this Answerer." Lek
spoke the Ollgrat language now, the language of imminent decision.

"Why?" Ilm asked him, in the Hvest tongue of light banter. "Why do you
want to know things? Isn't the job of gathering purple enough for
you?"

"No," Lek said, still speaking the language of imminent decision. "It
is not." The great job of Lek and his kind was the gathering of
purple. They found purple imbedded in many parts of the fabric of
space, minute quantities of it. Slowly, they were building a huge
mound of it. What the mound was for, no one knew.

"I suppose you'll ask him what purple is?" Ilm asked, pushing a star
out of his way and lying down.

"I will," Lek said. "We have continued in ignorance too long. We must
know the true nature of purple, and its meaning in the scheme of
things. We must know why it governs our lives." For this speech Lek
switched to Ilgret, the language of incipient-knowledge.

Ilm and the others didn't try to argue, even in the tongue of
arguments. They knew that the knowledge was important. Ever since the
dawn of time, Lek, Ilm and the others had gathered purple. Now it was
time to know the ultimate answers to the universe--what purple was,
and what the mound was for.

And of course, there was the Answerer to tell them. Everyone had heard
of the Answerer, built by a race not unlike themselves, now long
departed.

"Will you ask him anything else?" Ilm asked Lek.

"I don't know," Lek said. "Perhaps I'll ask about the stars. There's
really nothing else important." Since Lek and his brothers had lived
since the dawn of time, they didn't consider death. And since their
numbers were always the same, they didn't consider the question of
life.

But purple? And the mound?

"I go!" Lek shouted, in the vernacular of decision-to-fact.

"Good fortune!" his brothers shouted back, in the jargon of
greatest-friendship.

Lek strode off, leaping from star to star.

* * * * *

Alone on his little planet, Answerer sat, waiting for the Questioners.
Occasionally he mumbled the answers to himself. This was his
privilege. He Knew.

But he waited, and the time was neither too long nor too short, for
any of the creatures of space to come and ask.

* * * * *

There were eighteen of them, gathered in one place.

"I invoke the rule of eighteen," cried one. And another appeared, who
had never before been, born by the rule of eighteen.

"We