My father paused at the narrow window in the circular room and looked out onto the hills beyond and fell silent.

At last he spoke again.

"Where a man sets his Home Stone, he claims, by law, that land for himself. Good land is protected only by the swords of the strongest owners in the vicinity."

"Swords?" I asked.

"Yes," said my father, as if there were nothing incredible in this admission. He smiled. "You have much to learn of Gor," he said. "Yet there is a hierarchy of Home Stones, one might say, and two soldiers who would cut one another down with their steel blades for an acre of fertile ground will fight side by side to the death for the Home Stone of their village or of the city within whose ambit their village lies.

"I shall show you someday," he said, "my own small Home Stone, which I keep in my chambers. It encloses a handful of soil from the Earth, a handful of soil that I first brought with me when I came to this world — a long time ago." He looked at me evenly. "I shall keep the handful of earth you brought," he said, his voice very quiet, "and someday it may be yours." His eyes seemed moist. He added, "If you should live to earn a Home Stone."

I rose to my feet and looked at him.

He had turned away, as if lost in thought. "It is the occasional dream of a conqueror or statesman," he said, "to have but a single Supreme Home Stone for the planet." Then, after a long moment, not looking at me, he said, "It is rumored there is such a stone, but it lies in the Sacred Place and is the source of the Priest-Kings' power."

"Who are the Priest-Kings?" I asked.

My father faced me, and he seemed troubled, as if he might have said more than he intended. Neither of us spoke for perhaps a minute.

"Yes," said my father at last, "I must speak to you of Priest-Kings." He smiled. "But let me begin in my own way, that you may better understand the nature of that whereof I speak." We both sat down again, the stone table between us, and my father calmly and methodically explained many things to me.

As he spoke, my father often referred to the planet Gor as the Counter-Earth, taking the name from the writings of the Pythagoreans who had first speculated on the existence of such a body. Oddly enough, one of the expressions in the tongue of Gor for our sun was LarTorvis, which means The Central Fire, another Pythagorean expression, except that it had not been, as I understand it, originally used by the Pythagoreans to refer to the sun but to another body. The more common expression for the sun was Tor-tu-Gor, which means Light Upon the Home Stone. There was a sect among the people that worshiped the sun, I later learned, but it was insignificant both in numbers and power when compared with the worship of the Priest-Kings who, whatever they were, were accorded the honors of divinity. Theirs, it seems, was the honor of being enshrined as the most ancient gods of Gor, and in time of danger a prayer to the Priest-Kings might escape the lips of even the bravest men.

"The Priest-Kings," said my father, "are immortal, or so most here believe."

"Do you believe it?" I asked.

"I don't know," said my father. "I think perhaps I do."

"What sort of men are they?" I asked.

"It is not known that they are men," said my father.

"Then what are they?"

"Perhaps gods."

"You're not serious?"

"I am," he said. "Is not a creature beyond death, of immense power and wisdom, worthy to be so spoken of?"

I was quiet.

"My speculation, however," said my father, "is that the Priest-Kings are indeed men — men much as we, or humanoid organisms of some type who possess a science and technology as far beyond our normal ken as that of our own twentieth century would be to the alchemists and astrologers of the medieval universities."

His supposition seemed plausible to me, for from the very beginning I had understood that in something or someone existed a force and clarity of understanding beside which the customary habits of rationality as I knew them were little more than the tropisms of the unicellular animal. Even the technology of the envelope with its patterned thumb-lock, the disorientation of my compass, and the ship that had brought me, unconscious, to this strange world, argued for an incredible grasp of unusual, precise, and manipulable forces.

"The Priest-Kings," said my father, "maintain.the Sacred Place in the Sardar Mountains, a wild vastness into which no man penetrates. The Sacred Place, to the minds. of most men here, is taboo, perilous. Surely none have returned from those mountains." My father's eyes seemed faraway, as if focused on sights he might have preferred to forget. "Idealists and rebels have been dashed.to pieces on the frozen escarpments of those mountains. If one approaches the mountains, one must go on foot. Our beasts will not approach them. Parts of outlaws and fugitives who have sought refuge in them have been found on the plains below, like scraps of meat cast from an incredible distance to the beaks and teeth of wandering scavengers."

My hand clenched on the metal goblet. The wine moved in the vessel. I saw my image in the wine, shattered by the tiny forces in the vessel. Then the wine was still.

