These dwellers bad been a gentle sort, though, remarkably humanoid but possessing a culture unlike any ever created by man. They bad sought out the newcomers, had learned the Nomad dialect with ease, and bad asked many questions. But they had not told much concerning themselves; nor were the Nomads especially interested, once it became clear that these beings had nothing to trade.
The natives had courteously presented the Nomads with the area they already held, asking only that they not be molested elsewhere, and this the humans had readily voted into law. Since then, an occasional native had shown up at the assemblies, to watch for a while and disappear again -nothing else, for a good hundred and fifty years.
Blind, thought Sean. We’re blind as man has always been. There was a time when he imagined he was the only intelligent life in the universe-and he hasn’t changed much.
The thought died in the wonder that stood before him. He stopped, and the noise of his heart was loud in his ears. “Ilaloa.”
She stood looking at him, not moving or spealdng. The loveliness of her caught at his throat.
She could have been human-almost-had she not been so unhumanly fair. The Lorinyans were what man might be in a million years of upward evolution. Their bodies were slim and full of a liquid grace, marble-wbite;; the bair on their beads was like silk, floating about the shoulders and down the back, the color of blued silver. He had first seen Ilaloa when the Peregrine came to Rendezvous and he had wandered off to be alone.
“I came, Ilaloa,” he said, feeling the clumsiness of words. She remained quiet, and he sighed and sat down at her f eet.
He didn’t have to talk to her. With men, be was a lonely being, forever locked into the night of his own skull, crying to his kindred and never knowing them or feeling their nearness. Language was a bridge and a barrier alike, and Sean knew that men talk because they are afraid to be silent. But with Ilaloa he could know quiet; there was understanding and no loneliness.
Let the native females be! It was Nomad law which needed little enforcement on other planets-who was attracted by something that looked like a caricature of man? But no spear had thudded into his flesh when he met this being who was not less but more than a woman; and there had, after all, been nothing to disgrace them.
Ilaloa sat down beside him. He looked at her face-the smooth, lovely planes and curves of it, arched brows over huge violet eyes, small tilted nose, delicate mouth.
“When do you leave?” she asked. Her voice was low,
richly varied.
“In three days,” he answered. “Let’s not talk about it.”
“But we should,” she said gravely. “Where will you go?”
“Out.” He waved his hand at the thronging stars. “From sun to sun, I don’t know where. It will be into new territory this time, I hear.”
“To there?” She pointed at the Great Cross.
‘Why-yes. Toward Sagittari. How did you know?”
She smiled. “We hear talk, even in the forest. Will you come back, Sean?”
“If I live. But it won’t be for at least two years-a little more in your reckoning. Maybe four years, or six, I don’t know.” He tried to grin. “By then, Ilaloa, you will be-whatever your people do, and have clffldren of your own.”
“Have you none, Sean?”
It was the most natural thing in the universe to tell her of what bad happened. She nodded seriously and laid her fingers across his.
“How lonely you must be.” There was no sentimentality in her voice; it was almost mattter-of-fact. But she understood.
“I get along,” be said. With a sudden rising of bitterness: “But I don’t want to speak of going away. That will happen all too soon.”
“if you do not want to leave,” she said, “then stay.”
He shook his head heavily. “No. It’s impossible. I couldn’t stay, even on a planet of my own kind. For three-hundred years the Nomads have been living between the stars. Those who couldn’t endure it dropped out, and those from the planets who fitted into our kind of life were taken in. Don’t you see, it’s more even than habit and culture by now. We’ve been bred for this.”