physically most striking young males and females of her people to go with her, and she travelled southwards looking for a place and race that would respond to her instruction.
It was easy to imagine how these handsome visitors must have struck the tribes. Rhodia’s people were a tall, broad, red-brown type, with large dark eyes, and flowing luxuriant black hair. They had all the ease of manner and confidence of their past high culture. The tribes were of a slight, shorter kind, with dark brown skin, small black eyes, sparse coarse black locks. The new arrivals wore handsome coloured cotton clothes; the tribes wore skins. The “Gods” were able to instruct them in a thousand skills undreamed of by them, and to cut it short, within a couple of their generations, but while Rhodia's people were still youthful, there was large, expanding city that had been set up according to her instruction, but was governed by themselves. All the visitors but Rhodia had returned to their own people. Rhodia was considered, still, a “God,” but lived as they did, had married one of their males, and her children were not set apart in any way from the other citizens. Lelanos was governed like this.