The Oversoul is right. If I knew Chebeya and her people as individuals, then even with no more moral insight than a baboon, I would reach out to protect them. Or if I conceived myself to be one of them, I would subsume my own interests in the needs of the group as a whole, and would not dream of making them serve as bait in an attempt to serve the Keeper of Earth.

The Oversoul, on the other hand, was created to look out for the needs of humanity as a whole. The powers she had were tremendous, and her programmers had to build some kind of compassion into her. But it was an intellectual compassion, a historical compassion-the more people who were suffering, the greater the priority of easing their pain. Thus the Oversoul could overlook individual accidents, the intermittent deaths from the ordinary course of a disease cycling through a region; but the Oversoul would dread and try to avoid the large group suffering that came from war, drought, flood, epidemic. In those cases, the Oversoul could act, guiding individuals to actions that would help the whole affected population-not to save individual lives, but to reduce the scale of the suffering.

Between the two of us, though, thought Shedemei, we are left untouched by the suffering of Chebeya's people. There aren't enough of them to force the Oversoul to intervene on their behalf-though there are enough to make her uncomfortable. And I, on my isolated perch in the outer reaches of the atmosphere, I am no part of them. All my people are gone; my community is dead. As the digger women speak of me: I am the One-Who-Was-Never-Buried. That is the only difference between me and the dead, for a person who has no living community is dead. Haven't I seen it in old people? Spouse gone, friends gone, family gone except for later generations that barely remember the old one-they become annoyed to discover that they're still alive. Have I reached that point?

Not yet, she thought, sliding her fingers behind the tiny trowel in order to lift out a seedling that needed transplanting into a larger tray. Because my plants have become my people. My little animals, going through generation after generation as I play genetic games with them-they are the ones I think of as part of myself.

So is this good or bad? The Oversoul needs to get advice from the Keeper of Earth in order to alleviate the suffering of the people of Harmony. To accomplish that, we need to interfere with the Keeper's plans. The Keeper wants to rescue Chebeya and Akmaro; therefore we'll make it harder. It's not an unreasonable plan. In the end, it will be to the benefit of millions and millions of people on Harmony.

But we're doing it blindly. We don't know what the Keeper is trying to accomplish. Why is she trying to save the Akmari? Maybe we should have tried to understand her purpose before we started fiddling around with her ability to accomplish it.

Yet how can we understand her purpose if she won't talk to us? It's so circular.

"Don't talk into my mind," she said to the Oversoul. "I hate that."

"I wasn't talking to you, I was thinking to myself." Shedemei snorted. "Very funny."

"While we're at it, why not also think about what or who in the world the Keeper of Earth is."

"If we can't find the Keeper using physical evidence or recorded memory," said Shedemei, "then maybe we should study what she wants and what she does, and then search for some mechanism by which it is possible for her to do it, or some entity that might benefit from her doing it."

"Not at all. Any more than I will ever benefit from the expanded habitat that these little legumes will provide, if they are ever successful at producing useful nutrition in the low-oxygen, short-growing-season, thin-soil environment I intend them for. But someone will benefit. Therefore if some stranger who had no way of discovering me directly wanted to know something about me, she could at least start her reasoning from the fact that I have particular care for enhancing the ability of humans, diggers, and angels to expand into new habitats with improved nutrition. They might then look for me to be of a body-type that allowed me to identify with these creatures. Or at least they could gather from my actions that it is important to me that these creatures be protected."

"I have no idea," Shedemei said wearily. "But I also know that if somebody wanted to get my attention, all they'd need to do is start stomping out all my gardens on Earth. Then I'd notice them, all right."

"Not so destructive, I hope."

"If you keep goading me this way, you'll end up persuading me to care so much about them that I stop worrying about the people of Harmony altogether. Is that what you want?"

"Basilica was ruined half a millennium ago. My people are all dead. My nation of birth is irretrievable. Everything I ever felt myself to be a part of is dead, except my gardens. Do you really want me to become part of Akmaro and Chebeya, to begin to feel about them the way I once felt about Rasa and her household, about my friends, about my husband and my children?"

"Then leave me alone."

"Health! What does this have to do with health?"

Shedemei shuddered. She didn't want the Oversoul meddling like this. She was just fine on her own. Zdorab was gone, her children were gone, and that was fine, she had work to do, she didn't need distractions. Her health indeed!

Akma sat on the brow of the hill, exhausted from the day's work, but so filled with fury that even lying down wouldn't have been rest. And lying down he couldn't have watched his father stand there teaching the people-with Pabulog's vile sons sitting in the front row of the listeners. After all they had done to him, Father could bring them in and seat them in the place of honor? Of course Father and Mother made a great show of wanting him to sit there in the center of the front row, where he had always sat till now. But to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the lying Didul, the arrogant Pabul, the brutal Udad, the pathetic slimy sneaky little Muwu-Father had to know that it was more shame than Akma could bear.

So he sat here on the hilltop, looking now at the campfires of the digger guards, now down at the gathering of Akma's people. I can't sort friends from enemies anymore. The diggers hurt nothing but my body; the Pabulogi stabbed at my pride; and my own father has told me that I'm nothing to him, nothing compared to the sons of his enemy.

Your enemies were my enemies, Father. For your sake, for loyalty to you, I bore whatever came to me and bore it proudly, because it was for you. And then you take my tormentors and talk to them as if they were also your sons. You even call them, call them sons. You dared to call that hypocritical encrustation of a skunk's rectum "Di-duldis"-beloved son! Whose son? Only the son of the man who tried to kill you, Father, who drove you out! Only the son of the man that for your sake I hated. And now you have given him a name that you should never have spoken to anyone but me. I am Akmadis-but not if he has the name Diduldis from your lips. If he is your son then I am not.