"This island is Eden." Sears Oliphant spoke drowsily. Toy bat wings flickered from the woods crowning the hillside, hovered over a pond: illuama. In a scant year of Lucifer time (seventeen months of the calendar of Earth) native names had become natural, mostly Mijok's names.

Two red-moon changes ago, in the final jading month of the rains, the pygmy word "kaksma" had been only a symbol. Now it woke the image of a village desolate, bones scraped and scarred. The mind's eye winced in pity—a sentry careless, a bridge left in place after dark; thousands of ratty bodies rustling down from the wet hills, over open ground, swimming swollen streams, finding the bridge before oil on the rain water in the ditch could be ignited. Small bodies, not swift, leaping or humping along like furry worms, sniffing, squeaking, their stabbing teeth dark with the blood of any flesh that moved. The northernmost of the villages allied with Pakriaa's had already returned to jungle.

But here, ten miles offshore from the coastal range, no kaksmas lived; Sears and Paul, in two days of study on this second visit, had established that. No wide wings lurked in the sky. The hilly island had no large meadows where omasha could hunt. Three giants had been flown to the island a month ago—the girl Arek, her mother Muson, and old Rak. They said it was a place of calm. Their soft talk could be heard up the slope, where a log building was growing. Paul stretched, lean and comfortable, on the grass, glad to be alone for a while with this least demanding of his friends.

Sears was fatter, but hardened, a round block of man, with a coarse black beard, kindness of brown eyes unaltered. Christopher Wright, waiting at the "fortress" by Lake Argo and no doubt frantic for word of this exploration, had let his beard grow too, sandy gray. Spearman and Paul had stayed clean-shaven, with soap made from fat and wood ashes. "The others must come here, Paul. I suppose Chris won't consent till Pakriaa agrees—damn, you'd think she could see it. She knows her enemies fear the ocean as she does. Lantis' two-by-four army would never chase after us in their lake boats."

"Wait a minute, Jocko. Lantis is no two-by-four proposition."

"Damn pint-size Napoleon with four teats and a grass skirt."

"Lookee: that settlement south of Lake Argo is thirty miles long. Equivalent of two hundred villages, to Pakriaa's six. Say twenty thousand warriors who got their pride hurt a year ago when the crash of Argo swamped their fleet and scared the pants off 'em. They'll have replaced the fleet. They'll come overland too. Lantis, Queen of the World."

"If they do"—Sears' heavy voice had the tremor that he himself hated—"the firearms should be at least one ace in the hole."

"Ye—es. Ed's pistol helped in our one bad scrape with Pakriaa herself. But it was his smashing the idol that stalled 'em, not the gun."

"Poor little Abro Pakriaa!" Sears spoke with tenderness. "If ever a lady was pulled seven ways from Sunday! Wants our way of life, doesn't want it. Wants to grasp Chris' ethics, doesn't want to. Afraid of Ed's strength and aggressiveness, admires 'em too, oh my, yes. Tries to believe the god Ismar died or never lived—but can't, quite."

"And can't understand why our women are gentle—Dorothy anyway——"

"Nan's toughening up is conscious effort, Paul. Superficial. She's made herself hunt, shoot well, act hard, because her brain tells her she should. If we could only find something to restring her violin! I think she's given up hope of it: nothing I've found so far has been any good. She doesn't see that Dorothy does more for us by remaining the person she always was.... You know, when I go alone to Pak's village, I just set. Even the witches have got used to me, not that they wouldn't gut me if they could."

"Jocko"—Paul looked away—"you told me once you were scared all the time. When you go there alone—or when you tame the olifants for that matter—are you sort of grasping the nettle? And does it work?"

"Don't ask me, friend. Because I don't exactly know. I was never a brave man." Brown eyes misted in what was partly laughter. "Oy, the witches! There's the big enemy in the battle for Pakriaa's mind. Chris may claim they aren't real witch doctors, just advisers, low-grade magicians. I'm not so sure. Priests of Ismar, and when Ed clobbered the idol Pakriaa did consider having 'em all burned alive. Point is, she didn't do it. They gnaw away in the dark at all we try to teach her. That proposed bonfire, by the way, is gossip passed on to me in confidence by Abara."

"There's a dear little man."

