"Rock is alive," he said, "from the skin to his deepest heart. Here on the surface, he holds us up. Some of his skin he sheds and peels as we do, in sand and gravel and boulders. But it's still part of him. When men cut the rock, it no longer falls where it should; they take the rock and make false mountains of it, and that rock is dead. It's no longer part of him. It's all lost to him until, over the centuries, he can break it back into sand. He could kill you all, by sneezing," said Helmut angrily, "but he doesn't. Because he respects even evil life. Even civilized life."

Helmut did not sound like a child.

"But he will kill," said Helmut, "if the need is great and the time is right. When the civilized men of Sill decided they must own more of this desert, they came with armies to kill us. Many women lived there, the peaceful sleepers, and the men of Sill killed them. So we held a council, Lanik, and we spoke to the rock, and he agreed with us that this was a time for justice."

He stopped.

"And?" I prodded.

"And he swallowed them."

I imagined the horsemen of Sill out in the desert sand, suddenly finding the grains heaving and sifting under them, their horses sinking, their footing impossible, the sand closing over their heads as they screamed and choked and swallowed sand and were swallowed by sand until their bones were rubbed clean.

"Sill has never sent an army into the desert again," said Helmut. "That was when we knew we were savages. Civilized men don't value rocks above men. But then, savages don't kill sleeping womem. Do they?"

"Is this true?" I asked.

"Did you climb this cliff?"

I lay back and stared into the blue sky, where not a cloud passed. "How? Why do you know how to communicate with the rock--" I couldn't finish. It sounded stupid.

"You're ashamed," he said.

"Damn right," I answered.

"You're a child. But the rock is easiest to speak to. It's simple. It's large. So large that you can grasp it easily. Our children learned this first."

"Learned?"

"When we had children. Now that no one dies, why should we add to our numbers? We have no need. And some of us have chosen to be children forever, so that the older ones can be amused, and because we would rather play than think deep thoughts."

If someone had told me this while I was safely enwombed in the castle at Mueller, I would have laughed. I would have sneered. I would have hired the man who told me as a clown. But I had climbed the cliff. I had drunk the water. My body had been healed.

"Teach me, Helmut," I said. "I want to speak to the rock."

"Carbon is subtle," he said. "It holds to everything, and builds strange chains. It's softer than the rock, but it can make small lives, where rock can only live in a huge ball that spins around the sun. It's hard to speak to the carbon. It takes many voices to be heard by stone so subtle."

"But you spoke to me?"

"We found the place that had gone wrong. It was on your longest chains, and we taught them how to be differently, so that they only heal what has been lost, and not what is still whole. We thought at first that you were like us, that you could speak to the carbon, because your chains were different. We didn't have this healing in our bodies-- we had to heal every scratch, one at a time. We liked what you had done, and so we changed each other, too, and now we all heal like you do."

So much for the secret of Mueller, I thought. "Why hadn't you done it before?"

"We don't do very much to the carbon chains. They're subtle. They can cause problems. There are only a few changes we make. But to pay you for the healing change you taught to us, we gave you the life change."

It was near dark, and we still perched on the pillar of rock; the cliff was our only exit to the sand below. "What's the life change?" I asked.

"Civilized men kill because they have to, to live. To get energy, they have to murder plants or animals. With killing so common, they have no respect for life at all."

"And what do you do?"

"We're savages. We take our energy from the same source as the plants." And he pointed to where the sky was still light from the sun, which had dipped below the mountains to the west.

"From the sun," I said.

"That's why you aren't hungry," he said.

He talked on into the darkness, and I understood what Schwartz had achieved. A geologist, in a geologist's paradise, and her children after her, with a profound respect for rock, an ever deeper understanding of rock until they awakened, not the earth itself, but that part of their minds which could grasp the structures and change them. The language was mystical, but not a mystery. They understood even DNA as the experts of Mueller couldn't grasp it.

Yet the price of their knowledge was savagery. They could use no tools, make no homes, write no language. If they all died and archaeologists came to this desert, they would find nothing but corpses, and marvel that animals with human shape could be so utterly unintelligent.

"How can I learn to speak to the rock?" I asked.

Helmut's voice came from the darkness. "You must leap from this cliff in the darkness."

He was serious. But that was impossible. "I'll be killed."

"That's been known to happen," Helmut said. Was he amused? I couldn't see his face. "But you must do it soon. Dissent rises in a few minutes."

"Why will killing myself help me talk to the rock?" I tried to make a joke of it. Helmut was too serious.

"You've done killing, Lanik." he said. "You must hold yourself for judgment to see if you were innocent of malice. If the sand receives you gently, the rock will make himself known to you."

"But--" I said. I stopped because I couldn't say that I was afraid. Why should I be afraid, when I wasn't sure, even now, if I fully believed all this?

No. I knew that I was afraid because I did believe, and I was unsure whether I was innocent of malice. I had relished the prospect of warfare, and while I had never killed a man in battle back in Mueller, I had killed one man on the Singer ship, two soldiers of Mueller before I entered Ku Kuei, two soldiers of Allison as I left; I had surely killed others in escaping from Nkumai. Those killings had been forced on me, to defend myself, but hadn't I relished the feeling of triumph and power afterward? Was that different from loving to kill? Beyond that, I had approved of my father's strategies of war and longed to be the Mueller and better his achievements. Wasn't that longing for domination still in my heart? I was a truly civilized man. I couldn't believe there was any chance that the sand would, as Helmut put it, accept me.

"I should tell you," said Helmut, "that there is no other way down from this tower of rock."

"What about the handholds?"

"They're already gone. You'll jump, or you'll stay here forever. And you have to jump now, in the darkness, before Dissent rises, or your jump will surely be your death."

"You don't leave much to chance, do you, little boy?" I was angry-- I had been trapped.

"I'm a boy in spirit, Lanik, but I was old when your father's grandfather first learned not to piss in the family drinking water. And I tell you that I believe that if you jump, the sand might well receive you. But you have to have enough trust in yourself to leap. If you know that you're a murderer, you might as well stay here. You won't die if you stay here, you know. You won't starve to death. You'll just be alone here, forever."

I stood. I knew that the edge of the tower was only a few meters away in any direction. But I couldn't take the step.

"Lanik," Helmut whispered, and his voice was young and innocent again. "Lanik, I believe the sand will hold you." A cool, gentle hand grasped the inside of my thigh as I stood, trembling, because of what I had to do. "I want the sand to hold you."