"You are very kind, good sir," she said gravely.
He didn't reply, but held out his arm, and she clasped it with one hand
while her other arm gripped his waist. The generator inside his skull
responded to his will, reaching out and clawing itself to the fabric of
forces and energies which was physical space. They rose quietly, and
went so slowly seaward that he didn't have to raise a wind-screen.
"Will we be able to fly like this when we get to the stars?" she asked.
"I'm afraid not, Julith," he said. "You see, the people of my
civilization are born this way. Thousands of years ago, men learned how
to control the great basic forces of the cosmos with only a small bit of
energy. Finally they used artificial mutation--that is, they changed
themselves, slowly, over many generations, until their brains grew a new
part that could generate this controlling force. We can now even, fly
between the stars, by this power. But your people don't have that brain,
so we had to build spaceships to take you away."
"I see," she said.
"Your great-great-great-grandchildren can be like us, if your people
want to be changed thus," he said.
"They didn't want to change before," she answered. "I don't think
they'll do it now, even in their new home." Her voice held no
bitterness; it was an acceptance.
Privately, Jorun doubted it. The psychic shock of this uprooting would
be bound to destroy the old traditions of the Terrans; it would not take
many centuries before they were culturally assimilated by Galactic
civilization.
Assimilated--nice euphemism. Why not just say--eaten?
* * * * *
They landed on the beach. It was broad and white, running in dunes from
the thin, harsh, salt-streaked grass to the roar and tumble of surf. The
sun was low over the watery horizon, filling the damp, blowing air with
gold. Jorun could almost look directly at its huge disc.
He sat down. The sand gritted tinily under him, and the wind rumpled his
hair and filled his nostrils with its sharp wet smell. He picked up a
conch and turned it over in his fingers, wondering at the intricate
architecture of it.
"If you hold it to your ear," said Julith, "you can hear the sea." Her
childish voice was curiously tender around the rough syllables of
Earth's language.
He nodded and obeyed her hint. It was only the small pulse of blood
within him--you heard the same thing out in the great hollow silence of
space--but it did sing of restless immensities, wind and foam, and the
long waves marching under the moon.
"I have two of them myself," said Julith. "I want them so I can always
remember this beach. And my children and their children will hold them,
too, and hear our sea talking." She folded his fingers around the shell.
"You keep this one for yourself."
"Thank you," he said. "I will." The combers rolled in, booming and
spouting against the land. The Terrans called them the horses of God. A
thin cloud in the west was turning rose and gold.
"Are there oceans on our new planet?" asked Julith.
"Yes," he said. "It's the most Earth-like world we could find that
wasn't already inhabited. You'll be happy there."
_But the trees and grasses, the soil and the fruits thereof, the beasts
of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the waters
beneath, form and color, smell and sound, taste and texture, everything
is different. Is alien. The difference is small, subtle, but it is the
abyss of two billion years of separate evolution, and no other world can
ever quite be Earth._
Julith looked straight at him with solemn eyes. "Are you folk afraid of
Hulduvians?" she asked.
"Why, no," he said. "Of course not."
"Then why are you giving Earth to them?" It was a soft question, but it
trembled just a little.
"I thought all your people understood the reason by now," said Jorun.
"Civilization--the civilization of man and his nonhuman allies--has
moved inward, toward the great star-clusters of Galactic center. This
part of space means nothing to us any more; it's almost a desert. You
haven't seen starlight till you've been by Sagittarius. Now the
Hulduvians are another civilization. They are not the least bit like us;
they live on big, poisonous worlds like Jupiter and Saturn. I think they
would seem like pretty nice monsters if they weren't so alien to us that
neither side can really understand the other. They use the cosmic
energies too, but in a different way--and their way interferes with ours
just as ours interferes with theirs. Different brains, you see.
"Anyway, it was decided that the two civilizations would get along best
by just staying away from each other. If they divided up the Galaxy
between them, there would be no interference; it would be too far from
one civilization to the other. The Hulduvians were, really, very nice
about it. They're willing to take the outer rim, even if there are fewer
stars, and let us have the center.
"So by the agreement, we've got to have all men and manlike beings out
of their territory before they come to settle it, just as they'll move
out of ours. Their colonists won't be coming to Jupiter and Saturn for
centuries yet; but even so, we have to clear the Sirius Sector now,
because there'll be a lot of work to do elsewhere. Fortunately, there
are only a few people living in this whole part of space. The Sirius
Sector has been an isolated, primi--ah--quiet region since the First
Empire fell, fifty thousand years ago."