"Ain't he though?" Smiling into late sky, Paul envisaged the wizened red midget riding the white monsters that Sears had tamed and insisted on naming olifants-with-an-f. A painting might grow out of that, he thought, squat coppery lump astride of massive white—it might, if the desire to paint should ever wake again and be as strong as it once was on Argo, when his mind's eye could remember Earth without distortion. Abara, popeyed and potbellied, a favorite in Pakriaa's harem, had been commissioned by her as a student and go-between at the lakeside camp; Sears had not only adopted him as an olifant trainer, but suspected him of furtively possessing a sense of humor. "Well—the giants. Lantis will always have thought of them as wild animals——"

"Sears"—Paul rolled over and pressed his face in the grass—"can we ask or even permit the giants to tangle in a pygmy war?"

"Ah ... It's tormenting Chris too, ever since Lantis sent that ultimatum." He snarled in his beard, "Thirty fat meat slaves every two months! There's politics for you. Dirtiest way she could answer Pak's challenge to personal combat, and the automatic refusal makes an excuse to come and clean up. Sounds like home.... Mijok wants to help fight—says he does."

"It's still our responsibility." Paul sat up. His eyes kept returning to the towering courage of the trees. Brave as any cathedral spire, scarcely one was free from the clutch of the purple-leaf vine. "As for moving here to the island, Pak sees it, but the idea's too new. You just don't pull up stakes, venture on the Big Water, crossing forbidden kaksma country."

Sears chewed a grass blade. "Anyway we've got to bring Dorothy and the baby here, and Ann. Dorothy won't fuss, will she, son?"

"Since there is Helen—no, she won't. I still dream sometimes, as I did during her first pregnancy. Things, shapes, trying to pull her away—or she's where I can't find her, can't push through the leaves."

"She told me. It's something else that's made you blue lately."

"No."

Sears watched him. "Yes.... Want to start back tomorrow?"

"Might as well. We've learned all we need."

"Mm ... Second thoughts about the daddy of Dorothy's second——"

"No no. We settled that. She's proud to be carrying it."

"Good genetics could be damn bad psychology."

"No, Jocko. Don't think that. She's close to me as ever."

Sears waited and spoke softly: "New York late on a rainy night, a few car lights moving, street-lamp reflections like golden fish——"

"Orange paintbrush in New Hampshire meadows——We'd better stop."

"We better. I want boat whistles—floating city coming out of the fog. Call it a slow-healing wound.... And look across the channel."

Paul saw it presently: a cliff formation in the coastal range made a brow, nose, and chin. Below this, rounded rock could be a shoulder straining in heroic effort; then, tumbled reality of mountain-fancy must supply whatever held the figure in bondage. "Yes. He looks west. Past us, at the sun."

"Why, no, Paul. I think he looks west of the sun...."

A red-furred girl wandered down from the woods. "I got tired." Arek had lived twenty-two years; she was seven feet tall, not yet adolescent but near it. In the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains, ten months away, she might take adult part in the frenzy of love if her body demanded it: if not, she would go apart with the other children, whose play also became innocently erotic at that time, and help care for the youngest. Sears grinned as she sat down with them. "Tired or lazy?"

"Both. You Charins are never lazy enough." The name Charin, Paul thought, was almost natural now, a pygmy word for "halfway," intended by Pakriaa merely to convey that Wright and his breed were halfway in size between her people and the giants, but Wright took sardonic satisfaction in it as a generic name. "Work and loafing are both good. Why can Ed Spearman never sit still in the sun? Or maybe I like to talk too much."

"Never," Sears chuckled. "Well—his best pleasure is in action. Maybe it's the technician in him—he must always be doing something."

"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."

She stared at Paul with shock. "I had almost forgotten. But they do still hate us. The day before you flew us here, Paul, I met Pakriaa and two of her soldiers in the woods. I gave them the good-day greeting. Oh, if one of you had been there she would have answered it.... Wouldn't the island be better without them? Some of you don't like them. Even Dorothy only tries to like them. Since the baby was born, Paul, she—shrinks when they come to the fortress. They don't know it, but I do."

Dimly, Paul had known it, known also that it was a thing Dorothy would consciously reject. "Time, Arek. You'll live a hundred and fifty years or better—more than three pygmy lifetimes. You'll see them change."

