“I understand,” said Hewlitt.
The other seemed to sense his embarrassment. He said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going maudlin in my old age. We met during my second year here. She was what they call a Mother Teacher of the Young, one of the people who instruct four- to seven-year-olds, and the first Etlan to agree to introduce a Tralthan teacher equivalent and share her class with it. She had already accepted the idea that the best time to instruct children was before they had a chance to acquire their parents’ prejudices. She was a widow. There were an awful lot of widows and orphaned children about at the time. We could have none of our own, naturally, but we adopted four before we became too old to…”
“Doctor,” said Murchison, lengthening her stride until she drew level with them. “I know that the species difference is a bar to procreation, but it might answer a few puzzling clinical questions, or maybe puzzle us even more, if you knew of an exception to that rule. Do you? And if so, is it possible that one of Hewlitt’s parents was an Etlan. Or that he was an Etlan fosterling?”
Stillman shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am. I knew his parents very well before he was born, and I was present when he arrived.”
“It was a pretty wild idea, anyway,” said Murchison, holding up her hand and clenching it into a fist. “You are looking at a hand clutching at hypothetical straws.”
Hewlitt remained silent. He was aware of a strange feeling of temporal double vision. The grass was waist-high as it had been to the four-year-old Hewlitt, the trees and bushes had grown taller and thicker, but so had he, and the smell of sun-warmed vegetation and the droning and ticking sounds of insects were exactly the same. Only the distances between the landmarks had shrunk with age.
“I remember this very well,” he said, and raised his hand to point. “The first bush I played around is there.”
“Can you remember eating anything here?” said Murchison. “A wild berry, perhaps, or did you pull a blade of grass and chew on it? I’m thinking in terms of a possible antidote to the toxic material ingested later.”
“No,” said Hewlitt, and pointed again. “That ruined house was next. But I’m surprised it wasn’t pulled down or rebuilt by now. The whole area is still a wilderness.”
“That is deliberate,” said Stillman. He looked all around him before going on. “This was the place where the battle which finally overthrew their imperial representative was fought, and the area where all the off-wonders are housed. It is intended both as a reminder of the bad old days and the promise of the new. So far it seems to have worked. On public holidays this is a nice, quiet place to picnic, except when the Etlan children find some off-world kids to play with, when the noise can be horrendous.”
The house was little more than a shell with its roof open to the sky and weeds growing in the debris covering the floor. There were scorch marks on one wall, but after the passage of so many years the burnt smell was probably due to memory rather than lingering smoke. A different generation of small animals and insects scampered or crawled through the weeds, and Murchison asked if he remembered being bitten or stung by any of them. He shook his head, but she asked Naydrad to help her gather and trap a few random specimens for later analysis.
“Next,” he said, pointing, “I went to that burned-out fighting vehicle, over there.”
This time it was Fletcher rather than Hewlitt who was doing the exploring. They heard him crawling through the dark interior, muttering not quite under his breath that it was a tighter squeeze for a man than a child, until his head and shoulders reappeared through the entry hatch.
“It is a medium-level-technology mobile gun platform,” he reported, “with control positions for a crew of three. The larger weapon is designed to fire exploding shells; the smaller used beltfed solid projectiles. The ammunition, fuel, and most of the circuit boards have been withdrawn. There is nothing left but a few items of equipment not worth salvaging and a lot of insects. Do you want specimens?”