“And Luet was testing Father—about his memories. When his memory of the vision he saw was wrong, he felt kind of stupid, right?”

  “He said.”

  “Stupid. Disconnected. He just stared into space.”

  “I guess.”

  “Like you,” said Issib. “When I pushed you about the meaning of zrakoplov.”

  Suddenly Nafai felt as if there were no air in his lungs. “I’ve got to get outside!”

  “You are really sensitive to this,” said Issib. “Even worse than Father and Mother when I tried to tell them?”

  “Stop following me!” Nafai cried. But Issib continued to float down the hall after him, down the stairs, out into the street. There, in the open, Issib easily passed Nafai, floating here and there in front of him. As if he were herding Nafai back toward the house.

  “Stop it!” cried Nafai. But he couldn’t get away. He had never felt such panic before. Turning, he stumbled, fell to his knees.

  “It’s all right,” said Issib softly. “Relax. It’s nothing. Relax.”

  Nafai breathed more easily. Issib’s voice sounded safe now. The panic subsided. Nafai lifted his head and looked around. “What are we doing out here on the street? Mother’s going to kill me.”

  “You ran out here, Nafai.”

  “I did?”

  “It’s the Oversoul, Nafai.”

  “What’s the Oversoul?”

  “The force that sent you outside rather than listen to me talk about—about the thing that the Oversoul doesn’t want people to know about.”

  “That’s silly,” said Nafai. The Oversoul spreads information, it doesn’t conceal it. We submit our writings, our music, everything, and the Oversoul transmits it from city to city, from library to library all over the world.”

  “Your reaction was much stronger than Father’s,” said Issib. “Of course, I pushed you harder, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Oversoul is inside your head, Nafai. Inside all of our heads. But some have it more than others. It’s there, watching what we think. I know it’s hard to believe.”

  But Nafai remembered how Luet had known what was in his mind. “No, Issya, I already knew that.”

  “Really?” said Issib. “Well then. As soon as the Oversoul knew that you were getting close to a forbidden subject, it started making you stupid.”

  “What forbidden subject?”

  “If I remind you, it’ll just set you off again,” said Issib.

  “When did I get stupid?”

  “Trust me. You got very stupid. Trying to change the subject without even realizing it. Normally you’re extremely insightful, Nafai. Very bright. You get things. But this time up in the library you just stood there like an idiot, with the truth staring you in the face, and you didn’t recognize it. When I reminded you, when I pushed, you got claustrophobic, right? Hard to breathe, had to get out of the room. I followed you, I pushed again, and here we are.”

  Nafai tried to think back over what had happened. Issib was right about the order of events. Only Nafai hadn’t connected his need to get out of the house with anything Issib said. In fact, he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was that Issib had been talking about. “You pushed?”

  “I know,” said Issib. “I felt it, too, when I first started getting on the track of this a couple of years ago. I was playing around with lost words, just like that dancing bear thing. Making lists. I had a long list of terms like that, with definitions and explanations after each one, along with my best guess about what each lost word meant. And then one day I was looking at a list that I thought was complete and I realized that there were a couple of dozen words that had no meanings at all. That’s stupid, I thought. That’s ruining my list. So I deleted all those words.”

  “Deleted them?” Nafai was appalled. “Instead of researching them?”

  “See how stupid it can make you?” said Issib. “And the moment I finished deleting them, it came to me—what am I doing! So I reached for the undelete command, but instead of pushing those keys, I reflexively gave the kill command, completely wiping out the delete buffer, and then I saved the file right over the old one.”

  “That’s too complicated to be clumsiness,” said Nafai.

  “Exactly. I knew that deleting them was a mistake, and yet instead of undoing that mistake and bringing the words back, I killed them, wiped them out of the system.”

  “And you think the Oversoul did that to you?”

  “Nafai, haven’t you ever wondered what the Oversoul is? What it does?”

  “Sure.”

