FIVE—THE FACE OF THE KEEPER

Luet sat watching the baboons. The female that she thought of as Rubyet, because of a livid scar on her back, was in estrus, and it was interesting to watch the males compete for her. The most blustering male, Yobar, the one who spent so much time in camp with the humans, was the least effective at getting Rubyet’s attention. In fact, the more aggressive he got, the less progress he made. He would display his rage, stamping and snarling, even snapping his teeth and taking swipes with his hands, to try to intimidate one of the males who was courting Rubyet. Every time, the one he was intimidating would give up very quickly and run away from him—but while Yobar was chasing his victim, other males would approach Rubyet. So when Yobar returned to Rubyet from his “victory,” he would find other males there before him, and the whole play was enacted again.

Finally, Yobar got really angry and began to attack one of the males in earnest, biting and tearing at him. It was a male that Volemak had pointed out once with the name Salo, because he had once smeared grease all over his face while stealing food from the cookfire. Salo immediately became submissive, showing his backside to Yobar, but Yobar was too angry to accept the submission. The other males looked on, perhaps amused, as Yobar continued to pummel and nip at his victim.

Salo at last managed to break free, howling and whining as he ran away from Yobar, who, still raging, followed after him at a furious pace, knocking him this way and that whenever he got within reach.

Then Salo did the most extraordinary thing. He ran straight for a young mother called Ploxy, who had a nursing infant that Salo often played with, and tore the infant from Ploxy’s arms. Ploxy hooted once in annoyance, but the baby immediately started to act happy and excited—until Yobar, still furious, came charging up and started pummeling Salo again.

This time, however, the infant Salo was holding started screeching in terror, and now, instead of watching complacently, the other males immediately became agitated. Ploxy began screaming, too, calling for help, and within a few moments the entire troop of baboons had assembled around Yobar and were beating him and screaming at him. Confused, frightened, Yobar tried to grab the infant out of Salo’s hands, perhaps thinking that if he held the infant, everybody would be on his side, but Luet realized that it wouldn’t work. Sure enough, the moment he grabbed for the baby, the others became downright brutal in their beating of him, finally ejecting him from the group and chasing him away. Several of the males chased him quite a distance and then stayed nearby to watch and make sure he didn’t come near. Luet wondered if that would be the end of Yobar’s attempt to be part of the troop.

Then she looked for Salo, trying to spot him somewhere near Ploxy and the baby—but he wasn’t there, though most of the other baboons were still there, chattering and bobbing up and down and otherwise showing how agitated they were.

Salo, however, was off in the brush upstream of the main group. He had got Rubyet away from the rest and now was mounting her. She had the most comically resigned look on her face, which now and then gave way to a look of eyes-rolled-back pleasure—or exasperation. Luet wondered if human faces gave that same weirdly mixed signal under similar circumstances ... a sort of distracted intensity that might mean pleasure or might mean perplexity.

In any event, Yobar, the aggressive one, had been completely defeated—might even have lost his place in the tribe. And Salo, who wasn’t particularly large, had lost the skirmish but won the battle and the war.

All because Salo had grabbed a baby away from its mother.

“Lucky Salo,” said Nafai. “I wondered who would win sweet Rubyet’s heart.”

“He did it with flowers,” said Luet. “I didn’t mean to be off here so long.”

“I wasn’t looking for you to do anything,” said Nafai. “I was looking for you because I wanted to be with you. There isn’t anything for me to do now anyway, till supper. I got my prey early this morning and brought the bloody thing home to lay at my mate’s feet. Only she was busy throwing up and didn’t give me my customary reward.”

“Wouldn’t you know that I’d be the one who’d get sick all the time,” said Luet. “Hushidh burped once and that was it for her. And Kokor tries to throw up but she just can’t bring it off, so she ends up not getting the sympathy she wants and I end up having it when I don’t want it.”

“Who would have thought that it would be a race between you and Hushidh and Kokor for the first baby in the colony.”

“A good thing for you,” said Luet. “It’ll give you an infant to grab, in case there’s trouble.”

He hadn’t seen Salo’s strategem, so he didn’t understand.

“Salo—he grabbed Ploxy’s baby.”

“Oh, yes, they do that,” said Nafai. “Shedemei told me. The males who are fully accepted in the tribe make friends with an infant or two, so the infant likes them. Then, in combat, they grab the infant, who doesn’t scream when his friend takes him.

The other male isn’t his friend, so when he keeps attacking the baby gets scared and screams, which brings the whole tribe down on the poor pizdook’s head.”

“Oh,” said Luet. “So it was routine.”

“I’ve never seen it. I’m jealous that you did and I didn’t.”

“There’s the prize,” said Luet, pointing to Salo, who still hadn’t finished with Rubyet.

“And where’s the loser? I’ll bet it’s Yobar.” Luet was already pointing, and sure enough, there was Yobar, looking forlorn off in the distance, watching the troop but not daring to come closer because of the two males who were browsing halfway between him and the rest of the troop.

“You’d better make friends with my baby, then,” said Luet. “Or you won’t ever get your way in this tribe we’re forming.”

Nafai put his hand on Luet’s stomach. “No bigger yet.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Luet. “Now, what did you really come out here for?”

He looked at her in consternation.

“You didn’t know I was down here because nobody knew I was down here,” said Luet, “so you didn’t come looking for me, you came here to be alone.”

He shrugged. “I’d rather be with you.”

“You’re so impatient,” said Luet. “The Oversoul already said there’s no hurry—she won’t even be ready for us at Vusadka for years yet.”

“This place can’t sustain us—it’s already getting harder to find game,” said Nafai. “And we’re too close to that settled valley over the mountains to the east.”

“That isn’t what you’re anxious about, either,” said Luet. “It’s driving you crazy that the Keeper of Earth hasn’t sent you a dream.”

“Thatdoesn’t bother me at all,” said Nafai. “What bothers me is the way you keep throwing it up to me. That you and Shuya and Father and Moozh and Thirsty all saw these angels and rats, and I didn’t. What, does that mean that some computer orbiting a planet a hundred or so light-years away somehow judged me a century before I was born and decided that I wasn’t worthy to receive his neat little menagerie dreams?”

“You really are angry,” said Luet.

“I want to do something, and if I can’t then at least I want to know something!” cried Nafai. “I’m sick of waiting and waiting and nothing happens. It’s no good for me to work with the Index because Zdorab and Issib are constantly using it and they’re more familiar with how it works than I am—”

“But it still speaks more clearly to you than anybody.”

“So while it tells me nothing it does it with greater clarity, how excellent.”

“And you’re a good hunter. Elemak even says so.”

“Yes, that’s about all anybody’s found for me to do—kill things.”

Luet could see the shadow of the memory of Gaballufix’s death pass over Nafai’s face. “Aren’t you ever going to forgive yourself for that?”

“Yes. When Gaballufix comes down out of the baboons’ sleeping caves and tells me he was just pretending to be dead.”

“You just don’t like waiting, that’s all,” said Luet. “But it’s like my being pregnant. I’d like to have it over with. I’d like to have the baby. But it takes time, so I wait.”

“You wait, but you can feel the change in you.”

“As I vomit everything I eat.”

“Not everything,” said Nafai, “and you know what I mean. I don’t feel any changes, I’m not needed for anything…”

“Except the food we eat.”

“All right, you win. I’m vital, I’m necessary, I’m busy all the time, so I must be happy.” He started to walk away from her.

She thought of calling after him, but she knew that it would do no good. He wanted to be miserable, and so all she would do by trying to cheer him up was thwart him in his mood of the day. Aunt Rasa had told her a few days ago that it wouldn’t hurt for her to remember that Nafai was still just a boy, and that she shouldn’t expect him to be a mature tower of strength for her. “You were both too young to marry,” said Rasa then, “but events got away from us. You’ve come up to the challenge—in time, Nyef will too.”

But Luet wasn’t sure at all that she had come up to any challenge. She was terrified at the thought of giving birth out here in the wilderness, far from the physicians of the city. She had no idea whether they’d even have food in a few months—everything depended on their garden and the hunters, and it was really only Elemak and Nafai who were any good at that, though Obring and Vas sometimes went out with pulses, too. The food supply could fail at any time, and soon she’d have a baby and what if they suddenly decided they had to travel? Bad as her sickness was right now, what if she had to ride atop a swaying camel? She’d rather eat camel cheese.

Of course, the thought of camel cheese made the nausea come back in a wave, and she knew that this time it might well come out, so down she went on her knees again, sick of the pain of the acidy stuff that came up from her gut into her mouth. Her throat hurt, her head hurt, and she was tired of it all.

She felt hands touch her, gathering her hair away from her face, twisting it and holding it out of the way, so none of the flecks of vomitus would get in it. She wanted to say thank you, knowing it was Nafai; she also wanted him to go away, it was so humiliating and awful and painful to be like this and have somebody watching. But he was her husband. He was part of this, and she couldn’t send him away. Didn’t even want to send him away.

At last she was through puking.

“Not too effective,” said Nafai, “if we judge these things by quantity.”

“Please shut up,” said Luet. “I don’t want to be cheered up, I want my baby to be a ten-year-old child already so that I remember all of this as an amusing event from my childhood long ago.”

“Your wish is granted,” said Nafai. “The baby is here and aged ten. Of course, she’s incredibly obnoxious and bratty, the way you were at ten.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were the waterseer already, and we all knew you bossed and sassed grownups all the time.”

“I told them what I saw, that’s all!” Then she realized that he was laughing. “Don’t tease me, Nafai. I know I’d be sorry later, but I still may lose control and kill you now.”

He gathered her into his arms and she had to twist away to keep him from kissing her. “Don’t!” she said. “I’ve got the most awful taste in my mouth, it would probably kill you!”

So he held her and after a while she felt better.

“I think about Keeper of Earth all the time,” said Nafai.

I would, too, if I weren’t thinking about the baby, Luet said silently.

“I keep thinking that maybe it isn’t just another computer,” said Nafai. “That maybe it isn’t calling us through hundred-year-old dreams, that maybe it knows us, and that it’s just waiting for ... for something before it speaks to me.”

“It’s waiting for the message that only you can receive.”

“I don’t care,” said Nafai. “About it being only me. I’d take Father’s dream, if only I could experience what it feels like inside my head. How the Keeper is different from what the Oversoul does inside me. I want to know.”

Iknow you do. You keep coming back to it, day after day.

“I’ve been trying to talk to the Keeper of Earth. That’s how crazy I’m getting, Luet. Show me what you showed Father! I say it over and over.”

“And she ignores you.”

“It’s a hundred light-years away!” said Nafai. “It doesn’t know I exist!”

“Well if all you want is the same dream as Volemak, why not get the Oversoul to give it to you?”

“It isn’t from the Oversoul.”

“But she must have recorded the whole experience inside your father’s mind, right? And she can retrieve it, and show it to you. And the way you get everything so much more clearly through the Index –”

“Just like experiencing it myself,” said Nafai. “I can’t believe I never thought of that. I can’t believe the Oversoul never thought of that.”

“She’s not very creative, you know that.”

“She’s creatively inert,” said Nafai. “But you’re not.” He kissed her on the cheek, gave her one last hug, and bounded to his feet. “I have to go talk to the Oversoul.”

“Give her my love,” said Luet mildly.

“I—oh, I see. I can wait—let’s walk back together.”

“No, really—I wasn’t hinting. I want to stay here a while longer. Maybe just to see if they let Yobar back.”

“Don’t miss supper,” said Nafai. “You’re eating for –”

“Two,” said Luet.

“Maybe three!” said Nafai. “Who knows?”

She groaned theatrically, knowing that was what he wanted to hear. Then he ran off, back up the valley toward the camp.

He really is just a boy, as Aunt Rasa said. But what am I? His mother now? Not really— she’shis mother. I shouldn’t expect more of him—he works hard and well, and more than half the meat we eat is from his hunting. And he’s kind and gentle with me—I don’t know how Issib could be any sweeter and more tender than Nafai, no matter what Shuya says. And I’m his friend—he comes to me to talk about things that he says to no one else, and when I want to talk he listens and answers, unlike some of the other husbands, or so their wives say. By any standard I ever heard of, he’s a fine husband, and mature beyond his years—but it isn’t what I thought it was going to be. When I took him through the Lake of Women, I thought it meant that he and I were going to do great and majestic things together. I thought we would be like a king and a queen, or at least like a great priestess and her priest, doing powerful and majestic things to change the universe. Instead I throw up a lot and he bounds around like a fifteen-year-old who is really hurt because some computer from another planet won’t send dreams to him…

Oh, I’m too tired to think. Too sick to care. Maybe someday my image of our marriage will come true. Or maybe that’ll be his second wife, after I puke to death and get buried in the sand.

Shedemei had spent her whole life knowing that people looked at her oddly. At first it was because she was so intelligent as a child, because she cared about things that children weren’t supposed to care about. Adults would look at her strangely. So would other children, but sometimes the adults smiled and nodded their approval, while the children never did. Shedemei had thought this meant that when she was an adult, she would be fully accepted by everyone, but instead the opposite was true. When she became an adult it only meant that all the other adult were the same age now and treated her as the children had. Of course, now she was able to recognize what she was seeing. It was fear. It was resentment. It was envy.

Envy! Could she help it that she had been given a combination of genes that gave her an extraordinary memory, an enormous capacity for grasping and understanding ideas, and a mind that was able to make connections that no one else could see? It’s not as if she chose to be able to do mental gymnastics beyond the reach of anyone she had ever met in person. (There were people just as intelligent as she, and some perhaps more intelligent, but they were in far cities, even on other continents, and she knew of them only through their published works, distributed by the Oversoul from city to city.) She had no malicious intent. She certainly didn’t have the ability to share her ability with the envious ones—she could only share the products of her ability. They gladly took those, and then resented her for being able to produce them.

Most human beings, she concluded long ago, love to worship from afar people with extraordinary ability, but prefer to have their friends be genial incompetents. And, of course, most of them get their preference.

But now she was permanently attached to this little society of sixteen people, and unable to avoid meeting them day by day. She did her work—her time weeding in the garden, her water turn, her hours of baboon-watching during the day to make sure they didn’t leave their area and get into the food. She gladly covered for Luet when she was throwing up, and uncomplainingly did the tasks that Sevet was too lazy and Kokor too pregnant and Dol just generally too precious a being to do, Yet still she did not fit, was not accepted, was not part of the group, and it only got worse, day by day.

It didn’t help a bit that she understood exactly what was happening. The bonding between husband and wife triggers a need for others also to be bonded in the same pattern, she knew that, she had studied it. The old courtship patterns, the loose and easy friendships, those now make the married ones feel uneasy, because they don’t want anything around them that threatens the stability of the monogamous marriage bond, while the essence of unmarried society is always to be off balance, always to be free and random and unconnected and playful.

Admittedly, that was precisely the way some of them still wished to behave—Shedemei could see how monogamy chafed at Mebbekew and Obring, Sevet and Kokor. But they were acting the role of spouse right now, perhaps even more aggressively than the ones who actually meant it. In any event, the result was that Shedemei was even more cut off from others around her than she had ever been before. Not that she was shunned. Hushidh and Luet were as warm to her as ever, and Eiadh in her way was decent, while Aunt Rasa was utterly unchanged—she would never change. However, the men were all universally… what, civil? And Dol’s, Sevet’s, and Kokor’s attitudes ranged from ice to acid.

Worst of all, this little company of humans was taking a shape that systematically excluded her from any influence in it. Why had they stopped saying, “The men will do this while the women do that.” Now it was, ‘The wives can stay here while the men go off and’ do whatever it was that the men wanted to do. It drove her crazy sometimes that the women were lumped together as wives, while the men never called themselves husbands —they were still men. And, as if they were as stupid as baboons, the other women seemed not to know what Shedemei was talking about when she pointed it out.

Of course, they did notice, at least the brighter ones did, but they chose not to make an issue of it because… because they were all becoming so wifelike .All these years in Basilica, where women did not have to submerge their identity in order to have husbands, and now, six weeks into the journey, and they were acting like nomadic tribeswomen. The coding for getting along without making waves must be so deep in our genes that we can never get it out, thought Shedemei. I wish I could find it, though. I’d dig it out with a trowel, I’d burn it out with a hot coal held in my bare fingers. Never mind the absurdity of dealing with genes with such blunt instruments. Her rage at the unfairness of things went beyond reason.

