TWELVE - FRIENDS

Shedemei asked Volemak for a meeting of all those involved in dealing with the two sentient species. “There are decisions to be made,” she said, and so when the evening meal was done, they gathered in the ship’s library: Volemak and Shedemei, of course, and along with them Nafai and Luet, Issib and Hushidh, and Oykib and Chveya. “I invited Elemak,” Volemak explained, “because he had so much experience back on Harmony, dealing with strange cultures and foreign leaders. He declined to come, but I’m still going to ask him to work with the diggers, at least. They’re the ones who are living practically on top of us-“

“Actually, we’re living on top of them” said Nafai.

Volemak paused for a moment of patience, as if saying silently, When will the boy grow up enough not to make jokes during serious discussions? Luet leaned over to Nafai and jabbed his leg with her finger He grinned stupidly at her.

Volemak went on. “And it’s imperative that we reach a workable living arrangement. I don’t know about you, but what I saw the night of the kidnapping was a seriously conflicted digger society-an abduction organized by the son of the blood king, contrasted with the worship from the wife of the war king. The very fact that the wife-what’s her name?”

“Emeezem,” said Oykib.

“The fact that Emeezem succeeded where, um. . . .”

“Mufruzhuuzh.”

“Where Muffle-whatever had failed may have weakened him. Therefore we can count on there being a faction that wants to rid the Earth of human beings, and perhaps two-Mufya’s and the plotters who did the actual kidnapping. I think Elemak can be valuable in reaching some kind of understanding with the hostile ones.”

“If he’ll do it,” said Hushidh. “He isn’t very closely bonded right now with anyone. Not even Protchnu, since the boy couldn’t keep himself from bragging to his father about how he was the one who discovered the entrance to the digger city up in a tree. It wasn’t a welcome topic at home.”

“You saw this domestic scene?” asked Volemak.

“I heard about it from an eyewitness,” said Hushidh.

“So it’s gossip,” said Volemak.

“First-generation gossip,” said Hushidh, “Very accurate. The best quality.”

Volemak smiled, then repeated firmly. “Gossip.”

Nafai spoke up. “I think Elemak’s the natural choice to work with the diggers.”

“There won’t be just one,” said Volemak. “And do us all a favor, Nafai. Don’t let it be known that you favor the idea of Elemak having such an assignment.”

Nafai nodded, suddenly serious. But Luet was not impressed. She knew that he understood, intellectually, that it was a bad idea for him to keep trying to be nice to Elemak. Just yesterday Luet had tried to explain it to him again, and he had interrupted her and explained it right back. “Elemak doesn’t see my eagerness to give him authority as trust or kindness, he sees it as condescension and gloating, I know. But it’s not gloating and it’s not condescension, Luet. I really do admire his abilities and I trust him to do an excellent job of whatever he’s doing. I can’t help wanting to reach out to him.”

“From your end it looks like reaching out,” Luet explained, patiently-for the fiftieth time, she was sure. “From his end it’s more like rubbing in.”

Nafai knew that he should simply remain silent on any issue regarding Elemak, but he couldn’t stand it. “Then everybody will think I’m sulking or that I don’t want him to do anything. I really do want him to do things, and so I have to say so, don’t I? So everybody knows there’s no hard feelings.”

“Can’t you just trust me?” said Luet. “Can’t you just trust me and shut up?”

He had given her his solemn vow-again-that he would say nothing to or about Elemak’s role in the community. And here he was in this meeting, not a day since the last time she had pleaded with him and he had remade his promise to her, doing exactly what he had vowed not to do.

Volemak was taking the meeting back to its main subject. “Anyway, we won’t have just one person working with the diggers. We have to have as many different perspectives as possible-even as we work to raise crops and get food and seeds stored away for the dry season. All of this is just a preamble, though. This meeting is Shedemei’s. I assume this means she has a report on digger and angel biology, and that’s as good a starting place as any.”

“It’s not really a report,” said Shedemei. “It’s more like a list of questions. The initial scan showed that like all the other animals and plants we’ve examined since we arrived, the diggers and angels show only the normal sorts of evolutionary changes from their ancestors of forty million years ago. Diggers were a species of field rat common in southern Mexico, and angels were a common species of bat. The genetic variation is on the order of only five percent from the original in both cases. It will be ages before we can even begin to examine the fossil record, but here you can see how the digger body has changed to be able to support a heavier head and the hands have evolved for grasping big heavy tools-while not losing the raw power of digging, climbing, and, I must add, killing with no tools at all.”

She switched from the rat and digger skeletons on the computer display to the bat and angel skeletons. “The angels had a more complex job-to retain flight, support a heavier brain, and develop the manual strength to use tools. Their compromise is to keep the use of their feet as strong hands. Standing on one foot, these hip joints give them enough rotation to swing a hand axe. But their arms, which in bats have only vestigial hands, have evolved back into good manual instruments. They can’t bear much weight, and as we learned through an unfortunate incident, the arms break easily enough in a strong grasp. So the hands aren’t used for gross physical activities. Rather they’re used for very delicate, fine work.”

She sat and regarded them steadily.

Luet finally realized what she was indicating. “You mean that the statues down in the digger city were made by the angels?”

“The digger hand is simply incapable of doing the fine work you described,” said Shedemei. “I’ve tested the diggers when they were semi-conscious. They can’t do work that doesn’t require a lot offeree. When you sculpt in soft clay, you have to be very restrained, press only so hard. The diggers are incapable of that. They would mash the clay to a pulp.”

“Perhaps,” said Issib, “you’ve only been examining soldiers and manual laborers.”

“Did you notice any dimorphism underground?” Shedemei asked Nafai and Oykib.

“None,” said Nafai.

“And they admitted that they didn’t make the sculptures themselves,” added Oykib.

“But those are their gods,” said Chveya. “Gods which they worship by offering the bones of dead baby angels to them. It seems a little incongruous.”

“Yes, it does,” said Shedemei. “But that strikes at the heart of the most important questions. The first one is, Why did two intelligent species develop virtually in each other’s laps like this, without one destroying the other? According to the records in the library, several sentient species evolved along with humans from the same stock-robusts and heidelbergs, they called them-but the erects essentially erased the robusts, and the moderns wiped out the heidelbergs.”

“Might have absorbed them,” Issib corrected.

“However it happened,” said Shedemei, “where the moderns went, there were no more robusts, heidelbergs, or erects. So why do both angels and diggers survive?”

“Because they don’t compete for resources?” asked Chveya.

“My good student,” said Shedemei with a smile. “But the diggers do eat the angels’ young. And worship the statues they make. So it’s not the same as, for instance, octopuses and eagles, which simply don’t compete in any way. The angels are prey to the diggers. And yet they survive.”

“Art lovers,” said Nafai.

It sounded like another wisecrack and Luet was ready to poke him, but Shedemei answered as if it were a serious suggestion. “I think you’re right, Nafai. I think there’s something biological here, and the sculptures are involved. Didn’t you say, Oykib, that you’ve learned that the statues are always associated with mating and breeding in their worship?”

Oykib blushed and looked furtively at his wife, then at Nafai.

“Don’t be shy about it, Okya,” said Volemak. “Nafai felt it was wise to tell the rest of us about what you can do. Not everybody-just the people in this room. No reason to make everybody else paranoid about their prayers.”

Issib grinned maliciously. “We, of course, are the ones who are so perfect of heart that we don’t mind being spied on.”

“What Issya is trying to say,” said Volemak, “is that we accept that some of us have the ability to learn things that others might wish kept secret. But you’ve shown such remarkable discretion throughout your childhood and on into adulthood that we aren’t afraid of you.”

“I am,” said Chveya. “That’s the only reason I let you get me pregnant.”

“Veya,” Luet remonstrated. Did the girl have to be so crude?

“Anyway, Oykib, is that right?” said Shedemei.

“Yes,” he said. “Some of the ... worshipful thoughts . . . they’re downright pornographic. I mean, the way they think of the statues. We’ve seen how most of them were worn down until some of them were just lumps. They worship by rubbing the statues all over themselves,”

“That’s very helpful,” said Shedemei. “That’s not a behavior I’ve seen in rats or any other rodent. Have you ever seen anything about that in your studies?”

“You’re the biologist, Shedya,” said Hushidh. “If you haven’t seen it, you can count on it that we haven’t.”

“As long as we’re on the subject of who knows what,” said Luet, “I’d like to know why I’m here. I mean, Shedya’s husband isn’t here, and Aunt Rasa isn’t here, so we’re not doing this in couples cm- anything. Shuya and Veya are both needed for understanding the diggers and angels because they can see things that language can’t convey. Oykib’s method is different, but the result is the same. Nafai is the oik with the cloak, who has his face on a sculpture down in the digger city. Issib can’t work in the fields and he’s good at language and nobody handles the Index better than he does, so he’ll be vital for research and conversation. Why am I here?”

“Feeling a little insecure, my love?” asked Nafai with mock solicitude.

“You’re here,” said Volemak, “because you’re you. Not everybody has to have a specialization for what I have in mind. And you communicate with the Oversoul better than anyone.”

“Not when you use the Index,” said Luet. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Shut up, Lutya,” said Hushidh cheerfully. “Your self-doubt is wasting everyone’s time.”

“Be patient,” said Volemak. “I’m making my point, and you’ll understand.” He took Shedemei’s illustrations off the display and replaced them with a map of the immediate area. “Here we are,” he said, “and here are the diggers. And way up here are the angels. Take a wild guess which culture we’ll come to understand best.”

“Especially if they get into a kidnapping mood again,” said Issib.

“I think that this can lead to an unfortunate outcome,” said Volemak. “First, we’d no doubt become closer to the species we know the best, and that might be a serious mistake. Second, and perhaps more important, the angels would certainly assume that we were closer to the diggers, and therefore they would be suspicious of everything we did. Perhaps hostile. You see the problem?”

Issib nodded. “You want some of them to go up and live among the angels.”

“That sounds so final,” said Nafai. This time Luet did poke him.

“Not some of them, Issya,” said Volemak. “Some of you”

Issib looked angry. “Not me,” he said. “Not the chair.”

Luet understood. He had hated those years in the wilderness when he had been physically helpless except when in his floating chair. To have Hushidh have to lift him and carry him and help him with his bodily needs-it was bad enough when his children were little, but now it would be an unbearable humiliation. Here in the vicinity of the ship his magnetic floats worked just as they had in the city of Basilica, giving him nearly normal physical freedom. He was not about to give that up.

“Hear me out,” said Volemak. “I’ve thought this through very carefully, and if you Ksten reasonably you’ll agree with my conclusions. First, I don’t think we should send very many to the angels, because we need most of our strength here, working the fields and establishing the colony. So I’m sending only two couples and their small children. I can’t send Shedemei, because she has to be here, using the instruments in the ship. But I need to send somebody who is as methodical as she is, and as familiar with the library. That points to you, Issib.”

“It points to anybody here and half the people not here,” said Issib.

“Chveya and Hushidh both have roughly the same ability,” said Volemak, “and that ability is indispensable. So one stays here, and one goes there.”

“Oykib is the most valuable one for learning languages,” said Issib. “Send him up there.”

“I need Oykib down here,” said Volemak. “I want him learning the digger language alongside Elemak.”

Luet understood, as she was sure everyone else did-it would not be healthy if Elemak were the only interpreter they had. Volemak didn’t want to say it outright, but Elemak could not be wholly trusted. And the way he’d been acting since the night of the kidnapping, he might not accept the assignment to work with the diggers anyway.

“Besides,” said Volemak, “the diggers know Oykib.”

“They know Nafai, too,” said Issib.

“Don’t fight me on this, Issya,” said Volemak. “Nafai they see as a god. Therefore it’s very important that they not see too much of him. Let them worship the clay head and leave the man himself a mystery.”

“In other words,” said Nafai, “nobody who knows me could worship me.”

“That’s pretty much it,” said Volemak.

“I worship you,” Luet said, too sweetly.

Nafai smiled sweetly back.

“As for your loathing for the chair,” said Volemak, “Nafai and I are pretty sure we can install a relay somewhere on that peak. It overlooks the angels’ valley as well as the whole canyon approach. I think your magnetics will work there.”

“Unless I walk behind a tree,” said Issib.

“The relay consists of four installations so that there’s always a parallax,” said Nafai. “It would have to be a very big tree.”

“If the magnetics work, I’ll do it,” said Issib.

“You’ll do it anyway,” said Volemak. “You’ll just be angrier if you’re in the chair. But think of this as the consolation prize. You get the Index.”

“So there we’ll be,” said Nafai. “The four of us. The brothers who married the sisters.”

“I’ll still be useless,” said Luet, trying to sound dispassionate, but failing.

“No more so than Nafai,” said Volemak. “And no less. The angels aren’t going to be as impressed by the glowing skin as the diggers were. Their first exposure to us was an act of wanton violence. Even with Hushidh and Issib to counsel you, it’s going to take some delicate maneuvering to get them to accept you in the first place. Yasai and Padarok have assured me that our injured angel made no offer of violence. But that doesn’t mean that the others are necessarily peaceable. After all, they are a sentient species. If humans and diggers are any example of what that means, we can anticipate that they have just as many murderous tendencies as we have.”

“Then let’s just wipe ‘em all out,” said Nafai.

Everyone looked at him in horror,

“That was a joke” he said.

“Try not to make jokes like that with the angels,” said Volemak. Nafai looked disgusted. “When I’m responsible for something, I don’t make stupid jokes,” he said. Then he grinned. “But this is your meeting.”

“I appreciate your supportive attitude,” said Vole-mak. “Now does anyone have anything else?”

“I do,” said Shedemei. “This is especially for the four of you who are going up to the angels, but it’s really for everybody who works with the diggers, too. You have to notice everything. Not just the way that they’re different from us, but the ways that they’re the same, too. You have to make a note of it immediately, every single thing you notice, because the longer you wait to write it down, the more you’ll be accustomed to their way of doing things and so the more likely you are to stop noticing it. Issib has the Index, and I have the computers here on the ship-we should be making reports every night,”

“When do we do all this?” asked Oykib.

“The work with the diggers starts immediately,” said Volemak. “But until we can take a healthy-or at least not dying-angel back up to his people, we aren’t going back up that canyon. So for now, the four of you will take shifts with this poor busted-up fellow. Spend as much time with him as Shedemei thinks advisable. Make a friend out of him, if you can.” Then he glowered at them all. “And you will make sure that you never take this fellow anywhere that he even might run into Elemak. Elya will have access to the ship as always, but I’ll ask him to stay off the deck where Shedemei is helping the angel recuperate. That should do the job.”

Shedemei had only one thing to add. “I especially want to know anything that has to do with sex. Reproduction and survival-those are the two key forces that drive evolution. I won’t understand their biology or their culture until I know what is imperative for their mating, breeding, sustenance, and defense. Somehow those sculptures play a role for both cultures.”

“Art is life,” Nafai intoned. “And life is art.”

Luet poked him again, as hard as she could. He yelped. She hoped it left a bruise.

As the meeting broke up, Shedemei and Issib spent a few moments looking in detail at the scans and charts of the digger and angel bodies. “I was going to bring this up for the whole group,” Shedemei said, “but the meeting went a different way. I didn’t know what Volemak was planning, and all that matters is that you be aware of this so you can watch for an explanation when you’re up the canyon with the angels.”

“I haven’t agreed to go,” said Issib.

Shedemei looked at him blankly.

“Yes, well, show me anyway,” said Issib.

“Here,” she said, “In the digger males. And here, in our one angel, also a male.”

“I don’t know what it is you’re pointing at.”

“Neither do I,” said Shedemei. “But it’s a tiny organ, maybe a gland, I’m not sure at all of the function. But it isn’t present in humans, and it isn’t present in any other species I’ve scanned.”

“So, they’re different.”

“It’s not that simple,” said Shedemei. “Biological diversity come through branching. There are two ways that creatures can have similar organs. One is that they have a common ancestor. The other is through convergent evolution-similar pressures in the environment caused them to develop similar strategies to counter it. Now, if they have the identical organ because of a common ancestor, there should be evidence of it in all the other species that diverged from the same source at the same time. But there isn’t, Issib. No other species of rat or bat or any other rodent or related animal has anything remotely like this structure in this location or even near it, I’m talking about now and I’m talking about forty million years ago, when the oldest biological database on the ship was put together. It’s not there.”

“Convergent evolution, then.”

“But except in the case of skeletal and muscular structure, convergent evolution only gets you organs with similar functions. There’s no particular reason why they should have the same location.”

“Unless it has to do with male reproduction and just above the scrotum is the only location that would work,” said Issib.

“Exactly. So what I need you to look for, and what I’ll be looking for down here, is a reason for these two species, and only these two species, to have this organ. When you think about it, why should the two sentient species on Earth have this particular similarity?”

“Because it’s related to their intelligence?” asked Issib.

“That has to be the first thought,” said Shedemei. “But then, we haven’t had a chance to look at females. They’re intelligent, too-but if they lack this structure-“

“Or one that has an analogous function-“

“You see the mystery,” said Shedemei. “This organ came from somewhere and has some function, and it exists only in the two intelligent species, and may exist only in the males. It may have to do with intelligence. It may have to do with sex, given the location.”

Issib grinned. “Maybe they’re more similar to humans than we thought.”

Shedemei glowered. “You mean that maybe male intelligence is testosterone-related?”

“I would have put it more crudely,” said Issib.

“No doubt,” said Shedemei, “seeing as you’re a male. But as you implied, human males already think with their male appendage half the time, and they don’t have this strange little organ.”

“lt was just a joke, Shedemei, not a serious scientific proposal.”

Shedemei smiled thinly. “I knew that, Issib. I was joking back.”

He laughed. It was a little forced.

“Watch for some explanation, Issib, that’s all I ask. I’ll put everything I notice in the database so we can share information through the Index the whole time you’re up there.”

“If I’m up there,” Issib said.

“Whatever,” said Shedemei.

While Issib and Shedemei conferred at one of the computer displays, Chveya stopped Luet and took her aside, letting all the others leave the library and the ship without them.

“Why was Father acting so childish during the meeting?” Chveya asked. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Childish?” asked Luet. “I don’t think of it that way. He’s always done this sort of thing.”

“I’ve never seen him do it. And it isn’t funny.”

“It is to him,” said Luet. “And to me, actually.”

“I don’t understand him at all,” said Chveya,

“Of course not,” said Luet. “He’s your father,”

Chveya was almost to the ladderway when Luet thought of the real answer to Chveya’s real question. “Veya, my dear, the reason you’ve never seen him like this before is simple enough. This is how he acts when he’s happy.”

Chveya raised her eyebrows, nodded thoughtfully, then took hold of the ladder and slid down like a child. “Be careful!” Luet yelled down after her. “Remember that you’re pregnant!”

“Oh, Mother!” Chveya yelled back, her voice echoing through every floor of the ship.

And she criticizes her father for acting childish? Luet shook her head, then took hold of the ladder and went down, one step at a time.

Poto hung upside down from the branch, his wings gathered close against his body Kke the clothing that the Old Ones wore. He listened in patient silence to Boboi’s harangue, to all the others who argued her side. There were so many of them, and none had come to speak for Poto. pTo’s wife, Iguo, would gladly have spoken for him, but it was forbidden for a wife to speak in such circumstances, simply because everyone knows what she would say. She stood upside down from the same branch as Poto, but she was silent.

If Poto stood alone, he nevertheless had two things going for him. First, everyone here knew what one owed to one’s otherself. Boboi could muster all her arguments- pTo is certainly dead; the Old Ones are already angry so let’s not provoke them more; the Old Ones only took pTo’s body home to feed it to the devils-but in the heart of every man and woman in the assembly there would be all the deep and complicated feelings each had for his or her otherself. Poto’s own feelings were difficult to sort out. pTo had gone down against Poto’s own advice; it had also been against Poto’s advice that he went alone to face the Old Ones, to offer to return the stolen grain. But pTo was also his otherself, and when Poto watched the angry bearded giant break and tear pTo’s body like it was kindling, it was all Poto could do to keep himself from screaming and flying at the Old One, even though that would mean certain death and was strictly prohibited. When you cannot save the captured one, then don’t give them a second one. Poto tried to be perfectly obedient to the laws and wisdom of the people; others commended him afterward for his silence as it happened, but it was little consolation to him. pTo, you fool! he cried out inside himself. And then, O pTo, my otherself, if only I could have died for you!

