“I feel as if we owe this guy a good turn,” said Digger.

Kellie was a glowing wraith in his goggles, gliding between chairs and tables. “If we can figure out a way to turn that cloud aside,” she said, “you’ll have done that. And more.” The library was empty save for the aide. “What did you have in mind?”

“When this is over—”

“Yes?”

“—And we know how things stand, I’d like to leave something for him. He’d never know where it came from. A gift from the gods.”

“Leave what, Dig?”

“I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it. These folks like drama.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe something from Sophocles. Translated into Goompah.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

“Are books important, Boomer?”

“Reading them is important.”

“Why?”

“Because they take us places we can’t get to otherwise.”

“Like where, for instance?”

“Like China, when they were building the Great Wall. Or Italy, when they were discovering that the world could be explained rationally. Or Mars when McCovey and Epstein first walked out the door.”

“That sounds pretty exciting, Boomer.”

“There’s someplace else too, that’s especially important.”

“Where’s that? Ohio?”

“Ohio, too. But I was thinking that it’s the only way you have of getting behind someone else’s eyes. It’s the way we found out that we’re really all the same.”

— The Goompah Show

All-Kids Network

May 21

On board the al-Jahani, in hyperspace.

Monday, June 23.

IT WAS THE first day of full-time basic Goompah. The change came easier than anyone would have dreamed. Of the entire group of trainees, only two seemed to be struggling with the spoken languages, and even they could order food, ask directions and understand the bulk of the response, comment that it was going to rain, and inquire whether Gormir would be home in time for dinner.

They’d been speaking Goompah almost exclusively in the workroom since mid-May. And now Judy and her Shironi Kulp, her Elegant Eleven, were ready to excise all English from their vocabularies for the balance of the outbound flight, save when they had something that had to be passed on to the makla. The word meant outsider, she confided to Collingdale. It was the closest they could get to barbarian in Goompah.

They were permitted one sim per day. But teams had been assigned to translate the English so that even the entertainment was offered in the target language. An honor code was in effect, and violators were expected to turn themselves in.

Collingdale was present when Juan Gomez admitted to an infraction within an hour of converting to the new system. Juan explained himself in Goompah, and Collingdale couldn’t follow. Something to do with Shelley. The penalty was mild, a requirement to do an extra translation from one of the Brackel Library texts. A heroic poem, Judy explained.

Collingdale tried to restrict himself to Goompah in the presence of the Kulp. He was making progress, and he enjoyed impressing his young wards. They never ceased looking surprised, and he began to suspect they didn’t have a high opinion of his intellectual abilities, or, for that matter, of those of the Upper Strata in general. “Too locked in to their mental habits to be taken seriously,” Judy said with a perfectly straight face. “Except you of course.”

“Of course.”

“It is a problem,” she said. “People live longer all the time, but they still freeze up pretty early. Flexibility goes at thirty.”

“You really think so?”

“Lost mine last month.”

However that might have been, they called him in on that first full Goompah day and bestowed on him the Kordikai Award, named for an ancient Goompah philosopher famed for constructing what humans would have called the scientific method.

Had his support for them been tentative, that act alone would have won him over. They were the best people he’d ever worked with, young, enthusiastic, quick learners, and, perhaps, most important of all, they believed in what they were doing, saw themselves as the cavalry riding in to help an otherwise-doomed people. When the time came, when the cloud darkened the skies and frightened the wits out of the Goompahs, the Kulp would arrive, one for each of the eleven cities (by then they knew that the southernmost pair were a single political unit), their alienness hidden within Judy Sternberg’s exquisite disguises. They would go in, do a few high-tech magic tricks, claim the gods had sent them to warn of approaching disaster, and urge the inhabitants to clear out. Head for the high ground.

What could go wrong?

“Challa, Dr. Collingdale.” They shook his hand and told him they intended the Kordikai to become an annual award.

BUT SPEAKING GOOMPAH more or less full-time was one thing to talk about and something else to do. The breakfast is good. There’s a fruit bowl on the table. I am reading an interesting book. They had the lines down. And all quite effectively, except, of course, that they really needed to engage with native speakers. As things were, the conversation remained hopelessly superficial. It is nice out. Your shoes are untied. I am a little red pencil box.

“Pay-los, Dr. Collingdale.” Good-bye. See you around. Until next time.

And that’s what could go wrong. There would be all kinds of nuances that they were not going to pick up because there was no one to tell them where they were getting it wrong.

