“What were these sciences?”

Horng closed and opened his eyes.  Many of them are forgotten.

Rynason looked up at the alien, who sat quietly on a rough stone benchlike seat.  “But your race doesn’t forget.”

The memories are very far back and are hard to find.  There has been no effort to retain certain memories.

“But you can remember these if you try?”

Horng’s head dipped to one side, a characteristic movement which Rynason had not yet managed to interpret.  The shadowed, wrinkled eyes closed slowly.  The memories are there.  They are the sciences of Kor.  Many of them are warlike sciences.

“You’ve mentioned Kor before.  Who was he?”

Kor was is god knowledge.

Rynason frowned.  The interpreter automatically translated terms which had no reliable parallel in Terran by giving two or three related words, and usually the concept was fairly clear.  Not quite so with this sentence.

“God and knowledge are two different words in our language,” he said.  “Can you explain your term more fully?”

Horng shifted heavily on his seat, his blunt fingers tapping each other.  Kor was is existence which we worship Obey Admire follow.  Also essence concept of knowledge science questing.

Rynason, watching the stylus, pursed his lips.  “Mm,” he said softly, and shrugged his shoulders.  Kor was apparently some sort of god, but the interpreter didn’t seem capable of translating the term precisely.

“What were the sciences of Kor?”

There was a silence as the stylus finished moving across the paper, and Rynason looked up at Horng.  The alien’s eyes were closed and he had stopped the constant motion of his leathery grey fingers; he sat immobile, like a giant statue, almost a part of the complex of the hall and the crumbling domed building.  Rynason waited.

The silence remained for a long time in the dry air of the empty hall.  Rynason saw from the corner of his eye one of the dark little scavengers darting out of a gaping window.  He could almost hear, it seemed, the noise of the brawling, makeshift town the Earthmen had established a little less than a mile away from the Hirlaji ruins, where already the nomads and adventurers and drifters had erected a cluster of prefab metal buildings and were settling in.

“What were the sciences of Kor?” Rynason asked again, not wanting to think of the cheapness and dirt of the Earth outpost which huddled so near to the Hirlaji domes.