I didn’t plan to marry, not for years yet, and even when I did I expected it would only be for a year, long enough to conceive, and then I’d dismiss the husband except for his normal rights with the child. I had no place for bonding with a man in my life. And when I did marry it would not have been with a weak-kneed semi-vertebrate archivist who allowed himself to be turned into the only servant in a company of lords.

Shedemei had entered this camp determined to make the best of a bad situation, but the more she saw of Zdorab the less she liked him. She might have forgiven him the way he came to this company—tricked by Nafai into carrying the Index out of the city, and then bullied into taking an oath to go into the desert with them. A man could be forgiven for behaving in an unmanly fashion during a time of stress and uncertainty and surprise. But when she got here she found that Zdorab had taken a role that was so demeaning she was ashamed to belong to the same species as him. It wasn’t that he took upon himself all the tasks that no one else would do—covering the latrines, digging new ones, carrying away Issib’s bodily wastes, doing the baking, the washing up. She rather respected someone who was willing to help—she certainly preferred that to the laziness of Meb and Obring, Kokor and Sevet and Dol. No, what made her feel such contempt for Zdorab was his attitude toward doing all that work. He didn’t offer to do it, as if he had a right not to offer; he simply acted as if it were his natural place to do the worst jobs in the camp, and then performed his work so silently, so invisibly that soon they all took it for granted that the repulsive or unbearably tedious jobs were all Zdorab’s.

He’s a natural-born servant, thought Shedemei. He was born to be a slave. I never thought there was such a human creature, but there is, and it’s Zdorab, and the others have chosen him to be my husband!

Why the Oversoul permitted Zdorab to have such easy access to her memory through the Index was beyond Shedemei’s comprehension. Unless the Oversoul, too, wanted a servant. Maybe that’s what the Oversoul loves best—humans who act like servants. Isn’t that why we’re all out here, to serve the Oversoul? To be arms and legs for her, so she can make her journey back to Earth? Slaves, all of us ... except me.

At least, that’s what Shedemei had been telling herself for all these weeks, until at last she realized that she, too, was beginning to fall into the servant category. It came to her today, as she carried water up from the stream for Zdorab to cook and wash with. She used to do this job with Hushidh and Luet, but now Luet was too weak from all her vomiting—she had lost weight, and that was bad for the child—and Hushidh was nursing her, and so it fell to Shedemei. She kept waiting for Rasa to notice that she was hauling the water all alone, for Rasa to say, “Sevet, Dol, Eiadh, put a yoke on your shoulders and haul water! Do your fair share!” But Rasa saw Shedemei carryng the water every day now, saw her carry the water right past where Sevet and Kokor were gossiping as they pretended to card camel hair and twine it into string, and Aunt Rasa never said a thing.

Have you forgotten who I am! she wanted to shout. Don’t you remember that I am the greatest woman of science in Basilica in a generation? In ten generations?

But she knew the answer, and so she did not shout. Aunt Rasa had forgotten, because this was a new world, this camp, and what one might have been in Basilica or any other place did not matter. In this camp you were either one of the wives or you were not, and if you were not, you were nothing.

Which is why, today, with her work done, she went looking for Zdorab. Servant or not, he was the only available male, and she was sick of second-class citizenship in this infinitesimal nation. Marriage would symbolize her bowing to the new order, it would be another kind of servitude, and her husband would be a man for whom she had nothing but contempt. But it would be better than disappearing.

Of course, when she thought of actually letting him do his business with her body, it made her skin crawl. All she could think of was Luet throwing up all the time—that’s the result of letting men treat you like a bank in which to deposit their feeble little sperm.

No, I don’t really feel that way, thought Shedemei. I’m just angry. The sharing of genetic material is elegant and beautiful; it’s been my life. The grace of it when lizards mate, the male mounting and clinging, his long slender penis embracing the female and searching out the opening, as deft and prehensile as a baboon’s tale; the dance of the octopuses, arms meeting tip to tip; the shuddering of salmon as they drop eggs, then sperm, onto the bottom of the stream; it is all beautiful, all part of the ballet of life.

But the females always get to have some choice. The strong females, anyway, the clever ones. They get to give their ova to the male who will give them the best chance of survival—to the strong male, the dominant male, the aggressive male, the intelligent male—not to some cowering slave. I don’t want my children to have slave genes. Better to have no children at all than to spend years watching them grow up acting more and more like Zdorab so that I’m ashamed of the very sight of them.

Which is why she found herself at the door of the Index tent, ready to walk in and propose a sort of semi-marriage to Zdorab.

Because she felt such contempt for him, she intended it to be a marriage without sex, without children. And because he was so contemptible, she expected him to agree.

He was sitting on the carpet, his legs crossed, the Index on his lap, his hands together on the ball, his eyes closed. He spent every free moment with the Index—though that wasn’t really all that much time, since so few of his moments were free. Often Issib was with him, but in late afternoons Issib took his watch at the garden—the long arm of his chair was quite effective at discouraging baboons from exploring the melons, and had been known to bat birds out of the air. It was Zdorab’s time alone with the Index, rarely more than an hour, and the one respect that the company paid to him was to leave him alone then—provided that dinner was already cooking and somebody else didn’t want to use the Index, in which case Zdorab was casually shunted aside.

Looking at him there, his eyes closed, she could almost believe that he was communing with the great mind of the Oversoul. But of course he didn’t have the brains for that. He was probably just memorizing the main entries in the Index, so he could help Wetchik or Nafai or Luet or Shedemei herself locate some bit of information they wanted. Even with the Index, Zdorab was the pure servant.

He looked up. “Did you want the Index?” he asked mildly.

“No,” she said. “I came to talk to you.”

Did he shudder? Was that the quick involuntary movement of his shoulders? No, he was shrugging, that’s what it was.

“I expected that you would, eventually.”

“Everyone expects it, which is why I haven’t come till now.”

“All right then,” he said. “Why now?”

“Because it’s plain that in this company the unmarried people are going to slip further and further into oblivion as time goes on. You may be content with that, but I am not.”

“I haven’t noticed you slipping into oblivion,” said Zdorab. “Your voice is listened to in councils.”

“Patiently they listen,” said Shedemei. “But I have no real influence.”

“No one does,” said Zdorab. “This is the Oversoul’s expedition.”

“I didn’t think you’d grasp it,” said Shedemei. “Try to think of this company as a troop of baboons. You and I are getting thrust farther and farther to the edges of the troop. If s only a matter of time until we are nothing.”

“But that only matters if you actually care about being something.”

Shedemei could hardly believe that he would put it into words that way. “I know that you have utterly no ambition, Zdorab, but I don’t intend to disappear as a human being. And what I propose is simple enough. We just go through the ceremony with Aunt Rasa, we share a tent, and that’s it. No one has to know what goes on between us. I don’t want your babies, and I have no particular interest in your company. We simply sleep in the same tent, and we’re no longer shunted to the edge of the troop. It’s that simple. Agreed?”

“Fine,” said Zdorab.

She had expected him to say that, to go along. But there was something else in the way he said it, something very subtle …

“You wanted it that way,” she said.

He looked at her blankly.

“You wanted it this way all along.”

And again, something in his eyes …

“And you’re afraid.”

Suddenly his eyes flashed with anger. “Now you think you’re Hushidh, is that it? You think you know how everybody fits with everybody else.”

She had never seen him show anger before—not even sullen anger, and certainly not a hot, flashing scorn like the one she was seeing now. It was a side of Zdorab that she hadn’t guessed existed. But it didn’t make her like him any better. It reminded her, in fact, of the snarling of a whipped dog.

“I really don’t care,” she said, “whether you wanted to have sex with me or not. I never cared to make myself attractive to men—that’s what women do who have nothing else to offer the world than a pair of breasts and a uterus.”

“I have always valued you for your work with genetics,” said Zdorab. “Especially for your study of genetic drift in so-called stable species.”

She had no answer. It had never occurred to her that anyone in this group had read, much less understood, any of her scientific publications. They all thought of her as someone who came up with valuable genetic alterations that could be sold in faraway places—that’s what her relationship had been with Wetchik and his sons for years.

“Though I couldn’t help but regret that you didn’t have access to the genetic records in the Index. It would have clinched several of your points, having the exact genetic coding of the subject species as they came off the ships from Earth.”

She was stunned. “The Index has information like that?”

“I found it a few years ago. The Index didn’t want to tell me—I realize now because there are military applications of some of the genetic information in its memory—you can make plagues. But there are ways to get around some of its proscriptions. I found them. I’ve never been sure how the Oversoul felt about that.”

“And you haven’t told me till now?”

“You didn’t tell me you were continuing your research,” said Zdorab. “You did those papers years ago, when you were fresh out of school. It was your first serious project. I assumed you had gone on.”

“This is the kind of thing you do with the Index? Genetics?”

Zdorab shook his head. “No.”

“What, then? What were you studying just now, when I came in?”

“Probable patterns of continental drift on Earth.”

“On Earth! The Oversoul has information that specific about Earth?”

“The Oversoul didn’t know it had that information. I kind of had to coax it out. A lot of things are hidden from the Oversoul itself, you know. But the Index has the key. The Oversoul has been quite excited about some of the things I’ve found in its memory.”

Shedemei was so surprised she had to laugh.

“I suppose it’s amusing,” said Zdorab, not amused.

“No, I was just…”

“Surprised to know that I was worth something besides baking breads and burying fecal matter.”

He had struck so close to her previous attitude that it made her angry. “Surprised that you knew you were worth more than that.”

“You have no idea what I know or think about myself or anything else. And you made no effort to find out, either,” said Zdorab. “You came in here like the chief god of all pantheons and deigned to offer me marriage as long as I didn’t actually touch you and expected me to accept gratefully. Well, I did. And you can go on treating me like I don’t exist and it’ll be fine with me.”

She had never felt so ashamed of herself before in her life. Even as she had hated the way everybody else treated Zdorab as a nonentity, she had treated him that way herself, and in her own mind had given no thought for his feelings, as if they didn’t matter. But now, having stabbed him with the contemptuousness of her proposal of marriage, she felt she had wronged him and had to make it right. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m not,” said Zdorab. “Let’s just forget everything about this conversation, get married tonight and then we don’t have to talk again, agreed?”

“You really don’t like me,” said Shedemei.

“As if you have ever cared for one moment whether I or anyone else liked you, as long as we didn’t interfere too much with your work.”

Shedemei laughed. “You’re right.”

“It seems that we were both sizing each other up, but one of us did a better job of it than the other.”

She nodded, accepting the chastening. “Of course we will have to talk again.”

“Will we?”

“So you can show me how to get to that information from Earth.”

“The genetic stuff?”

“And the continental drift. You forget that I’m carrying seeds to replenish lost species on Earth. I need to know the landforms. And a lot more.”

He nodded. “I can show you that. As long as you realize that what I have are forty-million-year-old extrapolations of what might happen in another forty million years. It could be off by a lot—a little mistake early on would be hugely magnified by now.”

“I am a scientist, you know,” she said.

“And I’m a librarian,” said Zdorab. “I’ll be glad to show you how to get to the Earth information. It’s sort of a back door—I found a path through the agricultural information, through pig breeding, if you can believe it. It helps to be interested in everything. Here, sit across from me and hold on to the Index. You are sensitive to it, I hope.”

“Sensitive enough,” said Shedemei. “Wetchik and Nafai both took me through sessions, and I’ve used it to look things up. Mostly I just use my own computer, though, because I thought I already knew everything that was on the Index in my field.”

Now she was sitting across from him, and he set the Index between them and they both bowed forward to lean their elbows on their knees and rest their hands on the golden ball. Her hands touched his, but he did not move his hands out of the way, and there was no trembling; just cool, calm hands, as if he didn’t even notice she was there.

She immediately caught the voice of the Index, answering Zdorab’s inquiries, responding with names of paths and headings, subheads, and catalogs within the memory of the Oversoul. But as the names droned on she lost the thread of them, because of his fingers touching hers. Not that she felt anything for him herself; what bothered her was that he felt nothing at all for her. He had known for more than a month that she was going to be his wife, or at least that she was expected to; he had been watching her, certainly he had. And yet there was not even a glimmer of desire. He had accepted her proscription of sexual relations between them without a hint of regret. And he could endure her touch without showing the slightest sign of sexual tension.

Shedemei had never felt more ugly and undesirable than she did right now. It was absurd—until a few minutes ago she had had such contempt for this man that if he had expressed any sexual interest she would have been nauseated. But he was not the same man now, he was a much more interesting person, an intelligent person with a mind and a will, and while she didn’t exactly feel a great flood of love or even sexual desire for him, she still felt enough new respect that his utter lack of desire for her was painful.

Another wound in the same old place, opening all the fragile scabs and scars, and she bled afresh at the shame of being a woman that no man wanted.

“You’re not paying attention,” said Zdorab.

“Sorry,” she said.

He said nothing in reply. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her.

“Nothing,” she said, brushing away the tear that clung to her lower eyelashes. “I didn’t mean to distract you. Can we start again?”

But he didn’t look back down to the Index. “It isn’t that I don’t desire you, Shedemei.”

What, was her heart naked, that he could see right through her pretenses and see into the source of her pain?

“It’s that I don’t desire any woman.”

It took her a moment for the idea to register. Then she laughed. “You’re a zhop.”

“That’s really an old word for the human anus,” said Zdorab quietly. “There are those who might be hurt at being called by such a name.”

“But no one guessed,” she said.

“I have made quite sure that no one would guess,” said Zdorab, “and I’m putting my life in your hands telling you.”

“Oh, it’s not as dramatic as that,” she said.

“Two of my friends were killed in Dog Town,” he said.

Dog Town was where men who didn’t have a woman in Basilica had to live, since it was illegal for an unattached male to live or even stay overnight inside the city walls.

“One was set upon by a mob because they heard a rumor he was a zhop, a peedar. They hung him by the feet from a second-story window, cut off his male organs, and then slashed him to death with knives. The other one was tricked by a man who pretended to be ... one of us. He was arrested, but on the way to prison he had an accident. It was the oddest sort of accident, too. He was trying to escape, and somehow he tripped and in the act of falling, his testicles somehow came off and got jammed down his throat, probably with a broomhandle or the butt of a spear, and he suffocated on them before anybody could come to his aid.”

“They do that?”

“Oh, I can understand it perfectly. Basilica was a very difficult place for male humans. We have an innate need to dominate, you see, but in Basilica we had to deal with the fact that we had no control except as we had influence with a woman. The men living outside the walls in Dog Town were, by the very fact they didn’t live inside, branded as second-raters, men that women didn’t want. There was the constant imputation that Dog Town men weren’t real men at all, that they didn’t have what it took to please a woman. Their very identity as males was in question. And so their fear and hatred of zhops”— he said the word with scorching contempt—”reached peaks I’ve never heard of anywhere else.”

“These friends of yours … were they your lovers?”

“The one who was arrested—he had been my lover for several weeks, and he wanted to continue, but I wouldn’t let him because if we went on any longer people would begin to suspect what we were. To save our lives I refused to see him again. He went straight from me into the trap. So you see, Nafai and Elemak aren’t the only ones who have killed a man.”

The pain and grief he was showing seemed deeper than anything Shedemei had ever felt. For the first time she realized how sheltered her scholarly life had been. She had never had such a close connection with someone that she would feel their death this strongly, so long after. If it was long after.

“How long ago?”

“I was twenty. Nine years ago. No, ten. I’m thirty now. I forgot.”

“And the other one?”

“A couple of months before I—left the city.”

“He was your lover, too?”

“Oh, no—he wasn’t like me that way. He had a girl in the city, only she wanted it kept secret so he didn’t talk about it—she was in a bad marriage and was marking time till it ended, and so he never spoke about her. That’s why the rumor started that he was a zhop. He died without telling them.”

“That’s—gallant, I suppose.”

“It was stupid beyond belief,” said Zdorab. “He never believed me when I told him how terrifying it was in Basilica for people like me.”

“You told him what you are?”

“I thought of him as a man who could keep a secret. He proved me right. I kind of think—that he died in my place. So that I could be alive when Nafai came to take the Index out of the city.”

It was so far beyond anything she had experienced—beyond anything she had imagined. “Why did you keep on living there, then? Why didn’t you go to someplace that isn’t so—terrible?”

