If only the Oversoul had been just the teeniest bit fussier about whom she brought along on this journey.

Then Rasa stopped in the middle of dressing herself and realized: I'm thinking of how selfish and controlling Elemak is, and yet I'm angry this morning because I'm not the one in charge here. Who is the controlling one! Perhaps if I had been deprived of real control as long as Elemak has, I'd be just as desperate to get it and keep it.

But she knew that she would not. Rasa had never undercut her mother as long as she lived, and Elemak had already acted to thwart his father several times—to the point of almost killing Volemak's youngest son.

I must tell Volya what Elemak did, so that Volemak can make his decisions based on complete information. I would be a bad wife indeed if I didn't give my husband good counsel, including telling him everything I know. He has always done the same for me.

Rasa pushed aside the flap and stepped into the air trap, which was much hotter than the inside of the tent. Then, after closing the flap behind her, she parted the outer curtain and stepped out into the blazing sun. She felt herself immediately drenched in sweat.

"Lady Rasa!" cried Dol in delight.

"Dolya," said Rasa. What, had Dol been waiting for Rasa to emerge? There was nothing productive for her to do? Rasa could not resist giving her a little dig. "Working hard?"

"Oh, no, though I might as well be, with this hot sun."

Well, at least Dol wasn't a hypocrite…

"I volunteered to wait for you to come out of the tent, since Wetchik wouldn't let anybody waken you, not even for breakfast."

It occurred to Rasa that she was a little hungry.

"And Wetchik said that when you woke up you'd be starving, so I'm to take you to the kitchen tent. We keep everything locked up so the baboons don't ever find it, or Elemak says we'd have no peace. They can't ever learn to find food from us, or they'd probably follow us farther into the desert and then die."

So Dolya did absorb information from other people's conversation. It was so hard to remember sometimes that she was quite a bright girl. It was the cuteness thing she did that made it almost impossible to give her credit for having any wit.

"Well?" asked Dol.

"Well what?"

"You haven't said a thing. Do you want to eat now, or shall I call everyone together to hear Wetchik's dream?"

"Dream?" asked Rasa.

"He had a dream last night, from the Oversoul, and he wanted to tell us all together. But he didn't want to waken you, so we all started doing other things, and I was supposed to watch for you."

Now Rasa was deeply embarrassed. It was a bad precedent for Volya to set, making everyone else get up and work while Rasa slept. She did not want to be the pampered wife of the ruler, she wanted to be a full participant in the community. Surely Volemak understood that.

"Please, call everyone together. Point me to the kitchen tent first, of course. I'll bring a little bread to the gathering."

She heard Dol as she wandered off, calling out at the top of her lungs—with full theatrical training in projecting her voice—"Aunt Rasa's up now! Aunt Rasa's up!"

Rasa cringed inwardly. Why not announce to everybody exactly how late I slept in?

She found the kitchen tent easily enough—it was the one with a stone oven outside, where Zdorab was baking bread.

He looked up at her rather shamefacedly. "I must apologize, Lady Rasa. I never said I was a baker."

"But the bread smells wonderful," said Rasa.

"Smells, yes. I can do smells. You should catch a whiff of my favorite—I call it ‘burning fish.'"

Rasa laughed. She liked this fellow. "You get fish from this stream?"

"Your husband thought of doing some shore fishing down there." He pointed toward where the stream flowed into the placid waters of the Scour Sea.

"So you had some luck?"

"Not really," said Zdorab. "We caught fish, but they weren't very good."

"Even the ones that didn't get turned into your favorite smell…"

"Even the ones we stewed. There just isn't enough life on the land here. The fish would gather at the stream mouth if there were more organic material in the sediment being deposited by the stream."

"You're a geologist?" asked Rasa, rather surprised.

"A librarian, so I'm a little bit of everything, I guess," said Zdorab. "I was trying to figure out why this place doesn't have a permanent human settlement, and the reason came from the Index, some old maps from the last time there was a major culture in this area. They always grow up on the big river just over that mountain range." He pointed east. "Right now there are still a couple of minor cities there. The reason they don't use this spot is because there isn't enough plantable land. And the river fails one year in five. That's too often to maintain a steady population."

"What do the baboons do?" asked Rasa.

"The Index doesn't really track baboons," said Zdorab.

"I guess not," said Rasa. "I guess the baboons will have to build their own Oversoul someday, eh?"

"I guess." He looked mildly puzzled. "It'd help if they'd just build their own latrine."

Rasa raised an eyebrow.

"We have to keep an eye on them, so one of them doesn't wander upstream of us and then foul our drinking water."

"Mm," said Rasa. "That reminds me. I'm thirsty."

"And hungry too, I'll bet," said Zdorab. "Well, help yourself. Cool water and yesterday's bread in the kitchen tent, locked up."

"Well, if it's locked up ... "

"Locked to baboons. For humans, it should be easy enough."

When Rasa got into the kitchen tent she found he was right. The "lock" was nothing but a twist of wire holding the solar-powered cold chest closed. So why did they stress the fact that it was locked? Perhaps just to remind her to close it after her.

She opened the lid and found several dozen loaves of bread, as well as quite a few other cloth-wrapped parcels of food—frozen meat, perhaps? No, it couldn't be frozen, it wasn't cold enough inside. She reached down and opened one of the packages and found, of course, camel's milk cheese. Nasty stuff—she had eaten it once before, at Volemak's house, when she was visiting him once between the two times they were married. "See how much I loved you?" he had teased her. "The whole time we were married, and I never made you taste this!" But she knew now that she'd need the protein and the fat—they'd be on lean rations through most of the journey, and they had to eat everything that had nutritional value. Taking a flat round bread, she tore off half, rewrapped the rest, and then stuffed the part she meant to eat with a few chunks from the cheese. The bread was dry and harsh enough to mask much of the taste of the cheese, so all in all it wasn't as nauseating a breakfast as it could have been. Welcome to the desert, Rasa.

She closed the lid and turned toward the door.

"Aaah!" she screeched, quite without meaning to. There in the doorway was a baboon on all fours, looking at her intently and sniffing.

"Shoo," she said. "Go away. This is my breakfast."

The baboon only studied her face a little longer. She remembered then that she had not locked the cold box. Shamefaced, she turned her back on the baboon and, hiding what she was doing with her body, she retwisted the wire. Supposedly the baboon's fingers weren't deft enough to undo the wire. But what if his teeth were strong enough to bite through it, what then? No point in letting him know that it was the wire keeping him out.

Of course, it was quite possible he could figure it out on his own. Didn't they say that baboons were the closest things to humans on Harmony? Perhaps that's why the original settlers of this planet brought them—for they were from Earth, not native to this place.