At last there was silence except for the whimpering of babies and the high, clear voices of a group of children who had started to play a game.

“Hai! Hai! Ah-tsa-hai!”

The women looked at Angai, who spoke loudly and firmly.

The women replied with gestures of uncertain agreement.

Angai looked at me. “The day is almost finished. It is a bad idea to begin anything important in the dark. Therefore, I ask you to return to your boats. Come back in the morning with everyone. All your people. We will listen to your problem.”

I made the gesture of gratitude and stood.

“You, Nia.” Angai looked at my companion. “Go with the hairless person. People have known you too long. They will forget that you are a stranger now. They won’t treat you with the courtesy due a traveler.”

Nia made the gesture of assent.

Hua said, “I want to go with them.”

Angai frowned.

Nia said, “No. I don’t want people saying that you are like me.”

“Nia is right,” said Angai. She looked at her foster daughter. “Tomorrow you will see the hairless people. Tonight, stay here.”

Hua made the gesture of reluctant acquiescence.

The crowd parted. Nia and I passed through it.

“Aiya!” said Nia. “What a day!”

We went down the bluff. The lights on the first boat had been turned on. Pale and steady, they lit the open deck at the rear of the boat. The oracle sat there, gnawing on the forearm of a biped. He looked up as we climbed onboard. “What happened? Did you get any food?”

“No,” said Nia.

“You’d better soon. Everything is gone except for this and the food of Lixia’s people.”

“You saved nothing for me?”

“I thought you would eat in the village.”

“Aiya!”

He handed her the bone.

She made the gesture of effusive gratitude.

I opened the cabin door. Agopian and Ivanova were inside playing chess.

Agopian looked up. “You’re back.”

“Uh-huh. It went all right. We can go up tomorrow. All of us.”

“Congratulations.” Ivanova tipped over her king. “I concede. I can do nothing without my pawns.”

Agopian grinned. “One of her pawns became a revolutionary socialist and convinced the others to form a soviet, which means—of course—that white has no ordinary soldiers left.”

“And red wins,” said Ivanova grimly.

“What are you talking about?”

“Brechtian chess.” Agopian began to put the pieces away. “It was named in honor of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who said that ordinary chess was boring. The pieces ought to change according to where they were on the board and how long they’d been there. A madman named Robik actually invented the game early in the twenty-second century.”

“It is a thoroughly irritating game,” said Ivanova.

“Karl Marx hated losing at chess. It didn’t bother Lenin—at least according to Gorki.” Agopian folded the board, then folded it a second time. “Lenin was interested in howhe lost. That kept him from getting angry over the fact that he’d lost. He said chess taught him a lot about strategy and tactics. But he had to give it up. It was interfering with his revolutionary activity.”

“Where is everyone else?” I asked.

“On the other boat. Mr. Fang is fixing dinner. Iguana with red peppers and green onions. We wanted to finish our game.”

“Though I don’t know why,” said Ivanova. She stood up and stretched.

“You thought you were going to win, comrade, when my commissar developed ugly revisionist tendencies.”

“Commissar,” I said.

Agopian smiled. “Robik wanted to get rid of the feudal elements in chess. He changed the knights into commissars.”

“Don’t tell me any more.”

“I won’t. Are you coming to dinner?”

“No.”

“There is beer in the gallery and the makings for sandwiches.” He went out on deck.

Ivanova followed, pausing at the door. “You have done good work, Lixia.”

I made the gesture that indicated the modest acceptance of praise.

She left. I got a beer and drank it, then made a sandwich. I took it out on deck along with another beer.

Nia and the oracle were still there. “Did you get enough to eat?”

“I did,” the oracle said. “But Nia is going to be hungry when she wakes.”

Nia made the gesture that meant “no big deal.”

I sat down facing the natives. “Nia, why was your daughter upset when I asked if she had known old Hua?”

“Ai!” said the oracle. “You asked that?”

“Yes. What is wrong with the question?”

“No one ever names a child after a living woman,” Nia said. “If a woman meets her name-mother, she is meeting a ghost.”

I said, “Hu!” and drank some beer, then asked, “Is that true of men as well?”

“No,” said the oracle.

Nia added, “Boy children are named after men who have left the village. Usually it is the brother of their mother. My son is named after my brother Anasu. As far as I know, he is still alive.” She paused. “I hope he is.” She looked at the bone she held. It was gnawed clean. No shred of meat remained. “When my son leaves the village, he may well meet Anasu. That will not be especially frightening.”

“Unless they try to claim the same territory,” the oracle said.

“That is hardly likely.” Nia tossed the bone down. It rattled on the deck. “I am going to get a blanket and sleep up there.” She pointed toward the prow of the boat.

“All right,” I said.

She got up stiffly, as if she had been working hard at some kind of physical labor. Well, someday I would find out what it was like to go home.

I finished the beer, went into the cabin, and unfolded a bed.

“I need a blanket,” the oracle said.

I got one for him. He took it outside. I undressed and lay down. For a while I thought about the day—the tents and wagons, the people, especially the children. How must it feel to have a daughter? I reached for the button on the wall above me. I pressed it, and the lights went out.

Derek said, “You never came over to report last night. We were disappointed, Lixia.”

I opened my eyes. The cabin was full of people: Derek, Agopian, Tatiana.

“Do all of you have to be here?” I asked.

“We have limited space at the moment,” said Derek.

Agopian nodded. “Two boats and a planet.”

“What happened in the village?” asked Tatiana.

“I told Agopian. The shamaness—her name is Angai—has agreed to help us with our problem. Excuse me.” I went to the bathroom.

When I came back out, the cabin had been rearranged. The beds were couches again. The chairs and tables had been unfolded. Agopian and Derek were setting out plates.

Agopian glanced at me. “We are serving an American breakfast on this boat. The only decent food I ever had in America was served at breakfast. Though the hamburger has a certain je ne sais quoi.As does the Coney Island hot dog. Yunqi is serving a Chinese breakfast on the other boat. I hear she’s a really bad cook.”

“Are all Armenians oral-dependent?”

“That is a racist question.” He finished setting the table. “We like to eat. A lot of us have died of starvation over the centuries.”

“You might want to go outside,” said Derek.

“Why?”

“Nia’s son is there.”

I went on deck. Nia and the oracle sat on either side of an iron pot full of stew. They were eating, pulling out hunks of meat with their fingers, and they wore new clothes. Nothing impressive. Nia had on a dark green tunic, plain except for a single line of yellow embroidery at the neck. The oracle wore a reddish-orange kilt with no embroidery at all.

“Where is Anasu?” I asked.

She pointed.

The boy sat on the railing. He was the same height as the oracle, but not as solid-looking, and very dark brown. His eyes were gray. I had never seen that color in a native before.

His kilt was blue-gray. He wore boots designed—I was almost certain—for riding, not walking. They were knee high, made of thin flexible gray leather, which bagged at the ankles. The heels were decorated with silver studs. His belt had a silver buckle, and he wore four narrow silver bracelets, two on each wrist.