I made the gesture of agreement. He pulled something from the fire.

Leaves, burnt black. He unwrapped them with a couple of quick motions. “Ouch!” Inside was a piece of fish, steaming and fragrant. “No bones that I can find,” he said in the language of gifts. “Dig it up.”

It was delicious and there were no bones. “Did the oracle tell you about his dream?”

“Yes. It might mean nothing. He’s been through a lot and he’s in pain. I wish I could give him aspirin. Sometimes a dream means nothing important. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. However…” He paused. “He is an oracle and this is a holy place.”

“Derek, you are a superstitious savage.”

“Call me names, my love, and I will remind you that I have tenure and you do not.”

“Screw you,” I said.

He made the gesture of doubtful agreement.

I laughed.

“Nia is coming,” he said. “Let’s get the fire out.”

We traveled south and west along the river. The sky remained clear. The day grew gradually hot. The oracle rode ahead of me. I watched him shift in the saddle and move his arm, trying to find a comfortable position.

We stopped in the middle of morning. Derek made a sling out of his bloodstained shirt. The oracle put it on and sighed. “Aiya! That is better.”

The valley grew wider. The river spread out into marshes. At times I was unable to see the water, only the reeds, tall and purple, moving slightly in the very slight wind.

The birds grew quiet, as they did on Earth in the afternoon, and I drifted into a series of reveries: Earth, Hawaii, my family. They were all gone except for Charlie, a half sibling who’d gotten himself frozen. He was curious about the future, he told me in his last message. He’d be there to welcome me home.

The oracle sagged. I urged my bowhorn forward and grabbed him as he started to fall. “Derek!”

The oracle straightened. “I am only tired.”

Derek reached us. He and I got the oracle onto the ground.

“We have gone far enough,” said Nia. She glanced around. “This is not a good place to stop. But it isn’t bad either.”

We were in an open area. A meadow. Most of the vegetation was low and late-summer yellow. There was one really conspicuous exception: a plant that grew as tall as two meters. It dotted the meadow. I saw at least a dozen specimens. The lower half of the plant was a cluster of large, ragged, dusty-looking leaves. A stalk grew up from the leaves, ending in a cluster of flowers. The flowers were orange, an extraordinarily vivid color. It seemed to glow.

A weird-looking plant. Not really attractive.

“Are you dreaming?” asked Derek. “Get down here.”

I dismounted.

The oracle sat on the ground. His shoulders sagged, and his head was down.

“Nia, you take care of the animals. Lixia, get wood. I’ll take care of the oracle.”

I didn’t much care for the way he ordered everyone around. On the other hand, I didn’t have a better plan. I walked across the meadow. Bugs whirred and hummed around me. The sun was hot on my head and shoulders. The air had a sweet aroma: the orange flowers.

Bugs with orange wings fluttered around them, landed, and took off. I couldn’t always tell what was a bug and what was a blossom. That was eerie, to see a flower fold up and suddenly take off, sailing on the still air to another plant.

I reached the far side of the meadow. Trees grew there. I gathered branches, moving slowly, made sleepy by the heat.

When I returned, the oracle was lying down in the shade of a flower. Derek sat next to him, cross-legged, holding the radio.

“Damn it, Eddie,” he said. “I have a sick person on my hands. I need to talk to someone of the med team.”

“We have agreed,” the radio said. “No further intervention of any kind until we have discussed our policy.”

I dropped my branches, then dropped to my knees. “This is ridiculous, Eddie.”

There was silence except for static. “I have to admit, I think we have handled this badly. Though I am not sure how one works out a policy for something that has never happened before. We thought we had one. I thought we had one. But what I mean by nonintervention is not what you mean by it. And everyone seems to have a different idea of when—if ever—it is legitimate to bend the rules.

“For the time being, though, we are going to have no intervention at all.

“Do you have any idea when you’re going to reach the lake?”

“That depends on how sick the oracle is,” said Derek.

The radio made crackling noise. Finally Eddie said, “Call me when you have a better idea of his condition. I really don’t think we can help. But it isn’t my decision. I’ll tell the committee for day-to-day administration what is going on.”

“Thanks,” said Derek. He turned the radio off.

“Do you really think we’re going to need advice? We’ve dealt with injuries to two natives already.”

“In the case of Inahooli, not very successfully,” Derek said.

I made the gesture of unhappy agreement.

“No. I don’t think it’s necessary to have the med team in on this. It’s a pretty minor injury. But this is a way to check up on what is going on upstairs. I get uneasy when I’m in the field too long. I once came back from a trip to the moon and found the worst asshole in the department had gotten an office I wanted. It was on a corner. Four big windows and one heck of a view. If I’d been in Berkeley, I would’ve stopped him. No question about that! But I was out of touch. There were things I should have known and didn’t.”

He sounded still angry, though he had lost the office over one hundred years ago.

“What do you think will happen?” I asked.

“I think we’ll get to talk to the med team. Remember the people who are currently on the committee for day-to-day administration. Two biologists and three members of the crew.”

“That isn’t a majority,” I said.

“The Chinese usually vote as a block, and I think they’ll be in favor of intervention—in general and in this situation. Remember the theory of Jiang, the plumber. It’s our revolutionary duty to rescue these unfortunate people from stagnation.”

I considered for a moment, then made the gesture of uncertainty.

“I ought to take the oracle’s temperature,” Derek said. He glanced at my pile of branches. “And you ought to get more wood.”

I got back a second time and found the oracle asleep.

“No sign of infection,” Derek said. “His temperature is almost the same as Nia’s. Most likely the heat got to him—and traveling—and maybe some kind of reaction to last night. Dealing with spirits takes a lot of energy. Shamans and witches often feel sick for several days afterward.”

“So we don’t need any help from the ship.”

“No. But I’m not going to tell them that. If you’re looking for Nia, she has borrowed my bow and gone hunting along the river.”

The sun went down behind the valley wall, and Nia came back with a lizard. A big one, a meter and a half long. She gutted the animal and skinned it. We roasted it. The flesh was dark and tasted—more than anything else—like fish.

The next morning was clear. I did my yoga, ending with the solar salute. The oracle watched me. “What kind of ceremony is that?” he asked.

“I am welcoming the sun and giving it praise.”

“Ah. I have not been able to decide what you believe in.”

It was too early in the morning to discuss religion. “How are you doing?”

“I slept well. I had no dreams. My arm feels better. I think it is good that we left the cave. I think I might have gotten sicker, if we had stayed. The spirits there are very hungry, and I am not certain that my gift was big enough for them. But they are not the kind of spirits who travel. They have not followed me.”

We ate some more of the lizard, cold this time, saddled the bowhorns, and went on.

The valley kept widening. A little after noon I glanced around and saw the bluffs were gone. I twisted in the saddle and looked back. There they were: a yellow wall, lit by the sun, extending north and south as far as I could see. We had come out the valley of our little tributary. We were in the valley of the Great River, traveling through a level forest. A number of the trees had fallen, and a lot more leaned at perilous angles. There were patches of color on the trunks: pale blue, pale green, and yellow. The patches were organisms, I decided. Most likely they fed on dead tissue. This was the bottomland. The flood plain. A lot of trees must die in the years when the river rose.