Wyrms

Chapter 11. HEFFUFS HOUSE

LATE ONE AFTERNOON THEY WERE TRIMMING SAIL AS THEY rounded a bend through a narrow channel between sandbars, when River clicked his tongue twice and the monkey began to screech. By now everyone knew this meant River wanted a quick change in course. They stopped all conversation and listened-River's voice was never loud.

"Hard port!" he said. Will, who was at the helm, heeled the lever toward the starboard side, and almost at the same moment Sken grabbed Patience and a gebling and ran to the left side of the boat. Patience only had time to catch a glimpse of what they were avoiding-a large buoy, big enough that if they had collided head on, with their speed from such a brisk wind, it would have done real damage to buoy and boat alike. As it was, they still bumped into it, but side-on and slower.

"That's supposed to be two mile upriver," said the pilot. "Last flood season must have dragged her anchor down here so far. Cast a line."

Sken didn't hesitate. She knotted a rope onto a grappling hook, swung the hook above her head, and cast it against the buoy, now bobbing some dozen yards behind them. The hook caught on the first throw, but Patience didn't know whether that was remarkable or just what a competent riverwoman would be expected to do.

"What are you doing with that!" demanded Ruin.

"Putting it back where it belongs," said Sken, as if it were-a fact that should be obvious even to a child.

"None of our affair," said Ruin.

"There's too many on the river feels that way already," said Sken. "But River and me, we feel the same on this. When something's out of place that you can fix, then you fix it, so next pilot won't risk what almost got us."

They got back on course through the channel and then it was clear sailing for a while. Long enough to take a better look at the buoy. It had a sign on it, at such an angle that you could just read it if you leaned out from the stern on the starboard side. In Geblic, Gauntish, Dwelf, and Agarant-the language all traveling humans used, regardless of their native tongue-the sign advertised a single thing for sale:

ANSWERS

Angel laughed aloud when Patience told him what it said. "When have you seen such arrogance before?"

"Maybe they're not selling," said Reck. "Maybe they're buying."

Patience did not laugh. It was too ironic. If there was anything she needed right now, it was answers. And here they were, offered hi trade.

Two miles on, they dropped anchor and hauled in the buoy. Sken and Will lashed it to the boat, then hauled up the buoy's anchor and added a bag of ballast to it. It was an hour's work at most, but Patience took no part in it, so she had time to look for the place on shore where the answers might be found. It wasn't a heavily settled area, so it could only be the house well up on a hill, perhaps a quarter-mile walk from the river.

If the house had been one of the common inns along the river, preying upon travelers with rigged games, indigestible food, and bug-ridden beds, Patience would not have had them put ashore. Instead, though, it was old and modest, and far enough back from the water that it couldn't be a money trap for travelers. If they hadn't anchored to fix the buoy, it would have been visible only for a moment in a gap between trees along the river's edge. To Patience, this suggested that the sign was sincere enough. It was a place for people who wanted truth enough to work to get it-out of the way, hard to reach, with only a single sign to tell them what it was, and only a single sight to tell them where.

Of course, the moment she thought of stopping. Patience felt the pressure of the Cranning call within her, urging her to go on, faster, faster. It was no stronger now than before; Unwyrm was not trying to get her to avoid this place in particular. But because the need to hurry on was so great, and because she knew that someone else was producing that need within her, she resisted for the sake of resistance, the way that she had deliberately endured extra suffering as a child, to inure herself to hardship.

When Will and Sken climbed aboard the boat and began unlashing the buoy, Patience spoke her decision.

"Bring the boat ashore."

"At that place!" said Sken. "I will not! We'll pass a dozen better inns before nightfall."

Patience smiled and spoke to River. "The pilot sets the course, the captain rules the life aboard the ship, but the owner says what ports the ship will visit. Am I right?"

River winked at her.

Sken cursed, but instead of raising sail again, she and Will poled the boat to shore.

They touched the ragged-looking pier that ran out into the river and tied the boat fast. Leaving Sken to keep watch over Angel, Patience led Will and the geblings ashore. Angel demanded to be taken along. Patience ignored him. She didn't feel the same need to defer to him that she had felt before he started lying to her.

