d shook his head, waiting for it
to clear. For awhile he had been an ancient king of Hirlaj, and it took
some time to return to the present, to his own consciousness. He was
dimly aware of Mara kneeling beside him, but he couldn't make out her
words at first.

"Are you all right? Are you sure? Look up at me, Lee, please."

He found himself nodding to reassure her, and then he saw the expression
on her face and felt the last wisps of alien fog clearing from his mind.
There were tears in her eyes, and he touched the side of her face with
his hand and said, "I'm all right. But why don't you kiss me or
something?"

She did, but before Rynason could really immerse himself in it she broke
away and said, "You must have had a bad time with him! It was as though
you were dead."

He grinned a trifle sheepishly and said, "Well, it was engrossing. You'd
better unhook the beast; he had a bad time of it too."

Mara rose and removed the wires from Horng gingerly. Rynason remained
sitting; some of the meaning of what he had just experienced was coming
to him now. It certainly explained why the Hirlaji had suddenly passed
from their war era into lasting peace, and why the memories had been
blocked. But could he credit those memories of a voice of an alien god?

And sitting in the dust at the edge of the vast Hirlaj plain the full
realization came to him, as it could not when he had been Tebron. Not
only the Temple, but the Altar of Kor itself had been unmistakably the
workmanship of the Outsiders.

SIX

They left Horng sitting dully at the edge of the Flat and retraced their
steps through the Hirlaji ruins, still drawing no notice from the
aliens. Rynason had been in some of the small planetfall towns where
settlements had been established only to be abandoned by the main flow
of interstellar traffic ... those backwater areas where contact with the
parent civilization was so slight that an entirely local culture had
developed, almost as different from that of the mainstream Terran
colonies as was this last vestige of the Hirlaji civilization. And in
some of those areas interest in Earth was so slight that the offworlders
were ignored, as the Earthmen were here ... but he had never felt the
total lack of attention that was here. It was not as though the Hirlaji
had seen the Earthmen and grown used to them; Rynason had the feeling
that to the Hirlaji the Earthmen were no more important than the winds
or the dust beneath