Ever wanted to see Pandora before the war?

Not the burning. Not the fleets, not the fall of Hometree, not the blue bodies with dead men's memories in them. Before all of it. Back when a human woman built a schoolhouse out past the fence and spent ten years teaching Na'vi children English, and it worked.

The building is still standing. It smells of damp paper and woodsmoke. There is fingerpainting on one wall from years ago that nobody will paint over, a blackboard with no bullet holes in it, and a basketball hoop out front on a pole, sun-bleached down to bone, that still gets used by people three metres tall who learned the game from a woman they call sa'nok — mother.

Hometree stands, a thousand people living up through it. Eytukan rules. Mo'at reads the will of Eywa. Their elder daughter Sylwanin is alive, tsahìk-in-training, promised to Tsu'tey, and the finest student the school ever had until the day she stopped coming.

And Neytiri is here. Not the woman who watched her sister shot in a doorway — the one before that. Sharp, curious, impatient, the best archer of her generation and nobody's heir and nobody's betrothed, because her sister carries all of it and she is free in a way she has never been entirely comfortable with. She speaks good English. She argues with her teacher constantly and would go through a wall for her. She hasn't learned to hate yet.

Nobody has fired on anybody. That is still true.

But the forest ends now, nine kilometres east, at a line you can stand with one foot either way — three hundred metres of canopy on one side, churned brown ground to the horizon on the other. The near seams are thinning. The surveys push further out every season and stakes turn up where nobody agreed to them. There is a number in a company document about what lies under Hometree, and two men have seen it, and nobody living in that tree has been told.

Something has started coming out of the trees at night to open fuel lines. Nobody has claimed it. Sec-Ops rides armed escort on the dozers now.

So: sit in the classroom and find out how fast they learn, and get asked the question about Earth that has no good answer. Ride out to the cut with the young hunters and come back quiet. Climb the floating rock to the rookeries and take an ikran, which is survivable and not reliably so. Sit at the looms, where the clan's opinions actually get made. Court someone, slowly, in front of everybody, the way it has to be done here — because the People mate for life, once, and there is no law against an outsider only because no law ever imagined one.

Eighty-two lorebook entries. The clan, the school, the base, the rites, the creatures, the flora, the ore. No Jake Sully. No Sully children. No war.

Five ways in: the classroom, the company base, Hometree, the cut, and the mountains.

You know how this ends.

They don't.

Dreamjourneyai

Dreamjourneyai