Unknown COME SING THE MOONS OF MORAVENNLeigh BrackettThe Vanguard Foundation people told us that Moravenn was a young person's world, and they were right.I'm eighteen. My name is Art Farrell.I was seventeen when we landed. Vanguard Beautiful stood off-planet in a stationary orbit while the shuttles brought us down—two hundred of us, with an age limit of twenty-two, sponsored by the Foundation. And we stood looking at this world where we hoped to spend the rest of our lives building a new civilization, fresh and clean and untainted by the sins of our fathers on Earth. We would start anew, with respect for each other and the land.Moravenn's primary is a topaz-colored star way out in the Vela Spur. There are four other planets, either too close to the sun or not close enough to be habitable. Nature is very wasteful. The site chosen by the Vanguard survey for the colony was a wide alluvial plain between two rocky mountain ranges. The soil was rich, the climate dry and healthful, w ith enough seasonal change to keep us alert. The water in the small river ran clear as glass, humming over glistening stones, the day we landed.Marta took my hand and we stood close together, breathing in the alien air, feeling the alien ground beneath our feet. Our hearts were pounding, and I could see the tears of joy and excitement in her eyes."It's wonderful," she whispered. "So empty, so . .. innocent."That night, rolled in our sleeping bags on the sweet-smelling turf, we saw for the first time the moons of Moravenn.There are three of them. One is almost as large as our own Luna. The other two are smaller and closer to the planet. They rose one after the other and spanned the sky like three great, dusky pearls, drowning the starshine. I think we were all awed by the beauty of them, because out of the two hundred voices raised, none was much more than a whisper.Then I heard someone say that we ought to name the moons, and Jamie Hunter said, "They may already have names, you know. The survey party said there might be people here. of some sort."We looked at the mountains, eerie and still in the moonlight, and listened to the silence, and wondered whether there was somebody out there and how it would be if we met. We were not frightened, only curious. We had no prejudices and no warlike impulses, and we were certain that we could get along with anybody. But we were all Earth children and we had never met any extraterrestrials, though we had seen plenty of them on the Tri-D.Marta reached over and took my hand again, comfort for both of us against the strangeness. I know it was very late before I fell asleep.The shuttles brought down our tools and supplies: the field hospital, the microlibrary, the seeds that would be our crops, the animals that would be our companions, enough food to keep us until harvest time. There were no weapons, and no power sources to pour out their poisons into the air. We would use animals and our own unpolluting muscles. Vanguard Beautiful went away with six hundred more colonists to plant among the star-worlds. For the next two years we would be on our own.We set up camp on higher ground midway between the east bank of the river and the abrupt red-gold scarp of the mountains. We would live in pre-cut shelters provided for us until we could build permanent houses. With all hands working, it didn't take long to survey the campsite, lay out the streets—which followed the contours of the land so as to be pleasing to the eye as well as functional—and set up the metal frames of the shelters. The plastic panels slipped easily into place, and we had our first town, all our own. There was no single shelter large enough to hold all of us, so our community meetings were in the open. I can still remember the first one, the immense feeling of strength and pride and dedication we had.We were all specialists, of course, trained by the Foundation. My own field is agriculture, and so I was glad when the next phase of our settlement began, the laying out of theThen it was my turn, to test the soil and say which areas were best for root crops, legumes, leaf crops, and the all-important grains. A large area had been set aside for grazing, and our animals seemed to be thriving.Those were hard days. This alien spring was already well a long. and it was important to get the crops in the ground as rapidly as possible. Everybody worked. Those who were t trained in irrigation methods showed us how to prepare the fields, and then they went up into the mountains with the carpenters, to cut timber for well sweeps and water wheels.We broke the sod, and we broke our backs. We were city-bred, and found that our gymnasium courses hadn't fitted us for plain, hard manual labor. By the end of the day we were too tired for meetings or cultural events. We ate our rations, fell into our cots, and slept.I had a lot of responsibility here. Jamie Hunter was agricultural coordinator and I consulted with him, but the decisions