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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 32775 ***
+
+
+
+
+                         THE TIES THAT BIND
+
+                        By Walter Miller, Jr.
+
+                      Illustrated by Kelly Freas
+
+[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
+Fiction May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Sidenote: _The Earth was green and quiet. Nature had survived Man, and
+Man had survived himself. Then, one day, the great silvery ships broke
+the tranquillity of the skies, bringing Man's twenty-thousand-year-lost
+inheritance back to Earth...._]
+
+
+    "_Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
+      And why sae sad gang ye, O?"
+    "O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,
+      And I had nae mair but he, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+
+The Horde of sleek ships arose in the west at twilight--gleaming slivers
+that reflected the dying sun as they lanced across the darkling heavens.
+A majestic fleet of squadrons in double-vees, groups in staggered
+echelon, they crossed the sky like gleaming geese, and the children of
+Earth came out of their whispering gardens to gape at the splendor that
+marched above them.
+
+There was fear, for no vessel out of space had crossed the skies of
+Earth for countless generations, and the children of the planet had
+forgotten. The only memories that lingered were in the memnoscripts, and
+in the unconscious _kulturverlaengerung_, of the people. Because of the
+latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the
+slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in
+the language to name them.
+
+The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered
+in awed voices under the elms....
+
+The piping whine of a senile hag: "The ancient gods! The day of the
+judging! Repent, repent...."
+
+The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: "The alien! We're lost, we're
+lost! We've got to run for the hills!"
+
+The voice of the child: "See the pretty birdlights? See? See?"
+
+And a voice of wisdom in the councils of the clans: "The sons of
+men--they've come home from the Star Exodus. Our brothers."
+
+The slivers of light, wave upon wave, crept into the eclipse shadow as
+the twilight deepened and the stars stung through the blackening shell
+of sky. When the moon rose, the people watched again as the silhouette
+of a black double-vee of darts slipped across the lunar disk.
+
+Beneath the ground, in response to the return of the ships, ancient
+mechanisms whirred to life, and the tech guilds hurried to tend them. On
+Earth, there was a suspenseful night, pregnant with the dissimilar twins
+of hope and fear, laden with awe, hushed with the expectancy of twenty
+thousand years. The stargoers--they had come home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Kulturverlaengerung!_" grunted the tense young man in the toga of an
+Analyst. He stood at one end of the desk, slightly flushed, staring down
+at the haughty wing leader who watched him icily from a seat at the
+other end. He said it again, too distinctly, as if the word were a club
+to hurl at the wingsman. "_Kulturverlaengerung_, that's why!"
+
+"I heard you the first time, Meikl," the officer snapped. "Watch your
+tongue and your tone!"
+
+A brief hush in the cabin as hostility flowed between them. There was
+only the hiss of air from the ventilators, and the low whine of the
+flagship's drive units somewhere below.
+
+The erect and elderly gentleman who sat behind the desk cleared his
+throat politely. "Have you any further clarifications to make, Meikl?"
+he asked.
+
+"It should be clear enough to all of you," the analyst retorted hotly.
+He jerked his head toward the misty crescent of Earth on the viewing
+screen that supplied most of the light in the small cabin. "You can see
+what they are, what they've become. And you _know_ what _we_ are."
+
+The two wingsmen bristled slightly at the edge of contempt in the
+analyst's voice. The elderly gentlemen behind the desk remained
+impassive, expressionless.
+
+The analyst leaned forward with a slow accusing glance that swept the
+faces of the three officers, then centered on his antagonist at the
+other end of the desk. "You want to _infect_ them, ThaĆ¼le?" he demanded.
+
+The wingsman darkened. His fist exploded on the desktop. "Meikl, you're
+in contempt! Restrict yourself to answering questions!"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"There will be no further breaches of military etiquette during the
+continuance of this conference," the elderly gentleman announced icily,
+thus seizing the situation.
+
+After a moment's silence, he turned to the analyst again. "We've got to
+refuel," he said flatly. "In order to refuel, we must land."
+
+"Yes, sir. But why not on Mars? We can develop our own facilities for
+producing fuel. Why must it be Earth?"
+
+"Because there will be _some existing facilities_ on Earth, even though
+they're out of space. The job would take five years on Mars."
+
+The analyst lowered his eyes, shook his head wearily. "I'm thinking of a
+billion earthlings. Aren't they worth considering, sir?"
+
+"I've got to consider the men in my command, Meikl. They've been through
+hell. We all have."
+
+"The hell was our own making, baron."
+
+"_Meikl!_"
+
+"Sorry, sir."
+
+Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: "Besides, Meikl, your
+predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be
+true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the
+present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a
+thousand generations. I don't know a great deal about culturetics, but
+I've read that _kulturverlaengerung_ reaches a threshold of extinction
+after about a dozen generations, if there's no restimulation."
+
+"Only in laboratory cultures, sir," sighed the analyst. "Under rigid
+control to make certain there's no restimulant. In practice, in a
+planet-wide society, there's constant accidental restimulation,
+unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to
+original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult'laenger
+linkage never really dies out--although, it can stay recessive and
+unconscious."
+
+"That's too bad," a wingsman growled sourly. "We'll wake it up, won't
+we?"
+
+"Let's not be callous," the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. "Analyst
+Meikl has sensitivities."
+
+The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing
+consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. "Sir, I was
+_summoned_ here to offer my opinions about landing on Earth. You asked
+about possible cultural dangers. I've told you."
+
+"You discussed the danger to earthlings."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I meant 'danger' to the personnel of this fleet--to their esprit, their
+indoctrination, their group-efficiency. I take it you see none."
+
+"On the contrary, I see several," said the analyst, coming slowly to his
+feet, eyes flashing and darting among them. "Where were you born,
+Wingman?" he asked the officer at the opposite end of the desk.
+
+"Lichter Six, Satellite," the officer grunted after a moment of
+irritable silence.
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Omega Thrush," said the other wingsman.
+
+All knew without asking that the baron was born in space, his birthplace
+one of the planetoid city-states of the Michea Dwarf. Meikl looked
+around at them, then ripped up his own sleeve, unsheathed his
+rank-dagger, and pricked his forearm with the needle point. A red
+droplet appeared, and he wiped at it with a forefinger.
+
+"It's common stuff, gentlemen. We've shed a lot of it. And each of us is
+a walking sackful of it." He paused, then turned to touch the point of
+his dagger to the viewer, where it left a tiny red trace on the glass,
+on the bright crescent of Earth, mist-shrouded, chastely wheeling her
+nights into days.
+
+"It came from there," he hissed. "She's your womb, gentlemen. Are you
+going back?"
+
+"Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?" the baron asked sharply,
+hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. "This becomes silly."
+
+"If you land on her," Meikl promised ominously, "you'll go away with a
+fleet full of hate."
+
+Meikl's arm dropped to his side. He sheathed his dagger. "Is my presence
+at this meeting still imperative, sir?" he asked the baron.
+
+"Have you anything else to say?"
+
+"Yes--_don't land on Earth_."
+
+"That's a repetition. No further reasons?--in terms of danger to
+ourselves?"
+
+The analyst paused. "I can think of nothing worse that could happen to
+us," he said slowly, "than just being what we already are."
+
+He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of
+the cabin.
+
+"I suggest," said a wingsman, "that we speak to Frewek about tightening
+up the discipline in the Intelligence section. That man was in open
+contempt, Baron."
+
+"But he was also probably right," sighed the graying officer and
+nobleman.
+
+"_Sir--!_"
+
+"Don't worry, Wingsman, there's nothing else to do. We'll have to land.
+Make preparations, both of you--and try to make contact with surface.
+I'll dictate the message."
+
+When the wingsmen left, it was settled. The baron arose with a sigh and
+went to peer morosely at the view of Earth below. Very delicately, he
+wiped the tiny trace of blood from the glass. She was a beautiful world,
+this Earth. She had spawned them all, as Meikl said--but for this, the
+baron could feel only bitterness toward her.
+
+But what of her inhabitants? I'm past feeling anything for them, he
+thought, past feeling for any of the life-scum that creeps across the
+surface of a world, any world. We'll go down quickly, and take what we
+need quickly, and leave quickly. We'll try not to infect them, but
+they've already got it in them, the dormant disease, and any infection
+will be only a recurrence.
+
+Nevertheless, he summoned a priest to his quarters. And, before going to
+the command deck, he bathed sacramentally as if in preparation for
+battle.
+
+    "_Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
+      Edward, Edward;
+    Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
+      My dear son, I tell thee, O."
+    "O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my red roan steed,
+      That erst was sae fair and free, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+False dawn was in the east when the slivers of light appeared once again
+out of the eclipse shadow to rake majestically across the heavens, and
+again the children of Earth crowded in teeming numbers from the quiet
+gardens to chatter their excitement at the wonder in the sky. But this
+time, a message came. The men of the tech clans who tended the newly
+activated mechanisms heard it, and the mechanisms memorized it, and
+played it again and again for the people, while the linguists puzzled
+over the unidentified language used in the transmission.
+
+     PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+     PRESENTS GREETINGS!
+
+     IF YOU HAVE RECORDS, OUR USE OF ANCIENT ANGLO-GERMANIC SHOULD
+     MAKE OUR IDENTITY CLEAR. HAVE YOU FUELING FACILITIES FOR 720
+     SHIPS OF THOR-NINE CLASS? IF NOT, WE SHALL DEVELOP FACILITIES
+     FROM LOCAL RESOURCES, WITH, WE TRUST, YOUR PEACEFUL
+     COOPERATION. THIS CADRE NOT REIMMIGRATING, BUT EN ROUTE TO
+     URSAN STARS. REQUEST LANDING SUGGESTIONS, IN VIEW OF OUR
+     FUELING NEEDS.
+
+     REQUEST INTELLIGENCE CONCERNING PRESENT LEVEL OF TERRESTRIAL
+     CULTURE. OUR ORIBITAL OBSERVATIONS INDICATE A STATIC
+     AGRARIAN-TECHNICAL COMPLEX, BUT DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE. WE COME
+     IN ARMS, BUT WITHOUT ENMITY. PLEASE REPLY, IF POSSIBLE.
+
+     ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+     SPACESTRIKE COMMAND, IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So it came, repeated continuously for an hour, followed by an hour of
+silence, and then by another hour of repetition. The linguists were
+unable to discern meanings. Thousands of memorizers were consulted, but
+none knew the words of the harsh voice from the ships. At last, the
+sages consulted the books and memnoscripts in the ancient vaults,
+pouring over tomes that had been buried for countless centuries. After
+hours of hurried study....
+
+"It is found, _it is found_, a tongue of the ancients!" a joyous cry in
+the glades and the garden pathways.
+
+Happily, the sages recorded the linguistic structure of the forgotten
+tongue on memnoscript, and gave it to a servo translator. Outmoded
+mechanisms were being brought out of wraps and prepared for use. The
+servos supplied a translation of the message, and the sages studied it.
+
+"It is badly understood," was the curious mutter along the garden
+pathways.
+
+"Many words have no words to match them, nor any thoughts that are
+similar," was the only explanation the sages could give.
+
+In translation the message seemed meaningless, or unfathomable. Only one
+thing was clear. The sons of Man meant to descend again upon the world
+of their ancestors. There was a restless unease in the gardens, and
+groups of elders gathered in the conference glades to mutter and glance
+at the sky. "Invite our brothers to land," was the impetuous cry of the
+young, but there were dissenters.
+
+In the Glade of Sopho, a few thoughtful clansmen of Pedaga had gathered
+to muse and speak quietly among themselves, although it was not
+ordinarily the business of tutors to consider problems that confronted
+society as a whole, particularly problems arising outside society
+itself. The Pedaga were teachers of the very young, and deliberately
+kept themselves childlike in outlook in order to make fuller contact
+with the children in their charge.
+
+"I think we should tell them to go away," said Letha, and looked around
+at the others for a response.
+
+She got nothing in reply but a flickering glance from Marrita, who sat
+morosely on a cool rock by the spring, her chin on her bare knees. Evon
+gave her a brief polite smile, to acknowledge the sound of her voice,
+but he returned almost at once to absently tearing twigs and glancing up
+at the bits of sky that showed through the foliage of the overhanging
+trees. Iak and Karrn were whispering together at the far end of the
+glade, and had not heard her.
+
+Letha shrugged and leaned back against the tree trunk again, sitting
+spraddle-legged this time in the hope of catching Evon's eye. She was a
+graceful girl, and while gracefulness is sometimes feline, Letha's was
+more nearly kittenish. She was full-bodied and soft, but well-shaped in
+spite of a trace of plumpness. Thick masses of black hair fell over
+baby-skin shoulders in a pleasing contrast, and while her face was a bit
+too round, it radiated a gentle, winning grin, and the sympathetic gaze
+of gray-blue eyes. Now she seemed ready to pout. Evon remained
+self-absorbed.
+
+"I think we should tell them to go away," she repeated a little sharply.
+"They'll all be big and swashbuckling and handsome, and the children
+will become unmanageable as soon as they see them. All the little girls
+will swoon, and all the little boys will want to go with them."
+
+Evon glanced at her briefly. "It's up to the elders of the Geoark," he
+muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own
+meditations.
+
+"And all the _big_ girls will run away with them," she purred with a
+tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to
+waggle her foot.
+
+Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward
+again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually,
+she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He _must_ be--because she hadn't
+seen him sit still this long in years. He was _always_ doing something,
+or looking for something to do. It wasn't like Evon just to sit still
+and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting
+boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and
+looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled
+didn't fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily,
+with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an
+elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could
+twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just
+drooped.
+
+She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.
+
+"You wonder what it's like, Evon?" she asked.
+
+He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.
+
+"To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean," she added.
+
+"_Me?_ What _are_ you thinking of, Letha?"
+
+"Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad's face. You remind me of
+an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to
+play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens."
+
+"I don't fiddle."
+
+"But your eyes are on the sky-fleet."
+
+Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. "It's
+strange," he murmured at last. "It's as if I know them--the star-birds,
+I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at
+something I expected to happen ... or ... or...."
+
+"Something familiar?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?" she asked the blonde girl
+who sat on the cool rock by the spring.
+
+Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. "I don't
+believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief."
+
+"How silly! What's that to do with it?"
+
+"He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I'd remember
+where he buried it, wouldn't I?" She pouted, and went back to dabbling a
+club toe in the spring.
+
+Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. "We lie around here like
+sleepy pigs!" he grumbled. "Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on
+the Geoark to make up its mind?"
+
+"What do you think they'll do?"
+
+"The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?"
+
+"Tell them to go away."
+
+"And suppose they chose not to go?"
+
+The girl looked bewildered. "I can't imagine anyone refusing the
+Geoark."
+
+"Maybe they've got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with
+ours?"
+
+"_Two_ Geoarks? What a strange idea."
+
+"Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware
+that I have one too?"
+
+"Evon! What a _strange_ idea."
+
+He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring,
+then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling
+complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the
+glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon's laughter broke the
+gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to
+wander into the clearing from the pathways.
+
+"I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark," someone
+suggested.
+
+"About the sky-fleet? And who knows what to say?"
+
+"I'm afraid," said a girl. "Somehow I'm suddenly afraid of them."
+
+"Our brothers from the Exodus? But they're _people_--such as you and I."
+
+So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the
+glade to read another message received from the sky-fleet.
+
+     PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+     PRESENTS GREETINGS!
+
+     HAVING RECEIVED NO ANSWER TO OUR PREVIOUS COMMUNICATION, WE
+     HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LAND AT ONCE. I AM IMPOSING AN
+     INFORMATIONAL QUARANTINE TO AVOID RESTIMULATING POSSIBLE
+     RECESSIVE KULTURVERLAENGERUNG, BUT SUGGEST YOU GUARD
+     YOURSELVES. OUR CULTURES HAD A COMMON ORIGIN. WE COME IN ARMS,
+     WITHOUT ENMITY.
+
+     ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+     SPACESTRIKE COMMAND IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION
+
+This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less
+meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was
+going to land, without invitation.
+
+Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans.
+"Can you revive the devices that speak across space?" they asked.
+
+"They are revived," answered the tech clans.
+
+"Then let us speak to our brothers from space."
+
+And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out:
+
+     BRETHREN TO BRETHREN, PRESENT LOVE LOVE LOVE.
+
+     WE WELCOME YOU TO OUR GLADES AND TO OUR PLACES OF FEEDING AND
+     OUR PLACES OF SLEEPING. WE WELCOME YOU TO THE BOSOM OF THE
+     WORLD OF BEGINNING. AFTER TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS, EARTH HAS NOT
+     FORGOTTEN. COME AMID REJOICING.
+
+     THE ELDERS OF THE GEOARK
+
+"I'm afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to," growled Ernstli
+Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an
+atmospheric-braking orbit.
+
+And there was thunder in a cloudless sky.
+
+    "_O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
+      Edward, Edward.
+    O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
+      And some other dule ye dree, O."
+    "O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,
+      Alas and woe is me, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In accordance with the rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized
+planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group
+fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and
+established an "orbital shell" of criscrossing orbits, timed and
+interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first
+wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at
+three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When
+the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and
+flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked
+itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.
+
+From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its
+telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a
+hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.
+
+"No signs of the natives yet," came the report. "No signs of technology.
+No evidence of hostility."
+
+A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera
+caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing
+more.
+
+One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with
+steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave
+forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square
+miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen
+miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it
+would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.
+
+In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden,
+who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the
+enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock,
+sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of
+jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic
+extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush
+still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a
+bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized
+the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was
+born into his bones.
+
+Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the
+sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south,
+another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the
+flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a
+low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area
+toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf
+below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller
+fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color
+blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of
+brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery.
+Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind
+stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind
+changed, and the air that breathed about the commander's face was full
+of perfume.
+
+I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home
+of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote
+that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply
+dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure 76-A, "Refueling Method
+for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable."
+
+It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa,
+and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia
+ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across
+the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate
+histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered
+itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the
+histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied
+them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had
+ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man
+was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum--or had been, before
+the War of Secession--and when history moved into space, Earth was a
+half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the
+historians had reconstructed for the museums--vistas of roaring
+industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and
+spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully
+tended Japanese garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As he stared around, he felt a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed
+at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the
+landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so
+vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would
+be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had
+already been issued. "All personnel are forbidden to attempt the
+learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture
+language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with
+them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of
+Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in
+the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives,
+shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other
+form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in
+force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited
+purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby
+authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to
+try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized
+to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden,
+Comm."
+
+It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And
+Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language
+in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile,
+the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in
+which the messages had been exchanged.
+
+The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a
+flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and
+crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then
+he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk--a young girl, obviously
+frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she
+darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already
+approaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quick
+glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The
+instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in
+the ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. The
+rate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per
+unit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship for
+twenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.
+
+"_Keep clear!_" he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.
+
+She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she
+seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking
+toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.
+
+"_Go back, you little idiot!_"
+
+Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She kept
+coming--into the charred area.
+
+The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground
+near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun
+barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs.
+She yelped and fled back into the green garden.
+
+He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly.
+She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was
+frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human.
+But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself
+absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.
+
+It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the
+Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to
+translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a
+mutually recorded dead language.
+
+"We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," ven
+Klaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region is
+unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our
+measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for
+_our_ purposes."
+
+"Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentle
+voice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are."
+
+"Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military
+jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted
+area, closed to civilian population."
+
+"But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have
+surrounded!"
+
+"Evacuate them."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"_Evacuate_ them. Make them get out."
+
+"My translator is working badly."
+
+The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the
+colonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupied
+zone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us."
+
+"How much notice?"
+
+The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional
+hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius."
+
+"My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting.
+
+"Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplish
+what we came here for, and then get out--as quickly as possible. We
+don't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to
+confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is
+this agreed?"
+
+"My translator is working badly."
+
+"Aren't you getting anything?"
+
+A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where
+the sky-fleet rests."
+
+"Correct."
+
+"But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the
+feast-glades?"
+
+"I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have
+aircraft of your own."
+
+"We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."
+
+"Any of your population understand the mechanisms?"
+
+"Certainly, brother."
+
+"Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what we
+want, and maybe they can make it clear to you."
+
+"As you wish, brother."
+
+The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a
+satisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gone
+quickly," he said.
+
+"The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us."
+
+"Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted.
+
+"I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,'" came a voice from the
+back of the room.
+
+"Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably.
+
+"You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go
+back?"
+
+"It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be
+useful."
+
+Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir."
+
+"Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the
+tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time--have
+you got any suggestions?"
+
+"About how to deal with the natives?"
+
+"Certainly ... but with the accent on _our_ problems."
+
+Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively
+at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gathered
+through limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, and
+do our suggesting later."
+
+"That constitutes your entire opinion?"
+
+"Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung...."
+
+"_Our_ problems, I said!" the commander snapped.
+
+"It's likely to be our problem, sir."
+
+"How?"
+
+"In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns
+we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying
+the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns
+are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."
+
+"What patterns do you mean?"
+
+"The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron."
+
+A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander
+grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of _action_, not a transmittable
+determinant."
+
+Meikl shook his head. "We don't _know_ what is a transmittable
+determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some
+very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't
+feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it
+in our kulturverlaengerung lines."
+
+A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I think
+this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."
+
+"What, the kult'laenger lines?"
+
+"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed
+along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish,
+and deal in facts...."
+
+"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare
+absently out a viewing port at the trees.
+
+"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much
+about it."
+
+"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given
+intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult
+skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the
+game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the
+age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control
+group--another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."
+
+"Go on."
+
+"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests
+on all two hundred."
+
+"Learning the game, you mean?"
+
+"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So
+far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the
+first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the
+patterns of the game easily."
+
+"So?"
+
+"So--during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the
+parental mind--probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't
+'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural
+mechanism of transmittal--and it's an analog of heredity. The
+kulturverlaengerung--and it can linger in a family line without becoming
+conscious for many generations."
+
+"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."
+
+"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on--as a predisposition-talent--to
+the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a
+mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a
+memory...."
+
+"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the
+chances of utilizing native labor?"
+
+    "_And whatten penance will we dree for that,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    Whatten penance will ye dree for that?
+      My dear son, now tell me, O."
+    "I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
+      Mither, mither;
+    I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
+      And I'll fare over the sea, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl,
+Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill,
+once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and
+watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing
+the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine
+shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the
+valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered
+spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance,
+the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and
+natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian
+cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.
+
+"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter
+murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by
+staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.
+
+He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the
+valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no
+resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?
+
+Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of
+the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into
+their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he
+wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.
+Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the
+planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up,
+without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the
+casual statement: "_In our gardens, there are no weeds_," and it applied
+to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna
+and flora of the planet.
+
+This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but
+rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and
+Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and
+slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could
+raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up
+organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done
+both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his
+vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster
+than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms
+of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient
+species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.
+Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him
+with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive
+in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of
+their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.
