"I appreciate that decision," said Nafai.

(It means that decay has reentered this place. Not that it has been wholly excluded. The barrier excluded most harmful radiation, but not all. There has been damage. Nothing here was meant to last this long. But now that I can find myself instead of running into the perimeter system blocks, maybe I can figure out why I was looping.

(Or Issib and Zdorab can figure it out—they're at the Index even now, and the moment you passed through the perimeter, the blocks went down for them, too. I've shown them everything you did, and they're now searching through the new areas of memory opened to all of us.)

"Then I made it," said Nafai. "I did it. I'm done."

(Don't be a fool. You got through the barrier. The work is only just beginning. Come to me, Nafai.)

"To you?"

(To where I am. I have found myself at last, though I had never been able to think of searching for myself until now. Come to me—beyond those hills.)

Nafai searched for his clothes and found them scattered—winds that could blow his body around had easily snatched his clothing out from under the stones. What he needed most were shoes, of course, to make the trek across the stony ground. But he wanted the other clothes, too—eventually he'd have to come home.

(I have clothing waiting for you there. Come to me.)

"Yes, well, I'm coming," said Nafai. "But let me get my shoes on whether you think I need them or not." He also pulled on his breeches, and pulled his tunic over his head as he walked. And the bow—he searched a moment for his bow, and didn't give up until he found a piece of it and realized that it had broken in the wind. He was lucky that none of his bones had done likewise.

At last he headed out in the direction that the Oversoul showed him inside his mind. It took perhaps a half hour of walking—and he wasn't quick, either, his body was so bruised and sore. Finally, though, he crested the last hill and looked down into a perfect bowl-shaped depression in the earth, perhaps two kilometers across. In the center of it, six immense towers rose up out of the ground.

The recognition in his mind was instantaneous: the starships.

He knew the information came from the Oversoul, along with many facts about them. What he was seeing was really protective shells over the tops of the ships, and even then, only about a quarter of each ship rose above the ground. The rest was underground, protected and thoroughly linked into the systems of Vusadka. He knew without having to think about it that the rest of Vusadka was also underground, a vast city of electronics, almost all of it devoted to maintaining the Oversoul itself. All that was visible of the Oversoul were the bowl-shaped devices that pointed at the sky, communicating with the satellites that were its eyes and ears, its hands and fingers in the world.

(For all these years, I have forgotten how to see myself, have forgotten where I was and what I looked like. I remember only enough to set certain tasks in motion, and to bring you near here to Dostatok. When the tasks failed, when I began looping, I was helpless to help myself because I couldn't find where to search for the cause. Now Zdorab and Issib and I have seen the place. There has been damage to my memory—forty million years of atomic decay and cosmic radiation has scarred me. The redundancy of my systems has compensated for most of it, but not for damage within primitive systems that I couldn't even examine because they were hidden from me. I have lost the ability to control my robots. They were not meant to last this long, even in a place without oxygen. My robots were reporting to me that they had completed all safety checks on the systems inside the barrier, but when I tried to open the perimeter the system refused because the safety checks had not been completed. So I initiated the safety checks again, and the robots again reported that all was complete, and on and on. And I couldn't discover the loop because all of this was at the level of reflex to me—like the beating of your heart is to you. No, even less obvious. More like the production of hormones by the glands inside your body.)

"What would have happened if you could have broken out of the loop?" asked Nafai.

(If I could have found myself, I would have recognized the problem and brought you here at once.)

"You mean you could have shut down the barrier?"

(I wouldn't have needed to. Shutting it down was within your power all along. That's what the Index was for.)

"The Index!"

(If you had brought the Index with you, you would have met no resistance at any point. No mental aversion, and when you touched the Index to the physical barrier it would have gradually dissolved itself—avoiding the winds, which were not helpful, since they stirred dust into the air.)

"But you never told us the Index could do that."

(I didn't know it myself. I couldn't know it. All I knew was that whoever was coming to the starships would have to have the Index. Then, when the safety checks were completed, the perimeter system would have opened everything up to me and I would have understood what was needed and could have told you what you needed to do.)

"So my nearly suffocating myself to death and then getting bruised up in the windstorm wasn't a stupid waste of perfectly good panic."

(Forcing your way in here was the only way I would ever have broken out of my loop. I have read the memory of the perimeter system and I am delighted at the way you used the baboons to draw you through.)

"Didn't you show me that in my dream? That I needed to follow a baboon through the barrier?"

(Dream? Oh, I remember now, you dreamed. No, that wasn't from me.)

"From the Keeper, then?"

(Why must you look for an outside source? Don't you think your own unconscious mind is capable of giving you a true dream now and then? Aren't you willing to admit to yourself that perhaps it was your own mind that solved this problem?)

Nafai couldn't keep himself from laughing in delight. "I did it, then!"

(You did it. But you aren't done. Come to me, Nafai. I have work for you to do, and tools for you to do it with.)

Nafai strode down the hill into the valley of Vusadka. The place of disembarkation. The place where human feet had first touched the soil of Harmony, and where those first settlers had placed the computer that would protect their children from self-destruction for so many years that to them it must have seemed the protection would be forever.

But it would not be forever. It was dying already. And now Nafai was walking among the towers of the starships, the first human being to tread in their footsteps since they built this place. Whatever the Oversoul meant for him to do now, he would do it, and when it was done, human beings would return again to Earth.