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wasn't men per se, it was rational men, men of science and scholarship, men like Father. And like me.

Father was grumpy - no, downright surly - when he came downstairs for supper. Uncharacteristically, he said little during the beginning of the meal, though his eyes burned a little when Katerina crossed herself and muttered a short Christian prayer before setting fork to food. Ivan tried to ignore his father's ill temper, preferring to watch the way Katerina learned the customs of the table, different here from Cousin Marek's. From the imperious traveler she had been upon crossing the bridge, contemptuous of strange customs, Katerina had in a few days changed herself amazingly, becoming downright adaptable, perhaps even welcoming of change. She fumbled now and then, but with a charming manner, and when Ivan did notice his father it was because his father was noticing Katerina and giving her grudging respect.

Or was that it? For after the meal, when Katerina and Mother were clearing away - Ivan would have helped, but both women insisted that this time he let them work together - Father leaned back in his chair and, a cynical little smile at his lips, said, "She certainly is picking up modern customs quickly, isn't she?"

The implication was clear - that Katerina was only pretending not to be a modern woman.

"How stupid do you think people of the ninth century were, and how difficult and complicated do you think our customs are?" asked Ivan.

"Don't get sarcastic with me," said Father. "You're asking me to believe in a pretty far-fetched story, when Occam's razor demands a much simpler explanation."

"Believe me, Father, if there were a simpler explanation, Occam and I would both be happy."

"You believe what you want to believe," said Father. "I must believe the evidence."

Ivan could hardly believe what he was hearing. Switching into English - his natural language for savage intellectual argument - he leaned in and said, "How often in my life have you known me to get sucked into some confidence game? Have I claimed to see UFOs? Did I join the Communist Party? Where exactly did I earn this reputation as an unskeptical believer of whatever bullshit comes down the pike? And you, Father, when did you become the supreme rationalist, the impartial judge of evidence you haven't even seen? It seems to me that I'm the eyewitness, and you're the one making judgments based solely on your pre-existing faith."

"Faith in a rational universe, yes."

"No, Father. You don't have faith in a rational universe. This is a universe where nothing can move faster than the utterly arbitrary speed of 186,000 miles per second, where feathers and rocks fall at the same speed in a vacuum, where a measurable but unexplainable force called gravity binds people to planets and planets to stars, and where a butterfly's wing in China might cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. But you have faith in all this incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo which you don't begin to understand, solely because the priests of the established church of the intellectuals have declared these to be immutable laws and you, being a faithful supplicant at their altar, don't even think to question them."

"You sound like a convert to a new religion yourself," said Father dryly.

"Maybe I am. Or maybe I'm the guy who crawled out of the cave, and you're still back inside it, trying to understand the universe by studying shadows on the wall. Well, Father, I've seen things that can only be explained by magic. Now, I guess I'm really still a closet materialist, because I believe these things all have rational explanations, using principles of nature that are not yet known to us. But what I can't do is close my eyes and pretend that the things that have happened to me will go away if I just say 'Einstein' five times fast."

"I was invoking Occam, you'll remember," said Father.

That was enough of a touch of humor to defuse the situation a little. "Look, Father, I can't argue with you, I can't persuade you, because you weren't there. All I can tell you is this: No language can survive without a community of speakers. As you said yourself, the proto-Slavonic that Katerina speaks is far too pure and ancient to come from an isolated pocket in the mountains somewhere. Occam's razor demands only one answer: She actually is from the ninth century."

"No, Vanya, it demands a completely different one - she's an Eliza Doolittle. She's been trained to speak proto-Slavonic, fluently."

"No!"