What caused the tides along this coast, the great diurnal swinging in and swinging out of fifteen to fifty feet of water?  Not one of the Elders of the City of Tevar could answer that question.  Any child in Landin could: the moon caused the tides, the pull of the moon....

And moon and earth circled each other, a stately circle taking four hundred days to complete, a moonphase.  And together the double planet circled the sun, a great and solemnly whirling dance in the midst of nothingness.  Sixty moonphases that dance lasted, twenty-four thousand days, a lifetime, a Year.  And the name of the center and sun - the name of the sun Was Eltanin: Gamma Draconis.

Before he entered under the gray branches of the forest, Jakob Agat looked up at the sun sinking into a haze above the western ridge and in his mind called it by its true name, the meaning of which was that it was not simply the Sun, but a sun: a star among the stars.

The voice of a child at play rang out behind him on the slopes of Tevar Hill, recalling to him the jeering, sidelong-looking faces, the mocking whispers that hid fear, the yells behind his back - "There's a farborn here!  Come and look at himl"  Agat, alone under the trees, walked faster, trying to outwalk humiliation.  He had been humiliated among the tents of Tevar and had suffered also from the sense of isolation.  Having lived all his life in a little community of his own kind, knowing every name and face and heart, it was hard for him to face strangers.  Especially hostile strangers of a different species, in crowds, on their own ground.  The fear and humiliation now caught up with him so that he stopped walking altogether for a moment.  I'll be damned if go back there! he thought.  Let the old fool have his way, and sit smoke-drying himself in his stinking tent till the Gaal come.  Ignorant, bigoted, quarrelsome, mealy-face, yellow-eyed barbarians, wood-headed hilfs, let 'em all burn!

"Alterra?"

The girl had come after him.  She stood a few yards behind him on the path, her hand on the striated white trunk of a basuk tree.  Yellow eyes blazed with excitement and mockery in the even white of her face.  Agat stood motionless.

"Alterra?" she said again in her light, sweet voice, looking aside.

"What do you want?"

She drew back a bit. "I'm Rolery," she said.  "On the sands -'

"I know who you are.  Do you know who I am?  I'm a false-man, a farborn.  If your tribesmen see you with me they either castrate me or ceremonially rape you - I don't know which rules you follow.  Now go home!"

"My people don't do that.  And there is kinship between you and me," she said, her tone stubborn but uncertain.

He turned to go.  "Your mother's sister died in our tents -"

"To our shame," he said, and went on.  She did not follow.

He stopped and looked back when he took the left fork up the ridge.  Nothing stirred in all the dying forest, except one belated footroot down among the dead leaves, creeping with its excruciating vegetable obstinacy southward, leaving a thin track scored behind it.