“Sir,” said the soldier. “We have made an interesting arrest on the street in front of Lady Rasa’s house.”

  Moozh looked up from the map on the table and waited for the rest of the message.

  “Lady Rasa’s youngest son. The one who killed Gaballufix.”

  “He escaped into the desert,” said Moozh. “Are you sure it’s not an imposter?”

  “Quite possible,” said the soldier. “But he did walk out of Rasa’s house and straight up to the sergeant in charge and announce who he was and that he needed to speak to you at once about matters that would determine your future and the future of Basilica.”

  “Ah,” said Moozh.

  “So he’s either the boy with balls of brass who cut off Gaballufix’s head and wore his clothes out of the city, or he’s a madman with a deathwish.”

  “Or both,” said Moozh. “Bring him to me, and be prepared with an escort of four soldiers to take him directly back to Lady Rasa’s house afterward. If I slap his face when you open the door to take him back, then you will kill him on Lady Rasa’s front porch. If I smile at him, then you will treat him with courtesy and honor. Otherwise, he is under arrest and will not be permitted to leave the house again.”

  The soldier left the door open behind him. Moozh sat back in his chair and waited. Interesting, he thought, that I don’t have to search for the key players in this city’s bloody games. They all come to me, one by one. Nafai was supposed to be safely in the desert, beyond my reach—but he was in Lady Rasa’s house all the time. What other surprises have we pent up in her house? The other sons? How had Bitanke summed them up . . . Elemak, the sharp and dangerous caravanner; Mebbekew, the walking penis; Issib, the brilliant cripple. Or why not Wetchik, the visionary plantseller himself? They might all be waiting within Lady Rasa’s walls for Moozh to decide how to use them.

  Was it possible—barely possible—that God really had decided to favor Moozh’s cause? That instead of opposing him, God might now be aiding Moozh, bringing into his hands every tool he needed to accomplish his purpose?

  I am certainly not the incarnation of anything but myself, thought Moozh; I have no desire to play at holiness, the way the Imperator does. But if God is willing at long last to let me have some help in my cause, I will not refuse it. Perhaps in God’s heart the hour of the Sotchitsiya has arrived.

  Nafai was afraid, but also he was not afraid. It was the strangest feeling. As if there was a terrified animal inside him, aghast that he was walking into a place where death was only a word away, and yet Nafai himself, that part of him that was himself and not the animal, was simply fascinated to find out what he might say, and whether he would meet Moozh, and what would happen next. It was not that he was unaware of the perpetual immanence of death among the Gorayni; rather he had simply decided, at some deep level of his mind, that personal survival was an irrelevant issue.

  The soldiers had seemed, if anything, more perplexed than alarmed at his accosting them on the street with the words, “Take me to the general. I’m Wetchik’s son Nafai, and I killed Gaballufix.” With those words he put his very life into this conversation, since Moozh now had witnesses of his confession of a crime that could lead to his execution; Moozh wouldn’t even have to fabricate a pretext to have him killed if he wanted to.

  Gaballufix’s house had not changed, and yet it was entirely changed. None of the wall hangings, none of the furniture had been altered. All the lazy opulence was still intact, the plushness, the overdecoration in detail, the bold colors. And yet instead of being overpowering, the effect of all this ostentation was rather pathetic, for the simple discipline and brisk, unhesitating obedience of the Gorayni soldiers had the effect of diminishing everything around them. Gaballufix had chosen these furnishings to intimidate his visitors, to overawe them; now they looked weak, effete, as if the person who bought them had been frightened that people might see how weak his soul was, and so he had to hide it behind this barricade of bright colors and gold trim.

  Real power, Nafai realized, does not demonstrate itself in anything that can be purchased for mere money. Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will—will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth, as Rashgallivak had found; but real power grows stronger the more closely you look at it, even when it resides only in a single person, without armies, without servants, without friends, but with an indomitable will.