+
+_This_, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in
+the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant
+exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous
+world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or
+"authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or
+fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood
+beside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a
+foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for
+a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had
+possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual
+natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks.
+There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and
+starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language
+accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives
+enthusiastically strived to please.
+
+He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze.
+Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.
+
+"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.
+
+She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy
+named Evon...."
+
+He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You
+can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.
+
+"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.
+
+"Letha, I...."
+
+"Yes, Meikl."
+
+"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."
+
+Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you
+tell us nothing of space--how you've lived since the Exodus?"
+
+"We are an evil people."
+
+"Not so."
+
+She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.
+
+"What is it you wish to know?"
+
+"Why will you never return to your home?"
+
+"To space--but we shall."
+
+"To the worlds of your birth, I mean."
+
+He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?"
+he asked, a little sharply.
+
+"Will you?"
+
+So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things
+would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.
+
+"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."
+
+"But why? Where are your women and children?"
+
+He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the
+natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships
+departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic
+and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The
+single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from
+the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.
+
+"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had
+said too much.
+
+She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that
+point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"
+
+There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".
+
+"They hurl death, Letha."
+
+"How can 'death' be hurled?"
+
+Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of
+the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the
+children of space. The same traces of the ancient _kulturverlaengerung_
+would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.
+One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the
+Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in
+their culture. The records had been systematically censored and
+rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History
+had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute
+concepts of her understanding.
+
+"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them
+wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a
+contention for property."
+
+"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.
+
+He nodded slowly.
+
+It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and
+interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions
+reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of
+the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,
+the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in
+Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was
+approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and
+nationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
+
+"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our
+cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours
+has passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final."
+
+"And yours, Meikl?"
+
+"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile
+environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of
+the culture--_conquest_, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the
+mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."
+
+"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"
+
+He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."
+
+"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"
+
+He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second
+childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?--a final perpetual
+youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of
+the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in
+low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange
+of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers
+wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit,
+using the spacer's tongue.
+
+"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.
+
+"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three
+hundred men since we landed."
+
+"Found any of them?"
+
+"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."
+
+Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.
+
+"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.
+
+"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the
+elders. Let's go."
+
+They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The
+meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the
+men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The
+attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.
+
+From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of
+nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important
+loss of personnel. What _was_ important: the slow decay of discipline
+under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been
+established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone,
+Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he
+refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of
+the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a
+tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO_{2} gun that could be concealed in
+the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught
+him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter
+plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a
+week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization;
+if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus
+would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.
+
+The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives.
+The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of
+infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation
+for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful
+people after twenty thousand years.
+
+"I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered
+the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders
+had assembled.
+
+He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.
+
+"Letha--you have worked for me many months."
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"I love you, Letha."
+
+She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her
+quietly, hating himself.
+
+"You'll take me with you," she said.
+
+"No." It was impossible.
+
+"Then you'll stay."
+
+"It is ... _forbidden_ ... _verboten_...." There was no word in the
+tongue.
+
+"I can't understand.... If you love...."
+
+He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled
+everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.
+
+"Letha--in your culture, 'life' is the highest value."
+
+"How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl."
+
+He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha.
+I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious
+play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and
+you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?"
+
+She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance--act a different play."
+
+"It's not a play, Letha. We act an _unconscious_ drama, and thus the
+drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence
+over life."
+
+She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.
+
+"I don't know what you mean."
+
+"Can you understand?--that I love you, and yet my ... my...." He groped
+for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes
+precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you."
+
+Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a
+monotone. "It's growing late."
+
+    "_And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
+      My dear son, now tell me, O?"
+    "The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear,
+      Mither, mither;
+    The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear;
+      Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!_"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The trouble had begun on the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party
+of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night.
+Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the
+dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus
+immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and
+needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over
+the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a
+leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel.
+
+    NOTICE OF SANCTUARY
+    TO: ALL PERSONNEL
+    FROM: AUSLAND COMMITTEE
+    SUBJECT: FREEDOM
+
+     1. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO WISHES TO RESIGN FROM THE SERVICES OF
+     THE IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION MAY DO SO OF THIS DATE.
+
+     2. THE PROCEDURE FOR RESIGNATION INVOLVES NO FORMAL STATEMENT.
+     A MAN MAY TERMINATE HIS PERIOD OF SERVICE BY DEPARTING FROM THE
+     OCCUPIED ZONE.
+
+     3. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE WITH THE
+     RESIGNATION OF ANOTHER SHALL BE TRIED IN ABSENTIA BY THIS
+     COMMITTEE, AND IF FOUND GUILTY, SHALL INCUR THE DEATH PENALTY.
+
+     AUSLAND COMMITTEE
+
+"An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!" ven Klaeden had
+hissed. "Get them. Make an example of them."
+
+In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for
+the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on
+sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged
+eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native
+population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered.
+
+A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice
+Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from
+their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that
+had invaded their quarters.
+
+Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed
+to disclose the location of the immunizing serum.
+
+Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were
+brought before the baron.
+
+"Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close
+the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a
+work contract."
+
+On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse.
+The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a
+massacre.
+
+"We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry
+predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come
+out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit."
+
+Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder,
+tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to
+speak in the intermediate language.
+
+"Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear."
+
+Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly
+and turned to the girl. "Tell them," he said in the Intermedia, "that
+death will come to any native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will
+die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that the
+Geoark is...." He paused. There was no word for "hostage."
+
+He was explaining the hostage-concept lengthily, while the girl's face
+drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood
+stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron.
+
+"_They_ understood you, damn them!" ven Klaeden snapped. "They know the
+Intermedia."
+
+The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging
+that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to
+the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables.
+
+"_No!_" Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders.
+
+One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of
+them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few
+feet away stirred restlessly.
+
+The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade.
+The guard looked questioningly at the officers.
+
+"Where are they going?" ven Klaeden demanded.
+
+"Well, Letha?" Meikl muttered.
+
+"I--I don't know--"
+
+"You're lying, girl," the baron grunted, then to the guards: "Tell them
+to halt."
+
+"Party, _halt_!" snapped the guard.
+
+The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes
+gathered up from spindley shins.
+
+"_Party, halt!_"
+
+The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued.
+
+"HALT, I SAID."
+
+"Take the one in the middle," ordered ven Klaeden.
+
+The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief
+rattling hiss. The back of the elder's robe went crimson, and he
+crumpled at the entrance of the pathway.
+
+The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken.
+
+"Shoot for the legs, you fool!" barked the baron.
+
+The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering
+softly.
+
+Meikl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for
+Letha. She had vanished from the glade.
+
+"Haul them to the dispensary, keep them prisoner," the baron was
+growling.
+
+Meikl turned on him. "Now it's come to this, has it?" he snapped. "From
+the beginning, they were willing--even eager, to give what we wanted.
+Why did they _stop_ being willing?"
+
+"That's enough, Meikl!"
+
+"I've hardly started. You came here like a tyrant, and they served you
+like a friend. You couldn't bear it. 'Brethren', they said. But there's
+nothing about 'brethren' in the tactical handbooks, is there, Baron?"
+
+"Shut up."
+
+Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand
+before the analyst and stare at him icily.
+
+"You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst--the
+kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the
+war plague, eh?"
+
+Meikl paused. The baron's eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment
+or triumph.
+
+"Well, Meikl? Is that what we've done? Inflicted them with conflict?
+Brought back the old seeds of hate?"
+
+The analyst drew himself up slightly. "You just killed a man, a man of
+dignity," he snarled, "and you cut two others down like weeds."
+
+"Innocent old men." The baron's mouth twisted into a snarl.
+
+"They wanted nothing but to help us."
+
+"Yes, Meikl? And we are the barbarians, eh?"
+
+The analyst spoke disdain with his eyes.
+
+The baron straightened in sudden hauteur. "_Look down at the ground,
+Analyst_," he hissed.
+
+Ven Klaeden's sudden change of tone impelled him to obey. His eyes fell
+to the turf at his feet--moss covered sod, rich and dark beneath the
+green.
+
+The baron kicked a hole in the moss with the toe of his boot. "Tell me
+where the infection came from, Analyst," he growled. He scraped at the
+hole with his heel. "And why is the dirt so _red_ right here?"
+
+Meikl glanced up slowly. Two men were coming through the shrubs, walking
+warily along the path toward the clearing. Ven Klaeden seemed unaware.
+He leaned forward to speak through his teeth.
+
+"I give them nothing but what they gave our fathers--their own inner
+hell, Meikl--the curse they so carefully forgot. In their Eden."
+
+The man was mad ... perhaps. Meikl's eyes followed the men who
+approached through the shrubs. One of them carried a burden--the limp
+body of a girl, occasionally visible through the low foliage as they
+drew nearer. One of the men was a junior officer, the other a native.
+After a moment, he recognized the native....
+
+"Evon!"
+
+As he called out, the baron whirled, hand slipping to the hilt of the
+ceremonial sword he wore in the presence of the Geoark. The men stopped.
+Meikl stared at the limp figure in the arms of the native.
+
+"_Letha!_"
+
+"Dead," Evon hissed. "They killed her for running...."
+
+They emerged from the shrubs into full view. The officer was holding a
+gun.
+
+"Put that away!" ven Klaeden snapped.
+
+The young officer laughed sourly. "Sorry, baron, I'm from the
+committee."
+
+"_Guard!_"
+
+"There's no one in earshot, Baron."
+
+"Fool!" Ven Klaeden arrogantly whipped out the sword. "Drop that gun, or
+I'll blade-whip you!"
+
+"Easy, baron, easy. I'm your executioner...."
+
+The baron straightened haughtily and began a slow advance, a towering
+figure of icy dignity in the sun that filtered through the foliage.
+
+"... but I want to take care of this one first." The renegade waved the
+gun toward Meikl. "You, Baron, you can have it slower--a needle in your
+official rump."
+
+Ven Klaeden, a figure of utter contempt, continued the slow advance with
+the sword. The officer's lips tightened. He squeezed the trigger. Ven
+Klaeden hesitated, jerking slightly, then continued, his hand pressing
+against his abdomen, doubling forward slightly. The officer fired
+again--a sharp snap of sound in the glade. The baron stopped, wrestling
+with pain ten feet from the pale renegade.
+
+Suddenly he flung the sword. It looped in mid-air and slashed the man's
+face from chin to cheekbone. He tripped and tumbled backward as ven
+Klaeden slipped to his knees on the moss.
+
+Meikl dived for the gun. By the time he wrestled it away from the
+officer with the bloody face, ven Klaeden was sitting like a gaunt
+Buddha on the moss, and the body of Letha lay nearby, while a confused
+Evon clutched his hands to his face and rocked slowly. Meikl came slowly
+to his feet. The renegade officer wiped his face of blood and shrank
+back into shrubs.
+
+"Get him," croaked ven Klaeden.
+
+Scarcely knowing why, the analyst jerked the trigger, felt the gun
+explode in his fist, saw the renegade topple.
+
+There was a moment of stillness in the glade, broken only by ven
+Klaeden's wheezing breath. The baron looked up with an effort, his eyes
+traveling over the girl, then up to the figure of the child of Earth.
+
+"Your woman, Earthling?"
+
+Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He
+glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not
+touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword.
+
+"You have brought us death, you have brought us hate," he said slowly,
+his eyes clinging to the sword.
+
+"Pick it up," hissed the baron.
+
+"You will never leave. A party of men is wrecking what you have done.
+Then we shall wreck your ships. Then we...."
+
+"Pick it up."
+
+The native hesitated. Slowly, his brown hand reached for the hilt, and
+fascination was in his eyes.
+
+"You know what it is for?" the analyst asked.
+
+The native shook his head slowly.
+
+Then it was in his hand, fingers shaping themselves around the hilt--as
+the fingers of his fathers had done in the ages before the Star Exodus.
+His jaw fell slightly, and he looked up, clutching it.
+
+"_Now_ do you know?" the baron gasped.
+
+"My--my hand--_it_ knows," the native whispered.
+
+Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes
+glazed with pain. "He'll need it now, won't he, Analyst?" he breathed,
+then fell to the moss.
+
+Evon stood up slowly, moistening his lips, feeling the grip of the sword
+and touching the red-stained steel. He peered quickly up at Meikl. Meikl
+brandished the gun slightly.
+
+The low rumble of a dynamite blast sounded from the direction of the
+mines.
+
+"You loved her too," Evon said.
+
+He nodded.
+
+The native held the sword out questioningly, as if offering it.
+
+"Keep it," the analyst grunted. "You remembered its feel after twenty
+thousand years. That's why you'll need it."
+
+Some deeds, he thought, would haunt the soul of Man until his end, and
+there was no erasing them ... for they _were_ the soul, self-made,
+lasting in the ghost-grey fabric of mind as long as the lips of a child
+greedily sought the breast of its mother, as long as the child mirrored
+the mind of the man and the woman. _Kulturverlaengerung._
+
+The analyst left the native with the sword and went to seek the next in
+line of command. The purpose of the fleet must be kept intact, he
+thought, laughing bitterly. Yet still he went.
+
+
+THE END
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 32775 ***
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Ties That Bind, by Walter Miller, Jr.
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 32775 ***</div>
+<div class="figleft">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright">
+<img src="images/illus.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>THE TIES THAT BIND</h1>
+
+<h2>By Walter Miller, Jr.</h2>
+
+<h3>Illustrated by Kelly Freas</h3>
+
+<p>[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
+Fiction May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The Earth was green and quiet. Nature had survived Man, and
+Man had survived himself. Then, one day, the great silvery ships broke
+the tranquillity of the skies, bringing Man's twenty-thousand-year-lost
+inheritance back to Earth....</i></div>
+
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And why sae sad gang ye, O?"</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And I had nae mair but he, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>The Horde of sleek ships arose in the west at twilight&mdash;gleaming slivers
+that reflected the dying sun as they lanced across the darkling heavens.
+A majestic fleet of squadrons in double-vees, groups in staggered
+echelon, they crossed the sky like gleaming geese, and the children of
+Earth came out of their whispering gardens to gape at the splendor that
+marched above them.</p>
+
+<p>There was fear, for no vessel out of space had crossed the skies of
+Earth for countless generations, and the children of the planet had
+forgotten. The only memories that lingered were in the memnoscripts, and
+in the unconscious <i>kulturverlaengerung</i>, of the people. Because of the
+latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the
+slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in
+the language to name them.</p>
+
+<p>The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered
+in awed voices under the elms....</p>
+
+<p>The piping whine of a senile hag: "The ancient gods! The day of the
+judging! Repent, repent...."</p>
+
+<p>The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: "The alien! We're lost, we're
+lost! We've got to run for the hills!"</p>
+
+<p>The voice of the child: "See the pretty birdlights? See? See?"</p>
+
+<p>And a voice of wisdom in the councils of the clans: "The sons of
+men&mdash;they've come home from the Star Exodus. Our brothers."</p>
+
+<p>The slivers of light, wave upon wave, crept into the eclipse shadow as
+the twilight deepened and the stars stung through the blackening shell
+of sky. When the moon rose, the people watched again as the silhouette
+of a black double-vee of darts slipped across the lunar disk.</p>
+
+<p>Beneath the ground, in response to the return of the ships, ancient
+mechanisms whirred to life, and the tech guilds hurried to tend them. On
+Earth, there was a suspenseful night, pregnant with the dissimilar twins
+of hope and fear, laden with awe, hushed with the expectancy of twenty
+thousand years. The stargoers&mdash;they had come home.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"<i>Kulturverlaengerung!</i>" grunted the tense young man in the toga of an
+Analyst. He stood at one end of the desk, slightly flushed, staring down
+at the haughty wing leader who watched him icily from a seat at the
+other end. He said it again, too distinctly, as if the word were a club
+to hurl at the wingsman. "<i>Kulturverlaengerung</i>, that's why!"</p>
+
+<p>"I heard you the first time, Meikl," the officer snapped. "Watch your
+tongue and your tone!"</p>
+
+<p>A brief hush in the cabin as hostility flowed between them. There was
+only the hiss of air from the ventilators, and the low whine of the
+flagship's drive units somewhere below.</p>
+
+<p>The erect and elderly gentleman who sat behind the desk cleared his
+throat politely. "Have you any further clarifications to make, Meikl?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It should be clear enough to all of you," the analyst retorted hotly.
+He jerked his head toward the misty crescent of Earth on the viewing
+screen that supplied most of the light in the small cabin. "You can see
+what they are, what they've become. And you <i>know</i> what <i>we</i> are."</p>
+
+<p>The two wingsmen bristled slightly at the edge of contempt in the
+analyst's voice. The elderly gentlemen behind the desk remained
+impassive, expressionless.</p>
+
+<p>The analyst leaned forward with a slow accusing glance that swept the
+faces of the three officers, then centered on his antagonist at the
+other end of the desk. "You want to <i>infect</i> them, ThaĆ¼le?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The wingsman darkened. His fist exploded on the desktop. "Meikl, you're
+in contempt! Restrict yourself to answering questions!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"There will be no further breaches of military etiquette during the
+continuance of this conference," the elderly gentleman announced icily,
+thus seizing the situation.</p>
+
+<p>After a moment's silence, he turned to the analyst again. "We've got to
+refuel," he said flatly. "In order to refuel, we must land."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. But why not on Mars? We can develop our own facilities for
+producing fuel. Why must it be Earth?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because there will be <i>some existing facilities</i> on Earth, even though
+they're out of space. The job would take five years on Mars."</p>
+
+<p>The analyst lowered his eyes, shook his head wearily. "I'm thinking of a
+billion earthlings. Aren't they worth considering, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've got to consider the men in my command, Meikl. They've been through
+hell. We all have."</p>
+
+<p>"The hell was our own making, baron."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Meikl!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry, sir."</p>
+
+<p>Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: "Besides, Meikl, your
+predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be
+true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the
+present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a
+thousand generations. I don't know a great deal about culturetics, but
+I've read that <i>kulturverlaengerung</i> reaches a threshold of extinction
+after about a dozen generations, if there's no restimulation."</p>
+
+<p>"Only in laboratory cultures, sir," sighed the analyst. "Under rigid
+control to make certain there's no restimulant. In practice, in a
+planet-wide society, there's constant accidental restimulation,
+unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to
+original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult'laenger
+linkage never really dies out&mdash;although, it can stay recessive and
+unconscious."</p>
+
+<p>"That's too bad," a wingsman growled sourly. "We'll wake it up, won't
+we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let's not be callous," the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. "Analyst
+Meikl has sensitivities."</p>
+
+<p>The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing
+consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. "Sir, I was
+<i>summoned</i> here to offer my opinions about landing on Earth. You asked
+about possible cultural dangers. I've told you."</p>
+
+<p>"You discussed the danger to earthlings."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"I meant 'danger' to the personnel of this fleet&mdash;to their esprit, their
+indoctrination, their group-efficiency. I take it you see none."</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary, I see several," said the analyst, coming slowly to his
+feet, eyes flashing and darting among them. "Where were you born,
+Wingman?" he asked the officer at the opposite end of the desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Lichter Six, Satellite," the officer grunted after a moment of
+irritable silence.</p>
+
+<p>"And you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Omega Thrush," said the other wingsman.</p>
+
+<p>All knew without asking that the baron was born in space, his birthplace
+one of the planetoid city-states of the Michea Dwarf. Meikl looked
+around at them, then ripped up his own sleeve, unsheathed his
+rank-dagger, and pricked his forearm with the needle point. A red
+droplet appeared, and he wiped at it with a forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"It's common stuff, gentlemen. We've shed a lot of it. And each of us is
+a walking sackful of it." He paused, then turned to touch the point of
+his dagger to the viewer, where it left a tiny red trace on the glass,
+on the bright crescent of Earth, mist-shrouded, chastely wheeling her
+nights into days.</p>
+
+<p>"It came from there," he hissed. "She's your womb, gentlemen. Are you
+going back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?" the baron asked sharply,
+hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. "This becomes silly."</p>
+
+<p>"If you land on her," Meikl promised ominously, "you'll go away with a
+fleet full of hate."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl's arm dropped to his side. He sheathed his dagger. "Is my presence
+at this meeting still imperative, sir?" he asked the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you anything else to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;<i>don't land on Earth</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a repetition. No further reasons?&mdash;in terms of danger to
+ourselves?"</p>
+
+<p>The analyst paused. "I can think of nothing worse that could happen to
+us," he said slowly, "than just being what we already are."</p>
+
+<p>He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of
+the cabin.</p>
+
+<p>"I suggest," said a wingsman, "that we speak to Frewek about tightening
+up the discipline in the Intelligence section. That man was in open
+contempt, Baron."</p>
+
+<p>"But he was also probably right," sighed the graying officer and
+nobleman.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Sir&mdash;!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry, Wingsman, there's nothing else to do. We'll have to land.
+Make preparations, both of you&mdash;and try to make contact with surface.
