Father rose to his feet. "I see that you are disposed to doubt," he said. "Perhaps it was a mistake to share the good news with everyone. Perhaps we should have waited until Nafai came back, and we could all go to the place he found, and see what he has seen. But I thought that there should be no secrets among us, and so I insisted that we tell the story now, so no one could say later that they were not informed."

"A little late to try the honesty approach, isn't it, Father?" asked Mebbekew. "You said yourself that when Nafai left day before yesterday, he was searching for this hidden place and he thought it was probably where the first humans disembarked from their starships. Yet you didn't think of telling us all then, did you?"

Father glanced at Rasa, and Elemak felt completely confirmed in his suspicions. The old man was dancing to the old lady's tune. She had insisted it be kept secret before, and had probably counseled him against telling now, knowing her.

Nevertheless, it was time for Elemak's next move—he had to seize the high ground, now that Oykib had undercut his previous position. "Let's not be unfair," said Elemak. "We've only heard about Nafai. We don't have to decide anything or do anything yet. Let's wait until he gets home, and see how we feel then." Elemak turned to Oykib, who still stood in the middle of the group. "As for you, I'm proud that my next-to-last brother has such fire in him. You're going to be a real man, Oykib, and when you grow old enough to understand the issues instead of blindly following what others tell you, your voice will be well listened to in council, I can assure you."

Oykib's face reddened—with embarrassment, not anger. He was young enough to have heard only the clear praise and completely missed the subtle insult. Thus I wipe you out, too, Okya, dear brother, without your even realizing it.

"I say this meeting is over," said Elemak. "We'll meet again when Nafai comes back, except, of course, for the little conspiratorial meetings in the Index House where all this was cooked up in the first place. I have no doubt that those meetings will continue unabated." And with those words he put a sinister meaning into any kind of conversation that Rasa's party entered into, thus deeply weakening them.

These poor people—they thought they were so clever, until they actually came up against somebody who understood how power worked. And because it was Elemak who dismissed the meeting, and in effect announced the next one, he had gone a long way toward stripping Father of his leadership in Dostatok. The only test now was whether the meeting actually broke up with Elemak's departure. If he walked away, but the meeting went on substantially intact, then Elemak would have a much tougher time establishing leadership—in fact, he would have lost ground today.

But he needn't have worried. Meb arose almost at once and, with Dol and their children in tow, followed him away from the meeting; Vas and Obring and their wives also got up, and then Zdorab and Shedemei. The meeting was over—and it was over because Elemak had said it was over.

Round one for me, thought Elemak, and I'll be surprised if that isn't the whole match. Poor Nafai. Whatever you're doing out in the woods, you're going to come home and find all your plots and plans in disarray. Did you think you could really face me down from a distance and win?

There was no writing anywhere, no signs, no instructions.

(No one needs instructions here. I am with you always in this place, showing you what you need to know.)

"And they were content with this?" asked Nafai. "All of them?" His voice was so loud in the silence of this place, as he scuffed along the dustless catwalks and corridors, making his way downward, downward into the earth.

(They knew me. They had made me, had programmed me. They knew what I could do. They thought of me as their library, their all-purpose instruction manual, their second memory. In those days I knew only what they had taught me. Now I have forty million years of experience with human beings, and have reached my own conclusions. In those days I was much more dependent on them —I reflected back to them their own picture of the world.)

"And their picture—was it wrong?"

(They did not understand how much of their behavior was animal, not intellectual. They thought that they had overcome the beast in them, and that with my help all their descendants would drive out the beast in a few generations—or a few hundred, anyway. Their vision was long, but no human being can have that long a vision. Eventually the numbers, the dimensions of time, become meaningless.)

"But they built well," said Nafai.

(Well but not perfectly. I have suffered forty million years of cosmic and nuclear radiation that has torn apart much of my memory. I have vast redundancy, and so in my data storage there has been no meaningful loss. Even in my programming, I have monitored all changes and corrected them. What I could not monitor was the area hidden from myself. So when the programs there decayed, I could not know it and could not compensate for it. I couldn't copy those areas and restore them when any one copy decayed.)

"So they didn't plan well at all," said Nafai, "since those programs were at your very core."

(You mustn't judge them harshly. It never occurred to them that it would take even a million years for their children's children to learn peace and be worthy to enter this place and learn all about advanced technologies. How could they guess that century after century, millennium after millennium, the humans of Harmony would never learn peace, would never cease trying to rule over one another by force or deception? I was never meant to keep this place closed off for even a million years, let alone forty million. So they built well indeed—the flaws and failures in my secret core were not fatal, were they? After all, you're here, aren't you?)

Nafai remembered his terror when he had had no air to breathe, and wasn't sure that they hadn't cut it all a little fine.

"Where are you?" asked Nafai.

(All around you.)

Nafai looked, and saw nothing in particular.

(The sensors there, in the ceiling—those are how I see you right now, and hear you, besides my ways of seeing through your eyes, and hearing your words before you say them. Behind all these walls are bank after bank of static memory—all of that is my self. The machinery pumping air through these underground passages—they are also me.)

"Then why did you need me at all?" asked Nafai.

(You are the one who broke me out of my loop and opened up my vision to include my own heart, and you ask me that?)

"Why do you need me now?"

(I also need you—all of you—because the Keeper has sent you dreams. The Keeper wants you, and so I will bring you.)

"Why do you need me?" he asked, clarifying the question even further.

(Because my robots were all controlled by a place in my memory that has become completely untrustworthy. I have shut them down because they were reporting falsely to me. No one ship of these six has a fully uncorrupted memory. I need you to collect and test the memory in every part of the ships and bring good memory together until we have one perfect ship. I can't do this myself—I have no hands.)

"So I'm here to replace broken machines."

(And I need you to pilot the starship.)

"Don't tell me you can't do that yourself."

(Your ancestors did not let their starships pass completely under the control of computers like me, Nafai. There must be a starmaster on every ship, to give command. I will carry out those commands, but the ship will be yours. I will be yours.)

"Not me," said Nafai. "Father should do this."

(Volemak didn't come here. Volemak didn't open this place.)