_So I've lost_, Bart thought drearily. _I didn't even learn anything important enough for them to suppress._ There was a strange wounded pride in this; after all his trouble, he was being treated like a little boy who has used a great deal of enterprise and intelligence to rob a cookie cupboard, and for his pains is sent home with the stolen cookie in his hand.
Vorongil touched his arm. "Come, Bartol," he said gently, "I'm taking you back to the _Swiftwing_. I don't have to treat you like a prisoner, do I?"
Numbly, Bart gave what the old Lhari asked, his word of honor not to attempt escape (_Escape? Where to?_) or to attempt to enter the drive chamber of the _Swiftwing_ while they were still among the Lhari worlds.
As they left the council hall, Bart, in a gesture of despair, covered his face with his hands. As he brought them down, he found himself staring at them, transfixed.
The fingers looked longer and thinner than he remembered them, but they were his own hands again. The nails seemed faintly thick and ridged, and there was still a faint grayish tinge through the pale flesh color, but they were human hands. Unmistakably. He felt of his nose and ears, with fumbling fingers; raised his hand and touched the very short, crisp hair growing on his newly shaven skull.
"You fool," said Vorongil to the Mentorian, in disgust, "why didn't you tell him what the medics had done for him? Easy, Bartol!" The old Lhari's arm tightened around his shoulder. "I thought they'd told you. Somebody come here and give the youngster a hand."
Later, in the small cabin (it had been Rugel's) which was to be his prison during the return voyage of the _Swiftwing_, he had a chance to study his familiar-strange face. He had thought that only a short time--an hour or so--had elapsed between the time he was drugged and the time they took him before the Council. Later, from what he learned about the dispatch schedules of the _Swiftwing_, he realized that he had been kept under sedation for nearly three weeks, while his face and hands healed.
As Raynor Three had warned, the change was not altogether reversible. Studying his face in the mirror, he could still see a hint of something thin, strange, alien in the set of his features; the nose and chin somewhat too pointed, elfin, to be human. His hands would always be too long, too narrow, too supple. For the rest, he looked grim, older. He could never go back to what he had been before he became a Lhari; it had left its mark on him forever.
Before the _Swiftwing_ lifted, outbound, Vorongil came to his cabin. "You've seen very little of our world," he said diffidently. "I have permission for you to visit the city before we leave Council Spaceport."
"You think you can trust me?" Bart asked bitterly.
Vorongil said gravely, without humor, "The question does not arise. You do not know the coordinates of this world, and have no way of finding them. Within those limitations, you are an honored guest here, and if it would give you any pleasure, you are welcome to see as much of Council Planet as time permits."
It seemed, through Vorongil's kindness, that the old Lhari sensed his bitter defeat. Nothing was to be gained by sulking in his cabin, a prisoner. He had an opportunity which no human, except the Mentorians, had ever had; which perhaps no human would ever have again. He might as well take advantage of it.
Ringg and Meta both seemed startled at his new appearance, but Meta instantly held out her hands, clasping his quickly and warmly. "Bart! I wondered what your real face looked like. But I think I'd have known you anyhow."
Ringg surveyed him wonderingly, shaking his head. "Say something," he implored, "so I'll know you're Bartol."
Bart held out his arm, less gray by the day as the drug wore out of his system. The thin line of the scar was still on it. He raised his forefinger lightly to the fine line on Ringg's cheek. "I couldn't return that now. So let's not get into any more fights."
Ringg laughed and gave him a rough, affectionate shove. "You're Bartol, all right!"
Even his sense of defeat vanished in wonder as they came out into the great spaceport. He saw, now, that the Lhari spaceports in human worlds were built to create, for the spacemen so far from their native worlds, some feeling of home. But everything here was so vast as to stagger the imagination. There were miles and miles of the great ships, lying strewn like pebbles on this monster beachhead into space, bearing the strangeness of a million far-flung stars. He gaped like a child.
Above them, the burning brilliance of a star gave strange glow and color to the crystal pylons. What color was the star? He turned to Meta, irritated at his inability to be sure.
"Meta, what color is this sun? I've been all around the spectrum, and it's not red, blue, green, orange, violet--" He broke off, realizing what he had said and what he had seen. "An eighth color," he finished, anticlimatically.
"You and your talk of colors," Ringg grumbled, "I wish I knew what you Mentorians see! It's like trying to imagine seeing a smell or hearing light!"
Meta laughed. "As far as I know, no one's named it. Sometimes we Mentorians call it _catalyst color_. I think only Mentorians can see it as separate color."
"So what?" Ringg said impatiently, "What are we going to do, chatter about light waves or see the city?"
Bart acquiesced, trying to sound eager, but a wild excitement was gusting up in him. He dutifully pretended fascination with the towers, the many-leveled roads, the giant dams and pylons, but his thoughts were racing.
_The eighth color!_ There can't be too many suns of this color, or they'd have named it and known it! And telescopes can find it.
Could success be salvaged, then, at the very edge of failure? Maybe he need not go empty-handed, empty-eyed, from the Lhari worlds! They had dismissed him, scornfully, stolen cookie in hand--but maybe it would be a bigger cookie than they dreamed!
The exhilaration lasted through the tour of the port, through the heavy surge of acceleration which brought them up, out and way from Council Planet. Bart, confined in Rugel's cabin, hardly felt like a prisoner, his mind busy with schemes.
_I'll study star-maps, and spectroscope reports...._
It lasted almost two days of shiptime, and they were readying for Acceleration Two, before he came, figuratively, down to earth. To pick one star out of trillions--and not even in his own galaxy? It would take a lifetime and he didn't even know which of the four or five spiral nebulae in the skies of the human worlds was the Lhari Galaxy. A lifetime? A hundred lifetimes wouldn't do it!
He might have known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have been returned to the _Swiftwing_ as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he was safely back in the human worlds again.
He was under parole not to enter the drive chamber (and sure he would be stopped if he attempted it anyhow), but when Acceleration One was completed, he went to the viewport in the Recreation Lounge, and nobody threw him out. He stood long, looking at the unfamiliar galaxy of the Lhari stars; the unknown, forever unknowable constellations with their strange shapes. Stars green, gold, topaz, burning blue, sullen red, and the great strangely colored receding sun of the Lhari people, known to them by the melodious name of the Ke Lhiro--which meant, simply, _The Sun_: it was their first home.
Where had he seen that color? In that stolen glimpse of the Lhari ship landing, long ago? Of all the colors of space, this one he would never know.
He turned away from the unsolvable riddle of the strange constellations; and went to his cabin, to dream of the green star Meristem where he had first plotted known coordinates for a previously unknown world, and to wander in baffling nightmares where he fed jagged, star-colored pieces of hail into the ship's computer and watched them come out as tiny paperdoll spaceships with the letterhead of Eight Colors printed neatly across their sides.
After the warp-drive shift, Vorongil came to his cabin, this time crisp and businesslike.
"We're back in your galaxy," he said, "among the stars you know. We have no passenger space on the _Swiftwing_; we had to ship out without replacing Rugel, which means we're short two men. I've no authority to ask this of you, but--would you like your old job back for the rest of the voyage?"
Bart glanced at his human hands.
Vorongil shrugged. "We've carried Mentorians as full-ranking Astrogators. There don't happen to be any on the _Swiftwing_. But there's no law about it."
Bart looked the old Lhari in the eye. "I won't accept Mentorian terms, Vorongil."
"I wouldn't ask it. You worked your way outward on this run, and the High Council didn't see fit to erase those memories or inhibit them. Why should I? Do you want it or not?"