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shapes were altering his attitudes about evolution on Kanab. It had gone beyond earth evolution in producing differentiation and specialization. Or at least beyond the evolution of man and animals, he corrected himself. Such functional specialization did exist in some insect colonies on earth. Still, these people were far from being termites, and in time, perhaps, the social evolution of mankind would take a similar turn. There were signs of it already.
    As twilight approached, the Kanabians sat in a circle atop the mound, clipping the grass with their fingernails and munching it as each in turn told a story. Without knowledge of the language, Breedlove was able to catch the moods of the speakers in the susurrations of their voices, which assumed the quality of the twilight, a wavering, evanescent ephemerality distilling the sadness of farewells. Seated beside Breedlove, Kyra whispered interpretations.
    “The limbs of our trees grew long, writhing, with fronded tips imploring the sun to live. The tree trunks molded. Fungus grew. Our days were long twilights and our nights brittle with frost.”
    He had never felt himself particularly gifted with a visual imagination, but under the spell of the voices he could literally see the Rousseau-like landscape of the dying planet.
    Another voice sent an iron clang of determination ringing through its melancholy. “Our great, green mother was dying, the cold ordered us to go, but the little mothers came with us to spread the web of life from star to star. Now we have seen magnificent earth with its promise of planets awaiting us, and we have touched the warm Breedlove, whose blood flows red as ours.”
    As each skald recited her version of the Kanabian saga, a listener might quietly detach herself from the circle and go into the bushes briefly to attend to natural functions, but otherwise each speaker received the rapt attention of minds which, it was growing clear to Breedlove, shared with human beings the ability to feel loneliness and sadness, the terrors of the void and the wanderer’s longing for home. Yet each speaker ended on a note of affirmation, a reverence for life, and a faith that the wayfarers would survive. Atelya urritha was a promise to their faith and perhaps—as he soon surmised—more than a promise.
    A group sing marked the finale of the ceremony. Kyra invited him to join hands with them for this ritual, saying, “I can’t sing and interpret too, but if you listen closely you may grasp the meaning of some words from their sounds.”
    After the singing began, Breedlove had no need for an interpreter, Kanabian was indeed uniquely onomatopoetic. The song, apparently an Edda of sorts, narrated the tale of the group’s exodus, and he could recognize the rising, then long-diminishing roar of a departing spaceship. Fluting vibrations from deep within the throats of the singers projected a sensation of blurring speed which grew into a sibilant keening, like a scream in the night, that conveyed the horror felt by sentient creatures hurled into darkness at fantastic accelerations they had not been created to endure.
    He could not pinpoint when his understanding began, but at some time on the flight outward he became certain of the accuracy of the images he elicited from the melodious chant and aware, too, that his mind was opening into new dimensions. He felt the awesome loneliness of interstellar darkness, felt the slow awakening to the light of his own sun, saw the blue orb of Planet Earth, and swung in tightening orbits around the globe that had given him birth. His mind descended to the majesty of mountains, verdure, and running water.
    Then his apocalypse began, a dual revelation of alternate futures as if envisioned separately and simultaneously by the twin lobes of his brain. On the one hand he saw a future for mankind leading to the stars, and on the other he witnessed a silent Armageddon in which the cities of men crumbled from the disintegration of unknown