It would have been possible to abandon these people; at one time, Paul remembered, he had almost favored it himself, and Ed Spearman had very nearly hinted that it might be better to join forces with the tyranny in the south.... Life seemed cheap to Pakriaa's tribe--others' life. Devil-worshipping cannibals, capable of every cruelty, committed for thousands of years to all the superstitions that ever crippled intelligence. You had to look beyond that, said Christopher Wright the theorist, the doctor, the anthropologist, the impractical daydreamer. _Anyway I saved a Vestoian--if she lives. One balanced against how many that I destroyed...? No answer.... Unless you can see a world where the ways of destruction become obsolete under a government of laws. With the devils of human nature--the vanities, the greeds, the follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas--how do you see such a world...? You say, Christopher Wright, that no one is expendable. I believe you. But--when I must choose between the life of myself or my friends and the life of the one whom the stream of history has tossed against me as my enemy----_ _When I do that, I only discover once more that I am caught in the same net with the rest of my kind and cannot escape until all of them escape--escape into a region of living where men do not set traps for each other and the blind do not lead._ _Therefore----_ "Are you awake, Nisana?" Her even breathing quickened. It seemed to Paul that there was faint color in his glimpses of sky; he remembered the silver moon that had appeared over the jungle with first-light so long ago--yesterday morning. The passage of the red moon around Lucifer was swift: tonight it would be rising two hours before first-light and would be something broader than the gory scimitar he had seen from the knoll. "I am awake." "I think the red moon has come back." "Yes." She pointed over his shoulder; he glimpsed it through a gap in the leaves. "A good moon. Begins the Moon of Little Rains. The small rains make no harm, make the ground sweet. Is better than the moon past--that we call the Moon of Beginnings." She moved restlessly against him. "This country--all forest? How long have I sleep?" "Most of the night. We're past the open land." She whispered, "No one has ever come here. We have think always there are bad--what word?--tev--tevils in the north." "Tomorrow--rather, today--we turn west and then south on the other side of the hills, to the island." "Ah, the island.... I cannot see this island." "You'll like it, Nisana. You'll be happy there." "Happy?" And he remembered that the old pygmy language had no word for happiness. Wright's voice came thinly in the dark: "Abara, stop them! Sears----"