rs later--he never knew whether it was memory or imagination--it
seemed to him that he could reach into that patch of gray and dreamless
time and fish out questions and answers whole, the faces of Lhari
swelling up suddenly in his eyes and shrinking back into interstellar
distance, the sting-smell of drugs, the sound of unexpected voices, odd
reflex pains, cobwebs of patchy memories that fitted nowhere else into
his life so that he supposed they must go here.

He only knew that there was a time he did not remember and then a time
when he began to think there was such a thing as memory, and then a time
when he floated without a body, and then another time when the path of
every separate nerve in his body seemed to be outlined, a shimmering web
in the gray murk. There was a mirror and a face. There were blotchy
worms of light like the star-trails of peaking warp-drive through the
viewport, colors shifting and receding, a green star, the red eye of
Antares.

Then the peak-point faded, his mind began to decelerate and angle slowly
down and down into the field of awareness, and he became fuzzily aware
that he was lying full length on a sort of couch. He shook his head
groggily. It hurt. He sat up. That hurt, too. A hand closed gently
around his elbow and he felt the cold edge of a cup against his sore
mouth.

"Take a sip of this."

The liquid felt cool on his tongue, evaporating almost before he could
swallow; the fumes seemed to mount inside the root of his nose,
expanding tremendously inside his head and brain. Abruptly his head was
clear, the last traces of gray fuzz gone.

"When you feel able," the Mentorian said courteously, "the High Council
will see you."

Bart blinked. As if exploring a sore tooth with his tongue, his mind
sought for memories, but they all seemed clear, marshaled in line. The
details, clear and unblurred, of his voyage here. His humiliation and
resentment against the Lhari. _They could have changed my thinking, my
attitudes. They could have made me admire or be loyal to the Lhari. They
didn't. I'm still me._

"I'm ready now." He got up, reeled and had to lean on the Mentorian; his
feet did not seem to touch the ground in quite the right way. After a
minute he could walk steadily, and followed the Mentorian along a
corridor. The Mentorian said into a small grille, "The Vegan Bartol,
alias Bart Steele," and after a moment a doorway opened.

Inside a room rose, high, domed, vaulted above his h