Lifemaker’s plans required him to be the chosen instrument of other designs
destined to unfold at another place to which the greater powers would in due
course guide him.
After checking the room a last time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, he
pushed open the window, poked his head out, and looked first one way, then the
other. No one was in sight. He heaved his pack over the ledge, picked up his
staff, and climbed outside. One of Meerkulla’s steeds was tethered at the rear
of the house, grazing on slow charge from a domesticated forest transformer and
not yet unsaddled. Groork looked at it thoughtfully as he lifted his pack onto
his back, and then glanced from side to side and back over his shoulder. Had the
animal been left as a temptation to test his honesty at a time of stress, or was
it a gift from the Lifemaker to ensure Groork’s preservation for greater things?
And then, as he stood waiting for inspiration, he heard in his head the first
whisperings of a message from the voices that had begun speaking from the sky of
late.
In a control room inside the Orion, a computer display changed to read:
ORBITER FOUR MAPPING RADAR—COARSE SCAN 23-B37 COMPLETE ON SECTOR 19H. COMMENCING
HIGH RESOLUTION SCAN. SUBSECTORS 19-22 THROUGH 19-38. MODE 7. FRAME 5. SWEEP
PARAMETERS: 03, 12, 08, 23, 00, 00, 42.
Groork turned his face upward and gazed rapturously at the heavens as the
meaning of the voices became plain in his mind. “Thy work in Kroaxia is ended,
Groork,” they sang. “Take thee forth from this place now, for thy path lies
across the Wilderness and unto the lands of Carthogia.”
“Am I, then, to find the Waskorians and join them in their struggle to preserve
the true faith in the face of the barbarism wrought upon Carthogia by Kleippur,
who serves the Dark Master?” Groork asked himself. “Indeed the ways of the
Lifemaker are truly wise and all-seeing, for in that way also shall I find again
my lost brother and return his soul yet to the way of righteousness.” He looked
again at Meerkulla’s mount. “Could a mere robeing such as I presume to argue
with the will of Him who sends thee as His gift to carry me across the
Meracasine?” He unplugged the animal’s cord and swung himself up onto the
creature’s back. “The Lifemaker gave, and the Lifemaker has taken away,” he told
the back of Meerkulla’s house as he began moving off. Then he stopped and stared
uncomfortably for a few seconds at the dwelling of the one who had given him
shelter and hospitality. Slowly and deliberately he raised his arm and made the
motions in the air which would confer blessings upon Meerkulla, his family, his
descendants, his crops, and his animals for many twelve-brights to come. “There,
my friend, now thou hast more than just compensation,” Groork murmured. Feeling
better, he turned his mount about again and slipped quietly out of the village.
26
“YOU CAN’T DO IT,” MASSEY SAID, SHAKING HIS HEAD AS HE turned restlessly on his
feet between the bunks in his cabin in Globe II. He sounded as near to angry as
Zambendorf had ever heard him. “The Taloids aren’t some race of natural
inferiors put there to do all the work for free. It’s taken us centuries to get
over the consequences of trying to treat groups of our own kind that way back on
Earth. Those days are over now. We can’t go back to them. It would be a
catastrophe.”
“Any forms of life that have evolved intelligence and begun lifting themselves
above the animal level possess something in common that makes accidental
differences in biological hardware trivial by comparison,” Vernon Price said
earnestly from the edge of one of the lower bunks. “The word human has a broader
definition now. It describes a whole evolutionary phase, not just one species
that happens to have entered it.”
They had the cabin to themselves as Graham Spearman was busy in one of the labs,
and Malcom Wade, its fourth occupant, was busy running elaborate statistical
analyses and cross-correlations on reams of worthless data that he and Periera