"I was born in the September of 1523, nine months after the monks had discovered the child in the crib on that Christmas morning. My birth was, my father used to say, another miracle: He was not young at the time being forty years of age... My...
No one at Meetpoint Station had ever seen a creature like the Outsider. Naked-hided, blunt-toothed and blunt-fingered. Tully was the sole surviving member of his company — a communicative, spacefaring species hitherto unknown — and he was a...