+I'll dictate the message."</p>
+
+<p>When the wingsmen left, it was settled. The baron arose with a sigh and
+went to peer morosely at the view of Earth below. Very delicately, he
+wiped the tiny trace of blood from the glass. She was a beautiful world,
+this Earth. She had spawned them all, as Meikl said&mdash;but for this, the
+baron could feel only bitterness toward her.</p>
+
+<p>But what of her inhabitants? I'm past feeling anything for them, he
+thought, past feeling for any of the life-scum that creeps across the
+surface of a world, any world. We'll go down quickly, and take what we
+need quickly, and leave quickly. We'll try not to infect them, but
+they've already got it in them, the dormant disease, and any infection
+will be only a recurrence.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he summoned a priest to his quarters. And, before going to
+the command deck, he bathed sacramentally as if in preparation for
+battle.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>Your hawk's blude was never sae red,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Your hawk's blude was never sae red,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>My dear son, I tell thee, O."</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O I hae kill'd my red roan steed,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>That erst was sae fair and free, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>False dawn was in the east when the slivers of light appeared once again
+out of the eclipse shadow to rake majestically across the heavens, and
+again the children of Earth crowded in teeming numbers from the quiet
+gardens to chatter their excitement at the wonder in the sky. But this
+time, a message came. The men of the tech clans who tended the newly
+activated mechanisms heard it, and the mechanisms memorized it, and
+played it again and again for the people, while the linguists puzzled
+over the unidentified language used in the transmission.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+PRESENTS GREETINGS!</p>
+
+<p>IF YOU HAVE RECORDS, OUR USE OF ANCIENT ANGLO-GERMANIC SHOULD
+MAKE OUR IDENTITY CLEAR. HAVE YOU FUELING FACILITIES FOR 720
+SHIPS OF THOR-NINE CLASS? IF NOT, WE SHALL DEVELOP FACILITIES
+FROM LOCAL RESOURCES, WITH, WE TRUST, YOUR PEACEFUL
+COOPERATION. THIS CADRE NOT REIMMIGRATING, BUT EN ROUTE TO
+URSAN STARS. REQUEST LANDING SUGGESTIONS, IN VIEW OF OUR
+FUELING NEEDS.</p>
+
+<p>REQUEST INTELLIGENCE CONCERNING PRESENT LEVEL OF TERRESTRIAL
+CULTURE. OUR ORIBITAL OBSERVATIONS INDICATE A STATIC
+AGRARIAN-TECHNICAL COMPLEX, BUT DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE. WE COME
+IN ARMS, BUT WITHOUT ENMITY. PLEASE REPLY, IF POSSIBLE.</p>
+
+<p>ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+SPACESTRIKE COMMAND, IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION </p></blockquote>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>So it came, repeated continuously for an hour, followed by an hour of
+silence, and then by another hour of repetition. The linguists were
+unable to discern meanings. Thousands of memorizers were consulted, but
+none knew the words of the harsh voice from the ships. At last, the
+sages consulted the books and memnoscripts in the ancient vaults,
+pouring over tomes that had been buried for countless centuries. After
+hours of hurried study....</p>
+
+<p>"It is found, <i>it is found</i>, a tongue of the ancients!" a joyous cry in
+the glades and the garden pathways.</p>
+
+<p>Happily, the sages recorded the linguistic structure of the forgotten
+tongue on memnoscript, and gave it to a servo translator. Outmoded
+mechanisms were being brought out of wraps and prepared for use. The
+servos supplied a translation of the message, and the sages studied it.</p>
+
+<p>"It is badly understood," was the curious mutter along the garden
+pathways.</p>
+
+<p>"Many words have no words to match them, nor any thoughts that are
+similar," was the only explanation the sages could give.</p>
+
+<p>In translation the message seemed meaningless, or unfathomable. Only one
+thing was clear. The sons of Man meant to descend again upon the world
+of their ancestors. There was a restless unease in the gardens, and
+groups of elders gathered in the conference glades to mutter and glance
+at the sky. "Invite our brothers to land," was the impetuous cry of the
+young, but there were dissenters.</p>
+
+<p>In the Glade of Sopho, a few thoughtful clansmen of Pedaga had gathered
+to muse and speak quietly among themselves, although it was not
+ordinarily the business of tutors to consider problems that confronted
+society as a whole, particularly problems arising outside society
+itself. The Pedaga were teachers of the very young, and deliberately
+kept themselves childlike in outlook in order to make fuller contact
+with the children in their charge.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we should tell them to go away," said Letha, and looked around
+at the others for a response.</p>
+
+<p>She got nothing in reply but a flickering glance from Marrita, who sat
+morosely on a cool rock by the spring, her chin on her bare knees. Evon
+gave her a brief polite smile, to acknowledge the sound of her voice,
+but he returned almost at once to absently tearing twigs and glancing up
+at the bits of sky that showed through the foliage of the overhanging
+trees. Iak and Karrn were whispering together at the far end of the
+glade, and had not heard her.</p>
+
+<p>Letha shrugged and leaned back against the tree trunk again, sitting
+spraddle-legged this time in the hope of catching Evon's eye. She was a
+graceful girl, and while gracefulness is sometimes feline, Letha's was
+more nearly kittenish. She was full-bodied and soft, but well-shaped in
+spite of a trace of plumpness. Thick masses of black hair fell over
+baby-skin shoulders in a pleasing contrast, and while her face was a bit
+too round, it radiated a gentle, winning grin, and the sympathetic gaze
+of gray-blue eyes. Now she seemed ready to pout. Evon remained
+self-absorbed.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we should tell them to go away," she repeated a little sharply.
+"They'll all be big and swashbuckling and handsome, and the children
+will become unmanageable as soon as they see them. All the little girls
+will swoon, and all the little boys will want to go with them."</p>
+
+<p>Evon glanced at her briefly. "It's up to the elders of the Geoark," he
+muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own
+meditations.</p>
+
+<p>"And all the <i>big</i> girls will run away with them," she purred with a
+tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to
+waggle her foot.</p>
+
+<p>Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward
+again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually,
+she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He <i>must</i> be&mdash;because she hadn't
+seen him sit still this long in years. He was <i>always</i> doing something,
+or looking for something to do. It wasn't like Evon just to sit still
+and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting
+boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and
+looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled
+didn't fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily,
+with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an
+elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could
+twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just
+drooped.</p>
+
+<p>She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"You wonder what it's like, Evon?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean," she added.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Me?</i> What <i>are</i> you thinking of, Letha?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad's face. You remind me of
+an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to
+play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't fiddle."</p>
+
+<p>"But your eyes are on the sky-fleet."</p>
+
+<p>Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. "It's
+strange," he murmured at last. "It's as if I know them&mdash;the star-birds,
+I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at
+something I expected to happen ... or ... or...."</p>
+
+<p>"Something familiar?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?" she asked the blonde girl
+who sat on the cool rock by the spring.</p>
+
+<p>Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. "I don't
+believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief."</p>
+
+<p>"How silly! What's that to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I'd remember
+where he buried it, wouldn't I?" She pouted, and went back to dabbling a
+club toe in the spring.</p>
+
+<p>Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. "We lie around here like
+sleepy pigs!" he grumbled. "Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on
+the Geoark to make up its mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think they'll do?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell them to go away."</p>
+
+<p>"And suppose they chose not to go?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked bewildered. "I can't imagine anyone refusing the
+Geoark."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe they've got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with
+ours?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Two</i> Geoarks? What a strange idea."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware
+that I have one too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Evon! What a <i>strange</i> idea."</p>
+
+<p>He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring,
+then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling
+complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the
+glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon's laughter broke the
+gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to
+wander into the clearing from the pathways.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark," someone
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"About the sky-fleet? And who knows what to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid," said a girl. "Somehow I'm suddenly afraid of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Our brothers from the Exodus? But they're <i>people</i>&mdash;such as you and I."</p>
+
+<p>So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the
+glade to read another message received from the sky-fleet.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+PRESENTS GREETINGS!</p>
+
+<p>HAVING RECEIVED NO ANSWER TO OUR PREVIOUS COMMUNICATION, WE
+HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LAND AT ONCE. I AM IMPOSING AN
+INFORMATIONAL QUARANTINE TO AVOID RESTIMULATING POSSIBLE
+RECESSIVE KULTURVERLAENGERUNG, BUT SUGGEST YOU GUARD
+YOURSELVES. OUR CULTURES HAD A COMMON ORIGIN. WE COME IN ARMS,
+WITHOUT ENMITY.</p>
+
+<p>ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+SPACESTRIKE COMMAND IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less
+meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was
+going to land, without invitation.</p>
+
+<p>Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans.
+"Can you revive the devices that speak across space?" they asked.</p>
+
+<p>"They are revived," answered the tech clans.</p>
+
+<p>"Then let us speak to our brothers from space."</p>
+
+<p>And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>BRETHREN TO BRETHREN, PRESENT LOVE LOVE LOVE.</p>
+
+<p>WE WELCOME YOU TO OUR GLADES AND TO OUR PLACES OF FEEDING AND
+OUR PLACES OF SLEEPING. WE WELCOME YOU TO THE BOSOM OF THE
+WORLD OF BEGINNING. AFTER TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS, EARTH HAS NOT
+FORGOTTEN. COME AMID REJOICING.</p>
+
+<p>THE ELDERS OF THE GEOARK </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to," growled Ernstli
+Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an
+atmospheric-braking orbit.</p>
+
+<p>And there was thunder in a cloudless sky.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And some other dule ye dree, O."</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Alas and woe is me, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In accordance with the rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized
+planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group
+fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and
+established an "orbital shell" of criscrossing orbits, timed and
+interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first
+wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at
+three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When
+the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and
+flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked
+itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.</p>
+
+<p>From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its
+telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a
+hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.</p>
+
+<p>"No signs of the natives yet," came the report. "No signs of technology.
+No evidence of hostility."</p>
+
+<p>A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera
+caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing
+more.</p>
+
+<p>One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with
+steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave
+forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square
+miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen
+miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it
+would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden,
+who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the
+enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock,
+sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of
+jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic
+extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush
+still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a
+bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized
+the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was
+born into his bones.</p>
+
+<p>Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the
+sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south,
+another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the
+flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a
+low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area
+toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf
+below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller
+fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color
+blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of
+brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery.
+Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind
+stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind
+changed, and the air that breathed about the commander's face was full
+of perfume.</p>
+
+<p>I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home
+of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote
+that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply
+dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure 76-A, "Refueling Method
+for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable."</p>
+
+<p>It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa,
+and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia
+ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across
+the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate
+histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered
+itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the
+histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied
+them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had
+ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man
+was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum&mdash;or had been, before
+the War of Secession&mdash;and when history moved into space, Earth was a
+half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the
+historians had reconstructed for the museums&mdash;vistas of roaring
+industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and
+spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully
+tended Japanese garden.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>As he stared around, he felt a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed
+at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the
+landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so
+vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would
+be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had
+already been issued. "All personnel are forbidden to attempt the
+learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture
+language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with
+them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of
+Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in
+the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives,
+shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other
+form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in
+force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited
+purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby
+authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to
+try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized
+to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden,
+Comm."</p>
+
+<p>It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And
+Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language
+in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile,
+the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in
+which the messages had been exchanged.</p>
+
+<p>The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a
+flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and
+crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then
+he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk&mdash;a young girl, obviously
+frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she
+darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already
+approaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quick
+glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The
+instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in
+the ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. The
+rate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per
+unit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship for
+twenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Keep clear!</i>" he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.</p>
+
+<p>She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she
+seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking
+toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Go back, you little idiot!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She kept
+coming&mdash;into the charred area.</p>
+
+<p>The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground
+near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun
+barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs.
+She yelped and fled back into the green garden.</p>
+
+<p>He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly.
+She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was
+frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human.
+But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself
+absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.</p>
+
+<p>It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the
+Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to
+translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a
+mutually recorded dead language.</p>
+
+<p>"We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," ven
+Klaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region is
+unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our
+measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for
+<i>our</i> purposes."</p>
+
+<p>"Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentle
+voice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military
+jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted
+area, closed to civilian population."</p>
+
+<p>"But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have
+surrounded!"</p>
+
+<p>"Evacuate them."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Evacuate</i> them. Make them get out."</p>
+
+<p>"My translator is working badly."</p>
+
+<p>The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the
+colonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupied
+zone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us."</p>
+
+<p>"How much notice?"</p>
+
+<p>The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional
+hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius."</p>
+
+<p>"My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting.</p>
+
+<p>"Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplish
+what we came here for, and then get out&mdash;as quickly as possible. We
+don't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to
+confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is
+this agreed?"</p>
+
+<p>"My translator is working badly."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you getting anything?"</p>
+
+<p>A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where
+the sky-fleet rests."</p>
+
+<p>"Correct."</p>
+
+<p>"But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the
+feast-glades?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have
+aircraft of your own."</p>
+
+<p>"We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."</p>
+
+<p>"Any of your population understand the mechanisms?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, brother."</p>
+
+<p>"Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what we
+want, and maybe they can make it clear to you."</p>
+
+<p>"As you wish, brother."</p>
+
+<p>The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a
+satisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gone
+quickly," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us."</p>
+
+<p>"Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted.</p>
+
+<p>"I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,'" came a voice from the
+back of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably.</p>
+
+<p>"You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go
+back?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be
+useful."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the
+tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time&mdash;have
+you got any suggestions?"</p>
+
+<p>"About how to deal with the natives?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly ... but with the accent on <i>our</i> problems."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively
+at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gathered
+through limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, and
+do our suggesting later."</p>
+
+<p>"That constitutes your entire opinion?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung...."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Our</i> problems, I said!" the commander snapped.</p>
+
+<p>"It's likely to be our problem, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"How?"</p>
+
+<p>"In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns
+we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying
+the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns
+are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."</p>
+
+<p>"What patterns do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron."</p>
+
+<p>A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander
+grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of <i>action</i>, not a transmittable
+determinant."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl shook his head. "We don't <i>know</i> what is a transmittable
+determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some
+very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't
+feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it
+in our kulturverlaengerung lines."</p>
+
+<p>A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I think
+this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."</p>
+
+<p>"What, the kult'laenger lines?"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed
+along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish,
+and deal in facts...."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare
+absently out a viewing port at the trees.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much
+about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given
+intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult
+skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the
+game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the
+age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control
+group&mdash;another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on."</p>
+
+<p>"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests
+on all two hundred."</p>
+
+<p>"Learning the game, you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So
+far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the
+first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the
+patterns of the game easily."</p>
+
+<p>"So?"</p>
+
+<p>"So&mdash;during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the
+parental mind&mdash;probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't
+'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural
+mechanism of transmittal&mdash;and it's an analog of heredity. The
+kulturverlaengerung&mdash;and it can linger in a family line without becoming
+conscious for many generations."</p>
+
+<p>"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."</p>
+
+<p>"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on&mdash;as a predisposition-talent&mdash;to
+the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a
+mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a
+memory...."</p>
+
+<p>"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the
+chances of utilizing native labor?"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>And whatten penance will we dree for that,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Whatten penance will ye dree for that?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>My dear son, now tell me, O."</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"I'll set my feet in yonder boat,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>I'll set my feet in yonder boat,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And I'll fare over the sea, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl,
+Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill,
+once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and
+watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing
+the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine
+shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the
+valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered
+spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance,
+the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and
+natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian
+cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.</p>
+
+<p>"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter
+murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by
+staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the
+valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no
+resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?</p>
+
+<p>Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of
+the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into
+their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he
+wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.
+Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the
+planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up,
+without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the
+casual statement: "<i>In our gardens, there are no weeds</i>," and it applied
+to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna
+and flora of the planet.</p>
+
+<p>This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but
+rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and
+Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and
+slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could
+raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up
+organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done
+both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his
+vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster
+than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms
+of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient
+species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.
+Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him
+with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive
+in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of
+their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.</p>
+
+<p><i>This</i>, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in
+the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant
+exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous
+world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or
+"authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or
+fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood
+beside him on the hill&mdash;but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a
+foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for
+a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had
+possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual
+natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks.
+There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and
+starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language
+accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives
+enthusiastically strived to please.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze.
+Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.</p>
+
+<p>"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy
+named Evon...."</p>
+
+<p>He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You
+can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.</p>
+
+<p>"Letha, I...."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Meikl."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you
+tell us nothing of space&mdash;how you've lived since the Exodus?"</p>
+
+<p>"We are an evil people."</p>
+
+<p>"Not so."</p>
+
+<p>She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you wish to know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why will you never return to your home?"</p>
+
+<p>"To space&mdash;but we shall."</p>
+
+<p>"To the worlds of your birth, I mean."</p>
+
+<p>He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?"
+he asked, a little sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you?"</p>
+
+<p>So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things
+would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."</p>
+
+<p>"But why? Where are your women and children?"</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the
+natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships
+departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic
+and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The
+single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from
+the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.</p>
+
+<p>"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had
+said too much.</p>
+
+<p>She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that
+point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".</p>
+
+<p>"They hurl death, Letha."</p>
+
+<p>"How can 'death' be hurled?"</p>
+
+<p>Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of
+the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the
+children of space. The same traces of the ancient <i>kulturverlaengerung</i>
+would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.
+One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the
+Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in
+their culture. The records had been systematically censored and
+rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History
+had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute
+concepts of her understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them
+wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a
+contention for property."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded slowly.</p>
+
+<p>It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and
+interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions
+reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of
+the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,
+the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in
+Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was
+approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and
+nationalization rights&mdash;a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.</p>
+
+<p>"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our
+cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours
+has passed through them all&mdash;perhaps into a fourth and final."</p>
+
+<p>"And yours, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile
+environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of
+the culture&mdash;<i>conquest</i>, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the
+mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."</p>
+
+<p>"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."</p>
+
+<p>"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second
+childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?&mdash;a final perpetual
+youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of
+the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in
+low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange
+of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers
+wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit,
+using the spacer's tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.</p>
+
+<p>"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three
+hundred men since we landed."</p>
+
+<p>"Found any of them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."</p>
+
+<p>Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.</p>
+
+<p>"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the
+elders. Let's go."</p>
+
+<p>They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The
+meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the
+men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The
+attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.</p>
+
+<p>From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of
+nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important
+loss of personnel. What <i>was</i> important: the slow decay of discipline
+under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been
+established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone,
+Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he
+refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of
+the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a
+tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO<sub>2</sub> gun that could be concealed in
+the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught
+him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter
+plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a
+week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization;
+if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus
+would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.</p>
+
+<p>The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives.
+The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of
+infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation
+for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful
+people after twenty thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>"I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered
+the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders
+had assembled.</p>
+
+<p>He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.</p>
+
+<p>"Letha&mdash;you have worked for me many months."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I love you, Letha."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her
+quietly, hating himself.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll take me with you," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"No." It was impossible.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you'll stay."</p>
+
+<p>"It is ... <i>forbidden</i> ... <i>verboten</i>...." There was no word in the
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't understand.... If you love...."</p>
+
+<p>He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled
+everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.</p>
+
+<p>"Letha&mdash;in your culture, 'life' is the highest value."</p>
+
+<p>"How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl."</p>
+
+<p>He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha.
+I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious
+play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and
+you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance&mdash;act a different play."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not a play, Letha. We act an <i>unconscious</i> drama, and thus the
+drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence
+over life."</p>
+
+<p>She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you understand?&mdash;that I love you, and yet my ... my...." He groped
+for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes
+precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you."</p>
+
+<p>Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a
+monotone. "It's growing late."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>My dear son, now tell me, O?"</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The trouble had begun on the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party
+of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night.
+Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the
+dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus
+immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and
+needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over
+the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a
+leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel.</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">NOTICE OF SANCTUARY<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">TO: ALL PERSONNEL<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">FROM: AUSLAND COMMITTEE<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">SUBJECT: FREEDOM<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>1. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO WISHES TO RESIGN FROM THE SERVICES OF
+THE IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION MAY DO SO OF THIS DATE.</p>
+
+<p>2. THE PROCEDURE FOR RESIGNATION INVOLVES NO FORMAL STATEMENT.
+A MAN MAY TERMINATE HIS PERIOD OF SERVICE BY DEPARTING FROM THE
+OCCUPIED ZONE.</p>
+
+<p>3. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE WITH THE
+RESIGNATION OF ANOTHER SHALL BE TRIED IN ABSENTIA BY THIS
+COMMITTEE, AND IF FOUND GUILTY, SHALL INCUR THE DEATH PENALTY.</p>
+
+<p>AUSLAND COMMITTEE </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!" ven Klaeden had
+hissed. "Get them. Make an example of them."</p>
+
+<p>In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for
+the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on
+sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged
+eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native
+population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice
+Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from
+their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that
+had invaded their quarters.</p>
+
+<p>Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed
+to disclose the location of the immunizing serum.</p>
+
+<p>Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were
+brought before the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close
+the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a
+work contract."</p>
+
+<p>On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse.
+The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a
+massacre.</p>
+
+<p>"We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry
+predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come
+out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit."</p>
+
+<p>Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder,
+tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to
+speak in the intermediate language.</p>
+
+<p>"Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear."</p>
+
+<p>Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly
+and turned to the girl. "Tell them," he said in the Intermedia, "that
+death will come to any native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will
+die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that the
+Geoark is...." He paused. There was no word for "hostage."</p>
+
+<p>He was explaining the hostage-concept lengthily, while the girl's face
+drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood
+stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>They</i> understood you, damn them!" ven Klaeden snapped. "They know the
+Intermedia."</p>
+
+<p>The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging
+that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to
+the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>No!</i>" Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders.</p>
+
+<p>One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of
+them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few
+feet away stirred restlessly.</p>
+
+<p>The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade.
+The guard looked questioningly at the officers.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are they going?" ven Klaeden demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Letha?" Meikl muttered.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I don't know&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're lying, girl," the baron grunted, then to the guards: "Tell them
+to halt."</p>
+
+<p>"Party, <i>halt</i>!" snapped the guard.</p>
+
+<p>The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes
+gathered up from spindley shins.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Party, halt!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued.</p>
+
+<p>"HALT, I SAID."</p>
+
+<p>"Take the one in the middle," ordered ven Klaeden.</p>
+
+<p>The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief
+rattling hiss. The back of the elder's robe went crimson, and he
+crumpled at the entrance of the pathway.</p>
+
+<p>The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken.</p>
+
+<p>"Shoot for the legs, you fool!" barked the baron.</p>
+
+<p>The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering
+softly.</p>
+
+<p>Meikl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for
+Letha. She had vanished from the glade.</p>
+
+<p>"Haul them to the dispensary, keep them prisoner," the baron was
+growling.</p>
+
+<p>Meikl turned on him. "Now it's come to this, has it?" he snapped. "From
+the beginning, they were willing&mdash;even eager, to give what we wanted.
+Why did they <i>stop</i> being willing?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's enough, Meikl!"</p>
+
+<p>"I've hardly started. You came here like a tyrant, and they served you
+like a friend. You couldn't bear it. 'Brethren', they said. But there's
+nothing about 'brethren' in the tactical handbooks, is there, Baron?"</p>
+
+<p>"Shut up."</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand
+before the analyst and stare at him icily.</p>
+
+<p>"You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst&mdash;the
+kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the
+war plague, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Meikl paused. The baron's eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment
+or triumph.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Meikl? Is that what we've done? Inflicted them with conflict?
+Brought back the old seeds of hate?"</p>
+
+<p>The analyst drew himself up slightly. "You just killed a man, a man of
+dignity," he snarled, "and you cut two others down like weeds."</p>
+
+<p>"Innocent old men." The baron's mouth twisted into a snarl.</p>
+
+<p>"They wanted nothing but to help us."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Meikl? And we are the barbarians, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>The analyst spoke disdain with his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The baron straightened in sudden hauteur. "<i>Look down at the ground,
+Analyst</i>," he hissed.</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden's sudden change of tone impelled him to obey. His eyes fell
+to the turf at his feet&mdash;moss covered sod, rich and dark beneath the
+green.</p>
+
+<p>The baron kicked a hole in the moss with the toe of his boot. "Tell me
+where the infection came from, Analyst," he growled. He scraped at the
+hole with his heel. "And why is the dirt so <i>red</i> right here?"</p>
+
+<p>Meikl glanced up slowly. Two men were coming through the shrubs, walking
+warily along the path toward the clearing. Ven Klaeden seemed unaware.
+He leaned forward to speak through his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"I give them nothing but what they gave our fathers&mdash;their own inner
+hell, Meikl&mdash;the curse they so carefully forgot. In their Eden."</p>
+
+<p>The man was mad ... perhaps. Meikl's eyes followed the men who
+approached through the shrubs. One of them carried a burden&mdash;the limp
+body of a girl, occasionally visible through the low foliage as they
+drew nearer. One of the men was a junior officer, the other a native.
