Now it was Sumpter who was excited. She was forgetting herself in the enjoyment of new discoveries, as he’d hoped. She was feeling less trapped. He’d been appointed as her teacher, and she was learning quickly. But how much could she learn? What were her capacities? It was important that he encourage her just enough, without making her feel inferior, faced as she was with so many new experiences.

He walked quickly to a small particularly bright corner of the courtyard, without waiting for her, then stopped. Ma-ah followed readily enough, dawdling along slightly to show that the decision to follow was her own. Good. He wanted to encourage her independence, at least when it wasn’t just stubbornness.

But she forgot everything else as she examined this corner of the wall. Here the drawings were particularly vivid, the colors alive and glowing. Some were figures of animals and birds that she’d known in her own world, but others she’d never seen before. Excited, she pointed out those with which she was familiar, feeling that she was showing him something for a change. Sumpter was delighted. He waited for her to discover the writing, the simple one-word descriptions beneath.

It didn’t take her long. She spied the wiggly symbol beneath the bird first, and impulsively fingered it. The sound translation zinged through her fingertips—weak as yet, Sumpter could tell, but she was getting it. It took her only a few seconds to connect the sounds she was getting from the symbol, with the drawing of the bird above.

It would be a while before he could explain that the symbols were embossed with sound—not the drawings themselves, as in the earlier ones she’d seen, because if all the paintings identified themselves audibly, then there would be no built-in reason for pupils to learn the written characters.

“Boroo,” she said, wonderingly, pointing at the bird.

“Boruu,” he corrected quickly, almost shouting and smiling at once because she was learning so fast.

Ma-ah loved challenges, but she wasn’t about to appear inferior. She frowned, indicated the picture of a hare with its written character, and demanded the sound-word for it. Gently Sumpter shook his head. She sulked for a moment, but then returned to the wall, touched the symbol beneath the image, and laughed with renewed astonishment as the symbol automatically gave up its sound to the pressure of her hands.

“Zentu,” she said, repeating it. Then she put her fingers to her ears, but the sounds were absorbed too quickly by the skin; she couldn’t transmit the sound, like that, to the ears. She glared at Sumpter: where had the noises gone? Had he taken them from her in some way? He pointed back to the symbol. She touched it, receiving another sound stimulus, and from then on there was no stopping her.