There wasn't much of a path up the hill. Patience let Ruin lead the way-he could find a trail on bare rock in a rainstorm, or so it seemed. Reck and Will fell into place behind her. It was as though she were truly Heptarch, with an escort before and behind; or a prisoner, with keepers to cut off all escape.

The hilltop house was even shabbier than it had looked from below. The windows were unglazed and unshuttered, and the smell of the yard out back made it plain that the pigs were responsible for washing themselves. "Could it be that no one lives here now?" asked Patience.

Ruin grunted. "Fire's lit."

"And there's fresh water in the kitchen," added Reck.

Patience turned to Will. "Is there anything they can't find out with their noses?"

Will shrugged. Not too bright, thought Patience. But what could you expect of the sort of man who'd live with geblings?

Their knock on the door brought a quick shout from inside. A female voice, and not a young one. "I'm coming!" The cry was in common speech, but the accent told Patience that it was not her native tongue. And sure enough, it was a dwelf, smaller than the geblings, with the half-size head that made them look spectacularly repulsive.

"From a dwelf we're supposed to get answers?" asked Ruin, with his usual tact.

The dwelf frowned at him. "To a goblin I'm supposed to give them?"

"At least she speaks in complete sentences," said Reck.

But it was Patience who reached out her hand for the dwelf to lick her fingers. Custom satisfied, the dwelf invited them in, and immediately led Patience to what was obviously the seat of honor near the fire. Will, as always, hung back to stand by the door. He never seemed to consider himself to be part of what was going on.

Only a watcher, a listener. Or perhaps not even that, perhaps an accessory, like a horse, to be brought forward only when needed.

The dwelt brought them boiling water and let them choose the leaves for the tea. Patience inquired about the possibility of getting rooms with closable windows for the night.

"That depends," said the dwelf.

"On what? Tell us the price."

"Oh, the price, the price. The price is good answers for my questions, and good questions for my answers."

"You can never communicate with a dwelf," said Ruin impatiently. "You get more intelligent conversation from trees."

He spoke in Geblic, but it was obvious that the dwelf had at least caught the gist of what he said. Patience suspected that she actually understood Geblic, which would make her much brighter than usual for her kind.

"Tell us," said Patience, "what sort of question you have in mind?"

"Only the Wise stay here," said the dwelf. "The Wise from all lands, and they leave behind their wisest thoughts before they go."

"Then we've come to the wrong place," said Patience.

"All the Wise left our lands before I was born."

"I know," said the dwelf sadly. "But I make do with what comes along nowadays. You wouldn't happen to be an astronomer, would you?"

Patience shook her head.

"You have an urgent need for one?" asked Reck.

"Oh, not urgent, not urgent. It just seems to be a lost art, which should surprise you, considering that we all came from the stars."

"She did, and the big one at the door," said Ruin. "The rest of us are native born."

Tilt The dwelf smiled a little. "Oh," she said. "You think geblings are natives here?"

Now, for the first time, Patience began to wonder if she shouldn't take this dwelt seriously, not just out of courtesy, but because she might know something of value. Certainly her hint that the geblings were also starborn & I implied that her ideas would at least be interesting. Interesting enough that Angel ought to be here. She might be annoyed with him, might not trust him, but Patience was not such a fool that she would reject the possibility of profiting from what truth he would tell her. She turned to Reck. "Do you think Will would go down and bring Angel up?"

Reck looked annoyed. "I don't own Will," she said.

Since Will acted far more like a slave than Angel did, Patience thought Reek's pretense of not controlling him was ridiculous. Will never did anything unless Reck had given him permission first. Still, Patience offered no retort, but merely turned to Will and asked if he thought he could carry Angel up to the inn. Will said nothing, but left immediately.

"Why are you sending for more of your party," asked the dwelf, "when I haven't said that you could stay?"

"Because Angel is the closest thing to a wise man we have with us. He's a mathematician."

"He's a nothing, then. Numbers and more numbers. Even if you understand enough to ask the questions, the answers mean nothing at all."

This delighted Patience, who had said much the same thing to Angel on more than one occasion. She could have recited Angel's answer, too, since she had memorized it from the sheer repetition. Instead, though, Patience took the dwelf at her word. She offered answers, so why not ask the question that mattered most? "Let me ask you a question. Who and what is Unwyrm, and what does he want?"

