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

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

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

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

"pTo," Chveya corrected him.

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

"Yes," said Hushidh, "You see it, too, don't you, Chveya?"

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

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

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

"He won't like the pain."

"Can you give him something that leaves him conscious?"

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

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

"They trust us," said pTo. "Or else we're both prisoners," said Poto.

"Test them, then. Try to leave. They'll let you go, I know it."

"I won't leave until you can leave with me."

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

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

"That can't be," said pTo. "Tornwing never heals. Tornwing is devil's meat."

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

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

"Boboi can," said Poto wryly.

"What do you say?" asked pTo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What way is that?"

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

"So we must teach him another way."

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

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

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

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