For wasn’t it feted that Poto should be the one to die? When they were two years old-too big for either of their parents to carry one of them alone-the devils came on their raid and found the family hiding place. Without hesitation, both parents took hold of pTo’s feet and carried him off to the high refuge. It was a long flight. Poto was alone on the branch, with a digger climbing rapidly to reach him. Knowing that his parents had chosen his otherself, and not him, Poto almost stayed where he was; why should he value his own life, if his parents did not? But the will to live was too strong. And also there was pTo’s shout as his parents carried him off. “Live, little soul!” he cried. For his parents Poto was nothing, so he would not live for them. He would live for pTo.

So he inched his way out to the most remote end of the branch. The devil laughed at him then, and began climbing out the branch, slowly, carefully. It bowed lower and lower under his weight. Poto could see another devil waiting under the branch, ready to seize him the moment he descended low enough.

The devil below him jumped and its fierce digging hands brushed Poto’s head. Many children at such a time became so terrified that they tried to fly, but with wings so small and weak they couldn’t get aloft, and the devils would have sport chasing them as they fluttered and staggered near the ground. Those who tried to fly always were caught, were always carried down into the devil’s tunnels where they were eaten in terrible barbaric festivals.

Poto did not try to fly. Instead, he mustered his courage and moved closer to the devil on the branch. This had the effect of raising him above the height that the tower devil could reach by jumping. But it put him nearly within reach of the upper devil’s sweeping hand. Twice the hand struck at Poto’s feet. But the second time, the devil had so extended himself that his balance was precarious indeed, and at that moment Poto bounced. The devil yelped and fell from the branch. And before he could climb back up and try again, Poto’s parents returned and carried him away to safety, to the place where pTo greeted him with an embrace and listened as Poto told him of his terrible adventure. Ever since that time Poto knew that his life had been spared so he could watch over the chosen self; everyone had respect for that and knew that if it were not meant for Poto to protect pTo, he would have been taken by the devils that day.

The second great argument on Poto’s side was that everyone knew that no matter what the assembly decided, Poto would go down to find pTo and do his best to save him, even offering himself in pTo’s place, if he wasn’t already dead. So what the assembly was realty deciding was not whether Poto would go, but rather whether Poto’s going would be so dangerous that he should have a wing torn to prevent him from going. This would be a terrible punishment, for to deprive a man of flight was the ultimate humiliation. It was the punishment given to a man who forced himself on a woman, and it always led to the same end: a cruel, humiliating death at the hands of the devils on their next raid. Because he was not an infant, he would not be carried down into the caves. Instead, the raiders would eat him raw on the spot, not bothering to kill him first. The distraction of having a tornwing to eat might save a few infant lives-it was the only thing such a criminal was good for.

It would be a cruel thing to do, when Poto’s only crime was that he intended to save his otherself no matter what the assembly decided. But it would do no good to deny that he meant to defy the assembly-that would only humiliate him by making it seem that he did not love his otherself more than the law. Just as a wife was expected to plead for the rescue of her husband, and so was silenced regardless of whether she actually would have pled for him or not, so also a man was expected to defy all fears, laws, dangers, and wisdom to fly to the rescue of his otherself. So whether he broke the law or not, he should be punished as if he had. If the people did not punish him, it would mean they thought he was the most contemptible of creatures, a man who would not risk all for his otherself. Better to be a tornwing.

So the assembly had to decide whether to tear Poto’s wing or to let him risk the people’s safety by going down to confront the Old Ones yet again.

Finally Boboi fell silent, the last of her supporters having spoken. How many were there? Fewer than half the assembly, but not very much fewer. If even a few of the silent ones voted with her, Poto would be torn and pTo would remain alone among the Old Ones.

It was Poto’s turn. The people were already tired. He would be brief. “I don’t believe the Old Ones are all our enemies. They were very angry at pTo or they would not have come up the canyon to find him. They rejected his offering, it’s true. But the one who struck him acted alone. I saw the others turn away from him or reach out to stop him-“

“How do you know what the Old Ones meant by anything!” Boboi interrupted him.

The assembly squealed their anger at Boboi for daring to interrupt. After all, Poto had maintained perfect courtesy. Abashed by the high screeching, Boboi turned her face away from the assembly.

Poto resumed. “I’m not the only one who saw this. If there’s any witness who denies that the other Old Ones did not seem to want him to break pTo as he did, then speak now, I give my consent.”

There might have been some who disagreed, but none who were certain enough to dare to repudiate him when he was pleading for his otherself.

“pTo was not dead-I saw how bravely he opened his eyes to show us that he lived. And the Old Ones, seeing him alive, chose not to eat him, even though he was not a child. They treated him tenderly and put him in their own leather to carry him down the canyon. I have no idea what they intended. But the Old Ones are not devils in their bodies, even if they are mostly hairless under their leather, and so perhaps they are not devils in their hearts. They came from the sky, didn’t they? So perhaps they are no longer angry at pTo, and if I went to plead for him, they would let me take him home, or at least stay and tend him until he dies.”

He swallowed, trying to think of what other points Boboi had made, so he couki refute them. “I don’t think that the Old Ones are angry at all erf” us, or they would not have stopped with harming just pTo. It was dawn, and they could surely see the watchwomen flying above the village. They knew where we might be found, but they did not come further than the crest of the ridge. This shows that they do not hokl the whole responsible for the acts of the one. Therefore I will not bring danger to the people even if they hate me for coming to them.”

What else? Most of Boboi’s argument had consisted of many people saying the same things over and over; he had little else to say. “People of the assembly,” said Poto, “I can add only this: My otherself did nothing more terrible than to follow in the footsteps of his wife’s illustrious ancestor, Kiti. Both of them were drawn to the Old Ones. pTo put us all at risk, but even though Boboi had declared that no one should go to the Old Ones until the assembly decided, the fact remains that the assembly had not yet forbidden what he did. It was foolhardy, but it was also brave and he acted, not for himself, but for what he thought was the good of the people. Should such a one be abandoned? Should his otherself be torn to prevent him from standing beside him? I think everyone here, even Boboi, would be proud to be the otherself of one as brave as my pTo. Let me be a true brother and friend to him. The danger to the people is not known. Should the unknown evil prevent us from doing the known good?”

With that, Poto slowly turned around on the branch and extended his wings, ready to be torn if the vote went against him. He could hear the sound erf” Boboi’s supporters dropping to the ground. How many? They went quickly, all at once, and then there were no more. So easily they made up their minds. Perhaps that meant that only those who spoke with her had voted with her.

Or perhaps not.

Chveya woke up first, as usual. It used to be that she could out-sleep Oykib any day of the week, but, to her surprise, pregnancy had already diminished her bladder’s capacity and she had to get up before daybreak whether she wanted to or not. And she didn’t often want to. There was no use trying to get back to sleep, either. She would just lie awake anyway, so she might as well get up and do something.

What she was doing today was sitting on a stool, leaning against the wall of their one-room house, trying to imagine Basilica, the City of Women, Mother had told her about buildings, thousands of them, so dose together they touched on every side except the front. And sometimes people would come along and build a new house right in front of yours, completely cutting yours off from the street, unless you had the money to hire thugs to drive them away. They could build right across a street, completely blocking it-except when passersby, angry that someone was trying to close their street, would dismantle the building as they passed.

It was hard to imagine such a place, so many people. In her entire life, Chveya had known only the people of their colony. The only new people she had met were the , babies who were born. The only buildings she had seen were the buildings they built with their own hands- and the impossible, magical buildings of the spaceport, and that was no city, since its population consisted entirely of the same people she had always known.

The diggers had a city, though, didn’t they? Even though it was underground, except where the entrances of their tunnels were bored upward into the trees. Chveya imagined how they must have scrambled when the humans first arrived from Harmony and started cutting down the trees, extending the meadow where they had first landed. The tunnels that led to doomed trees had to be filled, so that when the humans looked down into the hollow trunks, they wouldn’t see that tunnels opened out underneath them. And yet even with so many tunnels filled, the digger city was a vast network of connected chambers.

Chveya knew k was real. She could now see the connections among many, perhaps most of the diggers, and she knew that there were hundreds of them down there, constantly coming and going. It was the only real city she had ever seen, but she hadn’t really seen it, probably never would see it. She would never crawl along the tunnels. She hoped she would never crawl through them, in the darkness. Her skin didn’t glow the way Father’s could, when he wanted it to. It would be night down there all the time. And she would be surrounded by strangers. It wasn’t that they were so alien, so animal-like. It was that she didn’t know them, didn’t know what to expect. Even Elemak, even Meb and Obring, dangerous and untrustworthy as they were, seemed safer to her because after all she knew them. The diggers were all strangers to her.

And that’s how it must have been in Basilica. Nobody could possibly know that many people, so walking along the streets must have meant being surrounded by strangers, by people you had never seen before and would never see again, people who could have come from anywhere, who could be thinking anything, who might be desiring terrible things that would destroy you or those you loved and cared for and you had no way of knowing.

How did they do it, the people who lived there? How could they bear to live their lives among aliens? Why didn’t they just retreat to their homes, block the doors, and cower in a corner, whimpering?

For that matter, thought Chveya, why don’t I? Right now, knowing that I am surrounded by diggers that I don’t know, that I can’t predict, who have the power to destroy me and everyone I love-why am I still going to bed at night, getting up in the morning?

Someone clapped their hands softly outside the door.

She got up and went to the door. It was Elemak.

“Is Oykib up?” he asked.

“Urn, .no,” said Chveya. “But it’s time he was.”

“I’m up,” said Oykib sleepily from the bed. “Awake, anyway.”

“Come in,” said Chveya.

Elemak came in. He stood until Oykib sat up in bed and indicated his eldest brother should sit at the foot of it. “What is it?” he asked.

“Volemak wants me to work with this digger hostage,” said Elemak,

“If you want to,” said Oykib. “I do my duty,” said Elemak. He smiled nastily. “I took the oath.”

“Well,” said Oykib. “Then we’re both supposed to learn his language.”

“You have a head start,” said Elemak. “I’d like you to teach me what you know about the language.”

“Not much yet. Just a few words. I don’t know the structure yet.”

“Whatever you know, I’d like to learn it. I’d like Protchnu to learn it, too. Can you give us a class in digger language?”

“That’s a good idea,” said Oykib. “Yes, I will.”

Someone was running around outside. Pounding feet. Protchnu stood in the doorway. “Father,” he said.

Elemak stood up.

“There’s one of those angels standing on the roof of Issib’s house.”

“Who’s on watch?” asked Oykib, standing up, pulling on his clothes.

“Motya,” said Protchnu. “He sent me to fetch you.”

“To fetch me?” asked Elemak.

“Um, to get the adults.”

“He didn’t mean me,” said Elemak.

Protchnu looked defiant. “But I did.”

“Go get Volemak,” said Elemak.

Chveya was surprised that Elemak understood so well what his role in the community was now-and that he seemed to accept it. She knew that his connection to most people was very thin these days, but she could see that his bond with his eldest son was bright and strong. Yet he had let his son see his own humility. It made her rather sad that he could not be as strong and proud as Protchnu longed for him to be. It was bound to cause real pain in Protchnu, and yet Elemak faced it openly and. . . .

Unless he wanted to make sure that Protchnu felt that pain.

No, she wasn’t going to believe that Elemak had some elaborate plan that involved the kindling of deep resentment in his son’s heart.

Oykib was dressed now, and heading out the door. Elemak gave no sign that he intended to follow.

“Aren’t you curious?” asked Chveya, as she followed Oykib out.

“I’ve seen one,” said Elemak.

When they got to Issib’s house, the angel was standing on the roof, rigid, unmoving. Issib and Hushidh and their children were outside, looking up at him; other people were gathering, too. “He looks so frightened,” said Chveya.

“Not of us,” said Oykib. He gestured toward the trees. The shadowy forms of diggers could be seen in the branches, in the underbrush, “Their word for the angels is mveevo. Meat from the sky.”

“They eat them?”

“They prefer the babies,” said Oykib. “Let’s just say that international relations between diggers and angels are on a kind of primitive level.”

But Chveya was seeing something else now. The angel on the rooftop had the brightest, strongest connection she had ever seen between any two people, and the connection led to the ship. “He’s here for the other one,” she said. “For the injured one in the ship.”

“I guess so,” said Oykib.

“I know it,” she said.

“He’s praying that we won’t give him to the devils before he finds his ... brother. But more than a brother.”

“Then let’s take him,” said Chveya. She walked to the edge of the roof, reached up, took hold of the roof beam, and started climbing up the rough log wall.

“Veya,” said Oykib, annoyed. “You’re pregnant.”

“And you’re just standing there,” she said.

A couple of moments later they were both on the roof. The angel looked at them, but didn’t move. Oykib held out a hand. So did Chveya.

The angel spread his wings, unfolding himself like an umbrella. The effect was astonishing. From being a small, quivering thing, he was suddenly transformed into a great looming shadow. So this is what the injured one would look like, if he were strong and healthy. Like a butterfly, though, the body was so thin and frail inside the canopy of the wings. Only the head was still in proportion to the great width of the wings. The heavy, nodding head,

“Well, we can’t carry him or anything,” Oykib said. He beckoned for the angel to come closer. The angel took an awkward step. “Not much of a walking animal, is he,” said Oykib.

“He’s not an animal,” said Chveya. “He’s a very brave and frightened man, and he loves his brother.”

“His other self,” said Oykib. “That’s what the word is. His otherself.”

“So let’s lead him there.” She went to the edge of the roof, sat down, swung off. Oykib followed her. And a few moments later, the angel perched on the edge, then swooped off. Some of the children shrieked and ran off a little way.

Chveya could see the diggers in the forest draw nearer, but they apparently didn’t dare to cross the line into human territory.

Oykib was explaining to Nafai and Volemak what he and Chveya had seen, what they had decided.

“Do we want the two angels together?” asked Nafai. “What will his reaction be when he sees how badly injured his brother is?”

“More to the point,” said Volemak, “what would his reaction be if we blocked him from seeing his brother?” Nafai nodded. In the meantime, Oykib and Chveya led the angel toward the ship. pTo had awakened several times since the Old Ones took him, but every wakening had been like a dream. He drifted, floating on his back, as if the air had grown thick and now held him up without effort. He didn’t know whether he could move or not because he couldn’t summon up the will to move, not even his lips to speak. And when he let his eyes fell open, what he saw was a female Old One, also floating, slowly drifting into and out of his field of vision. Above him the sky, of a neutral color, as if the clouds had not yet decided whether to be stormy or benign. And there were feint breezes, coming from no particular direction-perhaps from below him. Nothing smelled alive except his own faint sweat and the mustier perfumes of the Old One.

Then he drifted off again, not into sleep, really, but into oblivion.

Is this death? Do Old Ones take us to the sky god? Is this life inside a cloud?

But then, perhaps the third time or the fifth time he awoke-he wasn’t sure how many separate memories had gone before-he realized that this must be the inside of the tower of the Old Ones, and the sky was no sky, but rather a roof. So would this be considered a tunnel, like the ones the devils made, only built above the ground? Or would it be a sheltering nest, like the woven thatch that the people build above the nests where infants clung, first to their mothers’ fur, and then to the twigs under the nest?

Are the Old Ones like us, or like them?

Like the devils, because of the way the Old One in his terrible fury tore and flung pTo and left him for dead.

Like the people, because of the careful tender way the Old Ones lifted him onto the woven thatchlike leathers they put on and took off their bodies at will. Like the people, because of the way they carried him down the hill before at last, mercifully, he slipped into unconsciousness. Like the people, because he was still alive, not eaten, not torn to bits, not even held as a prisoner.

Or a third possibility. Perhaps they were like the gods. After all, there was no pain.

And then a day came when there was pain, but along with the pain he came fatty awake for the first time. Not floating any more. And now able to feel his limbs, his fingers, and to move them. Some of them. A great weight pressed down on the bones that had been broken. He turned his head-yes, he could turn his head, he could shift his back enough to let him see that something had been wrapped around his broken bones, splinting them like the graft of a tree branch. The splints were so heavy he couldn’t lift them, and when he tried it only caused the dull undercurrent of pain to become sharp.

Why have they let the pain come back? Is it a prelude to death? Have I been judged and found unworthy? Or is it because they have decided to let me return to life? To see again my otherself. My wife. My people.

A whining, hooting sound-ah, yes, the speech of the Old Ones. There was some music in it, but there were also those devil sounds, hissing and humming.

And then another sound. His name, spoken clearly, with love, with concern. “pTo,” said the voice, and he knew it at once, impossible as it was that it could be real.

“Poto,” he answered, and then with a rustic of his leathery wings pTo’s otherself stood on the same surface where pTo lay, and looked down at him. “I told you not to go to the Old Ones’ tower,” Poto said.

“And now you’ve come, too,” said pTo.

“Boboi wanted to tear my wings to prevent me,” said Poto. “I almost fled without awaiting the verdict. But I wanted you to be able to return in honor if you should live. So I waited, and the people stood with me. With us, pTo, They honor you. The way you bore the punishment of the angry Old One.”

“He was the most terrible creature I’ve ever seen,” said pTo. “Surely more terrible than the devils.”

Poto shook his head. “I’ve looked the devils in the face, and these Old Ones also.”

“But the devils, Poto, they don’t hate us, they merely hunger for us. There is no hate like the Old Ones’ hate.”

“They led me to you, my self, my most beautiful self,” said Poto. “They knew who I was and what I wanted, and they led me to you.”

The voice of the Old One rang out again. Poto looked at her, and at others; pTo looked around and saw that four others had come into the-what, the nest? The tunnel? Whatever this place was. He recognized one of them-the male he had seen that fateful night, just as he touched the tower. “That’s the one who saw me,” said pTo. “That’s the one who saw I stole the grasses and must have given the alarm.”

“But he’s not the angry one?” asked Poto.

“He’s not angry now,” said pTo. “Not like the other one. Oh, let me never see the angry Old One again!”

“Finally,” said Oykib. “Something like a prayer. Half of what the diggers say is at least partly directed toward their gods. It’d be easier for me if the angels were as pious.”

“But what did they say?” asked Shedemei.

“He wanted never to see the angry one again. The angry Old One.” He laughed. “We’re Old Ones, of course. The ancients come back.”

“That’s not to laugh about,” said Shedemei. “That’s very important. Luet or Nafai, can you go and get Hushidh and Issib? They need to be here, to meet them-if they’re going to be liaison with the angels.”

“Yes, I’ll go,” said Nafai.

“No, Nafai, that’s silly, I’ll go,” said Luet.

“I’ll go,” said Oykib.

“We need you here,” said Shedemei. “In case you can understand anything more.”

Nafai left.

“The language is all pops and song, isn’t it?” said Luet. “Like bubbles in a stream. Like. . . .”

“Yes, Mother?” said Chveya.

“Like the music of the Lake of Women, when I floated on it at the edges of a true dream.”

“Maybe the Keeper of Earth was able to send their songs to you,” said Chveya.

“Hush,” said Shedemei. “These two are twins, I think. Look how perfectly identical they are.”

“Each calls the other his otherself” said Oykib. “It’s much more than a brother.”

“My twins might feel that way about each other,” said Luet, “if only babies their age could articulate their feelings.”

“Hush,” said Shedemei. “Listen, Oykib. Watch, all of you.”

But Chveya had to say this one last thing; “There’s no love I’ve ever seen among humans like the love that binds these two.”

“You are without doubt the stupidest of all men,” said Poto.

“I accept the honor,” said pTo. “And you are the truest of all. May some woman now see the strength and power in you, and take you as her husband.”

Oykib spoke. “The injured one prays that some female will admire how strong the healthy one is and mate with him. No, bind with him,”

“Marry him,” suggested Chveya.

“Well, it could be. The word has overtones of twining and knotting.”

“I know about twining,” said Chveya. “He means marriage. The injured one is married, and the healthy one is not-because the injured one has a strong tie to someone not here, someone up the canyon.”

“Do they have names?” asked Shedemei.

“You expect me to produce those sounds?” asked Oykib.

“We’ll have to, someday. You might as well try.”

“The name of the healthy one is oh-oh, with quick little consonants in there. To-to. Po-to.”

“And the other one?”

Oykib laughed in frustration. “The same. The same name.”

“Otherself,” murmured Shedemei.

“No, it’s different. Like, Po-ta, and the healthy one is Po-to.”

“Quiet,” said pTo. “Listen.”

“To what?”

“The Old Ones. They just said your name.”

They listened.

“Poto,” said Oykib. “Poto.” Then he babbled some more, and then the name stuck out again. “Poto. Poto.”

“They want you,” said pTo.

