_This_, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or "authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood beside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks. There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives enthusiastically strived to please.
He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze. Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.
"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.
She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy named Evon...."
He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.
"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.
Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you tell us nothing of space--how you've lived since the Exodus?"
She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.
"Why will you never return to your home?"
He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?" he asked, a little sharply.
So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.
"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."
"But why? Where are your women and children?"
He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.