Rynason was a slender, sandy-haired man in his late twenties.  A sharp scar from a knife cut left a line across his forehead over his right eyebrow.  His eyes, perhaps brown, perhaps green—­the light on Hirlaj was sometimes deceptive—­were soft, but narrowed with an intent alertness.  He raised the interpreter’s mike and said, “How long ago?”

The stylus recorded the Earthman’s question too, but Rynason did not watch it.  He looked up at the bulk of the alien, watching for the slow closing of its eyes, so slow that it could not be called a blink, that would show it had understood the question.  The interpreter could feed the question direct to the telepathic alien, but there was no guarantee that it would be understood.

The eyes, resting steadily on him, closed and opened and in a few moments came the Hirlaji’s dry voice.

The great age was in the eighteenth generation past ...  Seven thousand years ago.

Rynason calculated quickly.  Translating that to about 8200 Earth-standard years and subtracting, that would make it about the seventeenth century.  About the time of the Restoration in England, when the western hemisphere of Earth was still being colonized.  Eighteen generations ago on Hirlaj.  He read the date into the mike for the stylus to record, and sat back and stretched.

They were sitting amid the ruins of a vast hall, grey dust covering the stone floor all around them.  Dry, hard vegetation had crept in through cracks and breaks in the walls and fallen across the dusty interior shadows of the building.  Occasionally a small, quick animal would dart from a dark wall across the floor to another shadow, its feet soundless in the dust.

Above Rynason the enormous arch of the Hirlaji dome loomed darkly against the deep cerulean blue of the sky.  The lines of all Hirlaji architecture were deceptively simple, but Rynason had already found that if he tried to follow the curves and angles he would soon find his head swimming.  There was a quality to these ancient buildings which was not quite understandable to a Terran mind, as though the old Hirlaji had built them on geometric principles just slightly at a tangent from those of Earth.  The curve of the arch drew Rynason’s eyes along its silhouette almost hypnotically.  He caught himself, and shook his head, and turned again to the alien before him.

The creature’s name, as well as it could be rendered in a Terran script, was Horng.  The head of the alien was dark and hairless, leathery, weathered; the light wires of the interpreter trailed down and across the floor from where they were clamped to the deep indentations of the temples.  Massive boney ridges circled the shadowed eyes set low on the head, directly above the wide mouth which always hung open while the Hirlaji breathed in long gulps of air.  Two atrophied nostrils were situated on either side