Poto immediately leapt down to the ground, out of pTo’s field of vision. But pTo could hear him say, “I am Poto, Old One, if it is truly me you seek. Let no more harm come to my otherself! If you have more punishment, I will bear it.”

“He’s praying to us” said Oykib.

“Oh, good,” said Shedemei. “Maybe we can be gods to everyone now.”

“If we’re going to tear the wings again, he wants us to tear his and not the wings of his otherself.”

“What brought that up?” asked Chveya. “Does he think we’re angry?”

“How can he know what to think?” said Luet. “Let me try to show him.”

They watched as Luet sank to her knees, then, still on her knees, shuffled forward to the healthy one. “Poto,” she said, pointing to him.

He turned his back to her and spread out his wings, not fully wide, but enough that the leather of the wings hung loose and open before her.

“Touch them,” suggested Shedemei. “Very gently. They’re strong, but I don’t know whether they’re sensitive to pain or not.”

Luet reached out her hand and gently stroked the skin of his wing. It was hairless and smooth, like shoe leather, but much lighter. Springier.

The angel seemed to wait for more, but when it didn’t come, he turned around, looked at her.

“Poto,” Luet said again. And now she held out her hand to him, palm up, open.

He studied her hand, then looked around from face to face, trying to find meaning. Perhaps he found some meaning that they could not even guess at, or perhaps he simply decided for himself what the gesture must mean. But in the end, he bowed his body until his cheek lay against her palm. As if she had intended this all along, Luet gently closed her other hand over his face, resting her palm against his other cheek. She held this pose for only a moment, then raised her hand.

The angel quietly spoke, not to her, but to his twin.

“pTo, she has made herself an aunt to me, she folded me truly, and on the side.”

“Oh, Poto, may all our people have such a gift from the Old Ones,” answered pTo from the bed behind him.

“The one on the bed prays that all his people can have a blessing like that from the Old Ones,” said Oykib.

“Very nice,” said Shedemei.

“Not enough,” said Luet. “I refuse to let us be gods to these people.”

So now she bowed herself before him, offering her own head to be clasped between hands.

“What do I do, pTo?” cried Poto in distress. “She bows to me as to a father, her head not even turned to the side.”

“If the Old One demands that you be her father, then do it!” said pTo. “Don’t make her angry! They’re terrible when they’re angry.”

“But I can’t be her father,” said Poto. “It isn’t right.”

“It is right,” said pTo, “She doesn’t have a father. He’s dead.”

“And how do you know that, Broken Wings?”

“He’s dead, Poto, I know it. I saw it when I was sleeping. I saw it in my dreams.”

“You’ve never even seen the face of the Old One who kneels before me.”

“I’ve seen her, too. I’ve seen them all.” It was true. pTo had not remembered until now, until the moment that he needed the memory, and then it flooded back. He had seen all their faces in dreams. Even the angry one, only not angry, surrounded by little ones, by his children. And he knew from her voice which one this was. She was the one he saw with both of his own firstborn children perched on her shoulders. “She will stand one day in a meadow in the village, and my children will stand on her shoulders.”

“All right,” said Poto. “I’ll take her as my niece, then.”

“Daughter,” said pTo. “She has no father. You will be her father now.”

“I have no wife,” said Poto. “What woman will marry me, if she must become the mother of an Old One when she does?”

“The one who should be your wife, and no other,” said pTo. “You have been chosen to be the father of an Old One, and you’re worried about mating? Are you that lonely, my dear mad self?”

“They sound upset,” Luet murmured.

“Just stay where you are,” said Oykib. “I’m catching some of this, I think when you took his head in your hands, it’s like you made him a relative. You took him under protection. And now you’re asking him to adopt you as a relative.”

“Mm,” said Luet. “Maybe it’s not a good idea.”

“Do it,” said Shedemei. “Just stay there and let him decide.”

The conversation between them stopped. And then Poto spread his wings wide, and instead of placing them on either side of Luet’s head, he enfolded her entire body in his wings. She felt them wrap around her, feathery-light. She knew that if she struck out with either arm she would tear the wing; she also knew that to tear this creature’s wing would destroy, not him, but her.

“He’s praying that he can be a good father to you,” said Oykib,

“Father?” asked Luet.

“He says that he hopes he can take the place of your ancient father who died in a faraway place.”

“What?” asked Chveya. “Mother, how can he know that?”

“He says that he will not die unless he can die defending you from the hungry devils. I think it’s part of the ritual language of adoption. Only of course you’re not an infant.”

“Can you tell me the word for father?” asked Luet.

“Um,” said Oykib, “I think-let’s see if he says it again when I can-“

The angel spoke some more.

“Bet,” said Oykib.

“What?” said Chveya.

“The word is bet. The word for father.”

When the angel took his wings from around her, Luet sat back on her heels and looked him in the eye. “Poto,” she said, pointing to him. “Bet.” Then she pointed to herself. “Luet,” she said.

“What’s she saying?” asked Poto. “I think she’s telling me her name, but I don’t know what the sound is, it’s so strange.”

“Oo-et,” said pTo.

“No, there’s something first. Not a devil sound, either, just a kind of twisting of the music. Woo-et. Yoo-et.”

“Listen to him trying to say your name,” said Oykib. “I don’t think they have an L sound in their language.”

“Wuet is close enough,” said Luet. She nodded, agreeing with the name Poto was able to produce. “Wuet,” she said, pointing to herself again. Then to him. “Poto. Bet Poto.”

“Potobet,” the angel corrected her.

“Potobet,” she said.

Then he pointed at her again. “Wuetigo,” he said.

“Wuetigo,” she said, pointing at herself.

As she had done, the angel nodded-but it was an exaggerated, awkward movement for him. Nodding must not be how they showed agreement, but he had learned her way and was using it. “Smart guy,” she said.

Then she pointed to the bed, to where the other angel lay. “Po-to?” she asked.

“pTo,” said Poto.

“pTo,” she answered.

“pTobet,” Poto added.

“Ah,” said Shedemei. “If the one adopts you, the other twin is also your father.”

“Twinning must be a big deal hi their culture,” said Oykib.

From the bed came the voice of the injured one. “Wuetigo,” he said. And then, to their surprise, he twisted his tongue around with great effort and said, “Luetigo.”

They laughed and clapped their hands in delight. At first the angels seemed startled, afraid. But then, seeing that they were also nodding as they clapped, Poto began to clap his hands together, too.

At that moment Nafai re-entered the room, with Issib and Hushidh behind him. “Did I miss anything?” he asked.

“Not much,” said Luet. “Meet my new adopted fathers, Poto and pTo. Only I must call them Potobet and pTobet because I’m their daughter. And they call me Luetigo.”

“Luetigo means that you’re their aunt,” said Oykib. “Remember, you adopted them first. The one on the bed-pub- to-“

“pTo,” Chveya corrected him.

“The injured guy,” said Oykib. “He’s very grateful that after you showed them the honor of taking them to be your nephews, you than showed them the even greater honor of letting them be your fathers. It’s a big deal to them. And I think it’s permanent.”

“Yes,” said Hushidh, “You see it, too, don’t you, Chveya?”

“They’ve taken you into their lives, Mother,” said Chveya. “You’re family. Tied in with them like the way you’re tied to me. They aren’t joking. It’s not just a formality.”

“They think,” said Oykib, “that it means that all the Old Ones will be friends with the-people, the angels- forever.”

“Good,” said Nafai. “I think we’re off to a very good start. Now let’s give the two of them time alone. Lock up the medicine, Shedya, and let’s get out of here for a few hours.”

“He won’t like the pain.”

“Can you give him something that leaves him conscious?”

“Yes,” said Shedemei. “But will his twin let me do it?”

Poto wasn’t happy about it. But when Luet bowed before him, both hands out in supplication, he seemed to understand that no harm was meant by the tool in Shedemei’s hand. She applied it to pTo’s shank, and then they all withdrew from the room.

“They trust us,” said pTo. “Or else we’re both prisoners,” said Poto.

“Test them, then. Try to leave. They’ll let you go, I know it.”

“I won’t leave until you can leave with me.”

“Then we are prisoners. But it is my injury that binds us here, and not the Old Ones.”

Poto was back on the bed now, examining his otherselFs wounds. “pTo,” he said, his voice filled with wonder, “The tear in your wing-it’s healing.”

“That can’t be,” said pTo. “Tornwing never heals. Tornwing is devil’s meat.”

“But it is true. The sides of the tear have been joined together, and a scar is forming between them, just like on far skin. The Old Ones have the power to make leather heal.”

“Oh, Poto. Who can say now that it was wrong for me to come down to the Old Ones?”

“Boboi can,” said Poto wryly.

“What do you say?” asked pTo.

“I say that my otherself led the way. I say that without your courage and daring and disobedience, the people would have remained strangers to the Old Ones. But now the Old Ones are our friends. And one of them is our aunt, and we are her fathers.”

For Elemak, learning the language of the diggers was like a return to his youth, to the days when he braved the dangers of the road in order to earn his rightful place as his father’s heir. In those days he was quick with languages, picking them up from men he hired, from guides, from hosts in the cities he visited. The first few languages took real effort, but after a while he began to find regularities, patterns in them. Bozhotz was like Cilme except that all B sounds became P sounds, and long vowels became diphthongs with terminal U’s. Just set your mouth right, be careful of a few words that didn’t mean the same thing in the different languages-olpoic does not mean home in Bozhotz, so don’t ask a man to take you to his olpoic if you don’t want to get stabbed-and you could get along. After long enough on the road, it became so easy that, while Elemak took pride in his ability with language, he took little interest in it.

Now he was discredited as his father’s heir, he would never be free to roam the world again-and even if he were, there’d be no place worth going-his wife had repudiated him in front of the entire human population of this planet, and all that was left to him was to learn the language of some overgrown underground rodents.

But that was all right. Even learning the rudiments of it from Oykib was all right. After all, he might be Nafai’s pet brother, but he wasn’t actually Nafai himself. In feet, if things had worked out differently, Oykib might at last have been the brother that Issib would have been, if he hadn’t been crippled. Smart, but not smart-mouthed; obedient, but willing to take the initiative; courageous but not foolish; confident but not boastful. He liked Oykib. He wished that he couldn’t tell how obviously Oykib distrusted and feared him. Well, there was that bit about throwing him around a little in the library back on the ship. A matter of temper. No use trying to explain to him that it was Nafai that Elemak was angry at, Nafai’s betrayal. No use trying to suck up to him, either, explaining that if once, just once, Nafai had shown a sign of being like Oykib, they would have been friends. It was enough to learn the language from him, to help him puzzle out the hard bits, to search for the rules and patterns.

Because there were rules and patterns. Nothing from the languages of Harmony applied, of course, because digger language had evolved on its own, without human antecedents. But there were still constants in language. Ways of expressing time so that language could convey past and present and future, cause and effect, motive and intention. Actors and actions forced every language to develop, after a fashion, nouns and verbs. And quite quickly-almost as quickly as when Elemak was young-he caught on to the feel of the language, the musk of it. When they went to the forest edge to converse with the observers who watched there, Elemak could see that they liked the way he talked, liked the sound of his voice, the fact that one of the gods could handle digger speech.

Elemak could see that Oykib was a little jealous. After all, he had begun as the teacher, and now, after a few weeks, it was Elemak who was teaching, if not the meanings of things, then the grammar and pronunciation, the idiomatic usage. When could Oykib have developed an ear for such things? This was his first foreign language, and Elemak’s fiftieth. To Oykib’s credit, though, he said nothing but praise for Elemak’s ability, and there was no hint of Oykib resisting the change in their relationship or trying to get out of teaching Elemak anymore. If only Nafai had had such self-control. . . .

The time came at last, however, when he felt confident enough to try to communicate with the hostages on the ship. Four of the original nine had already been let go-the soldiers who had been prepared, at the war king’s command, to kill the kidnappers. But the four kidnappers remained, and, most important of all, Fusum, the son of the blood king, the man who planned it all. “I want him rehabilitated,” said Volemak. “I want him to be the one who carries human culture to the diggers, because he was the one who tried to destroy us. His friendship is the friendship that matters most.”

So Elemak would make friends with him, “But I’ll do it my way, Father, or not at all.”

“What way is that?”

“Fusum is a man of violence and anger, Father,” Elemak said.

“So we must teach him another way.”

“First we must establish who is the teacher,” said Elemak. “Then we can set about teaching him another way to live.”

Volemak had his doubts, but finally he gave in. “No harm to him, though, Elya,” said Volemak. “Nothing to make the enmity between him and us worse than it already is.”

So Elemak wouldn’t hurt him. Not permanently, anyway. And in exchange for that promise, he had a free hand in every other way. A free hand, and no observers.

Except that at first he would only be able to meet with Fusum and the other diggers inside the ship, where he would be watched by the computer they still called the Oversoul, even though he hadn’t even a tiny fraction of the power the real Oversoul exercised back on Harmony. Well, let the machine watch. Let it make its reports to Volemak and Issib and Nafai. There’d be no secrets. Besides, Nyef and Issya were busy worrying about their little angel twins. Nasty little creatures. Bones like twigs. But they were so pretty when they flew, and they had made nice-nice with Nafai’s bitch so now they were ail family. Naturally Nafai was too stupid to realize that it does no good to ally yourself with weakness. The angels were useless. Skymeat, the diggers called them. As far as Elemak could figure, the only reason the angels weren’t wiped out by now was that the diggers wanted to keep a steady supply of their favorite dish. Sentient casserole, that’s all the angels were, stew on the wing, and those were the ones that Nafai and Issib were going to befriend.

Please, Father, don’t make me stay down here and make friends with the strongest, most courageous and self-willed of the strong, aggressive diggers! Elemak almost laughed out loud, sometimes, thinking about how Father’s clever maneuvering to try to create peace was setting up a future in which it was Elemak who was the expert on the only creatures of Earth that were worth knowing, while Nafai’s expertise pertained to their worthless, witless, boneless prey Elemak told Oykib first. “I’m going to start working with the hostages now. I’ll want to meet with you every day and compare what I’ve learned about the language and culture from them with the things you’ve learned from the free diggers down here.”

Oykib accepted that, and never even hinted that he might want to go with Elemak into the ship to work with the hostages. A good boy, a marvelous boy.

Then Elemak went to Shedemei. “Wake up the four kidnappers first,” he said. “I want to practice with them for a while. Learn from them, hear them talking to each other, in circumstances where I’m in control so they can’t just take off into the brush when the questions get hard.”

“They’re very strong,” said Shedemei. “Stronger than you might think.”

“But I think they’re very strong,” said Elemak. “So I don’t think I’ll be surprised.”

“I’m just saying you might not want to be alone,” she said.

“And I’m just saying that I might not want to give them the slightest hint that I fear them,” said Elemak. “I’ve handled men more dangerous than this-men from cultures I didn’t know anything about until they showed me by their actions. It’s my field of study. I don’t look over your shoulder on the genetics thing, do I?”

Shamed, Shedemei awoke the four kidnappers one at a time. Elemak made it a point to be the first face they saw when they woke up. He also made it a point to handle them roughly and constantly. They felt his grip on their shoulders as they were propelled along the corridors of the ship. By their ankles he pushed each one ahead of him up the ladderway to the deck of the ship that he would use as his school, his negotiating table, his prison.

Four weeks he spent with them, learning all he could. New vocabulary every day, of course, and more and more complex rules of grammar, which he scrupulously shared with Oykib every night when the diggers were locked down. But also he learned the culture, the way things worked in the underground city. How the blood king was the holy one, who gave boys the passage into young manhood. The blood king also marked the feast of the skymeat babies, taking care to assign much credit to the men with good clean kills, and most credit of all to those who brought their prey home alive, crippled but not bleeding. Thus the war king trained the young men in fighting, stalking, killing; chose their officers; led them against prey both large and small; but it was the blood king who conferred all honors, the blood king who chose which men were great and which were nothing.

Mufruzhuuzh had been a great war king, but there were men who said that his mistake was marrying Emeezem. Not that he had a choice, of course. He was forced into it. And it wasn’t his fault that because of her dreams and voices she was made deep mother, master of the underground city. But her very strength had weakened him; he deferred to her too much, listened to her when he should have been listening to his men. It left a vacuum.

Fusum’s father, Shosseemem, should have filled that vacuum. He should have stepped in and helped the men feel their strength instead of letting Emeezem’s dominance leach it away. But Shosseemem was as immobilized by Emeezem’s visions as Mufruzhuuzh was. After all, she had said that the Untouched God was coming from the sky, and he came. They saw him among the undergodls and demigods, saw how he moved with confidence and power, and they dared not doubt Emeezem’s authority even when she counseled weakness and passivity.

Watch, she said! Watch and wait! Learn before you act! Well, they had watched, they had waited, and then one day Fusum came to them and said, “Are you men or women? If you’re women, then where are the infants to suckle at your teats? And if you’re men, then why are you still waiting and watching, when you have seen where the babies are kept and how ill-watched they are? They have neither tunnels nor nests, so their babies are at ground level all the time. Why haven’t we taken them to the blood king?”

“Because the blood king doesn’t ask for them. And the war king doesn’t command us to act.”

“That is because they are ruled by women. But I am a man, and if I have no men to rule over me, then I will rule myself. These are not gods, even if they did come from the sky. Don’t they piss out their urine onto the ground just as we do? Don’t they eat and breathe and defecate as we do? What is there that is divine about them?”

“These are the lies that Fusum told us,” they insisted to Elemak. “He deceived us. If we had known that you truly are gods, as we do now, we would never have heeded him. Forgive us, mighty one, let not the wrath of your shining fathergod strike us down,” and so on and so on until Elemak wanted to strangle them for their weakness and disloyalty.

But he showed them no sign that he didn’t approve of their abject betrayal of Fusum. He let them believe that he wanted them to profess undying devotion to the shining god-to Nafai, the lying little bastard. And when he had learned from them all that he could learn, he told Volemak that he thought they were ready to come out of the ship to where Shedemei and Oykib, Chveya and Yasai and whoever else was trying to learn digger ways could work with them.

Oh, Volemak and all the others were so happy with the work that Elemak had done with them. They were so compliant, those four. So eager to please. So rich with information and wisdom. Their wives were sent for and came up to join the conversations; they all got along so well, the humans and the four who once had stolen a baby out of Elemak’s house. “I’m proud of you, Son,” said Volemak. “You took those who harmed you and your family, and made friends with them. It was a good work, and well done.”

Elemak knew better. It would have been a shameful thing, if it had been sincere. But he knew the truth about the four kidnappers. Disloyal, that’s what they were. Cowards. Fusum had bullied them into doing what they did, and now they were eager to let Elemak bully them into doing something else. If Fusum had any sense at all, he would kill them as soon as he came into power.

For Fusum would come into power. Of that Elemak was certain, for the more he heard from the kidnappers, the more he felt he knew Fusum, knew how he thought, what he felt, what he wanted, and what he would do to get what he wanted.

What he wanted was simple: power.

And what would he do to get it? Whatever it took.

Elemak knew Fusum, yes, because he wets Fusum. Or at least he might be Fusum, if this son of the blood king had sense enough to understand the situation and bide his time as Elemak was doing.

So the day came when Shedemei brought Fusum’s suspended animation chamber into readiness.

“I’d like to be alone with him when he comes to,” said Elemak.

She looked at him steadily. “And why is that?”

“Because I know him,” said Elemak. “From what the others have said. This one is dangerous, and if he’s to be tamed I have to show him who is master. If you’re here, he’ll see that there is some other human involved. He won’t know that I’m in sole control of every aspect of his life. Do you see?”

“I see,” said Shedemei. “But I don’t agree.”

“But you will leave me alone with him,” said Elemak.

“I will because Volemak said to let you handle things your way.” She turned her back on him and left.

After a while, the lid slid back and Fusum lay before him, blinking his eyes, trying to understand his surroundings. Elemak reached down with one hand, took him by the throat, and raised him up almost to a sitting position, screaming at him in the most fluent and colorful digger language, “You stole my daughter! You were going to eat her! Is that the warrior you are, the kind who can fight babies but you cower in front of men?”

Fusum’s first response was not fear but rage. Elemak was glad to see that, how Fusum reached out with arms still weak from the suspended animation drugs and tried to rake Elemak’s heart out of his chest. Very good. Not a whiner, are you? “So now you attack me, you fool!” Still gripping him by his throat, Elemak yanked him up and out of the chamber and flung him against the opposite wall.

