The lifeboat came in on the night side of Eden XI, and hung above the blue mountains like a basking shark. Saxon checked his coordinates. This had been the original landing site, almost two hundred years ago. He switched the infra-view on maximum, and began to cruise in widening spirals. These sixth generation hops were usually routine. If nomadic, a few political shifts could help warp the culture into a set pattern. A simple matter to play the visiting deity, pick one warped psychotic, and invest him with power. A dictatorship was by far the best way of inhibiting a young culture. Agricultural city-states were almost as easy. Designate a particular crop as sacred, kill the rotation program, impoverish the land, introduce serfdom.
By dawn, Saxon found what he was looking for. A row of cleared fields and a farmhouse. He reconnoitered a hundred miles farther and frowned. There was no clump of dwellings, no sign of a village trading community.
He brought the ship down in a forest three miles away from the farmhouse and camouflaged it to look like a great mossy boulder. He spent the entire morning testing the atmosphere and the soil with a savage patience. In the early years of the Corps, virus mutations had taken a fearful toll of intermittent spotters.
Finally he discarded his uniform and selected a pair of homespuns from the ship's wardrobe locker. Under the homespuns reposed his utility kit, a miniature arsenal.
Late that afternoon he emerged from the forest and stood at the edge of the cleared fields, a weatherbeaten itinerant, obviously willing to chop wood for a meal. Abruptly his jaw muscle twitched.
The scene was pastoral, perfect.
The man, plowing the south forty. The little girl, playing in the shadow of the sleepy farmhouse.
But no beast pulled that plow. A giant of a man with power and intelligence stamped on his bronze features pushed the plow by hand, in a die-straight furrow.
The little girl was blonde and elfin. She wore sandals, her tunic was brief and plain. She was playing follow-the-leader—