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I cared not an atom. As soon as I sat down I began to suspect I was in the wrong place. There was no slide projector set up, and the students were not ones I had seen in other art history classes. In fact, they were not ones I had seen anywhere. There were three men in identical oxford shirts and razor ties, who as far as I could see were unacquainted with each other; a very fat black man with a lazy eye; an impatient-looking punk wearing that T -shirt with theMilky Way and the legend, “ YOU ARE HERE ”; in the front, a hyperglandular adolescent boy who, after some minutes of examination, I realized was in fact a woman of no less than forty. I felt as if I were at a casting call for a film whose tortured, whimsical plot I could never hope to understand. I wondered briefly what my own part in it could be.
    The class was Introductory Gravinic. The man who had beckoned me in was Professor Gregory McTaggett—that same man whose broken wrist, decades before, had turned him from basketball to the life of the mind. He was the department chair now. Seeing me wandering, he’d taken me for the final student on his roll, a freshman named Bobby Trabant, who, I later found out, had tripped on a sidewalk outcropping on his way to class and split his forehead from his hairline to the bridge of his nose. Bobby never did come to that class, even after the stitches came out.
    But I stayed. Why not stay? Julia had opted out of Can Art? in favor of a course for which I lacked the prerequisites. Anyway, it had recently become clear to me (although I had not yet told Julia) that no amount of diligence would allow me to graduate in art history at the end of that year. I was going to have to switch to mass communications. Consequently I had a great deal of room for electives in my schedule.
    The first day was not what I expected—no hello, good-bye, my name is, I would like. Instead McTaggett outlined the history of the Gravine and its strange language, assuming correctly that the material was unfamiliar to all of us.
    McTaggett’s lecture began in the final, heady days of the Pleistocene, about 35,000 years past, when an arm of glacier retreated over a ridge in the Carpathians and revealed a bowl-shaped valley. Some time later, a troop of fresh-minted Cro-Magnons happened in, and, finding game plentiful and the climate to their liking, stayed. The only entrance, a narrow, snow-clogged pass, was easy to defend even with Paleolithic ordnance. So the proto-Gravinians retained the integrity of blood and territory, while clans displaced clans in violent feuds outside. Their language, too, developed without interference.There had been attempts to link Gravinic with other pre-Indo-European remnants: Basque, Finnish, the Tiktiksprache of certain Baltic islands. None were convincing. As far as was known, Gravinic constituted a linguistic family in and of itself.
    I found myself paying as much attention to McTaggett himself as I did to the content of his lecture. He was tall, of course, shocked with red hair, strangely wide in the shoulders and tapered thereafter. When he was speaking he paced out the blackboard side of the classroom, almost stomping, like a coach facing an inevitable loss. I noticed with some embarrassment that the students around me were all writing furiously. I had not even brought a notebook.
    Gravinian folklore had it (McTaggett went on) that the country had been founded by two ancient monarchs, called King Speaker and King Listener. Listener was perfectly attuned to the needs and desires of his subjects; a single word, it was said, would suffice for any petition to him. Speaker’s gift was to issue royal decrees in language so stirring and precise that it was considered a privilege to obey them. There was no archeological evidence for the existence of this colorful pair. The going theory had the Gravinian state developing gradually out of the usual communalistic sentiments, without the intervention of any