"We know what happened well enough," Rossiter corrected. He sounded older than his fifty-two years. "I was at the observatory that night. I remember thinking that it was almost time for me to go to the dormitory to sleep. It was summer; Sirius and the sun would both soon be up. Sirius rose, blazing in the darkness, and after him Leo, in the southeast. It should have been invisible in the sunlight. I couldn't believe what I saw. And still the sun didn't come up.
"We know what happened in a way. We don't know how or why. The sun, our sun, never rose. The sun just disappeared."
"How softly everyone's speaking," Bernard said irrelevantly. "It's the sky and the darkness. I could hardly hear you." He got to his feet.
"Where are you going, Tom?" Rossiter asked.
"I want to look at the bodies. The people we blasted, I mean."
"That's morbid. Don't go, Tom. Stay here."
"But I want to go. I'll be back." He moved away through the dimly visible outlines of men and women seated on the ground.
He came back after a while and sat down by his friend in silence. "I think I know why they attacked us," he said after a pause.
"Why?"
"I think we interrupted some magical or religious rite. They were at a very low level of material culture, of course. The points on the spears were stone, and they were wearing garments of what looked like some sort of tree bark. Not woven cloth. But the young men were wearing rattles of some sort of shell around their ankles, and the old man was holding a little drum in his hands.