To Bell the Cat

But what if Orr found out what he’d done? Orr might even disown him, for that: abandon him here…. But somehow the thought did not frighten him, now. Nothing they could do to him really mattered, now - because his decision had nothing to do with his life among men, where he lived only to pay and pay on a debt that he could never repay. No matter how much he suffered, in the universe of men he carried the mark of Cain, and he would never stop being Piper Alvarian Jary.

But here in this alien universe his crime did not exist. He could prove what he could never prove in his own world, that he was as free to make the right choice as the wrong one. Whatever happened to him from now on, it could never take away the knowledge that somewhere he had been a savior, and not a deviclass="underline" a light in the darkness….

Jary got to his feet and started back up the slope, carrying an empty cage.