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seemed to rise and fall and for a moment she felt she could grasp a word here and there. Then he stopped. She still had not understood a thing.
    She climbed to her feet, and went down the hill slowly, moving closer to him. She stopped several paces away and waited. He stepped toward her. She took a step back.
    He spoke again, pointing up at the sky with a finger. As he spoke, she reached out carefully and grasped only his unvoiced surface thoughts. Then she saw the meaning of the sounds he was making. She saw his face, then his body in the vehicle as the craft moved toward the foothills. He was saying he was from the sky, or from above, or from heaven; she was not sure which. He said another word, and pointed to her; she realized it was a question. He was asking who she was.
    She did not answer. Instead, in her own language, she said, “You are from the sky.”
    He seemed startled. His surface thoughts rushed together, blurred and incoherent, so she concentrated on his feelings. He had recognized some of her words and that had surprised him. Haltingly, he answered her in her language, though the words were so badly accented she could never have grasped them without reading his mind. “I am from above,” he said, and then a thought reached her, ancient language, very old . She waited for him to say more before realizing that he only recognized the words, had heard her speech before, but did not know more than a few phrases in the language.
    He went over to the craft and reached inside. He took out a small object wrapped in a shiny substance. He held it out to her. She caught the thought.
    “Food,” she said, pointing to it.
    “Food,” he repeated.
    Daiya was hungry. Her stomach gurgled. She suppressed the hunger and shook her head, waving the food away with a hand. She had to remember her training. Anyway, she thought suspiciously, the food could be poisoned or made of dangerous herbs; she had to guard herself.
    The boy peeled away the shiny covering and stuffed the food into his mouth, chewing it quickly. Then he pointed at the ground. He thrust out his hands, motioning downward. He seemed to be telling her to sit down.
    Daiya sat, folding her legs. He sat down across from her and motioned again, but she could not tell what he meant this time. He closed his eyes.
    She watched him. He seemed to be in a trance. For a moment, she thought of touching his mind again, but she did not want to intrude—not that he would notice even if she did. She felt that he did not want to be disturbed. It was almost as if he was communicating with another mind. But that was impossible; he did not have the ability.
    Daiya fidgeted, unfolding her legs, then tucking them in again. The boy was being very foolish, trusting that she would not harm him while he sat entranced. She knew what she should do now. She had only to pull the Net, call the Merging Ones, tell them about this strange boy. They could decide what to do. It would be out of her hands, and she would be free to continue with her training.
    She got up and walked over to the boy's vehicle. She touched the metal and pulled her hand back quickly; it had been warmed by the sunlight. He said he had traveled in this machine. If he had been from another part of Earth, he would have come here on foot or on horseback. But she had known he was not from another village. The ways of other towns were like those of her own community. Her father's own great-grandparents had come from a village several days’ travel to the south; they had been part of a group following an ancient custom which decreed that, every few generations, a number of young people past their ordeal must leave their own home and settle in another, so that human settlements did not grow apart from one another. So the boy had probably been speaking the truth when he said he came from the sky, unbelievable as it seemed. She thought of the comet; it had been a sign after all.
    A dark translucent dome covered the top of the boy's