Ah, yes, this one wasn’t a weak and fragile toy like the angel had been. This one rebounded, his body unbroken, his teeth bared and his hands ready for fighting. But he had been weakened and he was groggy. It wasn’t a fair fight, which was exactly as Elemak wanted it. This was about authority and dominance, not justice. If it were about justice, Elemak would have strangled him in his sleep.

Fusum leapt at him-a high, springing movement that might have caught Elemak off guard if he hadn’t already had the kidnappers demonstrate their fighting technique in mock gladiatorial combats. Just to learn the words for each of the things you do, he had told them. Well, he learned the words. He also figured out the physical reply. And so it was that Fusum found his own weight used against him as he was thrown again, this time down the corridor, so that he landed skidding and sliding until he fetched up against the back wall.

With a growl he leapt back into combat, but his feet made poor purchase on the smooth floor and he could never build up enough momentum to knock Ekmak off his feet or even unbalance him for a moment. By the time the drugs wore off he was physically exhausted and humiliated by his endless defeats at Elemak’s hands.

Finally, when Fusum could move no more, Elemak seized him by a hind leg and dragged him along the corridor to the central ladder, then carried him up to the room where he would be kept in lockdown when Elemak wasn’t with him. During the trip he made no effort to protect the digger’s head and body from pain, nor did he permit Fusum to get enough leverage or balance to protect himself. And when he got to the room, he threw Fusum into it, followed him in, shut the door, and stood there laughing.

The diggers didn’t laugh the way that humans did, but the message was clearly getting across. Fusum rose onto his hind legs, exposing his pink hairless belly. “Are you going to sacrifice me like a man?” Fusum asked. “Here’s my belly, take my heart and entrails and eat them before my eyes-I don’t care, I’ll eat as much of it myself as I can get away from you!”

Elemak knew brave posturing when he saw it. “I’d sooner eat my own feces than have any of your cowardly blood on my lips.”

“So you mean to give me a coward’s death, then. Here’s my throat. Cut it, I don’t care. Life is nothing to me because now that you gods are here, men are nothing. There are no men. Only women and cowards with two tails.”

Elemak couldn’t help but laugh again. Such defiance! He was such a boy, this one. But then, it would have been disappointing if he had reacted any other way. An Obring would have been groveling and pleading for his life. A Vas would have been sullen and silent. A Mebbekew would have been trying to bargain, to strike a deal. But this one, Fusum, he really was a man, doing his best to take any sense of joy and triumph out of Elemak’s victory.

“Fool,” said Elemak in digger language. “I don’t want you dead. I want you to be king,”

That silenced the digger as nothing else could have.

“Your father is worthless,” said Elemak. “Emeezem rules over him. Mufruzhuuzh isn’t a war leader, he might as well be wingless skymeat for all the good he does. I thought maybe your conspirators, those four who did the kidnapping, I thought perhaps they were men, but they are nothing, they gladly offered to trade you for their own lives, and blamed you for everything.” Elemak mimicked their voices, making them breathy and feminine, “Oh, Fusum deceived us. He made us. It wasn’t our fault. If we’d known you were really gods”

Fusum hissed in reply, spraying saliva across Elemak’s entire side of the room. It was the ultimate gesture of contempt. It would have provoked a deadly battle, if Elemak were a digger.

Elemak only laughed. “If your spittle were poison, it might be worth spending it on me. But there’s no point in it. If you intend to save your people, to keep them out of slavery to us, then I’m the only hope you’ve got.”

“If you’re my hope I have no hope.”

“You really are a fool, aren’t you. But what can I expect from you? After all, I’m a god, and you’re an earth-crawling worm.”

“I am no worm, and you. . . .”

“Go on, Fusum, my dear little boy, my helpless lovey baby, say the rest of it.”

Fusum shook his head.

“You were going to say, ‘And you are no god.’ Weren’t you? Let’s be honest with each other.”

“I felt your hands on my body,” said Fusum. “They were no god-hands.”

“Oh really,” said Elemak. “No doubt you’ve had many gods handle you before, so you know how their hands feel.”

Fusum didn’t answer.

“I’ll tell you what my hands felt like. They felt like they belonged to a man who is stronger, smarter, faster, and more filled with hate than you.”

Fusum studied him. “A man, you say.”

“I say a man,” said Elemak. “Not a god.”

“Stronger, yes,” said Fusum. “Today, anyway. Faster today. Smarter-perhaps. Today.”

“Forever, Fusum,” said Elemak. “In ten thousand years your whole people couldn’t learn what I know right now.”

“Smarter,” said Fusum, conceding the point. “But never filled with more hate than me.”

“Do you think not?” said Elemak, “Let’s compare stories, shall we?”

They did. And when that first long day together was done, when Elemak at last brought food to Fusum, they were no longer prisoner and guard, or hostage and master, or man and god. They were allies, two men out of power among their own people, but determined to use each other’s friendship to gain ascendancy over their rivals among their own people. It would take patience and planning. It would take time. But they had time, hadn’t they? And patience could be learned one day after another. Elemak was doing it, wasn’t he? Fusum could do the same.

“Just remember,” Elemak told him, as Fusum splunged noisily into his meal. “If there comes a time whey you think you can do just as well without me, I will see that thought in your mind before you notice it yourself, and when you turn around to put a knife in me, you’ll find that my knife is already in you.”

Fusum laughed, the wheezy, hissy laugh of a diggerman. “Now I know I can trust you with my life.”

“You can,” said Elemak. “All I’m telling you is that I will never trust you with mine”

When Nafai and Luet, Issib and Hushidh set out for the village of the angels, they carried their tools on their backs-or, in Issib’s case, on the chair he had following behind him. Yasai and Oykib had climbed to the chosen spot the week before and placed the relay array, so that Issib could float easily up the pathway into the canyon. But his chair was there in case of bad weather, or in case someone stole some of his floats while he slept.

Their little children they left behind in the care of others. If all went well in their first contact with the village of the angels, they would build houses and then come back down to retrieve the children-along with seeds, extra clothing, and materials for teaching. They hoped to have a working farm in time for the full growing season at that elevation. If all went well. pTo and Poto led the way up the canyon, quickly rising up into the air from time to time, then circling back down so that the humans could talk to them when they caught up. They were all quite aware that many among the angels had rejected the idea of befriending the humans-the Old Ones. But they had prepared the script that they thought would win them over, or at least win permission for the four humans to dwell among them. And when at last they reached the top of the canyon, the very meadow where pTo’s bones had been broken, wing torn, blood spilt, they stopped and played it out. pTo perched on Nafai’s head, and Poto on Luet’s. Their feet pressed, lightly but firmly, against the humans’ jaws. And their wings unfolded, wrapped around Nafai’s and Luet’s shoulders, like cloaks, like tents.

“Like nests,” said Luet.

Nafai nodded. For although they had never seen an angel nest with their own eyes, they had heard the descriptions pTo and Poto gave them, they had looked at the drawings they made, and finally they dreamed them and awoke from the dreams sure that the Keeper of Earth had shown them the truth. Woven and thatched out of supple twigs and grasses, the nests were really roofs sheltering the branches where the wives and young ones slept, hanging head down, wrapped in the blanket of their own wings.

Somewhere in the branches, in the surrounding trees, they knew the angels were watching them. Judging them.

Issib glided forward, his feet not touching the ground; Hushidh followed him, quietly telling him where the angels were, and which ones did not seem well connected to pTo and Poto. Those were the ones who needed to be won over, of course, and Issib, standing in the air-a trick that no one else, not even Nafai with his cloak, could do-he overawed them, the god visible, the only one who could fly.

“Where is Iguo, when her husband comes home to her?” Issib called out loudly in the language of the angels. He knew his voice would be hard to understand, pitched as low as it was, but he spoke quickly, hoping that the consonants would be enough of a guide to help them grasp his words.

No one emerged from the forest, but that was no surprise, not yet.

“His wing was torn, but now there is no tear in it. Do you think we will harm you, we who can heal the torn wing of a brave explorer?”

Still no one came forward.

“When the angry Old One harmed pTo, it was because he thought it was you, the people, who carried off his baby. We did not yet know the dark underground way of the devils.”

Luet had argued against using the angels’ word for the diggers, but Issib had insisted that they had to speak to them in language they would understand. “After all, Elya and Okya call the angels skymeat when they talk to the diggers, don’t they?” Issib had pointed out. Everyone agreed then that devils was certainly no worse a word to use than that.

Issib went on addressing the invisible angels. “Now we know that the people do not come down the canyon to steal our children. Instead we see that when one brave man has been stricken down unjustly, his otherself, a man as brave as the first, will come down to care for him and save him if he can.”

At last a few of the angels began letting themselves be seen, hopping forward to the leading branches of the trees that surrounded the clearing. Some of them stood upright atop the branches; others hung from them, head downward. It was dizzying to watch them, but Issib went on. “Now we know that the people who might have stopped brave Poto chose to let him come. These are the people who hoped for friendship with us, with the Old Ones who have been brought home by the Keeper of Earth.”

There had been some argument about that, too. The angels had no concept of the Keeper of Earth, but Nafai had insisted that the name must be introduced from the beginning. “They’ll find out soon enough that we aren’t gods,” Nafai had said. “Let it never be said we lied to them.”

“As we lied to the diggers?” asked Luet mildly.

“We aren’t trying to rescue a kidnapped baby from the angels,” Nafai pointed out. “We’re trying to make friends with people who have only seen us be mindlessly cruel. We’re not going to let them see us as gods, even if we do get their attention by having Issib do his hovering trick.”

So now Issib spoke the name of the Keeper of Earth, using the translation that pTo and Poto had given them, when they finally understood what and who the Keeper was. Or rather, when they understood as much as the humans did, as much as they could explain with their rudimentary mastery of the angels’ difficult language.

“The Old Ones ask you to forgive us for our mistake, We did not know you then, but we know you now. Through these two brave and virtuous men we know you. Through the healing of pTo’s wing you know us.

Let the four of us dwell among you. But first, let Iguo come forward to join her husband. Come and see, Iguo, that his body is whole, that it is truly pTo that we have brought back to you.”

They waited then, doing nothing, saying nothing except for pTo’s and Poto’s occasional murmurs of reassurance. Patience. Have patience. This is a difficult thing, for them to decide whether to let Iguo come to us.

She came, fluttering awkwardly under the branches of the nearer trees until she reached the clearing. Her awkwardness, they soon saw, was because two infants clung to the fur of her chest, unbalancing her as she flew. pTo gasped in surprise, while Poto sang in delight. “Sons,” he sang. “The wife of the broken one gave him sons while he healed. Now his joy is doubled and doubled again, for he returns to the woman he left as a wife and finds her now as a mother.” pTo leapt from Luet’s head and landed before his wife. The two of them spoke softly, rapidly, the music of their voices beautiful together even though none of the humans could make sense of the words they said. As Iguo inspected pTo’s body, especially the wing that had once been torn, pTo in his turn examined the two babies that she left in the grass at his feet. They could stand, even if they could not fly, and though their words were halting and babyish, they knew to call him Father, and pTo wept shamelessly to be able to touch them with his fingertips and his tongue, to have them climb up his body and frolic under the canopy of his wings.

At last Iguo turned back to the waiting angels. “What cannot be healed has been healed,” she said. “What was lost forever has been found. Therefore let that which cannot be forgiven be forgiven, and let friendship bind the guests who have come to us, weave them into our hearts and our families, our nests and our trees.”

It was the formal proposal that pTo and Poto had primed them to wait for. And now came the vote. Only a few dropped out of the trees to the ground to show their displeasure or their misgivings. And when the voting was finished, all those who had said yes by remaining in the trees now took flight, rising over the clearing, swarming and frolicking and singing, then darting down, a few at a time, to touch the humans, to see them with hands and feet as well as with their eyes, to hear their voices as they struggled with the difficult language.

“Dapai,” they called Nafai, because they could not pronounce the nasal and fricative of his name. “Quet,” they called Luet, now using the deep guttural plosive as their substitute for the unpronounceable L. “Ittib” was Issib, and “Kucheed” was Hushidh. pTo had corn-plained that the Old Ones seemed to have chosen all their names to make them impossible for the people to say them.

But Dapai, Quet, Ittib, and Kucheed were close enough. The angels had spoken their names and welcomed them. With the chair tagging along behind, they followed the soaring, swarming angels down into the valley that was their home.

THIRTEEN - KILLINGS

Vas meant no harm. He was simply an observant man, and a compassionate one. In the months that had passed since Elemak brutalized that flying nightmare they called an angel and Eiadh repudiated him in front of everybody, Vas noticed that the chill between Elemak and Eiadh seemed not to have thawed. Indeed, as far as he could tell the two of them were not speaking to each other, and Elemak managed to spend almost no time in the same house with his wife. Not that Vas normally kept track of people’s comings and goings. It was simply a matter of happening to observe that Elemak was staying in the ship with the digger hostage, learning to hum and hiss when he spoke, and poor Eiadh was without a male companion in her life.

Well, Vas was nearly as lonely. Sevet, his dear wife, who had regularly betrayed him back in Basilica, now had betrayed him again by growing thick-bellied from bearing so many children. Worse, she had none of the bright charm that he had loved back when he had contracted to marry her for a few years. In those days she had been a celebrity, a singer, popular and well-loved. It had been quite a coup for Vas to be the man on her arm.

But she hadn’t sung in years. Not since that night when Kokor came home to find her husband Obring bouncing away on Sevet’s nubile loins. Koya, acting more out of fitful temper than a sense of justice, lashed out at the person she hated most in all the world, her sister Sevet. The blow took her in the larynx, and Sevet hadn’t sung a note since. Not that the damage was physical. She could speak, and not in a monotone, either. And she hummed lullabies to the children as they were born. But singing, her voice full out and strong, that was over. And so, of course, was the fame in whose bright shadow Vas had so reveled. So there was nothing much attractive about Sevet anymore. Unfortunately, however, she was Rasa’s daughter and they all got caught up in the nonsense that trapped them into coming out in the desert and so the marriage had not ended even though any spark of love that had once been between them ended on the night she betrayed him with her sister’s pathetic miserable stupid loathsome worm of a husband, Obring.

So Vas was as lonely as Eiadh, and for similar reasons-both had discovered that their spouses were moral cretins, incapable of even a spark of human decency. Vas had endured his loveless marriage and even sired three children on the bitch and no one guessed how much he hated even to touch her. And it wasn’t just her thickening waist or the loss of their fame-gilt life in Basilica. It was the image of her legs wrapped around Obring’s white naked flaccid hairy thighs and knowing that she didn’t even do it to betray Vas but rather to spite her vicious untalented little sister Kokor. Vas no doubt didn’t even enter into Sevet’s thoughts at all as she. . . .

Many years ago, it was many long years ago, and a hundred years of interstellar flight, not to mention years in the desert and another year, almost, in this new world, but to Vas it was yesterday, perpetually yesterday, and so Vas remembered very dearly the vow he had made when Elemak stopped him from killing Obring and Sevet to redeem his honor and manhood. He had vowed then that someday, perhaps when Elemak was old and feeble and helpless, Vas would put things back in balance. Vas would kill Obring and Sevet and then, the blood still fresh on his hands, he would come to Elemak and Elemak would laugh at him and say, You still remember? For that, so long ago, you killed them? And Vas would say to him, Elemak, it wasn’t long ago. It was in this lifetime. And so it is in this lifetime that I will restore the balance. Them, for their betrayal. You, for stopping me from taking this vengeance hot. When it’s cold, it takes more blood to make it work. Yours now, Elemak. Die at my hands, the way my pride died at yours.

Oh, hadn’t he imagined it ten thousand times since then? Over and over again, when Elemak tried to kill Nafai or Volemak and they stopped him, battered him down, humiliated him, Vas had watched them, saying silently, Don’t kill him. Save him for me. Ten thousand times he had imagined the way Obring would whimper and plead for mercy, and Sevet would scornfully disdain him, not believing he would kill her until that look of unspeakable surprise as the knife went in-oh, it would have to be a knife, a weapon of the hand, to feel the flesh break under the pressure of the stabbing blade, to feel the steel slide into the blood-lubricated flesh, probing inside until it found the heart and the blood gouted out under his hand, spasming up his arm in the last climax of Sevet’s miserable life. ...

The day will come, thought Vas. But first, why not prepare for it properly? Elemak thought that it was nothing for another man to sleep with my wife. Won’t it be right and just, then, as he lies dying, for me to tell him in his last moments of consciousness that, Oh yes, Elemak, my friend, you remember what my wife did to me? Well, your wife did it to you, too, and with me. And Elemak will look into my eyes and know that I am speaking the truth and then he’ll realize that I wasn’t a passive creature after all, was never the mindless tool he thought I was for so many years.

The only trouble with that dream was Eiadh herself. Even if she wasn’t sleeping with Elemak, that didn’t mean she’d spare a thought for Vas. He wasn’t a fool. He was an observant man, that’s all. He knew that this was a rime of vulnerability for her. Loneliness. And Vas could be compassionate. He would not come to Eiadh in anger or seeking vengeance on Elemak, no, not at all. He would come to her as a friend, offer a strong arm of comfort, and one thing would lead to another. Vas had read books. He knew this sort of thing happened. Why not to him? Why not with Eiadh, whose waist had not thickened despite bearing twice as many children as Sevet? Eiadh, who still sang, not with the power of a famous entertainer like Sevet, but with a lustrous intimacy, a voice that could waken all the longing in a man’s soul, ah, yes, Eiadh, I have heard you singing and I have known that someday that voice would moan, that sweet throat would arch backward as your body shuddered in response to mine.

“Yes?” asked Eiadh.

He hadn’t even clapped his hands. She must have seen him coming. How awkward. “Eiadh,” he said.

“Yes?” she said again.

“May I come in?” asked Vas.

“Is something wrong?” asked Eiadh. He could see her taking mental inventory of her children.

“Not that I know of,” said Vas. “Except that I’m concerned about you.”

Eiadh looked confused. “Me?”

“Please, may I come in?” he asked.

She laughed but let him through the door. “Of course, Vas, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. Except that I’m tired all the time, but that’s the same complaint that everyone else has. If you’ve come to cut the vegetables for supper, then I’m delighted.”

“Do you really need help with the vegetables?” asked Vas.

“No, that was a figure of speech. I’m actually sewing. Volemak insists that we all learn to sew with these awful bone needles. They’re so thick that with every stitch they open gaping holes in the fabric but he insists that someday there’ll be no more steel ones and so-well, it makes no sense to me, not even in the desert did we have to-I’m boring you, aren’t I?”

“I’m sorry,” said Vas. “Not boring me. But I was listening more to your voice than your words, I hope you’ll forgive me. Elemak is a lucky man, to have a wife whose common speech is so like music.”

She looked puzzled at the compliment, but then laughed lightly. “I don’t think Elemak feels very lucky,” she said.

“Then Elemak is a fool,” said Vas. “For him to turn away from such goodness and beauty as-“

“Vas, are you trying to seduce me?” asked Eiadh.

Flustered, Vas could only deny it. “No, I can’t-did I lead you to think that I-oh, this is embarrassing. I came to talk. I’ve been lonely and I thought perhaps you-but if you think it’s not proper for us to be alone in the house here-“

“It’s all right,” said Eiadh. “I know my virtue is safe with you.”

Vas put on his best wry smile. “Everyone’s virtue is safe with me, apparently.”

“Poor Vas,” she said. “You and I have something in common.”

“Do we?” he asked. Was it possible she felt toward him as he felt toward her? Perhaps he shouldn’t have denied his seductive intent so quickly and emphatically.

“I mean besides the obvious,” she said. “It seems that both of us are fated to play secondary roles in our own autobiographies.”

Vas laughed because it seemed that she was waiting for him to laugh. “By which you mean . . .” he said,

“Oh, just that we both seem to be buffeted here and there by the choices that other people make. Why in the world were we ever brought aboard a starship, can you think of a reason? Just a matter of chance. Falling in love with the wrong person on the wrong day at the wrong point in history.”

“Yes,” said Vas. “Now I understand you. But can’t two bit players like ourselves nevertheless make our own little plays, on a small stage in the wings, while the famous actors make orotund speeches before the great audience of history? Can’t there be some kind of happiness snatched in the darkness, where the only audience is ourselves?”

“I’m not the snatch-in-the-darkness type,” said Eiadh. “I married stupidly and I knew it almost at once. So did you, I’m afraid. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll jeopardize the future of my children, not to mention my own future, for the sake of some kind of consolation or vengeance. I take what happiness I can in the light, out in the open. Loving my children. You have good children yourself, Vas. Take comfort in them.”

