"I will tell you what I believe about you. I think you came from a lost world; I think you were not born on Earth. I think you came here, the first Alien to return in a thousand years or more, bringing us a message or a sign. The Shing stopped your mouth, and turned you loose in the forests so that none might say they had killed you. You came to us. If you go I will grieve and fear for you, knowing how alone you go. But I will hope for you, and for ourselves! If you had words to speak to men, you'll remember them, in the end. There must be a hope, a sign: we cannot go on like this forever."

"Perhaps my race was never a friend of mankind," Falk said, looking at Zove with his yellow eyes. "Who knows what I came here to do?"

"You'll find those who know. And then you'll do it. I don't fear it. If you serve the Enemy, so do we all: all's lost and nothing's to lose. If not, then you have what we men have lost: a destiny; and in following it you may bring hope to us all…"

II

ZOVE HAD LIVED sixty years, Parth twenty; but she seemed, that cold afternoon in the Long Fields, old in a way no man could be old, ageless. She had no comfort from ideas of ultimate star-spanning triumph or the prevalence of truth. Her father's prophetic gift in her was only lack of illusion. She knew Falk was going. She said only, "You won't come back."

"I will come back, Parth."

She held him in her arms but she did not listen to his promise.

He tried to bespeak her, though he had little skill in telepathic communication. The only Listener in the house was blind Kretyan; none of them was adept at the nonverbal communication, mindspeech. The techniques of learning mindspeech had not been lost, but they were little practiced. The great virtue of that most intense and perfect form of communication had become its peril for men.