  “Me too. And now I know.”

  “Because of those words?”

  “I haven’t got them all back, but I retraced as much of my research as I could and I got a list of eight words. You have no idea how hard it was, because now I was sensitized to them. Before, I must have simply overlooked them, gotten stupid when I saw them—the way Father did when he was getting wrong ideas about the Oversoul’s vision. That’s how they got on my first list, but without definitions—I just got stupid whenever I thought of them. But now when I saw them I’d get that claustrophobic feeling. I needed air. I had to get out of the library. But I forced myself to go inside. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I forced myself to stay and think about the unthinkable. To hold concepts in my mind that the Oversoul doesn’t want us to remember. Concepts that once were so common that every language in the world has words for them. Ancient words. Lost words.”

  “The Oversoul is hiding things from us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I tell you, Nafai, you’ll take off again.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “You will,” said Issib. “Do you think I don’t know? Do you think I haven’t had my own struggle this past year? So you can imagine my surprise when last night Elemak sits there in the kitchen and explains to us about one of the forbidden things. War wagons.”

  “Forbidden? How could it be forbidden, it isn’t even ancient.”

  “See? You’ve forgotten already. The word kolesnisha.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s right. No, I remember that.”

  “But you didn’t till I said it.”

  That’s right, thought Nafai. A memory lapse.

  “Last night you and Elemak were sitting there talking about war wagons, even though it took me months to be able to study the word kolesnisha without gasping the whole time.”

  “But we didn’t say kolesnisha.”

  “What I’m telling you, Nafai, is that the Oversoul is breaking down.”

  “That’s an old theory.”

  “But it’s a true one,” said Issib. “The Oversoul has certain concepts that it is protecting, that it refuses to let human beings think about. Only in the past few years the Wetheads have suddenly become able to think about one of them. And so have the Potoku. And so have we. And last night, hearing Elemak talk about it, I felt not one twinge of the panic.”

  “But it still made me forget the word. Kolesnisha.”

  “A lingering residual effect. You remembered it this time, right? Nafai, the Oversoul has given up on keeping us away from the war wagon concept. After millions of years, it isn’t trying anymore.”

  “What else?” asked Nafai. “What are the other concepts?”

  “It hasn’t given up on those yet. And you seem to be really sensitive to the Oversoul, Nyef. I don’t know if I can tell you, or if you’d be able to remember for five minutes even if I did.”

  “You mean I can know that the Oversoul is keeping us from knowing things, only I can’t know which things because the Oversoul is still keeping me from knowing them.”

  “Right.”

  “Then why doesn’t the Oversoul stop people from thinking about murder? Why doesn’t the Oversoul stop people from thinking about war, and rape, and stealing? If it can do this to me, why doesn’t it do something useful?”

  Issib shook his head. “It doesn’t seem right. But I’ve been thinking about it—I’ve had a year, remember—and here’s the best thing I’ve come up with. The Oversoul doesn’t want to stop us from being human. Including all the rotten things we do to each other. It’s just trying to hold down the scale of our rottenness. All the things that are forbidden—how can I tell you this without setting you off?—if we still had the machines that the forbidden words refer to, it would make it so that anything we did would reach farther, and each weapon would cause more damage, and everything would happen faster.”

  “Time would speed up?”

  “No,” said Issib. He was obviously choosing his words carefully. “What if . . . what if the Gorayni could bring an army of five thousand men from Yabrev to Basilica in one day.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “But if they could?”

  “We’d be helpless, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we’d have no time to get an army together.”

  “So if we knew other nations could do that, we’d have to keep an army all the time, wouldn’t we, just in case somebody suddenly attacked.”

  “I guess.”

  “So then, knowing that, suppose the Gorayni found a way to get, not five thousand, but fifty thousand soldiers here, and not in a day, but in six hours.”

  “Impossible.”

  “What if I tell you that it’s been done?”

  “Whoever could do that would rule the whole world.”

