stylus
of the interpreter as the massive grey being in front of him spoke, its
dry, leathery mouth slowly and stumblingly forming the words of a spoken
language its race had not used for over thirty thousand years. The
stylus made no sound in the thin air of Hirlaj as it passed over the
plasticene notepaper; the only sounds in the ancient building were those
of the alien's surprisingly high and thin voice coming at intervals and
Rynason's own slightly labored breathing.

He did not listen to the alien's voice--by now he had heard it often
enough so that it was merely irritating in its thin dryness, like old
parchments being rubbed together. He watched the stylus as it jumped
along sporadically:

TEBRON MARL WAS OUR ... PRIEST KING HERO. NOT PRIEST BUT ONE WHO KNEW
... THAT IS PRIEST.

Rynason was a slender, sandy-haired man in his late twenties. A sharp
scar from a knife cut left a line across his forehead over his right
eyebrow. His eyes, perhaps brown, perhaps green--the light on Hirlaj was
sometimes deceptive--were soft, but narrowed with an intent alertness.
He raised the interpreter's mike and said, "How long ago?"

The stylus recorded the Earthman's question too, but Rynason did not
watch it. He looked up at the bulk of the alien, watching for the slow
closing of its eyes, so slow that it could not be called a blink, that
would show it had understood the question. The interpreter could feed
the question direct to the telepathic alien, but there was no guarantee
that it would be understood.

The eyes, resting steadily on him, closed and opened and in a few
moments came the Hirlaji's dry voice.

THE GREAT AGE WAS IN THE EIGHTEENTH GENERATION PAST ... SEVEN THOUSAND
YEARS AGO.

Rynason calculated quickly. Translating that to about 8200
Earth-standard years and subtracting, that would make it about the
seventeenth century. About the time of the Restoration in England, when
the western hemisphere of Earth was still being colonized. Eighteen
generations ago on Hirlaj. He read the date into the mike for the stylus
to record, and sat back and stretched.

They were sitting amid the ruins of a vast hall, grey dust covering the
stone floor all around them. Dry, hard vegetation had crept in through
cracks and breaks in the walls and fallen across the dusty interior
shadows of the building. Occasionally a small, quick animal would dart
from a dark wall across the floor to another shadow, its feet soundless
in the d