  Such a man waited for him, sitting at a table behind an open door. Nafai knew this room. It was here that he and his brothers had faced Gaballufix, here that Nafai had blurted out some word or other that destroyed Elemak’s delicate negotiations for the Index. Not that Gaballufix ever intended anything but to cheat them. The fact remained that Nafai had spoken carelessly, not realizing that Elemak, the sharp businessman, was holding back key information.

  For a moment Nafai resolved inside himself to be more careful now, to hold back information as Elemak would have done, to be canny in this conversation.

  Then General Moozh looked up and Nafai looked into his eyes and saw a deep well of rage and suffering and pride and, at the bottom of that well, a fierce intelligence that would see through all sham.

  Is this what Moozh really is? Have I seen him true?

  And in his heart, the Oversoul whispered, I have shown him to you as he truly is.

  Then I can’t lie to this man, thought Nafai. Which is just as well, because I’m not good at lying. I don’t have the skill for it. I can’t maintain the deep self-deception that successful lying requires. The truth keeps rising to the surface in my mind, and so I confess myself in every word and glance and gesture.

  Besides, I didn’t come here to play some game, to try my wits in some contest with General Vozmuzhalnoy Vozmozhno. I came here to give him the chance to join with us in our journey back to Earth. How could he do that if I tell him anything less than the truth?

  “Nafai,” said Moozh. “Please sit down.”

  Nafai sat down. He noticed that a map was spread out on the table before the general. The Western Shore. Somewhere on that map, deep in the southwest corner, was the stream where Father and Issib and Zdorab waited in their tents, listening to a troop of baboons hooting and barking at each other. Is the Oversoul showing Father what I’m doing now? Does Issib have the Index, and is he asking where I am?

  “I assume that you didn’t turn yourself in because your conscience overwhelmed you and you wanted to be put on trial for the murder of Gaballufix in order to expunge your guilt.”

  “No sir,” said Nafai. “I was married last night. I have no desire to be imprisoned or tried or killed.”

  “Married last night? And out on the street confessing felonies before dawn? My boy, I fear you have not married well, if your wife can’t hold you for even one night.”

  “I came because of a dream,” said Nafai.

  “Ah— your dream, or your bride’s?”

  “Your dream, sir.”

  Moozh waited, expressionless.

  “I believe you dreamed once of a man with a hairy flying creature on his shoulder, and a giant rat clinging to his leg, and men and rats and angels came and worshipped them, all three of them, touching them with . . .”

  But Nafai did not go on, for Moozh had risen to his feet and was boring into him with those dangerous, agonizing eyes. “I told this to Plod, and he reported it to the intercessor, and so it was known,” said Moozh. “And the fact that you know it tells me that you have been in contact with someone from the Imperator’s court. So stop this pretense and tell me the truth!”

  “Sir, I don’t know who Plod or the intercessor might be, and your dream wasn’t told to me by anyone from the Imperator’s court. I heard it from the Oversoul. Do you think the Oversoul doesn’t know your dreams?”

  Moozh sat back down, but his whole manner had changed. The certainty, the easy confidence was gone.

  “Are you the form that God has taken now? Are you the incarnation?”

  “Me?” asked Nafai. “You see what I am—I’m a fourteen-year-old boy. Maybe a little big for my age.”

  “A little young to be married.”

  “But not too young to have spoken to the Oversoul.”

  “Many in this city make a career of speaking to the Oversoul. You, however, God apparently answers.”

  “There’s nothing mystical about it, sir. The Oversoul is a computer—a powerful one, a self-renewing one. Our ancestors set it in place forty million years ago, when they first reached the planet Harmony as refugees from the destruction of Earth. They genetically altered themselves and all their children—to us, all these generations later—to be responsive, at the deepest levels in the brain, to impulses from the Oversoul. Then they programmed the computer to block us from any train of thought, any plan of action that would lead to high technology or rapid communications or fast transportation, so that the world would remain a vast and unknowable place to us, and wars would remain a local affair.”

  “Until me,” said Moozh.

