World without Stars by Poul Anderson

directly to the front:
    “Faulty memory editing. That’s not supposed to be possible, but it was in my case. I was out in the Frontier Beta region.
     A new planet, with a new med center. They didn’t yet know that the pollen there has certain psychodrug properties. I went
     under the machine, started concentrating as usual, and … and I lost control. The technicians didn’t see at once that something
     was wrong. By the time they did, and stopped the process— Well, I hadn’t lost everything. But what I had left was unrelated
     fragments insufficient for a real personality. Worse, in a way, than total amnesia. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to wipe the
     slate clean. That would be like suicide.”
    “How long ago was this?” I asked when he stopped to gulp for air.
    “Forty-odd years. I’ve managed to … to restructure myself. But the universe has never felt quite right. A great manyvery ordinary things still have a nightmare quality to them, and—” He beat the deck with his fist. “Can you imagine going
     through something like that again?”
    “I’m terribly sorry,” I said.
    He straightened. His aloofness came back to him. “I doubt that, captain. People have to be far closer than we are to feel
     anything but a mild regret at each other’s troubles. Or so I’ve observed. I spend a lot of time observing. Now I don’t want
     to talk further about this, and if you tell anyone else I’ll kill you. But take my advice and watch your mind!”

XI
    W E CAME to Prasiyo in darkness, and left in darkness, so to me it was only torches, shadows, sad strange noise of a horn blown somewhere
     out in the night. Afterward I saw it by day, and others like it; and as I became able to ask more intelligent questions, the
     Niao I met could give me better answers. Thus I learned a great deal, and never in my traveling have I met a society more
     outlandish.
    But that’s for the xenological files. Here I’ll just say that Prasiyo wasn’t a town, in the sense of a community where beings
     lived in some kind of mutual-interest relationship, with some feeling of common tradition. Prasiyo was only a name for that
     lakefront area where the docks happened to be. This made it convenient to locate certain workshops nearby. So the igloo-shaped
     huts of the Niao clustered a bit thereabouts—unlike in the wide, wet agricultural region that stretched behind Lake Silence,
     on and on to the ocean. Yes, and still further, because there were Niao who had been bred for pelagiculture too.
    The Pack maintained a true community, in those lairs where Valland was now a prisoner. Later we found that there were other
     savages, in other wild parts of the world, who did likewise. Some of them had progressed to building little villages. But
     the Niao, who appeared to be civilized, had nothing of the kind anywhere. For they were the Herd, and herds don’t create nations.
    Neither do gods.
    Our galley didn’t go to the wharf. Instead, we mooredalongside a structure built some distance offshore: a square, massive stone pile that loomed over us in the night like a thundercloud.
     Lanterns picked out soldier Niao guarding the ramparts. Helmeted and corseleted, armed with knives, pikes, bows, catapults,
     they stood as if they were also stone. Gianyi and three fellow scribes conducted us off ship, in a stillness so deep that
     the gangplank seemed to drum beneath our feet. The blind dwarf scuttled after us. They all bent low in reverence to the gate.
    “What is this?” I asked.
    “The house that is kept for the Ai Chun, when they choose to visit us here,” Gianyi said mutedly. “You are honored. No less
     than two of them have come to see you.”
    I had a last glimpse of the galaxy before we entered. The sight had always appeared unhuman to me before—lovely, but big and
     remote and indifferent. Now it was the one comfort I had.
    Lamps burned dim down the wet, echoing length of a hall. There was no ornament, no furniture, only the great