To Shayne Bell, a good friend, a good writer, a good man.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their help in the creation of this book, I am grateful to: Erin Absher, for keeping things going when the Card house was in permanent crisis, so that I could go off and write down these made-up stories;

Geoffrey Card, for the holes in the trees leading to the tunnels underground;

Mike Lewis and Dennis Child for the landforms and terrain 40 million years from now;

Clark and Kathy Kidd, for your dining room table, the trip to the beach with a broken leg, and putting up with 48 nights of dinner conversation;

Those who attended my thousand-ideas session at the BYU science fiction symposium where together we developed the original idea of the symbiotic cultures of the diggers and the angels;

Kristine and Kathy, for reading and responding to the pages as they spewed from the fax machine; and Geoff, for wanting to see what happened next;

The citizens of Hatrack River, my virtual neighborhood on America Online, for their critiques and comments on earlier volumes and on each chapter of this book as I completed it;

Scott Alien, for reinstalling every major piece of software on five computers about six times each;

Kathleen Bellamy, for proofreading The Ships of Earth right before I started writing this book, so she could remind me of all the questions that remained unanswered;

And above all to Kristine and the kids (Geoffrey, Emily, Charlie, and our newcomer, Zina), for making my life worth living and my work worth doing.

FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

Children Born in Basilica

Rasa's Children with Volemak, first contract:

Issib (Issya) with Gaballufix:

Sevet (Sevya)

Kokor (Koya) with Volemak, second contract:

Nafai (Nyef)

Volemak's Children with Hosni:

Elemak (Elya) with Kilvishevex:

Mebbekew (Meb) with Rasa:

Issib (Issya)

Nafai (Nyef)