"We have seen one of the cities of the heroes," said Luet.

"And the stories were true," said Obring. "Which leads me to wonder whether the city of Skudnooy might be around here somewhere, too."

"The Index says not," said Issib. "I asked."

"Too bad," said Obring. "All that gold!"

"Oh, right," said Elemak. "And where would you sell it? Or did you think you'd eat it? Or wear it?"

"Oh, I'm not allowed even to dream of tremendous wealth, is that it?" said Obring defiantly. "Only practical dreams allowed?"

Elemak shrugged and let the matter drop.

After leaving the vicinity of Raspyatny—and it took them another whole day to pass around the western side of the city, which really seemed to have covered the whole face of the mountain—they made their way through a high pass, which once again seemed to have been made almost uniform in width in order to accommodate a heavily trafficked road. "Once this was the highway between the Cities of Fire and the Cities of the Stars," said Issib. "Now it leads only to desert."

They came out of the pass and a vast, dry savanna spread out below them; they could see that the island narrowed here, with the Sea of Stars to the east and, far to the west, the blue shimmer of the southern reaches of the Scour Sea. As they descended, they lost sight of the western sea; instead, at the urging of the Oversoul, they hugged the eastern shore, because more rain fell there, and they could fish in the sea.

It was a hard passage—dry, so that three times they had to dig wells, and hot, with the tropical sun beating down on them. But this was exactly the sort of terrain that Elemak and Volemak had both learned to deal with from their youth, and they made good time. Ten days after they came down from the pass through the Dalatoi Mountains, the Oversoul had them strike south when the coastline turned southeast, and as they climbed through gently rolling hills, the grass grew thicker, and here and there more trees dotted the landscape. They passed through low and well-weathered mountains, down through a river valley, up over more hills, and then down through the most beautiful land they had ever seen.

Stands of forest were evenly balanced with broad meadows; bees hummed over fields of wildflowers, promising honey easily found. There were streams with clear water, all leading to a wide, meandering river. Shedemei dismounted from her camel and probed into the soil. "It isn't like desert grassland," she said. "Not just roots. There's true topsoil here. We can farm these meadows without destroying them."

For the first time in their journey, Elemak didn't bother riding ahead to confer with Volemak about a campsite. There was no place that they passed through where they could not have stopped and spent the night.

"This land could hold the population of Seggidugu and they could all live in wealth," said Elemak. "Don't you think so, Father?"

"And we're the only humans here," he answered. "The Over-soul prepared this place for us. Ten million years, it waited here for us."

"Then we stay here? This is where we were coming?"

"We stay here for now," said Volemak. "For several years at least. The Oversoul isn't ready yet to take us out into the stars, back to Earth. So for now this is our home."

"How many years?" asked Elemak.

"Long enough that we should build houses of wood, and let our poor old tents become awnings and curtains," said Volemak. "There'll be no more journeying by land or sea from this place. Only when we rise up into the stars will we leave here. So let us call this place Dostatok, because it has plenty for our needs. The river we will name Rasa, because it is strong and full of life and it will never cease to supply us with all we need."

Rasa nodded her head gently to acknowledge the honor of the naming; as she did, she had the tiniest smile, which Luet, at least, recognized as a sign that Rasa knew her husband was trying to be conciliatory in his naming.

They made their settlement on a low promontory overlooking the mouth of the River Rasa, where it poured into the Southern Ocean—for that was how far south they had come, leaving the Scour Sea and the Sea of Stars behind them. Within a month they all had houses of wood, with thatched roofs, and in this latitude they had a growing season almost all the year, so it hardly mattered when they planted; there were some rains almost every day, and heavy storms swept over quickly, doing no damage.

The animals were so tame they had no fear of man; they soon domesticated the wild goats, which clearly were descended from the same animals that were herded in the hills near Basilica—camel's milk at last became a liquid that only baby camels had to drink, and the term "camel's cheese" became a euphemism for what well-fed babies left in their diapers. In the next six years, more babies were born, until there were thirty-five young ones, ranging in age from nearly eight years to several newborns. They farmed their fields together, and shared equally from the produce; from time to time the men would leave and hunt together, bringing home meat for drying and salting and skins for tanning. Rasa, Issib, and Shedemei undertook the education of the children by starting a school.

Not that their lives were one unrelenting tale of joy and peace. There were quarrels—for an entire year Kokor would not speak to Sevet over some trivial slight; there was another quarrel between Meb and Obring that led to Obring building a house farther from the rest of the group. There were resentments—some felt that others weren't working hard enough; some felt that their kind of work was of greater value than the labor of others. And there was a constant undercurrent of tension between the women, who looked to Rasa for leadership, and the men, who seemed to assume that no decision was final unless Volemak or Elemak had approved it. But they weathered all these crises, all these tensions, finding some balance of leadership between Volemak's loyalty to the purposes of the Oversoul, Rasa's clearsighted compassion, and Elemak's hardheaded assessments of what they needed to survive. Any unhappiness that hey might harbor in their hearts was kept in check, buried under the hard work that marked the rhythms of their lives, and then dissolved in the moments when joy was bountiful and love unstinted.

Life was good enough over the years that there was not a one of them who did not wish, when they thought of it at all, that the Oversoul would forget that they were there, and leave them in peace and happiness in Dostatok.

NINE—PERIMETER

When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.

Like all the children of Dostatok, she grew up understanding the pure and simple relationships among families. For instance, Dazya and her younger brothers and sisters belonged to Hushidh and Issib. Krassya and Nokya and their younger brothers and sisters belonged to Kokor and Obring. Vasnya and her brother and sister belonged to Sevet and Vas. And so on, each set of children belonging to a mother and father.

The only oddity in this clear picture of the universe, at least until Chveya was eight, had been Grandfather and Grandmother, Volemak and Rasa, who not only had two children of their own—the brothers Okya and Yaya, who might as well be twins because, as Vasnya had said once, they had but one brain between them—but also were, in some vague way, the parents of all the other parents. She knew this because, in odd moments, she had heard adults call Grandmother not only "Lady Rasa" or "Grandmother" but also "Mother," and she heard her own father and Proya's father Elemak and Skiya's father Mebbekew call Grandfather "Father" more often than not.