Again he closed his eyes. “Not to pull them from a burning building. That never occurred to me until later, as I was walking the rest of the way into the city. At the moment I wanted to shout out that the city was burning, that we had to—”

  “What?”

  “I was going to say, we had to get out of the city. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say at first. When it started, I felt like I had to come to the city and tell everybody that there was a fire coming.”

  “And they had to get out?”

  “I guess,” said Father. “Of course, what else?”

  Luet said nothing, but her gaze never left his face.

  “No,” Father said. “No, that wasn’t it.” Father sounded surprised. “I wasn’t going to warn them to get out.”

  Luet leaned forward, looking somehow more intense, not so—analytical. “Sir, just a moment ago, when you were saying that you had wanted to warn them to get out of the city—”

  “But that wasn’t what I was going to do.”

  “But when you thought for a moment that—when you assumed that you were going to tell them to get out of the city—what did that feel like? When you told us that, why did you know that it was wrong?”

  “I don’t know. It just felt . . . wrong.”

  “This is very important,” said Luet. “How does feeling wrong feel?”

  Again he closed his eyes. “I’m not used to thinking about how I think. And now I’m trying to remember how it felt when I thought I remembered something that I didn’t actually remember—”

  “Don’t talk,” said Luet.

  He fell silent.

  Nafai wanted to yell at somebody. What were they doing, listening to this ugly stupid little girl, letting her tell Father—the Wetchik himself, in case nobody remembered—to keep his mouth shut!

  But everybody else was so intense that Nafai kept his own mouth shut. Issib would be so proud of him for actually refraining from saying something that he had thought of.

  “What I felt,” said Father, “was nothing.” He nodded slowly. “Right after you asked the question and I answered it—. Of course, what else—then you sat there looking at me and I had nothing in my head at all.”

  “Stupid,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow. To Nafai’s relief, he was finally noticing how disrespectfully Luet was speaking to him.

  “You felt stupid,” she said. “And so you knew that what you’d just said was wrong.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I guess that’s it.”

  “What’s all this about?” said Issib. “Analyzing your analysis of analyses of a completely subjective hallucination?”

  Good work, Issya, said Nafai silently. You took the words right out of my mouth.

  “I mean, you can play these games all morning, but you’re just laying meanings on top of a meaningless experience. Dreams are nothing more than random firings of memories, which your brain then interprets so as to invent causal connections, which makes stories out of nothing.”

  Father looked at Issib for a long moment, then shook his head. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “Even though I was wide awake and I’ve never had a hallucination before, it was nothing more than a random firing of synapses in my brain.”

  Nafai knew, as Issib and Mother certainly knew, that Father was being ironic, that he was telling Issib that his vision of the fire on the rock was more than a meaningless night dream. But Luet didn’t know Father, so she thought he was backing away from mysticism and retreating into reality.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “It was a true vision, because it came to you the right way. The understanding came before the vision—that’s why I was asking those questions. The meaning is there and then your brain supplies the pictures that let you understand it. That’s the way the Oversoul talks to us.”

  “Talks to crazy people, you mean,” Nafai said.

  He regretted it immediately, but by then it was too late.

  “Crazy people like me?” said Father.

  “And I assure you that Luet is at least as sane as you are,” Mother added.

  Issib couldn’t pass up the chance to cast a verbal dart. “As sane as Nyef? Then she’s in deep trouble.”

  Father shut down Issib’s teasing immediately. “You were saying the same thing yourself only a minute ago.”

  “I wasn’t calling people crazy,” said Issib.

  “No, you didn’t have Nafai’s—what shall we call it?—pointed eloquence.”

  Nafai knew he could save himself now by shutting up and letting Issib deflect the heat. But he was committed to skepticism, and self-control wasn’t his strong suit. “This girl,” said Nafai. “Don’t you see how she was leading you on, Father? She asks you a question, but she doesn’t tell you beforehand what the answer will mean—so no matter what you answer, she can say, That’s it, it’s a true vision, definitely the Oversoul talking.”

  Father didn’t have an immediate answer. Nafai glanced at Luet, feeling triumphant, wanting to see her squirm. But she wasn’t squirming. She was looking at him very calmly. The intensity had drained out of her and now she was simply—calm. It bothered him, the steadiness of her gaze. “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

  “A fool,” she answered.

  Nafai jumped to his feet. “I don’t have to listen to you calling me a—”

  “Sit down!” roared Father.

  Nafai sat, seething.

  “She just listened to you calling her a fraud,” said Father. “I appreciate how both of my sons are doing exactly what I wanted you here to do—providing a skeptical audience for my story. You analyzed the process very cleverly and your version of things accounts for everything you know about it, just as neatly as Luet’s version does.”

  Nafai was ready to help him draw the correct conclusion. “Then the rule of simplicity requires you to—”

  “The rule of your father requires you to hold your tongue, Nafai. What you’re both forgetting is that there’s a fundamental difference between you and me.”

  Father leaned toward Nafai.

  “I saw the fire.”

  He leaned back again.