At dinnertime, he went into the dining room. Five of the Kulp were at a corner table. He wandered over and, in his measured Goompah, asked them how it was going.

It was going well.

Had they encountered any problems?

Boka, Ska Collingdale. Friend Collingdale. Mr. Collingdale. Acquaintance Collingdale. Who really knew?

BUT THEY’D LEARNED much since Digger and Kellie had penetrated the library.

The cities were significantly older than anyone had assumed. Their roots went back at least five thousand years. If that were so, how did one explain that they were still sitting on the isthmus? Why had they never expanded into the rest of their world? What had happened to them?

Prior to the foundation of the first city, which the Goompahs believed to be Sakmarung, the world had belonged to the gods. But they had retreated to the skies, and had left the isthmus, the Intigo, which was also their word for world, to the mortal beings, created by a mating between the sun and the two moons; between Taris, who warms the day; Zonia, who brightens the night; and the elusive Holen, who flees and laughs among the stars.

The Goompahs had started with a ménage à trois, and several of the experts suspected there was a connection with the tradition of multiple husbands and wives in each connubial group. Collingdale knew that mythology inevitably comes to reflect the aspirations and ideals of any society.

They’d acquired illustrations of eleven gods and goddesses, and it had not been hard to match them with the sculptured figures in the temple at Brackel. There were deities charged with providing food and wine, laughter and music, the seasons and the crops. They maintained the sea, saw to the tides, controlled the winds, maintained the cycle of the seasons. They blessed the births of new arrivals and eased the final pains of the dying.

Jason Holder pointed out to him that, although their duties were similar to those of earth-born deities, there was a subtle difference. The gods at home had given their bounty as a gift, and might withdraw it if they were miffed, or out of town, or jealous of another deity. The Intigo’s gods seemed to have a responsibility to make provision. It was not quixotic, but rather an obligation. It almost seemed as if the Goompahs were in charge.

Also significant, Holder continued, there was no god of war. And none of pestilence. “All of the deities represent positive forces,” Jason said. But he admitted he didn’t know what to make of that fact, except that the Goompahs seemed remarkably well adjusted.

The artwork from the library texts revealed much about how the Goompahs saw their gods. They did indeed embody majesty and power; but there was also a strong suggestion of compassion. One of the deities, Lykonda, daughter of the divine trio, had wings. And she always carried a torch. So they knew who welcomed mortals at the entrance to the temple. There was as yet no indication that the natives believed in an afterlife, but Jason predicted that, if they did, Lykonda would be on hand to welcome them to their reward.

The cities formed a league whose political outline was vague. But they had a common currency. And neither Judy’s people nor Hutch’s analysts back home found any mention of defense needs. Nor did the available Goompah history, sketchy though it may have been, indicate any kind of conflict that humans would have described as war. Ever.

Well, some intercity disagreements had sent mobs from one town to the outskirts of another, where they threw rocks or, in one celebrated incident, animal bladders filled with dyed water. There had been occasional fatalities, but nowhere was there a trace of the kind of mass organized violence that so marred human history.

There had even been a handful of armed encounters. But they’d been rare, and the numbers involved had been small. Collingdale could by no means claim to have a complete history of the Intigo. Still, this seemed to be a remarkably peaceful race. And a reading of their philosophers revealed a subtle and extraordinary code of ethics that compared favorably with the admonitions of the New Testament.

The Goompah world appeared to be limited to the isthmus and the areas immediately north and south. Their sailing vessels stayed in sight of land. There was no indication whether they’d developed the compass. They had apparently not penetrated more than a few thousand kilometers in any direction from home. They had not established colonies. They showed no expansionist tendencies whatever.

The Goompahs possessed some scientific and engineering ability. Judy’s team had found a book devoted to climatology. Most of its assertions were wrong, but it revealed an underlying assumption that climatic fluctuations had natural causes, and if one could assemble the correct equations and make valid observations, weather prediction would become possible.

Some among them suspected they lived on a sphere. No one knew how they’d figured that out, but a number of references to the Intigo described it as a globe. Occasionally the adjective world-circling was attached to ocean.

The team had recovered and partially translated thirty-six books from the Brackel Library. Of the thirty-six, thirteen could be described as poetry or drama. There was nothing one might call a novel, or even fiction. The rest were history, political science—their governments were republics of one form or another—and philosophy, which had been separated from the natural sciences, itself no small achievement.