“In the first place, while there are places that aren’t so bad, I don’t know of any place that I could actually get to that is actually safe for someone like me. And in the second place, the Index was in Basilica. Now that the Index is out of there, I hope the city burns to the ground. I only wish that Moozh had killed every one of the strutting men of Dog Town.”

“The Index was that important to you, to make you stay?”

“I learned of its existence when I was a young boy. Just a story, that there was a magic ball that if you held it, you could talk to God and he would have to tell you the answer to any question you asked. I thought, How wonderful. And then I saw a picture of the Index of the Palwashantu, and it looked exactly like the image in my mind of the magic ball.”

“But that’s not evidence at all,” said Shedemei. “That’s a childhood dream.”

“I know it. I knew it then,” said Zdorab. “But without even meaning to, I found myself preparing. For the day when I’d have the magic ball. I found myself trying to learn the questions that it would be worth asking God to answer. And, still without meaning to, I found myself making choices that took me closer and closer to Basilica, to the place where the Palwashantu kept their sacred Index. At the same time, being a studious young man helped me conceal my—defect. My father would say, ‘You need to set down the books now and then, go and find some friends. Find a girl! How will you ever marry if you never meet any girls?’ When I got to Basilica I used to write to him about my girlfriends, so he felt much better, though he would tell me that the way Basilicans marry, for just a year at a time, was awful and against nature. He really didn’t like things that were against nature.”

“That must have hurt,” said Shedemei.

“Not really,” said Zdorab. “It is against nature. I’m cut off from that tree of life that Volemak saw, I’m not part of the chain—I’m a genetic dead end. I think I read once, in an article by a genetics student, that it was not unreasonable to suppose that homosexuality might be a mechanism that nature used to weed out defective genes. The organism could detect some otherwise unnoticeable genetic flaw, and this started a mechanism that caused the hypothalamus to remain stunted, causing us to be highly sexual beings but with an inability to fixate on the opposite sex. A sort of self-closing wound in the gene pool. We were, I think the article said, the culls of humanity.”

Shedemei blushed deeply—a feeling she rarely had and didn’t like. “That was student work. I never published it outside the scholarly community. It was speculation.”

“I know,” he said.

“How did you even find it?”

“When I realized that I was expected to marry you, I read everything you wrote. I was trying to discover what I could and could not tell you.”

“And what did you decide?”

“That I’d better keep my secrets to myself. That’s why I never spoke to you, and why I was so relieved that you didn’t want me.”

“And now you did tell me.”

“Because I could see that it hurt you, the fact that I didn’t want you. I hadn’t planned on that. You didn’t come across as someone who would ever want the love of a contemptible crawling worm like me.”

Worse and worse. “Was I so obvious in my attitude?”

“Not at all,” he said. “I deliberately cultivated my wormhood. I have worked hard to become the most unnoticeable, despicable, spineless being that anyone in this company will ever know.”

And now, thinking of what happened to his two friends, she understood. “Camouflage,” she said. “For you to remain single and not be suspected of what you are, you had to be sexless.”

“Spineless.”

“But Zdorab, we’re not in Basilica now.”

“We carry Basilica with us. Look at the men here. Look at Obring, for instance, and Meb—doomed by their particular lack of gifts to be at the bottom of any pecking order you can imagine. Both of them aggressive and yet cowardly—they long to be on top, but haven’t the gumption to take on the big men and take them down. That’s why they’re doomed to follow men like Elemak and Volemak and even Nafai, though he’s the youngest, because they can’t take risks. Imagine the rage built up inside them. And then imagine what they’d do if they learned that I was the monstrous thing, the crime against nature, the unmanly man, the perfect image of what they fear that they are.”

“Volemak wouldn’t let them touch you.”

“Volemak won’t live forever,” said Zdorab. “And I don’t trust my secret to those who won’t keep it.”

“Are you that sure of me?” said Shedemei.

“I have put my life into your hands,” said Zdorab. “But no, I’m not that sure of you. Like it or not, though, we’ve been forced together. So I’ve taken a calculated risk. To tell you, so that I have one person here that I don’t have to lie to. One person who knows that what I seem to be is only a pretense.”

“I’ll make them stop treating you so—so unregardingly.”

“No!”cried Zdorab. “No, you mustn’t. Things will be better when we’re married, for both of us—you were right about that. But you must let me remain invisible, as much as possible. I know best how to deal with what I am, believe me—you’ve never even imagined it, you said so yourself, so don’t bull your way into my survival strategy and start trying to fix things because you’ll end up killing me if you do. Do you understand that? You’re brilliant, one of the finest minds of our time, but you know absolutely nothing about this situation, you are hopelessly ignorant, you will destroy anything you touch, so keep your hands off.”

He spoke with unbelievable vehemence and power. She had not imagined him capable of talking this way. She loathed it—being put in her place so firmly. But when she thought about it, instead of reacting viscerally, she realized that he was right. That for now, at least, she really was ignorant and the best thing she could do was let him continue to handle things however he thought best.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll say nothing, I’ll do nothing.”

“Nobody expects you to be proud to be married to me,” said Zdorab. “In fact, they’ll all think of it as a noble sacrifice you’re making. So you won’t lose any status by being my wife. It’ll make you sort of heroic to them.”

She laughed bitterly. “Zdorab, that’s how I thought of it myself.”

“I know,” he said. “But that’s not how I thought of it. I even hoped—imagine, having the right to be alone in the same tent with the keenest scientific mind on the planet Harmony—every night—with nothing to do but talk!”

It was so sweetly flattering and yet, for reasons she couldn’t quite grasp yet, it was also vaguely tragic.

“That’s a marriage, after a fashion, don’t you think? We won’t have babies like the others, but we’ll have thoughts. You can teach me, you can talk to me about your work and if I don’t understand I can promise you that I’ll educate myself through the Index until I do. And maybe I can tell you some of the things I’ve found.”

“I’d love that.”

“We can be friends, then,” he said. “That’ll make ours a better marriage than most of theirs. Can you imagine what Obring and Kokor talk about?”

She laughed. “Do you think they actually do?”

“And Mebbekew and Dol, both playacting and secretly loathing each other.”

“No, I don’t think Dol hates Mebbekew, I think she actually believes the part she’s playing.”

“You’re probably right. But they’re pretty awful, don’t you think? And they’re going to have children!”

“Terrifying.”

They laughed, long and loud, till tears ran down both their faces.

The door parted. It was Nafai.

“I clapped,” he said, “but you didn’t hear me. Then I realized you were laughing and I thought I might come in.”

Both of them immediately grew sober. “Of course,” said Zdorab.

“We were just discussing our marriage,” said Shedemei.

Shedemei could see the relief spread over Nafai’s face as if the shadow of a cloud had just passed. “You’re going ahead and doing it,” he said.

“We were just stubborn enough to want to wait until it was our idea,” said Zdorab.

“I believe it,” said Nafai.

“In fact,” said Zdorab, “we ought to go tell Rasa and Volemak, and besides, you wanted to use the Index.”

“I did, but not if you’re not done with it,” said Nafai.

“It’ll still be here,” said Shedemei, “when we’re ready for it again.” And in moments they were outside the tent, heading for—where?

Zdorab took her by the hand and led her to the cookfire. “Dol was supposed to be watching here,” he said, “but she usually runs off—she needs her little nap, you know. It doesn’t matter—I let Yobar touch the cookpot once, and he must have spread the word about how it feels, because the boons don’t come anywhere near here now, even when it smells as good as this.”

It did smell good.

“How did you learn to cook?”

“My father was a cook,” said Zdorab. “It was the family business. He was good enough that he was able to afford to send me to Basilica to study, and I learned a lot of what he knew. I think he’d be proud of what I’ve been able to do in these piss-poor conditions.”

“Except the camel cheese.”

“I think I’ve found an herb that will improve it,” said Zdorab. He lifted the lid of the cookpot. “I’m trying it tonight—there’s twice as much cheese in this as usual, but I don’t think anybody will mind.” He lifted the stirring spoon and she saw how cheesily the liquid strung and glopped off of it.

“Mmm,” she said. “Can’t wait.”

He detected the irony in her voice. “Well, it’s not as though you don’t have ample reason to be suspicious of anything that looks like it might taste like the cheese, but I figure that we’ve all had years of loving cheese and only a couple of months of hating it, so I should be able to win you all back if I do it right. And we will need the cheese—it’s too good a source of animal protein for all the nursing mothers we’re going to have.”

“You’ve got it all planned out,” she said.

“I have plenty of time to myself, to think,” he said.

“In a way,” she said, “you’re really the leader of this group.”

“In a way,” he said, “you’d best not say that in front of anyone else or they’ll be sure you’ve lost your mind.”

“You’re the one who decides what we’ll eat and when, where we’ll void ourselves, what we’ll plant in the garden, and you guide us around in the Index—”

“But if I do it right, no one ever notices,” he said.

“You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told.”

“So do all good people,” he said. “That’s what it means to be a good person. And I am a good person, Shedya.”

“I know that now,” she said. “And I should have known it before. I interpreted all you did as weakness—but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don’t deserve it.”

And now at last it was time for tears to come to his eyes. Just a little shining, but she saw, and knew that he knew that she saw. It occurred to her that their marriage would be far more than the sham she had intended. It could be a real friendship, between the two people who had least expected to find friends and companions on this journey.

He stirred the pottage and then replaced the lid, leaving the spoon hooked over the side.

“I imagine this is the safest place we could come and talk, if we didn’t want to be disturbed or overheard,” she said. “Because I don’t imagine anybody ever comes near the cookfire if they can help it, for fear of being asked to work.”

Zdorab chuckled. “I’ll always be glad for your company while I’m working here, as long as you understand that cooking is an art, and I do concentrate on it sometimes while I do it.”

“I hope I can tell you things so stimulating and interesting that you ruin the soup sometimes.”

“Do it too often and they’ll be pleading with us to get a divorce.”

They laughed, and then again their laughter trailed off into silence.

“Why don’t I go and tell Aunt Rasa?” said Shedemei. “She’ll want to do up a wedding for us tonight, I’m sure. She’ll be even more relieved than Nafai was.”

“And we want it as public as possible,” said Zdorab.

She understood. “We’ll make sure everybody sees that we are definitely man and wife.” And the unspoken promise: I will never tell anyone that we are not man and wife at all.

Shedemei turned to leave, to look for Rasa, but Zdorab’s voice detained her. “Shedya,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Please call me Zodya.”

“Of course,” she said, though in fact she had never heard his familiar name. No one used it.

“And another thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Your student article—you were wrong. About genetic culls.”

“I said it was just speculation…”

“I mean, I know you were wrong because I know what we are. In the ancient science, the Earth science that I’ve been exploring through the Index: it’s not some internal mechanism of the human body. It’s not genetic. It’s just the level of male hormones in the mother’s bloodstream at the time the hypothalamus goes through its active differentiation and growth.”

“But that’s almost random,” said Shedemei. “It wouldn’t mean anything, it would just be an accident if the level happened to be low for those couple of days.”

“Not really random,” said Zdorab. “But an accident all the same. It means nothing, except that we’re born crippled.”

“Like Issib.”

“I think when Issib sees me walking, sees what I can do with my hands, that he would gladly trade places with me,” said Zdorab. “But when I see him with Hushidh, and see her pregnant as she is, and see how the others have given him real respect because of that, how they recognize him as being one of them, then there are moments—only moments, mind you—when I would gladly trade places with him.”

Shedemei impulsively squeezed his hand, though she was not one who was apt to make such affectionate gestures. It seemed appropriate, though. A friendly thing to do, and so she did it, and he squeezed back, so it was all right. Then she walked briskly away, looking for Lady Rasa.

And as she went, she thought: Who would have believed that finding out my husband-to-be is a zhop would come as such wonderful news, and that it would make me like him more. The world is truly standing on its head these days.

Alone in the Index tent after Shedemei and Zdorab left, Nafai did not hesitate. He took the Index—still warm from their hands—and held it close to him and spoke almost fiercely to the Oversoul. “All this time you’ve been telling me that Father’s dream of the tree didn’t come from you, but you never mentioned that you have his whole experience in your memory.”

“Of course I do,” said the Index. “It would be remiss of me not to record something as important as that.”

“And you knew how much I wanted a dream from the Keeper of Earth. You knew that!”

“Yes,” said the Index.

“Then why didn’t you give me my father’s dream!”

“Because it was your father’s dream,” said the Index.

“He told it—it isn’t secret anymore! I want to see what he saw!

“That’s not a good idea.”

“I’m tired of your deciding all the time what’s a good idea and what isn’t. You thought that killing Gaballufix was a fine idea.”

“And it was.”

“For you. You’ve got no blood on your hands.”

“I have your memory of it. And I didn’t do too badly by you out in the desert, when Elemak was plotting to kill you.”

“So… you saved my life because you wanted my genes in our little gene pool.”

“I’m a computer, Nafai. Do you expect me to save your life because I like you? My motives are a great deal more dependable than human emotions.”

“I don’t want any of that from you! I want a dream from the Keeper.”

“Exactly. And having me put your father’s dream into your mind is not the same thing as having a dream from the Keeper. It’s merely having a memory report from me.”

“I want to see those Earth creatures that the others have seen. The bats and angels.”

“Which they think are Earth creatures.”

“I want to have the taste of the fruit of the tree in my mouth!”

Even as he said it—as his lips silently formed the words, as the cry of anguish formed in his mind -Nafai knew that he was being childish. But he wanted it, wanted so badly to know what his father knew, to have seen what Luet saw, what Hushidh saw, what even General Moozh and Luet’s strange mother, Thirsty, saw. He wanted to know, not what they told about it, but what it looked like, felt like, sounded like, smelled like, tasted like. And he wanted it enough that even if he was being childish, he had to have it, he demanded it.

And so the Oversoul, regarding it as undesirable to have the male it had earmarked as the eventual leader of the party be in such an anguished and therefore unpredictable state, gave him what he asked for.

It came on him all at once, as he held the Index. The darkness that Father had described, the man who invited him to follow, the endless walking. Only there was something more, something Father hadn’t mentioned—a terrible disturbing feeling of wrongness, of unwanted, unthinkable thoughts going on in a powerful undercurrent. This wasn’t just a wilderness, it was a mental hell, and he couldn’t bear to stay in it.

“Skip past this part,” he said to the Index. “Take me past here, get me out of here.”

All at once the dream stopped.

“Not out of the dream, “ said Nafai impatiently. “Just skip the dull part.”

“The Keeper sent the dull part as much as it sent anything else,” said the Index.

“Skip to the end of it where things start happening.”

“That’s cheating, but I’ll do it.” Nafai hated it when the Index talked like that. It had learned that humans interpreted resistance followed by compliance as teasing, and therefore it now teased them as a way of simulating natural behavior. Only because Nafai knew that it was only a computer doing the teasing, and not a person, it was merely tedious, not fun. Yet when he complained about it, the Index merely replied that everybody else liked it and Nafai shouldn’t be such a killjoy.

The dream came back again, and immediately he was plunged into the darkness, the walking, the back of the man leading him, and that awful mental undercurrent that was so painful and distracting. But then he could hear his Father’s voice pleading with the man to tell him something, to lead him out of the place. Only it was not his Father’s voice. It was a strange voice that Nafai had never heard before, except that in his mind he kept perceiving it as his own voice, only it was Father’s thought that this voice was his own, not Nafai’s, because his own voice sounded nothing like this and neither did Father’s. Until finally Nafai realized that this was how his Father’s voice sounded to his father. In a dream, of course, Father wouldn’t hear the voice everyone else hears. He’d hear the voice he thinks he hears when he’s speaking. Only it’s not even that voice, it’s much younger, it’s the voice he learned to think of as his own when he formed his identity as a man. Deeper than his real voice, more manly, and younger.

Except Nafai couldn’t shake the powerful conviction that, no matter how he analyzed it, this was his own voice, not Father’s at all, though it was also completely wrong for his voice. And then Nafai realized that of course, if the Index was playing back for him his memory of Volemak’s experience of the dream, it would be filtered through Volemak’s consciousness, and therefore would have all of Volemak’s attitudes inextricably tied to it.