The dwelf smiled in delight, jumped to her feet, and ran out of the room.

"If she has the answer to that," said Reck, "then she knows what no other living soul knows."

Soon the dwelf came bounding back into the room.

"Unwyrm is the brother of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs, and the son of the Starship Captain's possessor," she said. "His mother once had the whole world, and he wants it back." She beamed with pride.

Ruin cut in, impatiently. "Anybody could make up this kind of mix of truth and speculation-"

"Hush," said Patience. Then, to the dwelt, she said, "I'm sorry, I missed part of that, where you said-"

Before she could finish, the dwelf said it again. "Unwyrm is the brother of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs, and the son of the Starship Captain's possessor. His mother once had the whole world, and he wants it back." Again she smiled the identical smile. It was as if they had seen the same moment twice. The dwelf was giving an answer that she had memorized.

Ruin looked at Reck, then smiled. "All right, now let us give you a question," said Ruin. "Where is the mindstone of the ancient gebling kings?"

Patience had little trouble guessing the answer to this question herself, but controlled her own misgivings and feigned ignorance. "What's the mindstone?" she began.

But the dwelf was already up and running out of the room. And while she was gone, Reck and Ruin kept touching each other's faces as if each were studiously forming the other's likeness in clay. Patience decided there was more to their question than a mere test. And sure enough, when the dwelf came back into the room, they turned to her and waited intently for her reply, showing more interest than Patience thought their stolid faces could ever show.

"The mindstone of the gebling kings, which became the scepter of the Heptarchs, is imbedded in the shoulder nothing, trying to keep her face a mask of polite bafflement. There was no way this dwelf could possibly have known about her father's secret.

Watching the silent tableau of geblings staring at the human girl, the dwelf began to giggle insanely. "And now you've answered my question, all of you."

Patience turned to her politely. "And what is your question?"

"My question of you is, who are you, and why do geblings and humans travel together this way?"

"And what was our answer?" asked Reck.

"Your answer was that you are the gebling king, the boy and girl of you, and you, human, are the daughter of Peace, the Heptarch, and he is dead, and you now have the mindstone and scepter. You're going into battle, but you aren't sure whether or not you're on the same side."

This was no ordinary dwelf.

Patience drew the slender glass rod of her blowgun from the cross at her neck. She also took the loop from her hair. She spoke quietly to Reck and Ruin, in a tone of calm, sure intention. "If you move from your places, you'll be dead before you take a step."

"Oh, my," said the dwelf. "You shouldn't ask for answers that you don't want to hear. Let's not have any killings here. This is a place where the only traffic is in truth. Let me have your oath, all of you, that you'll wait to kill each other until you get back to the river."

No one volunteered to take the oath.

"What have I done? Trouble, trouble, that's what the truth is. You poor fools-you thought a dwelf could never know anything, and so you asked me the questions whose answer you thought no one could have. But I have all the answers. Every one of them."

"Do you?" asked Reck. "Then tell us how to resolve our dilemma. However you knew the answer, Patience has as much as confessed that she has the most precious possession of the gebling kings. Now more than ever before in our history we must have it, we must know its secrets. We would gladly kill her to get it, and she would as gladly kill us to keep it for herself. When Will comes back, we'll have no difficulty killing her, so she'll have to kill us before he gets here."

"I told you, take an oath," said the dwelf.

"We would never keep an oath about the mindstone," said Ruin, "nor would we believe her if she made one."

"I don't even know what it is," said Patience. "I only know that Father said to keep it at all costs, and Angel said to ask you to implant it in my brain."

Ruin laughed. "He thought that once I had it in my hands, I would put it into you?"

Reck, still not moving, silenced him with a hiss. Then she said, "Patience, my fool of a brother doesn't understand.

Though the mindstone by rights belongs to us, it's no good to us now."

"No good to us!" said Ruin.

"When the humans first thought to put it in their brains, it drove them mad. There was too much gebling in it. But now we could never put it in our own minds- there's too much human in it."

Ruin frowned. "There's a chance we could use it."

"And there's a better chance we could destroy ourselves trying."

Ruin looked furious. "After so many years-and we find it now at the time of greatest need, and you say we can't use it!" But his anger turned immediately to despair.

