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

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

FOURTEEN - WORDS

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

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

"The diggers and angels are sentient. They're people. And they don't read and write."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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