Speaking almost like a Charin, Arek said, "They'd better."

They strolled up the hill; the other giants' labor had ceased. The building was a sturdy oblong, intended as storehouse and temporary communal dwelling for them all, including (Wright hoped) some of Pakriaa's people. Rafters were not yet in place. For that, Rak needed the strength of another like himself: chubby Muson tired easily. Someday a road would climb from the beach, traversing the ridge which was the backbone of the northern half of the island. Here, where spring water filled the pond and rushed on down to carve a small harbor below the beach, would be Jensen City, and the three races of Lucifer would learn to live there in good will and pleasure under a government of laws. So Wright said—peering at photographs, teasing his gray beard, tapping thin fingers on the map drawn on the paper of Earth, on the new maps of whitebark. Paul could see it too—sometimes; glimpse the houses, gardens, open places. South of the pond, a wheat field, for on Lucifer the wheat of Earth grew to four feet and bore richly. Near the field, perhaps the house for Dorothy and himself, with no doorway lower than ten feet.

At other times he could see only defeat—the arrogance and blind drive of genus Charin, species Semisapiens beating against the indifference of nature, the resentment of other life. He could see his people destroyed, by accident or anger, the giant friends adrift with only hints of the new life and spoiled for the old. Then he would stop trying to foresee and would make his mind's ear listen to Wright insisting: "Give protoplasm a chance. Patience is the well-spring...."

The walls were eleven feet in height. Rak and Muson rested on the coolness of bare ground within; Rak pointed at the top of the walls where rafters would rest. "Slow," he said, "and good." Rak could not be sure how old he was. When Mijok had first persuaded him to the camp ten months ago, Rak had won his English with the grave precision of a mason selecting fieldstone. His language had none of the flexibility and scope that Mijok and others had achieved, but it served him. After absorbing basic arithmetic, Rak had deliberated on the problem of his age—squatting at the gate of the stone fortress by Lake Argo, spreading out rows of colored pebbles to indicate years, rainy seasons, episodes of hunting or fear or passion too keen to forget. At last he had come up with the figure of 130 years. "But," he said, "there are two times. In here"—he patted an ancient scar on his belly—"and there." He pointed at the red crescent moon.

"I'll cook supper," Arek said. Muson bubbled and shadowboxed with her daughter. Muson would laugh at anything—the flutter of a leaf, a breath of breeze on her red-brown fur. Paul followed to help Arek trim the carcass of an asonis killed the night before. Hornless, short-legged, fat, the bovine animal was abundant on the island; its one enemy here was what Arek called usran, a catlike carnivore the size of a lynx, which could tackle only the young asonis or feeble stragglers. Rak hunted in the old way. Bow, club, spear, even rifle, had been explained to him, but the stalk, the single rush and leap, the grasp of a muzzle and backward jerk that snapped the neck before the prey could even struggle—these were Rak's way still. In the old life, Rak's age would have led him eventually to a few dim years with a band of women, who would have fed him until he chose to wander into deep jungle, preventing any from following. When far away, he would have sat in the shadows to wait—for starvation or the black marsh reptiles or a great mainland cat, uskaran, which never attacked a giant in the prime of strength. Rak would have taken no harm from the young men in this weakness: his own territory would have been inviolate, and he would have joined the women, in a taciturn farewell to life, only when teeth and arms had failed. ("We're gentle people," Mijok said, puzzled at it himself. "In the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains we only play at fighting. It's not like what we see the other creatures do at that time. How could one 'possess' a woman? Do I possess the wind because I like to run against the touch of it...?")

The meat hung from a makeshift tripod; Arek jumped back, startled, as a furry thing scampered down. It was like a kinkajou except for the hump on the back (a true hindbrain in the spine: Sears had long ago verified that guess of Wright's). "Little rascal," Paul said. "Let's tame it."

"What?" Arek was bewildered. "Do what?"

"Do these live on the mainland?"

"I never saw one till I came here. Too small to eat. Tame it?"

