Lee Rynason sat forward on the faded red-stone seat, watching the stylus
of the interpreter as the massive grey being in front of him spoke, its
dry, leathery mouth slowly and stumblingly forming the words of a spoken
language its race had not used for over thirty thousand years. The
stylus made no sound in the thin air of Hirlaj as it passed over the
plasticene notepaper; the only sounds in the ancient building were those
of the alien's surprisingly high and thin voice coming at intervals and
Rynason's own slightly labored breathing.
He did not listen to the alien's voice--by now he had heard it often
enough so that it was merely irritating in its thin dryness, like old
parchments being rubbed together. He watched the stylus as it jumped
along sporadically:
TEBRON MARL WAS OUR ... PRIEST KING HERO. NOT PRIEST BUT ONE WHO KNEW
... THAT IS PRIEST.
Rynason was a slender, sandy-haired man in his late twenties. A sharp
scar from a knife cut left a line across his forehead over his right
eyebrow. His eyes, perhaps brown, perhaps green--the light on Hirlaj was
sometimes deceptive--were soft, but narrowed with an intent alertness.
He raised the interpreter's mike and said, "How long ago?"
The stylus recorded the Earthman's question too, but Rynason did not
watch it. He looked up at the bulk of the alien, watching for the slow
closing of its eyes, so slow that it could not be called a blink, that
would show it had understood the question. The interpreter could feed
the question direct to the telepathic alien, but there was no guarantee
that it would be understood.
The eyes, resting steadily on him, closed and opened and in a few
moments came the Hirlaji's dry voice.
THE GREAT AGE WAS IN THE EIGHTEENTH GENERATION PAST ... SEVEN THOUSAND
YEARS AGO.
Rynason calculated quickly. Translating that to about 8200
Earth-standard years and subtracting, that would make it about the
seventeenth century. About the time of the Restoration in England, when
the western hemisphere of Earth was still being colonized. Eighteen
generations ago on Hirlaj. He read the date into the mike for the stylus
to record, and sat back and stretched.
They were sitting amid the ruins of a vast hall, grey dust covering the
stone floor all around them. Dry, hard vegetation had crept in through
cracks and breaks in the walls and fallen across the dusty interior
shadows of the building. Occasionally a small, quick animal would dart
from a dark wall across the floor to another shadow, its feet soundless
in the dust.
Above Rynason the enormous arch of the Hirlaji dome loomed darkly
against the deep cerulean blue of the sky. The lines of all Hirlaji
architecture were deceptively simple, but Rynason had already found that
if he tried to follow the curves and angles he would soon find his head
swimming. There was a quality to these ancient buildings which was not
quite understandable to a Terran mind, as though the old Hirlaji had
built them on geometric principles just slightly at a tangent from those
of Earth. The curve of the arch drew Rynason's eyes along its silhouette
almost hypnotically. He caught himself, and shook his head, and turned
again to the alien before him.
The creature's name, as well as it could be rendered in a Terran script,
was Horng. The head of the alien was dark and hairless, leathery,
weathered; the light wires of the interpreter trailed down and across
the floor from where they were clamped to the deep indentations of the
temples. Massive boney ridges circled the shadowed eyes set low on the
head, directly above the wide mouth which always hung open while the
Hirlaji breathed in long gulps of air. Two atrophied nostrils were
situated on either side and slightly below the eyes. The neck was so
thick and massive that it was practically nonexistent, blending the head
with the shoulders and trunk, on which the dry skin stretched so thin
that Rynason could see the solid bone of the chest wall. Two squat arms
hung from the shoulders, terminating in four-digited hands on which two
sets of blunt fingers were opposed; Horng kept moving them constantly,
in what Rynason automatically interpreted as a nervous habit. The lower
body was composed of two heavily-muscled legs jointed so that they could
move either forward or backward, and the feet had four stubby but
powerful toes radiating from the center. The Hirlaji wore a dark garment
of something which looked like wood-fibre, hanging from the head and
gathered together by a cord just below the chest-wall.
Rynason, since arriving on the planet three weeks before as one of a
team of fifteen archaeological workers, had been interviewing Horng
almost every day, but still he often found himself remembering only with
difficulty that this was an intelligent being; Horng was so slow-moving
and uncommunicative most of the time that he almost seemed like a mound
of leather, like a pile of hides thrown together in a corner. But he was
intelligent, and in his mind he held perhaps the entire history of his
race.
Rynason lifted the interpreter-mike again. "Was Tebron Marl king of all
Hirlaj?"
Horng's eyes slowly closed and opened. TEBRON MARL WAS RULER LEADER IN
THE REGION OF MINES. HE UNITED ALL OF HIRLAJ AND WAS PRIEST RULER.
"How did he unite the planet?"
TEBRON LIVED AT THE END OF THE BARBARIC AGE. HE CONQUERED THE PLANET BY
VIOLENCE AND DROVE THE ANCIENT PRIEST CASTE FROM THE TEMPLE.
"But the reign of Tebron Marl is remembered as an era of peace."