"Kretyan, let me tell you how he looks. His feet have walked, his hands have worked. Sleep and the drug relax his face, but only a thinking mind could use and wear a face into these lines."
"How did he look when he was awake?"
"Afraid," said Parth. "Afraid, bewildered."
"He may be an alien," Zove said, "not a Terran man, though how that could beBut he may think differently than we. Try once more, while he still dreams."
"I'll try, uncle. But I have no sense of any mind, of any true emotion or direction. A baby's mind is frightening but this is worsedarkness and a kind of empty jumble"
"Well, then keep out," Zove said easily. "No-mind is an evil place for mind to stay."
"His darkness is worse than mine," said the girl. "This is a ring, on his hand" She had laid her hand a moment on the man's, in pity or as if asking his unconscious pardon for her eavesdropping on his dreams.
"Yes, a gold ring without marking or design. It was all he wore on his body. And his mind stripped naked as his flesh. So the poor brute comes to us out of the forestsent by whom?"
All the family of Zove's House except the little children gathered that night in the great hall downstairs, where high windows stood open to the moist night air. Starlight and the presence of trees and the sound of the brook all entered into the dimly lit room, so that between each person and the next, and between the words they said, there was a certain space for shadows, night-wind, and silence.
"Truth, as ever, avoids the Stranger," the Master of the House said to them in his deep voice. "This stranger brings us a choice of several unlikelihoods. He may be an idiot born, who blundered here by chance; but then, who lost him? He may be a man whose brain has been damaged by accident, or tampered with by intent. Or he may be a Shing masking his mind behind a seeming amentia. Or he may be neither man nor Shing; but then, what is he? There's no proof or disproof for any of these notions. What shall we do with him?"
"See if he can be taught," said Zove's wife Rossa.
The Master's eldest son Metock spoke: "If he can be taught, then he is to be distrusted. He may have been sent here to be taught, to learn our ways, insights, secrets. The cat brought up by the kindly mice."
"I am not a kindly mouse, my son," the Master said. "Then you think him a Shing?"
"Or their tool."
"We're all tools of the Shing. What would you do with him?"
"Kill him before he wakes."
The wind blew faintly, a whippoorwill called out in the humid, starlit Clearing.
"I wonder," said the Oldest Woman, "if he might be a victim, not a tool. Perhaps the Shing destroyed his mind as punishment for something he did or thought. Should we then finish their punishment?"
"It would be truer mercy," Metock said.
"Death is a false mercy," the Oldest Woman said bitterly.
So they discussed the matter back and forth for some while, equably but with a gravity that included both moral concern and a heavier, more anxious care, never stated but only hinted at whenever one of them spoke the word Shing. Parth took no part in the discussion, being only fifteen, but she listened intently. She was bound by sympathy to the stranger and wanted him to live.
Rayna and Kretyan joined the group; Rayna had been running what physiological tests she could on the stranger, with Kretyan standing by to catch any mental response. They had little to report as yet, other than that the stranger's nervous system and the sense areas and basic motor capacity of his brain seemed normal, though his physical responses and motor skill compared with those of a year-old child, perhaps, and no stimulus of localities in the speech area had got any response at all. "A man's strength, a baby's coordination, an empty mind," Ranya said.
"If we don't kill him like a wild beast," said Buckeye, "then we shall have to tame him like a wild beast"
Kretyan's brother Kai spoke up. "It seems worth trying. Let some of us younger ones have charge of him; we'll see what we can do. We don't have to teach him the Inner Canons right away, after all. At least teaching him not to wet the bed comes firstI want to know if he's human. Do you think he is, Master?"
Zove spread out his big hands. "Who knows? Rayna's
blood-tests may tell us. I never heard that any Shing had yellow eyes, or any visible differences from Terran men. But if he is neither Shing nor human, what is he? No being from the Other Worlds that once were known has walked on Earth for twelve hundred years. Like you, Kai, I think I would risk his presence here among us out of pure curiosity"
So they let their guest live.
At first he was little trouble to the young people who looked after him. He regained strength slowly, sleeping much, sitting or lying quietly most of the time he was awake. Parth named him Falk, which in the dialect of the Eastern Forest meant "yellow," for his sallow skin and opal eyes.
One morning several days after his arrival, coming to an unpatterned stretch in the cloth she was weaving, she left her sunpowered loom to purr away by itself down in the garden and climbed up to the screened balcony where "Falk" was kept. He did not see her enter. He was sitting on his pallet gazing intently up at the haze-dimmed summer sky. The glare made his eyes water and he rubbed them vigorously with his hand, then seeing his hand stared at it, the back and the palm. He clenched and extended the fingers, frowning. Then he raised his face again to the white glare of the sun and slowly, tentative, reached his open hand up towards it.