“The love of my children isn’t the love that I hunger for,” he said. He dared to be direct with her because he realized that she saw through all his attempts at clever indirection anyway.

“Vas,” she said kindly. “I have admired you for so long, because you bear everything with such patience. I no longer have any problem knowing which kind of strength, yours or Elemak’s, is the better kind. But part of what I admire is that you are able to bear it all without flinching. Let’s not become like they are. Let’s not stoop low enough that we finally deserve what they’re doing to us.”

Vas was not an unobservant man. He noticed right away that she seemed to be referring to something recent, not ancient history from back in Basilica. She seemed to assume that he already knew something that he did not know. “You will never deserve what Elemak is doing to you,” he said, hoping that it would prompt a certain response.

And it did. “You don’t deserve what Sevet is doing to you, either,” she answered. “You’d think she would have learned her lesson long ago, but some women learn nothing, while others learn everything.”

Vas’s head spun. He had dwelt so long on the memory of the years-ago betrayal with Obring that it hadn’t crossed his mind that Sevet might be taking someone else into her bed. Yet there were many opportunities. When he was out in the fields, taking his turn; when he was standing watch; when he was off those two times with Zdorab, using the ship’s launch to explore and map the surrounding country. Sevet might have-but surely even she would not-not a second time, not after she lost so much, lost her voice. . . .

But then, I wasn’t the one who took her voice from her, was I? That was Kokor, and then we were out of Basilica by the time Sevet’s voice healed. Sevet might know to fear Kokor’s temper, but what has ever taught her to fear mine?

The time has come, Vas realized. This time there would be no patience. This time there would be no Elemak to stay his hand. Sevet and Obring would die, and then he would turn to Elemak and rid Eiadh of the burden of that monstrous husband forever. Then, with all impediments out of the way, then she would turn to the man who had freed her.

Or not. Who really cared whether anyone loved him or approved of him at all? He wasn’t trying to win anyone’s love or admiration except his own. He had been too long without it, and it was time to get it back.

“Hard to believe that she could still be taken in by Obring,” said Vas. “You’d think she would see through him now, when he’s outgrown his boyish charm-as if he ever had any.”

She laughed, but there was a puzzled look on her face. Now, what could that mean?

It meant that it wasn’t Obring. Sevet was being unfaithful, but not with Obring.

Then he remembered what she said before. About how they had something in common. “I mean besides the obvious,” she said. What was the obvious? So obvious that only Vas had missed it. Everyone must know. Everyone.

She must have seen the realization on his face, because it was her turn to look stricken. “Oh, Vas, I thought you knew, I thought that’s why you came here, to get even with them. But I wasn’t angry, you see, because I don’t want him in my bed anyway, so I don’t much care where he puts his sweaty body and I thought ... I don’t know why but I just assumed that you had the same attitude but I see that you don’t, you didn’t know, and I’m so sorry, I. . . .”

He didn’t hear her finish because he got up and left her house. Elemak’s house.

“Don’t do anything foolish, Vas,” she said softly. And then, because she knew perfectly well that there was a very good chance he would do something foolish, she went in search of help, Volemak had to know that there was a quarrel brewing. He would know how to put a stop to it. Eiadh should have done this long ago. Adultery was a terrible thing in their tiny community- Elemak himself had laid down that law in the desert years before. Eiadh had never complained because she honestly was glad not to have to have him close to her, with those angry hands that had broken a helpless innocent being, those hands that had brutalized and terrorized everyone aboard the ship. Better to sleep alone and dream of the only real man she had ever known. A man who once, when he was a boy, had loved her, or at least longed for her. A man who now didn’t so much as look at her with pleasure.

With all her childish longing for Nafai, it had never occurred to her that the reason Vas hadn’t complained about Elemak’s and Sevet’s adultery was because he didn’t know. How could he not know? Were men so much more blind than women? Or did he imagine that just because he might have stopped wanting Sevet, her own sexual desires would naturally just wither away?

It was going to be a mess, and somebody was going to be dead at the end of it, she knew that now, because she had never seen Vas with such a look of blank rage in his face before. She had seen Elemak like that, but Elemak was used to having such feelings and restraining them. Vas had no such practice.

On the way to Volemak’s house, she passed Mebbekew, who was staking out the hide of a goat that he and a couple of diggers had taken while hunting up in the hills this morning. “What’s the hurry?” he asked.

“You might want to come along and help,” she said. “Vas just found out about Sevet’s adultery and I think he might be dangerous.”

From the way Meb’s face went pale, Eiadh knew that Sevet had let more than one farmer plow in her field. “Not you,” said Eiadh. “He doesn’t know about you.”

“Who else?” he asked, baffled.

She laughed at him. “Are all the men as stupid as you and Vas? You all think you own the moon, just because you never see anybody else looking at it.”

Meb smiled. “So Vas is out to kill Elemak,” he said.

“I’m getting Volemak. We’ve got to put a stop to it.”

“Oh, and I’ll be right there to help, you can be sure of it. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

But Mebbekew did not follow her to Volemak’s house. Instead, still holding the heavy mallet in his hands, he tried to think where Vas might go first. The tool shed, no doubt, to get something to do violence with-Vas wasn’t likely to be a bare-hands sort of fighter, not if he had killing on his mind. He knew his limitations. So did Meb. Vas would have something sharp with a long handle. And Meb would have a very large mallet, Vas, being a proud man, would speak to his intended victim, call his name, face him. Meb, having no pride at all, would come up on him from behind. Or lie in wait and take him by ambush. Meb was not ashamed of this. He knew that in an open fight he was no match for a determined enemy. Fighting wasn’t a skill he had worked to acquire. He was meant to be an actor and, if there had been a real God and not just this stupid computer, Meb would still be in Basilica on the stage, making a name for himself and finding new women and new friends every night. Instead he was here in this filthy village living in dirt and covered every day with sweat and dust and mud and insect bites, and now there was a very angry husband and, whether the husband knew it or not, Meb was almost certainly the most recent man to sleep with Vas’s wife.

He will go to Sevet, of course. He’ll go home.

But at Vas’s own house there was no one. Sevet was gone. Off with the women. Oh, yes. Teaching, this was her time of day to teach the children, as if reading mattered anymore. What were they going to read? The latest story written by a rat in a hole? But it was saving Sevet’s life at the moment, so it wasn’t all bad, was it? Sevet was a very grateful lover. And she had acquired some skill during her heyday, so sleeping with her was a welcome relief after Dolya’s clinging, cloying, hungry, needy, selfish, clumsy. . . .

Which was not to say that Meb minded sleeping with Dol whenever she wanted. Meb was still a young man, and now that Elemak wasn’t policing the adultery law anymore, nobody else seemed to catch on except the adulterers themselves. That was the nice thing about having laws enforced only by those who believed in them-they were not likely to suspect that the laws were being broken because breaking them wouldn’t even occur to their innocent little minds.

If Vas couldn’t get to Sevet, and if he didn’t know about Meb, then he’d certainly go for Elemak. That meant he was heading for the ship, where Elemak would be working with the hostage.

On his way there, though, Meb passed Obring’s house and saw that the door stood open, even though Obring would be sleeping late after having kept watch last night and-was it possible? Did Vas harbor resentment against Obring so many years after the fact? Or did Vas imagine that Sevet would ever have slept with Obring again, after that nasty evening when Kokor came in on them? Or was it simply that his wife’s new adultery refreshed the memory of the old?

Even if he was safely asleep, Obring would want to see the fun and Meb wouldn’t mind having another man with him for safety’s sake, even if the man was Obring and therefore unreliable and cowardly. I’m unreliable and cowardly myself, thought Meb, so I can’t very well hold it against him.

Meb stepped into the house, Obring lay on his bed, eyes wide open, hands spread across the wound in his chest, though it was doubtful he had died from that alone. It was the deep slice across his throat that no doubt finished him off. Very neatly done. The wound in the chest could have been from a pick or an axe. Definitely not a hoe. The throat wound made it definite, though, that it was a bladed weapon. One of the scythes. No. An axe. Edge enough to slice the throat, but powerful enough to crush its way into the chest. Poor Obring. Poor me, if Vas decides to take after me. An axe against a mallet? Perhaps I’d better wait until Father decides what to do, let Nafai go in with his magical cloak and give poor Vas a jolt.

What in the world will they do with a murderer?

Meb heard some loud talking far away, near Vole-mak’s house, but he ignored it and headed swiftly into the ship. Vas is in a hurry, and Elemak is waiting. What deck does he have the digger on? Should have paid more attention. Elemak will be glad if I get there in time to save his life. And if I don’t, I might still be able to set up a little ambush for Vas. That’ll solve Father’s problem very nicely, if the murderer turns up pleasantly dead.

Elemak and Fusum were verbally sparring, arguing back and forth, Elemak speaking the digger language, Fusum doing the best he could with the human words. It was part of the deal they had worked out with each other. Fusum would teach Elemak the subtlest nuances of language if, in the end, Fusum also understood whatever it was the humans said. “If you’re not gods,” said Fusum, “then your language isn’t sacred and it’s no sin for me to learn it, right?” And Elemak could only agree.

Fusum had nothing like Elemak’s skill or practice at learning languages, however, and he had spent most of the morning being resentful and sullen about the way Elemak rattled off eloquent sentences while Fusum could only stammer his way through the most rudimentary answers. Every now and then he would erupt in a torrent of arguments in his native language, only to fall silent at Elemak’s superior smile and return to struggling with the human speech. The sounds they made- like skymeat, half their sounds were. Like animals. Or so Fusum said, whenever he gave up and raged for a few moments.

Elemak enjoyed it all. Until the moment that Vas appeared in the open doorway, a blood-soaked axe in his hands. This was not in Elemak’s plans for today. “What have you been doing with that axe?” asked Elemak. The sorry bastard couldn’t have killed Seyet already, could he? She’d be teaching right now-he wouldn’t do it in front of the children, would he? And who told him? After all these months, why did they tell him now?

“I planned to kill you anyway,” said Vas. “Because of how you stopped me from killing Obring and Sevet back all those years ago. I never forgot how you humiliated me, Elemak. But this-sleeping with Sevet. Why didn’t you just screw one of the digger women, if Eiadh wasn’t letting you into her bed? That’s your style, isn’t it, Elemak? Rutting with helpless little barbarian animals?”

Elemak spoke in digger language to Fusum. “I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do to help, is there?”

“Talk so I can understand you!” demanded Vas. “What, haven’t you been studying the diggers’ language like a good boy?” asked Elemak.

Meanwhile, Fusum had figured out how to answer Elemak’s request in human speech. “I’d like to help you but the crazy man has the axe.”

Vas looked at him coldly. “Very good decision, rat boy,” he said. “I don’t much care whether your brains end up on the floor or not.”

“Actually,” said Elemak-again in digger language- “he’ll kill you as soon as he kills me, and then he’ll say that you were the one who hit me with the axe and then he struggled with you and got it away and killed you with it.”

Fusum glared at him and answered, stubbornly, in human speech so Vas could understand him. “The axe is already bloody. He’s already killed somebody outside the ship.”

“Who did you kill, Vas?” asked Elemak. “Anyone I know?”

“Obring,” said Vas. “I took his throat out. After I smashed into his heart.”

“How appropriate. To shatter his heart as he shattered yours.” Elemak laughed. Not because he didn’t believe Vas would kill him. On the contrary, he was quite prepared to believe that Vas would try, and given the fact that Elemak was in a weak position, sitting on the floor with no particular leverage, there was a good chance Vas would fell him with a blow before he could attempt any kind of response.

“It’s funny to you?” asked Vas.

“And sad, of course. Poor Sevet. Once I’m dead, she’ll be back to having to make do with your clumsy occasional efforts at lovemaking.”

“I’ll kill her, too,” said Vas.

“And then who? Everybody else, for instance? You’re doomed, Vas. You should have been more clever. You should have bided your time.”

“I’ve already bided my time long enough.”

“You should have made it look like an accident. Or better yet, you could have made it look as though you tried to save my life. Take us one at a time, not all at once with an axe. And you have Obring’s blood on your clothes. Very clumsy, Vas. They’ll have to kill you for it, you know. Can’t very well let a murderer run loose.”

“You’ll be dead first,” said Vas.

“Oh, definitely. That’ll make you feel much better as they-what, strangle you? Drown you? Maybe Shede-mei has some drug that will carry you off painlessly in your sleep. You can dream of me as you croak out your last breath.”

“I’m not afraid to die,” said Vas.

“That’s too bad,” said Elemak. “Because I am. Do you know why? I’m afraid there might be a life after death. I’m afraid I might have to go on living, only without this very comfortable body. What if I’m reincarnated? What if I come back with a body like . . . yours?”

He said this last with as much loathing as he could muster. It had no effect.

“I’m not going to let you goad me into taking an un-considered move,” said Vas. “I know you’re sitting there imagining ways to take the axe away from me before I can smash your head in with it. But why should I aim for your head? There are your legs, spread out like the limbs of a tree. I can chop through a five-centimeter branch with a single blow-think I can do as well with your ankle?”

“No, I don’t think you can,” said Elemak.

“You think you’re quick enough to stop me? From a sitting position, you arrogant fool?”

“I don’t have to stop you,” said Elemak.

“Good thing,” said Vas. “Because you can’t.”

“But Meb can,” said Elemak, “He’s standing behind you with a very large mallet, and I think he’s planning to drive your head down into your shoulders like a spike.”

Vas didn’t even bother to turn around. “As long as you’re conjuring up demons to frighten me with, why not have it be Nafai? He’s the only real man around here anyway. I’m not afraid of Meb.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Elemak. “Meb is only frightening when he’s behind you with a mallet. Most of the time he’s a worthless little digger turd. But Meb, it won’t work. You can’t drive his head down into his shoulders, not a soft little head like Vas’s. It’ll burst open like a melon first. Splash all over the room.”

“Don’t fantasize about my head,” said Vas. “It’s your legs that are going to go.” He raised the axe above his head.

“If it’s any consolation to you,” said Elemak, “Meb’s been sleeping with Sevet, too.”

Vas hesitated, not swinging the axe, not striking the blow, Elemak went on talking. “Your poor wife is apparently lonely enough to settle for anything that pretends to be male, even Meb, who isn’t brave enough to smash you from behind after all. What’s the mallet for, then, Meb? A cure for rectal itch?”

Meb looked back at him with loathing. Elemak knew that he just hated being taunted and manipulated.

“Oh, Meb,” said Elemak. “Just swing the damn thing and have done.”

So he did. Meb turned out to have a much stronger swing than Elemak had expected. But Elemak was right about the splashing. It got really nasty, especially after Vas hit the floor and Meb kept right on pounding on his head with the mallet, three, four, five times, until the head was pulped and bits of brain and bone were spattered all over the room. Of course, as soon as Meb calmed down and could look at what he had done, he threw up, as if somehow Vas’s head had exploded all by itself and not because he mashed it. But Elemak didn’t much worry about Meb. It was Fusum who fascinated him, as he picked bits of Vas’s brains off his naked body and ate them.

“Don’t get a taste for that, Fusum,” Elemak said in digger language.

“Not much different from peccary brains,” said Fusum. “I already have a taste for those.”

“If you ever harm a human, Fusum, I’ll cut you into tiny pieces.”

“Even Nafai?” asked Fusum, taunting him.

So Fusum had picked up on the conflicts within the human community-even with Nafai up the canyon most of the time, trying to teach the skymeat how to farm.

“Especially Nafai,” said Elemak. “He’s mine.”

Meb had stopped throwing up. “What were you saying? I heard you mention Nafai.”

“Oh, Fusum and I were just saying what a pity it was that the one useful act you will ever perform in your life was wasted on Vas.”

“Wasted?” asked Meb. “I killed my friend to save your life and you call it a waste?”

“I would have stopped him before he touched me,” said Elemak, He didn’t know whether it was true, but he was fairly sure Meb would believe it. “And as for Vas being your friend-I’m not going to weep for you. Not with the smell of Sevet still on you from last night while he was on watch.”

“Shows what you know,” said Meb, “Last night I didn’t have time for Sevet. After all these months of pestering, I finally gave in and let Eiadh make love to-“

Meb didn’t finish his sentence. He found himself pressed against the wall with the axe handle strangling him.

“I know it’s a lie,” said Elemak. “But if I ever thought that it was true, you’d end up praying for me to do for you what you did for Vas. A quick finish. It’d be too good for you, Meb.”

“I was joking, you ass,” said Meb, when he could speak again.

“Don’t waste my time with your apologies,” said Elemak, “Not when we have to explain Vas’s death to the people I can hear coming up the ladderway right now.”

“What’s to explain?” said Meb. “I saved your life.”

“Ah, but why was Vas trying to take it? And why did you so sweetly care?”

“He was trying to kill you because you were humping his wife,” said Meb. “And I cared enough to stop him because you’re my older brother and I love you.”

“Is that your best performance, Meb?” asked Eiadh as she strode down the corridor toward them. “Lucky for you that we left Basilica before you could humiliate yourself by trying to act in public.” Volemak, Oykib, and Padarok came to the door with her, all carrying tools that would have made pretty convincing weapons if they hadn’t been in the hands of such gentle, peace-loving souls. “What’s all this mess?” asked Eiadh. “Where’s Vas?” Then she saw the body on the floor, the ruined head still crookedly connected to the shoulders. She recoiled. “What have you done?” she whispered to Elemak.

“Actually, I did it,” said Meb. “Just as he was about to take Elemak’s ankle off.”

But Eiadh paid no attention to Meb. She looked Elemak coldly in the eye. “This man is dead because you couldn’t live a month without getting same woman into bed.”

Elemak smiled at her. “Not true. As long as I’ve been married to you, my love, my bed has never had a woman in it.”

“You really are evil,” said Eiadh. “You really do love destroying things. And not even great evil, not even that spectacular, world-wrecking kind of evil that epics are written about. No, what’s in your heart is just a whiny little wormlike evil.”

“Say your worst,” said Elemak. “I know you’re really just glad I’m still alive.”

“The second most terrible thing I ever did in my life,” said Eiadh, “was letting you be the father of my poor, innocent children.”

“And the worst thing?” said Elemak. “Go ahead and say it-I’m brave, I’m tough. I’ve got Vas’s blood and brains all over me, I can take anything.”

Eiadh smiled at him, for she knew she was about to say the most terrible thing he could ever hear. “The worst thing I ever did was not to marry Nafai when I realized he was in love with me back in Rasa’s house. I knew my mistake long before I actually married you, Elemak. I only went ahead and married you in order to stay close to Nafai. I prayed that all my sons would grow up to be Hke him, not you. And every time you made love to me, I always pretended it was him. It was all I could do to keep from crying out his name.”

“Enough of this,” said Volernak. “Terrible things have happened here today, and you’re wasting our time with a domestic squabble.”

Elemak obediently dropped the discussion and submitted to Volemak’s questioning. But he heard what Eiadh had said to him. He heard, and he would remember.

It was Oykib who got the assignment of traveling up the canyon to tell about the killings. Shedemei could have used the ship’s computers to tell Issib through the Index, but Volemak insisted that it had to be done in person. The first thought, then, was to send Chveya to tell her parents, but she was almost ready to be delivered of her firstborn child, and so her husband was chosen instead. He was not grateful. “I don’t like leaving here right now,” he said. “Not with violence in the air.”

“I think the killing is over,” said Volemak.

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Be practical,” said Zdorab. “If Elemak did nothing when he had Obring and Vas to call upon, will he do anything now, when he has only Meb as a grown man to stand beside him? The killing is over.”

“The killing will never be over,” interrupted Rasa, “if the adultery continues and goes unpunished.”

“I would say,” said Volemak, “that the penalty for adultery has been clearly demonstrated.”

“I would say it hasn’t,” said Rasa. “I would say that your two oldest sons are adulterers by the words of their own mouths, and that my two daughters stand condemned by the same testimony.”

“What would you have me do?” asked Volemak. “Put them to death? Of the sixteen original adults of our expedition, shall we end with six of them dead?”

“Which is worse, Volemak? Six dead now, and the law affirmed? Or two dead, and the law with them?”

“You’re a hard one, Mother,” said Oykib. “The death penalty for adultery was a measure for the desert, not for here.”

“Because there are trees and streams, adultery is less fatal for our community?” asked Rasa. “I thought I raised you to reason better than that, Oykib.”

“Enough of this discussion,” said Volemak. “Oykib must travel up the canyon to break the news.”

