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entertainments moved to the largest Congregation Hall usually reserved for weekly Holy Day services. But as the weather warmed, the diversions multiplied and the outdoor facility was necessary. Now the written, developed, composed and practiced pieces which kept the citizens of Edge occupied during the long wet nights of the past season could be properly performed.
    Mahrree usually skipped those entertainments in favor of rea ding in her gathering room. She loved to lay out her father’s collection of writings across her eating table and spend hours thinking. She filled her mind with arguments and theories in preparation for her debates. And her students, of course. Mahrree had engaged in debates in her higher education at the woman’s university in Mountseen, much larger than Edge and only half a day’s walk away, so she could still visit her mother during those two years.
    But what passed for debates in Edge would never stand up to the rigors of a formal university argument. Edge’s debates were a sharing-arguing-complaining of ideas, disagreements, and occasio nally utter nonsense. And that’s what made the debates so interesting. Mahrree made her way up to the raised timber-worked platform, feeling the thrill of the unknown argument. Over four thousand people could be seated on the long lines of wooden benches for large events, which was all of the adults in Edge and a few hundred of their children—far too many people for Mahrree to comfortably face. But on planting evenings like this, only about five hundred people would be there at the beginning. Once the sun set, many more would trickle in to catch the end of a concert or see the last act of a play.
    Each performance began with a debate. It might be two neig hbors arguing over a property line, or a discussion about a public nuisance, such as an aggressive dog or a loud neighbor. One debate was begun by a young woman challenging what behaviors parents could dictate. It turned out the girl was angered by her parents’ refusal to allow her to wear a thin black line of charcoal around her eyes to make them “prettier.”
    The audience decided she was pretty enough, and didn’t need to look like an animal that raided the trash heaps at night.
    But mostly the debates were forums for new ideas to be analyzed in front of a group. Every village in the world argued, sniped, and shouted in this way, occasionally even to a consensus. In Edge, one of the three rectors always moderated the discussion, since men who knew the Creator could better quell anger than the local magistrate who instead inflamed it.
    Mahrree prided herself, though she humbly knew she shouldn’t, on her debating skills. She read everything she could find, listened to each idea, and wrote down any novel concept and the arguments for it and against it. She even ran her students through the paces of an alyzing an issue, turning the entire front wall of smoothed stone in the schoolhouse into a mass of words written in white chalk and black charcoal to represent the two sides. She interjected ideas from The Writings and found it all great fun.
    What students thought of it, that didn’t matter as long as they learned to think.
    Tonight a sizable crowd was gathered already, at least six hundred. Word had spread that there was a new debater “Just for Mahrree,” Rector Densal, her father’s old friend, had told everyone that day.  Not only did the debater bring ideas from Idumea, he was from there.
    “And I’ll warn you now, Miss Mahrree—he’s an officer,” he i nformed her three days ago when he suggested the debate.
    “In the army?” Mahrree asked the obvious to give herself time to think about this man whom no one in the village had been happy to hear had arrived. While he seemed to keep well enough to himself up at the forest edge, it was only a matter of time before he wa ndered down among them and did something . . . official .
    Rector Densal smiled warmly. “Miss Mahrree, the army is not