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She would be glad to see him, and surely he had some responsibility, even though he had fatheredthe child half-knowing, maddened like a beast in rut--he flinched at the thought. Still she had been gentleand understanding, and he owed her something, some kindness for having used and forgotten her. Whatwas her strange and lovely name?
 
Fiona
 
? Gaelic, surely. He rose from his bed, searching quickly forsome garments, then hesitated, standing at the door of the dome and looking out at the clear bright sky. The moons had set and the pale false dawn was beginning to glow far to the east, a rainbow light like anaurora, which he supposed was reflected from the faraway glacier he had never seen; would never see;never cared to see.

He sniffed the wind and as he drew it into his lungs a strange, angry suspicion came over him. Lasttime they had destroyed the ship; this time they would destroy him, and his work. He slammed the domeand locked it; double-locked it with the padlock he had demanded from Moray. This time no one wouldapproach the computer, not even those he trusted most. Not even Patrick. Not even Camilla.

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"Lie still, beloved. Look, the moons have set, it will be morning soon," Rafe murmured. "How warm

it is, under the stars in the wind. Why are you crying, Camilla?"

She smiled in the darkness. "I'm not crying;" she said softly, "I'm thinking that some day we'll find an

ocean and islands for the songs we heard tonight, and that some day our children will sing them there."

"Have you come to love this world as I do, Camilla?"

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"Love? I don't know;" she said tranquilly, "it's
 
our
 
world. We don't have to love it. We only have to

learn to live with it, somehow. Not on our terms but on its own."

All across Base Camp, the minds of the Earthmen flickered into madness, unexplained joy or fear;women wept without knowing why, or laughed in sudden joy they could not explain. Father Valentine,asleep in his isolated shelter, woke and came quietly down the mountain, and unnoticed, came into the Hall in New Skye, mingling with them in love and complete acceptance. When the winds died he wouldreturn to solitude, but he knew he would never be wholly alone again.

Heather and Ewen, sharing the night duty in the hospital, watched the red sun rise in the cloudlesssky. Arms enlaced, they were shaken out of their silent ecstatic watching of the sky (a thousand rubysparkles, the brilliant rush of light driving back the darknesses) by a cry behind them; a shrill, moaningwail of pain and terror.

A girl rushed toward them from her bed, panicked at the sudden pain, the gushing blood; Ewen liftedher and laid her down, mustering his strength and calm, trying to focus sanity (
you can get on top of it! Fight! try!
) but stopped in the very act, arrested by what he saw in her frightened eyes. Heather touchedhim compassionately.

"No," she said, "no need to try."

"Oh, God, Heather, I can't, not like that, I can't bear it--"

The girl's eyes were wide and terrified. "Can't you help me?" she begged. "Oh, help me, help me--"

Heather knelt and gathered the girl in her arms. "No, darling," she said gently. "No, we can't helpyou, you're going to die. Don't be afraid, Laura darling, it will be very quick, and we'll be with you. Don'tcry, darling,

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don't cry, there's nothing to be afraid of." She held the girl close in her arms, murmuring to her, comforting her, sensing every bit of fear and trying with the strength of their rapport to soothe her, until the girl lay quiet and peaceful on her shoulder. They held her like that, crying with her, until she stopped breathing; then they laid her gently on the bed, covered her with a sheet, and sorrowfully, hand in hand, walked out into the sunrise and wept for her.

Captain Harry Leicester saw the sun rise, rubbing weary eyes. He had not taken his eyes from theconsole of the computer, watching over the only hope to save this world from barbarism. Once, shortlybefore dawn, he had thought he heard Camilla's voice calling to him from the doorway, but it was surelydelusion. (
 
Once she had shared his dream. What had happened?
)

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Now, in a strange, uneasy half-doze, half-trance, he watched a procession through his mind ofstrange creatures, not quite men, lifting strange starships into the red sky of this world, and, centurieslater, returning. (
 
What had they been seeking, in the world beyond the stars? Why had they notfound it?
) Could the quest after all be endless or even come full circle and end in its beginning?

But we have something to build on, the history of a world.

Another world. Not this one.

Are the answers of another world fit for this one?

He told himself furiously that knowledge was knowledge, that knowledge was power, and could

save them--"

--
 
or destroy
. After the long struggle to survive, will they not seek old answers, ready-made from the past, and try to re-create the desperate history of Earth, here on a world with a more fragile chain of life? Suppose, one day, they come to believe, as I seemed to believe for a time, that the computer really does have all the answers?

Well, doesn't it?

He rose and went to the doorway of the dome. The shuttered window, made small against the bittercold, and high, swung wide at his touch and he looked out at the sunrise and the strange sun.
 
Not mine. But theirs
 
. Someday they will unlock its secrets.

With my help. My single-handed struggle to keep for

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them a heritage of true knowledge, a whole technology to take them back to the stars.

He breathed deep, and began to listen silently to the sounds of this world. The winds in the trees andthe forests, the running of the streams, the beasts and birds that lived their own strange secret lives deepin the woods, the unknown aliens whom his descendants would one day know.

And they would not be barbarian. They would know. If they were tempted to explore some blind

alley of knowledge, the answer would be there, ready for their asking, ready with its reply.

(Why did Camilla's voice echo in his mind?
 
"That only proves that a computer isn't God."
)

Isn't the truth a form of God? he demanded wildly of himself and of the universe.
 
