“The shamaness has left the village,” she told me. “People have gone with her. They will bring your friend back.”

“Good. When?”

“Tomorrow or the next day.”

I ate breakfast—more mush—then went outside. The sky was cloudless, and the air was warm. It smelled of midden heaps. I decided to take another look at the plain. I found the village gate and went through it.

A trail led around the village. I followed it. The plain stretched south and east, almost perfectly flat. There were animals in the distance: black dots that moved from time to time. I shaded my eyes, but I couldn’t make them out.

On the north side of the village were gardens that looked exactly like the gardens in the village of Nahusai. I stopped by one.

A woman looked up. “You are the stranger.”

“Yes.”

“You certainly are strange.”

I pointed at the animals on the plain. “What are those?”

Her eyes widened. “You don’t know?”

I made the gesture that meant “no.”

“How can anyone be that ignorant?”

I said nothing. After a moment she said, “They are bowhorns. Most of the herd is in the north. In the fall the men will bring them back. The whole plain will be black then.”

“Where are the men now?”

She frowned. “Don’t you know anything? They are with the herd. Where else would they be?”

“Thank you.” I wandered on.

The next day was overcast. I went down to the river, taking my pack with me. I settled at the foot of a tree and got out my radio.

Eddie was back. “How’s your friend?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I went to get help, and the help has gone to get Nia. I’ll find out how she is sometime today.”

“Where are you?”

I described the location of the village and told him about my meeting with the Voice of the Waterfall.

“Now that sounds fascinating.” He was silent for a minute or two. Then he said, “I don’t know much about oracles. They were big in Greece, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I ought to do some reading. What is the village like?”

I described the village. “As far as I can tell all the adults are women. The men are up north, taking care of a herd of animals. They’re migratory. The women stay put. How is the ship?”

“Pretty much the same. We got a message from Earth.”

“Oh, yeah?” I felt the usual excitement. “Anything interesting?”

“There’s a new space colony, and the Ukrainians are beginning to settle the wilderness around what used to be Kiev. And someone has come up with a practical faster-than-light radio. They have sent us the plans.”

I rocked back on my heels. We wouldn’t be isolated any longer. We wouldn’t have to wait forty years for the answer to a question.

“How long will it take to build the thing?”

Eddie laughed. “We can build the receiver. The engineers are almost sure of that. But in order to send messages, we have to be able to generate a very strange new particle, and the machine that does that is big.”

“Shit.”

“My thought exactly. The particle—you might be interested in knowing—is called fred. Not in honor of Friedrich Engels. The message was very clear about that.” Eddie’s voice had the tone he used when describing obvious lunacy. “It was found—no, theorized—by two people more or less simultaneously. Everything about this particle happens in sets of two, according to the message. The person in Beijing wanted to call it a guanyonin honor of the Chinese goddess of mercy Guan Yin. Apparently the goddess came to her in a dream, standing on a lotus flower and holding the crucial equation written on a fan.

“The person in Santiago wanted to call the particle a pablonin honor of the poet Pablo Neruda. I don’t know why. Maybe he got an equation in a dream. Neither person was willing to back down. So the particle is being called a fred. It always comes as one of a pair. The other particle is named frieda.”

“I suppose this is another example of the terrible whimsy of physicists,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why did they send the plans if we can’t use them?”

“For our information and just in case we ran into a lot of metal and a lot of silica and a modern industrial society. Always be prepared, as somebody said. Friedrich Engels maybe.”

I scratched my nose. “What is bothering you?”

“Aside from the fred?Derek has found a lump of copper. It’s a meter across, and as far as he can tell, it’s pure. It was lying on the edge of a river. Just lying there in plain sight. People are saying, maybe we can find the resources to build the new transmitter. You people are finding too much. Why don’t you shut up?”

“Come on, Eddie. We can’t do that. Secrecy is the enemy of democracy. Is there any other news?”

“Derek’s moving north as well as west. He’s only a hundred kilometers from you. He’d like to join with you. Do you think your friend would object to traveling with a man?”

“Yes.”

“I was afraid of that.”

Something moved at the edge of my vision. “I have to go.” I turned off the radio and shoved it into my pack, then looked around and saw a bipedal animal something like the one I had seen in the canyon. This was a new variety, however, as tall as I was, with a dark blue back. Its belly was cream-white, and it had a crest: a bunch of long feathers that shone bright blue in the sunlight. The animal was feeding off a tree covered with berries, reaching up its long arms and pulling the berries off, handful after handful. It crammed the berries into its mouth, then swallowed and reached for more. I got up. It twisted its long neck and stared at me, then went back to eating. There was something oddly human about its motions. It couldn’t be intelligent. Its crested head was tiny. Still and all—I watched till it finished eating and wandered off. Then I walked back to the village.

In the evening the shamaness returned. I saw her enter the village. She was wearing a blue robe and a hat made of feathers. Five women followed her. Two of them carried a litter. Nia was on it. Her eyes were closed. She seemed to be asleep.

“Don’t worry,” Eshtanabai said. “Our shamaness will cure your friend.”

“I hope so.”

The shamaness said, “Take the woman to my house. I will go and gather herbs.”

Eshtanabai touched my arm. “Come with me. The shamaness will not want visitors, except for the holy spirits. And you wouldn’t want to meet them. It isn’t safe.”

“All right.”

I spent the evening in the house of Eshtanabai. I felt restless and uneasy. What was happening to Nia? I bit my fingernails and watched the fire. Eshtanabai played with her children. After a while I went outside. The village was quiet except for the sound of a drum. Was that the shamaness? I didn’t know. I looked up. The sky was clear, and the stars shone brightly. A cool wind blew in off the plain. It was a lovely planet: pure and clean and almost empty. We had been working on our own planet for over a century when the ship left and the work had continued. Two centuries so far. There were still scars everywhere: stripped mountains, poisoned marshes, wide stretches where the land was useless, at least to humans—eroded, full of salt or dry, the water gone, pumped up and used in the twentieth century.

What had they been thinking of, those people then? They had left their descendants almost no water and great mountains of uranium. What kind of inheritance was that? How did they think we were going to survive?

We had managed with not much help from them. It was amazing how many people we had been able to save. When I thought of Earth, I thought of crowds. Only the ocean was really empty and the polar ice caps and the ruined lands.

Looking up at the starry sky I felt a terrible sense of loss.

Not that I objected to my society. It was sane, decent, humane, the best society that Earth had ever known. But it was enormously complex. Nothing was easy. Nothing was straightforward. For the first time history was a conscious process. For the first time people were shaping their lives deliberately, knowing what they did.