That’s what that undercurrent was of distracting, meaningless, confusing, frightening thoughts. It was Father’s stream of consciousness, constantly evaluating and understanding and interpreting and responding to the dream. Thoughts that Father wouldn’t even have been particularly conscious of himself, because they hadn’t surfaced yet—including scraps of ideas like This is a dream, and This is from the Oversoul, and I’m really dead, and This is not a dream, and all kinds of contradictory thoughts jumbled up and piled on top of each other. When Father was having these thoughts they arose out of his own unconscious mind and his own will sorted them out, and the thoughts responded to his will, terminated a thought as soon as he wanted to move on to another. But in Nafai’s mind, with all of this replayed, the thoughts did not respond to his own will, and in fact were superimposed on his own stream of consciousness. Therefore he was having twice as many under-the-breath thoughts as he usually had, and half of them did not respond to his will in any way, so it was at once confusing and terrifying, for his mind was out of control.

Father had given up talking to the man and now was crying out to the Oversoul, pleading with him. It was humiliating to hear the fear, the anxiety, the whining in Father’s voice. He had said that he was pleading, but Nafai had never actually heard his father take this self-abasing tone with anyone, and it was like seeing his father going to the toilet or something disgusting like that, he hated seeing his father this way. I’m spying on him. I’m seeing him as he sees himself at his worst moments, instead of seeing the man he presents to the world, to his sons. I’m stealing his self from him, and it’s wrong, it’s a terrible thing for me to do. But then maybe I should know this about my father, how weak he is. I can’t rely on him, a man who whimpers like this to the Oversoul, begging for help like a baby…

And then he thought of how he himself had pleaded with the Index to show him Father’s dream and realized that, in their own minds, even the bravest and strongest of men must have moments like these, only no one ever saw them because they never acted on them outside their dreams and nightmares. I only know this about Father because I’m spying on him.

At that moment, just as he was about to ask the Index to stop the dream, it changed, and suddenly he was in the field that Father had described. At once Nafai wanted to find the tree, but of course he could only look where Father looked in the dream, and could only see it when Father saw it.

Father saw now, and it was beautiful, and a great relief after all the darkness and bleakness. Only Nafai not only felt his own relief, but also had Father’s relief superimposed on his, and therefore it wasn’t relief at all, but more tension, and more distraction and disorientation and it didn’t help that, instead of walking to the tree in an orderly way, Father sort of just went to it. He thought of it as walking but he really just got closer suddenly and there he was at the tree.

Nafai felt Father’s desire for the fruit, his delight at the smell of it, but because he was faintly nauseated by the movement toward the tree and faintly headachy because of the constant undercurrent of Father’s thoughts, the smell did not arouse any desire in Nafai. Rather it made him sick. Father reached up and picked a fruit and tasted it. Nafai could feel that Father found it delicious, and for a moment, as the taste came into Nafai’s mind, it was delicious, powerfully, exquisitely delicious in a way Nafai could hardly have imagined. But almost immediately the experience was subverted by Father’s own reaction to it, his own associations with the taste and the smell of it; his reactions were so powerful, Father had been so overwhelmed by the taste that his feelings were out of control, and Nafai could not contain them. It was physically painful. He was terrified. He screamed to the Index to stop the dream.

It stopped, and Nafai let himself fall sideways onto the carpet, gasping and sobbing, trying to get the madness out of his mind.

And in a little while he was all right again, because the madness was gone.

“You see the problem I have communicating clearly with humans?” said the voice inside his head. “I have to frame my ideas so clearly and loudly, and even then most of them think that they’re hearing nothing but their own thoughts. Only the Index makes it possible for real clarity of communication with most people. Except you and Luet—I can talk to the two of you better than anybody.” The voice of the Index was silent for a moment. “I thought you were going to go insane there for a while. It wasn’t pretty, what was happening inside your head.”

“You warned me.”

“Well, I didn’t warn you of all that because I didn’t know it would happen. I’ve never put one person’s dream inside somebody else’s head before. I don’t think I’ll do it again, either, even if somebody gets very upset because I said no.”

“I agree with your decision,” said Nafai.

“And you were very unkind to judge your father that way. He’s a very strong and courageous man.”

“I know. If you were listening in, you know that I figured that all out.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d remember that. Human memory is very unreliable.”

“Leave me alone,” said Nafai. “I don’t want to talk to you or anybody right now.”

“Then let go of the Index. You can always walk away.”

Nafai removed his hand from the Index, then rolled over, got to his knees, to his feet. His head reeled. He was dizzy and felt sick.

He staggered outside the tent. Issib and Mebbekew were there. “We’re on our way to dinner,” said Issib. “Did you have a good session with the Index?”

“I’m not hungry,” said Nafai. “I don’t feel well.”

Mebbekew hooted. It sounded to Nafai very much like the pant-hoots of the baboons. “Don’t tell me Nafai’s going to try to get out of work by claiming to be sick all the time. But I guess it’s worked so well for Luet that he figures it’s worth a try, right?”

Nafai didn’t even bother to answer Meb. He just staggered away, looking for his tent. I’ve got to sleep, he thought. That’s what I need, to sleep.

Only when he got there and lay down on the bed, he realized he couldn’t possibly sleep. He was too agitated, too nauseated, his head was swimming and he couldn’t think but he also couldn’t stop thinking.

So I’ll go hunting, thought Nafai. I’ll go out and find some small helpless animal and I’ll kill it and tear its skin off and rip its guts out and I’m sure I’ll feel better because that’s the kind of man I am. Or maybe when the smell of the guts hits me I’ll throw up and then I’ll feel better.

No one saw him on the way out of camp—if they had seen him, walking so unsteadily and carrying a pulse, they probably would have stopped him. He crossed the stream and went up the hills on the other side. They never hunted in that direction because that was the side where the baboons slept in the cliffs and because if you went too far in that direction you’d get close enough to the villages in the valley called Luzha that you might run into somebody. But Nafai wasn’t thinking clearly. He only remembered that once before he had been on the other side of the stream and something wonderful had happened, and right now he very much wanted for something wonderful to happen. Or to die. Whatever.

I should have waited, he said to himself over and over again, when he could think well enough to know what he was thinking. If the Keeper of Earth wanted to send me a dream, it would have sent me a dream. And if it didn’t, I should have waited. I’m sorry. I just wanted to know for myself, but I should have waited. I can stand the waiting now, only now you’ll never send me a dream, will you, because I cheated, just as the Index said, I cheated, and so I’m not entitled… in fact I’m worthless now, I’ve ruined my own brain by what I insisted the Oversoul do for me, and now I’m going to be sick in the head forever and neither you nor the Oversoul nor Luet nor anybody else will have any use for me and I might as well drop off the edge of a cliff somewhere and die.

It was sundown when he realized that he had no idea of where he was, or how far he had wandered. He only knew that he was sitting on a rock on the crest of a hill—in plain sight, if there were some bandit looking for someone to rob, or a hunter looking for prey. And even though he had his head in his hands and was looking at the ground, he was aware that someone was sitting across from him. Someone who had not yet said anything, but who was watching him intently.

Say something, said Nafai silently. Or kill me and get it over with,

“Oo. Oo-oo,” said the stranger.

Nafai looked up then, for he knew the voice. “Yobar,” he said.

Yobar wiggled a little and hooted a few more times, in delight, apparently, at having been recognized.

“I don’t have anything for you to eat,” said Nafai.

“Oo,” said Yobar cheerfully. He was probably just grateful for someone to notice him, since he had been ostracized by the troop.

Nafai reached out a hand to him, and Yobar strode boldly forward and laid his forehand in Nafai’s.

And in that moment, Yobar was not a baboon at all. Instead, Nafai saw him as a winged animal, with a face at once more fierce and more intelligent than a baboon’s. The one wing flexed and stretched, but the other wing did not, for it was the hand that Nafai held in his own. The winged creature who had taken Yobar’s place spoke to him, but Nafai couldn’t understand his language. The creature—the angel, Nafai knew that’s what it was—spoke again, only now Nafai understood, vaguely, that it was warning him of danger.

“What should I do?” asked Nafai.

But the angel looked around and became more agitated and then, seeming to be quite frightened, it let go of his hand and leapt skyward and flew, circling overhead.

Nafai heard a sound of something hard scraping over rock. He looked back down at the rocks around him and saw what had made the noise. A half dozen of a larger, fiercer creature. The rats from the dreams the others had had. They were heavier and stronger-looking than the baboons had been, and Nafai well knew from the stories of other desert travelers that baboons were far stronger than a full-sized man. The teeth were fierce, but the hands—for they were hands, not claws—looked terrible indeed, especially because many of them held stones and seemed prepared to throw them.

Nafai thought of his pulse. How many of them can I kill before they hit me with a stone and knock me down? Two of them? Three? Better to die fighting than to let them take me without any cost at all.

Better? Why would it be better? Bad enough that one should die. What’s to be gained by killing more, except that they’d feel more justified in having slain me.

So he set down his pulse on the ground in front of him, and clasped his hands across his knees, and waited.

They waited also. Their arms were still poised to throw. The angel still circled overhead, a silent witness except for occasional high-pitched squeals.

Then, suddenly, Nafai realized he had something in his hand. He opened his hands and saw that he was holding a fruit. He recognized it immediately as one of the fruits of the tree of life.

He lifted it to his lips and tasted it, and ah! It was as Father had said, as Nafai had tasted for just a moment before, the most exquisite sensation he could imagine feeling. Only this time there was no distraction, no confusion, no disharmony; he was at peace inside himself, and healed.

Without thinking, he took the fruit from his lips and offered it to the rat directly in front of him.

The rat looked down at his hand, then up at Nafai’s face again, then down at the fruit.

Nafai thought of laying the fruit down and letting the rat pick it up himself, but then he realized that no, it would be wrong to let the fruit touch the ground, to let it be picked up like a rotting windfall. It should be taken from a hand. This fruit should always be taken from the tree itself, or from someone’s hand.

The rat sniffed, moved forward, sniffed again. And then it took the fruit out of Nafai’s hand and took it to its lips and bit down. The fruit squirted, and some of the juice of it struck Nafai in the face, but he hardly noticed, except to lick his lip where it ran. For he couldn’t take his eyes off the rat. It was frozen in place, unmoving, the juice of the fruit dribbling from the sides of its mouth. Have I poisoned it? thought Nafai. Have I killed it somehow with this fruit? I didn’t mean to.

No, the rat had not been poisoned, merely stunned by it. Now it began making urgent sounds in its throat, and it scurried to its nearest companion, who took the fruit from its mouth with its own teeth. And so that one fruit passed around the circle, each one taking it into its mouth directly from the mouth of the one before, all the way around the circle until it came back to the first one. And that one came forward and offered its mouth to Nafai, the remnant of the fruit still there, still visible.

Nafai’s face was not built to a point the way the rats’ faces were, and so he had to reach out and take the fruit with his hand. But he put it at once in his own mouth, dreading what it would taste like now, but knowing he must do it. To his relief the flavor of the fruit was unchanged. If anything, it was sweeter now, for having been shared by these others.

He chewed, he swallowed. Only then did they also swallow whatever juice and bits of fruit remained in their mouths.

They came forward and laid at his feet the stones they had been holding to use as weapons. The pile was a pyramid in front of him. Fourteen stones. Then they filed away among the rocks.

At once the angel swooped back down, circled around him, chirping madly, flapping and flapping, until it landed heavily on his shoulders and enfolded him in its wings.

“I hope this means you’re happy,” said Nafai.

In answer the angel said nothing, but flew away itself.

Then Nafai stood and saw that he was not on the crest of a rocky peak at all, but was in a field, beside a tree, and near him was a river, and beside the river a path with an iron railing. He saw all that his father had seen, including the building on the other side.

And then, when he expected the dream to end—for he knew it was a dream—it changed. He saw himself, standing in the midst of a huge multitude of people and angels and rats, and they were all watching a bright light coming down out of the sky. They had been waiting, he understood. They had all been waiting, and now it was here. The Keeper of Earth.

Nafai wanted to get nearer, to see the face of the Keeper of Earth. But the light was too dazzling. He could see that it had four limbs, just from the shape of it, four limbs and a head, but beyond that the light simply blinded him as if the Keeper were a small star, a sun too bright to look into without burning your eyes.

Finally Nafai had to close his eyes, squint them shut to relieve them from the pain of staring into the sun. When he opened them, though, he knew he would be close enough, he knew he would see the face of the Keeper.

“Oo.”

It was Yobar’s face he was staring into.

“Oo yourself,” whispered Nafai.

“Oo-oo.”

“It’s almost dark,” said Nafai. “But you’re pretty hungry, aren’t you?”

Yobar sat back on his haunches expectantly.

“Let’s see if I can find anything for you.”

It wasn’t hard, even in the dusky light, because the hares on this side of the valley hadn’t grown scarce yet. When full night came, Yobar was still tearing at the corpse, devouring every scrap of it, breaking open the skull with a rock to get at the soft brains. Yobar’s hands and face were covered with blood.

“If you have any wit at all,” said Nafai, “you’ll get home fast with what’s left of this meat and all the blood on you so some female will make friends with you and let you play with her baby so you can make friends with it and become a full-fledged member of the troop.”

It was unlikely that Yobar understood him, but then he didn’t have to. He was already trying to hide the body of the hare from Nafai, preparatory to stealing it and running away. Nafai made his life easier by turning a little bit away so that Yobar would seize the opportunity and run. He heard the scampering of Yobar’s feet and said silently to him, Buy what you can with this hare’s blood, my friend. I’ve seen the face of the Keeper of Earth, and it is you.

Then, regretting at once the disrespectful thought, Nafai spoke silently to the Keeper of Earth—or to the Oversoul, or to nobody, he didn’t know. Thank you for showing me, he said. Thank you for letting me see what Father saw. What all the others saw. Thank you for letting me be one of those who know.

Now, if someone could help me find my way home.

Whether it was the Oversoul helping him or simply his own memory and tracking ability, he found his way home by moonlight. Luet had been worried—so had Mother and Father, and others too. They had put off Shedemei’s and Zdorab’s wedding, because it would be wrong to do that on a night when Nafai might be in danger. Now that he was back, though, the wedding could go on, and nobody asked him where he had gone or what he had been doing, as if they knew it was something too strange or wonderful or awful to be discussed.

Only later that night, in bed with Luet, did he speak of it. First of feeding Yobar, and then of the dream.

“It sounds like everyone was satisfied tonight,” said Luet.

“Even you?” he asked.

“You’re home,” she said, “and I’m content.”

SIX—PULSES

They stayed in their camp in the Valley of Mebbekew, by the River of Elemak, longer than they intended. First they had to wait for the harvest. Then, despite the anti-vomiting herbs that Shedemei learned about from the Index, Luet was so weakened from pregnancy that Rasa refused to let them begin the journey and risk her life. By the time Luet’s morning sickness had ended and she had regained some strength, all three pregnant women—Hushidh, Kokor, and Luet—were large enough in the belly that traveling would have been uncomfortable. Besides, they had been joined in their pregnancy by Sevet, Eiadh, Dol, and Lady Rasa herself. None of them were as sick as Luet had been, but neither were any of them much disposed to mount camels and ride all day and then pitch tents at night and strike them in the morning while subsisting on hard biscuit and jerky and dried melon.

So they ended up staying in their camp for more than a year, till all seven babies were born. Only two of them had sons. Volemak and Rasa named their boy Oykib, after Rasa’s father, and Elemak and Eiadh named their firstborn son Protchnu, which meant endurance. Eiadh made mention of the fact that only her husband, Elemak, was as manly as Volemak, to put a son in her as Volemak had sired nothing but sons. By and large the others ignored her boasting and enjoyed their daughters.

Luet and Nafai named their little girl Chveya, because she had sewn them together into one soul. Hushidh’s and Issib’s daughter was the first birth of the new generation, and they named her simply Dza, because she was the answer to all the questions of their life. Kokor and Obring named their daughter Krasata, a name meaning beauty that had been rather in fashion in Basilica. Vas and Sevet named their daughter Vasnaminanya, partly because the name meant memory, but also because it was related to Vas’s name; they called her Vasnya. And Mebbekew and Dol named their daughter Basilikya, after the city which they both still loved and dreamed of. Everyone knew that Meb meant his daughter’s name to be a constant reproach to those who had dragged him from his proper home, so everyone picked up on the nickname Volemak thought of for her, and so called her Syelsika, meaning country girl. Of course this annoyed Meb, but he learned to stop protesting since it only caused the others to laugh at him.