  “Exactly, Nyef, unless everybody else could do it, too. But what kind of world would that be? It would be as if the world had turned small, and everybody was right next door to everybody else. A cruel, bullying, domineering nation like the Gorayni could put their armies on anybody’s doorstep. So all other nations of the world would have to band together to stop them. And instead of a few thousand people dying, a million, ten million people might die in a war.”

  “So that’s why the Oversoul keeps us from thinking about . . . quick ways . . . to get lots of soldiers from one place to another.”

  “That was hard to say, wasn’t it?”

  “I kept . . . my mind kept wandering.”

  “It’s a hard concept to keep in your mind, and you aren’t even thinking about anything specific.”

  “I hate this,” said Nafai. “You can’t even tell me how anybody could do a trick like that. I can hardly even hold the concept in my mind as it is. I hate this.”

  “I don’t think the Oversoul is used to having anybody notice. I think that the very fact that you’re able to think about the concept of unthinkable concepts means that the Oversoul is losing control.”

  “Issya, I’ve never felt so helpless and stupid in my life.”

  “And it isn’t just wars and armies,” said Issib. “Remember the stories of Klati?”

  “The slaughter man?”

  “Climbing in through women’s windows in the night and gutting them like cattle in the butcher’s shop.”

  “Why couldn’t the Oversoul have made him get stupid when he thought of doing that?”

  “Because the Oversoul’s job isn’t to make us perfect,” said Issib. “But imagine if Klati had been able to get on a—been able to travel very quickly and get to another city in six hours.”

  “They would have known he was a stranger and watched him so closely that he couldn’t have done a thing.”

  “But you don’t understand—thousands, millions of people every day are doing the same thing—”

  “Butchering women?”

  “Flying from one place to another.”

  “This is too crazy to think about!” shouted Nafai. He bounded to his feet and moved toward the house.

  “Come back,” cried Issib. “You don’t really think that, you’re being made to think it!”

  Nafai leaned against one of the pillars of the front porch. Issib was right. He had been fine, and then suddenly Issib said whatever it was that he said and suddenly Nafai had to leave, had to get away and now here he was, panting, leaning up against the pillar, his heart pounding so hard that somebody else could probably hear it from a meter away. Could this really be the Oversoul, making him so stupid and fearful? If it was, then the Oversoul was his enemy. And Nafai refused to surrender. He could think about things whether the Oversoul liked it or not. He could think about the thing that Issib had said, and he could do it without running away.

  In his mind Nafai retraced the last few moments of his conversation with Issib. About Klati. Going from city to city in a few hours. Other cities would notice him, of course—but then Issib said what if thousands of people . . . were . . . flying.

  The picture that came into Nafai’s mind was ludicrous. To imagine people in the air, like birds, soaring, swooping. He should laugh—but instead, thinking of it made his throat feel tight. His head felt tight, constrained. A sharp pain grew out of his neck and up into the back of his head. But he could think of it. People flying. And from there he could finish Issib’s thought. People flying from city to city, thousands of them, so that the authorities in each city had no way of keeping track of one person.

  “Klati could have killed once in each city and no one would ever have found him,” said Nafai.

  Issib was beside him again, his arm resting oh-so-lightly across Nafai’s shoulder as he leaned against the pillar. “Yes,” said Issib.

  “But what would it mean to be a citizen of a place?” asked Nafai. “If a thousand people . . . flew here . . . to Basilica . . . today.”

  “It’s all right,” said Issib. “You don’t have to say it.”

  “Yes I do,” said Nafai. “I can think anything. It can’t stop me.”

  “I was just trying to explain—that the Oversoul doesn’t stop the evil in the world—it just stops it from getting out of hand. It keeps the damage local. But the good things—think about it, Nafai—we give our art and music and stories to the Oversoul, and it offers them to every other nation. The good things do spread. So it does make the world a better place.”

