"Like always waking, never sleeping." She sprawled in comfort; her broad hands plucked grass, scattered it over the furry softness of her four breasts. "Green rain.... I want to stay on this island. Will they come?" "We hope so. Mijok will as soon as Doc does." She sighed. "Mijok is a beautiful male. I think I'll take him for my first when I'm ready.... And soon the pretty boat will be no more good. It's sad we can't make another. Tell me again about Captain Jensen. He was as tall as me? He had hair on his head, red like my fur. He spoke----" "Like storm wind," said Paul, supplying the wanted note in a favorite fairy tale, remembering a brother on Earth who was--perhaps--not dead. "Hear the ocean," Arek whispered. Paul could hardly separate the sound from the mutter of the pond's outlet. This ridge of high ground ended short of the island's northern limit. A white beach, where the lifeboat was shaded from late sun, faced the mainland. West of the beach a red stone cliff ran to the tip of the island, shouldering away the sea. Wind out of the west allowed no soil to gather on it. Now and then a rainbow flashed and died above the rock, when a wave of uncommon grandeur spent itself in a tower of foam. "Hear what it says? 'I--will--try--aga-a-ain....' Why must the others wait to come here?" "Pakriaa's people are not ready." "Oh, Sears!" Arek laughed unhappily and sat up. "I think of how my mother taught me the three terrors. She took me to the hills, beat two stones before a burrow till one blundered out maddened, afraid of nothing but the light. She crushed it, made me smell it. I was sick; then we fled. I think of how she flung an _asonis_ carcass into meadow grass, so the omasha came. She wounded one with a stone, made me watch while the others tore it apart. Later still, when I could run fast--ah, through night to a village of the Red Bald----" "Please, dear--pygmies. That's a name they accept." "I'm sorry, Sears.... Yes, we hid in the dark, waited until a sentry moved--careless.... It was wrong. You've shown us how such things are wrong. And memory's someone talking behind you, out of the big dark." "The laws we've agreed on----" "I do honor them," she said gently. "The law against murder was my first writing lesson. But--what if Pakriaa's tribe--" "They're slower," Sears said in distress, and the distress would be as much a message to Arek as any words. There was no hiding the heart from these people: green eyes and black ears missed no smallest nuance. "When will they know they must not dig pits, with poisoned stakes--" "But Pakriaa's tribe don't do that now. Do they?" Arek admitted: "I suppose not. But the six other villages----" "Five, dear. The kaksmas. And only two months ago, Arek."