She nodded. There was a queer adult maturity about her as she said, "Wait. They're calling an emergency Council meeting to decide if you're fit."
"Fit," Saxon said. Coldly, it seeped in. To survive? To be a playmate, a slave? "It's been a game," he said, grasping her shoulders. "You've known all along."
"They're taking the transmitter to the Landing Site now," she said. "Would you like to watch?"
Watch judgment of the outcasts on one of those who had marooned them? Why not?
Lang and Merl were no longer in the house. Veena touched a silver stud in one corner, and one side of the room dissolved from a vista of golden wheat to a grassy amphitheatre. There were people assembled in the clearing. Lang and Merl stood on a mossy dais, making a speech.
He saw the ship.
It was a giant silver ovoid, fretted with strange vanes, pockmarked by the red cancer of rust. Towering forest patriarchs guarded that ship like a woodland shrine. A ship that had never been born on Earth. An alien ship.
Understanding came, and a quiet horror.
He lurched away from the screen, away from Veena. He was outside now, and running. He was a good Inhibition agent, he had been conditioned to the shock of alien concepts for half his lifetime, but the ground reeled beneath him as he ran and he could feel the hot trickle of blood where he had bitten through his lip to keep from screaming.
Aliens.