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could only wonder how his father’s upload would react to the news that Reislon had been a triple agent.
    “We were quite prepared to ‘play’ him, as I believe your own intelligence community puts it, in an effort to exploit his Rogovon contacts. But he dropped from sight after the war. We would of course be very interested in any information as to who his current employers might be.” Svyatog paused significantly, but Andrew maintained his poker face. “At any rate,” Svyatog resumed, “I was obliged to take his report seriously, despite its inherent improbability and its author’s duplicity, because I had independent knowledge of its sources.”
    “What were those?”
    “First I must give you a little background. Before a Gev-Tizath expedition discovered you, we had never encountered any non-Lokaron races above a Bronze Age technological level. As a result, we had fallen into the fallacy of equating ‘non-Lokaron’ with ‘primitive.’ I fear this engendered certain attitudes and assumptions that caused us to miscalculate in your case. At any rate, your uniqueness naturally aroused interest. During the 2040s and early 2050s, according to your dating system, the study of human cultures enjoyed a certain fad among the intelligentsia of Gev-Harath and Gev-Tizath.”
    “Yes, I seem to recall reading that we got a number of curious visitors then.”
    “One of them was an extremely wealthy Tizathon amateur named Persath’Loven. He began to publish his findings in 2050. At that time, his work was considered quite sound. But subsequently, he wandered into some dubious byways. In particular, he took an interest in the doctrines of the Imperial Temple of the Star Lords. Indeed, his next two works reflected . . . Ah, did you say something?”
    Andrew choked down his smothered laugh and took a deep breath. “No, sir. Sorry to interrupt. But . . . did you say the Imperial Temple of the Star Lords ? They’re crackpots—a fringe group!” He took another breath. “You must understand that back in the middle of the last century, when people were expecting the world to end in a nuclear holocaust, one form the general hysteria took was sightings of supposed extraterrestrial spaceships: unidentified flying objects, or ‘flying saucers,’ as they were called. One offshoot of this was the notion that the saucers had visited us thousands of years ago and started humans on the road to civilization. Every impressive relic of ancient times—the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Easter Island statues, you name it—was attributed to godlike beings from the stars.”
    “Odd that humans would assume their own ancestors incapable of such works,” Svyatog observed mildly.
    “Not if you know humans! It was all a substitute for religion. But then, in 2020, the ships from Gev-Tizath actually appeared, and the flying-saucer believers announced that they’d been vindicated.”
    “But the Tizathon carefully explained that neither they nor any other Lokaron had been observing Earth for decades before that, or at any previous time.”
    “Yes, and as a result all the nonsense died down—but only for a while. Shortly before the time you’re talking about, around 2040, a con artist named Sebastian Gruber rummaged up the ‘ancient astronauts’ theory, complete with all its bogus archaeology and mythology and linguistics, and added a new twist: the ancient astronauts were humans , who colonized Earth. We today on Earth are a surviving remnant of a prehistoric human galactic empire!”
    “But is there not conclusive evidence that your species evolved on Earth?”
    “Sure. But many people have never wanted to accept that, and still don’t. By denying evolution, Gruber roped in a whole new category of suckers.”
    “And what supposedly became of this human interstellar empire?” Svyatog sounded intrigued.
    “Ah, that was Gruber’s masterstroke. It seems the empire fell because it strayed from the true religion—which he, Gruber, had