“Be seated,” I said, for his capering was disturbing me. I wondered how to launch the conversation. How much could I ask him before he claimed Covenant at me and sealed his lips? Would he talk about himself and his world? Had I any right to pry into a foreigner’s soul in a way that I would not dare do with a man of Borthan? I would see. Curiosity drove me. I picked up the sheaf of documents on his case, for he was looking at the file unhappily, and held them toward him, saying, “One places the first matters first. Your verdict has been affirmed. Today High Justice Kalimol gives his seal and within a moonrise you’ll have your money.”

“Happy words, your grace.”

“That concludes the legal business.”

“So short a meeting? It seems hardly necessary to have paid this call to exchange only a moment’s talk, your grace.”

“One must admit,” I said, “that you were summoned here to discuss things other than your lawsuit.”

“Eh, your grace?” He looked baffled and alarmed.

“To talk of Earth,” I said. “To gratify the idle inquisitiveness of a bored bureaucrat. Is that all right? Are you willing to talk a while, now that you’ve been lured here on the pretense of business? You know, Schweiz, one has always been fascinated by Earth and by Earthmen.” To win some rapport with him, for he still was frowning and mistrustful, I told him the story of the two other Earthmen I had known, and of my childhood belief that they should be alien in form. He relaxed and listened with pleasure, and before I was through he was laughing heartily. “Fangs!” he cried. “Tendrils!” He ran his hands over his face. “Did you really think that, your grace? That Earthmen were such bizarre creatures? By all the gods, your grace, I wish I had some strangeness about my body, that I could give you amusement!”

I flinched each time Schweiz spoke of himself in the first person. His casual obscenities punctured the mood I had attempted to build. Though I tried to pretend nothing was amiss, Schweiz instantly realized his blunder, and leaping to his feet in obvious distress, said, “A thousand pardons! One tends to forget one’s grammar sometimes, when one is not accustomed to—”

“No offense is taken,” I said hastily.

“You must understand, your grace, that old habits of speech die hard, and in using your language one sometimes slips into the mode most natural for himself, even though—”

“Of course, Schweiz. A forgivable lapse.” He was trembling. “Besides,” I said, winking, “I’m a grown man. Do you think I’m so easily shocked?” My use of the vulgarities was deliberate, to put him at his ease. The tactic worked; he subsided, calming. But he took no license from the incident to use gutter talk with me again that morning, and in fact was careful to observe the niceties of grammatical etiquette for a long time thereafter, until such things had ceased to matter between us.

I asked him to tell me now about Earth, the mother of us all.

“A small planet,” he said. “Far away. Choked in its own ancient wastes; the poisons of two thousand years of carelessness and overbreeding stain its skies and its seas and its land. An ugly place.”

“In truth, ugly?”

“There are still some attractive districts. Not many of them, and nothing to boast about. Some trees, here and there. A little grass. A lake. A waterfall. A valley. Mostly the planet is dunghole. Earthmen often wish they could uncover their early ancestors, and bring them to life again, and then throttle them. For their selfishness. For their lack of concern for the generations to come. They filled the world with themselves and used everything up.”

“Is this why Earthmen built empires in the skies, then, to escape the filth of their home world?”

“Part of it is that, yes,” Schweiz said. “There were so many billions of people. And those who had the strength to leave all went out and up. But it was more than running away, you know. It was a hunger to see strange things, a hunger to undertake journeys, a hunger to make fresh starts. To create new and better worlds of man. A string of Earths across the sky.”

“And those who did not go?” I asked. “Earth still has those other billions of people?” I was thinking of Velada Borthan and its sparse forty or fifty millions.

“Oh, no, no. It’s almost empty now, a ghost-world, ruined cities, cracking highways. Few live there any longer. Fewer are born there every year.”

“But you were born there?”

“On the continent called Europe, yes. One hasn’t seen Earth for almost thirty years, though. Not since one was fourteen.”

“You don’t look that old,” I said.

“One reckons time in Earthlength years,” Schweiz explained. “By your figuring one is only approaching the age of thirty.”

“Also this one,” I said. “And here also is one who left his homeland before reaching manhood.” I was speaking freely, far more freely than was proper, yet I could not stop myself. I had drawn out Schweiz, and felt an impulse to offer something of my own in return. “Going out from Salla as a boy to seek his fortune in Glin, then finding better luck in Manneran after a while. A wanderer, Schweiz, like yourself.”

“It is a bond between us, then.”

Could I presume on that bond? I asked him, “Why did you leave Earth?”

“For the same reasons as everyone else. To go where the air is clean and a man stands some chance to become something. The only ones who spend their whole lives there are those who can’t help but stay.”

“And this is the planet that all the galaxy reveres!” I said in wonder. “The world of so many myths! The planet of boys’ dreams! The center of the universe—a pimple, a boil!”

“You put it well.”

“Yet it is revered.”

“Oh, revere it, revere it, certainly!” Schweiz cried. His eyes were aglow. “The foundation of mankind! The grand originator of the species! Why not revere it, your grace? Revere the bold beginnings that were made there. Revere the high ambitions that sprang from its mud. And revere the terrible mistakes, too. Ancient Earth made mistake after mistake, and choked itself in error, so that you would be spared from having to pass through the same fires and torments.” Schweiz laughed harshly. “Earth died to redeem you starfolk from sin. How’s that for a religious notion? A whole liturgy could be composed around that idea. A priestcraft of Earth the redeemer.” Suddenly he leaned forward and said, “Are you a religious man, your grace?”

I was taken aback by the thrusting intimacy of his question. But I put up no barriers.

“Certainly,” I said.

“You go to the godhouse, you talk to the drainers, the whole thing?”

I was caught. I could not help but speak.

“Yes,” I said. “Does that surprise you?”

“Not at all. Everyone on Borthan seems to be genuinely religious. Which amazes one. You know, your grace, one isn’t religious in the least, oneself. One tries, one has always tried, one has worked so hard to convince oneself that there are superior beings out there who guide destiny, and sometimes one almost makes it, your grace, one almost believes, one breaks through into faith, but then skepticism shuts things down every time. And one ends by saying, No, it isn’t possible, it can’t be, it defies logic and common sense. Logic and common sense!”

“But how can you live all your days without a closeness to something holy?”

“Most of the time, one manages fairly well. Most of the time.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“That’s when one feels the impact of knowing one is entirely alone in the universe. Naked under the stars, and the starlight hitting the exposed skin, burning, a cold fire, and no one to shield one from it, no one to offer a hiding place, no one to pray to, do you see? The sky is ice and the ground is ice and the soul is ice, and who’s to warm it? There isn’t anyone. You’ve convinced yourself that no one exists who can give comfort. One wants some system of belief, one wants to submit, to get down and kneel, to be governed by metaphysics, you know? To believe, to have faith! And one can’t. And that’s when the terror sets in. The dry sobs. The nights of no sleeping.” Schweiz’s face was flushed and wild with excitement; I wondered if he could be entirely sane. He reached across the desk, clamped his hand over mine—the gesture stunned me, but I did not pull back—and said hoarsely, “Do you believe in gods, your grace?”