Littlejohn sank back in his desk chair, feeling somewhere between surprised and deflated.
“You’re returning to the village?” he asked, annoyed at the squeak of his own tone. As he waited for Brad’s reply, he berated himself for letting his surprise and frustration show. Brad’s going too far, he thought. He decides what he wants to do and then does it. Leaves it to me to clear it with Kosoff. Makes me his errand boy.
“Yessir,” said Brad.
“You should get approval from the executive committee before doing that, Brad,” Littlejohn said.
Littlejohn’s holographic display showed what Brad was seeing: a broad green meadow that ended in the gentle slope of grassy hills. A few trees rose here and there, several of them noticeably bent by the recent storms. The ground appeared to be littered with twigs and debris. The sky overhead was cloudless, a brazen bowl of hammered copper.
At last Brad said, “I promised them I’d come back to the village. They must think I’ve been killed … or maybe that I lied to them. I can’t break their trust in me. You can get Kosoff and the executive committee to approve my action, can’t you, please?”
“What choice do I have?” Littlejohn muttered.
* * *
Beneath the hot glow of Mithra, Brad paused as he reached the crest of the hills that ringed the village. The hollow looked much as it had when he’d first seen it. The floodwaters were gone and the ground looked firm and dry. Several of the Gammans were repairing their roofs, including the longhouse’s, hauling cartloads of branches and twigs, teetering on the edge of the walls to weave them into rainproof roofs.
Others were out in the fields, he saw, clearing the clutter blown in by the storms among the carefully tended rows.
From this distance it was impossible for Brad to tell one of the aliens from another. They were all tall, lanky, dome-headed humanoids, unclothed, their pale white bodies spattered with irregular splotches of blues and purples.
He started down the slope, into their hollow.
“Brrd!” his computer translator erupted. “Look, it’s Brrd!”
For an instant, everything in the village stopped, frozen with surprise. Then all the Gammans rushed toward him, dropping to the ground from their rooftop repairs, racing in from the fields.
“Brrd!” they shouted. “Brrd!”
Halfway down the hillside, Brad stopped and waved at them. “Hello!” he called.
They stopped a respectful few meters before him. Mnnx shouldered his way to the front of the pack.
“Brrd, we thought you were dead.”
“We thought the cats got you.”
“We thought you had left us.”
Smiling inside his helmet, Brad said, “No. I’m fine. I simply need a little rest.”
“But you’ve come back to us.”
“I have come back to you.”
“And you’ll never leave us again?”
Brad hesitated. Then, “I will not leave you until I know that you can live through the long winter and survive on your own.”
“But how can we do that? No one has ever lived through the winter,” said Mnnx.
“Except the Rememberer,” Lnng corrected. “And even he goes to sleep in the ground until the winter is over.”
“I will show you how to survive the long winter,” said Brad. Mentally, he added, If Kosoff and those other oafs don’t get in my way.