were mine.We got the planting done, then rested our aching muscles. Every day I walked among the fields, searching impat tly for the first signs of green. I had never grown any-thing before except in the Foundation's training plots, and the sheer size and importance of this operation scared me.We got two good rains. That and the warm sun brought every thing leaping up. We watched our growing crops and loved them, and reckoned we could start thinking about building our houses. We had a big meeting on that, to decide whether to bring down timber from the mountains or to make bricks. We decided against the timber because we would have had to cut too many trees, and that was againstour beliefs. We hunted around for a good deposit of clay instead.We found one, and the construction experts got busy. The weather turned hot, which was good for drying the adobe bricks, but the river began to shrink and I had to call for extra help to keep water coming into the irrigation ditches.One afternoon, looking northward where the lines of the mountain ranges converged, we saw enormous clouds pile up. They were purple-black and we could see the distant flicker of lightning. The thunder came muffled, like a distant growl, rumbling on the threshold of hearing. Jamie Hunter looked at the beasts walking their patient circles around the creaking water wheels, and at the people working the well sweeps."It's got to be raining up there," Jamie said. "Maybe that'll help us."We went to bed hoping that the river would rise.In the middle of the night all two hundred of us tumbled out. By the glorious moonlight of Moravenn we watched a foaming wall of water come down our valley, carrying uprooted trees and great booming boulders. The river had risen, all right. We ran from it, and in the morning we saw that half of our fields had been torn away and half of what was left was flooded, and one shelter house was gone.Marta cried, and she wasn't the only one.All that work!All that time and loving care.All that irreplaceable food. Our supplies wouldn't last us to another harvest.This wasn't fair. We felt betrayed. Outraged. And frightened."It's your fault!" somebody screamed. "You, Jamie Hunter! And you, Art Farrell!"Jamie bristled. "What do you mean, it's our fault? Our job was to get the crops in and growing. We did it. Who can help a flood?""You ought to have done your planting somewhere else," shouted another voice, and a lot more chimed in. I looked at all those faces, black, white, brown, yellow, Indian bronze, every one hostile and accusing, glaring at Jamie and me. And we were all brothers and sisters! I took a step forward, my lists doubled. I felt hot all over."We had to have water, didn't we?" I yelled. "Where the hell else could we have done our planting?""Hold it, hold it," said Tom Chen. He was the elected president of our Council, twenty-one years old. He climbed up on a rock. "Listen, all of you! We've taken a hard blow, we're in trouble, and it isn't going to do any good to start fighting among ourselves." He turned to Jamie and me. "We must salvage as much as we can. Get to it. The rest of you, start cleaning up the camp."One truculent girl cried out, "Are you giving us orders, Tom Chen?" But somebody silenced her and we all went grumbling off to see what had to be done and where to startit.Marta spoke to me, worried. "You were ready to hit somebody, Art.""Yes, I was," I said, ashamed. "But they made me angry, blaming Jamie and me. They ought to blame the river.""It's only a river," Marta said. "It doesn't know what it's doing."I couldn't find much charity in my heart for the great slop of muddy water that was drowning my young crops. "Rivers," I said, "can be tamed."The water went down, leaving big raw gouges and piles of debris behind. For days we worked in the mud, digging and hoeing, desperate to save what we could. But when, in our first full meeting after the flood, Tom Chen asked me how much we had saved, I had to admit I didn't know. "I've done everything I could think of, but this is all new to me. We'll have to wait and see.""A great ag expert you are!" somebody said."Let it be," said Tom Chen wearily. "None of us has any real experience. We've read the books, and that's it, and there aren't any books for Moravenn. We'll have to write those ourselves." He was beginning to get lines and shadows in his face that had not been there before. "Anyway, what are you crying about? They told us at the Foundation that this would be hard."Sure, they did. But how could we have imagined an existence bordering on nightmare?Tom Chen went on. "We've inventoried the food stocks. It must be obvious to all of you that we'll have to go on reduced rations in order to stretch our supply as far as we can. And I warn you right now, we may have to start killing things.""You mean, eat meat?" a horrified voice said."Start getting used to the idea."The animal husbandry team jumped up and began making a lot of