+After a moment, he recognized the native....</p>
+
+<p>"Evon!"</p>
+
+<p>As he called out, the baron whirled, hand slipping to the hilt of the
+ceremonial sword he wore in the presence of the Geoark. The men stopped.
+Meikl stared at the limp figure in the arms of the native.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Letha!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Dead," Evon hissed. "They killed her for running...."</p>
+
+<p>They emerged from the shrubs into full view. The officer was holding a
+gun.</p>
+
+<p>"Put that away!" ven Klaeden snapped.</p>
+
+<p>The young officer laughed sourly. "Sorry, baron, I'm from the
+committee."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Guard!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"There's no one in earshot, Baron."</p>
+
+<p>"Fool!" Ven Klaeden arrogantly whipped out the sword. "Drop that gun, or
+I'll blade-whip you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Easy, baron, easy. I'm your executioner...."</p>
+
+<p>The baron straightened haughtily and began a slow advance, a towering
+figure of icy dignity in the sun that filtered through the foliage.</p>
+
+<p>"... but I want to take care of this one first." The renegade waved the
+gun toward Meikl. "You, Baron, you can have it slower&mdash;a needle in your
+official rump."</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden, a figure of utter contempt, continued the slow advance with
+the sword. The officer's lips tightened. He squeezed the trigger. Ven
+Klaeden hesitated, jerking slightly, then continued, his hand pressing
+against his abdomen, doubling forward slightly. The officer fired
+again&mdash;a sharp snap of sound in the glade. The baron stopped, wrestling
+with pain ten feet from the pale renegade.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he flung the sword. It looped in mid-air and slashed the man's
+face from chin to cheekbone. He tripped and tumbled backward as ven
+Klaeden slipped to his knees on the moss.</p>
+
+<p>Meikl dived for the gun. By the time he wrestled it away from the
+officer with the bloody face, ven Klaeden was sitting like a gaunt
+Buddha on the moss, and the body of Letha lay nearby, while a confused
+Evon clutched his hands to his face and rocked slowly. Meikl came slowly
+to his feet. The renegade officer wiped his face of blood and shrank
+back into shrubs.</p>
+
+<p>"Get him," croaked ven Klaeden.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely knowing why, the analyst jerked the trigger, felt the gun
+explode in his fist, saw the renegade topple.</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment of stillness in the glade, broken only by ven
+Klaeden's wheezing breath. The baron looked up with an effort, his eyes
+traveling over the girl, then up to the figure of the child of Earth.</p>
+
+<p>"Your woman, Earthling?"</p>
+
+<p>Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He
+glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not
+touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword.</p>
+
+<p>"You have brought us death, you have brought us hate," he said slowly,
+his eyes clinging to the sword.</p>
+
+<p>"Pick it up," hissed the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"You will never leave. A party of men is wrecking what you have done.
+Then we shall wreck your ships. Then we...."</p>
+
+<p>"Pick it up."</p>
+
+<p>The native hesitated. Slowly, his brown hand reached for the hilt, and
+fascination was in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You know what it is for?" the analyst asked.</p>
+
+<p>The native shook his head slowly.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was in his hand, fingers shaping themselves around the hilt&mdash;as
+the fingers of his fathers had done in the ages before the Star Exodus.
+His jaw fell slightly, and he looked up, clutching it.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Now</i> do you know?" the baron gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"My&mdash;my hand&mdash;<i>it</i> knows," the native whispered.</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes
+glazed with pain. "He'll need it now, won't he, Analyst?" he breathed,
+then fell to the moss.</p>
+
+<p>Evon stood up slowly, moistening his lips, feeling the grip of the sword
+and touching the red-stained steel. He peered quickly up at Meikl. Meikl
+brandished the gun slightly.</p>
+
+<p>The low rumble of a dynamite blast sounded from the direction of the
+mines.</p>
+
+<p>"You loved her too," Evon said.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>The native held the sword out questioningly, as if offering it.</p>
+
+<p>"Keep it," the analyst grunted. "You remembered its feel after twenty
+thousand years. That's why you'll need it."</p>
+
+<p>Some deeds, he thought, would haunt the soul of Man until his end, and
+there was no erasing them ... for they <i>were</i> the soul, self-made,
+lasting in the ghost-grey fabric of mind as long as the lips of a child
+greedily sought the breast of its mother, as long as the child mirrored
+the mind of the man and the woman. <i>Kulturverlaengerung.</i></p>
+
+<p>The analyst left the native with the sword and went to seek the next in
+line of command. The purpose of the fleet must be kept intact, he
+thought, laughing bitterly. Yet still he went.</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 32775 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #32775 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32775)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ties That Bind, by Walter Miller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Ties That Bind
+
+Author: Walter Miller
+
+Illustrator: Kelly  Freas
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2010 [EBook #32775]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIES THAT BIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         THE TIES THAT BIND
+
+                        By Walter Miller, Jr.
+
+                      Illustrated by Kelly Freas
+
+[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
+Fiction May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Sidenote: _The Earth was green and quiet. Nature had survived Man, and
+Man had survived himself. Then, one day, the great silvery ships broke
+the tranquillity of the skies, bringing Man's twenty-thousand-year-lost
+inheritance back to Earth...._]
+
+
+    "_Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
+      And why sae sad gang ye, O?"
+    "O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,
+      And I had nae mair but he, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+
+The Horde of sleek ships arose in the west at twilight--gleaming slivers
+that reflected the dying sun as they lanced across the darkling heavens.
+A majestic fleet of squadrons in double-vees, groups in staggered
+echelon, they crossed the sky like gleaming geese, and the children of
+Earth came out of their whispering gardens to gape at the splendor that
+marched above them.
+
+There was fear, for no vessel out of space had crossed the skies of
+Earth for countless generations, and the children of the planet had
+forgotten. The only memories that lingered were in the memnoscripts, and
+in the unconscious _kulturverlaengerung_, of the people. Because of the
+latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the
+slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in
+the language to name them.
+
+The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered
+in awed voices under the elms....
+
+The piping whine of a senile hag: "The ancient gods! The day of the
+judging! Repent, repent...."
+
+The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: "The alien! We're lost, we're
+lost! We've got to run for the hills!"
+
+The voice of the child: "See the pretty birdlights? See? See?"
+
+And a voice of wisdom in the councils of the clans: "The sons of
+men--they've come home from the Star Exodus. Our brothers."
+
+The slivers of light, wave upon wave, crept into the eclipse shadow as
+the twilight deepened and the stars stung through the blackening shell
+of sky. When the moon rose, the people watched again as the silhouette
+of a black double-vee of darts slipped across the lunar disk.
+
+Beneath the ground, in response to the return of the ships, ancient
+mechanisms whirred to life, and the tech guilds hurried to tend them. On
+Earth, there was a suspenseful night, pregnant with the dissimilar twins
+of hope and fear, laden with awe, hushed with the expectancy of twenty
+thousand years. The stargoers--they had come home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Kulturverlaengerung!_" grunted the tense young man in the toga of an
+Analyst. He stood at one end of the desk, slightly flushed, staring down
+at the haughty wing leader who watched him icily from a seat at the
+other end. He said it again, too distinctly, as if the word were a club
+to hurl at the wingsman. "_Kulturverlaengerung_, that's why!"
+
+"I heard you the first time, Meikl," the officer snapped. "Watch your
+tongue and your tone!"
+
+A brief hush in the cabin as hostility flowed between them. There was
+only the hiss of air from the ventilators, and the low whine of the
+flagship's drive units somewhere below.
+
+The erect and elderly gentleman who sat behind the desk cleared his
+throat politely. "Have you any further clarifications to make, Meikl?"
+he asked.
+
+"It should be clear enough to all of you," the analyst retorted hotly.
+He jerked his head toward the misty crescent of Earth on the viewing
+screen that supplied most of the light in the small cabin. "You can see
+what they are, what they've become. And you _know_ what _we_ are."
+
+The two wingsmen bristled slightly at the edge of contempt in the
+analyst's voice. The elderly gentlemen behind the desk remained
+impassive, expressionless.
+
+The analyst leaned forward with a slow accusing glance that swept the
+faces of the three officers, then centered on his antagonist at the
+other end of the desk. "You want to _infect_ them, Thaüle?" he demanded.
+
+The wingsman darkened. His fist exploded on the desktop. "Meikl, you're
+in contempt! Restrict yourself to answering questions!"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"There will be no further breaches of military etiquette during the
+continuance of this conference," the elderly gentleman announced icily,
+thus seizing the situation.
+
+After a moment's silence, he turned to the analyst again. "We've got to
+refuel," he said flatly. "In order to refuel, we must land."
+
+"Yes, sir. But why not on Mars? We can develop our own facilities for
+producing fuel. Why must it be Earth?"
+
+"Because there will be _some existing facilities_ on Earth, even though
+they're out of space. The job would take five years on Mars."
+
+The analyst lowered his eyes, shook his head wearily. "I'm thinking of a
+billion earthlings. Aren't they worth considering, sir?"
+
+"I've got to consider the men in my command, Meikl. They've been through
+hell. We all have."
+
+"The hell was our own making, baron."
+
+"_Meikl!_"
+
+"Sorry, sir."
+
+Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: "Besides, Meikl, your
+predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be
+true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the
+present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a
+thousand generations. I don't know a great deal about culturetics, but
+I've read that _kulturverlaengerung_ reaches a threshold of extinction
+after about a dozen generations, if there's no restimulation."
+
+"Only in laboratory cultures, sir," sighed the analyst. "Under rigid
+control to make certain there's no restimulant. In practice, in a
+planet-wide society, there's constant accidental restimulation,
+unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to
+original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult'laenger
+linkage never really dies out--although, it can stay recessive and
+unconscious."
+
+"That's too bad," a wingsman growled sourly. "We'll wake it up, won't
+we?"
+
+"Let's not be callous," the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. "Analyst
+Meikl has sensitivities."
+
+The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing
+consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. "Sir, I was
+_summoned_ here to offer my opinions about landing on Earth. You asked
+about possible cultural dangers. I've told you."
+
+"You discussed the danger to earthlings."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I meant 'danger' to the personnel of this fleet--to their esprit, their
+indoctrination, their group-efficiency. I take it you see none."
+
+"On the contrary, I see several," said the analyst, coming slowly to his
+feet, eyes flashing and darting among them. "Where were you born,
+Wingman?" he asked the officer at the opposite end of the desk.
+
+"Lichter Six, Satellite," the officer grunted after a moment of
+irritable silence.
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Omega Thrush," said the other wingsman.
+
+All knew without asking that the baron was born in space, his birthplace
+one of the planetoid city-states of the Michea Dwarf. Meikl looked
+around at them, then ripped up his own sleeve, unsheathed his
+rank-dagger, and pricked his forearm with the needle point. A red
+droplet appeared, and he wiped at it with a forefinger.
+
+"It's common stuff, gentlemen. We've shed a lot of it. And each of us is
+a walking sackful of it." He paused, then turned to touch the point of
+his dagger to the viewer, where it left a tiny red trace on the glass,
+on the bright crescent of Earth, mist-shrouded, chastely wheeling her
+nights into days.
+
+"It came from there," he hissed. "She's your womb, gentlemen. Are you
+going back?"
+
+"Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?" the baron asked sharply,
+hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. "This becomes silly."
+
+"If you land on her," Meikl promised ominously, "you'll go away with a
+fleet full of hate."
+
+Meikl's arm dropped to his side. He sheathed his dagger. "Is my presence
+at this meeting still imperative, sir?" he asked the baron.
+
+"Have you anything else to say?"
+
+"Yes--_don't land on Earth_."
+
+"That's a repetition. No further reasons?--in terms of danger to
+ourselves?"
+
+The analyst paused. "I can think of nothing worse that could happen to
+us," he said slowly, "than just being what we already are."
+
+He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of
+the cabin.
+
+"I suggest," said a wingsman, "that we speak to Frewek about tightening
+up the discipline in the Intelligence section. That man was in open
+contempt, Baron."
+
+"But he was also probably right," sighed the graying officer and
+nobleman.
+
+"_Sir--!_"
+
+"Don't worry, Wingsman, there's nothing else to do. We'll have to land.
+Make preparations, both of you--and try to make contact with surface.
+I'll dictate the message."
+
+When the wingsmen left, it was settled. The baron arose with a sigh and
+went to peer morosely at the view of Earth below. Very delicately, he
+wiped the tiny trace of blood from the glass. She was a beautiful world,
+this Earth. She had spawned them all, as Meikl said--but for this, the
+baron could feel only bitterness toward her.
+
+But what of her inhabitants? I'm past feeling anything for them, he
+thought, past feeling for any of the life-scum that creeps across the
+surface of a world, any world. We'll go down quickly, and take what we
+need quickly, and leave quickly. We'll try not to infect them, but
+they've already got it in them, the dormant disease, and any infection
+will be only a recurrence.
+
+Nevertheless, he summoned a priest to his quarters. And, before going to
+the command deck, he bathed sacramentally as if in preparation for
+battle.
+
+    "_Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
+      Edward, Edward;
+    Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
+      My dear son, I tell thee, O."
+    "O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my red roan steed,
+      That erst was sae fair and free, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+False dawn was in the east when the slivers of light appeared once again
+out of the eclipse shadow to rake majestically across the heavens, and
+again the children of Earth crowded in teeming numbers from the quiet
+gardens to chatter their excitement at the wonder in the sky. But this
+time, a message came. The men of the tech clans who tended the newly
+activated mechanisms heard it, and the mechanisms memorized it, and
+played it again and again for the people, while the linguists puzzled
+over the unidentified language used in the transmission.
+
+     PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+     PRESENTS GREETINGS!
+
+     IF YOU HAVE RECORDS, OUR USE OF ANCIENT ANGLO-GERMANIC SHOULD
+     MAKE OUR IDENTITY CLEAR. HAVE YOU FUELING FACILITIES FOR 720
+     SHIPS OF THOR-NINE CLASS? IF NOT, WE SHALL DEVELOP FACILITIES
+     FROM LOCAL RESOURCES, WITH, WE TRUST, YOUR PEACEFUL
+     COOPERATION. THIS CADRE NOT REIMMIGRATING, BUT EN ROUTE TO
+     URSAN STARS. REQUEST LANDING SUGGESTIONS, IN VIEW OF OUR
+     FUELING NEEDS.
+
+     REQUEST INTELLIGENCE CONCERNING PRESENT LEVEL OF TERRESTRIAL
+     CULTURE. OUR ORIBITAL OBSERVATIONS INDICATE A STATIC
+     AGRARIAN-TECHNICAL COMPLEX, BUT DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE. WE COME
+     IN ARMS, BUT WITHOUT ENMITY. PLEASE REPLY, IF POSSIBLE.
+
+     ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+     SPACESTRIKE COMMAND, IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So it came, repeated continuously for an hour, followed by an hour of
+silence, and then by another hour of repetition. The linguists were
+unable to discern meanings. Thousands of memorizers were consulted, but
+none knew the words of the harsh voice from the ships. At last, the
+sages consulted the books and memnoscripts in the ancient vaults,
+pouring over tomes that had been buried for countless centuries. After
+hours of hurried study....
+
+"It is found, _it is found_, a tongue of the ancients!" a joyous cry in
+the glades and the garden pathways.
+
+Happily, the sages recorded the linguistic structure of the forgotten
+tongue on memnoscript, and gave it to a servo translator. Outmoded
+mechanisms were being brought out of wraps and prepared for use. The
+servos supplied a translation of the message, and the sages studied it.
+
+"It is badly understood," was the curious mutter along the garden
+pathways.
+
+"Many words have no words to match them, nor any thoughts that are
+similar," was the only explanation the sages could give.
+
+In translation the message seemed meaningless, or unfathomable. Only one
+thing was clear. The sons of Man meant to descend again upon the world
+of their ancestors. There was a restless unease in the gardens, and
+groups of elders gathered in the conference glades to mutter and glance
+at the sky. "Invite our brothers to land," was the impetuous cry of the
+young, but there were dissenters.
+
+In the Glade of Sopho, a few thoughtful clansmen of Pedaga had gathered
+to muse and speak quietly among themselves, although it was not
+ordinarily the business of tutors to consider problems that confronted
+society as a whole, particularly problems arising outside society
+itself. The Pedaga were teachers of the very young, and deliberately
+kept themselves childlike in outlook in order to make fuller contact
+with the children in their charge.
+
+"I think we should tell them to go away," said Letha, and looked around
+at the others for a response.
+
+She got nothing in reply but a flickering glance from Marrita, who sat
+morosely on a cool rock by the spring, her chin on her bare knees. Evon
+gave her a brief polite smile, to acknowledge the sound of her voice,
+but he returned almost at once to absently tearing twigs and glancing up
+at the bits of sky that showed through the foliage of the overhanging
+trees. Iak and Karrn were whispering together at the far end of the
+glade, and had not heard her.
+
+Letha shrugged and leaned back against the tree trunk again, sitting
+spraddle-legged this time in the hope of catching Evon's eye. She was a
+graceful girl, and while gracefulness is sometimes feline, Letha's was
+more nearly kittenish. She was full-bodied and soft, but well-shaped in
+spite of a trace of plumpness. Thick masses of black hair fell over
+baby-skin shoulders in a pleasing contrast, and while her face was a bit
+too round, it radiated a gentle, winning grin, and the sympathetic gaze
+of gray-blue eyes. Now she seemed ready to pout. Evon remained
+self-absorbed.
+
+"I think we should tell them to go away," she repeated a little sharply.
+"They'll all be big and swashbuckling and handsome, and the children
+will become unmanageable as soon as they see them. All the little girls
+will swoon, and all the little boys will want to go with them."
+
+Evon glanced at her briefly. "It's up to the elders of the Geoark," he
+muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own
+meditations.
+
+"And all the _big_ girls will run away with them," she purred with a
+tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to
+waggle her foot.
+
+Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward
+again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually,
+she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He _must_ be--because she hadn't
+seen him sit still this long in years. He was _always_ doing something,
+or looking for something to do. It wasn't like Evon just to sit still
+and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting
+boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and
+looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled
+didn't fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily,
+with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an
+elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could
+twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just
+drooped.
+
+She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.
+
+"You wonder what it's like, Evon?" she asked.
+
+He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.
+
+"To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean," she added.
+
+"_Me?_ What _are_ you thinking of, Letha?"
+
+"Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad's face. You remind me of
+an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to
+play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens."
+
+"I don't fiddle."
+
+"But your eyes are on the sky-fleet."
+
+Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. "It's
+strange," he murmured at last. "It's as if I know them--the star-birds,
+I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at
+something I expected to happen ... or ... or...."
+
+"Something familiar?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?" she asked the blonde girl
+who sat on the cool rock by the spring.
+
+Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. "I don't
+believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief."
+
+"How silly! What's that to do with it?"
+
+"He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I'd remember
+where he buried it, wouldn't I?" She pouted, and went back to dabbling a
+club toe in the spring.
+
+Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. "We lie around here like
+sleepy pigs!" he grumbled. "Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on
+the Geoark to make up its mind?"
+
+"What do you think they'll do?"
+
+"The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?"
+
+"Tell them to go away."
+
+"And suppose they chose not to go?"
+
+The girl looked bewildered. "I can't imagine anyone refusing the
+Geoark."
+
+"Maybe they've got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with
+ours?"
+
+"_Two_ Geoarks? What a strange idea."
+
+"Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware
+that I have one too?"
+
+"Evon! What a _strange_ idea."
+
+He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring,
+then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling
+complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the
+glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon's laughter broke the
+gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to
+wander into the clearing from the pathways.
+
+"I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark," someone
+suggested.
+
+"About the sky-fleet? And who knows what to say?"
+
+"I'm afraid," said a girl. "Somehow I'm suddenly afraid of them."
+
+"Our brothers from the Exodus? But they're _people_--such as you and I."
+
+So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the
+glade to read another message received from the sky-fleet.
+
+     PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+     PRESENTS GREETINGS!
+
+     HAVING RECEIVED NO ANSWER TO OUR PREVIOUS COMMUNICATION, WE
+     HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LAND AT ONCE. I AM IMPOSING AN
+     INFORMATIONAL QUARANTINE TO AVOID RESTIMULATING POSSIBLE
+     RECESSIVE KULTURVERLAENGERUNG, BUT SUGGEST YOU GUARD
+     YOURSELVES. OUR CULTURES HAD A COMMON ORIGIN. WE COME IN ARMS,
+     WITHOUT ENMITY.
+
+     ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+     SPACESTRIKE COMMAND IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION
+
+This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less
+meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was
+going to land, without invitation.
+
+Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans.
+"Can you revive the devices that speak across space?" they asked.
+
+"They are revived," answered the tech clans.
+
+"Then let us speak to our brothers from space."
+
+And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out:
+
+     BRETHREN TO BRETHREN, PRESENT LOVE LOVE LOVE.
+
+     WE WELCOME YOU TO OUR GLADES AND TO OUR PLACES OF FEEDING AND
+     OUR PLACES OF SLEEPING. WE WELCOME YOU TO THE BOSOM OF THE
+     WORLD OF BEGINNING. AFTER TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS, EARTH HAS NOT
+     FORGOTTEN. COME AMID REJOICING.
+
+     THE ELDERS OF THE GEOARK
+
+"I'm afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to," growled Ernstli
+Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an
+atmospheric-braking orbit.
+
+And there was thunder in a cloudless sky.
+
+    "_O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
+      Edward, Edward.
+    O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
+      And some other dule ye dree, O."
+    "O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,
+      Alas and woe is me, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In accordance with the rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized
+planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group
+fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and
+established an "orbital shell" of criscrossing orbits, timed and
+interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first
+wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at
+three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When
+the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and
+flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked
+itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.
+
+From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its
+telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a
+hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.
+
+"No signs of the natives yet," came the report. "No signs of technology.
+No evidence of hostility."
+
+A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera
+caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing
+more.
+
+One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with
+steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave
+forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square
+miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen
+miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it
+would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.
+
+In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden,
+who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the
+enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock,
+sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of
+jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic
+extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush
+still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a
+bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized
+the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was
+born into his bones.
+
+Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the
+sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south,
+another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the
+flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a
+low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area
+toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf
+below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller
+fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color
+blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of
+brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery.
+Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind
+stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind
+changed, and the air that breathed about the commander's face was full
+of perfume.
+
+I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home
+of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote
+that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply
+dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure 76-A, "Refueling Method
+for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable."
+
+It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa,
+and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia
+ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across
+the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate
+histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered
+itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the
+histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied
+them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had
+ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man
+was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum--or had been, before
+the War of Secession--and when history moved into space, Earth was a
+half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the
+historians had reconstructed for the museums--vistas of roaring
+industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and
+spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully
+tended Japanese garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As he stared around, he felt a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed
+at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the
+landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so
+vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would
+be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had
+already been issued. "All personnel are forbidden to attempt the
+learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture
+language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with
+them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of
+Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in
+the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives,
+shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other
+form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in
+force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited
+purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby
+authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to
+try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized
+to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden,
+Comm."