  “No,” said Nafai. “In some ways better, yes, but how can it help but be a good thing to live in a world where people . . . where we could . . . fly.”

  The word almost choked him, but he said it, and even though he could hardly bear to stay in the same place, the air felt so close and unbreathable, nevertheless he stayed.

  “You’re good,” said Issib. “I’m impressed.”

  But Nafai didn’t feel impressive. He felt sick and angry and betrayed. “How does the Oversoul have the right,” he said. “To take this all away from us.”

  “What, armies appearing at our gates without warning? I’m glad enough not to have that.”

  Nafai shook his head. “It’s deciding what I can think.”

  “Nyef, I know the feeling, I went through all this months ago, and I know, it makes you so angry and frightened. But I also know that you can overcome it. And yesterday, when Mother talked about her vision. Of a planet burning. There’s a word for—well, you couldn’t hear it now, I know that—but the Oversoul has been keeping us from that. For thirty or forty million years—don’t you realize that this is a long time? More history than we can imagine. It’s all stored away somewhere, but the most we can hold onto, the most that we can get into our minds is the most skeletal sort of plan of what’s happened in the world for the last ten million years or so—and it takes years and years of study to comprehend even that much. There are kingdoms and languages we’ve never heard of even in the last million years, and yet nothing is really lost. When I went searching in the library, I was able to find references to works in other libraries and trace my way back until I read a crude translation from a book written thirty-two million years ago and do you know what it said? Even then the writer was saying that history was now too long, too full for the human mind to comprehend it. That if all of human history were compressed into a single thousand-page volume, the whole story of humankind on Earth would be only a single page. And that was thirty-two million years ago.”

  “So we’ve been here a long time.”

  “If I take that writer’s arithmetic literally, that would mean that human history on Earth lasted only eight thousand years before the planet . . . burned.”

  Nafai understood. The Oversoul had kept human beings from expanding the scale of their destructiveness, and so humanity had lasted five thousand times longer on the planet Harmony than it did on Earth.

  “So why didn’t the Oversoul keep Earth from being destroyed?”

  “I don’t know,” said Issib. “I have a guess.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I don’t know if you’ll be allowed to think about it.”

  “Give me a try.”

  “The Oversoul wasn’t made until people got to Harmony. It has the same meaning in every language, you know—the name of the planet. Sklad. Endrakt. Soglassye. Maybe when they got here, with Earth in ashes behind them, they decided never to let it happen again. Maybe that’s when the Oversoul was put in place—to stop us from ever having such terrible power.”

  “Then the Oversoul would be—an artifact.”

  “Yes,” said Issib. “This isn’t hard for you to think about?”

  “No,” said Nafai. “Easy. It’s not that uncommon a thought. People have talked about the Oversoul as a machine before.”

  “It was hard for me,” said Issib. “But maybe because I came to the idea another way. Through a couple of unthinkable paths. Genetic alteration of the human brain so it could receive and transmit thoughts from communications satellites orbiting the planet.”

  Nafai heard the words, but they meant nothing to him.

  “You didn’t understand that, did you,” said Issib.

  “No,” said Nafai.

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Issya, what is the Oversoul doing to us now?”

  “That’s what I’ve been working on. Trying to look through the forbidden words, find the pattern, find out what it means to be giving Father this vision of a world on fire. And Mother. And the dream of blood and ashes that Luet was given.”

  “It means that we’re puppets.”

  “No, Nafai. Don’t talk yourself into hating the Oversoul about this. That does no good at all—I know that now. We have to understand it. What it’s doing. Because the world really is in danger, if the Oversoul’s control is breaking down. And it is. It’s given up on war wagons—what will it give up on next? What empire will be the next to get out of hand? Which one will discover—that word you asked about—puscani prah. It’s a powder that when you put flame to it, it blows up. Pops like a balloon, only with thousands of times more force. Enough to make a wall fall down. Enough to kill people.”