noise."Of course not your animals!" said Tom Chen. "We need them for other things. I'm suggesting hunters and wild game." We had seen animals from time to time, but they were shy and stayed away from us. Perhaps they didn't like our alien smell. "I won't put it to the vote now. But consider it.""That's silly," Marta said. "We couldn't kill game if we wanted to. We haven't got any weapons.""We can learn to make some. Art Farrell?"I was standing up, asking for the floor. I said, "We've got to dam that river. Control it. Otherwise, every dry season we'll hurt for water, and every time there's a storm in the mountains we'll get washed away.""That's interfering with the environment," said Antelope Woman, the head of our ecology team."We've already interfered with it, haven't we? We ploughed up the land. We planted seeds, we introduced animals that don't belong here, including ourselves. Where do we stop? And there are the fall crops to think about."Everybody started talking at once. Finally, when he could make himself heard, Tom Chen said he wouldn't put that to a vote either, but he would appoint a committee of engineers to make a feasibility study.Some more of the young wheat yellowed and died. Then we had another flood. It wasn't as big as the first one, but it got people thinking. At the next meeting the engineers said they could build a dam, and when it came to a vote the ayes had it.There was a place where the river came through a canyon. The canyon narrowed at one point, and there was a natural basin there to form a big reservoir. The engineers, with all the labor that could be spared from other duties, started work on the dam.In all this time we had never seen any native humans, or humanoids.Now, suddenly, they came.I don't know who saw them first. I was carrying a basketful of stones, coolie-fashion, and I heard the silence kind of close in around me. People were stopping whatever they were doing, putting down their loads and just standing there. I stopped, too, and set my basket on the ground. And I was scared. Gut-scared. These were aliens. They weren't doing anything frightening. They were just watching us. They were stockily built and very agile, about the same size as ourselves, taking a median height. They were naked except for a few strings at the neck and waist for carrying necessities, so we could see that they were all males. Their skin was a ruddy bronze-pink. They had arms and legs, feet and hands—the hands held weapons—and heads.The heads were what curdled me. They were perfectly human—two eyes set frontward, a small nose, a largish mouth—but the bone structure was so oblong and blocky, the jaw so enormously squared and elongated, that they looked like horses' heads. The resemblance was carried even further, in spite of little close-set ears, by the tight white curls that grew on the tops of their heads and continued on down the back of the neck to the shoulders.About thirty of them, looking like so many ponies with their hides off.Tom Chen, who had been toting stones with the rest of us, said, "Everybody stand easy." He beckoned to the two other council members who were there. The three of them joined up and stepped forward, their right hands raised in the universal gesture of peace.Universal?We hoped so.One of the aliens courteously laid his weapons aside and came to meet them. I judged he was an old man. He was weathered and wrinkled, and his eyes had an expression of patient wisdom. In spite of their nakedness, these people did not strike me as being savages.Our spokesman and theirs stood face to face, gabbling and mmaking gestures. The gabble was useless so they dropped that. The old man did a series of things with his hands, pointing to the river and then to the dam, and then making a mot ion of going. He repeated this several times, and finally Tom Chen said, "I think he's telling us that water must be free to run. He imitated the old man. The old man's face brightened and he wagged his huge chin. I noticed they seemed to talk a lot with their chins. The ones in the background were having a busy discussion about us.The old man trotted over to our embryonic dam. He picked up a stone and threw it away. He looked at Tom Chen to see if he understood.He did. "He wants us to tear it down," Tom said, and stared at the old man in baffled annoyance. "How do you explain to him?""Why not invite them to our camp?" I said. "Let them see why we want to dam the river. Let Sammy have a crack at them." That was Sam Agatelli, our extraterrestrial anthropologist. "Maybe he can communicate with them." Sammy had been filling in on everybody else's work; it was time he had his chance to show off.And for all our sakes, we hoped he knew his business.It was no struggle to get them to come with us. They were curious, and I guess they felt strong enough to take us on, if it should come to that. We all marched back to the camp together.On the way I found myself walking next to a young