+
+It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And
+Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language
+in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile,
+the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in
+which the messages had been exchanged.
+
+The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a
+flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and
+crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then
+he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk--a young girl, obviously
+frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she
+darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already
+approaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quick
+glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The
+instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in
+the ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. The
+rate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per
+unit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship for
+twenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.
+
+"_Keep clear!_" he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.
+
+She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she
+seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking
+toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.
+
+"_Go back, you little idiot!_"
+
+Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She kept
+coming--into the charred area.
+
+The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground
+near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun
+barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs.
+She yelped and fled back into the green garden.
+
+He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly.
+She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was
+frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human.
+But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself
+absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.
+
+It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the
+Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to
+translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a
+mutually recorded dead language.
+
+"We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," ven
+Klaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region is
+unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our
+measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for
+_our_ purposes."
+
+"Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentle
+voice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are."
+
+"Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military
+jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted
+area, closed to civilian population."
+
+"But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have
+surrounded!"
+
+"Evacuate them."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"_Evacuate_ them. Make them get out."
+
+"My translator is working badly."
+
+The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the
+colonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupied
+zone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us."
+
+"How much notice?"
+
+The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional
+hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius."
+
+"My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting.
+
+"Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplish
+what we came here for, and then get out--as quickly as possible. We
+don't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to
+confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is
+this agreed?"
+
+"My translator is working badly."
+
+"Aren't you getting anything?"
+
+A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where
+the sky-fleet rests."
+
+"Correct."
+
+"But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the
+feast-glades?"
+
+"I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have
+aircraft of your own."
+
+"We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."
+
+"Any of your population understand the mechanisms?"
+
+"Certainly, brother."
+
+"Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what we
+want, and maybe they can make it clear to you."
+
+"As you wish, brother."
+
+The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a
+satisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gone
+quickly," he said.
+
+"The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us."
+
+"Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted.
+
+"I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,'" came a voice from the
+back of the room.
+
+"Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably.
+
+"You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go
+back?"
+
+"It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be
+useful."
+
+Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir."
+
+"Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the
+tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time--have
+you got any suggestions?"
+
+"About how to deal with the natives?"
+
+"Certainly ... but with the accent on _our_ problems."
+
+Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively
+at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gathered
+through limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, and
+do our suggesting later."
+
+"That constitutes your entire opinion?"
+
+"Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung...."
+
+"_Our_ problems, I said!" the commander snapped.
+
+"It's likely to be our problem, sir."
+
+"How?"
+
+"In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns
+we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying
+the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns
+are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."
+
+"What patterns do you mean?"
+
+"The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron."
+
+A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander
+grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of _action_, not a transmittable
+determinant."
+
+Meikl shook his head. "We don't _know_ what is a transmittable
+determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some
+very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't
+feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it
+in our kulturverlaengerung lines."
+
+A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I think
+this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."
+
+"What, the kult'laenger lines?"
+
+"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed
+along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish,
+and deal in facts...."
+
+"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare
+absently out a viewing port at the trees.
+
+"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much
+about it."
+
+"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given
+intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult
+skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the
+game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the
+age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control
+group--another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."
+
+"Go on."
+
+"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests
+on all two hundred."
+
+"Learning the game, you mean?"
+
+"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So
+far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the
+first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the
+patterns of the game easily."
+
+"So?"
+
+"So--during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the
+parental mind--probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't
+'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural
+mechanism of transmittal--and it's an analog of heredity. The
+kulturverlaengerung--and it can linger in a family line without becoming
+conscious for many generations."
+
+"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."
+
+"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on--as a predisposition-talent--to
+the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a
+mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a
+memory...."
+
+"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the
+chances of utilizing native labor?"
+
+    "_And whatten penance will we dree for that,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    Whatten penance will ye dree for that?
+      My dear son, now tell me, O."
+    "I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
+      Mither, mither;
+    I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
+      And I'll fare over the sea, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl,
+Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill,
+once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and
+watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing
+the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine
+shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the
+valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered
+spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance,
+the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and
+natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian
+cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.
+
+"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter
+murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by
+staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.
+
+He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the
+valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no
+resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?
+
+Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of
+the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into
+their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he
+wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.
+Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the
+planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up,
+without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the
+casual statement: "_In our gardens, there are no weeds_," and it applied
+to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna
+and flora of the planet.
+
+This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but
+rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and
+Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and
+slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could
+raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up
+organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done
+both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his
+vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster
+than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms
+of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient
+species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.
+Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him
+with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive
+in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of
+their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.
+
+_This_, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in
+the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant
+exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous
+world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or
+"authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or
+fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood
+beside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a
+foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for
+a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had
+possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual
+natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks.
+There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and
+starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language
+accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives
+enthusiastically strived to please.
+
+He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze.
+Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.
+
+"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.
+
+She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy
+named Evon...."
+
+He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You
+can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.
+
+"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.
+
+"Letha, I...."
+
+"Yes, Meikl."
+
+"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."
+
+Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you
+tell us nothing of space--how you've lived since the Exodus?"
+
+"We are an evil people."
+
+"Not so."
+
+She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.
+
+"What is it you wish to know?"
+
+"Why will you never return to your home?"
+
+"To space--but we shall."
+
+"To the worlds of your birth, I mean."
+
+He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?"
+he asked, a little sharply.
+
+"Will you?"
+
+So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things
+would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.
+
+"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."
+
+"But why? Where are your women and children?"
+
+He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the
+natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships
+departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic
+and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The
+single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from
+the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.
+
+"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had
+said too much.
+
+She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that
+point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"
+
+There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".
+
+"They hurl death, Letha."
+
+"How can 'death' be hurled?"
+
+Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of
+the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the
+children of space. The same traces of the ancient _kulturverlaengerung_
+would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.
+One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the
+Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in
+their culture. The records had been systematically censored and
+rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History
+had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute
+concepts of her understanding.
+
+"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them
+wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a
+contention for property."
+
+"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.
+
+He nodded slowly.
+
+It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and
+interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions
+reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of
+the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,
+the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in
+Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was
+approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and
+nationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
+
+"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our
+cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours
+has passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final."
+
+"And yours, Meikl?"
+
+"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile
+environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of
+the culture--_conquest_, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the
+mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."
+
+"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"
+
+He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."
+
+"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"
+
+He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second
+childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?--a final perpetual
+youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of
+the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in
+low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange
+of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers
+wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit,
+using the spacer's tongue.
+
+"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.
+
+"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three
+hundred men since we landed."
+
+"Found any of them?"
+
+"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."
+
+Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.
+
+"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.
+
+"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the
+elders. Let's go."
+
+They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The
+meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the
+men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The
+attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.
+
+From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of
+nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important
+loss of personnel. What _was_ important: the slow decay of discipline
+under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been
+established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone,
+Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he
+refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of
+the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a
+tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO_{2} gun that could be concealed in
+the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught
+him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter
+plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a
+week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization;
+if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus
+would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.
+
+The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives.
+The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of
+infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation
+for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful
+people after twenty thousand years.
+
+"I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered
+the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders
+had assembled.
+
+He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.
+
+"Letha--you have worked for me many months."
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"I love you, Letha."
+
+She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her
+quietly, hating himself.
+
+"You'll take me with you," she said.
+
+"No." It was impossible.
+
+"Then you'll stay."
+
+"It is ... _forbidden_ ... _verboten_...." There was no word in the
+tongue.
+
+"I can't understand.... If you love...."
+
+He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled
+everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.
+
+"Letha--in your culture, 'life' is the highest value."
+
+"How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl."
+
+He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha.
+I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious
+play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and
+you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?"
+
+She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance--act a different play."
+
+"It's not a play, Letha. We act an _unconscious_ drama, and thus the
+drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence
+over life."
+
+She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.
+
+"I don't know what you mean."
+
+"Can you understand?--that I love you, and yet my ... my...." He groped
+for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes
+precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you."
+
+Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a
+monotone. "It's growing late."
+
+    "_And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
+      My dear son, now tell me, O?"
+    "The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear,
+      Mither, mither;
+    The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear;
+      Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!_"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The trouble had begun on the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party
+of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night.
+Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the
+dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus
+immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and
+needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over
+the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a
+leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel.
+
+    NOTICE OF SANCTUARY
+    TO: ALL PERSONNEL
+    FROM: AUSLAND COMMITTEE
+    SUBJECT: FREEDOM
+
+     1. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO WISHES TO RESIGN FROM THE SERVICES OF
+     THE IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION MAY DO SO OF THIS DATE.
+
+     2. THE PROCEDURE FOR RESIGNATION INVOLVES NO FORMAL STATEMENT.
+     A MAN MAY TERMINATE HIS PERIOD OF SERVICE BY DEPARTING FROM THE
+     OCCUPIED ZONE.
+
+     3. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE WITH THE
+     RESIGNATION OF ANOTHER SHALL BE TRIED IN ABSENTIA BY THIS
+     COMMITTEE, AND IF FOUND GUILTY, SHALL INCUR THE DEATH PENALTY.
+
+     AUSLAND COMMITTEE
+
+"An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!" ven Klaeden had
+hissed. "Get them. Make an example of them."
+
+In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for
+the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on
+sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged
+eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native
+population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered.
+
+A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice
+Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from
+their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that
+had invaded their quarters.
+
+Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed
+to disclose the location of the immunizing serum.
+
+Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were
+brought before the baron.
+
+"Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close
+the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a
+work contract."
+
+On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse.
+The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a
+massacre.
+
+"We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry
+predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come
+out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit."
+
+Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder,
+tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to
+speak in the intermediate language.
+
+"Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear."
+
+Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly
+and turned to the girl. "Tell them," he said in the Intermedia, "that
+death will come to any native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will
+die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that the
+Geoark is...." He paused. There was no word for "hostage."
+
+He was explaining the hostage-concept lengthily, while the girl's face
+drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood
+stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron.
+
+"_They_ understood you, damn them!" ven Klaeden snapped. "They know the
+Intermedia."
+
+The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging
+that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to
+the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables.
+
+"_No!_" Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders.
+
+One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of
+them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few
+feet away stirred restlessly.
+
+The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade.
+The guard looked questioningly at the officers.
+
+"Where are they going?" ven Klaeden demanded.
+
+"Well, Letha?" Meikl muttered.
+
+"I--I don't know--"
+
+"You're lying, girl," the baron grunted, then to the guards: "Tell them
+to halt."
+
+"Party, _halt_!" snapped the guard.
+
+The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes
+gathered up from spindley shins.
+
+"_Party, halt!_"
+
+The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued.
+
+"HALT, I SAID."
+
+"Take the one in the middle," ordered ven Klaeden.
+
+The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief
+rattling hiss. The back of the elder's robe went crimson, and he
+crumpled at the entrance of the pathway.
+
+The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken.
+
+"Shoot for the legs, you fool!" barked the baron.
+
+The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering
+softly.
+
+Meikl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for
+Letha. She had vanished from the glade.
+
+"Haul them to the dispensary, keep them prisoner," the baron was
+growling.
+
+Meikl turned on him. "Now it's come to this, has it?" he snapped. "From
+the beginning, they were willing--even eager, to give what we wanted.
+Why did they _stop_ being willing?"
+
+"That's enough, Meikl!"
+
+"I've hardly started. You came here like a tyrant, and they served you
+like a friend. You couldn't bear it. 'Brethren', they said. But there's
+nothing about 'brethren' in the tactical handbooks, is there, Baron?"
+
+"Shut up."
+
+Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand
+before the analyst and stare at him icily.
+
+"You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst--the
+kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the
+war plague, eh?"
+
+Meikl paused. The baron's eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment
+or triumph.
+
+"Well, Meikl? Is that what we've done? Inflicted them with conflict?
+Brought back the old seeds of hate?"
+
+The analyst drew himself up slightly. "You just killed a man, a man of
+dignity," he snarled, "and you cut two others down like weeds."
+
+"Innocent old men." The baron's mouth twisted into a snarl.
+
+"They wanted nothing but to help us."
+
+"Yes, Meikl? And we are the barbarians, eh?"
+
+The analyst spoke disdain with his eyes.
+
+The baron straightened in sudden hauteur. "_Look down at the ground,
+Analyst_," he hissed.
+
+Ven Klaeden's sudden change of tone impelled him to obey. His eyes fell
+to the turf at his feet--moss covered sod, rich and dark beneath the
+green.
+
+The baron kicked a hole in the moss with the toe of his boot. "Tell me
+where the infection came from, Analyst," he growled. He scraped at the
+hole with his heel. "And why is the dirt so _red_ right here?"
+
+Meikl glanced up slowly. Two men were coming through the shrubs, walking
+warily along the path toward the clearing. Ven Klaeden seemed unaware.
+He leaned forward to speak through his teeth.
+
+"I give them nothing but what they gave our fathers--their own inner
+hell, Meikl--the curse they so carefully forgot. In their Eden."
+
+The man was mad ... perhaps. Meikl's eyes followed the men who
+approached through the shrubs. One of them carried a burden--the limp
+body of a girl, occasionally visible through the low foliage as they
+drew nearer. One of the men was a junior officer, the other a native.
+After a moment, he recognized the native....
+
+"Evon!"
+
+As he called out, the baron whirled, hand slipping to the hilt of the
+ceremonial sword he wore in the presence of the Geoark. The men stopped.
+Meikl stared at the limp figure in the arms of the native.
+
+"_Letha!_"
+
+"Dead," Evon hissed. "They killed her for running...."
+
+They emerged from the shrubs into full view. The officer was holding a
+gun.
+
+"Put that away!" ven Klaeden snapped.
+
+The young officer laughed sourly. "Sorry, baron, I'm from the
+committee."
+
+"_Guard!_"
+
+There's no one in earshot, Baron."
+
+"Fool!" Ven Klaeden arrogantly whipped out the sword. "Drop that gun, or
+I'll blade-whip you!"
+
+"Easy, baron, easy. I'm your executioner...."
+
+The baron straightened haughtily and began a slow advance, a towering
+figure of icy dignity in the sun that filtered through the foliage.
+
+"... but I want to take care of this one first." The renegade waved the
+gun toward Meikl. "You, Baron, you can have it slower--a needle in your
+official rump."
+
+Ven Klaeden, a figure of utter contempt, continued the slow advance with
+the sword. The officer's lips tightened. He squeezed the trigger. Ven
+Klaeden hesitated, jerking slightly, then continued, his hand pressing
+against his abdomen, doubling forward slightly. The officer fired
+again--a sharp snap of sound in the glade. The baron stopped, wrestling
+with pain ten feet from the pale renegade.
+
+Suddenly he flung the sword. It looped in mid-air and slashed the man's
+face from chin to cheekbone. He tripped and tumbled backward as ven
+Klaeden slipped to his knees on the moss.
+
+Meikl dived for the gun. By the time he wrestled it away from the
+officer with the bloody face, ven Klaeden was sitting like a gaunt
+Buddha on the moss, and the body of Letha lay nearby, while a confused
+Evon clutched his hands to his face and rocked slowly. Meikl came slowly
+to his feet. The renegade officer wiped his face of blood and shrank
+back into shrubs.
+
+"Get him," croaked ven Klaeden.
+
+Scarcely knowing why, the analyst jerked the trigger, felt the gun
+explode in his fist, saw the renegade topple.
+
+There was a moment of stillness in the glade, broken only by ven
+Klaeden's wheezing breath. The baron looked up with an effort, his eyes
+traveling over the girl, then up to the figure of the child of Earth.
+
+"Your woman, Earthling?"
+
+Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He
+glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not
+touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword.
+
+"You have brought us death, you have brought us hate," he said slowly,
+his eyes clinging to the sword.
+
+"Pick it up," hissed the baron.
+
+"You will never leave. A party of men is wrecking what you have done.
+Then we shall wreck your ships. Then we...."
+
+"Pick it up."
+
+The native hesitated. Slowly, his brown hand reached for the hilt, and
+fascination was in his eyes.
+
+"You know what it is for?" the analyst asked.
+
+The native shook his head slowly.
+
+Then it was in his hand, fingers shaping themselves around the hilt--as
+the fingers of his fathers had done in the ages before the Star Exodus.
+His jaw fell slightly, and he looked up, clutching it.
+
+"_Now_ do you know?" the baron gasped.
+
+"My--my hand--_it_ knows," the native whispered.
+
+Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes
+glazed with pain. "He'll need it now, won't he, Analyst?" he breathed,
+then fell to the moss.
+
+Evon stood up slowly, moistening his lips, feeling the grip of the sword
+and touching the red-stained steel. He peered quickly up at Meikl. Meikl
+brandished the gun slightly.
+
+The low rumble of a dynamite blast sounded from the direction of the
+mines.
+
+"You loved her too," Evon said.
+
+He nodded.
+
+The native held the sword out questioningly, as if offering it.
+
+"Keep it," the analyst grunted. "You remembered its feel after twenty
+thousand years. That's why you'll need it."
+
+Some deeds, he thought, would haunt the soul of Man until his end, and
+there was no erasing them ... for they _were_ the soul, self-made,
+lasting in the ghost-grey fabric of mind as long as the lips of a child
+greedily sought the breast of its mother, as long as the child mirrored
+the mind of the man and the woman. _Kulturverlaengerung._
+
+The analyst left the native with the sword and went to seek the next in
+line of command. The purpose of the fleet must be kept intact, he
+thought, laughing bitterly. Yet still he went.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ties That Bind, by Walter Miller
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ties That Bind, by Walter Miller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Ties That Bind
+
+Author: Walter Miller
+
+Illustrator: Kelly  Freas
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2010 [EBook #32775]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIES THAT BIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figleft">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright">
+<img src="images/illus.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>THE TIES THAT BIND</h1>
+
+<h2>By Walter Miller, Jr.</h2>
+
+<h3>Illustrated by Kelly Freas</h3>
+
+<p>[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
+Fiction May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><i>The Earth was green and quiet. Nature had survived Man, and
+Man had survived himself. Then, one day, the great silvery ships broke
+the tranquillity of the skies, bringing Man's twenty-thousand-year-lost
+inheritance back to Earth....</i></div>
+
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And why sae sad gang ye, O?"</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And I had nae mair but he, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>The Horde of sleek ships arose in the west at twilight&mdash;gleaming slivers
+that reflected the dying sun as they lanced across the darkling heavens.
+A majestic fleet of squadrons in double-vees, groups in staggered
+echelon, they crossed the sky like gleaming geese, and the children of
+Earth came out of their whispering gardens to gape at the splendor that
+marched above them.</p>
+
+<p>There was fear, for no vessel out of space had crossed the skies of
+Earth for countless generations, and the children of the planet had
+forgotten. The only memories that lingered were in the memnoscripts, and
+in the unconscious <i>kulturverlaengerung</i>, of the people. Because of the
+latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the
+slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in
+the language to name them.</p>
+
+<p>The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered
+in awed voices under the elms....</p>
+
+<p>The piping whine of a senile hag: "The ancient gods! The day of the
+judging! Repent, repent...."</p>
+
+<p>The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: "The alien! We're lost, we're
+lost! We've got to run for the hills!"</p>
+
+<p>The voice of the child: "See the pretty birdlights? See? See?"</p>
+
+<p>And a voice of wisdom in the councils of the clans: "The sons of
+men&mdash;they've come home from the Star Exodus. Our brothers."</p>
+
+<p>The slivers of light, wave upon wave, crept into the eclipse shadow as
+the twilight deepened and the stars stung through the blackening shell
+of sky. When the moon rose, the people watched again as the silhouette
+of a black double-vee of darts slipped across the lunar disk.</p>
+
+<p>Beneath the ground, in response to the return of the ships, ancient
+mechanisms whirred to life, and the tech guilds hurried to tend them. On
+Earth, there was a suspenseful night, pregnant with the dissimilar twins
+of hope and fear, laden with awe, hushed with the expectancy of twenty
+thousand years. The stargoers&mdash;they had come home.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>"<i>Kulturverlaengerung!</i>" grunted the tense young man in the toga of an
+Analyst. He stood at one end of the desk, slightly flushed, staring down
+at the haughty wing leader who watched him icily from a seat at the
+other end. He said it again, too distinctly, as if the word were a club
+to hurl at the wingsman. "<i>Kulturverlaengerung</i>, that's why!"</p>
+
+<p>"I heard you the first time, Meikl," the officer snapped. "Watch your
+tongue and your tone!"</p>
+
+<p>A brief hush in the cabin as hostility flowed between them. There was
+only the hiss of air from the ventilators, and the low whine of the
+flagship's drive units somewhere below.</p>
+
+<p>The erect and elderly gentleman who sat behind the desk cleared his
+throat politely. "Have you any further clarifications to make, Meikl?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It should be clear enough to all of you," the analyst retorted hotly.