Oykib and Protchnu, Chveya and Dza, Krasata, Vasnya, and Syelsika—on a cool morning more than a year after their parents had all come together in the Valley of Mebbekew, the babies were loosely wrapped in cool traveling clothes and laid in hammocks slung across their mothers’ shoulders, so the babes could nurse during the day when they grew hungry. The women, except childless Shedemei, did none of the work of striking tents, though as the children grew they would soon be expected to resume their duties. And the men, strong now, tanned and hardened from a year’s life and work in the desert, strutted a little before their wives, proud of what babies they had made together, full of their lofty responsibility to provide and care for wives and children.

All but Zdorab, of course, who was as quiet and unprepossessing as ever, with his wife still childless; the two seemed almost to disappear sometimes. They were the only members of the company unconnected to Rasa and Volemak by blood or marriage; they were the only childless ones; they were considerably older than any of the others of their generation except Elemak; no one would have said that they were not fully the equals of the rest of the company, but then, no one actually believed that they were, either.

As the company gathered to go, Luet, with Chveya asleep in her sling, carried an overripe melon on her shoulder down to where the baboon troop was pursuing its normal business. The baboons seemed agitated and jumpy, which was hardly surprising, considering the tumult up at the human camp. As Luet passed the perimeter of their feeding area, they kept glancing up at her, to see what she was doing. Some of the females approached, to see her baby—she had let them touch Chveya before, though of course she could never let them play with her the way they played with their own children; Chveya was far too fragile for their rough fondling.

It was a male, not a female, that Luet was looking for, and as soon as she moved away from the curious females, there he was—Yobar, the one who had been an outcast less than a year ago, and who now was best friends with the oldest daughter of the matriarch of the tribe; he had as much prestige as a male could get in this city of women. Luet brought the melon to where Yobar could see what she had. Then, turning slightly away so he wouldn’t be too frightened, she cast it down on a rock and the melon burst open.

As she expected, Yobar jumped back, startled. When he saw that Luet was not afraid, however, he soon came closer to investigate. Now she could show him what she wanted him to see—the secret that they had so carefully kept from all the baboons during their year in this place. She reached down, picked up a fragment of rind with plenty of the meat of the fruit still clinging to it, and ate noisily.

The sound of her eating drew the others, but it was Yobar—as she had expected—who followed her example and began to eat. He made no distinction between fruit and rind, of course, and seemed to enjoy both equally. When he was full, he jumped around, hooting and frolicking, until others—especially young males—began to venture forward to try the fruit.

Luet slowly stepped back, then turned and walked away.

She heard footsteps padding behind her. She glanced back; Yobar was following her. She had not expected this, but then Yobar had always surprised her. He was intelligent and curious indeed, among animals whose intelligence was only a little short of the human mind, and whose curiosity and eagerness to learn were sometimes greater.

“Come if you will, then,” said Luet. She led him upstream to the garden, where the baboons had long been forbidden to go. The last of the third crop of melons was still on the vine, some ripe, some not yet. He hesitated at the edge of the garden, for the baboons had long since learned to respect that invisible boundary. She beckoned to him, though, and he carefully crossed the edge into the garden. She took him to a ripe melon. “Eat them when they look like this,” she said. “When they smell like this.” She held the melon out to him, still attached to the vine. He sniffed it, shook it, then thumped it on the ground. With enough thumping, he broke it. Then he took a bite and hooted happily at her.

“I’m not done yet,” said Luet. “You have to pay attention through the whole lesson.” She held out another melon, this one not ripe, and though she let Yobar sniff it, she wouldn’t let him hold it. “No,” she said. “Don’t eat these. The seeds aren’t mature, and if you eat them when they look like this, you won’t have a crop next year.” She set the unripe melon down behind her, and pointed to the broken ripe melon in pieces around Yobar’s feet. “Eat the ripe ones. Shedemei says the seeds will pass right through your digestive system unharmed, and they’ll sprout right in your turds and grow quite nicely. You can have melons forever, if you teach the others to eat only the ripe ones. If you teach them to wait.”

Yobar looked at her steadily.

“You don’t understand any of the words I’m saying,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t understand the lesson, does it? You’re a smart one. You’ll figure it out. You’ll teach the others before you move on to another troop, won’t you? It’s the only gift we can leave for you, our rent for using your valley this past year. Please take this from us, and use it well.”

He hooted once.

She got up and walked away from him. The riding camels were ready for mounting now; they had been waiting for her. “I was just showing the garden to Yobar,” she said. Of course Kokor rolled her eyes at that, but Luet hardly noticed—it was Nafai’s smile, and Hushidh’s nod, and Volemak’s “Well done” that mattered.

On command, the camels lurched to their feet, burdened with tents and supplies, dryboxes and coldboxes full of seeds and embryos, and—above all—with not sixteen but twenty-three human beings now. As Elemak said only last night, the Oversoul had better lead them to their destination before the children get too big to ride with their mothers, or else it had better find them more camels along the way.

The first two days’ travel took them northeast, along the same route they had taken from Basilica. It had been a year since they came that way, however, and almost nothing looked familiar—or at least nothing looked more familiar than anything else, since all gray-brown rocks and yellow-gray sand begin to look familiar after the first hour.

Mebbekew rode beside Elemak for a short way, late in the second afternoon. “We passed the place where you sentenced him to death, didn’t we?”

Elemak was silent for a moment. Then: “No, we won’t pass it at all.”

“I thought I saw it.”

“You didn’t.”

They rode in silence for a while more.

“Elemak,” said Mebbekew.

“Yes?” He didn’t sound as if he was enjoying the conversation.

“Who could stop us if we simply took our share of the tents, and three days’ supplies, and headed north to Basilica?”

Sometimes it seemed to Elemak that Mebbekew’s shortsightedness bordered on stupidity. “Apparently you’ve forgotten that we have no money. I can assure you that being poor in Basilica is even worse than being poor out here, because in Basilica the Oversoul won’t give a lizard’s tit for your survival.”

“Oh, and we’ve been so well taken care of here!” said Meb scornfully.

“We were at a well-watered location for more than a year and not once did any travelers or bandits or eloping couples or families on holiday ever come near us.”

“I know, we might as well have been on another planet. An uninhabited one! I can tell you, when Dolya was too pregnant to move, the baboon females were starting to look good to me.”

Never had Mebbekew seemed more useless than now. “I’m not surprised,” said Elemak.

Meb glared at him. “I was joking, pizdook.”

“I wasn’t,” said Elemak.

“So you’ve sold your soul, is that it? You’re Daddy’s little boy now. Nafai senior.”

Mebbekew’s resentment of Nafai was only natural—since Nafai had shown him up so many times. But Elemak had long since decided to endure Nafai, at least as long as he stayed in his place, as long as he was useful. That’s all Elemak really cared about now—whether a person contributed to the survival of the group. Of Elemak’s wife and child. And it wouldn’t hurt for Mebbekew to recall exactly how much more useful Nafai was than Meb himself. “We’ve lived a year together,” said Elemak. “You’ve eaten meat that Nafai killed during every week of that year, and you still think he’s nothing more than Father’s favorite?”

“Oh, I know he’s more than just that,” said Mebbekew. “Everyone knows it. In fact, most of us realize that he’s worth more than you.”

Mebbekew must have seen something in Elemak’s face, then, for he dropped back and stayed in line directly behind Elemak for some time.

Elemak knew that Meb’s little insult was meant to enrage him—but Elemak was not going to play along. He understood what Mebbekew wanted: out of his marriage, away from the crying of his baby, and back to the city, with its baths and commodes, its cuisine and its art, and, above all, its endless supply of flatterable and uncomplicated women. And the truth was that if he went back, Mebbekew would probably do as well as ever in Basilica, with or without money; and Dol, too, would certainly find a good living there, being an almost-legendary child actress. For the two of them, Basilica would be a lot better than anything that lay ahead of them in the foreseeable future.

But that issue is closed, thought Elemak. It was closed when the Oversoul made such a fool of me. The message was clear—try to kill Nafai and you’ll only be made to bumble and fumble around like a half-wit, unable even to tie a knot. And now it wouldn’t be Nafai he’d have to overcome in order to change their destination, it would be Father. No, there was no escape for Elemak. And besides, Basilica had nothing for him. Unlike Meb, he wasn’t content to hop from bed to bed and live off any woman who’d take him in. He needed to have stature in the city, he needed to know that when he spoke, men listened. Without money, there was little hope of that.

Besides, he loved Eiadh and was proud of little Proya, and he loved the desert life in a way that no one else, not even Volemak, could ever understand. And if he went back to Basilica, Eiadh would eventually not renew his marriage contract. He would again be in the unmanly position of having to look for a wife solely in order to maintain himself in the city. That would be unbearable— thiswas how men were meant to live, secure with their women, secure with their children. He had no desire to break up his family now. He had stopped dreaming of Basilica, or at least had stopped wishing for it, since the only kind of life worth living there was out of reach to him.

Only Meb and Dolya still had fantasies of returning. And, useless as they both were, it wouldn’t hurt the company one bit to let them go.

So as Elemak and his father were choosing the site for that night’s camp, he broached the subject. “You know that Meb and Dolya still want to go back to Basilica.”

“They have so little imagination, I’m not surprised,” said Volemak. “Some people only have one idea in their lives, and so they can hardly bear to let it go.”

“You know that they’re also nearly worthless to us.”

“Not as worthless as Kokor,” said Father.

“Yes, well, it’s hard to compete with her.”

“None of them are completely worthless,” said Father. “They may not do their share of work, but we need their genes. We need their babies in our community.”

“Our life would be much easier… a lot less conflict and annoyance… if—”

“No,” said Volemak.

Elemak seethed. How dare Father not even let him finish his sentence.

“It’s not by my choice,” said Volemak. “I’d let anyone go back who wanted to, if it were up to me. But the Oversoul has chosen this company.”

Elemak stopped paying attention almost as soon as Father mentioned the Oversoul. It always meant that the reasonable part of the discussion was over.

When they camped for the night, Elemak determined that during his watch, if Meb and Dolya decided to slip away, he’d make sure he didn’t happen to notice them. It would be easy enough to find the way—the desert wasn’t all that challenging through here, and they’d have the best chance of the whole journey to return to civilization. Which wasn’t that good a chance, admittedly—there would be as great a risk of bandits as ever. Perhaps more, now that Moozh ruled in Basilica and would drive rough and uncivilized men from the city. Maybe the Oversoul would watch out for them and help them get back to Basilica—and maybe not. Whatever happened, Elemak wouldn’t block their attempt, if they made one.

But they didn’t. Elemak even stood a longer watch than usual, but they never slipped out of their tent, never tried to steal a camel or two. Elemak finally woke Vas for his watch and then went to bed, full of fresh contempt for Meb. If it had been I who wanted to leave the group and live somewhere else, I would have taken my wife and baby and left. But not Mebbekew. He takes no for an answer far too easily.

At midmorning on the third day of travel, they reached the point where, to return to Basilica, they would have traveled north. Elemak recognized the spot; so, of course, did Volemak. But no one else did; no one realized that when they continued eastward instead of turning straight north, they were closing their last hope of restoring something like their old life.

Elemak didn’t feel at all sad about it. He wasn’t like Mebbekew—his life had centered in the desert all along. He had only returned to Basilica in order to sell his goods and find a wife, though of course he always enjoyed the city and thought of it as home. It’s just that the idea of home had never meant that much to him—he didn’t get homesick or nostalgic or teary-eyed about it. Not till Eiadh gave birth and he held Proya in his arms and heard the boy’s firm loud cry and saw his smile. And then home, to him, was the tent where Eiadh and Proya slept. He had no need of Basilica now. He was too strong in himself to hunger for a particular city the way Meb did.

But if this caravan was going to be Elemak’s world for the next few years, he was determined to make sure his position in this small polity was as dominant and important as possible. In the valley, where Zdorab’s garden brought in half the food and Nafai was as good at hunting as Elemak himself, there was no way for Elemak to fully emerge, secure in his position of leadership. Now, though, on camelback again, even Father deferred to Elemak’s judgment on many, many issues, and while the Oversoul chose their general direction, it was Elemak who determined their exact path. He could look back over the company and find Eiadh, her eyes on him whenever she wasn’t busy with nursing the baby. The journey was reminding her of how essential he was to the survival of the whole enterprise, and he loved the pride she took in that.

The Oversoul had told Father that if they found a good safe route and had plenty of supplies, sixty days of steady traveling would bring them to their destination. But of course, sixty days of traveling was out of the question. The babies could never endure that long a stretch of heat and dryness and instability. No, they would have to find another secure place and rest again. And perhaps another after that. And in each place, they would probably have to stay long enough to put in a crop and harvest it to feed them on the next leg of their journey. A year. A year in each place, perhaps three years to make a sixty-day journey. Yet through it all, it would be Elemak truly leading them, and by the end of it everyone should be turning to me for leadership, with Father reduced to nothing more than what he ought to be—a wise old counselor. But not the true leader, not anymore.

That will be me, by right. If I decide then that the Oversoul’s destination is the place where I want to lead the group, then that’s where I’ll lead them, and they’ll get there safely and in good time. If I decide otherwise, of course, then the Oversoul can go hang.

The Nividimu River wasn’t a seasonal river—it rose from natural springs in the rugged Lyudy Mountains, which were high enough to catch snow in the winter. But the flow was never much, and when the river dropped steeply down the Krutohn Valley and reached the low, hot, dry desert, it sank into the sand and disappeared many kilometers before reaching the Scour Sea.

It was because of the Nividimu that the great north-south caravan trail climbed steeply up into the Lyudy Mountains and then followed the river down, almost to the point where it disappeared. It was the most dependable source of drinkable water between Basilica on the north and the Cities of Fire to the south. Perhaps a dozen caravans a year passed along the banks of the Nividimu, and so it was almost to be expected that the Index would instruct them to make camp for a week in the foothills of the Lyudy Mountains while a northbound caravan with a heavy military escort made its way up the valley and then down the twisting road out of the mountains.

The worst thing about the wait was that they couldn’t make any fires. The military escort, the Index told them, was nervous and eager to find an enemy. Smoke would be taken as a sign of bandits, and the soldiers wouldn’t wait to find out otherwise before slaughtering them all. So they ate the most miserable traveling rations and sat around getting annoyed with each other, waiting for the day that Volemak told them that the Index had decided they could leave.

It was on the second day, as Elemak and Vas were hunting together—for Vas had some talent as a tracker of animals—that they lost the first pulse. Vas probably shouldn’t have been carrying one, but he asked for it, and it would have been too humiliating to forbid him to have one. Besides, there was always the chance that he’d surprise a dangerous beast of prey that had tracked the same quarry, and then he’d need the pulse to defend himself.

Vas was not usually clumsy. But as he crabwalked along a narrow ledge over a defile, he stumbled, and as he caught himself the pulse slipped out of his hand. It bounced on a rocky outcropping, and then sailed out into space and on into a canyon. Vas and Elemak never heard it strike bottom. “It could have been me,” he kept saying, when he told the story that night.

Elemak didn’t have the heart to tell him that it might have been better for everyone if it had been him. They only had four pulses, after all, and no way of getting more—eventually they would lose their ability to recharge themselves from sunlight, which was why Elemak was so careful about keeping two of them hidden away in a dark place. With one pulse gone, now one of the hidden ones had to come out and into use for hunting.

“Why were you hunting, anyway?” asked Volemak, who understood what the loss of the pulse might mean in the future. He directed his question at Elemak, which was proper, since it was Elemak’s decision to take two pulses out into the desert that day.

Elemak answered as coldly as if he thought Volemak had no right to challenge his decision. “For meat,” he said. “The wives can’t nurse properly on hard biscuits and jerky.”

“But since we can’t cook the meat, what did you expect them to do, eat it raw?” asked Volemak.

“I thought I could sear the meat with the pulse,” said Elemak. “It would be rare, but…”

“It would also be a waste of power that we can ill afford,” said Volemak.

“We need the meat,” said Elemak.

“Should I have jumped after the pulse?” asked Vas, nastily.

“Nobody wants that,” said Elemak scornfully. “This isn’t about you anymore.”

