"How often do these Changes come along?" I asked. "It varies greatly. Some men, of great strength and moral power, have been known to go on unchanged for three or four hundred years. But the ordinary man lives a life of eighty to one hundred years." Sime paused. "Or it may be less. A life of travail and strife can age one sooner than one of peace and retirement. Or unusual vicissitudes can shorten a life remarkably. A cousin of mine, who was marooned on the Great Stony Place in the southern half-world and who wandered for three weeks without more to eat or drink than a small bag of wine, underwent the Change after only fourteen years. When he was found his face was lined and his hair had greyed, in the way that presages the Change. And it was not long before he fell in a fit, as one does, and slept for a night and a day. When he awoke he was a newman: young and knowing nothing." "Didn't you tell him who he was?" "Nay!" Sime lowered his voice. "You are much favored of Owner Gope, good Drgon, and rightly. Still, there are matters a man talks not of----" "A newman takes a name and sets out to learn whatever trade he can," put in the Carver of Roasts. "By his own skills he can rise ... as you have risen, good Drgon." "Don't you have memory machines--or briefing rods?" I persisted. "Little black sticks: you touch them to your head and----" Sime made a motion in the air. "I have heard of these wands: a forbidden relic of the Black Arts----" "Nuts," I said. "You don't believe in magic, do you, Sime? The rods are nothing but a scientific development by your own people. How you've managed to lose all knowledge of your own past----" Sime raised his hands in distress. "Good Drgon, press us not in these matters. Such things are forbidden." "Okay, boys. I guess I'm just nosy." I went on out to the car and climbed in to wait for Owner Gope. Trying to learn anything about Vallon's history was about like questioning a village of Eskimos about the great trek over from Asia: they didn't know anything. I had reached a few tentative conclusions on my own, however. My theory was that some sudden social cataclysm had broken down the system of personality reinforcement and memory recording that had given continuity to the culture. Vallonian society, based as it was on the techniques of memory preservation, had gradually disintegrated. Vallon was plunged into a feudal state resembling its ancient social pattern of fifty thousand years earlier, prior to the development of memory recording. The people, huddled together on Estates for protection from real or imagined perils and shunning the old villas and cities as tabu--except for those included in Estates--knew nothing of space travel and ancient history. Like Sime, they had no wish even to speak of such matters.