"You have never been to Zafega on Fomalhaut-2. You have not beheld the creata-screens, where your dreams become reality, where the deeps of the subconscious are caught in graphs and translated into pictures. That is incredible beauty, and horror in one! No one is ever the same, having beheld his dreams in a waking moment.
"Then there are the historays that recapture the past, making a living, breathing thing of it. You could see the history of all Lyallar, Tyr, from its primordial beginnings until the—"
Tyr whispered roughly, "That sight would make me realize even more bitterly what it means to be a Tryllan—and alive—these days."
Katha turned her back to him, looking across the rock and sand to a distant fringe of silver trees. Tyr bit his lip, staring at her shapely shoulders. Fool! To alienate the one person on all the planet who cared whether—
An old face lying on the ground, his eyes saw. Gaunt brown cheeks, and sparse grey hair on a round skull. Harl. The ancient one with a brain filled with the magic of war and the knowledge of sciences lost to all the Trylla, other than himself. Harl was dead.
IV
Katha killed him. That was why she was here. She cared not a fig for his chances of freeing the Trylla. She was a spy. And he believed her talk of screens and luxuries and the joys of joining the ardth!
His hand vised at her wrist and twisted her around to face him. Her black eyes went wide, frightened at the mad rage in his face. Under the grip of that hand, her knees dug into the sand.
"You murdered him. You—"