Hushidh watched the conversation in silence, as she usually did when there was conflict, seeing how the threads connecting them seemed to change. She knew that the lines she saw between people were not real, that they were simply a visual metaphor that her mind constructed for her—a sort of hallucinatory diagram. But their message about relationships and loyalties and hatreds and loves was real enough, as real as the rocks and sand and scrub around them.

Vas was the anomaly of the group and had been all along. No one hated him, no one resented him. But no one loved him, either. There was no great loyalty binding anyone to him—and none binding him to anybody else, either. Except the strange bond between him and Sevet, and the even stranger one between him and Obring. Sevet had little love or respect for her husband Vas—theirs had been a marriage in name only, for convenience, with no particular bond of loyalty between them, and no great love or friendship, either. But he seemed to feel something very powerful toward her, something that Hushidh did not understand, had never seen before. And his bond with Obring was almost the same, only a bit weaker. Which should not have been the case, since Vas had no reason to be closely tied to Obring. After all, hadn’t Obring been the one who was caught in bed with Sevet the night that Kokor surprised them and almost killed her sister? Why should Vas feel a strong connection to Obring? Its strength—which Hushidh recognized by the thickness of the cord she saw connecting them—rivaled the strength of the strongest marriages in the company, like the one between Volemak and Rasa, or what Elemak felt toward Eiadh, or the growing bond between Hushidh herself and her beloved Issib, her devoted and sweet and brilliant and loving Issib, whose voice was the music underlying all her joy…

That,she knew, was not what Vas felt toward Sevet or Obring—and toward everyone else he seemed to feel almost nothing. Yet why Sevet and Obring, and no one else? Nothing connected them except their one-time adultery…

Was that the connection? Was it the adultery itself? Was Vas’s powerful link with them an obsession with their betrayal of him? But that was absurd. He had known of Sevet’s affairs all along; they had an easy marriage that way. And Hushidh would have recognized the connection between them if it had been hate or rage—he had seen plenty of that before.

Even now, when Vas should have been connected to everyone in the company by a thread of shame, of desire to make amends, to win approval, there was almost nothing. He didn’t care. Indeed, he was almost satisfied.

“We could more easily have afforded the power to cook the meat,” said Sevet, “back when we had all four pulses.”

It astonished Hushidh that Vas’s own wife would bring up Vas’s culpability.

But it was no surprise when Kokor followed her sister and pounced even more directly. “You might have watched your step in the first place, Vas,” she said.

Vas turned and regarded Kokor with mild disdain. “Perhaps I should have learned about working carefully and efficiently by following your example.”

Quarrels like this started far too easily and usually went on far too long. It didn’t take a raveler like Hushidh to know where this argument would lead, if it was allowed to continue. “Drop it,” said Volemak.

“I’m not going to take the blame for our having no cooked meat,” said Vas mildly. “We still have three pulses and it’s not my fault that we can’t light fires.”

Elemak put a hand on Vas’s shoulder. “It’s me that Father holds responsible, and rightly so. It was my misjudgment. There should never have been two pulses on the same hunting trip. When we blame you for our lack of meat, you’ll know it.”

“Yes, we’ll start eating you” said Obring.

It was funny enough that several people laughed, if only to release the tension; but Vas did not appreciate the joke’s having come from Obring. Hushidh saw the odd connection between them flare and thicken, like a black hawser mooring Vas to Obring.

Hushidh watched, hoping that they might quarrel just long enough for her to understand what it was between them, but at that moment Shedemei spoke up. “There’s no reason we can’t eat the meat raw, if it’s from a fresh kill and the animal was healthy,” she said. “Searing the outside a little just before eating it would help kill any surface contamination without using much power. We have a good supply of antibiotics if someone does get sick, and even when we run out of those, we can make fairly adequate ones from available herbs if we need to.”

“Raw meat,” said Kokor in disgust.

“I don’t know if I can eat it,” said Eiadh.

“You just have to chew it more,” said Shedemei. “Or cut it into finer pieces.”

“It’s the taste of it,” said Eiadh.

“It’s the idea of it,” said Kokor, shuddering.

“It’s only a psychological barrier,” said Shedemei, “which you can easily overcome for the good of your babies.”

“I don’t know why someone without a baby should be telling the rest of us what’s good for us,” snapped Kokor.

Hushidh saw how Kokor’s words stung Shedemei. It was one of Hushidh’s most serious worries about their company, the way that Shedemei was becoming more and more isolated from the women. Hushidh talked about it with Luet rather often, and they had been doing their best to deal with it, but it wasn’t easy, because much of the barrier was in Shedemei herself—she had persuaded herself that she didn’t want children, but Hushidh knew from the way Shedemei focused so intently on all the babies in the group that unconsciously she judged her own value by the fact that she had no children. And when some shortsighted, unempathic little birdbrain like Kokor threw Shedemei’s childlessness in her face, Hushidh could almost see Shedemei’s connections with the rest of the group dropping away.

And the silence after Kokor’s remark didn’t help. Most of them were silent because that’s how one responded to unspeakable social clumsiness—one gave it just a long enough silence to serve as a rebuke to the offensive one, and then one went on as if it had not been said. But Hushidh was sure that was not how Shedya interpreted the silence. After all, Shedya was not well versed in high manners, and she was also relentlessly aware of her childlessness, so to her the silence no doubt meant that everyone agreed with Kokor, but was too polite to say so. Just one more injury, one more scar on Shedemei’s soul.

If it were not for the intense friendship between Shedemei and Zdorab, and the much slighter friendship that Luet and Hushidh had cultivated with Shedya, and Shedya’s great love and respect for Rasa, the woman would have no positive connection with the rest of the company at all. It would be nothing but envy and resentment.

It was Luet who finally broke the silence. “If meat is what our babies need, then of course we’ll eat it seared, or even raw. But I wonder—are we so close to the edge, nutritionally, that we can’t go a week without meat?”

Elemak looked at her coldly. “You can treat your baby as you want. Ours will always suckle on milk that has been freshened with animal protein within three days.”

“Oh, Elemak, do I have to eat it?” asked Eiadh.

“Yes,” said Elemak.

“It’ll be fine,” said Nafai. “You’ll never notice the difference.”

They all turned to look at him. His remark was quite outrageous. “I think I can tell whether meat is raw or cooked, thank you,” said Eiadh.

“We’re all here because we’re more or less susceptible to the Oversoul,” said Nafai. “So I just asked if the Oversoul could make the meat taste acceptable to us. Make us think that there’s nothing wrong with it. And it said that it could do that, if we didn’t try to resist it. So if we don’t dwell on the fact that we’re eating raw meat, the Oversoul can influence us enough that we won’t really be aware of the difference.”

No one answered for a moment. Hushidh could see that Nafai’s almost casual relationship with the Oversoul was quite unnerving to some of them—not least to Volemak himself, who only spoke to the Oversoul in solitude, or with the Index.

“You asked the Oversoul to season our food?” asked Issib.

“We know from experience that the Oversoul is good at making people stupid,” said Nafai. “You went through it with me, Issya. So why not have the Oversoul make us just a little stupid about the taste of the meat?”

“I don’t like the idea of the Oversoul messing with my mind,” said Obring.

Meb looked at Obring and grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure you can be adequately stupid without help.”

The next day, when Nafai brought home a nolyen—a small deerlike creature, barely a half-meter from the shoulder to the ground—they cut it up and seared the meat and then ate it, rather gingerly, until they realized that either raw meat wasn’t so bad or the Oversoul had done a good job of making them insensitive to the difference. They’d get by without fire whenever they had to.

But the Oversoul couldn’t give them a new pulse to replace the lost one.

They lost two more pulses crossing the Nividimu. It was a stupid, unnecessary loss. The camels were reluctant to make the crossing, even though the ford was wide and shallow, and there was some jostling as they were herded across. Still, if all the loads had been competently and carefully tied in place, none of them would have come loose, none would have spilled their contents into the ice-cold water.

It took a few minutes before Elemak realized that this was the camel that carried two of the pulses; until then he had concentrated on getting the rest of the camels across before trying to retrieve the load. By the time he found the pulses, in a poke, wrapped in cloth, they had been immersed for a quarter of an hour. Pulses were durable, but they had not been meant for use under water. Their seals had been penetrated and the mechanism inside would corrode rapidly. He saved the pulses, of course, in the hope that perhaps they would not corrode, though he knew the chance of that was slim.

“Who packed this camel?” Elemak demanded.

No one seemed to recall having packed it.

“That’s the problem,” said Volemak. “The camel obviously packed itself, and it wasn’t good with the knots.”

The company laughed nervously. Elemak whirled on his father, prepared to castigate him for making light of a serious situation. When he met Volemak’s gaze, however, he paused, for he could see that Volemak was taking things very seriously indeed. So Elemak nodded to his father and then sat down, to show that he was going to let Volemak handle it.

“Whoever loaded this camel knows his responsibility,” said Volemak. “And finding out who it is will be very simple—I have only to ask the Index. But there will be no punishment, because there’s nothing to be gained by it. If I ever feel a need, I will reveal who it was whose carelessness cost us our security, but in the meantime you are safe in your cowardly refusal to name yourself.”

Still no one spoke up.

Volemak said no more, but instead nodded toward Elemak, who got up and held the last pulse in front of him. “This is the pulse we have used most” he said. “Therefore this is the one whose charge is least durable, and yet it’s all we have to bring us meat. It could last a couple of years—pulses have lasted that long before—but when this one is no longer workable, we have no other.”

He walked to Nafai and held out the pulse to him. Nafai took it gingerly.

“You’re the hunter,” said Elemak. “You’re the one who’ll make best use of it. Just make sure you take care of it. Our lives and the lives of our children depend on how you fulfil this duty.”

Nafai nodded his understanding.

Elemak turned to the others. “If anyone sees that the pulse is in any danger whatever, you must speak or act at once to protect it. But except for such a case, no one but Nafai is to touch the pulse for any reason. We’ll no longer use it even to sear the meat—what meat we eat during dangerous passages, we’ll eat raw. Now, let’s get down this valley before we’re discovered here.”

By late afternoon they were at the place where caravans either went on south, into the inhabited valleys where the cities of Dovoda and Neeshtchy clung to life between the desert and the sea, or southeastward into the Razoryat Mountains, and then on down into the northern reaches of the Valley of Fires. Volemak led them up into Razoryat. But it occurred to more than one of them that if they went south into Dovoda or Neeshtchy, there would be more pulses they could buy, and decent food, for that matter. And above all, other faces, other voices. Hardly a one of them that didn’t wish they could, at the very least, visit there.

But Volemak led them on up into the hills, where they camped that night without a fire, for fear it would be seen by some dweller in the distant cities.

It was slow travel, from then on, for the Index warned Volemak that there were three caravans coming north through the Valley of Fires, two of them from the Cities of Fire and another from the Cities of the Stars, even farther to the south. To most of them those were names out of legend, cities even older and more storied than Basilica. Tales of ancient heroes always seemed to begin, “Once upon a time in the Cities of the Stars,” or “Here is how things were in the old days, in the Cities of Fire.” They hoped, many of them: Perhaps that’s where the Oversoul is taking us, to the great ancient cities of legend.

To avoid the caravans, however, they had to travel away from the road. In the desert that had been easy enough—the road was barely distinguishable from the rest of the desert, and it made little difference what path, precisely, one followed. But here it mattered a great deal, for the terrain was strange, and more difficult and confusing than in any other place in Harmony. They came down out of the mountains and saw at once that it was a greener place, with grass almost everywhere, and vines, and bushes, and even a few trees. It was also rocky and craggy, and the land was strangely stepped, as if someone had pushed together a thousand tables of different sizes and heights, so that every surface was flat, but no two surfaces met at a level. And between the grassy tables were cliffs, some only a meter or so high, but some towering a hundred meters, or five hundred.

And the strangeness grew even greater as they moved down into the Valley of Fires, for there were places where vents in the earth or cracks in a cliff gave off remarkable stenches. Most of them made faces and tried to breathe through their mouths, but Elemak and Volemak took the stinks very seriously indeed, often finding circuitous routes that avoided the vent where the gas was coming from. Only when Zdorab discovered that the Index could provide them with immediate spectroscopic analysis of the gas, at least during daylight, were they able to be sure which gases—and therefore which stinks—were safe to breathe.

Even more frightening—though Elemak assured them that it was much safer—were the smokeholes and the open flames. They would see them from miles away, either thick columns of smoke or bright flames, and they learned to bend their course toward them, especially after Shedemei assured them that they would certainly not explode. When they camped near the open flames, they used them to cook their meat and even bake fresh bread, though only Zdorab, Nafai, and Elemak were willing to do the actual cooking, since it involved running near enough to the flames to leave the meat and the loaves where there was enough heat to cook flesh—which, of course, meant that the heat could cook the cooks if they didn’t get out fast enough. They would all help dress the meat that Nafai had killed, put it on griddles, and then cheer madly as Nafai, Zdorab, and Elemak, each in turn, ran toward the fire, set down a griddle of meat, and then ran back to cooler air. Fetching the meat was even harder, of course, since it took longer to pick up the hot griddles than to set down the cool ones, and sometimes when they came back their clothes were smoking.

“It’s only our sweat steaming,” Nafai insisted, when Luet announced she preferred to have her meat raw and keep her husband alive.

But there weren’t that many fires that were usable, since they were not often located near sources of water, and as often as not they ate cold food.

It was a place of glorious beauty, the Valley of Fires, but there was also something frightening about it, to be confronted at every turn by evidence of the terrible forces that moved inside the planet they lived on—forces strong enough to lift solid rock hundreds of meters straight up in the air.

Glorious, frightening, and also inconvenient, they realized, when they came to a place where the route they had chosen funneled them into a cul-de-sac—a deep, hot lake, surrounded by five-hundred-meter cliffs on both sides. There was no getting across the lake, and no getting around it either. They would have to backtrack several days’ journey, Volemak and Elemak decided, and choose another route even farther from the regular caravan roads, and much closer to the sea.

“Couldn’t the Oversoul have seen this?” asked Mebbekew, rather caustically.

“The Index showed this lake,” said Volemak. “That’s why we came this way. What the Oversoul could not tell us was that there was no way around it on either side.”

“Then the last three days of traveling are wasted?” Kokor whined.

“We’ve seen things that aren’t even dreamed of in Basilica,” Lady Rasa answered.

“Except in nightmares” said Kokor.

“Some artists have been known to take sights like these and turn them into song,” said Rasa. “Which reminds me—we’ve heard neither you nor Sevet sing this whole year and more, except when you sing to your babies. Nor Eiadh, for that matter—she never had a chance to try her career as my daughters did, but she has the sweetest voice.”

Hushidh could have told her to save her breath—there would be no singing until something changed among the women. It was the old quarrel between Sevet and Kokor, of course. Sevet either could not sing anymore or chose not to, all as a result of the damage Kokor did by striking her on the larynx when she caught her in bed with Obring. And as long as Sevet wasn’t singing, Kokor dared not sing—she feared Sevet’s vengeance if she did. And Eiadh was hopelessly intimidated by the two older girls, who had been quite famous in Basilica, especially Sevet. Kokor had made it clear that if she couldn’t sing, she didn’t want to hear Eiadh’s wretched little voice like a mockery of music. Which was unfair—Eiadh did have talent, and the very thinness of her voice might have been called bell-like purity if someone besides Kokor had been the critic. But whenever Eiadh did try to sing, Kokor made such a show of grimacing and enduring that Eiadh soon lost heart and never tried again. So there would be no songs in their company about the grandeur and majesty of the Valley of Fires.

There was another kind of poetry, though, and another kind of artist, and Hushidh and Luet were the audience as Shedemei rhapsodized about the forces of nature. “Two great landmasses, once a single continent but now divided,” she said. “They pressed against each other like your two hands laid side by side on a table. But then they began to rotate in opposite directions, with the center right where your thumbs touch. Now they press toward each other at the fingertips, crushing into each other, even as they pull away from each other at the heels of the hands.”

Shedemei was explaining this as she sat on the carpet in Luet’s tent, holding both their babies sitting up on her knees, her arms around them, her hands in front of her, demonstrating. The babies seemed fascinated indeed—there was something in the color or intensity of Shedemei’s voice that all the babies in the company were drawn to, for Hushidh saw how alert they all became when she spoke. Often Shedemei could quiet a fussy infant when the child’s own mother could not—which meant that Kokor and Sevet never let Shedemei near their babies, out of jealousy at being shown up—and Dol was always dropping off her little Syelsika for Shedemei to tend, often leaving her until Dol’s own breasts were so sore that she had no choice but to fetch her baby and nurse it.