  “Luet didn’t tell me what to think or feel at the time. And her questions helped me remember—helped me remember—the way it really happened. Instead of the way I was already changing it to fit my preconceptions. She knew that it would be strange—in exactly the ways that it was strange. Of course, I can’t convince you.”

  “No,” said Nafai. “You can only convince yourself.”

  “In the end, Nafai, oneself is the only person anyone can convince.”

  The battle was lost if Father was already making up aphorisms. Nafai sat back to wait for it all to end. He took consolation from the fact that it had been, after all, merely a dream. It’s not as if it was going to change his life or anything.

  Father wasn’t done yet. “Do you know what I actually wanted to do, when I felt such urgency to get to the city? I wanted to warn people—to follow the old ways, to go back to the laws of the Oversoul, or this place would burn.”

  “What place?” asked Luet, her intensity back again.

  “This place. Basilica. The city. That’s what I saw burning.”

  Again Father fell silent, looking into her burning eyes.

  “Not the city,” he said at last. “The city was only the picture that my mind supplied, wasn’t it? Not the city. The whole world. All of Harmony, burning.”

  Rasa gasped. “Earth,” she whispered.

  “Oh, please,” Nafai said. So Mother was going to connect Father’s vision with that old story about the home planet that was burned by the Oversoul to punish humanity for whatever nastiness the current storyteller wanted to preach against. The all-purpose coercive myth: If you don’t do what I say—I mean, what the Oversoul says—then the whole world will burn.

  “I haven’t seen the fire itself,” said Luet, ignoring Nafai. “Maybe I’m not even seeing the same thing.”

  “What have you seen?” asked Father. Nafai cringed at how respectful he was being toward this girl.

  “I saw the Deep Lake of Basilica, crusted over with blood and ashes.”

  Nafai waited for her to finish. But she just sat there.

  “That’s it? That’s all?” Nafai stood up, preparing to walk out. “This is great, hearing the two of you compare visions. I saw a city on fire. Well, I saw a scum-covered lake.’

  Luet stood up and faced him. No, faced him down—which was ridiculous, since he was almost half a meter taller than her.

  “You’re only arguing against me,” she said hotly, “because you don’t want to believe what I told you about Eiadh.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Nafai.

  “You had a vision about Eiadh?” asked Rasa.

  “What does Eiadh have to do with Nyef?” asked Issib.

  Nafai hated her for mentioning it again, in front of his family. “You can make up whatever you want about other people, but you’d better leave me out of it.”

  “Enough,” said Father. “We’re done.”

  Rasa looked at him in surprise. “Are you dismissing me in my own house?”

  “I’m dismissing my sons.”

  “You have authority over your sons, of course.” Mother was smiling, but Nafai knew from her soft speech that she was seriously annoyed. “However, I see no one here in my house but my students.”

  Father nodded, accepting the rebuke, then stood to leave. “Then I’m dismissing myself—I may do that, I hope.”

  “You may always leave, my adored mate, as long as you promise to come back to me.”

  His answer was to kiss her cheek.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “What the Oversoul told me to do.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Warn people to return to the laws of the Oversoul or the world will burn.”

  Issib was appalled. “That’s crazy, Father!”

  “I’m tired of hearing that word from the lips of my sons.”

  “But—prophets of the Oversoul don’t say things like that. They’re like poets, except all their metaphors have some moral lesson or they celebrate the Oversoul or—”

  “Issya,” said Wetchik, “all my life I’ve listened to these so-called prophecies—and the psalms and the histories and the temple priests—and I’ve always thought, if this is all the Oversoul has to say, why should I bother to listen? Why should the Oversoul even bother speaking, if this is all that’s on his mind?”

  “Then why did you teach us to speak to the Oversoul?” asked Issib.

  “Because I believed in the ancient laws. And I did speak to the Oversoul myself, though more as a way of clarifying my own thoughts than because I actually thought that he was listening. Then last night—this morning—I had an experience that I never conceived of. I never wished for it. I didn’t even know what it was until now, these last few minutes, talking to Luet. Now I know—what it feels like to have the Oversoul’s voice inside you. Nothing like these poets and dreamers and deceivers, who write down whatever pops into their heads and then sell it as prophecy. What was in me was not myself, and Luet has shown me that she’s had the same voice inside her. It means that the Oversoul is real and alive.”

  “So maybe it’s real,” said Issib. “That doesn’t tell us what it is.”

  “It’s the guardian of the world,” said Wetchik. “He asked me to help. Told me to help. And I will.”

  “That’s all temple stuff,” said Issib. “You don’t know anything about it. You grow exotic plants.”

  Father dismissed Issib’s objections with a gesture. “Anything the Oversoul needs me to know, he’ll tell me.” Then he headed for the door into the house.

  Nafai followed him, only a few steps. “Father,” he said.

  Father waited.

  The trouble was, Nafai didn’t know what he was going to say. Only that he had to say it. That there was a very important question whose answer he had to have before Father left. He just didn’t know what the question was.

  “Father,” he said again.

  “Yes?”

  And because Nafai couldn’t think of the real question, the deep one, the important one, he asked the only question that came to mind. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Keep the old ways of the Oversoul,” said Father.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Or the world will burn.” And Father was gone.

