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"another day, and talk with you, Selver? It is important to me-*-"
"I leave here today," Selver said even more gently, but letting go Lyubov's arms, and also looking away. He thus put himself literally out of touch. Civility required that Lyubov do the same, and let the conversation end. But then there would be no one to talk to. Old Tubab had not even looked at him; the town had turned its back on him. And this was Selver, who had been his friend.
"Selver, this killing at Kelme Deva, maybe, you think that lies between us. But it does not. Maybe it brings us closer together. And your people in the slave-pens, they've all been set free, so that wrong no longer lies between us. And even if it does—it always did—all the same I ... lam the same man I was, Selver."
At first the Athshean made no response. His strange face, the large deep-set eyes, the strong features misshapen by scars and blurred by the* short silken fur that followed and yet obscured all contours, this face turned from Lyubov, shut, obstinate. Then suddenly he looked round as if against his own intent. "Lyubov, you shouldn't have come here. You should leave Central two nights from now. I don't know what you are. It would be better if I had never known you."
And with that he was off, a light walk like a long-legged cat, a green flicker among the dark oaks of Tun tar, gone. Tubab followed slowly after him, still without a glance at Lyubov. A fine
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rain fell without sound on the oak-leaves and on the narrow pathways to the Lodge and the river. Only if you listened intently could you hear the rain, too multitudinous a music for one mind to grasp, a single endless chord played on the entire forest.
"Selver is a god," said old Sherrar. "Come and see the fishing-nets now."
Lyubov declined. It would be impolite and impolitic to stay; anyway he had no heart to.
He tried to tell himself that Selver had not been rejecting him, Lyubov, but him as a Terran. It made no difference. It never does.
He was always disagreeably surprised to find how vulnerable his feelings were, how much it hurt him to be hurt. This sort of adolescent sensitivity was shameful, he should have a tougher hide by now.
The little crone, her green fur all dusted and besilvered with raindrops, sighed with relief when he said goodbye. As he started the hopper he had to grin at the sight of her, hop-hobbling off into the trees as fast as she could go, like a little toad that has escaped a snake.
Quality is an important matter, but so is quantity: relative size. The normal adult reaction to a very much smaller person may be arrogant, or protective, or patronising, or affectionate, or bullying, but whatever it is it's liable to be better fitted to a child than to an adult. Then, when the child-sized person was furry, a further response got called upon, which Lyubov had labeled the
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Teddybear Reaction. Since the Athsheans used caress so much, its manifestation was not inappropriate, but its motivation remained suspect. And finally there was the inevitable Freak Reaction, the flinching away from what is human but does not quite look so.
But quite outside of all that was the fact that the Athsheans, like Terrans, were simply funny-looking at times. Some of them did look h'ke little toads, owls, caterpillars. Sherrar was not the first little old lady who had struck Lyubov as looking funny from behind. ...
And that's one trouble with the colony, he thought as he lifted the hopper and Tuntar vanished beneath the oaks and the leafless; orchards. We haven't got any old women. No old men either, except Dongh and he's only about sixty. But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think. The Athsheans are governed, in so far as they have government, by old women. Intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interaction of both: that's their arrangement. It has charm, and it works—for them. I wish the administration had sent out a couple of grannies along with all those nubile fertile high-breasted young women. Now that girl I had over the other night, she's really very nice, and nice in bed, she has a kind heart, but my God it'll be forty years before she'll say anything to a man. . . .
But all the time, beneath his thoughts concerning old women and young ones, the shock per-
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sis ted, the intuition or recognition that would not let itself be recognized.
He must think this out before he reported to HQ.
Selver: what about Selver, then?
Selver was certainly a key figure to Lyubov. Why? Becalise he knew him well, or because of some actual power in his personality, which Lyubov had never consciously appreciated?
But he had appreciated it; he had picked Selver out very soon as an extraordinary person. 'Sam,' he had been then, bodyservant for three officers sharing a prefab. Lyubov remembered Ben son boasting what a good creechie they'd got, they'd broke him in right.
Many Athsheans, especially Dreamers from the Lodges, could not change their polycyclic sleep-pattern to fit the Terran one. If they caught up with their normal sleep at night, that prevented them from catching up with the REM or paradoxical sleep, whose 120-minute cycle ruled their life both day and night, and could not be fitted in to the Terran workday. Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think. So many of the men became groggy, confused, withdrawn, even catatonic. Woman, bewildered and abased, behaved with the sullen listlessness 'of the newly enslaved. Male non-adepts and some
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of the younger Dreamers did best; they adapted, working hard in the logging camps or becoming clever servants. Sam had been one of these, an efficient, characterless body servant, cook, laundry-boy , butler, back soaper and scapegoat for his three masters. He had learned how to be invisible. Lyubov borrowed him as an ethnological informant* and had, by some affinity of mind and nature, won Sam's trust at once. He found Sam the ideal informant, trained in his people's customs, perceptive of their significances, and quick to translate them, to make them intelligible to Lyubov, bridging the gap between two languages, two cultures, two species of the genus Man.
For two years Lyubov had been traveling, studying, interviewing, observing, and had failed to get at the key that would let him into the Athshean mind. He didn't even know where the lock was. He had studied the Athsheans' sleeping-habits and found that they apparently had no sleeping-habits. He had wired countless electrodes onto countless furry green skulls, and failed to make any sense at all out of the familiar patterns, the spindles and jags, the alphas and deltas and thetas, that appeared on the graph. It was Selver who had made him understand, at last, the Athshean significance of the word 'dream/ which was also the word for 'root,* and so hand him the key of the kingdom of the forest people. It was with Selver as EEC subject that he had first seen with comprehension the extraordinary impulse-patterns of a brain entering a dream-state neither sleeping nor awake: a-condition which related to Terran dreaming-sleep as the Parthenon to a mud hut: the same thing basically, but with the addition of complexity, quality, and control. Selver might have escaped. He stayed, first as a valet, then (through one of Lyubov's few useful perquisites as spesh) as Scientific Aide, still locked up nightly with all other creechies in the pen (the Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Personnel Quarters). ' 'I'll fly you up to Tuntar and work with you there,' * Lyubov had said, about the third time he talked with Selver, "for God's sake why stay here?**—"My wife Thele is in the pen," Selver had said. Lyubov had tried to get her released, but she was in the HQ kitchen, and the sergeants who managed the kitchen-gang resented any interference from 'brass' and 'speshes.' Lyubov had to be very careful, lest they take out their resentment on the woman. She and Selver had both seemed willing to wait patiently until both could escape or be freed. Male and female creechies were strictly segregated in the pens—why, no one seemed to know—and husband and wife rarely saw each other. Lyubov managed to arrange meetings for them in his hut, which he had to himself at die north end of town. It was when Thele was returning to HQ from one. such meeting that Davidson had seen her and