“I think he should take Eiadh with him,” said Rasa.

The others looked at her as if she were insane. “After what she said to Elemak?” asked Oykib. “Do you want to sign her death warrant?”

“Do you think that leaving her down here is any better?” asked Rasa.

“Yes,” said Volemak. “For her to go up where Nafai is would be seen by Elemak as proof of some kind of liaison between them, when in fact there has never been any such thing. Rasa, are you determined to make things worse?”

Rasa was furious, “I am determined to make things better five years from now, while you seem determined to make things better for the moment and let the future go hang.” She stormed out of the library.

Volemak sighed. “Every leader has his critics,” he said. “Usually, though, they don’t have to go home to them at night.”

“She was right in everything she said,” said She-demei. “But you were also right in everything you decided.”

Volemak laughed grimly. “Sometimes, Shedya, there is no middle way.”

“I’m not taking a middle way. You were right that at this moment you can’t decide any other way than the way you have decided. But she was right about the consequences. Sevet and Kokor will go on sleeping with Elemak and Mebbekew and, for all we know, every randy male digger who passes by their houses. Elemak and Mebbekew will go on betraying their wives and then hating the very women they’re harming.”

“And what am I supposed to be able to do about that?” demanded Volemak.

“Nothing,” said Shedemei. “Nothing except watch our social order disintegrate.”

“Sometimes you’re too much the scientist, Aunt Shedya,” said Oykib.

“Not possible,” said Shedemei. “And you forget, my own children have to live in the new social order we’ve created here. When you think about it, this really marks the moment of Elemak’s triumph over his father. Despite the oath, despite Elemak’s many defeats, he has finally succeeded in undoing all his father’s works. This is Elemak’s type of society now, because the rest of us haven’t the coldness of heart to uphold the law and put him to death.”

“That’s right,” said Volemak. “The rest of us haven’t the coldness of heart. Do you?”

“No,” said Shedemei immediately. “As I said, your decisions are the only ones that can be made, disastrous as they are. Now let’s let Oykib be on his way while the rest of you prepare the bodies for burning. As for me, I have a very messy room to clean up.”

Oykib stood up to leave. “I’ll go up the mountain, but I don’t like leaving Chveya at a time like this.”

“I’ll be all right,” Chveya murmured.

“And what worries me has nothing to do with Elemak and Mebbekew and adultery and all that,” said Oykib.

“Oh, what’s your concern, then?” asked Volemak. “I’m always happy to learn of something new to keep me awake at night.”

“Fusum saw Vas die.”

“We’ve never pretended to be immortal,” Volemak said.

Oykib shook his head. “Fusum saw Vas die. Someday we’ll all agree that that was the worst thing about today’s events.”

He went home long enough to pack up some hard-crusted bread for the journey. The way up the canyon was a path, now, and was becoming more of a road as they cut out underbrush and used picks and spades to smooth the roughest places. So it was only two hours to the saddle at the top of the canyon, and then another hour through the forest to the village.

It had been transformed in the past few months, as Nafai and the others worked with the angels to teach them ways to make their lives better. Where the angels had known the location of every useful plant within twenty kilometers of their village, they now had felled enough trees to make a field where yams and manioc, melons and maize could thrive in open sunlight. Where the angels had kept herbivores from their protected plants and predators from their houses by building traps along every path and track at the perimeter of their territory, they now had a fence around their fields, and their turkeys and goats were corralled at night. Already the angels could grow food enough to feed twice their present population, and most of the surplus could be stored.

But the agricultural revolution was not the only one. The angels seemed to want to emulate the humans in every way. Many of them now had built houses on the ground, the way the humans did, even though they hadn’t the strength to build as sturdily and the first strong wind would tear the houses away. They knew this, too, and during bad weather continued to sleep hanging from branches in the trees. But it was important to them that they have a house in the human style, and Nafai had long since given up trying to persuade them of the uselessness of it.

Oykib found Nyef and Hushidh working with the angel toolmakers.

“What’s wrong?” Hushidh said instantly. “Who is dead?”

“How did you know?” asked Oykib.

“Your face,” she said. “Your fear to speak to us.”

“Is it Father?” asked Nafai, And that was the most pertinent question-when Volemak died, everything would change.

“Not Father,” said Oykib. “Vas killed Obring- vengeance for what happened between him and Sevet back in Basilica, apparently. And when he went to kill Elemak for more current betrayals, Meb was able to slip up behind him and kill him.”

“Elemak didn’t do any killing?”

“He might have, but he didn’t get the chance,” said Oykib. “Another thing. Fusum was watching when Mebbekew killed Vas. It happened right in front of him. With the mallet Meb had been using to stake out hides.”

“And how did Vas kill Obring?”

“An axe to the chest and then through the throat,” said Oykib. “Does it matter how?”

“It matters what the diggers have learned about how to kill us,” said Nafai.

Oykib smiled grimly. “My own thoughts exactly.”

“That’s not all you came to tell us, though, is it,” said Hushidh.

“No,” said Oykib. And then he told them what Eiadh had said to Elemak, taunting him that she had been in love with Nafai all through her marriage to Elemak, that she wanted her sons to grow up to be like Nafai.

“Why didn’t she save time and just slit my throat?” said Nafai.

“And then her own,” said Hushidh. “As far as Elemak is concerned, the two of you might as well have committed adultery. And no one hates other people’s adultery like an adulterer.”

“Funny, isn’t it,” said Nafai, “how few years it took for us to change from the way it was at Basilica. Back there, Eiadh would simply not have renewed Elemak, and Sevet and Kokor would be on their sixth or tenth husbands since then, and nobody would have died for it,”

“Do you think that it was more civilized?” asked Hushidh. “The same rages were just beneath the surface, the same hunger for loyalty from a husband or wife. Obring didn’t die for something he did in the wild. He died for what he did back there in the city.”

“But it wasn’t in the city that he died,” said Nafai. “Never mind. If the diggers know that humans can be killed, we’d better make sure we tell the story to the angels as well. Fortunately I’ve never had to play god up here, so it’ll come to them as less of a shock. We’ll come down the mountain for the fimeral, of course. And we’ll bring some angels with us. They need to see a human body going into the flames.”

“Maybe that’s the wrong lesson to teach them,” said Hushidh.

“Why?” asked Nafai. “Do you think some angels are secretly wishing to slaughter all the humans?”

“Not at all,” said Hushidh. “But I think some angels are counting on us to keep the diggers from coming up against them and stealing their infants to eat them and make pedestals out of their bones. It won’t encourage them to see that we can be broken and killed.”

“Especially not the way Vas died,” said Oykib. Whereupon they insisted that he describe how it happened, and then clearly wished that he had not.

“Just as well to have the angels know our weakness,” said Nafai. “It’s their own strength they have to trust in, that and the care and wisdom of the Keeper of Earth.”

“The Keeper?” asked Oykib. “They know about him?”

“Not by that name, not till we taught them,” said Nafai. “But there have always been dreamers among them. And Luet has found several who respond well to the trances that she used as Waterseer in Basilica. The Keeper speaks to them. And I’m working on trying to find weapons they can use that will enable them to stand against the diggers, if it ever comes to war.”

“Don’t you think we’ll be able to keep them at peace with each other?” asked Oykib.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to keep at peace with ourselves,” said Nafai. “We have the first two deaths as evidence.”

“Is it very awful of me,” said Hushidh, “that I don’t think I’m going to miss Obring at all?”

“It would be more surprising if you did,” said Nafai. “But Vas wanted to be a good man, I think.”

Oykib scoffed. “If he had wanted to be, he would have, Nafai. People are what they want to be.”

“What an uncharitable view,” said Hushidh. “Why, you’d think, from the way you talk, that people were responsible for their own behavior.”

“And they’re not?” asked Oykib.

“Haven’t you ever seen a three-year-old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him, ‘Look what you made me do!’ That’s the moral universe that Vas and Obring always lived in, and Sevet and Kokor, too.”

At the funeral, Kokor kept watching Sevet furtively, matching her tear for tear and sigh for sigh. I’m not going to let the old bitch get any more mileage out of widowhood than me, thought Kokon After all, it was her husband who killed mine. She drove him to it, that’s what, because she was so clumsy she got found out. I slept with Elemak even back before the voyage to Earth, and nobody ever knew. Sevet has a habit of getting caught in her little liaisons. Of course, maybe she wants to. Maybe that’s how she gets her kicks, watching people go into frenzies of misery and rage over what she did and who she did it with.

It certainly worked on me, back in Basilica. She certainly got me angry, didn’t she? And then got to play the victim for years and years, never singing again even though her voice came back just fine within the first year. Always holding her musical silence over my head when Mother would look at her and reminisce about how she once sang the “Love Dream of Sogliadatai” or the “Death of the Poisoned Sparrow.”

The funeral pyres were set alight, and the angels around them started making the most awful whining sort of sound. Nasty little creatures. What did they know of grief?

But their singing-if that’s what it was-gave Kokor an idea, and she acted on it at once. The “Death of the Poisoned Sparrow” had been Sevet’s signature song, and it would fit beautifully right at this moment, even though it was not actually about a funeral, but rather about the end of a beautiful but impossible love affair. And one of the best arrangements of the song had been a duet between Sevet and a flute. Kokor had listened to it over and over, had coveted the song with all her heart, but had never dared to sing it in public for the obvious reason that it would make it look as though she envied her sister and was trying to compete with her. Still, she knew every note of it. And, as she thought about it for a moment, she realized that she also remembered every note of the flute part.

So that is what she began to sing, wordlessly, letting her voice rise and soar in the notes of the flute. She couldn’t sing it quite as high as the flute had played, of course, but then, Sevet no doubt couldn’t sing as high as she had sung back when she was a girl, especially without practice. Once Kokor started singing, she did not dare even steal a glance at Sevet, or it would look like she was trying to get Sevet to do something instead of simply expressing the heartbreak she felt as she watched her husband’s body going up in flame.

She sang the entire flute part and Sevet didn’t join in. But Kokor could also tell from the stillness of the others-even the angels fell silent to hear her-that she had chosen to do the right thing this time, that for once the others approved of and even appreciated her. And when she began the flute part again at the beginning, Sevet’s voice came out at last, singing the melody. Now the strangeness of the melody Kokor had sung began to make sense as harmony to Sevet’s voice, and the words Sevet sang brought tears to people’s eyes as the death of such worthless men as Obring and Vas never would have. People cried when she sang it in theaters, when nobody had died-how could they help but sob their little hearts out here, with the smell of cooking meat in their nostrils and Obring’s and Vas’s littlest children crying their poor little eyes out because their papas were such worthless murdering fornicating pieces of digger poo. Kokor loved the way her voice sounded with Sevet’s. For Sevet’s had changed, had grown richer and more mature, but Kokor’s had not, had retained the flutelike simplicity and purity of youth. Kokor had no need to try to sound like Sevet now, nor Sevet to resent the similarity between them. They made different sounds, but they could be beautiful together nonetheless.

When the song ended, the appropriate action was obvious, and Sevet did not fail her. They both extended their arms at once, and weeping copiously they fell into each other’s embrace. Kokor enjoyed hearing the collective sigh of the watching humans. The sisters, reconciled at last! She could imagine Mother reaching down and squeezing Volemak’s hand, and Volemak whispering to her later, If only my sons could make peace as your daughters have.

While they clung to each other in their embrace of grief and forgiveness, Sevet whispered in Kokor’s ear. “I’m going to be Elemak’s mistress now, little sister, so don’t try to stop me,”

To which Kokor whispered in reply, “So am I. He’s cocksman enough for the two of us, don’t you think?”

“Share and share alike?” murmured Sevet.

“I’ll bet I bear him a baby before you do,” whispered Kokor. Of course she had no intention of bearing him a child at all, but it would be lovely if Sevet did, ruining her thick body even more than having three children already had. Let the poor bitch think we’re competing to give birth to Elya’s bastards-I’ll just let her “win” and keep the real victory, which is my youthful body despite having let Obring sire five babies on me. If all five were really his.

They broke the embrace and pulled apart a little.

“Oh, Kokor,” said Sevet. “My sister.” Then she burst into tears again.

Damn. That would be hard to top.

Kokor reached out and took a tear from Sevct’s cheek, then held it up as a glistening patch of wetness on her fingertip. “I will never cause you to shed another one of these, my beloved Sevya.”

The sigh from the others was all the applause Kokor needed. I win again, Sevet. You’re simply no match for me.

Fusum learned two things from the killing of Obring and Vas.

First, he learned that the humans were, in fact, mortal, and could be killed if enough force were applied using a sufficient weapon in the right way. He had no immediate plans to use this information, but he intended to devote a great deal of thought to it over the months and years to come.

Second, he learned that killing was a powerful device that should not be wasted. You must kill the right person, and at the right time, and always in order to achieve an important purpose. That was why, when Fusum was finally judged to be rehabilitated and returned to his people, he made it a point to become a friend and companion to Nen. As the eldest and most gifted son of Emeezem and Mufruzhuuzh, the deep mother and the war king, Nen was the bright golden hope of the next generation. He spoke the human language almost as fluently as Fusum himself, having learned it through close association with Oykib, and when Emeezem and Mufruzhuuzh coerced Fusum’s own father, the blood king Shosseemem, to join them in declaring a ban on the kidnapping and eating of skymeat infants, it was Nen who came forward and swept away the pedestal of bones on which the Untouched God had rested. It was Nen who cried out, “Let friendship everlasting stand between our people and the people of the sky.” Oh, Fusum had cheered along with everyone else that day. And he worked hard to win a place at Nen’s side, as his most trusted friend.

Then one day they were out hunting together, carrying the traditional stone-tipped spear in one hand, knotty club in the other. They were stalking a peccary through the undergrowth, near enough to hear it grunting now and then, when suddenly Fusum saw his opportunity. A panther, too, was stalking the peccary, but as everyone knew, panthers were only too happy to make a meal of whatever meat was at hand. It had to be living meat, though, so when Fusum struck, he didn’t strike hard enough to kill-or at least he hoped not. Nen dropped like a rock, but then almost immediately lifted himself up on his elbows, moaning. Fusum didn’t even need to throw a stone to attract the panther’s attention. It leapt on Nen and tore his throat out in a moment. Then Fusum charged, driving his spear into the panther’s side under the ribs, finding its heart immediately. I am good at this, thought Fusum. Then he clubbed the panther in the head, over and over, so that no one would think to look for traces of Nen’s blood and hair and scent on the club.

Minutes later, he came staggering and weeping into the digger city, crying out his grief at the death of his friend Nen, blaming himself for having failed the golden one, the beautiful one. “No man ever had a worse friend than me!” he cried. “Kill me, I beg you! I don’t want to live with Ncn’s death on my hands.” But when they found the scene, the men of the city cleared Fusum of any culpability, and the story of his great grief at the death of his beloved friend swept through the city. Some of Nen’s glory thus lingered with Fusum, and many began to look to him as the hope of the future, now that Nen was gone.

FOURTEEN - WORDS

Nafai wasn’t sure whether the dream came from the peeper, the Oversoul, or his own concerns. Perhaps it was amply the fact that he realized that in all their teaching of the angels and the diggers, in all their teaching of their own children, the one thing they couldn’t give them was a compelling reason to learn how to read and write.

What was it good for? Did it make the crops grow better? Did it keep the flocks in their pens at night? Did it ward off predators? Did it keep children from getting sick? When he talked to Luet about it, she didn’t seem worried. “Nyef, we’re not recreating Basilica here. We can’t. The next generation is going to lack so many things. We have to teach them the herbs that can heal infections or cure different diseases. We have to teach them the principles of sanitation, so they don’t foul their own water supply. We have to-“ “We have to keep them human.” “It isn’t writing that makes us human.” “Isn’t it?” asked Nafai. “Then what is it?”

“The diggers and angels are sentient. They’re people. And they don’t read and write.”

It was unanswerable, what she said, and the way she said it made it clear she didn’t think it a problem worth worrying about. Yet hadn’t they taught their own children how to read and write? Hadn’t they risked destruction on the journey, teaching them how to use the computers, letting them pore over millions of volumes of human learning and history and it would all be extinguished in the next generation.

And the next generation was already here. In the five years since landfall, Chveya’s and Oykib’s generation had all started families. Their children were growing up and when they turned six or seven or eight would there even be a school for them? No, they would set to work learning the skills of survival. Side by side with diggers and angels in the fields, out gathering in the forest, building fences and walls, gleaning and weeding, planting and harvesting, tanning hides and tooling leather, carding wool and spinning it into yarn-where in all this activity was there a moment when they needed to read something? On the ship they had been preparing for a new life, learning in advance what they would need to know for subsistence in a new world. Now they were in that world, and the new generation learned from the adults, not from books.

And that was fine. No harm was done. The things that mattered for survival were taught. What else was needed?

Yet Nafai couldn’t shake his uneasiness about it. In all the forty million years of history on Harmony, human beings could read and write. Languages drifted and changed over centuries and across kilometers. But there was writing. The past could be recovered. Learned from. It was writing that allowed a community to hold its memory outside the individuals who happened to be alive and present at the moment.

How long till I’m forgotten, I and Luet and Father and Mother and all of us?

Then he laughed at himself for the vanity of wanting people to go to the trouble of reading and writing, just so they could remember that he had once lived. In ten generations it wouldn’t matter at all.

It was in the beginning of the sixth year that he had the dream. He saw a man leading a great nation of angels and humans, with farms spreading on either side of a great river, kilometer after kilometer, as for as the eye could see. Angels flew here and there, and goats and dogs drew carts and sledges along roads. Boats trafficked up and down the river, some of them with diggers, some with angels as their crew. And here and there, in towers rising high above the tallest trees, watchmen kept the perimeter in view, so that no enemy could take them unaware.

The man who led this great nation was weary and afraid. Enemies were coming to beset them on every side, and within the nation factions threatened to tear apart the fabric of the community. Towns that had once been independent forgot that in those days they had also been hungry. People whose ancestors had once been rulers forgot that those ancestors had also been killed by enemies and their people only survived at all because they came under the protection of this great nation. People who longed for wealth were getting it by any means possible, plotting and cheating, bullying and sometimes even killing to get rivals out of the way. It was a beautiful land, but the struggle to keep it so seemed harder every year and the man despaired.

In his loneliness and fear, he went into his small house and opened a box he kept hidden inside a jar of dried corn. Inside the box he found a thick pile of metal sheets, bound together on one side with metal rings. It was a book, Nafai realized, for language had been inscribed in the metal, and the man opened it and began to turn the pages.

Without understanding how, Nafai knew what the words contained, what the man was seeing in his mind’s eye as he read. The man was reading the story of Volemak seeing a pillar of fire on a rock in the desert and coming home to Basilica to give warning that the city was going to be destroyed. The story of Nafai and his brothers going back to the city to fetch the Index. The man saw Nafai standing over the dead body of Gaballufix and he nodded. Sometimes those who care for a whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when the people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won’t shrink from it, he’ll do it with his own hand and let k be known what he does.

From me he learned this, thought Nafai, and then he realized that he was the one who made the book and wrote in it the story of his life, of the life and acts of all the people in this community, their evil deeds and their heroic ones, their times of doubt and their astonishing achievements. And this man, this leader, this king, he looked into the book and found stories in it, tales that made clear to him what he must do, wisdom that stiffened his resolve, love that taught him compassion, hopes that led to noble actions even when the hopes themselves were unfulfilled.

Nafai awoke and thought, This dream was so clear, it must have come from the Oversoul. Or perhaps the Keeper of Earth.

And then he thought, This dream so exactly fits my own desire to keep reading and writing alive among this people that it could just as easily have crane out of my own longings.

But then, where did his longings come from? Why did he want so much to preserve written language among his descendants? Couldn’t those very desires have come from the Keeper?

No, he thought. Those desires came from my memory of standing over the corpse of Gaballufix. I killed him in order to get the Index from him. And what was the Index for? It was my access-our access-to the vast store of learning in the star-ship that brought us here. It was the key to all that the Oversold knew. What would it have meant to us if none of us could read and write? To an illiterate people, the Index would be worthless and there-fore no man should have had to die so Nafai could get it. I dream the dream that justifies my own actions to myself.

Yet even as he dismissed the dream, he knew that he would act on it.

