y? Where are your women and children?"

He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the
natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships
departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic
and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The
single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from
the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.

"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had
said too much.

She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that
point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"

There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".

"They hurl death, Letha."

"How can 'death' be hurled?"

Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of
the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the
children of space. The same traces of the ancient _kulturverlaengerung_
would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.
One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the
Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in
their culture. The records had been systematically censored and
rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History
had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute
concepts of her understanding.

"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them
wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a
contention for property."

"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.

He nodded slowly.

It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and
interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions
reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of
the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,
the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in
Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was
approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and
nationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.

"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our
cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours
has passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final."

"And yours, Meikl?"

"I d