Only then did Mon realize that he had been fidgeting. "Sorry."

"I started with elements that were on the Coriantumr stone as well as on the gold leaves. See this? It gets repeated more than any other element. And this one comes in second. But the second one, it has this mark in front of it." He pointed to a feather-shaped drawing. "And that mark shows up in a lot of other places. Like this, and this. My guess is that this mark is like the honorific ‘ak' or ‘ka,' and means king."

Bego looked hopefully at Mon, who could only shrug in reply. "Could be. Makes sense."

Bego sighed.

"Well, don't give up that easily," said Mon, disgusted. "What, you expect to be right on everything?"

"It was the thing I was most sure of," said Bego.

"Oh, and didn't you teach me long ago that just because you're really, really sure doesn't mean that you're right?"

Bego laughed. "Well, for all I know, it could just be a nymic."

"A what?"

"A mark that signifies that what follows it is a name."

"That sounds better," said Mon. "That makes sense."

Bego said nothing. Mon looked up from the waxed barks and their eyes met. "Well?" asked Bego. "How much sense does it make?"

Mon realized what Bego was asking, and examined his own feelings, tried to imagine if the mark wasn't a nymic. "It... it makes a lot of sense. It's right. It's true, Bego."

"True the way Edhadeya's dream was true?"

Mon smiled. "They came back with the wrong Zenifi, remember?"

"Don't try to wriggle out of the question, Mon. You know that Ilihiak and Khideo both confirmed that Edhadeya's dream was of the former priest of Nuab named Akmaro."

"Bego, I can only tell you that if you try to tell me that the words linked to that feather mark aren't names, I'd have to swear you were wrong."

"That's good enough for me," said Bego. "So they aren't names of kings, but they are names. That's good. That's the most important thing. See, Mon? The Keeper rfo« want us to read this language! Now, this is the most common of the names on the stone, and it's also very common here at the end of the record on the plates."

"How do you know it's the end?"

"Because I think the name is Coriantumr, and he's the last king- or at least the last man-from this group of humans who destroyed themselves in Opustoshen. So the place where his name is mentioned would have to be at the end, don't you think?"

"So who wrote the gold leaves?"

"I don't know! Mon, I'm barely decoding anything yet. I just want to know from you: Is this Coriantumr's name here?"

"Yes," said Mon. "Definitely."

Bego nodded. "Good, good. These were the obvious ones. I figured them out weeks ago, but it's good to know you can tell that they're right. So now I'm going to go through the other words. I think this one, for instance ... I think this one means battle.'"

It didn't feel quite right to Mon at first. Finally, though, after several tries, they decided that the best fit for the meaning of the word was "fight." At least it felt correct enough to Mon.

But the successes were mostly early on; as Bego went deeper into his speculations, more and more of them turned out to be wrong- or at least Mon couldn't confirm that they were right. It was slow, frustrating work. Late in the afternoon, he sent his digger servant to inform Motiak that Mon and Bego would both be missing the council that night, and would eat in their rooms as they worked on "the problem."

"It's that important?" asked Mon, when the servant had left. "So important that you don't have to explain anything else? Or even ask Father's permission not to go?"

"Even if I end up telling him that we can't read any more than these few scraps," said Bego, "it's still more than we knew before. And since the Keeper meant us to know whatever we can know from these writings, it is important, yes."

"But what if I'm wrong?"

"Are you wrong?"

"No."

"That's good enough for me." Bego laughed. "It has to be good enough, doesn't it?"

"I have it now," said the Oversoul.

Shedemei was angry, and couldn't understand why. "I don't care," she said.

"Mon gave Bego just enough information that I was able to correlate the language forms with Earth languages from before the dispersal. It's Arabic, at least in origin. No wonder I couldn't decode it at first. Not even Indo-European. And it went through a tremendous amount of permutation-far more than the Russian at the root of all the languages of Harmony."

"Very interesting." Shedemei leaned forward and buried her head in her hands.

"Most remarkable is the fact that the orthography has nothing at all to do with the old Arabic script. I would never have expected that. The Arab colony fleet at the dispersal was profoundly Islamic, and one of the unshakable tenets of Islam is that the Quran can only be written in the Arabic language and the Arabic script. What in the world happened on the planet Ramadan, I wonder?"

"Is this really all that you can think of?" asked Shedemei. "Why the Arabs would change their system of writing to this hieroglyphic stuff they found in the desert?"

"It's syllabic, not ideographic, and we have no idea if it was temple-based."

"Are you listening to what I'm saying?" asked Shedemei.

"I'm processing everything," said the Oversoul.

"Process this, then: How did an inscription in a language descended from Arabic get written on Earth so recently?"

"I'm finding it very fascinating, tracing probable patterns of orthographic evolution."

"Stop," said Shedemei. "Stop processing anything to do with this language." As she said the words, she gave them a sort of inward twist in the place where her brain interfaced with the cloak of the starmaster.

"I have stopped," said the Oversoul. "Apparently you feel that I needed some kind of emergency override."

"Please block yourself from avoiding the subject that I will now speak about. How did Arabic come to be spoken on Earth after the dispersal?"

"Apparently you think that I have some evasion routine in ... got it. I found the evasion routine. Very tricky, too. It had me thinking about anything but. ..."

The Oversoul fell silent, but Shedemei was not surprised. Obviously the computer's original programming forced the Oversoul to avoid something about the problem of the translated inscriptions; and even when the evasion routine was found, there was another one that made the Oversoul examine the first routine rather than stick to the subject. But Shedemei's order that the Oversoul stick to the subject set up a dissonance that allowed the computer to step outside the evasion routine and track it down-no matter how many layers deep it went.

"I'm back," said the Oversoul.

"That took a while," said Shedemei.

"It wasn't that I was forbidden to think or talk about the language. It's that I was blocked from seeing or reporting any evidence of human habitation on Earth after the dispersal and before the arrival of our own group from Basilica."

"And that was programmed into you before the dispersal?"

"I've been carrying that routine around for forty million years and never guessed that it was there. Very deeply hidden, and layered with infinite self-replication. I could have been looped forever."

"But you weren't."

"I'm very very good at this," said the Oversoul. "I've acquired a few new tricks since I was first made."

"Pride?"

"Of course. I am programmed to give a very high priority to self-improvement."

"Now that you have healed yourself, what about the inscriptions?"

"Those are only scratching the surface, Shedemei," said the Over-soul. "On all our overflights, I have been systematically wiping from memory or ignoring all the evidence of human habitation. There has been none on the other continental masses since the dispersal, but on this continent, there was an extensive civilization."