Wearily, Rynason switched off the interpreter, leaving the wires still
connected to the alien. He walked through the faintly echoing,
dust-filled temple and stepped out onto the colonnade around it. It was
almost dark now; the deep blue of the Hirlaj sky had turned almost black
and the pinpoint lights of the stars broke through. The wind was rising
from the Flat; it caught his hair and whipped it roughly around his
head. He looked up at the emerging stars, remembering the day when Horng
had suddenly, inexplicably stood and walked to the base of a broken
staircase. He had looked up those stairs, past where they had broken and
fallen, past the shattered roof, to the sky. The Hirlaji had never
reached the stars, but they might have. It had taken a god, or a jumbled
legacy from an older, greater race, to forestall them. And now all they
had was the dust and the wind.
Rynason could hear the rising moan of that wind gathering itself around
him, building to a wailing planet-dirge among the columns of the Temple.
And inside, the Hirlaji were dying. The knives and bludgeons of the
Earth mob outside would only complete the job; the Hirlaji were too
tired to live. They dreamed dimly under the shadowed foreheads ...
dreamed of the past. And sometimes, perhaps, of the stars.
Behind the altar, the huge and intricate mass of alien circuits glowed
and clicked and pulsated ... slowly; seemingly at random, but steadily.
The brain must be self-perpetuating to have lasted this long ... feeding
its energy cells from some power-source Rynason could only guess at, and
repairing its time-worn linkages when necessary. In its memory banks was
stored the science of the race which had preceded even the ancient
Hirlaji. The Outsiders had sprung up when this planet was young, had
fought their way to the stars and galaxies, and eventually, when aeons
of time pressed down, had pulled in their outposts and fallen back to
this world. And they had died here, on this world, falling to dust which
was ground under by the grey race which had followed them to dominance.
"Before time," Horng had said; that must have meant before the Hirlaji
had developed telepathy, before the period covered by the race-memory.
But the Outsiders were still here, alive in that huge alien brain ...
the science, the knowledge, the strange arts of a race which had
conquered the stars while men still wondered about the magic of
lightning and fire. A science was encapsuled here which could speak of
war and curiosity as discontent, but could say nothing definite of
contentment. An incomplete science? A merely alien science? Rynason
didn't know.
And the Hirlaji.... Twenty-six of their race remained, dreaming under
heavy domes through which the stars shone at night and silhouetted the
worn edges of broken stone. Twenty-six grey, hopeless beings who had not
even been waiting. And the Earthmen had come.
For a moment Rynason wondered if the Hirlaji did not perhaps carry a
message for the Earthmen too: that decadence was the price of peace,
death the inevitable end of contentment. The Hirlaji had stilled
themselves, back in the grey past ... had taken their measure of quiet
and contentment for thousands of years, the searching drives of their
race dying within them. And this was their end.