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rare one had evidently been missed.
    The farm was some distance from the village, more than an hour’s walk, and the road was one of many spokes radiating out from that center. Whenever anybody started a new farm, the Technicians brought their Machines to extend some spoke road a little farther—his own land, if he’d claimed it, would have been several hours out, bordering the wilderness on two sides instead of one. There were also continuous roads that connected the various villages; a large map of them had hung between the schoolroom windows. Farmland on one of these connecting roads was not open to claim. It was already cleared and very expensive, particularly if it lay on a main radial, which was a direct route to the City.
    Noren had spoken of traveling to the City on impulse, but once the words were out, he’d known that was what he would try. Traders did go there—not inside, of course, but to the great markets outside the walls—and one of them might well hire a man to drive a string of work-beasts or an extra sledge. Work-beasts were exasperating creatures, so slow and stupid that it was odd the Scholars were credited with having created them; one would think people would expect guardians of all wisdom to have done a better job of it. But he could put up with a driver’s work if the City was his destination.
    The City was beautiful. There had been a painting of it in the schoolroom next to the map. It had high lustrous walls, a ring of scallops, within which stood towers that were much, much higher, so high that the Technicians who lived in them must fly from top to bottom; and those towers had windows: not mere openings like ordinary windows, but sheets of what almost appeared to be glass. The towers of the City were made not of stone or even of metal, but of some sparkling silvery substance that Noren judged to be akin to the surface of the aircar he had once touched. He had always wanted to see them for himself, and there was no reason why he should not make such a journey.
    A thrill spread through him, rousing him from the dazed state in which he had left the farm. The City! The City had more than beauty; it was where knowledge was. The Prophecy even said so: Knowledge shall be kept safe within the City; it shall be held in trust until the day when the Mother Star becomes visible to us. And that, at least the first half of it, was very likely one of the few statements in the whole thing that was accurate. The Scholars were keeping their knowledge safe within the City, all right, and though looking at the place from the outside wasn’t going to get him any of that knowledge, there was a certain excitement in the idea of being so close.
    But to reach the City, he must be hired by a trader, for it was a journey of many days, and were he to set out alone, he would starve along the way if he failed to find work at the farms he passed. He must therefore wait in the village until a trader came through who would take him on. Since it might be a long wait, he would have to have a means of paying for food, water and lodging while he was there. If he was lucky, the innkeeper, whose kitchen-maid was expecting a child soon, might have a place for him; he knew old Arnil for a kindly man, unlike the keeper of the brewery’s tavern who’d denounced Kern.
    Noren straightened and began to walk faster. As he did so, he was struck by the thought that he might never again pass over this road. Having walked it three days a week to school, except during the long season of harvest and replanting, he seldom noticed its landmarks; but if he was having his last view of them, he ought to. There were none he expected to miss, yet there was a pleasantness in the panorama of purple-clad knolls seen from the rise just before the softstone quarry. Then too, the pond where the work-beasts were watered, with its dense edging of rushes, held memories from his early childhood. Purple knolls; rush-lined ponds, springs, streams; spongy