"You say it, and it's true."

Patience was skeptical. This could be a trick to lull her into complacency. So she turned to the dwelt for the only help she could think to ask for.

"I have a question for you," she said. "Tell me what the scepter does when it's connected to the brain."

"If I leave to get the answer," said the dwelf, "you'll probably kill each other before I get back, and then I can never ask you anything more."

"If they don't leave their chairs, then I won't kill them," said Patience.

"We won't leave our chairs," said Reck.

"But don't be too sure you could kill us," said Ruin.

Patience smiled. The dwelf shuddered and left the room. There was no spring in her step this time.

She came back in muttering to herself. "It's long," she said.

"I'm listening," said Patience.

The dwelf began to recite. "When implanted above the limbic node in the human brain, the organic crystal called the scepter or mindstone grows smaller crystals that penetrate to every portion of the brain. Most of these are passive, collecting important memories and thoughts.

A few of them, however, allow the human to receive memories previously stored in the crystal by prior occupants.

Since many of the memories belong to the first seven gebling kings, in whose brains the crystal originated, this can be most disorienting to the human. If the human is not able to gain control of the crystal, the alien memories can impinge on the mind in unwelcome and unmanageable ways, lending to confusion of identity, which is to say, madness. The safest way to use the crystal is to implant it in a protected place near a fairly important nerve. One or two chains of crystal will make their way to the brain, collecting memories but almost never supplying any to the human host. But there's bloody little chance that you'll ever meet anyone who needs this information, Heffiji."

All of them laughed at the last sentence.

"Whoever gave you that answer, dwelf, wasn't as wise as he thought."

"I know," said the dwelf. "That's why I left it in, so you could see that I asked him a good question after all, even though he thought I didn't."

"And what happens when it's implanted in a gebling's brain?" asked Patience.

"But why would anyone do that?" asked the dwelf.

"All a gebling has to do is-"

"Silence!" whispered Ruin.

"No," said Reck. "No, let her tell."

"All a gebling has to do," said Heffiji, "is swallow it. The gebling body can break the crystal into its tiniest pieces, and it will form again exactly where it ought to be in the gebling's brain."

"How could that happen?" asked Patience. "Why can geblings use it so easily, when humans-"

"Because we're born with mindstones," said Ruin, scornfully. "We all have them. And we eat our parents' mindstones when they die, to carry on the memories that mattered most to them in their lives." He looked at Reck with bitter triumph, as if to say, Well, you said to tell her, and now I have.

Patience looked from one to the other in growing understanding. "So all those stories that geblings eat their dead-"

Reck nodded. "If a human saw it, though it's hard to believe a gebling would ever let them see-"

"Dwelfs too," said Heffiji. "And gaunts."

"There are mindstones of some sort, much smaller than ours, too small to see, in all the animals of this world," said Ruin. "Except humans. Crippled, fleshbound humans, whose souls die with them."

Our souls die, thought Patience, except those whose heads are taken. It was a question she had thought of more than once. How did the taking of heads begin?

Why did human scientists every try to keep a head alive?

Because they knew, hundreds of generations ago, they knew that the native species had a kind of eternal life, a part of their brain that lived on after death. They were jealous. Taking heads was the human substitute for the mindstones of the geblings, dwelfs, and gaunts. Instead of the crystal globe of the mindstone, for us it was gools, headworms, and eviscerated rats dropped by a hawk into a glass jar.

"Only the Heptarchs, among all humans, have taken their parents into themselves," said Reck. "And that was only by stealing our noblest parents from us. Your ancestor killed the seventh king and stole his mindstone, so that the kings of the geblings have no memory now of how the kingdom began. Ruin is of the foolish opinion that it would be of some advantage to us to have it now.

I, however, understand that it would only have been to our advantage if we had had it all along."

"I must have it," said Ruin. "If I'm to know what I must know-"

"Unwyrm wants you to do it, Ruin." Reck seemed to enjoy forcing her brother to bow before her superior understanding. "It would please him, to have half the gebling king a babbling lunatic. Fool. If it drove humans insane, with their incomplete coupling with the stone, what do you think it will do to you, to be utterly and perfectly bonded to more than three hundred human minds?

No gebling is strong enough to endure that."

