Wright dismissed that with a chuckle. "Ach--she floats, boy. She
sails.... When I get angry or impatient or discouraged--when I stick
too tight to a plan of my own and fail to hear the opposing
argument--then I remember that Jensen had a charity, a patience, a
kindliness, almost as great as Sears had--"
"Tocwright," said Pakriaa, half amused, "why do you search yourself?
Must you always be sitting in judgment on your own mind?"
"Why, yes, dear, I must." His fingers played in his white beard.
"Cod-and-baked-beans origin.... Remember my fussy little _History of
the Americas_, the first book Dorothy and Nisana copied out for me
when we found how to make good paper from the marsh grass...? But
self-searching is a vice-and-virtue not limited to the Charin tribe,
Pakriaa--ask yourself. And ask Elis." The black giant smiled.
"So--I'll go on with it just a little. Paul, is it weakness in me to
ask that when we find Ed Spearman, you do most of the talking? I want
to be--merely friendly if I can, not say much. At least until we know
what sort of man he's become. Nine years ago, I don't think he ever
had much resentment against you. You hear both sides--usually the
surest way to make an extremist hate you bitterly, but somehow people
don't. You're a--kindly listener; I only try to be, pushing down a big
part of my natural temperament to do it.... Why, I think I never even
appreciated the full nastiness of sarcasm until one time (it's not
such a small matter)--one time on the space ship, when Sears
reproached me for it: something that went against his own nature, by
the way, because he was always too afraid of finding fault with
others."
"I'll talk with him first, Doc, if you want me to. But I wonder what I
can say. I keep seeing Ann. The things she told us--he things Miniaan
has told us today."
"A city that never was," said Miniaan sleepily, "never was even in the
old times. Maybe I dreamed it. If you are quiet, maybe I will allow us
to wake up in a moment on the island of Adelphi...."
"Ann is not changed," Muson reflected, "even though the baby died."
Mijok said, "I'm not sure. I think she is. In what way I can't define.
But she's not the same sad little thing I watched when she was
sleeping in that fever. Well now, that was truly long ago. She puzzled
me more than the rest of you, and you were all a great mystery--and I
with a dozen words and the old terrors crawling on my skin like lice.
Maybe it was her seeming weakness, her secret look of listening--which
I thought I began to understand when she taught me the Earth music,
but I don't suppose I ever did understand it." Mijok laughed and
looked away. "Doc, it was very difficult for me to grasp that you were
not begotten out of the west wind by a thunderbolt. You'll never know
how difficult, because you were never a savage. You were born to be
articulate. Those twenty thousand years of blundering--bad I don't
doubt they were, but they gave you something. I am as if the forest
had generated me, with no past."
Miniaan murmured and rolled over on her back to look up into the
leaves. "I too. I was never born. Someone with no father nor mother
looked at that filthy mound they say is the grave of the Queen of the
World. The mind of a white-furred Charin is my father and my mother."