Only Luet and Hushidh, it seemed, sought out Shedemei’s company, and even they had to use their babies as an excuse—could you help us with our babies while we bathe? So it was that Shedya sat on the carpet in Luet’s tent while the two sisters sponged the dirt of the several days’ journey from each other’s backs and washed each other’s hair.

“The crushing at the fingertips raises the great mountains of the north,” said Shedemei. “While the parting at the heels created the Scour Sea, and then the Sea of Smoke. The Valley of Fires is the upwelling at the center. Someday, when the tearing apart is done, Potokgavan will sink into the sea and the Valley of Fires will be an island in an ever-widening ocean. It will be the most glorious and isolated spot on all of Harmony, the place where the planet is most alive and dangerous and beautiful.”

Chveya, Luet’s daughter, made a gurgling sound in the back of her throat. Like a growl.

“That’s right, Veyevniya,” said Shedemei, using her own silly name for Chveya. “A place for wild animals like you.”

“And what about the thumbs?” asked Hushidh. “What happens there?”

“The thumbs, the fulcrum, the center—that’s Basilica,” said Shedemei. “The stable heart of the world. There are other continents, but no place on any of them where the water is so hot and cold and deep or the land so old and unchangeable. Basilica is the place where Harmony is most at peace.”

“Geologically speaking,” said Hushidh.

“Humanity’s little disturbances—what are they?” asked Shedemei. “The smallest unit of time that ever matters is the generation, not the minute, not the hour, not the day, not even the year. Those all come and go and are done in a moment. But the generation—that’s where the true changes come, when a world is really alive.”

“Is humanity dead, then, since we’ve gone forty million years without evolution?” asked Luet.

“Do you think these children aren’t evolution in progress?” asked Shedemei. “Speciation comes at times of genetic stress, when a species—not a mere individual or even a tribe—is in danger of destruction. Then the vast variety of possibilities within the species is winnowed down to those few variations that offer particular advantages to survival. So a species seems to be unchanged for millions of years, only to have change come suddenly when the need arises. The truth is that the changes were present all along—they simply hadn’t been isolated and exposed.”

“You make it sound like a wonderful plan,” said Luet. “I know—that’s how it’s always taught among women, isn’t it? The Oversoul’s plan. The patterns of generation: coupling, conception, gestation, birth, nurturing, maturation, and then coupling again—all the plan of the Oversoul. But we know better, don’t we? The machine in the sky is merely an expression of humanity’s will—part of the reason why we have not undergone speciating stress in forty million years. A tool to keep us as widely varied as possible, without ever achieving power enough to destroy ourselves and our world, as we did on Earth. Isn’t that what Nafai and Issib learned? Isn’t that why we’re here? Because this isn’t a plan of the Oversoul, because the Oversoul is losing the power to keep humanity self-tamed. Yet I can’t help but think that it might be a good thing to let the Oversoul wither and die. In the generations that came after that, in the terrible stresses that would come, maybe humanity would speciate again and develop something new.” She leaned down to little Dza and poofed in her face, which always made Dza laugh. “Maybe you are the new thing that humanity is supposed to become,” said Shedemei. “Isn’t that right, Dazyitnikiya?”

“You do love children so,” said Luet, with a wistful tone.

“I love other people’s children,” said Shedemei. “I can always give them back, and then have time for my work. For you, poor things, it never ends.”

But Hushidh was not deceived. Not that Shedemei didn’t mean what she said—far from it. Shedya was quite sincere in her decision that it was perfectly all right for her not to have children—that she actually preferred it that way. She meant it, or at least meant to mean it.

Hushidh was convinced, however, that the powerful bond between Shedemei and every baby in the camp was really the infants’ unconscious response to Shedemei’s irresistible hunger. She wanted babies. She wanted to be part of the vast passage of the generations through the world. And more than that—as Hushidh watched the love between her and Zdorab grow into one of the strongest friendships she had ever seen, Hushidh became more and more certain that Shedemei wanted to bear Zdorab’s child, and it made Hushidh yearn more and more for that longing to come true.

She had even asked the Oversoul why it was that Shedemei didn’t conceive, but the Oversoul had never answered—and Luet said that when she asked, she got the clear answer that what went on between Zdorab and Shedemei was none of her business.

Maybe it’s none of our business, though Hushidh, but that doesn’t mean we can’t wish that Shedemei had all that she needs to make her happy. Didn’t the Oversoul bring everyone into the company because all their genes were needful? Was it possible that the Oversoul had erred, and either Zdorab or Shedemei was sterile? Awfully clumsy of her, if that’s what happened.

Even now, Shedemei was explaining how Zdorab was the one who had discovered the geological history of the Valley of Fires. “He plays the Index like a musical instrument. He found things in the past that even the Oversoul didn’t know that she knew. Things that only the ancients who first settled here understood. They gave the memory to the Oversoul, but then programmed her so that she couldn’t find those memories on her own. Zdorab found the back doors, though, the hidden passageways, the strange connections that led into so many, many secrets.”

“I know,” said Hushidh. “Issib marvels at him sometimes, even though Issya himself isn’t bad at getting ideas out of the Index.”

“Oh, indeed, I know that,” said Shedemei. “Zdorab says all the time that Issib is the real explorer.”

“And Issib says that’s only because he has more time, being useless at everything else,” said Hushidh. “It’s as if they both have to find reasons why the other is much better. I think they’ve become good friends.”

“I know it,” said Shedemei. “Issib is able to see how fine a man Zdorab really is.”

“We all understand that,” said Luet.

“Do you?” said Shedemei. “Sometimes it seems to me that everyone thinks of him as a sort of universal servant.”

“We think of him as our cook because he’s the best at it,” said Hushidh. “And our librarian because he’s the best at that.”

“Ah, but only a few of us care about his archival skills; to most of the people in our company, his culinary skills are the only things they notice about him.”

“And his gardening,” said Luet.

Shedemei smiled. “You see? But he gets little respect for it.”

“From some,” said Hushidh. “But others respect him greatly.”

“I know Nafai does,” said Luet. “And I do.”

“And I, and Issib and Volemak, too, I know that,” said Hushidh.

“And isn’t that everybody that matters?” asked Luet.

“I tell him that,” said Shedemei, “but he persists in playing the servant.”

Hushidh could see that, for this moment at least, Shedemei was closer to opening her heart to someone than ever before on this journey. She hardly knew, though, how to encourage her to go on—should she prod with a question, or keep silence so as not to impede her?

She kept silence.

And so did Shedemei.

Until at last Shedemei sniffed loudly and put her nose down near Chveya’s diaper. “Has our little kaka factory produced another load?” she asked. “Now is the time when my permanent aunthood pays off. Mama Luet, your baby needs you.”

They laughed—because of course they knew that Shedemei was as likely to change a baby’s diaper as not. This business of giving the baby back to the mother whenever taking care of it was a bother was only a joke.

No, not only a joke. It was also a wistful regret. Shedemei’s reminder to herself that, like her husband Zdorab, she was not really one of the company of women. She had been on the verge, Hushidh knew it, of telling something that mattered… and then the moment had passed.

As Luet cleaned her baby, Shedemei watched, and Hushidh watched her watching. Near the end of her bath, Luet was wearing nothing but a light skirt, and the shape of her motherly body—heavy breasts, a belly still loose and full from the birthing not that many months ago—was sweetly framed as she knelt and bent over her baby. What does Shedemei see when she looks at Luet, whose figure was once as lean and boyish as Shedemei’s is still? Does she wish for that transformation?

Apparently, though, Shedemei’s own thoughts had taken a different turn. “Luet,” she said, “when we were at that lake yesterday, did it remind you of the Lake of Women in Basilica?”

“Oh yes,” said Luet.

“You were the waterseer there,” said Shedemei. “Didn’t you want to float out into the middle of it, and dream?”

Luet hesitated a moment. “There was no boat,” she said. “And nothing to make one out of. And the water was too hot to float in it myself.”

“Was it?” said Shedemei.

“Yes,” said Luet. “Nafai checked for me. He passed through the Lake of Women too, you know.”

“But didn’t you wish that you could be—for just a little while—the person you were before?”

The longing in Shedemei’s voice was so strong that Hushidh immediately understood. “But Luet is the same person,” said Hushidh. “She’s still the waterseer, even if she now spends her days on camelback and her nights in a tent and every hour with a baby fastened to her nipple.”

“Isshe the waterseer, then?” asked Shedemei. “She was— but is she? Or are we nothing more than what we’re doing now? Aren’t we truly only what the people we live with think we are?”

“No,” said Hushidh. “Or that would mean that in Basilica I was nothing but the raveler, and Luet was nothing but the waterseer, and you were nothing but a geneticist, and that was never true, either. There’s always something above and behind and beneath the role that everyone sees us acting out. They may think that we are the script we act out, but we don’t have to believe it.”

“Who are we then?” asked Shedemei. “Who am I?”

“Always a scientist,” said Luet, “because you’re still doing science in your mind every hour you’re awake.”

“And our friend,” said Hushidh.

“And the person in our company who understands best how things work,” added Luet.

“And Zdorab’s wife,” said Hushidh. “That’s the one that means the most to you, I think.”

To their surprise and consternation, Shedemei’s only answer was to lay down Dza on the carpet and lightly run from the tent. Hushidh caught only a glimpse of her face, but she was weeping. There was no doubt of that. She was weeping because Hushidh had said that being Zdorab’s wife meant more to her than anything. It was what a woman might do if she doubted her husband’s love. But how could she doubt? It was obvious that Zdorab’s whole life was centered around her. There were no better friends in the company than Zodya and Shedya, everyone knew that—unless it was Luet and Hushidh, and they were sisters so it hardly counted.

What could possibly be wrong between Zdorab and Shedemei, that would cause such a strong woman to be so fragile on the subject? A mystery. Hushidh longed to ask the Oversoul, but knew she’d get the same answer as always—silence. Or else the answer Luet already got—mind your own business.

The best thing and the worst thing about turning back and taking another route south was that they could see the sea. In particular, they could see Dorova Bay, an eastern arm of the Scour Sea. And on clear nights—which all the nights were—they could see, on the far side of that bay, the lights of the city of Dorova.

It was not a city like Basilica, they all knew that. It was a scrubby edge-of-the-desert town filled with riffraff and profiteers, failures and thieves, violent and stupid men and women. They told each other that over and over, remembering tales of desert towns and how they weren’t worth visiting even if they were the last town in the world.

Except that Dorova was the last town in the world—the last town in their world, anyway. The last they would ever see. It was the town they could have visited more than a week ago, when Volemak led them up into the mountains from the Nividimu and they left the last hope of civilization behind—or the last danger of it, for those who had that perspective.

Nafai saw how others looked at those lights, when they gathered at night, fireless, chilly, the bundled infants smacking and suckling away as they drank cold water and gnawed on jerky and hard biscuit and dried melon. How Obring got tears in his eyes—tears! And what was the city to him, anyway, except a place to get his hooy polished. Tears! And Sevet was no better, with her simple, steady gaze, that stony look on her face. She had a baby at her breast, and all she could think of was a city so small and filthy that she wouldn’t have stepped into its streets two years ago. If they had offered her twenty times her normalfee to come and sing there, she would have sneered at the offer—and now she couldn’t keep her eyes off of it.

But looking was all they could do, fortunately. They could see it, but they had no boat to cross the bay, and none of them could swim well enough to cross that many kilometers without a boat. Besides, they weren’t at the beach, they were at least a kilometer above it, at the edge of a craggy, rugged incline that couldn’t decide whether to be a cliff or a slope. There might be a way to get the camels down, but it wasn’t likely, and even if they did, it would be several days’ journey back along the beach, with the camels—and without them, there would be no water to drink and so they couldn’t make it at all. No, nobody was going to be able to slip away from the group and make it to Dorova. The only way there was if the whole group went, and even then they would probably have to go back the way they came, which meant a week and a half at least, and probably one of the caravans from the south to contend with along the way. And it was all meaningless because Father would never go back.

And yet Nafai couldn’t stop thinking about how much these people wanted that city.

How much he wanted it.

Yes, there was the trouble. That’s what bothered him. He wanted the city, too. Not for any of the things they wanted, or at least the things he imagined that they wanted. Nafai had no desire for any wife but Luet; they were a family, and that wouldn’t change no matter where they lived, he had decided that long ago. No, what Nafai wanted was a soft bed to lay Chveya in. A school to take her to. A house for Luet and Chveya and whatever children might come after. Neighbors and friends—friends that he might choose for himself, not this accidental collection of people most of whom he just didn’t like that much. That’s what those lights meant to him—and instead here he was on a grassy meadow that sloped deceptively downward toward the sea, so that if you just squinted a little you couldn’t really tell you were a kilometer above sea level, you could pretend for a few moments that it was just a stroll across the meadow, and then a short ride on a boat across the bay, and then you’d be home, the journey would be over, you could bathe and then sleep in a bed and wake up to find breakfast cooking already, and you’d find your wife in your arms beside you, and then you’d hear the faint sound of your baby daughter waking, and you’d slip out of bed and go get her from her cradle and bring her in to your wife, who would sleepily draw her breast from inside her nightgown and put it into the mouth of the baby that now nestled in the crook of her arm on the bed, and you’d lie back down beside her and listen to the sucking and smacking of the baby as you also heard the birds singing outside the window and the noises of morning in the street not far away, the venders starting to cry out what they had to sell. Eggs. Berries. Cream. Sweet breads and cakes.

Oversoul, why couldn’t you have left us alone? Why couldn’t you have waited another generation? Forty million years, and you couldn’t wait for Luet’s and my great-grandchildren to have this great adventure? You couldn’t have let Issib and me figure out how to build one of those marvelous ancient flying machines, so we could go to wherever you’re taking us in just a few hours? Time, that’s all we needed, really. Time to live before we lost our world.

Stop whining, said the Oversoul in Nafai’s mind. Or maybe it wasn’t the Oversoul. Maybe it was just Nafai’s own sense that he had indulged himself too much already.

It was morning, just before dawn, at the spring the Index had told them was named Shazer, though why anyone should have bothered to name such an obscure place, and why the Oversoul had bothered to remember, Nafai could not begin to guess. Vas had had the last watch of the night, and then came and woke Nafai so they could hunt together. Three days since they last had meat, and this was a good campsite so they could take two days to hunt if need be. So Vas would catch sight of something, or find some fresh animal trace; Nafai would trail after him and, when the quarry was near, creep silently forward until the animal came in sight. Then Nafai would take the sacred pulse, aim so carefully, trying to guess which way the animal would move, and how far, and how fast, and then he would squeeze the trigger and the beam of light would burn a hole into the heart of the creature, sear it so that the wound would never bleed, except for a hot wet smoke that would stain the sand and rocks it fell on red and black.

Nafai was tired of it. But it was his duty, and so when Vas scratched softly on the cloth of the tent, near where he knew Nafai’s head lay, Nafai awoke at once—if he had not already been awake, coasting on the verges of a dream—and got up and dressed without waking Luet or Chveya and took the pulse out of its box and joined Vas outside in the chilly darkness.

Vas nodded a greeting to him—they tried to avoid speaking, lest they wake babies unnecessarily—and then turned slowly, finally pointing toward the downhill slope. Not toward the city, but still toward the sea. Downward. Nafai normally thought it was a stupid plan to go downhill on the hunt, since it would mean carrying the game back uphill to get it to camp. But this time he wanted to go down. Even though he would never abandon their quest, even though he had no thought of betraying either Father or the Oversoul, nevertheless there was a part of him that longed for the sea, and for what lay across the sea, and so he nodded when Vas pointed toward the seaward slope of the meadow.

When they were well away from the camp, and over the brow of the hill, they stopped and peed, and then began the difficult descent into the tumble of rocks that led downward. All the slope ahead of them lay in shadow, since the dawn was coming up behind them. But Vas was the tracker, and Nafai had long since learned that he was both good at it and very proud of his prowess, so things went better if Nafai didn’t try to second-guess him.

