C. Cherryh - Kutath

"Some songs hoped for that.”

"When our ancestors were one," Melein said, "not alone the tribes, but yourselves and my ancestors… that was a great age of the world; and there had been many before. The cities were standing, already old, built on the ruins of others, and our ancestors walked on the dust of a thousand thousand civilizations and forgotten races. The four races who walked the world at the beginning of that age dwindled to two, and them you know. After so long there was building again; elee cities, and mri service… it was a great age, the coming-to-green of an old, old plant that the sands had long buried… but its roots were deep and it stood in the winds again. It was the last of everything that nourished it; it took from all else, so that it was the last greening… mri saw this; and we who had loved the land… knew. We built ... the great edunei; and the great machines of the elee we appropriated to our own purposes.

"We and the elee," Melein's voice continued, low and vibrant. "We knew, and they wanted only what had always been. Shon'ai! we cast ourselves to chance and the great Dark 'Go out,' we advised the elee, in the world's bright hour. ‘ We have risen on all the worlds strength; now we go out, shon'ail now…for the world's wind is at our backs, and we feel it’

"'Go then,' said the elee, for all they hated such an idea and pleased themselves to turn their faces away. We went and we brought greater and greater things, bringing them comfort, so that for an age the elee were very content, seeing the chance of more and more comfort and long life. We went farther; we took stars for the elee, in slow years of voyaging, and brought knowledge”

"But the elee began to be afraid. They feared the Dark and hated anything strange. They wanted only Kutath, and to live with their comforts and their cities and to use up the wealth we could bring. They cared only for that They let the stars go.

"And they let us go. They put us increasingly out of their thoughts. Had they been able, they would have sealed us up on this world.

"Some of us ... stayed; you held this world for mri; you entered on a holy trust, to save the standing-place from which we launched, to save the precious things and to honor the service that we served.

"Hard for us ... to keep our ways, in our slow voyaging, always out of touch with the visible, the physical Kutath. We had to keep it in our hearts, and yet to protect the knowledge of it; only she'panei and Sen of the voyagers were permitted to remember; Kath and Kel knew only the ships ... or between the Darks… the hundred twenty-five homeworlds-of-con-venience. Aye," she said when Niun looked up at her in stark bewilderment "They were ours. Ours, our homes, Niun.

"And hard for you who stayed behind," she said, " to live with the visible, among the monuments, with Kutath a reality about you and to keep contact with the invisible, with the dream.

"When we must, we moved on, shedding each world's taint, renewing ourselves like something born always new, young again and strong; we kept nothing of the Betweens. We boarded our ships and Kutath was born anew aboard them, the old language, the old ways, the ancient knowledge during generations of voyage.

"When calamity fell here, you had no means to veil what resulted; the sights were before you. You lived in the visible and looked to the promise... so long, so very long.

'To go on believing… and clinging to old ways… when elee mocked them; to teach the young the promise… which they might never see, while the seas sank further, and the world had no more strength for a new beginning, and the elee interest only in the moment To remember skills which had passed beyond use; to sing the old chants; to look for hope, when all the sights about you counseled that the world was ending, and that there was no sane hope that this year or the next thousand years would bring what millennia before did not.

"Hardest, surely, when ships did come… when after centuries of waiting… ships came down on you not ours and then the elee wanted protection; then they surely wanted what they had cast from them. The world was laid waste and mri and elee were slaughtered, the land ruined so that even the enemy fled it. Enemy ... it was the collapse of the empire which we had made; it was the last tremor of a dying power, in which the elee had refused to involve themselves, which had gone its own way; and that power died and their worlds with them perhaps. At least they did not come again.

"After that, what was there left, but to live narrowly, to find elee fighting among themselves for water and for less substantial things? Some mri took hire in these wars; some left the promise and involved themselves in the immediate and the visible. But the she'pan Gar'ai s'Hana, may her name live to all castes so long as there are mri to sing it led a retreat from the cities and the wars, into the open land. I know her," Melein added, and there seemed not a breath in Council, the while tears flowed openly down her face, across the kel-scars. "I know such a she'pan, to do the unreasonable, and to lead others where she would fear to send even one. She foresaw, perhaps, the death of the children and the elders, of all the vulnerable ones; and for what? For what hope? To exist, and wait, singing the old songs, while the mountains wore away.

"And we Voyagers…

"We served other services. Darks intervened. To my sorrow, the passing of the she'panate of the Voyagers to me was in calamity, the massacre of us all on a world named Kesrith. Some things my she'pan had no time to teach me. Most of all the reason why, the reason why we went out at all, and why after so many, many ages ... we never returned. The reason why at last… the she'pan who prepared me for the she'panate… had decided it was time to turn the People homeward."

There was disturbance in the Kel. Niton glanced that way with a forbidding frown and unfocused his eyes and stared through them, his heart leaden within him, the confirmation of doubts he had held from the beginning.

"Is it this," Melein pursued, "for which we were met with doubt? That dreams are better than what we can touch? That Niun and I are the too-mortal flesh of a great hope? That the dream brought you destruction, and the death of friends and children and tsi'mri, as it was in the world's worst hour?

"Why did my she'pan refuse the offer the tsi'mri of our last service made, of a green and living world, and choose instead Kesrith, which was desolation? The Forge of the People, she named it, and gave the Sen no other answer. Why did she speak even before the danger came on us ... of leaving the service that we served, which was to regul and against humans; and why was her mind set toward this homecoming?

"It might have been the diminishing of our numbers; we were very few when the regul decided to betray us and kill us, in the knowledge that they could no longer control us.

"It might have been that my she'pan was mad; there were some who believed so, even among her children.

"And do you think that I was not afraid, when I took up the robes, when I knew that I was charged to come home, and that I had not been told the last secret the great why of all the she'panei before me. I tell you that I was greatly afraid.

"I gained the pan'en for my guide; and in the beginning I believed blindly, reading the record it holds, that guided our ship… the way that the People had passed, viewing world after world which our ancestors had known, and thinking them beautiful.”

"She'pa," Niun objected, a breath, a pain which wrung at

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"But they were all dead." Her voice faltered and steadied. "Dead worlds, every one. And do you think then that I was not afraid?