native about my own age, as near as I could guess. His skin was still fresh and glossy, and his blue eyes had a bright sparkleto them. He seemed to want to strike up an acquaintance, so I smiled and said my name, pointing to myself. He bared a set of big white teeth in his equine face and made a noise that sounded like Hrrng."Hrung?" I said, pointing to him.He wagged his chin and laughed. He shifted spear and throwing stick to his left hand, reached out his right hand, and touched me three times on the chest, over the heart. I couldn't help flinching a bit, but I guessed it was a ritual gesture indicating friendship so I reached out and touched him the same way. This time we both laughed, and some of the feeling of strangeness began to ebb.There was big excitement in the camp when we showed up. Tom Chen had sent a runner ahead to warn them. Sam Agatelli was out to meet us, quivering like a puppy. People were setting out food at the meeting ground. They were falling over themselves to make our guests feel welcome, and at the same time trying to hide their own nervousness.We did the hospitality bit. The natives—they called themselves the R'Lann, as nearly as Sammy could make it out—were grave and courteous. They examined all our off-planet things with less amazement than we expected. Then we took them down to the fields and showed them what the river had done.Very carefully, Sammy drew pictographs in the dust. He drew the immature crop, then the mature grain, then a picture of a man eating it. The old man rubbed them out impatiently with his foot."I guess they know about agriculture," Sammy said, and drew a picture of the river. He set two stones to be the cliffs and he built a little earthen dam between them. He drew a lake behind the dam. He indicated how the water would flow through a floodgate, nice and tame and well-behaved. He indicated the fields. He smiled and made gestures meaning "good."The old man shook his head. He took Sammy's stick and began to draw pictures of his own. First he drew a big circle, and stamped on the ground; the circle was Moravenn. Our name, not his. Then he drew a moon. He drew two more moons, in the positions where we now saw them. He erased the two smaller moons and redrew them, in different positions. He did this rapidly three or four times, until the smaller moons were superimposed on the big one. He said something sonorous and very emphatic, and kicked over Sammy's little dam. He threw the stick down and called his people together and they marched away. Hrung looked back and wagged his jaw at me, and I waved.Then we stared at the old man's drawing."What's it mean?" asked Tom Chen.Sammy shook his head. "When the three moons are in line, the dam goes out? I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe it's a symbol of some kind, something to do with their worship. Everybody's got moon myths.""When the three moons are in line," said Tom Chen, frowning. "Gravitational pull? If it's strong enough, it could make trouble. But how often does that happen—if ever?"Nobody could answer that. And we had no computer to do the enormously complicated math that might have told us.Thoughtfully, Tom Chen erased the old man's picture. "We'll build the dam anyway.""Maybe we ought to think about that, Tom," said Sammy. "This is their world. They might know something we don't.""Bunch of bare-backed savages," somebody said. "What would they know?""Besides," said Antelope Woman, "if it is something to do with their worship, and we break a taboo, they might get angry enough to attack us, and they're armed. We're not.""And we don't know how many more of them there may be," somebody said. "We ought to do something—""Make some clubs!""Pile up stones!""Build a wall around the camp!"In a minute everybody was quarreling about what we ought to do. Tom Chen waved his arms and shouted."You want to eat, don't you? Then we've got to build that dam!"Through the clamor of voices I said to Tom, "Looks to me as though there's only one way to find out for sure what they mean. I'll go and stay with them for a while, learn the language.""Do you think they'll let you?""I can try."Tom nodded and turned again to the crowd. I said good-by to Marta. She wasn't at all happy. Neither was Sammy, but he didn't make any offers to go himself. I picked up my bedroll and hurried after the R'Lann.I had a time catching up with them. They really traveled. But I finally did. They stopped when they saw me. I didn't know what they might do, but I held up my hands and smiled, and prayed. Hrung said something to the old man. The old man nodded, and Hrung came, wagging his chin and grinning, and led me into the group.We all went on at a loping trot, up over some cliffs and along a ridge, with the sun hot on my back and my legs aching, and then down some more cliffs into a red rock valley with its own stream and its patches of green and gold where things were growing. The patches were irregular and looked