It wasn’t an easy climb, though the darkness was easing with every moment that passed, for dawn seemed to light the sky from horizon to horizon far more quickly here than it ever had in Basilica. Was it the latitude? The dry desert air? Whatever the cause, he could see, but what he saw was a confusion of cliffs and crags, ledges and outcroppings that would challenge the nimblest of animals. What kind of creature do you hope to find, Vas? What kind of animal could live here?

But these were just Nafai’s normal doubts—fearing the worst even as he knew that there was plenty of vegetation here, and there’d be no difficulty finding game. It would just be hard to get it home. Which was another reason why Elemak had always sent a hunter and tracker together, either Nafai and Vas or, back when there was more than one pulse, Elemak as hunter and Obring as tracker. When they were successful, the team would come home with each man carrying half a beast over his shoulders. It happened more often with Nafai and Vas, however, in part because Nafai was the best shot, and in part because Obring could never really keep his mind on tracking well enough to do a good job, so that Elemak ended up having to divide his concentration to do both jobs.

Vas, though, could concentrate very well, seeing things that no one else had noticed. Vas could follow the same prey relentlessly for hours and hours. Like a fighting dog that gripped with its teeth and never let go. It was part of the reason why Nafai succeeded so much more often—because Vas would bring him to the prey. The rest of the success, however, was Nafai’s own. Nobody could approach so near to the prey in silence; nobody’s aim was as steady and true. They were a good team, and yet in all their lives they had never imagined that they’d be good at hunting. It would never have crossed their minds.

Soon enough, Vas found something—small mark. Nafai had long since given up trying to see all the things that Vas saw—to him it didn’t look like an animal sign, but then it often didn’t. Nafai just followed along, keeping his eyes open for predators that might decide that human beings were either a threat or a meal. The animal’s trail led farther and farther down the slope, so far that by midmorning Nafai could see a clear and easy route that would lead down to the beach. For reasons he wasn’t proud of, he wanted to go down that path and at least put his feet in the water of Dorova Bay. But Vas was not going that way—he was leading them across the face of an increasingly steep and dangerous cliff.

Why would an animal have chosen this route? Nafai wondered. What kind of animal is it? But of course he said nothing; it was a point of pride, to maintain perfect silence throughout the hunt.

Just as they reached the most dangerous part of the passage, where they would have to traverse a smooth surface of rock with no ledge at all, only friction to keep them from falling down fifty meters or more, Vas stopped and pointed, indicating that the prey was on the other side of the traverse. That was bad news. It would mean that Nafai would have to make the passage with his pulse out and ready to fire—that, in fact, he would have to aim and fire from that very slope.

But after all this tracking, they couldn’t give up and start over just because it was momentarily difficult.

Vas pressed himself against the cliff wall, and Nafai passed behind him, then drew the pulse out of the sling he carried it in and moved ahead onto the difficult traverse.

At that moment the thought came into his head: Don’t go on. Vas is planning to kill you.

This is stupid, thought Nafai. It’s one thing to be afraid of the traverse—I’m only human. But if Vas wanted to kill me he had only to shrug when I was passing behind him on the ledge just now.

Don’t take another step.

And leave the family without meat, because I got a sudden attack of jitters? Not a chance.

Nafai swallowed his fear and moved across the face. He arched his body out a little, so that there would be the greatest possible pressure and therefore the greatest possible friction on the soles of his climbing boots. Even so, he could feel that there was too much give—this was very dangerous indeed, and shooting from this point would be almost impossible.

He reached the point where he could at last see all of the area that had been hidden before, and now he stopped and looked for the animal. He couldn’t see it. This sometimes happened—especially because they hunted in silence. Vas would lead him to an animal with good natural camouflage, and when Nafai got within range the animal would see or smell him and freeze, becoming almost completely invisible. Sometimes it took a long time before the animal moved and Nafai could see him. This was going to be one of those waiting games. Nafai hated it that he would have to do his waiting on this traverse, but he was perfectly visible now, and if he moved any closer the animal would bolt and they would have to start over.

He gingerly shifted his hands so that all his weight was on his feet and the hand without the pulse, then brought the pulse to where he could easily aim at any point on the face of the mountain before him. Was the animal in those shrubs? Perhaps behind a rock, ready to emerge at any moment?

Holding the same pose in that awkward place was hard. Nafai was strong, and used to holding still for long periods of time—but this posture was one he had never had to hold before. He could feel sweat dripping down his forehead. If it got in his eye it would sting mercilessly, mixed as it was with dust from his face. Yet there was no way he could move to wipe it away without spooking the animal.

An animal I haven’t even seen.

Forget the animal. Just get off the face of this rock.

No, I’m stronger than that. I need to get the food for the family—I won’t go back and say we’ll have no meat today because I was afraid to wait in stillness on a rock.

He could hear Vas moving behind him, traversing the rock. That was stupid—why was Vas doing that?

To kill me.

Why couldn’t he shake that idea? No, Vas was coming because he could tell that Nafai hadn’t seen the animal yet, and he wanted to point it out. But how would he do that? Nafai couldn’t turn to look at him, and Vas couldn’t pass him to get into his field of view.

Oh, no. Vas was going to talk to him.

“It’s too dangerous,” said Vas. “You’re going to slip.”

And just as he said it, the friction holding Nafai’s right foot in place suddenly gave way. His foot slipped inward and down, and now with the abrupt movement his left foot couldn’t hold and he began to slide. It must have been very quick but it felt like forever; he tried to dig in with his hand, with the butt of the pulse, but they both just rubbed along the rock, doing almost nothing even to slow his fall. And then the rock grew steeper and he wasn’t sliding, he was falling, falling, and he knew he was going to die.

“Nafai!” screamed Vas. “Nafai!”

Luet was at the stream, washing clothes, when suddenly there came a clear thought into her mind: (He’s not dead.)

Not dead? Who’s not dead? Why should he be dead?

(Nafai is not dead. He’ll come home.)

She knew at once that it was the Oversoul speaking to her. Reassuring her. But she was not reassured. Or rather, she was reassured to know that Nafai was all right. But now she had to know, demanded to know what had happened.

(He fell.)

How did he fall?

(His foot slipped on the face of the rock.)

Nafai is sure-footed. Why did his foot slip? What is it that you’re not telling me?

(I was watching Vas very carefully with Sevet and Obring. Watching all the time. He has murder in his heart.)

Did Vas have something to do with Nafai’s fall?

(Not until they were traversing the rock did I see the plan in his mind. He had already destroyed the first three pulses. I knew he meant to destroy the last one, but I wasn’t concerned because there are alternatives. I never saw it in his mind, not until the last moment, that the simplest way to destroy the last pulse was to lead Nafai to a dangerous place and then push his foot so he would fall.)

You never saw a plan like that in his mind?

(All the way down the mountain he was thinking of a route to the sea. How to get down to the bay so he could walk to Dorova. That’s all that was in his mind as he led Nafai after quarry that didn’t exist. Vas has remarkable powers of concentration. He thought of nothing but the path to the sea, until the very last moment.)

Didn’t you warn Nafai?

(He heard me, but he didn’t realize it was my voice he was hearing. He thought it was his own fear, and he fought it down.)

So Vas is a murderer.

(Vas is what he is. He will do anything to get his vengeance on Obring and Sevet for their betrayal of him back in Basilica.)

But he seemed so calm about it.

(He can be cold.)

What now? What now, Oversoul?

(I will watch.)

That’s what you’ve been doing all along, and yet you never gave any of us a glimpse of what you saw. You knew what Vas was planning. Hushidh even saw those powerful bonds between him and Sevet and Obring and you never told her what they were.

(This is how I was programmed. To watch. Not to interfere unless and until the danger would damage my purpose. If I stopped every bad person from doing bad things, who would be free? How would humans still be human, then? So I let them plan their plans, and I watch. Often they change their minds, freely, without my interference.)

Couldn’t you have made Vas stupid and forgetful long enough to stop this?

(I told you. Vas has a very strong ability to concentrate.)

What now? What now?

(I will watch.)

Have you told Volemak?

(I told you.)

Should I tell anyone?

(Vas will deny it. Nafai doesn’t even realize that he was the victim of a would-be murderer. I told you because I don’t trust my own ability now to predict what Vas will do.)

And what can I do?

(You’re the human. You’re the one who’s able to think of things that exceed your programming.)

No, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that you don’t have a plan.

(If I have a plan, it includes you making your own decisions about what to do.)

Hushidh. I have to tell my sister.

(If I have a plan, it includes you making your own decisions.)

Does that mean I mustn’t consult with Hushidh, because then my decision wouldn’t be my own? Or does it mean that consulting with Hushidh is one of the decisions I need to make on my own?

(If I have a plan, it is for you to make your own decisions about your own decisions about your own decisions.)

And then she felt that she was alone again; the Oversoul was not talking to her.

The clothes lay in the grass beside the stream, except for the one gown of Chveya’s that she had been washing; that one she still held in the stream, her hands freezing cold now because through all this conversation with the Oversoul she had not moved.

I must talk to Hushidh, and so that’s the first decision I will make. I’ll talk to Hushidh and Issib.

But first I’ll finish washing these clothes. That way no one will know anything is wrong. I think that’s the right thing to do, to keep anyone from knowing that something’s wrong, at least for now.

After all, Nafai is all right. Or at least Nafai is not dead. But Vas is a murderer in his heart. And Obring and Sevet are in danger from him. Not to mention Nafai, if Vas even suspects that Nafai knows what Vas tried to do to him. Not to mention me, if Vas realizes that I also know.

How could the Oversoul have let things get to such a point? Isn’t she responsible for all of this? Doesn’t she know that she has brought terrible people along with us on this journey? How could she make us travel and camp for so many months, for a year and more, for many years ahead, with a murderer?

Because she hoped that he would decide not to murder after all, of course. Because she has to allow humans to be human, even now. Especially now. But not when it comes to killing my husband. That is going too far, Oversoul. You took too great a chance. If he had died I would never have forgiven you. I would refuse to serve you anymore.

No answer came from the Oversoul. Instead it came from her own heart: An individual’s death can come at any time. It isn’t the task of the Oversoul to prevent it. The Oversoul’s task is to prevent the death of a world.

Nafai lay stunned in the grass. It was a ledge invisible from above because of the way the cliff bowed out. He had fallen only five or six meters, after sliding down the face of the rock for a while. It was enough to knock the breath out of him; enough that he blacked out. But he was uninjured, except for a sore hip where he landed.

If he had not fetched up on the ledge, he would have plummeted another hundred meters or more and surely died.

I can’t believe I lived through this. I should never have tried to kill the animal from that position. It was stupid. I was right to be afraid. I should have listened to my fears and if we lost that animal, fine, because we can always find another beast to follow and kill. What we can’t find again is another father for Chveya, another husband for Luet, another hunter who isn’t needed for other tasks.

Or another pulse.

He looked around and realized that the pulse wasn’t on the ledge. Wasn’t anywhere that he could see. He must have let go of it as he fell, and it must have bounced. Where was it?

He crept to the lip of the ledge and looked over. Oh, yes, straight down, except for a few small outcroppings—if the pulse struck them, then it would have bounced and kept on falling. There was nowhere that the pulse could have fetched up and stopped except at the bottom of the cliff. If that’s where it was, Nafai couldn’t possibly see it from here—it would be lost in the bushes. Or were those treetops?

“Nafai!” It was Vas, calling for him.

“I’m here!” Nafai cried.

“Thank God!” cried Vas. “Are you injured?”

“No,” said Nafai. “But I’m on a ledge. I think I can get off to the south. I’m about ten meters below you. Can you move south too? I may need your help. There’s nothing below me but a deadly fall, and I don’t see any obvious way to get up to where you are.”

“Do you have the pulse?” asked Vas.

Of course he had to ask about the pulse. Nafai blushed with shame. “No, I must have dropped it as I fell,” he said. “It’s got to be at the bottom of the cliff, unless you can see it somewhere up there.”

“It’s not here—you had it with you as you fell.”

“Then it’s at the bottom. Move south with me,” said Nafai.

He found, though, that it was easier to talk about moving along the face of the cliff than it was to do it. The fall might not have injured him seriously, but the terror of it had done something to him, oh yes—he could barely bring himself to get to his feet, for fear of the edge, for fear of the fall.

I didn’t fall because I lost my balance, thought Nafai. I fell because friction simply wasn’t strong enough to hold me in that dangerous place. This ledge isn’t like that. I can stand securely here.

So he stood, his back to the cliff, breathing deeply, telling himself to move, to sidle south along the ledge, around the corner, because there might be a way to get up. Yet the more he told himself this, the more his eyes focused on the empty space beyond the edge of the cliff, not a meter from his feet. If I lean just a little, I’ll fall. If I fell forward now, I’d plunge over the side.

No, he told himself. I can’t think that way, or I’ll never be good for anything again. I’ve taken ledges like this a hundred times. They’re nothing. They’re easy. And it would help if I faced the cliff instead of facing the empty space leading down to the sea.

He turned and stepped carefully along the ledge, pressing himself rather closer to the cliff than he would have in former times. But his confidence increased with every step he took.

When he rounded the bend in the cliff, he saw that the ledge ended—but now it was only two meters from this ledge to the next one up, and from there it was an easy climb back to where he and Vas had come down less than an hour ago. “Vas!” he called. He continued until he stood directly under the place where the ledge above was nearest. He could almost reach far enough onto the ledge to lift himself by his own arms, but there was nothing to hold on to, and the edge was crumbly and unreliable. It would be safer if Vas helped him. “Vas, here I am! I need you!”

But he heard nothing from Vas. And then he remembered the thought that had come into his mind as he was starting the dangerous traverse: Don’t go on. Vas is planning to kill you.

Is it possible that that was a warning from the Oversoul?

Absurd.

But Nafai didn’t wait for Vas to answer. Instead he reached his arms as far as they could go onto the ledge above, then dug his fingers into the loose grassy soil. It slipped and came away, but by scrabbling constantly, grabbing more and more, he was able to get enough of a purchase that he could get his shoulders above the edge of the cliff, and then it was a relatively easy matter to swing a leg up onto the ledge and pull himself to safety. He rolled onto his back and lay there, panting in relief. He could hardly believe that he had done such a dangerous thing so soon after falling—if he had slipped at any time while clambering up onto this ledge, he would have had a hard time catching himself on the ledge below. He was risking death—but he had done it.

Vas came now. “Ah,” he said. “You’re already up. Look—this way. Right back to where we were.”

“I’ve got to find the pulse.”

“It’s bound to be broken and useless,” said Vas. “It wasn’t built for a fall like that.”

“I can’t go back and tell them that I don’t have the pulse,” said Nafai. “That I lost it. It’s down there, and even if it’s in forty pieces, I’ll bring those pieces home.”

“It’s better to tell them you broke it than to tell them you lost it?” asked Vas.

“Yes,” said Nafai. “It’s better to show them the pieces than have them always wonder whether, if I had only looked, I might have found it. Don’t you understand that this is our families’ meat supply we’re talking about?”

“Oh, I understand,” said Vas. “And now that you put it that way, of course I see we must search for it. Look, we can come down this way—it’s an easy enough path.”

“I know,” said Nafai. “Right down to the sea.”

“Do you think so?” asked Vas.

“Down that way, and jogging to the left—see?”

“Oh, that would probably work.”

It made Nafai faintly ashamed, that he had noticed the route to the sea, while Vas had not even thought of it.

Instead of going down to the sea, however, they scrambled down to the brush where the pulse must have fallen. They didn’t have to search long before they found it—split in half, right down the middle. Several small internal components were also scattered here and there in the bushes, and without doubt there were others that they didn’t find. There would be no repairing this pulse.

Still, Nafai put the pieces, large and small, into the sling he had made for carrying the pulse, and tied it closed. Then he and Vas began the long climb up the mountain. Nafai suggested that Vas should lead, since he would do a better job of remembering the way, and Vas agreed at once. Nafai didn’t give the slightest hint that he didn’t dare let Vas walk behind him, where he couldn’t see what he was doing.

Oversoul, was that warning from you?

He didn’t get any answer from the Oversoul, or at least not a direct answer to his question. What he got instead was the clear thought that he should talk to Luet when he got back to camp. And since that was what he would have done anyway, especially after an experience like this, being so close to death, he assumed that it was his own thought, and the Oversoul had not spoken to him at all.