ked up in the various
precincts of his property? Why did those slips oftentime change color,
from blue to pink, or pink-to-blue? What was in those sacks of stuff--no
dung of animals, but a sort of flour--that he intended to work into his
soil? Aaron answered each question as best he could, Waziri
supplying--and often inventing--Hausa words for concepts like
phosphorous, ascarid worms, and litmus.

Aaron had as much to learn from his brown-skinned neighbors as he had to
teach them. He was persuaded to lay in a supply of seed-yams,
guaranteeing a crop that would bring bronze cowries next fall in Datura,
the price of next year's oil and cloth and tools. The peanut, a legume
Aaron had no experience of beyond purchasing an occasional tooth-ful at
the grocery-store, won half a dozen acres from Korean lespedeza, the
crop he'd at first selected as his soil-improver there. He got
acquainted with a plant no Amishman before him had ever sown, a
crabgrass called fonio, a staple cereal and source of beer-malt on
Murna, imported with the first Nigerian colonists.

Aaron refused to plant any lalle, the henna-shrub from which the Murnans
made the dye to stain their women's hands, feeling that it would be
improper for him to contribute to such a vanity. Bulrush millet, another
native crop, was ill suited to Aaron's well-drained fields. He planned
to grow corn, though, the stuff his people called _Welschkarn_--alien
corn. Though American enough, maize had been a foreigner to the first
Amish farmers, and still carried history in its name. This crop was
chiefly for Wutzchen, whose bloodlines, Aaron was confident, would lead
to a crop of pork of a quality these heretics from Islam had never
tasted before.

* * * * *

Work wasn't everything. One Sunday, after he and Martha had sung
together from the _Ausbund_, and Aaron had read from the _Schrift_ and
the _Martyr's Mirror_, there was time to play.

Sarki Kazunzumi and several other gentlemen who enjoyed City Hall or
Chamber of Commerce standing in Datura had come to visit the
Stoltzfooses after lunch; as had Musa the carpenter and his older son,
Dauda, Waziri's brother. Also on the premises were about a dozen of the
local farmers and craftsmen, inspecting the curious architecture the
off-worlder had introduced to their planet. Aaron, observing that the
two classes of his guests were maintaining a polite fiction, each that
the other was not present, had an