natural, and there were no houses. That was why the survey people had not been sure, on their flyover, whether anybody actually did live here.I learned later that the different bands of the R'Lann--this was only one of them—moved from place to place according to the seasons, and they were somewhere else when the survey crew had a look at their valley. Otherwise they might have seen the women and children tending the garden patches or dressing game.The R'Lann live in caves, neat rooms cut into the soft rock and walled up in front with stones. I found out that a cave is pretty nice—cool in summer, warm in winter, and if you want, to heat it a tiny little blaze will do, hardly more than a lamp flame. If you keep the front wall in repair, a cave is impervious to weather. There's no better place to be at night when a thunderstorm is trying to pound the world apart. The R'Lann decorate their dwellings with carvings outside and bright, wall paintings in the rooms.It was a strange new life I settled into. Hrung seemed to have adopted me as his special property. He spent hours teaching me the language, and I felt the old man was anxious to have him do this as quickly as possible.So the dry hot days were spent in learning, and at night we watched the moons.I mean, watched. There was a special place high on the cliff, where a very elaborate diagram was incised into the rock. There were three stone counters on the diagram, and someone had to sit up there all night long moving the count ters as the moons moved. Normally, Hrung told me, this was done only once a month. But now something was about to happen. I could feel the undercurrent of excitement, and the fear. You could smell the fear in the air of the valley. Something was coming.When it was Hrung's turn to watch, he let me sit up with him. The floor of the watching place was worn smooth and hollow, and it was strange to touch it. It was as though I touched time.The moons seemed to be lower and brighter and more beautiful than ever. But as they drew closer together in their orbits, the cool moonfire seemed to change and grow baleful. The valley was unreal in that wicked light, the cliffs flaring with queer shifting colors. A wind rose and ruffled my hair, and my back went cold. I wanted to crouch and howl like a dog."They will build the Ladder of Souls," Hrung said, "so the spirits of our dead may climb to the holy sky. It is a time of judgment." His voice was very quiet, as if he feared the moons might hear him. He didn't look real, either, sitting like a statue with his massive head bent forward and the shadows on his long face. "I am unlucky.""Why is that?""Unless I die very soon, which I don't want to do, my soul will have to wait many years for its turn at the Ladder. My father has not seen it before. The oldest of the old men has not seen it.""How long is it between these—these happenings?"Hrung shrugged. "The old men say words, but I don't know what they mean. A long time." He swung his head around and the moonlight burned on his white curls. "There are no old men in your band.""No.""But the old men keep wisdom alive.""Old men keep war alive, and lies, and greed," I said. "We do not trust old men.""Well," said Hrung, "perhaps it is so on your world."The moonfire died in the west. The old R'Lann—his name was Kladth and he was chief of the band—came and looked at the markers. Then he motioned with his chin, and we followed him down to the floor of the valley and far along to a desolate and lonely place I hadn't seen before. There was a cave opening and we went to it. The path was worn hollow like the watching place.It was a natural cave. The walls had been smoothed for the paintings that covered them. Thin strips of limber bone were set into cracks in the floor. They stood up like white wands. Kladth led me around to study the paintings. Hrung stayed by the opening. I think he didn't like this place. There was a coldness in it.I couldn't believe what I saw there. I wasn't even certain that I understood. R'Lann art is very stylized and full of symbols.Kladth pointed to the floor. "Down," he said. "Look. Feel."He made me lie down on the rock with my nose almost touching one of the bone wands. I wondered what I was supposed to feel.Deep down beneath me there came a groaning and stirring, as though Moravenn moved in her sleep. The bone wand bent from side to side."It begins," Kladth said.We left the cave, with all those white wands quivering. "Your band is still building," Kladth said to me."The dam?""And houses. This world does not consent to buildings. Go and tell them. Tell them to stop or they will die."Hrung led me back over the ridges to where my people still sweated on the dam. It was higher than I had thought possible. Water had already backed up behind it, a blue lake shimmering in the sun.Hrung said, "I will stop here." I went on alone.Tom Chen and some others met me. The others went on working. They looked thin and sullen; the