Martin suspected the Ship of the Law had lost portions of its crucial memory, and was merely a shadow of its former self. The mom would not elaborate; it, too, seemed lost in a kind of dullness, and dullness was the order of things. In a way, Martin did not mind this difficulty; it gave them all plenty of time for thought, and he used that time.

Hans was clearly made uneasy by it.

The ex-Pans held colloquium every five days in his quarters.

"I'd hate to be known as the exercise Pan," Hans said. "We have three more months until we rendezvous with our new partners. We've done about all the science there is to do with Wormwood—at least, everybody has but Jennifer and Giacomo… We're bored, there's still only one mom, and that worries me. Am I right?"

Hans had been asking that more and more lately: a slightly nasal "Am I right?" with one eyebrow lifted and a perfectly receptive expression. "We need some mental action, too. The ship isn't going to be much help." He looked to Cham, but Cham shrugged.

"Martin?" Harpal asked.

Martin made a wry face. "Without the remotes, we can't learn much more about Leviathan."

"The food is dull," Harpal offered. "Maybe we can cook it ourselves."

Joe Flatworm snorted. "The mom won't let us near raw materials."

"Any suggestions, Joe?" Hans asked.

"We're stuck in a long dull rut," Joe said softly. "We should be asleep."

"I'm sure if that were an option—" Martin began.

"Yeah. The mom is concerned." That was another phrase Hans used often now, and others in the crew had picked it up. The proper form was: stated problem or dissatisfaction; reply, "Yeah, the mom is concerned."

"I think we should—" Martin began again.

"Slick worrying about the ship," Hans said.

"That wasn't what I was—"

"Fine," Hans interrupted.

"Goddammit, let me finish!" Martin shouted. Joe and Cham flinched, but Hans grinned, held up his hands, and shook his head.

"You have the floor," he said.

"We can't blame the ship for saving our lives," Martin said, expressing not a shred of what he had meant to say, and now realized was useless to say under the present circumstances.

"I don't think any of us Pans have actively enjoyed our rank," Hans said, drumming his fingers on the table between them. "Am I right? But I'm faced with problems none of you faced. Political problems. Psychological problems. We don't have any real work to do. We have plenty of time on our hands. The only thing I can think of to keep us occupied is sports. I don't like it, but there it is."

Cham raised one hand to shoulder level.

"Yes?"

"We should begin thinking about after," he said.

"After what?"

"After the Job is done. We should work on a constitution. Laws, and so on. Get ready for when we look for another world…"

Hans considered with a thoughtfulness that somehow did not convince Martin. "Right," he said. "Joe, get on it. Cham, for your sins, organize some games and competitions. Start with races from nose to tail, like we used to do. Think up rewards.

Shake them up, get their blood moving. Martin, perhaps you should work on intellectual games… More your speed, no? Get together with Hakim. Jennifer. Whoever. Competition. If we're cast on our own resources, we have to be resourceful." Am I right? Martin predicted. Hans smiled and said nothing.

Rosa Sequoia sat comfortably in the middle of thirty-two of the crew—a broad selection, including Erin Eire and Paola Bird-song. Martin stood to one side of the schoolroom, listening, observing.

With all of her words, she made gentle, sweeping hand gestures, drawing in but not demanding or assertive. Her voice soothed, low and soft, yet authoritative. Something had come together for her, Martin saw; and her newfound grace and ease of expression worried him. A special time.

Hans entered behind him, leaned against the wall next to Martin, nodded in greeting, folded his arms, and listened.

"… To have lost the home we all cherished, we all grew up with, is like the farmer who lost his farm, when the wind came and blew it away. One day he awoke and walked out his door to see barren dirt, the crops smashed flat, dead and brown, and he told himself, 'I have worked this land all my life, why didn't the wind take me as well? This farm is like an arm or a leg to me—why wasn't I snatched away with it?' "

Martin listened intently, waiting to see if Rosa's fairy tale or parable or whatever it was came close to those he had experienced in the volumetric fields.

Rosa looked down, lowered her arms as if resting. "The farmer became bitter. He thought he would fight the wind. He built walls against the wind, higher and higher, making them out of the dust and straw and the mud that ran in rivers across the dead fields. But the wind knocked the walls down, and still the farmer was alive. The wind took his family one by one, and still the farmer lived, and cursed the wind, and finally he began to curse the Maker of Winds—"

"He became a wind breaker!" Rex Live Oak called out.

Rosa smiled, unperturbed. "He tried magic when the walls wouldn't work. He chanted against the wind, and sang songs, and all the while, he grew to hate the land, the wind, the water.

He cursed them all and he became more and more bitter, until it seemed bad water ran in his veins, and his mind was poisoned with hate and fear and change. He no longer missed his family; he no longer missed the farm. It seemed nothing meant anything to him but revenge against the wind—"

"Sounds subversive to me," Hans whispered to Martin.

"And he grew thinner and thinner each day, more and more wrinkled, until he looked like a dead stalk of corn—"

"I don't remember what corn looked like, growing on a stalk," Bonita Imperial Valley said. "I grew up in a farm town, and I just don't remember."

"He couldn't remember, either," Rosa continued smoothly. "He couldn't remember what the crops looked like, or what had been important to him. He fought the wind with the only weapon he had left, useless empty words, and the wind howled and howled. Finally, the farmer became so bitter and dry and dead inside, the wind sucked him up through the air like a leaf. He lived inside the wind, empty as a husk, and the wind filled his dry lungs, and reached into his dry stomach, and then into his dry, rattling head."

"So what's the point?" Jack Sand asked, looking around the assembled group with a puzzled expression.

"It's a story," Kimberly Quartz said. "Just listen."

"I don't listen to stories unless they have a point. It's a waste of time," Jack said. He got up and left, glancing at Hans and Martin and shaking his head.

"In the wind," Rosa continued, hardly missing a beat, "the farmer knew what he was up against, and that he had no power. He stopped cursing and he started listening. He stopped resisting—I mean, how can you resist something so powerful?—and he began to live in the wind, as part of the howl and the whirl and the swirling. He saw other people in the wind—"

Hans motioned for Martin to follow him outside. Martin walked through the door and they stayed in step down the corridor, past Jack Sand, past Andrew Jaguar and Kirsten Two Bites.

Out of the others' hearing, Hans said, "When I was a little kid, back on Earth, my folks took television and video games away from me for a week to punish me for something I did. I went nuts. I even started to read books. Well," he said, "our TV's gone now. Rosa is better than nothing." He shook his head. "But not much."