“You have no fight with me. I don’t know enough about Western philosophy to defend it. And I have to get off the air.”

“Give me a call tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

At twilight Nia came back. She divided her pile of furs in two. “You sleep there.” She pointed at one pile.

I woke at sunrise. Nia was up and putting on her apron. “Yohai says you can learn. Come.”

We went to the smithy. Nia got the fire going, then taught me how to work the bellows. That morning she made the blade for a hoe. The blade was pointed and had two barbs at the back—for weeding, I decided, though it looked as if it could be used as a weapon.

I had not seen any real weapons. No swords. No pikes. No battleaxes or battle clubs. Nothing that was clearly designed to harm another person.

That was interesting. Maybe the men—wherever they were—had the tools for killing.

At noon we stopped and ate. I asked Nia the names of several things: the hoe blade, the hammer, and so on. She frowned and told me. I had a feeling that she wasn’t going to be a very good teacher. She seemed laconic by nature.

We went back to work. My arms started to ache, then my back, and finally my legs. The smoke was bothering my eyes, and I wasn’t too crazy about the clouds of steam produced when Nia dropped the glowing blade into a bucket of water. She did this twice. Finally she took the blade outside. She examined it in the sunlight, then made the gesture that meant “yes.”

“Is it good?” I asked.

“Yes. I will make another one.”

Damn her. She did. By the time she was finished, I was exhausted. I went outside and lay on the ground, while she banked the fire and put her tools away. She was meticulously neat in her work. Her house was a shambles, though. The day—I noticed for the first time—was bright and cool. A lovely day, now almost over. I decided not to call Eddie. It was too much effort. Instead I went to bed.

The next day Nia made wire. I worked the bellows and learned a new phrase. “Pump evenly, you idiot.”

In the evening we sat in Nia’s house and drank the pungent liquid. We both got a little drunk. Nia began chanting to herself, slapping one hand against her thigh to keep time. Her eyes were half-shut. She looked dreamy.

I leaned against the wall and watched smoke rise from the fire. This was a change for the better, I decided. Nia was taciturn and short-tempered, but she wasn’t melancholy. Nahusai had spent a lot of time sitting and brooding, and Yohai had almost always been busy. I found that unrestful.

Nia stopped chanting. I looked at her. She was lying down. A minute later she began to snore. A very restful companion, I told myself.

Nothing much happened in the next ten days. I helped Nia in the smithy. At night I talked to Eddie.

“There’s no question about your language,” he said one evening. “It’s pidgin, which explains why it’s so easy to learn.

“The big continent has a trade language, too—a different one, in no way related to yours. Yvonne and Santha are learning it. Meiling is learning something else. A local language, horrifying in its complexity.”

“And Gregory?” I asked.

“Another local language, but less difficult. Oh, an interesting thing happened to Gregory…”

I waited expectantly. Eddie, I had learned, tended to save the really important information till the end of a conversation.

“His people found out he was male. They told him to leave. He asked why? The question was a stunner, apparently. They couldn’t believe he was asking it. But in the end they told him. In their society the men live alone, up in the high mountains. They take care of the flocks, and they never come to the houses where the women live. The idea is shameful. Gregory says, he couldn’t think of a polite way to ask about procreation.”

“Did they throw him out?”

“No. He told them he didn’t know how to stay alive alone in the mountains. They had a long argument, then decided to let him stay in one of the outbuildings—a barn of some kind. And there he remains. J’y suis, j’y reste,he says.”

“The men live entirely alone?”

“According to Gregory, yes. The women say the men are bad-tempered. They don’t like company.”

“Oh, yeah? It explains what happened to Harrison.”

“Uh-huh. I warned Derek and Santha. Yvonne is going to talk to her hostess. She’s the ideal informant: a tribal historian who never stops talking.”

I made the gesture of agreement, then grinned and said, “Yes.”

“You talk to Nia. Ask her about the men in her society.”

I said I would, but I didn’t. Nia was never easy to talk with. Often she would stop in the middle of a sentence and stare off into space or else change the subject. I got the impression she had lived alone for a long time. She had forgotten how to carry on a conversation. I concentrated on prying information about grammar out of her. Questions about folkways could wait until later.

One morning Nia reached into the rafters of her house. She pulled down two axes.

“Come,” she told me. “We are going to get wood.”

We spent all morning in the forest. Nia felled a tree, maybe ten meters tall. The trunk was straight. The branches were bare, except for a few shriveled leaves. The tree was obviously dead and had been for some time.

When it was down, Nia said, “Make it into pieces.”

“I’ll do my best.”

I started chopping. Nia went off. When I paused to rub my hands, I heard her axe a short distance away. She was felling another tree.

At noon we rested.

“What is this for?” I asked.

“Charcoal.” She chewed on a piece of bread. “This wood is dry already. Tomorrow we put it underground. It will burn for nine days, ten days, slowly, underground. Then it will be charcoal.” She got up, stretched, and rubbed her palms along her thighs. “Time to work.”

I groaned and got my axe.

A few minutes later the blister on my right hand broke. I put down my axe and looked at the blister. There was blood. I was going to have to spray it. I walked back to Nia’s house and opened my pack.

Should I wash the wound? I decided not to. It looked clean, and I didn’t know what kind of microbe lived in the streams, especially the streams close to a village. In theory, nothing on this planet could live off me. Our genetic material was too different. No local virusoid could use my DNA for replication. No local bacteroid could use my cells for food. Still and all—

I got out the bandage can and sprayed on a small thin bandage. It stung. That would be the disinfectant. I sat down and waited for the bandage to dry. It was shiny and dark brown: flesh-colored, according to the label on the can, and made in the South African Confederation.

“Nia!” a voice cried.

I looked up. Yohai came out of the forest, walking quickly.

“Where is Nia?”

“There.” I pointed. “You can hear the sound of her axe.”

“Bad news! I must tell her.” Yohai ran off.

I thought about following her, but decided no, put the can of bandages away and did a little housework. The mess was beginning to drive me crazy. I hung up Nia’s clothes and arranged the furs we slept on in two neat piles. When I was done, I went outside. I couldn’t hear the sound of chopping or anything except the rustle of leaves. The sun blazed overhead, almost as bright as Sol. The air was hot. I sat down in the shadow of a wall and waited. After half an hour Nia and Yohai came.

“It is time to tell you what is going on,” Nia said.

“I would like that.”

They squatted down. Nia laid her two axes on the ground, then scratched her nose. “Nahusai lies in bed. She cannot get up. She cannot eat. Hakht says, you have done this. Hakht says, you must be driven away. If not, Nahusai will die and then other people. You will make songs. The songs will do harm. They will steal breath out of the mouth. They will make the blood in the belly get hard like a stone.” Nia glanced at Yohai. “This is what you said.”