We'd had to talk Provencal, of course-the only language we knew that he could understand. Fortunately, Moise was from a seaport called Genoa, where the language, Piedmontese, was pretty much like Provencal. He could understand us, and we understood him, without a lot of trouble. He told us he also spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, and quite a bit of Greek. And Arabic, the language of the Saracens. It had been important in Tarragona, the place where they'd lived before going to Genoa. The pirates had spoken Arabic, too. He'd learned quite a bit of Arabic poetry where he'd lived in Tarragona; he'd thought they were the best poems of all. And the poetry had built his Arabic vocabulary well above the street vocabulary of the children he'd played with.

I'd become aware on our first trip to Fangiith that there was a bad communication scene on this world, but now I began to realize how bad. Because all of those languages, plus a bunch of others, were spoken in just the region around the Mediterranean. Who knew how many different languages there might be on Fanglith? It seemed a safe bet that there were hundreds of them.

Because Arabic was important around much of the Mediterranean, it seemed to me that it might be useful to us. So between times, I had Moise say Arabic words into the recorder, discussing in Piedmontese what they meant. Then I'd load them into the computer. But for the time being we'd stick with Provencal/Piedmontese. Moise said we should be able to make ourselves understood with it, more or less, in Tuscany and Venice, which were important regions of Italy.

Moise was unusually well educated, I realized-even compared with most of the "nobility" of the time. But it was interesting how little he knew of geography-even the geography of the Mediterranean. He knew a lot about a lot of places and peoples, but a map he tried to sketch for us, in our first session, was so crude and incomplete that, comparing it with the one our ship had made, we couldn't figure out where it was supposed to be. And he had no idea where it was on our map.

It turned out that on Fanglith they hadn't developed map-making as a technical skill. They hardly even had the concept of an overall geographical view-of the planet's surface as something you could sketch on a coordinate system. If they could get where they wanted to go from where they already were, that was enough for them.

Briefly we took him out to 5,000 miles-briefly because that was in one of Fanglith's heavy radiation belts, and because we couldn't see Larn's ship from there. Instead of being scared or awed or anything like that, Moise was positively enraptured. Later, I had the computer print out a map of the whole Mediterranean region for him, and the country north of it all the way to the northern sea. From the way he'd reacted, you'd think I'd given him something of fabulous value, which I guess maybe I had.

When the pirates had attacked the ship his family was on, his mother and sister had jumped into the sea so they wouldn't be sold as slaves. Neither one of them could swim. His father had ordered Moise to lie on his face, then died fighting. Moise, because he was young, and for Fanglith big, had been chained to a rowing bench to replace a slave too sick to row anymore. The sick slave had then been thrown into the sea as a lesson to the others not to get sick.

Moise had never exercised much before, and he told us with a laugh about his first couple of days at the oar. The skin had rubbed off his hands, and in general his body had gotten so tired he'd thought he was dying. Then there'd been a couple of days when the wind had been right, and they hadn't had to row. That's when his muscles, from legs to shoulders and arms, had gotten so stiff and sore he didn't think he'd ever be able to move again.

But he had. Because the next day, when they were ordered to row again, he'd seen the whip used. He'd rowed then in spite of his soreness. Three weeks of slave food and rowing changed him from kind of pudgy to lean and sinewy. In the months since then he'd added a lot of muscle.

He was lucky, he told us, to have had the captain he'd had. He'd heard that some pirate captains underfed their slaves. His had fed them enough to keep them strong for rowing. He'd even given them dates and raisins, along with dried and salted meat, occasional stew, and what Moise called massah-some kind of bread.

Most of the time we stayed at fifteen miles, keeping the viewscreen locked on Larn's ship, and Bubba kept some telepathic attention on what was going on down there. I checked in with Larn once a day just to stay in touch. After we'd sunk the pirate ship, he'd only called once while he was at sea. My brother isn't the kind who needs his hand held.

But after they got to the port of Reggio, he called again, sounding kind of bummed out. It seemed as if he was wondering what he was down there for. I could see his problem; it was ours too-Tarel's and mine.

"Larn," I said, "you're worrying about no workable plan again." He didn't say anything back right away.

"Can I make a suggestion?" I asked.

"Okay. Sure."

"We've got an intention. Right?"

"I guess so. Yes."

"So what is it, then? The intention."

It took him a minute-well, ten or fifteen seconds- before he answered, I suppose because what he was looking at didn't seem do-able to him. "Make this a rebel world," he said at last.

I was playing it by ear myself now, and what I said next surprised me. "Take it back another step," I told him, "Our real intention is to rid the Empire of tyrannical rule. Right?"

There was another lag, and when he answered, his voice was thoughtful. "Right. That's right."

"So how about this, then: You're down there doing things, making decisions step by step to suit the situation-the best you can and with no need to hurry. And if you keep that intention in mind, to rid the Empire of tyrannical rule, your decisions will move us in that direction.

"Does that make any sense to you?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Yeah."

"Good. And we're not in a hurry! We can't make a rebel world out of Fanglith overnight. As far as that's concerned, maybe it's not even possible. Take things a step at a time, learn, and wait for the bright idea that you can build a plan on. And if things don't look good in a year or two, maybe we'll decide to go somewhere else, to some other planet. We don't have to make it on Fanglith."

I shut up then, to give him a chance. After a minute though, when he hadn't said anything more, I spoke again. "Brother mine, are you there?"

I heard him chuckle then, the welcomest sound I'd heard in a long time. "Yeah, I'm here. Thanks, sis. You're the greatest. This is Larn, over and out."

"This is the Jav, over and out."

I switched off the mike. Maybe not the greatest, I thought, but l am pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Tarel and Moise were already sleeping. Only Bubba was awake with me, looking at me and grinning, his tongue hanging out. I winked at him, then put on the learning program skullcap and began my first lesson in Arabic.

Moise:

These people who rescued me were clearly not children of Abraham. Nor were they Christian, nor of Islam. Yet if they were heathen, they seemed nonetheless people of honor and nobility. And surely they had shown me kindness and many wonders. Even their huge wolf-like dog spoke with them in his own language, which they understood, and they answered him in-theirs. Deneen says they will start to teach me their language tomorrow.

Although they have knowledge and power incredibly beyond my own, they treat me almost like one of them. True, at first they locked me in my room at night, but that was a reasonable precaution. And they showed me no other distrust, though they knew nothing about me except what I told them. They have told me their dog reads the thoughts of men, and has told them I am honorable, worthy of their trust. Perhaps he does read thoughts. I will test him when I learn to understand his speech.