  “Your conquests have indeed ranged far beyond the area that the Oversoul would normally allow.”

  “Because I am not a slave to God,” said Moozh. “Whatever power God—or, if you’re right, this computer—whatever power it might have over other men is weaker in me, and I have withstood it and overwhelmed it. I am here today because I am too strong for God.”

  “Yes, he told us that you thought so,” said Nafai. “But actually the influence of the Oversoul is even stronger in you than in most people. Probably about as strong as it is in me. If it was appropriate, if you opened yourself to its voice, the Oversoul could talk to you and you wouldn’t need me to tell you what I’m here to tell you about.”

  “If the Oversoul told you that it is stronger in me than in most people, then your computer is a liar,” said Moozh.

  “You have to understand—the Oversoul isn’t really concerned with individual people’s lives, except insofar as it’s been running some kind of breeding program to try to create people like me—and you, of course. I didn’t like it when I learned about it, but it’s the reason I’m alive, or at least the reason my parents were brought together. The Oversoul manipulates people. That’s its job. It has manipulated you almost constantly.”

  “I’m aware that it has tried. I call it God, you call it the Oversoul, but it has not controlled me.”

  “As soon as it became aware that you intended to resist it, it simply turned things backward,” said Nafai. “Whatever it wanted you to do, it forbade you to do. Then it made sure you remembered to do it and you obeyed almost perfectly.”

  “A lie,” whispered Moozh.

  It made Nafai afraid, to see how emotions were seizing this man. The general clearly was not accustomed to feelings he could not control; Nafai wondered if perhaps he ought to let him calm down before proceeding. “Are you all right?” Nafai asked.

  “Go on,” said Moozh acidly. “I can hear anything that dead men say.”

  That was such a weak thing to say that Nafai was disgusted. “Oh, am I supposed to change my story because you threaten me with death?” he asked. “If I was afraid to die, do you think I would have come here?”

  Nafai could see a change come over Moozh. As if he visibly reined himself in. “I apologize,” said Moozh. “For a moment I behaved like the kind of man I most despise. Blustering a threat in order to change the message of a messenger who believes, at least, that he is telling me the truth. But I can assure you, whatever I might feel, if you die today it will not be because of any words you might say. Please go on.”

  “You must understand,” said Nafai, “if the Oversoul really wants you to forget something, you will forget it. My brother Issib and I thought we were very clever, forcing our way through its barriers. But we didn’t really force it. We simply became more trouble than it was worth to resist us. The Oversoul would rather have us go along with its plans knowingly than to have to control us and manipulate us. That’s why I’m here. Because my wife’s sister saw in a dream how strong your link with the Oversoul is, and how you waste yourself in a vain effort to resist. I came to tell you that the only way to break free of its control is to embrace its plan.”

  “The way to win is to surrender?” Moozh asked wryly.

  “The way to be free is to stop resisting and start talking,” said Nafai. “The Oversoul is the servant of humanity, not its master. It can be persuaded. It will listen. Sometimes it needs our help. General, we need you, if you’ll only come with us.”

  “Come with you?”

  “My father was called out to the desert as the first step in a great journey.”

  “Your father was driven out onto the desert by the machinations of Gaballufix. I have spoken with Rashgallivak, and I can’t be deceived.”

  “Do you honestly believe that speaking with Rashgallivak is a way to ensure that you won’t be deceived?”

  “I would know if he lied to me.”

  “But what if he believed what he told you, and yet it still wasn’t true?”

  Moozh waited, unspeaking.

  “I tell you that, regardless of the immediate impetus that caused our departure at a certain hour of a certain day, it was the Oversoul’s purpose to get Father and me and my brothers out into the desert, as the first step to a journey.”

  “And yet here you are in the city.”

  “I told you,” said Nafai. “I was married last night. So were my brothers.”

  “Elemak and Mebbekew and Issib.”