  Nafai looked at the empty door for a while. It didn’t do anything, so he turned back to the others. They were all looking at him, as if they expected him to do something.

  “What!” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” said Mother. She arose from her seat in the shade of the kaplya tree. “We’ll all return to our work.”

  “That’s all?” said Issib. “Our father—your mate—has just told us that the Oversoul is speaking to him, and we’re supposed to go back to our studies?”

  “You really don’t understand, do you?” said Mother. “You’ve lived all these years as my sons, as my students, and you are still nothing more than the ordinary boys wandering the streets of Basilica hoping to find a willing woman and a bed for the night.”

  “What don’t we understand here?” asked Nafai. “Just because you women all take this witchgirl so seriously doesn’t mean that—”

  “I have been down into the water myself,” said Mother, her voice like metal. “You men can pretend to yourselves that the Oversoul is distracted or sleeping, or just a machine that collects our transmissions and sends them to libraries in distant cities. Whatever theory you happen to believe, it makes no difference to the truth. For I know, as most of the women in this city know, that the Oversoul is very much alive. At least as the keeper of the memories of this world, she is alive. We all receive those memories when we go into the water. Sometimes they seem random, sometimes we are given exactly the memory we needed. The Oversoul keeps the history of the world, as it was seen through other people’s eyes. Only a few of us—like Luet and Hushidh—are given wisdom away from the water, and even fewer are given visions of real things that haven’t happened yet. Since the great Izumina died, Luet is the only seer I know of in Basilica—so yes, we take her very, very seriously.”

  Women go down into the water and receive visions? This was the first time Nafai had ever heard a woman describe any part of the worship at the lake. He had always assumed that the women’s worship was like the men’s—physical, ascetic, painful, a dispassionate way of discharging emotion. Instead they were all mystics. What seemed like legends or madness to men was at the center of a woman’s life. Nafai felt as though he had discovered that women were of another species after all. The question was, which of them, men or women, were the humans? The rational but brutal men? Or the irrational but gentle women?

  “There’s only one thing rarer than a girl like Luet,” Mother was saying, “and that’s a man who hears the voice of the Oversoul. We know now that your father does hear—Luet confirmed that for me. I don’t know what the Oversoul wants, or why she spoke to your father, but I am wise enough to know that it matters.”

  As she passed Nafai, she reached up and caught his ear firmly, though not painfully, between her fingers. “As for the mythical burning of Earth, my dear boy, I’ve seen it myself. It happened. I can only guess how long ago—we estimate there’s been at least thirty million years of human history on this world we named Harmony. But I saw the missiles fly, the bombs explode, and the world erupt in flame. The smoke filled the sky and blocked the sun, and underneath that blanket of darkness the oceans froze and the world was covered in ice and only a few human beings survived, to rise up out of the blackness as the world died, carrying their hopes and their regrets and their genes to other planets, hoping to start again. They did. We’re here. Now the Oversoul has warned your father that our new start can lead to the same ending as before.”

  Nafai had seen Mother’s public face—playful, brilliant, analytical, gracious—and he had seen her family face—frank of speech yet always kind, quick to anger yet quicker to forgive. Always he had assumed that the way she was with the family was her true self, with nothing held back. Instead, behind the faces that he thought he knew, she had kept this secret all the time, her bitter vision of the end of Earth. “You never told us about this,” whispered Nafai.

  “I most certainly told you about it,” said Rasa. “It’s not my fault that when you heard it, you thought I was telling you a myth.” She let go of his ear and returned to the house.

  Issib floated past him, mumbling something about waking up one morning to find that you’ve been living in a madhouse all your life. Hushidh went past him also, not meeting his gaze; he could imagine the gossip that she would spread in his class all the rest of the day.

  He was alone with Luet.

  “I shouldn’t have spoken to you before,” she said.

  “And you shouldn’t speak to me again, either,” suggested Nafai.

  “Some people hear a lie when they’re told the truth. You’re so proud of your status as the son of Rasa and Wetchik, but obviously whatever genes you got from your parents, they weren’t the right ones.”

  “While I’m sure you got the finest your parents had to offer.”

  She looked at him with obvious contempt, and then she was gone.

  “What a wonderful day this is going to be,” he said—to no one, since he was alone. “My entire family hates me.” He thought for a moment. “I’m not even sure that I want them to like me.”

  For one dangerous moment, alone on the portico, he toyed with the idea of slipping past the screens and going to the edge, leaning out, and looking at the forbidden sight of the Valley of the Holy Women, casually referred to as the Rift Valley, and more crudely known as the Canyon of the Crones. I’ll see it and I bet I don’t even get struck blind.

  But he didn’t do it, even though he stood there thinking about it for a long time. It seemed that every time he was about to take a step toward the edge, his mind suddenly wandered and he hesitated, confused, forgetting for a moment what it was he wanted to do. Finally he lost interest and went back inside the house.

  He should have gone back to class—it’s what he expected to do when he went inside. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he wandered to the front door and out onto the porch, into the streets of Basilica. Mother would probably be furious at him but that was too bad.