“A starman!” one of the young men shouted defiantly. “A starman! The Ship is coming!”
And the others took up the howl with wild-eyed fervor, the same ones who had lately thrown him in the dust.
“The ship, ya, the Ship, the Ship, the machines and the armies!”
“They are coming!”
“Indresul Indresul! The waiting is over!”
The chief backhanded Kurt to the ground, kicked him to show his contempt, and there was a cry of resentment from the people. A youth ran in-for what purpose was never known. The chief dropped the boy with a single blow of his fist and rounded on the leaders of the dissent.
“And I am still captain here,” he roared, “and I know the Articles and the Writings, and who will come and argue them with me?”
One of the men looked as if he might, but when the captain came closer to him, he ducked his head and sidled off. The rebellion died into sullen resentment
“You’ve seen the sign,” said the captain. “Maybe the
Ship is near. But this little thing isn’t what the Writings predict.” He looked down at Kurt with threat in his eyes. “Where are the machines, the Ship as large as a mountain, the armies from the starworlds that will take us to Indresul?”
“Not far away,” said Kurt, setting his face to lie, which was never a skill of his. “I was sent out from Aeolus to find you. Is this how you welcome me? That will be the last you ever see of Ships if you kill me.”
The captain was taken aback by that answer.
“Mother Aeolus,” cried one of the men, though he called it Elus, “the great Mother. He has seen the Great Mother of All Men.”
The captain looked at Kurt from under one brow, hating, just the least part uncertain. “Then,” he said, “what did she say to you?”
The lie closed in on him, complex beyond his own understanding. Aeolus-homeworld-confounded with the nemet’s Mother Isoi, Mother of Men; nemet religion and human hopes confused into reverence for a promised Ship. “She… lost you,” he said, gathering himself to his feet. They personified her; he hoped he understood that rightly. “Her messenger was lost on the way hundreds of years ago, and she was angry, blaming you. But she has decided to send again, and now the Ship is coming, if my report to her is good.”
“How can her messenger wear the mark of Phan?” the captain asked. “You are a liar.”
The sunburst emblem of the ship. Kurt resisted the impulse to lose his dignity by looking where the captain pointed. “I am not a liar,” said Kurt. “And if you don’t listen to me, you’ll never see her.”
“You come from Phan,” the captain snarled, “from Phan, to lie to us and turn us over to the nemet.”
“I am human. Are you blind?”
“You camped with the earthpeople. You were no prisoner in that camp.”
Kurt straightened his shoulders and looked the man in the eyes, lying with great offense in his tone. “We thought you men were supposed to have these nemet under control. That’s what you were left here to do, after all, and you’ve had three hundred years to do that. So I had no real fear of the nemet and they were able to surprise me some time ago and take my weapons. It took me this long to escape from Nephane and come south. They hunted me down, with orders to bring me back to Nephane alive, so naturally they did me no harm in that camp, but that doesn’t mean the relationship was friendly. I don’t particularly like the nemet, but I’d advise you to save these three alive. When my captain comes down here, as he will, he’s going to want to question a few of the nemet, and these will do very well for that purpose.”
The captain bit his lip and gnawed his mustache. He looked at the three nemet with burning hatred and spit out an obscenity that had not much changed in several hundred years. “We kill them.”
“No,” Kurt said. “There’s need of them live and healthy.”