+He jerked his head toward the misty crescent of Earth on the viewing
+screen that supplied most of the light in the small cabin. "You can see
+what they are, what they've become. And you <i>know</i> what <i>we</i> are."</p>
+
+<p>The two wingsmen bristled slightly at the edge of contempt in the
+analyst's voice. The elderly gentlemen behind the desk remained
+impassive, expressionless.</p>
+
+<p>The analyst leaned forward with a slow accusing glance that swept the
+faces of the three officers, then centered on his antagonist at the
+other end of the desk. "You want to <i>infect</i> them, Thaüle?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The wingsman darkened. His fist exploded on the desktop. "Meikl, you're
+in contempt! Restrict yourself to answering questions!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"There will be no further breaches of military etiquette during the
+continuance of this conference," the elderly gentleman announced icily,
+thus seizing the situation.</p>
+
+<p>After a moment's silence, he turned to the analyst again. "We've got to
+refuel," he said flatly. "In order to refuel, we must land."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. But why not on Mars? We can develop our own facilities for
+producing fuel. Why must it be Earth?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because there will be <i>some existing facilities</i> on Earth, even though
+they're out of space. The job would take five years on Mars."</p>
+
+<p>The analyst lowered his eyes, shook his head wearily. "I'm thinking of a
+billion earthlings. Aren't they worth considering, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've got to consider the men in my command, Meikl. They've been through
+hell. We all have."</p>
+
+<p>"The hell was our own making, baron."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Meikl!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry, sir."</p>
+
+<p>Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: "Besides, Meikl, your
+predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be
+true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the
+present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a
+thousand generations. I don't know a great deal about culturetics, but
+I've read that <i>kulturverlaengerung</i> reaches a threshold of extinction
+after about a dozen generations, if there's no restimulation."</p>
+
+<p>"Only in laboratory cultures, sir," sighed the analyst. "Under rigid
+control to make certain there's no restimulant. In practice, in a
+planet-wide society, there's constant accidental restimulation,
+unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to
+original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult'laenger
+linkage never really dies out&mdash;although, it can stay recessive and
+unconscious."</p>
+
+<p>"That's too bad," a wingsman growled sourly. "We'll wake it up, won't
+we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let's not be callous," the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. "Analyst
+Meikl has sensitivities."</p>
+
+<p>The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing
+consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. "Sir, I was
+<i>summoned</i> here to offer my opinions about landing on Earth. You asked
+about possible cultural dangers. I've told you."</p>
+
+<p>"You discussed the danger to earthlings."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"I meant 'danger' to the personnel of this fleet&mdash;to their esprit, their
+indoctrination, their group-efficiency. I take it you see none."</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary, I see several," said the analyst, coming slowly to his
+feet, eyes flashing and darting among them. "Where were you born,
+Wingman?" he asked the officer at the opposite end of the desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Lichter Six, Satellite," the officer grunted after a moment of
+irritable silence.</p>
+
+<p>"And you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Omega Thrush," said the other wingsman.</p>
+
+<p>All knew without asking that the baron was born in space, his birthplace
+one of the planetoid city-states of the Michea Dwarf. Meikl looked
+around at them, then ripped up his own sleeve, unsheathed his
+rank-dagger, and pricked his forearm with the needle point. A red
+droplet appeared, and he wiped at it with a forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"It's common stuff, gentlemen. We've shed a lot of it. And each of us is
+a walking sackful of it." He paused, then turned to touch the point of
+his dagger to the viewer, where it left a tiny red trace on the glass,
+on the bright crescent of Earth, mist-shrouded, chastely wheeling her
+nights into days.</p>
+
+<p>"It came from there," he hissed. "She's your womb, gentlemen. Are you
+going back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?" the baron asked sharply,
+hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. "This becomes silly."</p>
+
+<p>"If you land on her," Meikl promised ominously, "you'll go away with a
+fleet full of hate."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl's arm dropped to his side. He sheathed his dagger. "Is my presence
+at this meeting still imperative, sir?" he asked the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you anything else to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;<i>don't land on Earth</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a repetition. No further reasons?&mdash;in terms of danger to
+ourselves?"</p>
+
+<p>The analyst paused. "I can think of nothing worse that could happen to
+us," he said slowly, "than just being what we already are."</p>
+
+<p>He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of
+the cabin.</p>
+
+<p>"I suggest," said a wingsman, "that we speak to Frewek about tightening
+up the discipline in the Intelligence section. That man was in open
+contempt, Baron."</p>
+
+<p>"But he was also probably right," sighed the graying officer and
+nobleman.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Sir&mdash;!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry, Wingsman, there's nothing else to do. We'll have to land.
+Make preparations, both of you&mdash;and try to make contact with surface.
+I'll dictate the message."</p>
+
+<p>When the wingsmen left, it was settled. The baron arose with a sigh and
+went to peer morosely at the view of Earth below. Very delicately, he
+wiped the tiny trace of blood from the glass. She was a beautiful world,
+this Earth. She had spawned them all, as Meikl said&mdash;but for this, the
+baron could feel only bitterness toward her.</p>
+
+<p>But what of her inhabitants? I'm past feeling anything for them, he
+thought, past feeling for any of the life-scum that creeps across the
+surface of a world, any world. We'll go down quickly, and take what we
+need quickly, and leave quickly. We'll try not to infect them, but
+they've already got it in them, the dormant disease, and any infection
+will be only a recurrence.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he summoned a priest to his quarters. And, before going to
+the command deck, he bathed sacramentally as if in preparation for
+battle.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>Your hawk's blude was never sae red,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Your hawk's blude was never sae red,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>My dear son, I tell thee, O."</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O I hae kill'd my red roan steed,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>That erst was sae fair and free, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>False dawn was in the east when the slivers of light appeared once again
+out of the eclipse shadow to rake majestically across the heavens, and
+again the children of Earth crowded in teeming numbers from the quiet
+gardens to chatter their excitement at the wonder in the sky. But this
+time, a message came. The men of the tech clans who tended the newly
+activated mechanisms heard it, and the mechanisms memorized it, and
+played it again and again for the people, while the linguists puzzled
+over the unidentified language used in the transmission.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+PRESENTS GREETINGS!</p>
+
+<p>IF YOU HAVE RECORDS, OUR USE OF ANCIENT ANGLO-GERMANIC SHOULD
+MAKE OUR IDENTITY CLEAR. HAVE YOU FUELING FACILITIES FOR 720
+SHIPS OF THOR-NINE CLASS? IF NOT, WE SHALL DEVELOP FACILITIES
+FROM LOCAL RESOURCES, WITH, WE TRUST, YOUR PEACEFUL
+COOPERATION. THIS CADRE NOT REIMMIGRATING, BUT EN ROUTE TO
+URSAN STARS. REQUEST LANDING SUGGESTIONS, IN VIEW OF OUR
+FUELING NEEDS.</p>
+
+<p>REQUEST INTELLIGENCE CONCERNING PRESENT LEVEL OF TERRESTRIAL
+CULTURE. OUR ORIBITAL OBSERVATIONS INDICATE A STATIC
+AGRARIAN-TECHNICAL COMPLEX, BUT DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE. WE COME
+IN ARMS, BUT WITHOUT ENMITY. PLEASE REPLY, IF POSSIBLE.</p>
+
+<p>ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+SPACESTRIKE COMMAND, IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION </p></blockquote>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>So it came, repeated continuously for an hour, followed by an hour of
+silence, and then by another hour of repetition. The linguists were
+unable to discern meanings. Thousands of memorizers were consulted, but
+none knew the words of the harsh voice from the ships. At last, the
+sages consulted the books and memnoscripts in the ancient vaults,
+pouring over tomes that had been buried for countless centuries. After
+hours of hurried study....</p>
+
+<p>"It is found, <i>it is found</i>, a tongue of the ancients!" a joyous cry in
+the glades and the garden pathways.</p>
+
+<p>Happily, the sages recorded the linguistic structure of the forgotten
+tongue on memnoscript, and gave it to a servo translator. Outmoded
+mechanisms were being brought out of wraps and prepared for use. The
+servos supplied a translation of the message, and the sages studied it.</p>
+
+<p>"It is badly understood," was the curious mutter along the garden
+pathways.</p>
+
+<p>"Many words have no words to match them, nor any thoughts that are
+similar," was the only explanation the sages could give.</p>
+
+<p>In translation the message seemed meaningless, or unfathomable. Only one
+thing was clear. The sons of Man meant to descend again upon the world
+of their ancestors. There was a restless unease in the gardens, and
+groups of elders gathered in the conference glades to mutter and glance
+at the sky. "Invite our brothers to land," was the impetuous cry of the
+young, but there were dissenters.</p>
+
+<p>In the Glade of Sopho, a few thoughtful clansmen of Pedaga had gathered
+to muse and speak quietly among themselves, although it was not
+ordinarily the business of tutors to consider problems that confronted
+society as a whole, particularly problems arising outside society
+itself. The Pedaga were teachers of the very young, and deliberately
+kept themselves childlike in outlook in order to make fuller contact
+with the children in their charge.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we should tell them to go away," said Letha, and looked around
+at the others for a response.</p>
+
+<p>She got nothing in reply but a flickering glance from Marrita, who sat
+morosely on a cool rock by the spring, her chin on her bare knees. Evon
+gave her a brief polite smile, to acknowledge the sound of her voice,
+but he returned almost at once to absently tearing twigs and glancing up
+at the bits of sky that showed through the foliage of the overhanging
+trees. Iak and Karrn were whispering together at the far end of the
+glade, and had not heard her.</p>
+
+<p>Letha shrugged and leaned back against the tree trunk again, sitting
+spraddle-legged this time in the hope of catching Evon's eye. She was a
+graceful girl, and while gracefulness is sometimes feline, Letha's was
+more nearly kittenish. She was full-bodied and soft, but well-shaped in
+spite of a trace of plumpness. Thick masses of black hair fell over
+baby-skin shoulders in a pleasing contrast, and while her face was a bit
+too round, it radiated a gentle, winning grin, and the sympathetic gaze
+of gray-blue eyes. Now she seemed ready to pout. Evon remained
+self-absorbed.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we should tell them to go away," she repeated a little sharply.
+"They'll all be big and swashbuckling and handsome, and the children
+will become unmanageable as soon as they see them. All the little girls
+will swoon, and all the little boys will want to go with them."</p>
+
+<p>Evon glanced at her briefly. "It's up to the elders of the Geoark," he
+muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own
+meditations.</p>
+
+<p>"And all the <i>big</i> girls will run away with them," she purred with a
+tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to
+waggle her foot.</p>
+
+<p>Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward
+again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually,
+she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He <i>must</i> be&mdash;because she hadn't
+seen him sit still this long in years. He was <i>always</i> doing something,
+or looking for something to do. It wasn't like Evon just to sit still
+and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting
+boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and
+looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled
+didn't fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily,
+with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an
+elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could
+twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just
+drooped.</p>
+
+<p>She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"You wonder what it's like, Evon?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean," she added.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Me?</i> What <i>are</i> you thinking of, Letha?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad's face. You remind me of
+an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to
+play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't fiddle."</p>
+
+<p>"But your eyes are on the sky-fleet."</p>
+
+<p>Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. "It's
+strange," he murmured at last. "It's as if I know them&mdash;the star-birds,
+I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at
+something I expected to happen ... or ... or...."</p>
+
+<p>"Something familiar?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?" she asked the blonde girl
+who sat on the cool rock by the spring.</p>
+
+<p>Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. "I don't
+believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief."</p>
+
+<p>"How silly! What's that to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I'd remember
+where he buried it, wouldn't I?" She pouted, and went back to dabbling a
+club toe in the spring.</p>
+
+<p>Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. "We lie around here like
+sleepy pigs!" he grumbled. "Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on
+the Geoark to make up its mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think they'll do?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell them to go away."</p>
+
+<p>"And suppose they chose not to go?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked bewildered. "I can't imagine anyone refusing the
+Geoark."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe they've got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with
+ours?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Two</i> Geoarks? What a strange idea."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware
+that I have one too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Evon! What a <i>strange</i> idea."</p>
+
+<p>He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring,
+then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling
+complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the
+glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon's laughter broke the
+gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to
+wander into the clearing from the pathways.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark," someone
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"About the sky-fleet? And who knows what to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid," said a girl. "Somehow I'm suddenly afraid of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Our brothers from the Exodus? But they're <i>people</i>&mdash;such as you and I."</p>
+
+<p>So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the
+glade to read another message received from the sky-fleet.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+PRESENTS GREETINGS!</p>
+
+<p>HAVING RECEIVED NO ANSWER TO OUR PREVIOUS COMMUNICATION, WE
+HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LAND AT ONCE. I AM IMPOSING AN
+INFORMATIONAL QUARANTINE TO AVOID RESTIMULATING POSSIBLE
+RECESSIVE KULTURVERLAENGERUNG, BUT SUGGEST YOU GUARD
+YOURSELVES. OUR CULTURES HAD A COMMON ORIGIN. WE COME IN ARMS,
+WITHOUT ENMITY.</p>
+
+<p>ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+SPACESTRIKE COMMAND IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less
+meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was
+going to land, without invitation.</p>
+
+<p>Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans.
+"Can you revive the devices that speak across space?" they asked.</p>
+
+<p>"They are revived," answered the tech clans.</p>
+
+<p>"Then let us speak to our brothers from space."</p>
+
+<p>And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>BRETHREN TO BRETHREN, PRESENT LOVE LOVE LOVE.</p>
+
+<p>WE WELCOME YOU TO OUR GLADES AND TO OUR PLACES OF FEEDING AND
+OUR PLACES OF SLEEPING. WE WELCOME YOU TO THE BOSOM OF THE
+WORLD OF BEGINNING. AFTER TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS, EARTH HAS NOT
+FORGOTTEN. COME AMID REJOICING.</p>
+
+<p>THE ELDERS OF THE GEOARK </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to," growled Ernstli
+Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an
+atmospheric-braking orbit.</p>
+
+<p>And there was thunder in a cloudless sky.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And some other dule ye dree, O."</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Alas and woe is me, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In accordance with the rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized
+planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group
+fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and
+established an "orbital shell" of criscrossing orbits, timed and
+interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first
+wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at
+three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When
+the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and
+flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked
+itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.</p>
+
+<p>From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its
+telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a
+hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.</p>
+
+<p>"No signs of the natives yet," came the report. "No signs of technology.
+No evidence of hostility."</p>
+
+<p>A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera
+caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing
+more.</p>
+
+<p>One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with
+steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave
+forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square
+miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen
+miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it
+would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden,
+who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the
+enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock,
+sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of
+jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic
+extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush
+still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a
+bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized
+the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was
+born into his bones.</p>
+
+<p>Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the
+sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south,
+another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the
+flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a
+low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area
+toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf
+below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller
+fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color
+blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of
+brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery.
+Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind
+stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind
+changed, and the air that breathed about the commander's face was full
+of perfume.</p>
+
+<p>I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home
+of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote
+that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply
+dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure 76-A, "Refueling Method
+for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable."</p>
+
+<p>It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa,
+and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia
+ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across
+the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate
+histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered
+itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the
+histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied
+them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had
+ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man
+was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum&mdash;or had been, before
+the War of Secession&mdash;and when history moved into space, Earth was a
+half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the
+historians had reconstructed for the museums&mdash;vistas of roaring
+industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and
+spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully
+tended Japanese garden.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>As he stared around, he felt a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed
+at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the
+landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so
+vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would
+be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had
+already been issued. "All personnel are forbidden to attempt the
+learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture
+language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with
+them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of
+Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in
+the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives,
+shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other
+form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in
+force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited
+purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby
+authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to
+try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized
+to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden,
+Comm."</p>
+
+<p>It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And
+Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language
+in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile,
+the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in
+which the messages had been exchanged.</p>
+
+<p>The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a
+flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and
+crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then
+he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk&mdash;a young girl, obviously
+frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she
+darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already
+approaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quick
+glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The
+instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in
+the ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. The
+rate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per
+unit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship for
+twenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Keep clear!</i>" he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.</p>
+
+<p>She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she
+seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking
+toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Go back, you little idiot!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She kept
+coming&mdash;into the charred area.</p>
+
+<p>The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground
+near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun
+barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs.
+She yelped and fled back into the green garden.</p>
+
+<p>He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly.
+She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was
+frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human.
+But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself
+absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.</p>
+
+<p>It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the
+Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to
+translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a
+mutually recorded dead language.</p>
+
+<p>"We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," ven
+Klaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region is
+unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our
+measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for
+<i>our</i> purposes."</p>
+
+<p>"Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentle
+voice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military
+jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted
+area, closed to civilian population."</p>
+
+<p>"But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have
+surrounded!"</p>
+
+<p>"Evacuate them."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Evacuate</i> them. Make them get out."</p>
+
+<p>"My translator is working badly."</p>
+
+<p>The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the
+colonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupied
+zone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us."</p>
+
+<p>"How much notice?"</p>
+
+<p>The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional
+hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius."</p>
+
+<p>"My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting.</p>
+
+<p>"Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplish
+what we came here for, and then get out&mdash;as quickly as possible. We
+don't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to
+confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is
+this agreed?"</p>
+
+<p>"My translator is working badly."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you getting anything?"</p>
+
+<p>A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where
+the sky-fleet rests."</p>
+
+<p>"Correct."</p>
+
+<p>"But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the
+feast-glades?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have
+aircraft of your own."</p>
+
+<p>"We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."</p>
+
+<p>"Any of your population understand the mechanisms?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, brother."</p>
+
+<p>"Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what we
+want, and maybe they can make it clear to you."</p>
+
+<p>"As you wish, brother."</p>
+
+<p>The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a
+satisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gone
+quickly," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us."</p>
+
+<p>"Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted.</p>
+
+<p>"I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,'" came a voice from the
+back of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably.</p>
+
+<p>"You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go
+back?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be
+useful."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the
+tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time&mdash;have
+you got any suggestions?"</p>
+
+<p>"About how to deal with the natives?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly ... but with the accent on <i>our</i> problems."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively
+at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gathered
+through limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, and
+do our suggesting later."</p>
+
+<p>"That constitutes your entire opinion?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung...."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Our</i> problems, I said!" the commander snapped.</p>
+
+<p>"It's likely to be our problem, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"How?"</p>
+
+<p>"In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns
+we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying
+the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns
+are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."</p>
+
+<p>"What patterns do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron."</p>
+
+<p>A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander
+grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of <i>action</i>, not a transmittable
+determinant."</p>
+
+<p>Meikl shook his head. "We don't <i>know</i> what is a transmittable
+determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some
+very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't
+feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it
+in our kulturverlaengerung lines."</p>
+
+<p>A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I think
+this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."</p>
+
+<p>"What, the kult'laenger lines?"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed
+along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish,
+and deal in facts...."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare
+absently out a viewing port at the trees.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much
+about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given
+intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult
+skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the
+game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the
+age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control
+group&mdash;another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on."</p>
+
+<p>"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests
+on all two hundred."</p>
+
+<p>"Learning the game, you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So
+far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the
+first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the
+patterns of the game easily."</p>
+
+<p>"So?"</p>
+
+<p>"So&mdash;during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the
+parental mind&mdash;probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't
+'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural
+mechanism of transmittal&mdash;and it's an analog of heredity. The
+kulturverlaengerung&mdash;and it can linger in a family line without becoming
+conscious for many generations."</p>
+
+<p>"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."</p>
+
+<p>"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on&mdash;as a predisposition-talent&mdash;to
+the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a
+mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a
+memory...."</p>
+
+<p>"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the
+chances of utilizing native labor?"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>And whatten penance will we dree for that,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Whatten penance will ye dree for that?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>My dear son, now tell me, O."</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"I'll set my feet in yonder boat,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>I'll set my feet in yonder boat,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>And I'll fare over the sea, O.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl,
+Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill,
+once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and
+watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing
+the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine
+shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the
+valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered
+spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance,
+the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and
+natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian
+cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.</p>
+
+<p>"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter
+murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by
+staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the
+valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no
+resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?</p>
+
+<p>Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of
+the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into
+their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he
+wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.
+Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the
+planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up,
+without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the
+casual statement: "<i>In our gardens, there are no weeds</i>," and it applied
+to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna
+and flora of the planet.</p>
+
+<p>This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but
+rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and
+Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and
+slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could
+raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up
+organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done
+both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his
+vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster
+than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms
+of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient
+species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.
+Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him
+with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive
+in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of
+their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.</p>
+
+<p><i>This</i>, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in
+the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant
+exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous
+world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or
+"authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or
+fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood
+beside him on the hill&mdash;but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a
+foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for
+a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had
+possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual
+natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks.
+There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and
+starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language
+accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives
+enthusiastically strived to please.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze.
+Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.</p>
+
+<p>"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy
+named Evon...."</p>
+
+<p>He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You
+can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.</p>
+
+<p>"Letha, I...."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Meikl."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you
+tell us nothing of space&mdash;how you've lived since the Exodus?"</p>
+
+<p>"We are an evil people."</p>
+
+<p>"Not so."</p>
+
+<p>She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you wish to know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why will you never return to your home?"</p>
+
+<p>"To space&mdash;but we shall."</p>
+
+<p>"To the worlds of your birth, I mean."</p>
+
+<p>He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?"
+he asked, a little sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you?"</p>
+
+<p>So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things
+would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."</p>
+
+<p>"But why? Where are your women and children?"</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the
+natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships
+departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic
+and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The
+single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from
+the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.</p>
+
+<p>"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had
+said too much.</p>
+
+<p>She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that
+point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".</p>
+
+<p>"They hurl death, Letha."</p>
+
+<p>"How can 'death' be hurled?"</p>
+
+<p>Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of
+the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the
+children of space. The same traces of the ancient <i>kulturverlaengerung</i>
+would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.
+One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the
+Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in
+their culture. The records had been systematically censored and
+rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History
+had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute
+concepts of her understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them
+wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a
+contention for property."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded slowly.</p>
+
+<p>It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and
+interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions
+reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of
+the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,
+the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in
+Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was
+approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and
+nationalization rights&mdash;a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.</p>
+
+<p>"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our
+cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours
+has passed through them all&mdash;perhaps into a fourth and final."</p>
+
+<p>"And yours, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile
+environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of
+the culture&mdash;<i>conquest</i>, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the
+mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."</p>
+
+<p>"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."</p>
+
+<p>"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second
+childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?&mdash;a final perpetual
+youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of
+the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in
+low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange
+of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers
+wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit,
+using the spacer's tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.</p>
+
+<p>"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three
+hundred men since we landed."</p>
+
+<p>"Found any of them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."</p>
+
+<p>Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.</p>
+
+<p>"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the
+elders. Let's go."</p>
+
+<p>They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The
+meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the
+men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The
+attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.</p>
+
+<p>From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of
+nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important
+loss of personnel. What <i>was</i> important: the slow decay of discipline
+under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been
+established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone,
+Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he
+refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of
+the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a
+tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO<sub>2</sub> gun that could be concealed in
+the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught
+him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter
+plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a
+week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization;
+if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus
+would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.</p>
+
+<p>The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives.
+The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of
+infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation
+for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful
+people after twenty thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>"I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered
+the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders
+had assembled.</p>
+
+<p>He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.</p>
+
+<p>"Letha&mdash;you have worked for me many months."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I love you, Letha."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her
+quietly, hating himself.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll take me with you," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"No." It was impossible.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you'll stay."</p>
+
+<p>"It is ... <i>forbidden</i> ... <i>verboten</i>...." There was no word in the
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't understand.... If you love...."</p>
+
+<p>He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled
+everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.</p>
+
+<p>"Letha&mdash;in your culture, 'life' is the highest value."</p>
+
+<p>"How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl."</p>
+
+<p>He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha.
+I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious
+play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and
+you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance&mdash;act a different play."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not a play, Letha. We act an <i>unconscious</i> drama, and thus the
+drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence
+over life."</p>
+
+<p>She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you understand?&mdash;that I love you, and yet my ... my...." He groped
+for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes
+precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you."</p>
+
+<p>Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a
+monotone. "It's growing late."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"<i>And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Edward, Edward?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>My dear son, now tell me, O?"</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>"The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Mither, mither;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">&mdash;ANONYMOUS<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The trouble had begun on the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party
+of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night.
+Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the
+dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus
+immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and
+needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over
+the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a
+leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel.</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">NOTICE OF SANCTUARY<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">TO: ALL PERSONNEL<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">FROM: AUSLAND COMMITTEE<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">SUBJECT: FREEDOM<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>1. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO WISHES TO RESIGN FROM THE SERVICES OF
+THE IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION MAY DO SO OF THIS DATE.</p>
+
+<p>2. THE PROCEDURE FOR RESIGNATION INVOLVES NO FORMAL STATEMENT.
