“Word comes down that our invaders are plying mass opinion, winning converts with drugs, potions, and miracle cures. Already, unsanctioned caravans of the sick and lame have set out from Tarek and other sites, hobbling up the hard trails in desperate search of remedies. I admit, the thought even crossed my mind.” She lifted her stick-thin arms from her fragile body. “Many may die on the trek, but what matters such risk against the lure of hope?”

Sara paused. “Do you think the outsiders can help him?”

Ariana shrugged in the hoonish manner, with a puff of air in her cheeks. “Who can say? Frankly, I doubt even Galactics could repair such damage. But they may have palliatives to improve his lot. Anyway, all bets are off if my suspicion is true.”

“What suspicion?”

“That our Stranger is no poor savage at all.”

Sara stared, then blinked. “Ifni,” she breathed.

“Indeed.” Ariana Foo nodded. “Shall we see if our guest truly was delivered to us by our goddess of luck and change?”

Sara could barely manage a nod. While the old woman rummaged in her valise, Sara pondered. This must be why everyone was in awe of her, when she was chief human sage before Cambel. They say genius is a knack for seeing the obvious. Now I know it’s true.

How could I have been so blind!

Ariana took up several of the sheets recently copied on Engril’s machine. “I thought of asking a Sensitive to sit in, but if I am right, we’ll want this kept quiet. So we’ll make do by watching how he reacts. Note that he is probably the only person in Tarek Town who has not seen these yet. Everybody pay close attention, please.”

She rolled closer to the patient, who watched attentively as Ariana laid a single sheet on the coverlet.

His smile gradually thinned as he picked up the drawing, touching the fine expert lines. Mountains framed a bowllike vale littered with shattered trees — nest lining for a thick javelin, adorned with jutting spines, whose contours Sara had first seen hurtling above her shaken home. Fingertips traced the sloping curves, trembling. The smile was gone, replaced by a look of agonized perplexity. Sara sensed that he was trying to remember something. Clearly there was familiarity here, and more, much more.

The Stranger looked up at Ariana Foo, eyes filled with pain and questions he could not pose.

“What can this prove?” Sara asked, writhing inside.

“He finds the image of the ship troubling,” Ariana answered.

“As it would any thoughtful member of the Six,” Sara pointed out.

The older woman nodded. “I had expected a happier response.”

“You think he’s one of them, don’t you?” Sara asked. “You think he crashed into the swamp east of Dolo, aboard some kind of flying machine. He’s a Galactic. A criminal.”

“It seemed the simplest hypothesis, given the coincidence in timing — a total stranger, burned amid a humid swamp, appearing with injuries unlike anything our doctors have seen. Let’s try another one.”

The next sketch showed the same little valley, but with the starship replaced by what the sages called a “research station,” assigned the task of analyzing Jijoan life. The Stranger peered at the black cube, intrigued and perhaps a little frightened.

Finally, Ariana presented a drawing showing two figures with strong, confident faces. A pair who had come a hundred thousand light-years to plunder.

This time a sharp gasp escaped him. The Stranger stared at the human forms, touching the symbol-patches on their one-piece exploration suits. It did not require fey sensitivity to read despair in his eyes. With an incoherent cry, he crumpled the sketch and flung it across the room, then covered his eyes with an arm.

“Interesting. Very interesting,” Ariana murmured.

“I fail to understand,” the doctor sighed. “Does this mean he is from off-Jijo or not?”

“It is too soon to tell, I fear.” She shook her head. “But let’s say it turns out he is from the Five Galaxies? If the forayers are seeking a mislaid confederate, and we have him in hand to offer in trade, it might work to our advantage.”

“Now just a darn—” Sara began, but the older human only continued, thinking aloud.

“Alas, his reaction isn’t one I’d call eager to be reunited with lost comrades. Do you think he might be an escaped foe? That somehow he survived imprisonment, even attempted murder, just a day or so before the foray ship came down to land? If so, how ironic his particular injury, which prevents him from telling so much! I wonder if they did it to him… the way barbaric kings of old Earth used to rip out an enemy’s tongue. How horrible, if true!”

The range of possibilities rattled off by the sage left Sara momentarily stunned. There was a long stretch of silence, until the doctor spoke once more.

“Your speculations intrigue and terrify me, old friend.

Yet now I must ask that you not agitate my patient further.”

But Ariana Foo only shook her head in somber pondering. “I had thought to send him up to the Glade right away. Let Vubben and the others decide for themselves what to do next.”

“Indeed? I could never allow you to move one so seriously—”

“Of course an opportunity to offer him Galactic-level treatment of his injuries would make a fine synergy, combining pragmatism with kindness.”

The g’Kek medic’s oral flap opened and shut soundlessly, as he worked to find a way past Ariana’s logic. Finally, his stalks contracted unhappily.

The retired sage sighed. “Alas, the point seems moot. From what we’ve seen, I doubt very much that our guest here will be willing to go.”

Sara was about to tell the old woman where she could go, with her intent to meddle in a man’s life. But just then the subject of their deliberations lowered his arm. He looked at Ariana and Sara. Then he picked up one of the sketches.

“G-guh…?” He swallowed, and his brow furrowed with intense concentration.

All eyes stared back at him. The man lifted one of the drawings, showing the starship nestled in a bower of shattered trees. He stabbed the scene with his index finger.

“G-g-g-oh!”

Then he looked into Sara’s eyes, pleadingly. His voice dropped to a whisper. .

“Go.”

After that, discussion of Sara’s plan seemed almost anticlimactic. I won’t be going back to Dolo on the next boat, after all. I’m on my way to see the aliens.

Poor Father. All he ever wanted was to raise a gaggle of safe little paper makers. Now every heir goes rushing into danger’s pincers, just as fast as our legs can carry us!

Engril and Bloor, the portraitist, arrived, bearing portable tools of their trades.

Bloor was a short, fair-skinned man with ringlets of yellow hair showering over his shoulders. His hands were stained blotchy from years creating the delicate emulsions required by his art. He held up a plate of metal, as wide as his palm, which shimmered with finely etched lines and depressions. From certain angles, those acid-cut shapes coalesced to form sharp profiles of shadow and light.

“It’s called the Daguerre process,” he explained. “Actually, it is quite a simple technique for creating permanent images. One of the first methods of photography ever invented by wolfling humans, back on Old Earth. Or so say our reference books. We don’t employ the procedure for portraits nowadays, as paper is faster and safer.”

“And paper decays,” Ariana Foo added, turning the plate over in her hands. Depicted on the etched metal was an urrish warrior of high rank, with both husbands perched on her back in a formal pose. The female’s sinuous neck was painted with garish, zigzag stripes, and she held a large crossbow, as if cradling a beloved scent-daughter.

“Indeed.” The portraitist conceded. “The fine papers produced by Sara’s father are guaranteed to corrupt in less than a century, leaving no traces to betray our descendants. This sample daguerreotype is one of only a few not sent to the dross middens since our strengthened Commons started promoting wider respect for the Law. I have special permission to hold on to this excellent example. See the fine detail? It dates from before the third urrish-human war. The subject is a chieftain of the Sool tribes, I believe. Note the tattoo scars. Marvelous. As crisp and clear as the day it was taken.”