Star Hunter

Nahuatl’s larger moon pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl. Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike–flowers on the top terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He understood. Mankind’s age–old hatred, brought from his native planet to the distant stars, was evil symbolized by a coil in a twisted, belly–path across the ground. And on