the center of the tent, in a dust-spangled shaft of sunlight admitted by a vent in the canvas roof, was chained a man the color of pale jade. He wore a kilt of leaves, now fading; beside him stood a clay pot filled to the brim with clear water.
For a moment we were silent. I stood looking at him. He sat looking at the ground. “That’s not paint,” I said. “Nor do I think it dye. And you have no more hair than the man I saw dragged from the sealed house.”
He looked up at me, then down again. Even the whites of his eyes held a greenish tint.
I tried to bait him. “If you are truly vegetable, I would think your hair should be grass.”
“No.” He had a soft voice, saved from womanishness only by its depth.
“You are vegetable then? A speaking plant?”
“You are no countryman.”
“I left Nessus a few days ago.”
“With some education.”
I thought of Master Palaemon, then of Master Malrubius and my poor Thecla, and I shrugged. “I can read and write.”
“Yet you know nothing about me. I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a plant were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being.”
“The same thing might be said of stones, yet there are statues.”
For all his aspect of despair (and his was a sadder face by far than my friend Jonas’s), something tugged at the corners of his lips. “That is well put. You have no scientific training, but you are better taught than you realize.”
“On the contrary, all my training has been scientific—although it had nothing to do with these fantastic speculations. What are you?”
“A great seer. A great liar, like every man whose foot is in a trap.”
“If you’ll tell me what you are, I’ll endeavor to help you.”
He looked at me, and it was as if some tall herb had opened eyes and shown a human face. “I believe you,” he said. “Why is it that you, of all the hundreds who come to this tent, know pity?”
“I know nothing of pity, but I have been imbued with a respect for justice, and I am well acquainted with the alcalde of this village. A green man is still a man; and if he is a slave, his master must show how he came to that state, and how he himself came into possession of him.”
The green man said, “I’m a fool, I suppose, to put any confidence in you. And yet I do. I am a free man, come from your own future to explore your age.”
“That is impossible.”
“The green color that puzzles your people so much is only what you call pond scum. We have altered it until it can live in our blood, and by its intervention have at last made our peace in humankind’s long struggle with the sun. In us, the tiny plants live and die, and our bodies feed from them and their dead and require no other nourishment. All the famines, and all the labor of growing food, are ended.”
“But you must have sun.”
“Yes,” the green man said. “And I have not enough here. Day is brighter in my age.”
That simple remark thrilled me in a way that nothing had since I had first glimpsed the unroofed chapel in the Broken Court of our Citadel. “Then the New Sun comes as prophesied,” I said, “and there is indeed a second life for Urth—if what you say is the truth.”
The green man threw back his head and laughed. Much later I was to hear the sound the alzabo makes as it ranges the snowswept tablelands of the high country; its laughter is horrible, but the green man’s was more terrible, and I drew away from him. “You’re not a human being,” I said. “Not now, if you ever were.”
He laughed again. “And to think I hoped in you. What a poor creature I am. I thought I had resigned myself to dying here among a people who are no more than walking dust; but at the tiniest gleam, all my resignation fell from me. I am a true man, friend. You are not, and in a few months I will be dead.”
I remembered his kin. How often I had seen the frozen stalks of summer flowers dashed by the wind against the sides of the