Or!ge peered at the images coalescing in the display-cone. There was no longer any question; the Outsider fleet was sending an advance party toward the Lost World, and if present indications were reliable, it would be here by the end of the next wakeshift, just as the final survey was being completed . . . just as Or!ge was preparing to launch the first landing party, the first ground search for the Lost Ell.
The timing was uncanny. How could the Outsiders have known? Had they intercepted communications to the homeworld? What other reason could there be, except to observe—or to thwart—the Ell landing?
Or!ge had hoped to believe otherwise. He had been swayed by earlier observations, and by the fact that the Outsider fleet, approaching cautiously, had taken no hostile action. Perhaps he had been unduly influenced; he should have known that years of aggressive behavior would not change so quickly. And yet few of the enemy's robot fighters had appeared recently—just one, preceding this fleet, which Or!ge had destroyed.
If only the translators could make some sense of the Outsider transmissions. Various signals had been received, but in the absence of a translation, they could only be assumed to be a challenge.
Or!ge opened a channel to outreach. "Left flank, prepare a fighter(ship) for detachment." He gave the order, knowing that it could be an opening salvo in a new battle that might be the costliest yet. If the Outsiders attempted to capture the planet, the Rediscovery Expedition itself might have to become a war (fleet), a sacrificial (fleet); they could not hope for more than a delaying action against those oversized Outsider ships. If that was required, then that was what the expedition would do. Under no circumstances could the enemy be allowed to take this world, at least not until they knew: Was it really the Lost World, and did the descendants of the Lost Ell survive?
Time would be the guide. He did not wish to risk a landing with the Outsiders so close, but neither could he delay much longer. The readings from the surface were inconclusive—flickerings of an odd thought-energy. Could it be the Lost Ell? If so, they must be radically changed from their relatives circling their world. How much change could befall a race in a thousand years? Or!ge longed to know.
He reopened the channel to outreach. "Orders to fighter (ship): Follow and observe the Outsider scout. If it attempts planetary landing, destroy it. Orders to landing party: Deployment will be delayed, remain on standby."
One last thing remained to be done, as soon as the alignments were correct and the (fleet) activity calmed enough to free the energy, and that was to open a vortex and relay a message home: Send help with all possible speed.
A short time later he observed, with as much satisfaction as the situation allowed, the departure of the fighter(ship) on intercept course.
* * *
Dououraym stood in the archway with Lenteffier and watched Moramaharta cross the grassy inland in front of the meditation hall. The wind was gusting, whipping the binder's robe about him like a flag on a pole. "Coming from the upper part of the valley again," Dououraym said. "He has been devoting more and more of his time there, pursuing a personal form of meditation. It is of this that I wish to speak to you."
Lenteffier turned a cautious eye. He was the tallest member of the Inner Circle—lanky, and steely of expression—and when he peered down at Dououraym, himself no small individual, he reminded Dououraym of a tall verberta tree stripped of its needles in the autumn, stooping in the wind, his bony eye ridges looking like a tree's upper buds brooding over its smaller kin. He held his upper pair of arms close to his breast. It was no wonder, Dououraym thought, that the younger students found this master so disconcerting.
"Do you understand the meaning of it?" Lenteffier asked.
Dououraym touched his rigid lip. "In a precise way, no. But there may be certain insights. I believe it might be useful to explore this further—his belief in perspective, as he has called it—his belief that there is a centering influence to be felt there, among the trees and the wind and the sky. I do not understand. But I wish to." Dououraym watched Moramaharta pause to let the wind billow about his head. "It is a question of whether there is something that Moramaharta has to teach us, or something amiss in him that we should beware of."
"Indeed," Lenteffier said. "And your suggestion?"
Dououraym's gaze narrowed briefly. "To follow his example. To walk into the upper vale, to lose myself—or ourselves, if you will accompany me—to see what there is to be found."
"You do not have enough to occupy you here—with the news from Hope Star and the decisions that await?"
"More than enough," Dououraym said, gazing up at the treetops. "But I suspect. I wonder. If there is something to learn which could help us in our task, even indirectly . . ." He looked at Lenteffier, whose sharp eyes were tracking Moramaharta's progress toward the side entrance.
"Perhaps," Lenteffier said. "I do not see the likelihood. But I will accompany you if you believe it worth the walk."
Dououraym made a noncommittal hiss. "And if there is something else to learn—something about Moramaharta . . ." He did not complete the thought. Moramaharta was the binder, the mediator, the one whose empathic powers joined the minds and transformed them into a force greater than any and greater than all, the lan'dri, the focus out of which decision was wrought. If the binder had lost his way, then he must be replaced, for the greater good. And yet, to do so would mean a difficult readjustment for the Circle . . . and, likely, the end for the binder. It was a matter of nature, of inevitability. Once isolated from the core of his being, a binder could only wither and die.
Lenteffier's eyes narrowed to thin, vertical slits. "Then the sooner we learn . . ."
