"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 s.p.a.ce. 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 subst.i.tute 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 s.p.a.ce-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 pa.s.sed 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 p.u.b.erty? 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 a.n.a.lyst. The officers wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit, using the s.p.a.cer'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 s.p.a.cers 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 a.s.sembled.

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.