+A MAN MAY TERMINATE HIS PERIOD OF SERVICE BY DEPARTING FROM THE
+OCCUPIED ZONE.</p>
+
+<p>3. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE WITH THE
+RESIGNATION OF ANOTHER SHALL BE TRIED IN ABSENTIA BY THIS
+COMMITTEE, AND IF FOUND GUILTY, SHALL INCUR THE DEATH PENALTY.</p>
+
+<p>AUSLAND COMMITTEE </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!" ven Klaeden had
+hissed. "Get them. Make an example of them."</p>
+
+<p>In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for
+the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on
+sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged
+eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native
+population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice
+Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from
+their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that
+had invaded their quarters.</p>
+
+<p>Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed
+to disclose the location of the immunizing serum.</p>
+
+<p>Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were
+brought before the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close
+the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a
+work contract."</p>
+
+<p>On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse.
+The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a
+massacre.</p>
+
+<p>"We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry
+predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come
+out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit."</p>
+
+<p>Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder,
+tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to
+speak in the intermediate language.</p>
+
+<p>"Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear."</p>
+
+<p>Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly
+and turned to the girl. "Tell them," he said in the Intermedia, "that
+death will come to any native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will
+die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that the
+Geoark is...." He paused. There was no word for "hostage."</p>
+
+<p>He was explaining the hostage-concept lengthily, while the girl's face
+drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood
+stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>They</i> understood you, damn them!" ven Klaeden snapped. "They know the
+Intermedia."</p>
+
+<p>The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging
+that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to
+the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>No!</i>" Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders.</p>
+
+<p>One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of
+them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few
+feet away stirred restlessly.</p>
+
+<p>The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade.
+The guard looked questioningly at the officers.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are they going?" ven Klaeden demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Letha?" Meikl muttered.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I don't know&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're lying, girl," the baron grunted, then to the guards: "Tell them
+to halt."</p>
+
+<p>"Party, <i>halt</i>!" snapped the guard.</p>
+
+<p>The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes
+gathered up from spindley shins.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Party, halt!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued.</p>
+
+<p>"HALT, I SAID."</p>
+
+<p>"Take the one in the middle," ordered ven Klaeden.</p>
+
+<p>The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief
+rattling hiss. The back of the elder's robe went crimson, and he
+crumpled at the entrance of the pathway.</p>
+
+<p>The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken.</p>
+
+<p>"Shoot for the legs, you fool!" barked the baron.</p>
+
+<p>The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering
+softly.</p>
+
+<p>Meikl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for
+Letha. She had vanished from the glade.</p>
+
+<p>"Haul them to the dispensary, keep them prisoner," the baron was
+growling.</p>
+
+<p>Meikl turned on him. "Now it's come to this, has it?" he snapped. "From
+the beginning, they were willing&mdash;even eager, to give what we wanted.
+Why did they <i>stop</i> being willing?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's enough, Meikl!"</p>
+
+<p>"I've hardly started. You came here like a tyrant, and they served you
+like a friend. You couldn't bear it. 'Brethren', they said. But there's
+nothing about 'brethren' in the tactical handbooks, is there, Baron?"</p>
+
+<p>"Shut up."</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand
+before the analyst and stare at him icily.</p>
+
+<p>"You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst&mdash;the
+kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the
+war plague, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Meikl paused. The baron's eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment
+or triumph.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Meikl? Is that what we've done? Inflicted them with conflict?
+Brought back the old seeds of hate?"</p>
+
+<p>The analyst drew himself up slightly. "You just killed a man, a man of
+dignity," he snarled, "and you cut two others down like weeds."</p>
+
+<p>"Innocent old men." The baron's mouth twisted into a snarl.</p>
+
+<p>"They wanted nothing but to help us."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Meikl? And we are the barbarians, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>The analyst spoke disdain with his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The baron straightened in sudden hauteur. "<i>Look down at the ground,
+Analyst</i>," he hissed.</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden's sudden change of tone impelled him to obey. His eyes fell
+to the turf at his feet&mdash;moss covered sod, rich and dark beneath the
+green.</p>
+
+<p>The baron kicked a hole in the moss with the toe of his boot. "Tell me
+where the infection came from, Analyst," he growled. He scraped at the
+hole with his heel. "And why is the dirt so <i>red</i> right here?"</p>
+
+<p>Meikl glanced up slowly. Two men were coming through the shrubs, walking
+warily along the path toward the clearing. Ven Klaeden seemed unaware.
+He leaned forward to speak through his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"I give them nothing but what they gave our fathers&mdash;their own inner
+hell, Meikl&mdash;the curse they so carefully forgot. In their Eden."</p>
+
+<p>The man was mad ... perhaps. Meikl's eyes followed the men who
+approached through the shrubs. One of them carried a burden&mdash;the limp
+body of a girl, occasionally visible through the low foliage as they
+drew nearer. One of the men was a junior officer, the other a native.
+After a moment, he recognized the native....</p>
+
+<p>"Evon!"</p>
+
+<p>As he called out, the baron whirled, hand slipping to the hilt of the
+ceremonial sword he wore in the presence of the Geoark. The men stopped.
+Meikl stared at the limp figure in the arms of the native.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Letha!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Dead," Evon hissed. "They killed her for running...."</p>
+
+<p>They emerged from the shrubs into full view. The officer was holding a
+gun.</p>
+
+<p>"Put that away!" ven Klaeden snapped.</p>
+
+<p>The young officer laughed sourly. "Sorry, baron, I'm from the
+committee."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Guard!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>There's no one in earshot, Baron."</p>
+
+<p>"Fool!" Ven Klaeden arrogantly whipped out the sword. "Drop that gun, or
+I'll blade-whip you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Easy, baron, easy. I'm your executioner...."</p>
+
+<p>The baron straightened haughtily and began a slow advance, a towering
+figure of icy dignity in the sun that filtered through the foliage.</p>
+
+<p>"... but I want to take care of this one first." The renegade waved the
+gun toward Meikl. "You, Baron, you can have it slower&mdash;a needle in your
+official rump."</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden, a figure of utter contempt, continued the slow advance with
+the sword. The officer's lips tightened. He squeezed the trigger. Ven
+Klaeden hesitated, jerking slightly, then continued, his hand pressing
+against his abdomen, doubling forward slightly. The officer fired
+again&mdash;a sharp snap of sound in the glade. The baron stopped, wrestling
+with pain ten feet from the pale renegade.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he flung the sword. It looped in mid-air and slashed the man's
+face from chin to cheekbone. He tripped and tumbled backward as ven
+Klaeden slipped to his knees on the moss.</p>
+
+<p>Meikl dived for the gun. By the time he wrestled it away from the
+officer with the bloody face, ven Klaeden was sitting like a gaunt
+Buddha on the moss, and the body of Letha lay nearby, while a confused
+Evon clutched his hands to his face and rocked slowly. Meikl came slowly
+to his feet. The renegade officer wiped his face of blood and shrank
+back into shrubs.</p>
+
+<p>"Get him," croaked ven Klaeden.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely knowing why, the analyst jerked the trigger, felt the gun
+explode in his fist, saw the renegade topple.</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment of stillness in the glade, broken only by ven
+Klaeden's wheezing breath. The baron looked up with an effort, his eyes
+traveling over the girl, then up to the figure of the child of Earth.</p>
+
+<p>"Your woman, Earthling?"</p>
+
+<p>Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He
+glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not
+touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword.</p>
+
+<p>"You have brought us death, you have brought us hate," he said slowly,
+his eyes clinging to the sword.</p>
+
+<p>"Pick it up," hissed the baron.</p>
+
+<p>"You will never leave. A party of men is wrecking what you have done.
+Then we shall wreck your ships. Then we...."</p>
+
+<p>"Pick it up."</p>
+
+<p>The native hesitated. Slowly, his brown hand reached for the hilt, and
+fascination was in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You know what it is for?" the analyst asked.</p>
+
+<p>The native shook his head slowly.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was in his hand, fingers shaping themselves around the hilt&mdash;as
+the fingers of his fathers had done in the ages before the Star Exodus.
+His jaw fell slightly, and he looked up, clutching it.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Now</i> do you know?" the baron gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"My&mdash;my hand&mdash;<i>it</i> knows," the native whispered.</p>
+
+<p>Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes
+glazed with pain. "He'll need it now, won't he, Analyst?" he breathed,
+then fell to the moss.</p>
+
+<p>Evon stood up slowly, moistening his lips, feeling the grip of the sword
+and touching the red-stained steel. He peered quickly up at Meikl. Meikl
+brandished the gun slightly.</p>
+
+<p>The low rumble of a dynamite blast sounded from the direction of the
+mines.</p>
+
+<p>"You loved her too," Evon said.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>The native held the sword out questioningly, as if offering it.</p>
+
+<p>"Keep it," the analyst grunted. "You remembered its feel after twenty
+thousand years. That's why you'll need it."</p>
+
+<p>Some deeds, he thought, would haunt the soul of Man until his end, and
+there was no erasing them ... for they <i>were</i> the soul, self-made,
+lasting in the ghost-grey fabric of mind as long as the lips of a child
+greedily sought the breast of its mother, as long as the child mirrored
+the mind of the man and the woman. <i>Kulturverlaengerung.</i></p>
+
+<p>The analyst left the native with the sword and went to seek the next in
+line of command. The purpose of the fleet must be kept intact, he
+thought, laughing bitterly. Yet still he went.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ties That Bind, by Walter Miller
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ties That Bind, by Walter Miller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Ties That Bind
+
+Author: Walter Miller
+
+Illustrator: Kelly  Freas
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2010 [EBook #32775]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIES THAT BIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
+
+
+                         THE TIES THAT BIND
+
+                        By Walter Miller, Jr.
+
+                      Illustrated by Kelly Freas
+
+[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
+Fiction May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Sidenote: _The Earth was green and quiet. Nature had survived Man, and
+Man had survived himself. Then, one day, the great silvery ships broke
+the tranquillity of the skies, bringing Man's twenty-thousand-year-lost
+inheritance back to Earth...._]
+
+
+    "_Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
+      And why sae sad gang ye, O?"
+    "O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude,
+      And I had nae mair but he, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+
+The Horde of sleek ships arose in the west at twilight--gleaming slivers
+that reflected the dying sun as they lanced across the darkling heavens.
+A majestic fleet of squadrons in double-vees, groups in staggered
+echelon, they crossed the sky like gleaming geese, and the children of
+Earth came out of their whispering gardens to gape at the splendor that
+marched above them.
+
+There was fear, for no vessel out of space had crossed the skies of
+Earth for countless generations, and the children of the planet had
+forgotten. The only memories that lingered were in the memnoscripts, and
+in the unconscious _kulturverlaengerung_, of the people. Because of the
+latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the
+slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in
+the language to name them.
+
+The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered
+in awed voices under the elms....
+
+The piping whine of a senile hag: "The ancient gods! The day of the
+judging! Repent, repent...."
+
+The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: "The alien! We're lost, we're
+lost! We've got to run for the hills!"
+
+The voice of the child: "See the pretty birdlights? See? See?"
+
+And a voice of wisdom in the councils of the clans: "The sons of
+men--they've come home from the Star Exodus. Our brothers."
+
+The slivers of light, wave upon wave, crept into the eclipse shadow as
+the twilight deepened and the stars stung through the blackening shell
+of sky. When the moon rose, the people watched again as the silhouette
+of a black double-vee of darts slipped across the lunar disk.
+
+Beneath the ground, in response to the return of the ships, ancient
+mechanisms whirred to life, and the tech guilds hurried to tend them. On
+Earth, there was a suspenseful night, pregnant with the dissimilar twins
+of hope and fear, laden with awe, hushed with the expectancy of twenty
+thousand years. The stargoers--they had come home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Kulturverlaengerung!_" grunted the tense young man in the toga of an
+Analyst. He stood at one end of the desk, slightly flushed, staring down
+at the haughty wing leader who watched him icily from a seat at the
+other end. He said it again, too distinctly, as if the word were a club
+to hurl at the wingsman. "_Kulturverlaengerung_, that's why!"
+
+"I heard you the first time, Meikl," the officer snapped. "Watch your
+tongue and your tone!"
+
+A brief hush in the cabin as hostility flowed between them. There was
+only the hiss of air from the ventilators, and the low whine of the
+flagship's drive units somewhere below.
+
+The erect and elderly gentleman who sat behind the desk cleared his
+throat politely. "Have you any further clarifications to make, Meikl?"
+he asked.
+
+"It should be clear enough to all of you," the analyst retorted hotly.
+He jerked his head toward the misty crescent of Earth on the viewing
+screen that supplied most of the light in the small cabin. "You can see
+what they are, what they've become. And you _know_ what _we_ are."
+
+The two wingsmen bristled slightly at the edge of contempt in the
+analyst's voice. The elderly gentlemen behind the desk remained
+impassive, expressionless.
+
+The analyst leaned forward with a slow accusing glance that swept the
+faces of the three officers, then centered on his antagonist at the
+other end of the desk. "You want to _infect_ them, Thauele?" he demanded.
+
+The wingsman darkened. His fist exploded on the desktop. "Meikl, you're
+in contempt! Restrict yourself to answering questions!"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"There will be no further breaches of military etiquette during the
+continuance of this conference," the elderly gentleman announced icily,
+thus seizing the situation.
+
+After a moment's silence, he turned to the analyst again. "We've got to
+refuel," he said flatly. "In order to refuel, we must land."
+
+"Yes, sir. But why not on Mars? We can develop our own facilities for
+producing fuel. Why must it be Earth?"
+
+"Because there will be _some existing facilities_ on Earth, even though
+they're out of space. The job would take five years on Mars."
+
+The analyst lowered his eyes, shook his head wearily. "I'm thinking of a
+billion earthlings. Aren't they worth considering, sir?"
+
+"I've got to consider the men in my command, Meikl. They've been through
+hell. We all have."
+
+"The hell was our own making, baron."
+
+"_Meikl!_"
+
+"Sorry, sir."
+
+Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: "Besides, Meikl, your
+predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be
+true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the
+present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a
+thousand generations. I don't know a great deal about culturetics, but
+I've read that _kulturverlaengerung_ reaches a threshold of extinction
+after about a dozen generations, if there's no restimulation."
+
+"Only in laboratory cultures, sir," sighed the analyst. "Under rigid
+control to make certain there's no restimulant. In practice, in a
+planet-wide society, there's constant accidental restimulation,
+unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to
+original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult'laenger
+linkage never really dies out--although, it can stay recessive and
+unconscious."
+
+"That's too bad," a wingsman growled sourly. "We'll wake it up, won't
+we?"
+
+"Let's not be callous," the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. "Analyst
+Meikl has sensitivities."
+
+The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing
+consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. "Sir, I was
+_summoned_ here to offer my opinions about landing on Earth. You asked
+about possible cultural dangers. I've told you."
+
+"You discussed the danger to earthlings."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I meant 'danger' to the personnel of this fleet--to their esprit, their
+indoctrination, their group-efficiency. I take it you see none."
+
+"On the contrary, I see several," said the analyst, coming slowly to his
+feet, eyes flashing and darting among them. "Where were you born,
+Wingman?" he asked the officer at the opposite end of the desk.
+
+"Lichter Six, Satellite," the officer grunted after a moment of
+irritable silence.
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Omega Thrush," said the other wingsman.
+
+All knew without asking that the baron was born in space, his birthplace
+one of the planetoid city-states of the Michea Dwarf. Meikl looked
+around at them, then ripped up his own sleeve, unsheathed his
+rank-dagger, and pricked his forearm with the needle point. A red
+droplet appeared, and he wiped at it with a forefinger.
+
+"It's common stuff, gentlemen. We've shed a lot of it. And each of us is
+a walking sackful of it." He paused, then turned to touch the point of
+his dagger to the viewer, where it left a tiny red trace on the glass,
+on the bright crescent of Earth, mist-shrouded, chastely wheeling her
+nights into days.
+
+"It came from there," he hissed. "She's your womb, gentlemen. Are you
+going back?"
+
+"Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?" the baron asked sharply,
+hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. "This becomes silly."
+
+"If you land on her," Meikl promised ominously, "you'll go away with a
+fleet full of hate."
+
+Meikl's arm dropped to his side. He sheathed his dagger. "Is my presence
+at this meeting still imperative, sir?" he asked the baron.
+
+"Have you anything else to say?"
+
+"Yes--_don't land on Earth_."
+
+"That's a repetition. No further reasons?--in terms of danger to
+ourselves?"
+
+The analyst paused. "I can think of nothing worse that could happen to
+us," he said slowly, "than just being what we already are."
+
+He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of
+the cabin.
+
+"I suggest," said a wingsman, "that we speak to Frewek about tightening
+up the discipline in the Intelligence section. That man was in open
+contempt, Baron."
+
+"But he was also probably right," sighed the graying officer and
+nobleman.
+
+"_Sir--!_"
+
+"Don't worry, Wingsman, there's nothing else to do. We'll have to land.
+Make preparations, both of you--and try to make contact with surface.
+I'll dictate the message."
+
+When the wingsmen left, it was settled. The baron arose with a sigh and
+went to peer morosely at the view of Earth below. Very delicately, he
+wiped the tiny trace of blood from the glass. She was a beautiful world,
+this Earth. She had spawned them all, as Meikl said--but for this, the
+baron could feel only bitterness toward her.
+
+But what of her inhabitants? I'm past feeling anything for them, he
+thought, past feeling for any of the life-scum that creeps across the
+surface of a world, any world. We'll go down quickly, and take what we
+need quickly, and leave quickly. We'll try not to infect them, but
+they've already got it in them, the dormant disease, and any infection
+will be only a recurrence.
+
+Nevertheless, he summoned a priest to his quarters. And, before going to
+the command deck, he bathed sacramentally as if in preparation for
+battle.
+
+    "_Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
+      Edward, Edward;
+    Your hawk's blude was never sae red,
+      My dear son, I tell thee, O."
+    "O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my red roan steed,
+      That erst was sae fair and free, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+False dawn was in the east when the slivers of light appeared once again
+out of the eclipse shadow to rake majestically across the heavens, and
+again the children of Earth crowded in teeming numbers from the quiet
+gardens to chatter their excitement at the wonder in the sky. But this
+time, a message came. The men of the tech clans who tended the newly
+activated mechanisms heard it, and the mechanisms memorized it, and
+played it again and again for the people, while the linguists puzzled
+over the unidentified language used in the transmission.
+
+     PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+     PRESENTS GREETINGS!
+
+     IF YOU HAVE RECORDS, OUR USE OF ANCIENT ANGLO-GERMANIC SHOULD
+     MAKE OUR IDENTITY CLEAR. HAVE YOU FUELING FACILITIES FOR 720
+     SHIPS OF THOR-NINE CLASS? IF NOT, WE SHALL DEVELOP FACILITIES
+     FROM LOCAL RESOURCES, WITH, WE TRUST, YOUR PEACEFUL
+     COOPERATION. THIS CADRE NOT REIMMIGRATING, BUT EN ROUTE TO
+     URSAN STARS. REQUEST LANDING SUGGESTIONS, IN VIEW OF OUR
+     FUELING NEEDS.
+
+     REQUEST INTELLIGENCE CONCERNING PRESENT LEVEL OF TERRESTRIAL
+     CULTURE. OUR ORIBITAL OBSERVATIONS INDICATE A STATIC
+     AGRARIAN-TECHNICAL COMPLEX, BUT DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE. WE COME
+     IN ARMS, BUT WITHOUT ENMITY. PLEASE REPLY, IF POSSIBLE.
+
+     ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+     SPACESTRIKE COMMAND, IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So it came, repeated continuously for an hour, followed by an hour of
+silence, and then by another hour of repetition. The linguists were
+unable to discern meanings. Thousands of memorizers were consulted, but
+none knew the words of the harsh voice from the ships. At last, the
+sages consulted the books and memnoscripts in the ancient vaults,
+pouring over tomes that had been buried for countless centuries. After
+hours of hurried study....
+
+"It is found, _it is found_, a tongue of the ancients!" a joyous cry in
+the glades and the garden pathways.
+
+Happily, the sages recorded the linguistic structure of the forgotten
+tongue on memnoscript, and gave it to a servo translator. Outmoded
+mechanisms were being brought out of wraps and prepared for use. The
+servos supplied a translation of the message, and the sages studied it.
+
+"It is badly understood," was the curious mutter along the garden
+pathways.
+
+"Many words have no words to match them, nor any thoughts that are
+similar," was the only explanation the sages could give.
+
+In translation the message seemed meaningless, or unfathomable. Only one
+thing was clear. The sons of Man meant to descend again upon the world
+of their ancestors. There was a restless unease in the gardens, and
+groups of elders gathered in the conference glades to mutter and glance
+at the sky. "Invite our brothers to land," was the impetuous cry of the
+young, but there were dissenters.
+
+In the Glade of Sopho, a few thoughtful clansmen of Pedaga had gathered
+to muse and speak quietly among themselves, although it was not
+ordinarily the business of tutors to consider problems that confronted
+society as a whole, particularly problems arising outside society
+itself. The Pedaga were teachers of the very young, and deliberately
+kept themselves childlike in outlook in order to make fuller contact
+with the children in their charge.
+
+"I think we should tell them to go away," said Letha, and looked around
+at the others for a response.
+
+She got nothing in reply but a flickering glance from Marrita, who sat
+morosely on a cool rock by the spring, her chin on her bare knees. Evon
+gave her a brief polite smile, to acknowledge the sound of her voice,
+but he returned almost at once to absently tearing twigs and glancing up
+at the bits of sky that showed through the foliage of the overhanging
+trees. Iak and Karrn were whispering together at the far end of the
+glade, and had not heard her.
+
+Letha shrugged and leaned back against the tree trunk again, sitting
+spraddle-legged this time in the hope of catching Evon's eye. She was a
+graceful girl, and while gracefulness is sometimes feline, Letha's was
+more nearly kittenish. She was full-bodied and soft, but well-shaped in
+spite of a trace of plumpness. Thick masses of black hair fell over
+baby-skin shoulders in a pleasing contrast, and while her face was a bit
+too round, it radiated a gentle, winning grin, and the sympathetic gaze
+of gray-blue eyes. Now she seemed ready to pout. Evon remained
+self-absorbed.
+
+"I think we should tell them to go away," she repeated a little sharply.
+"They'll all be big and swashbuckling and handsome, and the children
+will become unmanageable as soon as they see them. All the little girls
+will swoon, and all the little boys will want to go with them."
+
+Evon glanced at her briefly. "It's up to the elders of the Geoark," he
+muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own
+meditations.
+
+"And all the _big_ girls will run away with them," she purred with a
+tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to
+waggle her foot.
+
+Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward
+again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually,
+she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He _must_ be--because she hadn't
+seen him sit still this long in years. He was _always_ doing something,
+or looking for something to do. It wasn't like Evon just to sit still
+and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting
+boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and
+looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled
+didn't fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily,
+with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an
+elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could
+twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just
+drooped.
