Yoonbarla

Desa has finally decided this is the year to make her trip to the largest city of this basin. While she's beginning to plan that trip, a young man comes in off the desert asking to learn to read. She soon learns he needs a mother more than a reading teacher, and wonders why she let herself get involved in this so soon before her trip. Then when he abandons her, she is hurt more than she would have thought, but is more determined than ever to escape Yoonbarla and the hills of Wescarp. It's an adventure getting ready for the trip and the annual logging party, but when that boy returns, her real adventure begins. By the end of this volume, Desa knows the facts of Alan's origin, but she does not sense even a wisp of the added responsibility she has taken on by offering to teach this boy to read.

Alan must not let anyone suspect that he’s from another planet. That was Alan's most important order. To obey that order, he has to break all the others. He has to remain out of contact too long, he has to enter native dwellings and eat native food. He soon found his training was nowhere near enough, and that nothing about this society is what it seemed. Instead of being primitive, the village teacher knew how many nucleotides it takes to code an amino acid in all five evolutions on this planet, how to amplify music pneumatically and a little about the thermonuclear reactions that go on inside stars. The expedition is frightened by what he finds and orders him back aboard. But more than anything, the training did not prepare him for another thing he found on the study planet. He wasn't prepared for the power of love.

This is both a ‘coming of age’ story and a very different intercultural romance, one between a 20 year old from Earth and a 400 year old from the planet where humans have been modified to make the ‘hippy’ society real.