uy, Dave--not, like
some of those Satheri. Well, you figure how you'd like it if you were
just a simple man and some priest magicked her away from you--and then
sent her back with enough magic of her own to be a witch and make life
hell for you because she'd been kicked out by the priest, but he hadn't
pulled the wanting spell off her. Or anything else you wanted and
couldn't keep against magic. Sure, they fed us. They had to, after they
took away our fields and the kine, and got everyone into the habit of
taking their dole instead of earning our living in the old way. They
made slaves of us. Any man who lets another be responsible for him _is_
a slave. It's a fine world for the Satheri, if they can keep the egg
from breaking."

"What's all this egg nonsense?"

Bork shrugged. "Plain good sense. Why should there be a sky shell around
the planet? Look, there's a legend here. You should know it, since for
all I know it has some meaning for you. Long ago--or away, or
whatever--there was a world called Thare and another called Erath. Two
worlds, separate and distinct, on their own branching time paths. They
must have been that way since the moment of creation. One was a world of
rule and law. One plus one might not always equal two, but it had to
equal something. There seems to be some similarity to your world in
that, doesn't there? The other was--well, you'd call it chaos, though it
had some laws, if they could be predicted. One plus one there
depended--or maybe there was no such thing as unity. Mass-energy wasn't
conserved. It was deserved. It was a world of anarchy, from your point
of view. It must have been a terrible place to live, I guess."

He hesitated somberly. "As terrible as this one is getting to be," he
said at last. "Anyway, there were people who lived there. There were the
two inhabited worlds in their own time lines, or probability orbits, or
whatever. You know, I suppose, how worlds of probability would separate
and diverge as time goes on? Of course. Well, these two worlds
_coalesced_."

He looked searchingly at Dave. "Do you see it? The two time lines came
together. Two opposites fused into one. Don't ask me to explain it; it
was long ago, and all I know for sure is that it happened. The two
worlds met and fused, and out of the two came this world, in what the
books call the _Dawnstruggle_. When it was over, our world was as it
has been for thousands of centuries. In fact, one result was that in
theo