+
+She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.
+
+"You wonder what it's like, Evon?" she asked.
+
+He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.
+
+"To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean," she added.
+
+"_Me?_ What _are_ you thinking of, Letha?"
+
+"Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad's face. You remind me of
+an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to
+play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens."
+
+"I don't fiddle."
+
+"But your eyes are on the sky-fleet."
+
+Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. "It's
+strange," he murmured at last. "It's as if I know them--the star-birds,
+I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at
+something I expected to happen ... or ... or...."
+
+"Something familiar?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?" she asked the blonde girl
+who sat on the cool rock by the spring.
+
+Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. "I don't
+believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief."
+
+"How silly! What's that to do with it?"
+
+"He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I'd remember
+where he buried it, wouldn't I?" She pouted, and went back to dabbling a
+club toe in the spring.
+
+Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. "We lie around here like
+sleepy pigs!" he grumbled. "Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on
+the Geoark to make up its mind?"
+
+"What do you think they'll do?"
+
+"The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?"
+
+"Tell them to go away."
+
+"And suppose they chose not to go?"
+
+The girl looked bewildered. "I can't imagine anyone refusing the
+Geoark."
+
+"Maybe they've got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with
+ours?"
+
+"_Two_ Geoarks? What a strange idea."
+
+"Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware
+that I have one too?"
+
+"Evon! What a _strange_ idea."
+
+He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring,
+then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling
+complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the
+glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon's laughter broke the
+gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to
+wander into the clearing from the pathways.
+
+"I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark," someone
+suggested.
+
+"About the sky-fleet? And who knows what to say?"
+
+"I'm afraid," said a girl. "Somehow I'm suddenly afraid of them."
+
+"Our brothers from the Exodus? But they're _people_--such as you and I."
+
+So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the
+glade to read another message received from the sky-fleet.
+
+     PROPAUTH EARTH FROM COMMSTRAFEFLEET THREE, SPACE, KLAEDEN COMM,
+     PRESENTS GREETINGS!
+
+     HAVING RECEIVED NO ANSWER TO OUR PREVIOUS COMMUNICATION, WE
+     HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LAND AT ONCE. I AM IMPOSING AN
+     INFORMATIONAL QUARANTINE TO AVOID RESTIMULATING POSSIBLE
+     RECESSIVE KULTURVERLAENGERUNG, BUT SUGGEST YOU GUARD
+     YOURSELVES. OUR CULTURES HAD A COMMON ORIGIN. WE COME IN ARMS,
+     WITHOUT ENMITY.
+
+     ERNSTLI BARON VEN KLAEDEN, COMMANDING STRAFEFLEET THREE,
+     SPACESTRIKE COMMAND IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION
+
+This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less
+meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was
+going to land, without invitation.
+
+Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans.
+"Can you revive the devices that speak across space?" they asked.
+
+"They are revived," answered the tech clans.
+
+"Then let us speak to our brothers from space."
+
+And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out:
+
+     BRETHREN TO BRETHREN, PRESENT LOVE LOVE LOVE.
+
+     WE WELCOME YOU TO OUR GLADES AND TO OUR PLACES OF FEEDING AND
+     OUR PLACES OF SLEEPING. WE WELCOME YOU TO THE BOSOM OF THE
+     WORLD OF BEGINNING. AFTER TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS, EARTH HAS NOT
+     FORGOTTEN. COME AMID REJOICING.
+
+     THE ELDERS OF THE GEOARK
+
+"I'm afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to," growled Ernstli
+Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an
+atmospheric-braking orbit.
+
+And there was thunder in a cloudless sky.
+
+    "_O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
+      Edward, Edward.
+    O your steed was auld and ye hae mair,
+      And some other dule ye dree, O."
+    "O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,
+      Mither, mither;
+    O I hae kill'd my ain father dear,
+      Alas and woe is me, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In accordance with the rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized
+planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group
+fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and
+established an "orbital shell" of criscrossing orbits, timed and
+interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first
+wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at
+three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When
+the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and
+flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked
+itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.
+
+From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its
+telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a
+hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.
+
+"No signs of the natives yet," came the report. "No signs of technology.
+No evidence of hostility."
+
+A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera
+caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing
+more.
+
+One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with
+steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave
+forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square
+miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen
+miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it
+would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.
+
+In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden,
+who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the
+enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock,
+sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of
+jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic
+extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush
+still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a
+bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized
+the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was
+born into his bones.
+
+Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the
+sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south,
+another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the
+flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a
+low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area
+toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf
+below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller
+fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color
+blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of
+brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery.
+Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind
+stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind
+changed, and the air that breathed about the commander's face was full
+of perfume.
+
+I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home
+of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote
+that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply
+dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure 76-A, "Refueling Method
+for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable."
+
+It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa,
+and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia
+ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across
+the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate
+histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered
+itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the
+histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied
+them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had
+ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man
+was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum--or had been, before
+the War of Secession--and when history moved into space, Earth was a
+half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the
+historians had reconstructed for the museums--vistas of roaring
+industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and
+spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully
+tended Japanese garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As he stared around, he felt a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed
+at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the
+landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so
+vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would
+be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had
+already been issued. "All personnel are forbidden to attempt the
+learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture
+language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with
+them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of
+Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in
+the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives,
+shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other
+form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in
+force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited
+purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby
+authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to
+try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized
+to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden,
+Comm."
+
+It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And
+Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language
+in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile,
+the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in
+which the messages had been exchanged.
+
+The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a
+flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and
+crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then
+he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk--a young girl, obviously
+frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she
+darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already
+approaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quick
+glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The
+instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in
+the ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. The
+rate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per
+unit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship for
+twenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.
+
+"_Keep clear!_" he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.
+
+She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she
+seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking
+toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.
+
+"_Go back, you little idiot!_"
+
+Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She kept
+coming--into the charred area.
+
+The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground
+near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun
+barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs.
+She yelped and fled back into the green garden.
+
+He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly.
+She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was
+frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human.
+But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself
+absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.
+
+It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the
+Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to
+translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a
+mutually recorded dead language.
+
+"We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," ven
+Klaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region is
+unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our
+measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for
+_our_ purposes."
+
+"Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentle
+voice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are."
+
+"Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military
+jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted
+area, closed to civilian population."
+
+"But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have
+surrounded!"
+
+"Evacuate them."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"_Evacuate_ them. Make them get out."
+
+"My translator is working badly."
+
+The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the
+colonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupied
+zone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us."
+
+"How much notice?"
+
+The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional
+hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius."
+
+"My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting.
+
+"Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplish
+what we came here for, and then get out--as quickly as possible. We
+don't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to
+confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is
+this agreed?"
+
+"My translator is working badly."
+
+"Aren't you getting anything?"
+
+A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where
+the sky-fleet rests."
+
+"Correct."
+
+"But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the
+feast-glades?"
+
+"I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have
+aircraft of your own."
+
+"We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."
+
+"Any of your population understand the mechanisms?"
+
+"Certainly, brother."
+
+"Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what we
+want, and maybe they can make it clear to you."
+
+"As you wish, brother."
+
+The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a
+satisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gone
+quickly," he said.
+
+"The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us."
+
+"Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted.
+
+"I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,'" came a voice from the
+back of the room.
+
+"Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably.
+
+"You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go
+back?"
+
+"It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be
+useful."
+
+Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir."
+
+"Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the
+tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time--have
+you got any suggestions?"
+
+"About how to deal with the natives?"
+
+"Certainly ... but with the accent on _our_ problems."
+
+Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively
+at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gathered
+through limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, and
+do our suggesting later."
+
+"That constitutes your entire opinion?"
+
+"Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung...."
+
+"_Our_ problems, I said!" the commander snapped.
+
+"It's likely to be our problem, sir."
+
+"How?"
+
+"In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns
+we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying
+the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns
+are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."
+
+"What patterns do you mean?"
+
+"The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron."
+
+A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander
+grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of _action_, not a transmittable
+determinant."
+
+Meikl shook his head. "We don't _know_ what is a transmittable
+determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some
+very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't
+feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it
+in our kulturverlaengerung lines."
+
+A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I think
+this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."
+
+"What, the kult'laenger lines?"
+
+"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed
+along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish,
+and deal in facts...."
+
+"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare
+absently out a viewing port at the trees.
+
+"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much
+about it."
+
+"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given
+intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult
+skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the
+game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the
+age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control
+group--another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."
+
+"Go on."
+
+"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests
+on all two hundred."
+
+"Learning the game, you mean?"
+
+"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So
+far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the
+first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the
+patterns of the game easily."
+
+"So?"
+
+"So--during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the
+parental mind--probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't
+'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural
+mechanism of transmittal--and it's an analog of heredity. The
+kulturverlaengerung--and it can linger in a family line without becoming
+conscious for many generations."
+
+"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."
+
+"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on--as a predisposition-talent--to
+the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a
+mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a
+memory...."
+
+"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the
+chances of utilizing native labor?"
+
+    "_And whatten penance will we dree for that,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    Whatten penance will ye dree for that?
+      My dear son, now tell me, O."
+    "I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
+      Mither, mither;
+    I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
+      And I'll fare over the sea, O._"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl,
+Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill,
+once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and
+watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing
+the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine
+shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the
+valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered
+spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance,
+the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and
+natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian
+cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.
+
+"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter
+murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by
+staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.
+
+He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the
+valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no
+resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?
+
+Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of
+the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into
+their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he
+wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.
+Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the
+planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up,
+without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the
+casual statement: "_In our gardens, there are no weeds_," and it applied
+to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna
+and flora of the planet.
+
+This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but
+rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and
+Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and
+slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could
+raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up
+organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done
+both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his
+vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster
+than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms
+of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient
+species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.
+Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him
+with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive
+in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of
+their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.
+
+_This_, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in
+the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant
+exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous
+world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or
+"authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or
+fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood
+beside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a
+foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for
+a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had
+possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual
+natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks.
+There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and
+starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language
+accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives
+enthusiastically strived to please.
+
+He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze.
+Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.
+
+"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.
+
+She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy
+named Evon...."
+
+He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You
+can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.
+
+"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.
+
+"Letha, I...."
+
+"Yes, Meikl."
+
+"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."
+
+Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you
+tell us nothing of space--how you've lived since the Exodus?"
+
+"We are an evil people."
+
+"Not so."
+
+She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.
+
+"What is it you wish to know?"
+
+"Why will you never return to your home?"
+
+"To space--but we shall."
+
+"To the worlds of your birth, I mean."
+
+He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?"
+he asked, a little sharply.
+
+"Will you?"
+
+So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things
+would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.
+
+"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."
+
+"But why? Where are your women and children?"
+
+He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the
+natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships
+departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic
+and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The
+single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from
+the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.
+
+"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had
+said too much.
+
+She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that
+point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"
+
+There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".
+
+"They hurl death, Letha."
+
+"How can 'death' be hurled?"
+
+Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of
+the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the
+children of space. The same traces of the ancient _kulturverlaengerung_
+would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.
+One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the
+Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in
+their culture. The records had been systematically censored and
+rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History
+had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute
+concepts of her understanding.
+
+"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them
+wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a
+contention for property."
+
+"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.
+
+He nodded slowly.
+
+It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and
+interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions
+reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of
+the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,
+the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in
+Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was
+approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and
+nationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
+
+"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our
+cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours
+has passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final."
+
+"And yours, Meikl?"
+
+"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile
+environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of
+the culture--_conquest_, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the
+mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."
+
+"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"
+
+He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."
+
+"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"
+
+He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second
+childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?--a final perpetual
+youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of
+the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in
+low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange
+of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers
+wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit,
+using the spacer's tongue.
+
+"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.
+
+"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three
+hundred men since we landed."
+
+"Found any of them?"
+
+"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."
+
+Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.
+
+"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.
+
+"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the
+elders. Let's go."
+
+They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The
+meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the
+men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The
+attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.
+
+From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of
+nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important
+loss of personnel. What _was_ important: the slow decay of discipline
+under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been
+established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone,
+Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he
+refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of
+the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a
+tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO_{2} gun that could be concealed in
+the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught
+him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter
+plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a
+week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization;
+if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus
+would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.
+
+The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives.
+The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of
+infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation
+for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful
+people after twenty thousand years.
+
+"I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered
+the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders
+had assembled.
+
+He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.
+
+"Letha--you have worked for me many months."
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"I love you, Letha."
+
+She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her
+quietly, hating himself.
+
+"You'll take me with you," she said.
+
+"No." It was impossible.
+
+"Then you'll stay."
+
+"It is ... _forbidden_ ... _verboten_...." There was no word in the
+tongue.
+
+"I can't understand.... If you love...."
+
+He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled
+everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.
+
+"Letha--in your culture, 'life' is the highest value."
+
+"How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl."
+
+He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha.
+I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious
+play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and
+you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?"
+
+She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance--act a different play."
+
+"It's not a play, Letha. We act an _unconscious_ drama, and thus the
+drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence
+over life."
+
+She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.
+
+"I don't know what you mean."
+
+"Can you understand?--that I love you, and yet my ... my...." He groped
+for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes
+precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you."
+
+Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a
+monotone. "It's growing late."
+
+    "_And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
+      Edward, Edward?
+    And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
+      My dear son, now tell me, O?"
+    "The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear,
+      Mither, mither;
+    The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear;
+      Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!_"
+
+    --ANONYMOUS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The trouble had begun on the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party
+of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night.
+Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the
+dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus
+immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and
+needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over
+the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a
+leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel.
+
+    NOTICE OF SANCTUARY
+    TO: ALL PERSONNEL
+    FROM: AUSLAND COMMITTEE
+    SUBJECT: FREEDOM
+
+     1. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO WISHES TO RESIGN FROM THE SERVICES OF
+     THE IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION MAY DO SO OF THIS DATE.
+
+     2. THE PROCEDURE FOR RESIGNATION INVOLVES NO FORMAL STATEMENT.
+     A MAN MAY TERMINATE HIS PERIOD OF SERVICE BY DEPARTING FROM THE
+     OCCUPIED ZONE.
+
+     3. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE WITH THE
+     RESIGNATION OF ANOTHER SHALL BE TRIED IN ABSENTIA BY THIS
+     COMMITTEE, AND IF FOUND GUILTY, SHALL INCUR THE DEATH PENALTY.
+
+     AUSLAND COMMITTEE
+
+"An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!" ven Klaeden had
+hissed. "Get them. Make an example of them."
+
+In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for
+the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on
+sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged
+eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native
+population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered.
+
+A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice
+Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from
+their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that
+had invaded their quarters.
+
+Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed
+to disclose the location of the immunizing serum.
+
+Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were
+brought before the baron.
+
+"Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close
+the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a
+work contract."
+
+On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse.
+The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a
+massacre.
+
+"We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry
+predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come
+out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit."
+
+Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder,
+tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to
+speak in the intermediate language.
+
+"Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear."
+
+Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly
+and turned to the girl. "Tell them," he said in the Intermedia, "that
+death will come to any native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will
+die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that the
+Geoark is...." He paused. There was no word for "hostage."
+
+He was explaining the hostage-concept lengthily, while the girl's face
+drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood
+stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron.
+
+"_They_ understood you, damn them!" ven Klaeden snapped. "They know the
+Intermedia."
+
+The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging
+that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to
+the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables.
+
+"_No!_" Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders.
+
+One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of
+them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few
+feet away stirred restlessly.
+
+The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade.
+The guard looked questioningly at the officers.
+
+"Where are they going?" ven Klaeden demanded.
+
+"Well, Letha?" Meikl muttered.
+
+"I--I don't know--"
+
+"You're lying, girl," the baron grunted, then to the guards: "Tell them
+to halt."
+
+"Party, _halt_!" snapped the guard.
+
+The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes
+gathered up from spindley shins.
+
+"_Party, halt!_"
+
+The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued.
+
+"HALT, I SAID."
+
+"Take the one in the middle," ordered ven Klaeden.
+
+The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief
+rattling hiss. The back of the elder's robe went crimson, and he
+crumpled at the entrance of the pathway.
+
+The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken.
+
+"Shoot for the legs, you fool!" barked the baron.
+
+The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering
+softly.
+
+Meikl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for
+Letha. She had vanished from the glade.
+
+"Haul them to the dispensary, keep them prisoner," the baron was
+growling.
+
+Meikl turned on him. "Now it's come to this, has it?" he snapped. "From
+the beginning, they were willing--even eager, to give what we wanted.
+Why did they _stop_ being willing?"
+
+"That's enough, Meikl!"
+
+"I've hardly started. You came here like a tyrant, and they served you
+like a friend. You couldn't bear it. 'Brethren', they said. But there's
+nothing about 'brethren' in the tactical handbooks, is there, Baron?"
+
+"Shut up."
+
+Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand
+before the analyst and stare at him icily.
+
+"You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst--the
+kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the
+war plague, eh?"
+
+Meikl paused. The baron's eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment
+or triumph.
+
+"Well, Meikl? Is that what we've done? Inflicted them with conflict?
+Brought back the old seeds of hate?"
+
+The analyst drew himself up slightly. "You just killed a man, a man of
+dignity," he snarled, "and you cut two others down like weeds."
+
+"Innocent old men." The baron's mouth twisted into a snarl.
+
+"They wanted nothing but to help us."
+
+"Yes, Meikl? And we are the barbarians, eh?"
+
+The analyst spoke disdain with his eyes.
+
+The baron straightened in sudden hauteur. "_Look down at the ground,
+Analyst_," he hissed.
+
+Ven Klaeden's sudden change of tone impelled him to obey. His eyes fell
+to the turf at his feet--moss covered sod, rich and dark beneath the
+green.
+
+The baron kicked a hole in the moss with the toe of his boot. "Tell me
+where the infection came from, Analyst," he growled. He scraped at the
+hole with his heel. "And why is the dirt so _red_ right here?"
+
+Meikl glanced up slowly. Two men were coming through the shrubs, walking
+warily along the path toward the clearing. Ven Klaeden seemed unaware.
+He leaned forward to speak through his teeth.
+
+"I give them nothing but what they gave our fathers--their own inner
+hell, Meikl--the curse they so carefully forgot. In their Eden."
+
+The man was mad ... perhaps. Meikl's eyes followed the men who
+approached through the shrubs. One of them carried a burden--the limp
+body of a girl, occasionally visible through the low foliage as they
+drew nearer. One of the men was a junior officer, the other a native.
+After a moment, he recognized the native....
+
+"Evon!"
+
+As he called out, the baron whirled, hand slipping to the hilt of the
+ceremonial sword he wore in the presence of the Geoark. The men stopped.
+Meikl stared at the limp figure in the arms of the native.
+
+"_Letha!_"
+
+"Dead," Evon hissed. "They killed her for running...."
+
+They emerged from the shrubs into full view. The officer was holding a
+gun.
+
+"Put that away!" ven Klaeden snapped.
+
+The young officer laughed sourly. "Sorry, baron, I'm from the
+committee."
+
+"_Guard!_"
+
+There's no one in earshot, Baron."
+
+"Fool!" Ven Klaeden arrogantly whipped out the sword. "Drop that gun, or
+I'll blade-whip you!"
+
+"Easy, baron, easy. I'm your executioner...."
+
+The baron straightened haughtily and began a slow advance, a towering
+figure of icy dignity in the sun that filtered through the foliage.
+
+"... but I want to take care of this one first." The renegade waved the
+gun toward Meikl. "You, Baron, you can have it slower--a needle in your
+official rump."
+
+Ven Klaeden, a figure of utter contempt, continued the slow advance with
+the sword. The officer's lips tightened. He squeezed the trigger. Ven
+Klaeden hesitated, jerking slightly, then continued, his hand pressing
+against his abdomen, doubling forward slightly. The officer fired
+again--a sharp snap of sound in the glade. The baron stopped, wrestling
+with pain ten feet from the pale renegade.
+
+Suddenly he flung the sword. It looped in mid-air and slashed the man's
+face from chin to cheekbone. He tripped and tumbled backward as ven
+Klaeden slipped to his knees on the moss.
+
+Meikl dived for the gun. By the time he wrestled it away from the
+officer with the bloody face, ven Klaeden was sitting like a gaunt
+Buddha on the moss, and the body of Letha lay nearby, while a confused
+Evon clutched his hands to his face and rocked slowly. Meikl came slowly
+to his feet. The renegade officer wiped his face of blood and shrank
+back into shrubs.
+
+"Get him," croaked ven Klaeden.
+
+Scarcely knowing why, the analyst jerked the trigger, felt the gun
+explode in his fist, saw the renegade topple.
+
+There was a moment of stillness in the glade, broken only by ven
+Klaeden's wheezing breath. The baron looked up with an effort, his eyes
+traveling over the girl, then up to the figure of the child of Earth.
+
+"Your woman, Earthling?"
+
+Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He
+glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not
+touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword.
+
+"You have brought us death, you have brought us hate," he said slowly,
+his eyes clinging to the sword.
+
+"Pick it up," hissed the baron.
+
+"You will never leave. A party of men is wrecking what you have done.
+Then we shall wreck your ships. Then we...."
+
+"Pick it up."
+
+The native hesitated. Slowly, his brown hand reached for the hilt, and
+fascination was in his eyes.
+
+"You know what it is for?" the analyst asked.
+
+The native shook his head slowly.
+
+Then it was in his hand, fingers shaping themselves around the hilt--as
+the fingers of his fathers had done in the ages before the Star Exodus.
+His jaw fell slightly, and he looked up, clutching it.
+
+"_Now_ do you know?" the baron gasped.
+
+"My--my hand--_it_ knows," the native whispered.
+
+Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes
+glazed with pain. "He'll need it now, won't he, Analyst?" he breathed,
+then fell to the moss.
+
+Evon stood up slowly, moistening his lips, feeling the grip of the sword
+and touching the red-stained steel. He peered quickly up at Meikl. Meikl
+brandished the gun slightly.
+
+The low rumble of a dynamite blast sounded from the direction of the
+mines.
+
+"You loved her too," Evon said.
+
+He nodded.
+
+The native held the sword out questioningly, as if offering it.
+
+"Keep it," the analyst grunted. "You remembered its feel after twenty
+thousand years. That's why you'll need it."
+
+Some deeds, he thought, would haunt the soul of Man until his end, and
+there was no erasing them ... for they _were_ the soul, self-made,
+lasting in the ghost-grey fabric of mind as long as the lips of a child
+greedily sought the breast of its mother, as long as the child mirrored
+the mind of the man and the woman. _Kulturverlaengerung._
+
+The analyst left the native with the sword and went to seek the next in
+line of command. The purpose of the fleet must be kept intact, he
+thought, laughing bitterly. Yet still he went.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ties That Bind, by Walter Miller
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