"Watch." Paul tossed a bit of meat. The visitor's chatter changed to a whistling whine; it elongated itself, grabbed, sat back on stubby hind legs to eat in clever paws; it washed itself with a squirrel's pertness. Arek chuckled, examining the idea, and went on with her work; she had become a hypercritical cook, under Dorothy's guidance. "Jocko, biologist, stand by: I propose to name an animile. Genus Kink, species quasikinkajou." Genus Kink did not retreat at Sears' quiet approach, but wriggled a black nose.

Rak asked in solemn curiosity, "For what is it good?"

"To make us laugh," Paul said, "so long as we're kind to it."

"Ah?" Rak moved his fingers to aid the patient mill of his mind.

"Dance-Nose," said Muson, who already understood. She shook all over. "Come, Funny-Nose." It would not—yet, but Muson could be patient too.

Sears whispered in his beard, "Less homesick?"

"Yes...."

After the meal Arek wanted Paul to come out on the cliffs. Though there seemed no danger from the omasha, she carried a long stick and Paul took his pistol. The slope leveled out to the bare rock of the headland; the ocean voice was the humming of a thousand giants. The way was easy, with no crevasses, no peril while the wind was mild. Arek had often been out here alone. Yesterday Paul had seen her standing for an hour, watching the west where unbroken water met a sun-reddened horizon. In her earlier years there might have been dim mention of the sea by her almost wordless people, but no true knowledge: the mainland coast was steaming vine-choked jungle, or tidal marsh, and shut away by the kaksma hills. Paul wondered what member of his race could stand for an hour in contemplation like a thinking tree, not shifting a foot nor raising an arm...?

"Paul, why did you leave Earth?" Arek patted the rock beside her.

Below the troubled water laughed, endlessly defeated and returning. Cloud fantasies gathered below a lucid green, and the wind was a friend. "I have doubted sometimes whether we ought to have done so."

"That wasn't my meaning. We love you. Didn't you know? But I've wondered what sent you away from such a place. Ann says it was beautiful."

"A—drive of restlessness. We took boundaries as a challenge. I used to think that a great virtue. Now I call it neither good nor evil."

"I think it is good."

"Everywhere, we carry good and evil."

"What you do here is good. You teach us. You do kind things."

"We can be bad. But for Doc Wright and his dreams that Ed Spearman finds so impractical, we'd have done you harm." Helpless at her innocence, Paul saw she did not believe him. "On Earth, we fought each other. We hunted for lies to make ourselves feel big. We created great institutions built on vanity—tickling lies: imperialism, communism—most of the isms you find so puzzling when we talk of Earth history. The anger of Charins rarely focused itself on the actual causes of unhappiness or injustice. Instead we hunted for scapegoats, easy solutions. We wouldn't study ourselves. Always we itched for something external to take the blame for our own follies and crimes."

"I don't understand."

"As if you stumbled on a root, Arek, and then banged your fist on the tree that grew it, to blame it for your own clumsiness."

"But Paul—only a very small child would act like that."

"Darling, let's watch the sunset." She felt his pain, touched his knee, and was silent until he said, "A poor naughty child...."

"There was a thing Ed Spearman said to me—what I wanted to talk to you about. I've never gone to Pakriaa's village. You know, even Mijok won't go there except with one of you. I asked Ed if Pakriaa still kept that stockade for drugging and fattening prisoners—in spite of her agreeing to the laws. He said yes, she did. I said it was not right. I said we made a law against slavery too. He said, 'Forget it, baby—one thing at a time.' I am not a baby. How can the laws govern us unless all obey them?"

"Ed—meant no harm, Arek. He only meant it does take time. The pygmies have more to unlearn. You—started clean. And—well—with the army of Lantis likely to come back at any time—we can't afford—"

Yet it seemed natural that this giant child, who had herself done murder in the old days, should answer his troubled evasions not only with reproach but with command: "If the laws are to govern us they must be respected by everyone. I wish I had gone to that village and torn down the stockade with my hands."

"And they would have killed you with a hundred spears and Pakriaa's people would hate us forever, learning nothing but more hatred."

Arek cried a little, rubbing at the unfamiliar wetness. "Maybe I begin to see, how difficult.... The sun's going." But they sat quietly in the warm and undemanding wind until the first sapphire glint of fireflies dotted the slope where Jensen City might one day shine. Arek stood, reaching down an affectionate hand.