"Perhaps it is harmless," Dououraym said. "Perhaps it is useful."
"Perhaps it is neither."
Dououraym made a tiny upper-hand gesture, snapping his nails. "Shall we walk into the woods?"
"The sooner . . ." Lenteffier said, stepping out into the gusty air. Moramaharta had disappeared around the corner of the hall. "Which way?"
Dououraym pointed to the right, where a slender path wound its way upslope. "That direction. And then we must use our senses."
Without further words, the two *Ell* decision-makers passed into the woods.
* * *
Moramaharta watched thoughtfully as the two disappeared. He'd sensed his companions' thoughts and observed their passing, but his mind was full of the woods and the wind and the sky, and his fellow *Ell* were full of questions that he could not answer. He knew what they were about, and he generally approved, though he was unsure whether they would discover what they sought or understand what he had found . . .
The brilliance of the sun soothed the mind like a sidan'dri but without the directive force . . . the sunlight was its own center, bringing the spirit into balance.
Better that they go on their own. If they had wanted his company, or his advice, they would have asked. And he had much to consider already.
Moramaharta passed the Inner Circle chambers and walked to his own living quarters. As the door fluttered closed behind him, a single light globe came to life. He stood gazing at its glow refracted through the angular bookshards on the rack beneath it. Shadows filled the rest of the room, but the shadows were filled with images from his mind: . . . a wave of color rippling through the forest with the shift toward winter . . . the whisper, the adan'dri, of the wind . . . the smell of the needles freshly fallen.
He picked up one of the bookshards—not reading it, but focusing on the light rotating through its planes as he turned the crystal in his hand. The light drew his thoughts into a deeper focus, the montan'dri of the inner mind. Memories came alive, dancing like water down a mountain stream, bound for lakes visible only as faraway sparks of sunlight among the forests. Where the memories led, he did not know, any more than he knew the path of that stream; but something was happening inside him, a sifting and channeling of thought that must be allowed to run its course. He could no more stop it than he could stop the mountain stream.
Memories of the nexus-dwelling; of an Ell people pursuing their purpose despite the war, with an icy longing and hope; of his own nest-mates carrying on in his absence; of the racial history entrusted to him . . .
Why this compulsion to wonder? Why? Was he so different from his fellows? Were his own meditations so much more perceptive? Even in his home-nest, he had been considered . . . odd . . . unusually sensitive . . . His compulsion was connected to the war, but overshadowed it; the war had served as a catalyst to the other. In attacking, the Outsiders had begun the changes that had led to his walking now upon these shifting sands of uncertainty.
Gazing into the bookshard, focusing only on the light patterns there, he gathered to himself a recent memory: The sun, slanting downward, created a tower of light, dust motes and air and radiance enveloped by the trees. Moving in that ghostly chamber, wings beating, was a nesting kettle-piper, a blur of shadow and silver carrying food to its young, oblivious to his presence. Feelings stirred that he could not identify, feelings that reached deep, shifting him at his center.
More than anything else, he wanted to understand those feelings. It was not curiosity alone, but an intuition that they might be a clue to the quest, to the need that had driven the Ell halfway across the galaxy in search of . . . not just the Lost Ell, but something they could not name. It was difficult to define, because there were no words in the language to describe it.
The language. That was a part of the problem. Since the Change—since the tar'dyenda, when the Ell race was reborn from the ashes of the catastrophe that had torn its homeworld from it—the language, like the people, had been mutated and robbed of qualities that, it was said, had once characterized both.
It was said. That phrase conveyed so much, and so little. If only they could truly remember . . . if only they could remember their distant past with the clarity reserved for later events. What folly, for racial memory following the tar'dyenda to have been entrusted through generations to the lan'dri, to collective meditational memory, rather than to the permanence of the bookshards. In the years following the Change, the bookshards had not been available, it was said, and by the time they were, the accuracy of the lan'dri was already being called into question. By the time the full extent of the Change had been recognized, it was too late. No one lived who could recall the Ell as they had been. No one knew what had been given up, for what gain. The darkness of spirit had already overtaken the race, and there was no light to illumine against it.
And so the legend, the failing memory of the lost homeworld and the Lost Ell, had deepened in the collective thought; and the hope of rediscovery had arisen, the hope that somewhere the Lost Ell lived, and with them the lost spirit and character of the Ell race. Thus was born the quest for the Hope Star, the Lost World, the Forgotten Ell.
Moramaharta knew, as surely as the night followed upon day, that his feelings in the woods were intimately connected to that process. He did not yet know how, but he was certain that it was true—even now, in this time of uncertainty. Especially now.
He hoped that Lenteffier and Dououraym would find echoes, at least, of what he had felt—not just for his sake, or for theirs, but for the quest. For the decisions that lay ahead. For the Ell.
He closed his eyes and began again to reconstruct the scene. To relive the image, to feel the wind: that way, he was sure, lay understanding.
Overhead, the wind danced and shifted like a feinting knife-wielder, and shook the trees against a blazing sky . . .