Valka Vahino sat in his garden and let sunlight wash over his bare skin. It was not often, these days, that he got a chance to aliacaui… What was that old Terrestrial word? “Siesta”? But that was wrong. A resting Cundaloan didn’t sleep in the afternoon. He sat or lay outdoors, with the sun soaking into his bones or a warm rain like a benediction over him, and he let his thoughts run free. Solarians called that daydreaming, but it wasn’t, it was, well — they had no real word for it. Psychic recreation was a clumsy term, and the Solarians never understood.
Sometimes it seemed to Vahino that he had never rested, not in an eternity of years. The grinding urgencies of wartime duty, and then his hectic journeys to Sol — and since then, in the past three years, the Great House had appointed him official liaison man at the highest level, assuming that he understood the Solarians better than anyone else in the League.
Maybe he did. He’d spent a lot of time with them and liked them as a race and as individuals. But — by all the spirits, how they worked! How they drove themselves! As if demons were after them.
Well, there was no other way to rebuild, to reform the old obsolete methods and grasp the dazzling new wealth which only lay waiting to be created. But right now it was wonderfully soothing to lie in his garden, with the great golden flowers nodding about him and filling the summer air with their drowsy scent, with a few honey insects buzzing past and a new poem growing in his head.
The Solarians seemed to have some difficulty in understanding a whole race of poets. When even the meanest and stupidest Cundaloan could stretch out in the sun and make lyrics — well, every race has its own peculiar talents. Who could equal the gadgeteering genius which the humans possessed?
The great soaring, singing lines thundered in his head. He turned them over, fashioning them, shaping every syllable, and fitting the pattern together with a dawning delight. This one would be — good! It would be remembered, it would be sung a century hence, and they wouldn’t forget Valka Vahino. He might even be remembered as a masterversemaker — Alia Amaui cau-ianriho, valana, valana, vro!
“Pardon, sir.” The flat metal voice shook in his brain, he felt the delicate fabric of the poem tear and go swirling off into darkness and forgetfulness. For a moment there was only the pang of his loss; he realized dully that the interruption had broken a sequence which he would never quite recapture.
“Pardon, sir, but Mr. Lombard wishes to see you.”
It was a sonic beam from the roboreceptionist which Lombard himself had given Vahino. The Cundaloan had felt the incongruity of installing its shining metal among the carved wood and old tapestries of his house, but he had not wanted to offend the donor — and the thing was useful.
Lombard, head of the Solarian reconstruction commission, the most important human in the Avaikian System. Just now Vabino appreciated the courtesy of the man’s coming to him rather than simply sending for him. Only — why did he have to come exactly at this moment?