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After di

"Maybe I ought to take that one," Ella said, looking over her shoulder. "You could have this place. I need the exercise more than you do." She sighed. "No, it wouldn't do. Knowing me, I'd take the shuttle in instead of walking. Oh, well."

Still grumbling, Je

"When does it come vacant, three days from now?" Ella asked.

"That's right. I hope I won't be too much a bother till then," Je

"Tonight's not a problem, and neither is tomorrow. But the day, or rather the night after that?well, I'd invited Xavier over, and… you know what I mean," Ella said.

"Oh, yes," Je

"You're sweet, Je

Je

When Je

"I suppose so," Je

"You never do," Ella said. "I remember this fellow I was seeing about ten years ago…" The tale that followed went on for some time and was more lurid than the fiction Je

When she tried to sleep in Ella's front room, Je

Ella's alarm screamed like a banshee?worse than an Atheter, Je

Je

The caffeine and the thought of the material she was going to present made her more lively by the time her Middle English class rolled around. She was begi

The chuckles disappeared before she reached the podium. She fixed the class with as steely a gaze as she could muster?not very steely, she knew down deep, but she did her best. In what she hoped was a stern voice, she demanded, "Who hasn't kept up with the reading for today?"

A few luckless souls, lazy and honest at the same time, raised their hands. "You'll have to do better than that," she told them. "You knew when you enrolled?you certainly knew when you saw the syllabus?your work load would be heavy here. You have to stay with the lectures if you expect to get full benefit from the course."

Thegun Thegun Nug and the other two Foitani had kept their big, thick-fingered hands down. Je

She said, "We're not going to look at imaginary aliens for a while. Instead, we'll consider science fiction's examination of a problem that was pressing for several generations: the risk that mankind would a

All three Foitani sat straighter in their slight, too-small chairs. She thought of the history of their race and shivered a little: a species didn't have to be planet-bound to do a pretty fair job of a

"For those of you who did read the lesson," she went on, "we'll discuss A Canticle for Leibowitz first. Ever since it was written, many people have named it the best science fiction novel of all time. The section I want to examine now is the middle one, the one called 'Fiat Lux.'"

"What is the meaning of this heading?" Aissur Aissur Rus asked. "Our translator program broke down on it, making obscure references to ancient wheeled conveyances and soaps. This does not seem appropriate to the content of the book."

"It sure doesn't." Je

"Ah." That wasn't Aissur Aissur Rus; it was a human student. Several others also made notes. Je

"'Fiat Lux' is particularly interesting for its blend of historical analogy and extrapolation," she said. "The role of the church in the piece is based on what the church actually did after the collapse of the Roman civilization earlier in Earth's history; the Romans, by the way, were the people who used Latin.

"But the civilization which Miller envisioned collapsing after nuclear war was his own, which had already become highly dependent on technology. As civilization restored itself, as it began to discover once more how the world worked, it also began to discover that it was in fact rediscovering, was only finding out what its ancestors had already known. Miller effectively paints into his book the intellectual turmoil this realization would create?"

Je