"Sometimes," said my father, his eyes still faraway, "when men are old or have had enough of life, they assault.the mountains, looking for the secret of immortality in the barren crags. If they have found their immortality, none have confirmed it, for none have returned to the Tower Cities." He looked at me. "Some think that such men in time become Priest-Kings themselves. My own speculation, which I judge as likely or unlikely to be true as the more popular superstitious stories, is that it is death to learn the secret of the Priest-Kings."

"You do not know that," I said.

"No," admitted my father. "I do not know it."

My father then explained to me something of the legends of the PriestKings, and I gathered that they seemed to be true to this degree at least that the PriestKings could destroy or control whatever they wished, that they were, in effect, the divinities of this world. It was supposed that they were aware of all that transpired on their planet, but, if so, I was informed that they seemed, on the whole, to take little note of it. It was rumored, according to my father, that they cultivated holiness in their mountains, and in their contemplation could not be concerned with the realities and evils of the outside and unimportant world. They were, so to speak, absentee divinities, existent but remote, not to be bothered with the fears and turmoil of the mortals beyond their mountains. This conjecture, the seeking of holiness, however, seemed to me to fit not well with the sickening fate apparently awaiting those who attempted the mountains. I found it difficult to conceive of one of those.theoretical saints rousing himself from contemplation to hurl the scraps of interlopers to the plains below.

"There is at least one area, however," said my father, "in which the Priest-Kings do take a most active interest in this world, and that is the area of technology. They limit, selectively, the technology available to us, the Men Below the Mountains. For example, incredibly enough, weapon technology is controlled to the point where the most powerful devices of war are the crossbow and lance. Further, there is no mechanized transportation or communication equipment or detection devices such as the radar and sonar equipment so much in evidence in the military establishments of your world."

"On the other hand," he said, "you will learn that in lighting, shelter, agricultural techniques, and medicine, for example, the Mortals, or the Men Below the Mountains, are relatively advanced." He looked at me amused, I think. "You wonder," he said, "why the numerous, rather obvious deficits in our technology have not been repaired — in spite of the Priest-Kings. It crosses your mind that there must exist minds on this world capable of designing such things as, say, rifles and armored vehicles."

"Surely these things must be produced," I urged.

"And you are right," he said grimly. "From time to time they are, but their owners are then destroyed, bursting into flame."

"Like the envelope of blue metal?"

"Yes," he said. "It is Flame Death merely to possess a weapon of the interdicted sort. Sometimes bold individuals create or acquire such war materials and sometimes for as long as a year escape the Flame Death, but sooner or later they are struck down." His eyes were hard. "I once saw it happen," he said.

Clearly, he did not wish to discuss the topic further.

"What of the ship that brought me here?" I asked. "Surely that is a marvelous example of your technology?"

"Not of our technology, but of that of the Priest-Kings," he said. "I do not believe the ship was manned by any of.the Men Below the Mountains."

"By Priest-Kings?" I asked.

"Frankly," said my father, "I believe the ship was remotely controlled from the Sardar Mountains, as are said to be all the Voyages of Acquisition."

"Of Acquisition?"

"Yes," said my father. "And long ago I made the same strange journey. As have others."

"But for what end, to what purpose?" I demanded.

"Each perhaps for a different end, for each perhaps a different purpose," he said.

My father then spoke to me of the world on which I found myself. He said, from what he could learn from the Initiates, who claimed to serve as the intermediaries of Priest-Kings to men,that the planet Gor had originally been a satellite of a distant sun, in one of the fantastically remote Blue Galaxies. It was moved by the science of the Priest-Kings several times in its history, seeking again and again a new star. I regarded this story as improbable, at least in part, for several reasons, primarily having to do with the sheer spatial improbabilities of such a migration, which, even at a speed approximating light, would have taken billions of years. Moreover, in moving through space, without a sun for photosynthesis and warmth, all life would surely have been destroyed.

If the planet had been moved at all, and I knew enough to understand that this was empirically possible, it must have been brought into our system from a closer star. Perhaps it had once been a satellite of Alpha Centauri, but, even so, the distances still seemed almost unimaginable. Theoretically, I did admit that the planet might have been moved without destroying its life, but the engineering magnitude of such a feat staggered the imagination. Perhaps life might have been suspended temporarily or hidden beneath the planet's surface with sufficient sustenance and oxygen for the incredible journey. In effect, the planet would have functioned as a gigantic sealed spacecraft.