Explaining nothing, he took his leave from Volemak, from Luet, and took the ship’s launch out to where the survey maps showed that gold could be found. It was a rich vein, one brought to the surface of the earth through the great foldings and upheavals that had taken place in the last forty million years. Nafai was armed with the metal tools from the ship’s store, and in two days of solitary labor he had several pounds of solid gold taken from the exposed vein in the mountainside. He spent a day refining it. Then he pounded it, unalloyed, into flat, smooth sheets, using the imperturbable metal surface of the launch as his anvil. The metal was very thin, but piled together it was also very heavy. It took him three days to make the sheets of gold, and during that time he only occasionally paused to gather the most obvious food that came easily to hand. He was hungry, but the work he was doing mattered more to him than food.

He found, in his first experiments, that the sweeping curves of the alphabet that had been used for so many millennia on Harmony simply did not work well when pressed by hand into the gold. He had to find squarer forms for the letters and yet still keep them different from each other. Also, some of the spellings were too complex and used too many letters to represent the sounds. So he changed them, inventing five new letters to represent sounds that had previously required two letters each. The result was a definite compression of the written language, and as he wrote, he compressed it even more, using only a couple of letters to stand for the most common words. How do I dare to change the language like this? he asked himself. Who in the world could understand this?

Obviously, the only people who could read it easily would be people that he taught to read and write, and so they would know what his symbols meant. Perhaps just as important, though, anyone who had learned to read the script he used for pressing language into the gold would easily decode most of the letters used in the language of Harmony-the language of the ship’s computer library. At least until the language changed, he would not have cut his descendants off from their literary heritage, if ever the chance came for them to recover it.

Gold. How appropriate, for such a treasure as he hoped this book would be. But it wasn’t for the value of the gold as a medium of exchange that he chose it. Rather he used it for the same reasons that gold had been used for coinage in most cultures through most of human history. It was soft. It could be shaped. Yet it was not so soft that it couldn’t hold its shape. And it didn’t corrode or corrupt, tarnish or degrade in any way. Long after Nafai was dead, the letters would still exist on the pages of his metal book.

He put the gold leaves into the launch, along with all the leftover gold, and flew home. When he returned the launch to the ship, he explained nothing about where he had gone or what he had done. He didn’t mean to deceive anyone, and it wasn’t that he had no trust in Father or Mother, in Luet or anyone else. It’s just that he felt shy about telling anyone. They would think it was silly of him.

No, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all, he knew. As he sat there working by lamplight, the wick flickering as it floated on the melted fat in the clay cup, he could feel the power in what he was doing. I am projecting myself and my view of all that has happened to us into the future. Someday the only version of these events that anyone will know will be the one I wrote. Our descendants will see us through my eyes and no other. So it is I who will live in their memories. I who will whisper in the ear of that great leader-if he ever exists, if this book survives, if there is really anything of wisdom in it.

It is the writing on these gold pages that makes me immortal. When everyone else is dead, I will be alive and shining. That’s why I keep this secret. That’s why I hold it for myself. It’s a heartless, egotistical thing for me to do.

<No it isn’t.>

I know my own heart. I’m not ashamed to admit that my motives are impure.

<It’s a generous thing you’re doing. Giving your children of ten and twenty generations from now a knowledge of their past. A knowledge of why humans and diggers and angels dwell together in this place.>

What if Elemak were writing this book? It would be a different thing entirely, wouldn’t it?

<It would be filled with lies.>

A storyteller can’t help but distort every tale he tells. Without even knowing it, I’m also lying by giving events the shape that makes sense to me. Anyone eke would write it differently. My way isn’t necessarily the best.

<What you are creating will be treated as a sacred object. A token of authority, passed down from generation to generation. Like the Index. It lasted forty million years.>

Nafai laughed silently, careful not to waken Luet or their last three little ones, born since they came up the canyon to live here with the angels, or the twins, who slept in the loft, dreaming of new pranks to play and accidents to stumble into in order to cause their parents to live in perpetual terror.

<You laugh, but you know that I’m telling you the truth.>

So, Oversoul, my dear old friend, was it you that sent me my dream?

<No.>

The Keeper, then?

<You know that I don’t know what the Keeper does and doesn’t do.>

So it could be just the private fancy of a man who is reaching middle age and feels his future death breathing down his neck.

<And if it is nothing more than that, does that change the fact that it’s a wise thing to do? A great gift to give to the future?>

I’ll have to teach somebody to read my script. I’ll have to give it to somebody to pass along into the future.

<You’ll find someone. Perhaps one who’s little now. It will be clear to you who should have the book, when the time comes.>

I’m telling everything. If they read this, my children will say, Why didn’t he just shut up? Why didn’t he ever leave well enough alone? My mistakes will be out in the open and they’ll despise me.

<What if they do? You’ll be dead.>

And if Elemak ever reads this, he’ll kill me and destroy the book. You know that.

<I’d suggest that you not show it to him.>

Or anyone. The hours I spend on this-are they wasted?

<Are they?>

Nafai had no answer. Except that he kept on writing. Writing and writing, his script getting ever tinier and more compact, fitting more and more words onto the pages. His tale getting more and more spare.

What did he write? At first it was a very personal story, an account as best he remembered it of ail their days in Basilica, of the journey through the desert, of the finding of the starport at Vusadka. But when the story reached Earth, it became far more general. The things they had learned about diggers and angels were set down in the order in which they discovered them or figured them out. The results of Zdorab’s journeys in the ship’s launch, mapping and bringing back plant and animal samples for Shedemei to study. The culture of the angels and diggers, and the way they responded to the cultural innovations the humans brought to them. The political machinations as the digger and angel communities struggled to deal with the destruction of their gods and the shattering of their equilibrium.

For the old gods were being destroyed. One cannot live with gods and still believe in diem, Nafai decided. And even though after the early times of crisis Nafai had explained to them all that he and Volemak had never been gods, that their powers were all the result of technology and learning, that not a one of them had the power to duplicate even the least of the complicated machines in the starship-even though he explained this, he could sense that many resented knowing it. Emeezem most of all. When he told her that as for as he could tell the clay figure that she had worshipped and treasured almost her entire life was just a remarkably fine sculpture by a talented angel named Kiti, she didn’t thank him. She acted as if he had slapped her face. “Should I break the statue then?” she demanded bitterly.

“Break something as finely wrought as that?” asked Nafai. “Break something that helped make you into the noble ruler that you are?”

But she was not to be mollified with praise; it sounded like flattery to her now, even though it was truthful and sincere. Nafai’s rejection of her worship was the cruelest blow. He could see her wither up; even though she lived on and continued to lead her people with wisdom and firmness, the heart had gone out of her. It was not just faith but also hope that she had tost.

The angels had it easier. Since Elemak’s rage had been their first exposure to humans, it was a relief to them to learn that none of them were gods. But the humans knew so many secrets and their wisdom, put to work for the angels, saved so many lives and improved everyone’s health so much that there was still an element of worship in their relationship, and therefore a bit-or perhaps a lot-of disappointment and disillusion when some human failed at a task, gave bad advice, or predicted an outcome and was proven wrong.

As he was writing about all of this, Nafai realized that what the people needed, diggers and angels and humans alike, was someone outside themselves in whom their hopes of wisdom and lightness could be invested. They had to begin to think of the Keeper of Earth as the only one who would never be wrong.

Not that Nafai was altogether sure of this himself. He never heard the voice of the Keeper with the kind of clarity with which the Oversoul spoke to him. In fact he was never quite sure whether he heard the voice or saw the dreams of the Keeper of Earth at all. Nor did he know what the Keeper might be. That he was real enough was obvious-there was no other explanation of the statue whose face looked exactly like Nafai, carved back when Nafai was just getting on the starship to come to Earth. Nor was there any other explanation of the dreams they had back on Harmony, when so many of them saw diggers and angels when the Oversoul himself had no notion that these were the creatures that populated Earth. Yet the dreams were always ambiguous, and tinged with the dreamer’s own hopes and fears and memories, so that it was never certain where the Keeper’s message left off and self-deception began.

Yet, inadequate as Nafai’s understanding of the Keeper of Earth might be, he knew that belief in the Keeper would fulfill a vital social function. The Keeper would be the highest authority, the one who was never wrong, the repository of Truth. When it became clear that even the wisest of humans knew very little, really; when it became plain that the most marvelous of miracles was in feet the result of working with a machine or exploiting a bit of ordinary knowledge; then there would still be no disillusionment because, after all, everyone knew that humans, angels, and diggers were all equal in the eyes of the Keeper of Earth, and all equally ignorant and weak and unwise compared to him.

Nafai explained these thoughts to Luet and she agreed. She began teaching the angel women about the Keeper of Earth, and adapting their ancient lore about various gods into a coherent story that replaced all the good gods with various aspects of the Keeper. With the angel men, Nafai was a bit more brutal, sweeping all the old gods away and keeping only a few of their ancient legends. Not that the old legends would die, of course-but he wanted them to start with a pure core of knowledge about the Keeper, even though the knowledge was really very small.

Then Nafai and Luet took Oykib and Chveya into their confidence, and soon Oykib was teaching the digger men and Chveya the digger women about the Keeper of Earth. They, too, adapted what the people already believed; they, too, were candid about how Kttle they personally knew about the Keeper. But they did know this much: The Keeper wanted humans, diggers, and angels to live together in peace.

The trouble was that as the old religion faded, as fewer and fewer diggers took part in the annual raid to steal statues from the mating angels, the diggers’ birthrate also seemed to fall off-even as the angels prospered, their population blooming at an almost alarming rate. Whispers began among the diggers that the new religion of the Keeper of Earth was really part of a conspiracy to destroy the diggers so that angels and humans could divide the world between them. Not that many people believed these tales, but enough did that it was a worry. There were those who would exploit such rumors. And, in fact, when Nafai began to hear that it wasn’t all the humans but rather just Nafai and those who followed him who were plotting to destroy the diggers, he knew that someone was already seeking to turn these fears to his advantage.

In the meantime, though, the digger birthrate continued falling off, even though the nutrition kvels were higher and higher all the time. And the angels had to expand constantly, burning more patches of forest to put more land under cultivation. All those twins, and none of them getting murdered now in infancy; all those healthy adults, and none of them getting culled by the marauding diggers.

They had been on Earth for twelve years when She-demei called the adult humans together for a meeting. She had finally solved the mysteries, she said. But now there were some new mysteries, and some decisions to be made.

“We’ve been meddling,” said Shcdemei. “As you’re all aware, the felling birthrate among the diggers is causing some serious worries among them.”

“We’re worried too,” said Volcmak.

“Yes, well, now I know why it’s happening. We did it. We’re doing it.”

They waited. Finally Mebbekew said, “I didn’t know you had such a flair for the dramatic, Shedya. How long do we wait for the other shoe to drop?”

“This is only the first shoe,” she said. “The other shoe comes after.” There was some nervous laughter. “The problem is, you see, that we’ve stopped them from believing in their gods. They aren’t worshipping anymore. They aren’t even stealing fresh statues from the angels. And that’s why they aren’t having any babies.”

“You’re telling us,” said Elemak, laughing, “that their religion is true?”

“In a word, yes,” said Shedemei. “We have a dozen years’ worth of close observation of the local digger and angel tribes. Zdorab and I have also made some sampling visits to other digger and angel settlements, and we feel reasonably confident that we have uncovered a universal pattern. For one thing, there’s no such thing as an angel village without a digger city nearby, nor a digger city without an angel village within a few hours’ walk. This is not an accident. The diggers can’t survive without the angels. Specifically, the diggers can’t reproduce without worshipping the statues that the angel males create as part of their mating ritual.”

“Do I get the impression that the cause is biological rather than theological?” asked Rasa.

“Of course, though it’s hard to look at little clay statues and see a biological mechanism,” said Shedemei. “It was Zdorab who first pointed out to me that what matters, biologically, may not be the artistry involved in the creation of the statues. It’s the spit. The angel men take the clay into their mouths and mix a wet mud out of it, which they use to start the wad that becomes the statue. Every now and then they take another mouthful of mud and wet it. The saliva flows very freely.”

The listeners’ minds were working rapidly, trying to put things together. “You mean diggers need to rub angel spit on their bodies in order to mate?” asked Dza.

“Not quite,” said Shedemei. “The first time we examined the bodies of angels and diggers, we found a little organ-a gland, actually-near the scrotum. It was identical in both species, even though they have no common ancestor with a similar organ. Very puzzling, of course. But we now know the function of the organ. It continuously secrets tiny amounts of a hormone that suppresses the production of sperm. No, let me be clear. It completely shuts down the production of sperm. While the organ is functioning, males are completely, absolutely sterile.”

“What a useful little organ,” murmured Oykib. Then, louder, “Why would that evolve?”

“It gets worse,” said Zdorab.

“There’s a tiny flatworm, a microscopic one, that Hves in all the freshwater rivers of this massif. During the rainy season, when the rivers are in flood, this flatworm burrows into beds of firm clay and lays millions of tiny eggs. They don’t develop as long as they remain wet. But when the dry season comes and the water subsides, the eggs develop, forming hard littk coatings that hold in what moisture they have. The embryos are ready to hatch at any time. But they can’t, because they can’t get rid of their own confining shells. So they hibernate, living off their yolks. They use the yolks so slowly that they can live for twenty or thirty years like that. The next rainy season doesn’t cause them to hatch, because water doesn’t dissolve the shells. Guess what dissolves them.”

“Angel spit,” said Oykib.

“Amazing boy,” said Shedemei. “My prize student.” There was some laughter, but they were all waiting for the story to go on. “No other fluid will do it, because the angels have tiny organelles in the saliva-producing cells of their mouths, which secrete an enzyme that has no function whatsoever within the bodies of the angels-but it dissolves the shells of the flatworm eggs. So when the males bring the clay into their mouths, they’re not just softening it to make sculptures. They’re also dissolving the shells erf” millions of little flatworms. And it just so happens that the dissolved shells contain precisely the one chemical that suppresses the action of the prophylactic gland near the angels’ and diggers’ scrota. The fertility chemical breaks down very slowly, and the statues contain useful quantities of it perhaps as long as ten years, certainly for five.”

Everybody was getting it now. “So when the diggers rubbed the statues all over their bodies. ...” “Were the angels swallowing some of it?” “How much of the fertility chemical does it take?”

Shedemei raised her hands to damp the questions and comments. “Yes, you’ve got it. The angel males absorb the fertility enzyme by mouth. It doesn’t take much of it to shut down the action of the prophylactic gland, and it doesn’t recover and start up again for about two weeks, maybe three. So there’s a window there in which reproduction can take place. And the digger males have a special absorbent patch on their lower bellies, near the groin, where the chemical can be absorbed quite directly into the bloodstream. Rubbing the statues on their sweating bellies dissolves some of the day, whereupon the dissolved fertility enzyme is taken into the blood and, just as with the angels, it shuts down the prophylactic gland and the digger males are fertile. But because they actually get a great deal less of the enzyme, the fertility window is only a few days long for them. Doesn’t matter, though. Where the angels make their statues once a year and have to score a reproductive hit that one time, the diggers are culturally able to worship the statues any time. In effect, the statues enable them to reproduce whenever they want. They just have to pray first.”

“That is the most absurdly complicated, unlikely, ridiculous mechanism I’ve ever heard of,” said Issib.

“Exactly,” said Shedemei. “There is no chance that it evolved naturally. Why would the diggers and angels independently evolve identical organs that make them sterile? There’s no evolutionary advantage in it. Why didn’t the angels simply die out before they ever started making their sculptures in the first place? Why didn’t the diggers die out before they ever discovered the virtues of rubbing angel statues all over themselves? And why would a species of flatworm just happen to require a special chemical in angel saliva in order to hatch their eggs? And why did the angels develop a chemical with no use in their bodies except to dissolve the shells of the flatworms?”

“There are a lot of strange things in nature,” said Oykib.

“Of course,” said Shedemei. “I shouldn’t have said there’s no chance it evolved naturally. It’s just that for me, at least, the coincidence is too great to believe in natural causation. This was done to the diggers and angels.”

“But that’s not what matters right now,” said Zdorab. “Shedya has an answer to that, but what matters is that we have to tell the diggers the truth. They need to go bade to using the statues. And getting new chics.”

“Maybe we can get the angels just to give their statues to the diggers,” said Padarok. “It’s not as if the angels use diem after the women judge the men.”

“Maybe,” »aid Shedemei. “But it’s not just the diggers who are suffering from our interference in their previous social patterns. This relationship, this connection between diggers and angels has been going on for millions of years. Forty million years, to be more precise. And in those countless generations, certain patterns have evolved. The twinning of the angels, for instance. Every pregnancy is double. This isn’t accidental. It’s only happened twice in all our observations, and never in our own angel village, but when a single birth takes place, the baby is destroyed and the mother is never allowed to mate again. In other words, single births are ruthlessly exduded from angel society. It looks to me as if this is a response to the feet that diggers follow angels wherever they go. The diggers have to follow the angels in order to get the statues. But then the diggers can’t help but see the angels as an easy source of meat, especially when the angel infants are at that awkward age when they can’t fty well at all, and yet they’re too heavy for one adult to carry them alone and still fly. In effect, the twinning allows each generation of angels to have one death and one survivor. Over the years, community cooperation has enabled between two-thirds and three-fourths of the twin-pairs to survive intact. Now, though, in our village all the twins are living to adulthood. And all the damaged, weak, sick, and crippled angels are surviving, where in other villages the diggers cull them out. In short, the angels have evolved a strategy of reproducing far beyond their sustainaWe population in order to survive the depredations of the diggers. When the diggers no longer prey on them, their population balloons out of control”

“It’s a delicate balance,” Zdorab saki “I found one place where it reached a crisis. The diggers had lost discipline and were eating more than the infants and the strays. They were systematically wiping out the angels in their area. When I got there, only a few beleaguered families of angels survived. But the diggers were already paying the price. They had plenty of old statues, of course.

But no new ones. And so after about five years, their birthrate fell off. Just as it has here. Not so suddenly, of course, since they were still worshipping the statues they had, only the statues contained progressively less and less of the enzyme. Births became more and more rare. With fewer diggers to prey on them, the angel population was going to start recovering soon. When it did, eventually the few surviving diggers would also recover.”

Shedemei took over again. “So there’s a social balance, you see. The diggers can’t harvest too many of the angels for food, because then they lose their own ability to reproduce. It’s self-correcting.”

“What’s to stop the angels from taking off and starting a colony where there aren’t any diggers?” asked Protchnu. “Nothing,” said Shedemei, “and I’m sure it’s happened many times. But they can only live where they can find clay that supports the flatworms. That means that they can only live where there’s a pattern of rainy season flooding, and they can only live at elevations where the flat-worm can survive. It’s a pretty narrow range, common enough on this massif but not elsewhere. And the diggers range far and wide. I don’t think there’s anywhere that angels can go without a digger finding them sooner or later. When the digger finds them, he goes home and reports that he’s found a new spot that’s favored by the gods, and so they send out a colony. It’s actually to the benefit of the angels. Without diggers devouring their young, their populations reach climax very quickly.”

“Are you suggesting,” said Nafai, “that we should let the diggers go back to kidnapping and eating angel infants?”

“That’s the question,” said Shedemei. “That’s really the question, isn’t it?”

“Does any of this,” asked Chveya, “have to do with the evolution of intelligence among the angels and diggers?”

“Some, I think,” said Shedemei. “The way the angel females select their mates is by the intricacy, beauty, originality, and accuracy of their sculptures. Obviously, the more intelligent and creative the angel male, the better his chances of reproducing early and often. For the diggers, it’s a little different. In order to kill angels, they have to be devious and smart. We don’t see it that much now, of course, because the diggers are so smart that the angels had almost given up trying to stop them. But we’ve all seen the traps that the angels set at the perimeter of their villages. It may be that the stupid diggers used to get caught in such traps. NoW they recognize and evade them easily. But perhaps their very intelligence evolved because only the smart ones got through the angel traps ki order to steal statues and baby angels.”

“In other words, intelligence evolved naturally,” said Chveya. “It’s this symbiotic relationship that’s unnatural.”

“Not just unnatural,” said Shedemei. “Human-made.”

“How can you know that?” asked Protchnu.

“Because we believed that it couldn’t be natural. And we knew that humans ceased to live on Earth at the time of the emigration that settled Harmony and, no doubt, other worlds as well. As we searched with the Index, we found that the one part of history where the ship’s library had no useful information was human life at the time of the emigration.”

