ying to find
some scrap of familiarity to indicate that I had lived here for the past
eleven years.

Jay Allison was thirty-four years old. I had given my age, without
hesitation, as 22. There were no obvious blanks in my memory; from the
moment Jay Allison had spoken of the trailmen, my past had rushed back
and stood, complete to yesterday's supper (only had I eaten that supper
twelve years ago)? I remembered my father, a lined silent man who had
liked to fly solitary, taking photograph after photograph from his plane
for the meticulous work of Mapping and Exploration. He'd liked to have
me fly with him and I'd flown over virtually every inch of the planet.
No one else had ever dared fly over the Hellers, except the big
commercial spacecraft that kept to a safe altitude. I vaguely remembered
the crash and the strange hands pulling me out of the wreckage and the
weeks I'd spent, broken-bodied and delirious, gently tended by one of
the red-eyed, twittering women of the trailmen. In all I had spent eight
years in the Nest, which was not a nest at all but a vast sprawling city
built in the branches of enormous trees. With the small and delicate
humanoids who had been my playfellows, I had gathered the nuts and buds
and trapped the small arboreal animals they used for food, taken my
share at weaving clothing from the fibres of parasite plants cultivated
on the stems, and in all those eight years I had set foot on the ground
less than a dozen times, even though I had travelled for miles through
the tree-roads high above the forest floor.

Then the Old-One's painful decision that I was too alien for them, and
the difficult and dangerous journey my trailmen foster-parents and
foster-brothers had undertaken, to help me out of the Hellers and
arrange for me to be taken to the Trade City. After two years of
physically painful and mentally rebellious readjustment to daytime
living, the owl-eyed trailmen saw best, and lived largely, by moonlight,
I had found a niche for myself, and settled down. But all of the later
years (after Jay Allison had taken over, I supposed, from a basic
pattern of memory common to both of us) had vanished into the limbo of
the subconscious.

A bookrack was crammed with large microcards; I slipped one into the
viewer, with a queer sense of spying, and found myself listening
apprehensively to hear that measured step and Jay Allison's falsetto
voice demanding what the hell I was doing, meddling with his