At the church, the pastor blessed the vasái, the exchange itself, which kept the fjord clans strong.

Out in the air of the dance ground after the church service had finished, two long hours of it, the dancers prepared themselves for the formal invitation from across the fjord. Any time now, Aaron said, the host village would summon them across the water for the start of the vasái. A conch would sound, they’d cross the water and the dancers would lead the way up the peninsula to the feast. Young men adjusted their heavy headdresses, old men with bulging calves beat the drums; young girls adorned each other’s tattooed faces with fresh dabs of paint. The atmosphere was festive, a hum of expectation and talk. Martha and Pete were standing in the shade of the church when aya Aita padded up on dusty feet, with square-faced Dulcie and a school-aged boy trailing reluctantly behind. She had a question for the white-man visitor from the university, and the boy was there to turn the talk from saltwater language to English.

Aya Aita wanted to know whether being baptised, which she wasn’t, would mean her passage to paradise could be extended to include her sister, Aaron’s mother, who, being dead, she hadn’t seen for many years, and also her dead husband. Pete said he didn’t know, but Aita clearly didn’t believe him. Would she do better to remain unbaptised, a woman of the old ways, and join her sister with the ancestors? She accepted that God had created the ancestors. But if he had, then wouldn’t the new knowledge, like the knowledge of the ancestors, also have been given by God, and therefore divided into the ownership of separate clans? People were crowding around, joining the debate with noisy interjections. Pete tried to turn matters back to the vasái. But Aita wasn’t to be deflected. Determination was glinting in her one good eye; another grandson was sent to find Aaron.

She wasn’t asking Pete about paradise – the pastor was adept at that. She was asking who owned this white-man knowledge, who had the right to it. Pete, a white man from the university, a friend of Aaron, would surely know something as basic as that. The danger she seemed to be getting at was that, with Aaron and Jacob gone to town, no one knew who had the right to the new knowledge and the new ways, which clans it rightfully belonged to. As aya, mother of the ground, was it not her task to hold the rightful ways in place? If paradise was the way of the future, as the pastor said, then why, all around, were there signs of trouble?

She set her one good eye on Pete and slapped at the boy turning the talk. ‘You tell us not what?’ the boy whispered, ashamed to be asking such questions of this white-man visitor, friend of Aaron.

Afterwards, Pete said it wasn’t an unusual suspicion, he’d heard it many times, and if you think about it, why wouldn’t we white people keep our knowledge secret or give it out to the wrong clans, if it brings us such wealth? But Martha didn’t think it was wealth Aita was asking about, but babies. Hadn’t she turned towards where the women were sitting? Hadn’t she put her hands to her eye, made the shape of a camera? Wasn’t that what she meant when she said the pathways were confused between the old ways and the new? How could a woman who looked at the world through a camera know what was needed?