Zdorab, the librarian, took over here. “Now, we have always imagined that this was because it was such a terrible time that they tried to forget it. There were implications of wars using weapons so dreadful that they turned the Earth for a while into a ball of ice. That’s what the Oversoul himself believed. But then something Nafai said to me one time made me realize that this paucity of information really wasn’t believable. He said, ‘How could the people who saved humanity by leaving Earth have allowed themselves to be so completely forgotten?’ And I thought. Of course they couldn’t. So I started searching the computers on the ship, the ones that tren’t tied to the Oversoul. And I found what I was looking for. A database that the Over-soul has no conscious access to. It’s called, as nearly as I can translate it, The Book of the Sins of the Human Race”

“Sins?” asked Mebbekew.

“Well, it’s the most economical translation. It’s a term that means ‘willful mistakes.’ ‘Crimes of avoidable negligence,’ perhaps. I thought sin was a pretty good way of summing it up.”

“What does the book contain?” asked Nafai.

“I only just found it. I haven’t read it all, and I’d be glad to have any of you who have the time and interest help me in the translation. The language is close to several known languages but it’s very very old and the Oversoul hasn’t been updating it because he wasn’t conscious that it was there. The thing is, one of the first things I found was the explanation for how the angels and diggers began. It was one of the ‘sins,’ you see.”

Zdorab brought up a document on the computer screen nearest to him and began to read aloud.

“We have sinned by fiddling with the genes of animals, giving them intelligence without freedom, talent without power, desires without hope. We used them for our amusement, displaying their paintings and sculptures and music and dance while keeping the painters and sculptors, the musicians and dancers in prisons. If they escaped their freedom was worthless because they could have children only in captivity. This was an abomination, and the Keeper of Earth revolted against it, driving away the slavemakers and slavekeepers, and setting the little ones free.”

Shedemei spoke up. “I think the possible connection with diggers and angels should be obvious. The angels are the ones who still do some kind of art, but that’s what they were bred for, perhaps. Zdorab and I can’t think what the diggers were originally bred to do.”

“Dig,” said Elemak.

“Possibly,” said Shedemei. “Just because the Book of Sins mentioned only the intelligent animals created in order to entertain humans doesn’t mean there weren’t also animals that were genetically enhanced in order to do more menial tasks. Like seeking out underground deposits of various minerals, for instance. Or simply digging tunnels.”

“Sewer work,” said Elemak.

“As I said, we don’t know,” said Shedemei. “I think there’s a good chance that the diggers’ ancestors weren’t very intelligent at all. Enhanced physically, but not mentally. But they survived because they were bright enough, or lucky enough, to live close to a tribe of angels and perhaps simply by chance they rubbed themselves with the statues.”

“Or maybe they survived,” said Zdorab, “because the diggers lived in burrows and the angels lived in caves, and so when the Earth went into a profound ice age they both survived underground and developed their symbiosis there.”

“Or maybe they were taught to do it in a dream,” said Luet,

“Well, there we are,” said Shedemei. “It might all have been planned and controlled. Even as the Keeper of Earth drove out the human race, she might have been planning to replace our ancestors with new species. She might have been manipulating them both to help them both evolve intelligence.”

“And in the meantime,” said Zdorab, “to make them symbiotic so that they couldn’t possibly survive without each other The old humans created the fiatworms and made it so that the angels’ ancestors had to sculpt clay or they couldn’t reproduce. Perhaps they didn’t give any of the other captive animals a mechanism that would allow them to get a supply of the chemical they needed without human intervention. Only the diggers found their own way to piggyback on the angels’ survival method. Who says the Keeper of Earth couldn’t have put it all together that way? Perhaps it was because of the Keeper that humans first developed the flatworm vector for creating the chemical the angels needed. Perhaps the Keeper planned it all.”

“Whatever the Keeper is,” said Meb.

“I have another idea,” said Elemak. “What if there’s no such thing as the Keeper? Those dreams you had back on Harmony, you were all so sure they came from this supposed Keeper because the Oversoul knew nothing about the diggers and the angels. But now we find out that the Oversoul had all this information in his databanks, only he simply couldn’t consciously access it. So those dreams could have come from the Oversoul all along, without his knowing it, right? And now we don’t have to imagine some mechanism for sending dreams fester than light across the space between Earth and Harmony.”

“Very good theory,” said Shedemei. “But it doesn’t explain Kiti making a perfect likeness of Nafai a hundred years before we arrived here.”

“I don’t think,” said Volemak icily, “that it’s very helpful to assume that just because we find the natural mechanism by which some things came to be, we have therefore proven that the Keeper of Earth does not exist. We don’t know how far the reach of the Keeper might be, or what power he has; perhaps all he can do is give dreams to people. Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking.”

“I’ll memorize that one, Father,” said Meb. “That was deep.”

Elemak smiled but did not speak.

“If we can set aside speculative theology,” said Shedemei, “I want to lay two choices before you. The first choice is this: We can explain everything to the diggers and angels. The diggers can go back to using the sculptures. The angels can start trying to control their population by breeding less often-perhaps nothing more than each man making a sculpture only every other year. There’s no reason to go back to the slaughter of infant angels. The trouble is that while this might work here, it will have no effect elsewhere. But perhaps that’s the reason the Keeper of Earth brought us here, to teach the diggers and angels how to live together without killing.”

“I thought we were setting aside speculative theology,” said Meb.

“The other choice,” said Shedemei, “is to get rid of that prophylactic gland.”

“Get rid of it?” asked Volemak.

“I’ve found the gene that creates it. It’s artificial-it was inserted. By analogy with the genes of unaltered rats and bats, we’ve found all the inserts and they’re quite obvious. We isolated the particular genetic word that creates the prophylactic gland by inserting each of the artificial words into common rats and bats and seeing which ones developed the prophylactic gland. Knowing which gene causes it, we can uncause it.”

“How?” asked Volemak.

“A bacterial infection that carries an enzyme whose sole function is to find that genetic word and clip it out. It’s the method I use to do gene alteration anyway. I’ll just use an infectious bacterium instead of the benign ones I usually work with. It has few symptoms. With the diggers it’s a little stuffness of the joints and some nasal inflammation. With the angels it can also cause weeping eyes for a few days. Once the infection has spread throughout all digger and angel populations, reproduction will be cut loose from the flatworms. The angels can sculpt to their hearts’ content, of course, but if they stop it won’t matter. The change will only affect those conceived after the bacterial epidemic made the alteration in their parents, and it may cause spontaneous abortion of male digger and angel embryos that happen to be in the first few weeks of development when the infection comes. But in a single generation, the prophylactic gland will disappear.”

“I don’t like it,” said Oykib. “The Keeper of Earth set up a mechanism that kept balance here, and we’ll be destroying it.”

“I don’t know, Okya,” said Chveya. “It was humans who set up the mechanism, really. It’s listed in the Book of Sins. It’s one of the things that the Keeper hated. Maybe we’ve been brought back just to remove it.”

“As I said,” Shedemei went on. “We have those two choices. But personally I favor intervention. Removing the prophylactic gland seems to me like striking the manacles off a slave. After forty million years, it’s about time, don’t you think?”

“Just do it,” said Elemak, “Don’t waste our time with endless discussion about what the Keeper might want or might not want. You have the power to do it, and it’s a decent thing to do, so just do it and have done.” Elemak got up and left.

It took many hours of discussion after that, but finally Elemak’s point of view prevailed. The only reason the discussion took so long was because Protchnu suggested asking the diggers and angels what they thought should be done. But they all realized that neither the diggers nor the angels had the conceptual framework to understand the genetic issues involved. “They won’t receive it as science because they have no science,” said Volemak as he reached his decision. “They’ll convert it to religion and it will cause division and controversy among them and may lead to real hatred of us or civil war within their own communities, I believe in letting people make their own choices, when they’re capable of understanding the choice. But you don’t let your toddlers decide whether or not they’re ready to play in the stream. You simpry keep them away from the water and you don’t even try to explain the concept of drowning.

Later you can explain it to them, when they’re older.” “So the diggers and angels are our children now?” asked Meb, mockingly.

“Better to treat them as our children,” said Volemak,

“than to treat them as our ancestors did-as slaves, as playthings. So the decision is made. We explain only as much as they can understand. Oykib will explain to the diggers, and Nafai to the angels. I’d appreciate it if everyone else would keep their mouths shut about it. Shedemei, I’d like you to introduce the bacteria as quickly as possible into both communities.”

“It’s simple enough,” she said. “I’ll simply expose everyone here to it right now. It’ll cause a bit of a runny nose, maybe a slight fever in a few cases. Just make sure you follow your normal patterns of interaction with diggers and angels, and the disease will spread naturally. Just come up here and swab the insides of your noses with this gel.”

“That’s disgusting,” said one of the younger women.

“Only if you use someone else’s swab,” said Protchnu.

“What worries me,” said Mebbekew, “is what’s going to happen to the poor flatworms. Nobody seems to care about them. I think we have too much of a bias in favor of big animals. Don’t microscopic creatures have rights?” He grinned, and the others laughed with him.

While the meeting went on, however, Elemak had a meeting of his own. He sought out Fusum, who had recently been made blood king after the death of his father.

“I have a gift for you,” Elemak said.

“What could you possibly have that I want?” asked Fusum.

“Oh, we’re full of ourselves, aren’t we, now that we’re king.”

Fusum growled a little. “I have a life of my own, Elemak. I’m not a hostage anymore. I have responsibilities.”

“You also have power,” said Elemak, “and I think you wouldn’t mind getting a little more. So here’s my gift-more power.”

“Really,” said Fusum. “I didn’t know you had any power to give.”

“Knowledge is power, or so I’ve heard,” said Elemak. “But there’s a condition. You have to promise to tell your people you got the idea from me.”

“What idea?” asked Fusum.

“Promise first.”

“I promise,” said Fusum.

“But do you really mean it?” asked Elemak,

“If you’re going to mock me, you can keep your gift,” said Fusum.

“Ah, now that we’re the blood king, we’re too important to take a little teasing from a friend.”

“You’ve never been a friend, Elemak,” said Fusum. “You’ve been a useful source of knowledge.”

“But perhaps now we can be friends,” said Elemak.

“Either tell me the idea you have or don’t.”

“Go at once to the statue of the Untouched God,” said Elemak.

“You mean the one that looks like your shining brother Nafai?”

Elemak refused to be goaded. “That’s the one. Go to it, and in front of as many witnesses as possible, declare that the reason so few children are being born is because this statue has not been properly worshipped. Then do whatever it is you do with it. Rub it all over yourself.”

“That could get me killed.”

“Not the blood king. Not right away. And not if you promise the people that now that you have worshipped the Untouched God, obliterating the face of that deceiver Nafai, the true god will send a mild plague to purge the last traces of evil among your people. A few male embryos may even be miscarried because they were not pure. All those who are alive right now will have to worship the gods in the old way until the day they die. But the new children born after this time will not have to worship any gods at all. They are born in purity and they are blessed.”

“What kind of fungus are you trying to make me eat?” said Fusum. “You’re the one who told me that all this religious stuff was nonsense.”

“But the people believe it, don’t they. So you tell them that no matter what Oykib or Chveya or anybody else tells them, I told you the truth, and it’s your action that will free your people from having to go up the canyon and get your gods from the skymeat. You won’t need the skymeat anymore. Your new children and grandchildren can kill them all then, and it won’t matter because they will be pure and the gods won’t require them to humiliate themselves by worshipping objects created by the skymeat.”

“Why should I believe that any of this will happen?”

“I don’t care,” said Elemak. “You can doubt me and delay, and then Oykib will come out and make an announcement and all the power and influence will go to him and, through him, to Emeezem. Or you can believe me and act now, so that you’ve already done it before anybody else says a word. Then you and I will be the liberators of the diggers. It’s going to happen anyway, of course. The little act you put on with that statue of Nafai won’t actually do anything at all. Except make your people think you’ve got religious powers beyond any blood king before you. And it won’t hurt that you can make hash out of Erncezem’s insistence that the Untouched God remain untouched. When your prophecies come true, she’ll be discredited. But you can let the opportunity pass you by, Fusum. You can spend the rest of your life wishing you had taken the chance when I gave it to you. I really don’t care.”

“Yes you do,” said Fusum. “And you can be sure that I will use your name and tell them that I learned about this from you. Because if it fails, I might be able to save myself by laying the blame on you.” and then reconciled their translations. “Who wrote this?” Oykib asked. “How could he know what power the Keeper had? To cause earthquakes and volcanos, to change the flow of continental drift. ...”

“Maybe the Keeper has something to do with the convection currents in the flowing magma on which the crust of the Earth floats. Who knows how quickly it might change?” said Nafai.

“I know this much,” said Oykib. “We have to teach our people about this book, the warnings in this book. We have to teach them what the Keeper expects of us, even if we don’t understand exactly what the Keeper of Earth might be.”

“By ‘our people’ do you mean just humans?” asked Nafai.

“Of course not,” said Oykib. “In fact, maybe the reason the Keeper brought us back to Earth was precisely so that we could not only set the angels and diggers free from their ancient bondage, but also could teach them how to live so that the Keeper won’t feel the need to make the Earth uninhabitable again.”

“I think you’re right,” said Nafai. “But it’s going to become a religion no matter what we do or how we teach it. Even our most naturalistic explanations are going to sound mystical to them. After all, what our ancestors wrote in the Book of Sins sounds mystical to us”

“Is that bad?” asked Oykib.

“Not bad in itself. It’s just that religions have a way of losing track of the truth at the core. The diggers had a religion that kept them rubbing themselves with clay that contained the chemical derived from flatworm eggshells and angel spit-but they had no idea why they were doing it, and so they were enslaved by it. All we’ll be doing, then, is teaching our children and their children arbitrary rules. The true reasons will be lost, or converted into myths.”

“What can we do about it?” asked Oykib.

“We can write a book,” said Nafai.

“You mean like the one you’re already writing?” he asked.

Nafai glared at him. “I should have known I couldn’t keep a secret from you.”

“Yes, you should have,” said Oykib. “Especially since you talked to the Oversold about it almost constantly for weeks when you first thought of it. I figured you’d tell me about it when you felt like it.”

“Well, I feel like it,” said Nafai. “Because I think our descendants aren’t going to have access to the ship’s computer. The skill of reading and writing will be lost to most of them. But a few of them will be taught to read and write in order to keep a record of what we’ve learned. We’ll write it down as clearly as we can, a true history of our voyage and everything we’ve learned and done. We’ll pass it along from parent to child, and because it’s written down it can’t be distorted.”

“People can distort anything,” said Oykib.

“But as long as the original text is there, the next generation or the one after, somewhere along the line, they can go back to the original and discover the truth. The way we learned so much from the Book of Sins”

“Well, fine,” said Oykib. “You’re already keeping a record.”

“I’m keeping one record. But I think we need to keep another. The first one has everything in it, all the details, everything I can remember. But I had a dream last night. . . .”

“Ah, another dream.”

“I know you’d like to have these dreams yourself, Oykib, but-“

“I don’t need to have my own dreams,” Oykib said. “Not when I have yours. You dreamed of writing a book that you would give to me and Chveya instead of to Zhyat and Netsya.”

“A book,” said Nafai, “that includes everything from the Book of Sins, written on gold so we don’t need a computer to read it and so it won’t corrode. We can seal up that part, so no one adds to or changes it. But the rest of the book will be a record, not of the whole history of our people, but just the story of our dealings with the Ovcrsoul and the Keeper of Earth. Just the. . . .”

“Just the theology,” said Oykib.

“To the diggers and angels it will seem like theology,” said Nafai.

“And to our children and grandchildren, too,” said Oykib. “They won’t have lived in the starship. They won’t have used the great library. They’ll have no idea of what a computer is.”

Nafai nodded. “So you’ve come to the same conclusion.”

“No, I’ve simply seen you and Luet and Chveya all having the same dream. The ship has got to go. We have to cut ourselves off from the machinery of the past and live in the technology of the present. The ship has to go up into orbit.”

“We don’t have the technology anymore to hide it on the planet’s surface, the way our ancestors hid it on Harmony,” said Nafai.

“I’ll help you with your second book,” said Oykib. “You write whatever you want to ki order to start it off. You have to tell the parts where I wasn’t born yet anyway. I’ll take over when you tell me to. But in the meantime, I can be copying out the Book of Sins”

“The Book of Sins, yes,” said Nafai, “And maybe also you should start a record of the dreams the Keeper sent us. Especially the ones that don’t seem yet to be completely fulfilled. It’s the only guide we have to what the Keeper might have planned for us.”

“The Book of Sins and the Book of Dreams” said Oykib. “I’ll get those started. And you write the Book of Nafai.”

“And in the meantime,” said Nafai, “I’m going to start figuring out some kind of weapon that the angels can use in flight, something that can kill a digger despite the diggers’ enormously greater strength.”

Oykib nodded. “So you think your dreams of war between diggers and angels, you think those are from the Keeper of Earth.”

“Whether they come from the Keeper or my own fears, I have to be prepared, don’t I? I have to prepare my people, just in case.”

Oykib nodded. “I love the diggers, Nafai. I don’t want to have to choose between them and the angels.”

“That won’t be your choice, Oykib. Tour choice will be the same one it’s always been. Between Elemak and me, after Father dies.”

“Still? Broken as Elemak is?”

“Elemak isn’t broken, Oykib, He simply learned how to be patient. How to bide his time. But Hushidh has told me that his connection with Fusum is strong, even if it’s tinged wkh loathing on both their parts. I’m sure Chveya has noticed the same thing, with the two of you living here among the diggers all these years.”

“She’s noticed it,” said Oykib. “But it’s hard to see how he can turn it to his advantage.”

“Not really,” said Nafai. “They’ll follow Elemak, if he leads them where they already want to go.”

“And where is that?” asked Oykib.

“To slaughter angels. They don’t have to leave any angels alive now, because they can propagate without the statues.”

Oykib frowned. “Then we made a mistake to wipe out the prophylactic gland?”

“No,” said Nafai. “It was right to set both peoples free. But now we have to help them struggle to find a new equilibrium. One that’s based on respect and tolerance.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that anytime soon,” said Oykib, “not as long as the diggers think of angels as meat, and angels think of diggers as devils.”

“I know,” said Nafai. “That’s why we have our work cut out for us. Many lifetimes of teaching lie ahead, for us and for those who try to serve the Keeper of Earth after us. And in the meantime, I’m going to come up with some weapons that help even up the combat between angels and diggers. Something that will drive the diggers back into their holes when they dare to make war against the angels.”

“So then the angels are masters. How does that help?”

“The angels don’t seek out diggers in order to eat them,” said Nafai. “They don’t want to fight with the diggers at all. They just want to be left alone. As far as I can see, that tips the moral balance heavily onto the side of the angels.”

“The diggers aren’t monsters,” Oykib said. “They’re children of their own genetic and cultural heritage. They don’t deserve to be slaughtered from the sky.”

“I know that,” said Nafai. “That’s why we have to teach them all as well as we can. And in the meantime, try to keep a balance between them.”

“I don’t want to choose,” said Oykib.

“You have no choice but to choose,” said Nafai. “When Elemak takes the diggers to war, you’re one of the ones he’ll be trying to kill. You’ll be on the angels’ side because you have nowhere else to turn.”

“You know this from dreams?” asked Oykib.

“The Keeper doesn’t have to send me dreams to tell me what I can figure out for myself.”

Oykib furiously brushed away a tear that had slipped down his cheek. “None of this was necessary,” he said. “Why didn’t you just kill Elemak when you had the chance?”

“Because I love him,” said Nafai.

“So how many of my friends among the diggers and your friends among the angels have to die because of that?”

“Elemak has his hand in it,” said Nafai, “but if you think that Fusum or someone else wouldn’t have stirred up the diggers to rebellion against us or war against the angels, you don’t understand human nature.”

“The diggers aren’t humans,” said Oykib.

“When it comes to hate and rage and envy, yes they are,” said Nafai.

“And love and generosity, too,” said Oykib. “And trust, and wisdom, and dignity, and-“

“Yes,” said Nafai. “They’re human in all those ways. So are the angels.”

“So how are we different from our ancestors, who got driven off the planet forty million years ago?”

“I don’t know,” said Nafai. “But maybe, given enough time, we and the diggers and the angels can find our way to peace.”

“And in the meantime, you’re going to design weapons,” said Oykib.

“I’m thinking of blowguns,” said Nafai. “With fleched darts. What I don’t know is whether they need to be poisoned or not, in order to be effective.”

“It’s my friends you’re talking about killing,” said Oykib.

“Do your best to teach your friends to hate war and refuse to take part in it,” said Nafai. “Teach them to loathe the very thought of eating infant skymeat. Then they’ll never be brought down by an angel’s dart.”