Ye shall know the

truth and the truth shall make you free
 
.

(Or enslave you? Can one truth hide another?)

Suddenly a horrid vision came into his mind, as his thoughts burst free from time and slid into the

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future, which lay quivering before him. A race taught to go for all its answers here, to the shrine which had all the right answers. A world where no question could ever be left open, for it had all the answers, and what lay outside it was not possible to explore.

A barbarian world with the computer worshipped as a God.

A God. A God. A God.

And he was creating that God.

God! Am I insane?

And the answer came, clear and cold. No. I have been insane since the ship crashed, but now I amsane. Moray was right all along. The answers of another world are not the answers we can use here.
 
Thetechnology
 
, the science, are only a technology and a science for Earth, and if we try to transfer themhere, whole, we will destroy this planet. Some day, not as soon as I would wish, but in their own goodtime, they will evolve a technology rooted in the soil, the stones, the sun, the resources of this world. Perhaps it will take them to the stars, if they want to go. Perhaps it will take them into time or the innerspaces of their own hearts. But it will be theirs, not mine. I am not a God. I cannot make a world in myown image.

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He had brought all the supplies of the ship from the bridge to this dome. Now, quietly, he turned and

began to fashion what he sought, old words from another world ringing in his mind;

Endless the world's turn, endless the sun's spinning

Endless the quest;

I turn again, back to my own beginning,

And here, find rest.

With steady hands he lighted a resin-candle and, deliberately, set a light to the long fuse.

Camilla and MacAran heard the explosion and ran toward the dome, just in time to see it erupt

skyward in a shower of debris, and rising flame.

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Fumbling with the padlock, Harry Leicester began to realize that he wasn't going to get out. Thistime he wasn't going to make it. Staggering from the blow and concussion, but coldly, gladly sane, helooked at the wreckage.
 
I've given you a clean start
 
, he thought confusedly, maybe I am God after all,the one who drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and stopped telling them all the answers, letting them findtheir own way, and grow

… no lifelines, no cushions, let them find their own way, live or die...

He hardly knew it when they forced the door open and took him up gently, but he felt Camilla's

gentle touch on his dying mind and opened his eyes into the blue compassionate stare.

He whispered in confusion, "
 
I am a very foolish fond old man...
 
"

Her tears fell on his face. "Don't try to talk. I know why you did it. We began to do it together, last

time, and then... oh, Captain, Captain…"

He closed his eyes. "Captain of what?" he whispered. And then, at his last breath, "You can't retire a

Captain. You have to shoot him... and I shot him..."

And then the red sun went out, forever, and blazed into luminous galaxies of light.

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Epilogue

Even the struts of the starship were gone, carried away to the hoarded stores of metal; mining wouldalways be slow on this world, and metals scarce for many, many generations. Camilla, from habit, gavethe place a glance, but no more, as she went across the valley. She walked lightly, a tall woman, her hairlightly touched with frost, as she followed a half-heard awareness. Beyond the range of vision she sawthe tall stone memorial to the crash victims, the graveyard where all the dead of the first terrible winterwere buried beside the dead from the first summer and the winds of madness. She drew her fur cloakaround her, looking with a regret so long past that it was no longer even sadness, at one of the greenmounds.

MacAran, coming down the valley from the mountain road, saw her, wrapped in her furs and hertartan skirt, and raised his hand in greeting. His heart still quickened at the sight of her, after so manyyears; and when he reached her, he took both her hands for a moment and held them before he spoke.

She said, "The children are well--I visited Mhari this morning. And you, I can tell without asking thatyou had a good trip." Letting her hand rest in his, they turned back together through the streets of New Skye. Their household was at the very end of the street, where they could see the tall East Peak, beyond

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which the red sun rose every morning in cloud; at one end, the small budding which was the weather

station; Camilla's special responsibility.

As they came into the main room of the house they shared with half a dozen other families, MacAranthrew off his fur jacket and went to the fire. Like most men in the colony who did not wear kilts, he woreleather breeches and a tunic of woven tartan cloth. "Is everyone else out?"

"Ewen is at the hospital; Judy is at the school;

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Mac went off with the herding drive," she said, "and if you're dying for a look at the children I thinkthey're all in the schoolyard but Alastair. He's with Heather this morning."

MacAran walked to the window, looking at the pitched roof of the school. How quickly they grewtall, he thought, and how lightly fourteen years of childbearing lay on their mother's shoulders. The sevenwho had survived the terrible famine winter five years ago were growing up. Somehow they hadweathered, together, the early storms of this world; and although she had had children by Ewen, by Lewis MacLeod, by another whose name he had never known and he suspected Camilla herself did notknow, her two oldest children and her two youngest were his. The last, Mhari, did not live with them; Heather had lost a child three days before Mhari's birth and Camilla, who had never cared to nurse herown children if there was a wet-nurse available, had given her to Heather to nurse; when Heather wasunwilling to give her up after she was weaned, Camilla had agreed to let Heather keep her, although shevisited her almost every day. Heather was one of the unlucky ones; she had borne seven children but onlyone had lived more than a month after birth. Ties of fosterage in the community were stronger than blood;a child's mother was only the one who cared for it, its father the one who taught it. MacAran had childrenby three other women, and cared for them all equally, but he loved best Judy's strange young Lori, tallerthan Judy at fourteen and yet childlike and peculiar, called a changeling by half the community, herunknown father still a secret to all but a few.