  Nafai was surprised and a little frightened that Moozh knew so much about them. But he had set out to tell the truth, and tell it he would. “Issib is with Father. He wanted to come. I wanted him to come. But Elemak wouldn’t have it, and Father went along. We came for wives. And for Father’s wife. When we arrived, Mother laughed and said that she would never go out onto the desert, no matter what mad project Wetchik had in mind. But then you put her under arrest and spread those rumors about her. In effect, you cut her off from Basilica, and now she understands that there’s nothing for her here and so she, too, will go with us into the desert.”

  “You’re saying that what I did was all part of the Oversoul’s plan to get your mother to join her husband in a tent?”

  “I’m saying that your purposes were bent to serve the Oversoul’s plans. They always will be, General. They always have been.”

  “But what if I refuse to allow your mother to leave her house? What if I keep you and your brothers and your wives under arrest here? What if I send soldiers to stop Shedemei from gathering up seeds and embryos for your journey?”

  Nafai was stunned. He knew about Shedemei? Impossible—she would never have told anyone. What was this Moozh capable of, if he could come into a strange city and be so aware of things so quickly that he could realize that Shedemei’s gathering of seeds had something to do with Wetchik’s exile?

  “You see,” said Moozh. “The Oversoul does not have power where I rule.”

  “You can keep us under arrest,” said Nafai. “But when the Oversoul determines that it’s time for us to go, you will find that you have a compelling reason to let us go, and so you’ll let us go.”

  “If the Oversoul wants you to go, my boy, you may be sure that you will not go.”

  “You don’t understand. I haven’t told you the most important part. Whatever this war is that you think you’re having with whatever version of the Oversoul it is that you call God, what matters is that dream you had. Of the flying beasts, and the giant rats.”

  Moozh waited, but again Nafai could see that he was deeply disturbed.

  “The Oversoul didn’t send that dream. The Oversoul didn’t understand it.”

  “So. Then it was a meaningless dream, a common sleeping dream.”

  “Not at all. Because my wife also dreamed of those same creatures, and so did her sister. All three of you, and these were not common dreams. They felt important to all of you. You knew that they had a meaning. Yet they didn’t come from the Oversoul.”

  Again Moozh waited.

  “It has been forty million years since human beings abandoned the Earth they had almost completely destroyed,” said Nafai. “There has been time enough for Earth to heal itself. For there to be life there again. For there to be a place for humankind. Many species were lost—that’s why Shedemei is gathering seeds and embryos for our journey. We are the ones that have the gift of speaking easily with the Oversoul. We are the ones who have been gathered together, here in Basilica, this day, this hour, so that we can go forth on a journey that will lead us back to Earth.”

  “Apart from the fact that Earth, if it exists, is a planet orbiting a faraway star, to which even birds can’t fly,” said Moozh, “you have still said nothing about what this journey might have to do with my dream.”

  “We don’t know this,” said Nafai. “We only guess it, but the Oversoul also thinks it might be true. Somehow the Keeper of Earth is calling us. Across all the lightyears between us and Earth, it has reached out to us and it’s calling us back. For all we know, it even altered the programming of the Oversoul itself, telling it to gather us together. The Oversoul thought it knew why it was doing this, but it only recently learned the real reason. Just as you are only now learning the real reason for everything you’ve done in your life.”

  “A message in a dream, and it comes from someone thousands of lightyears away from here? Then the dream must have been sent thirty generations before I was born. Don’t make me laugh, Nafai. You’re far too bright to believe this. Doesn’t it occur to you that maybe the Oversoul is manipulating you?”

  Nafai considered this. “The Oversoul doesn’t lie to me,” he said.

  “Yet you say that it has lied to me all along. So we can’t pretend that the Oversoul is rigidly committed to truthfulness, can we?”

  “But it doesn’t lie to me.”

  “How do you know?” asked Moozh.

  “Because what it tells me . . . feels right.”

  “If it can make me forget things—and it can, it’s happened so many times that...” His voice petered out as Moozh apparently decided not to delve into those memories. “If it can do that, why can’t it also make you, as you say, ’feel right’?”