short rations were telling on them."You look fat enough," said Sam Agatelli."I've been eating meat," I said. "It was that or starve.""Savage," somebody said, and spat.Tom Chen told her to shut up. "What did you find out, Art?""They say you must stop building or die.""Tear down the dam?""And the houses.""Or they'll kill us, is that it?""Kladth said, 'This world does not consent to buildings."" I think he meant the planet will kill you. Tom, they have a cave, with strips of bone set in the floor. Sort of primitive seismographs. Something is happening, deep down in the rock. I felt it. And there are paintings. Pictures of cities, and how they were destroyed. Quakes and tidal waves. It's the moons, I think. They watch. They have a diagram—""How can you be sure of all this?" asked Sammy. "You're not a trained anthropologist." He was sulky because he knew he ought to have gone instead of me."According to anthropologists," I said, "their name ought to mean something like The People, or The Real Men. Right?" Sammy nodded. "Well, R'Lann means The Survivors. They believe they were colonists themselves, long ago. Their legends say they came from the stars, and there was a picture of a great ship in the cave. At least .. .""At least what?" asked Tom Chen."That's what Kladth said it was."Word had spread now that I wanted them to pull down the dam. More people came. Some carried stones, or clubs."We've worked too hard on this to destroy it because of a legend," Tom said, and the crowd growled. "Our winter crops depend on it, our lives depend on it. Have you any better evidence?""The moons," I said. "When the three moons are in line, that's when everything breaks loose. It doesn't happen very often. There's time enough between for men to forget, and build again. That's why they have the paintings, and the diagram at the watching place.""Is that all they told you?"I thought I had to be honest and tell them everything. Maybe if I hadn't. . . . But I told them what Hrung had said about the Ladder of Souls."Moon myth," said Sammy contemptuously. "Just myth.""And I can tell you this," somebody shouted. "If your hammerheaded friends come here looking for trouble, they'll get it. We haven't sweated our hearts out for nothing."Hands waved sticks and stones. Tom Chen sighed and sent them back to work. "We have to go on what we know and believe," he said. "Don't hold it against them, Art. We're tired and hungry. What's worse, we found that somebody's been stealing from the food supplies. I've had to post guards." He shook his head. "Where did it go, Art? Everything we started wit h love, brotherhood, faith . . .""I guess," I said, "things just aren't as simple as we thought,.""Simple!" Torn said bitterly. "No. Art, will you go back to the R'Lann and find out for certain about the moons? They make me uneasy, too."I went back to the red valley with Hrung. And that night the Singing began.In every cave the sacred bundles were taken from the niches and opened, and the sacred garments taken out. Only the stars know how old they were. They were woven of a silvery thread that looked like finely drawn metal, and they weighed a lot. I don't know what the cloth had been used for originally. Shelter tents, perhaps, for the colony. I knew now that that legend was true. The R'Lann reverently clothed their nakedness and marched in solemn procession up the cliff path, past the watching place, to the highest point, where there was an altar cut from the living rock.Those of us who had no garments came behind, and sat down modestly at the back of the space below the altar. The robed men gathered around it. Kladth mounted the low step and laid a wrapped object on the altar. He undid the wrappings, and I saw without too much surprise that the object was a small telescope. The robed men chanted. Kladth stepped down. The chant continued, with halts for our responses.I whispered to Hrung, "What are we doing?""Singing the moons," he said. "Telling them how to make the Ladder of Souls, reminding them to spare the living who obey their laws. The Singing is very important. You see, in so much time, the moons may have forgotten."So we sang. Night after night we sang, and the moons came closer together, and the trouble of the world increased. The small river in the valley began to behave strangely. It rose and fell, overflowing its banks and washing back again. The women and children hurried to harvest the last of the crops, and there was no joy about it, only a furtive haste. People hardly spoke during those days. The oppression of fear and holiness was stifling. I wanted to leave it, but Tom Chen had told me to find out for certain.Then came a night when the innermost moon took a large bite out of her middle sister, who was almost touching the outermost moon. I looked down from our rocky platform and saw the river stand straight up out of its bed, shining in the wild light, and I knew for certain. I touched Hrung and said