Thousands of parsecs from his homeworld, and even farther from Earth, here was a planet that bore not only Earth-type life, but human life.
Don’t get emotional, Vorgens told himself. Human life is a logical development in the evolution of an Earth-type planet. It happened on your homeworld, it happened on
Earth, it’s happened spontaneously on some fifteen thousand planets within the Empire.
He watched a small, furry animal scurry across the trail up ahead and dash up a tree trunk. Still, he thought, it’s not much less than miraculous.
The priest especially fascinated Vorgens. He was evidently quite old, yet he carried himself with a dignity that forced respect. His sidn was a deep brown, his eyes jet black, and what was left of his wispy hair was silverish. His face was spiderwebbed with age, and Vorgens finally realized that this was what intrigued him. He had never seen a really old person before, not face to face. On Plione IX, his homeworld, on Mars, where he received his Star Watch training, on Earth and throughout the Terran Empire, he had never seen a truly old person close up. The physical signs of age had been eliminated by Terran science centuries ago.
Vorgens soon found himself talking with the priest— Sittas was his name—as the little group made its way through the cool woods. They talked of general things, noncommittal things, things that had nothing to do with war and the inevitability of death.
“Tell me of your homeworld,” Sittas asked.
“It’s a long, long distance from here, even in a starship,” Vorgens said. “Phone IX—the ninth planet circling the star that the Terrans call Plione; a giant blue star, much larger and hotter than Oran, although our planet is considerably farther away from Plione than you are from your sun.”