good-by, very softly so as not to disturb the Singing. I went down the path with the mountain shaking under me, and the standing river fell suddenly apart in lashing coils of water. Some of it wetted me, and I was cold enough already.I knew the way back now, and the beautiful, gliding, deadly moons gave me light enough. The sound of the Singing followed me for a long while. When it faded I could listen to the stones knocking together whenever the world shook.I found Tom Chen sitting above the dam, watching the lake. I sat down beside him. The water had a life of its own. We could hear it moving, talking to itself, searching for a way to freedom. The moons were calling it, and it wanted to go."How long do we have?" asked Tom Chen."I don't know," I said, and told him about the standing-up river."Not long, then," he said, and rose. "We'll do what we can."Day was breaking as we came into the town. I don't think anybody had slept much, tired as they were. People who had moved into permanent houses were out looking at them to see what damage the night's quakes had done. Tom called them all to the meeting place.Marta came to me, but she treated me like a stranger. Her face was hollow and her hands were scarred with work.Tom Chen spoke. "I think now the R'Lann were right. I think we made a mistake. The pull of the moons has been getting stronger and stronger—you can feel that. When they come into line, everything on this side of the planet that isn't nailed down will be obeying that pull. That includes our lake. And I think we had better get the hell out.""Just leave all this? Everything we've worked for?" The pinched, tired faces squinted at him in the morning light."You're only guessing," said Antelope Woman. "You don't know.""Of course I don't know," said Tom irritably. "We have no past on this world. But the R'Lann—""You've been listening to Art Farrell," said Sammy. "He's been swallowing everything those people fed him. Legend, superstition . . .""The quakes aren't superstition," I said. "The river came up out of its bed. I saw that. The lake will do the same thing.""Let the water out!" somebody shouted.Gust Clausen, our chief engineer, said, "We can't. The floodgate's not finished. All we could do is blow the dam, and the whole lake would come down on us anyway. We weren't counting on anything like this."The voices rose, blaming Tom, me, the engineers, the Foundation, and the survey for getting them into this mess. Tom finally quieted them."Those of you who want to gamble that things won't reallly get that bad are free to stay, though I don't advise it. Those of you who want to come with me, get busy. Take the animals up into the hills, except for the draught teams. Food supplies, tools, hospital, library, anything we have time to move, we'll move." Somebody protested, and Tom snarled, "If nothing happens, we can bring them all down again, can't we?"So we took refuge, such as it was, among the hills. Eighteen people elected to stay behind.On the night of the Ladder of Souls, when the two inner moons eclipsed the outer one and the sky turned dark and coppery, and the stars blazed bright, we lay hugging the ground that rumbled and shook and sent the loose rock crashing down. And we saw a great pillar of water rise up above the dam and then slowly, slowly lean over, with tatters of itself shredding away around it. It fell into the valley with a roar like the end of the world, and when the night cleared we couldn't see anything at all below but a glistening wetness.So here we are, one hundred and eighty-two of us. The R'Lann have been good friends. They helped to feed us until we learned how to make spears and hunt, and they're helping us cut caves in the cliffs. They helped us to bury our dead, the eleven we could find, and I'm listening to Kladth about agricultural methods. We'll make it.But it's strange. Nothing worked out the way we expected, not even ourselves. Tom Chen and I haven't got many friends now. People seem to blame Tom for bad leadership, even though we all voted on everything. And the dam was my idea. I thought I was right, I was doing the best I knew how at the time, and I did try to warn them. It's not my fault they wouldn't listen. But they thought they were right. As for the eighteen who died, they made their own decision, and I'm finding out that if you make a wrong one, nothing can protect you from the consequences.Some of our people are determined to go home when Vanguard Beautiful comes again. This wasn't what they bargained for, and they've had it. Most of them, though, seem to be taking up the challenge. They're beginning to think of Moravenn as their world. We have a past here now, and a burying ground, and the beginning of a legend, and I think the colony will stay. Perhaps we'll even get recruits in time to come.And I will stay, of course. Someone has to teach our children how to sing the moons of Moravenn.

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