Patience could see that Ruin was not pretending now; he was yielding to his sister's arguments. If she said nothing, it was clear the dispute would be settled with the scepter left peacefully in her possession, perhaps even implanted in her brain. Yet if it was so dangerous that Ruin would not use it, she had to know more of what it would do to her.

"Are human and gebling minds so alien to each other?" she asked. "We speak each other's languages, we-"

"You don't understand the beginning of the gebling mind-" began Ruin.

"It's our strength," said Reck, "and our weakness.

We're never alone from the moment of our birth. Isolation is a meaningless word to us. We can feel other geblings on the fringes of our consciousness, awake and asleep. When we swallow a mindstone, we become the person whose stone we swallowed, for days, sometimes weeks and months, until we can sort out all the memories and put them in their place. If Ruin had to become human that way, three hundred times over, the isolation would probably be unbearable, like the death of half himself. You, though, a human being-you're used to loneliness because you never know anything else. And the mindstone doesn't bond so perfectly with you. A strong human-like you-"

"You want me to implant it in her, don't you," Ruin said.

"I think so, yes," said Reck.

"It may make her even more subject to Unwyrm's will," he said.

"But what does that matter? At worst, it would make her a helpless pawn to Unwyrm. Since that's how she'll probably end up anyway, what difference does it make?"

Patience shuddered inwardly at their utter lack of sympathy for her. Even she, a sometime assassin, still felt some understanding, some elementary kinship with the people that she killed. Now, for the first time, she realized that they regarded her as a beast, not a person. They assessed her as a man might assess a good horse, speaking of its strengths and weaknesses candidly, in the horse's presence. The difference was that Patience could understand.

Ruin, still angry despite having to admit that his sister was right, turned to Patience. "I'll implant the mindstone, on two conditions. First, that you give it back to me or Reck or our children when you die."

"Why, when you can never use it?" asked Patience.

"When all this is over," Ruin said, "and my work is; done, then I can use it. If it mads me, then it's no worse than death, and I'm not afraid to die. But if I succeed in mastering it, then all we lost will be restored to us, and I can pass it to my heir."

"I'll make you a different oath," said Patience. "Implant it, and if I die in the presence of the king of the geblings, I'll make no effort to stop them from taking it, whoever they are."

Ruin smiled. "It amounts to the same thing. Only you must promise to make every effort to die in the presence of the king of the geblings."

"If you promise to make no effort to hasten that day."

"I hate politics," said Heffiji. "You don't need any oaths. You'll implant it in her because it's no use to you, and you'll get it back when she's dead if you can." She snorted. "Even a dwelt with less than half a brain can tell you that."

"What is the second condition?" asked Patience.

"The first gebling king," said Reck. "He was Unwyrm's brother. His memories of Unwyrm are in the stone. You must tell us what Unwyrm is. You must tell us everything about him that you can remember, when the mindstone is in place."

"So the Heptarchs remember Unwyrm," she whispered.

"They have known who the enemy is, all these years."

"Only the ones with courage enough to put it in their brains," said Reck.

"And strength enough to keep their sanity when they did," said Ruin.

Reck asked again, "Will you tell us?"

Patience nodded. "Yes." And then, deciding not to be the careful diplomat, she let Reck and Ruin see her fear.

"Do you believe that I'm truly strong enough to bear it?"

Ruin shrugged. "If you aren't, we're no worse off than before." She was still an animal to him.

But Reck noticed her vulnerability this time, and answered with sympathy. "How many times has this been done in the history of the world? How can we know how strong a human has to be, to hold geblings in her mind, and still remain human? But I'll tell you what I know of you. Many humans, most humans, cringe in their solitude, frightened and weak, struggling to bring into themselves as many things and people as they can. To own so much that they can feel large and believe, falsely, that they are not alone. But you. You are not afraid of your own voice in the dark."

Patience put the loop back in her hair, and slid the tube into its wooden sheath. The geblings visibly relaxed.

"You said your name was Heffiji?" asked Patience.

"Yes. A scholar gave it to me once, long ago. I forget what my name was before that. If you ask me, I'll tell, you." I

"A gaunt, wasn't he? The scholar who named you?;

Heffiji is a Gauntish word."

"Yes, she was. Do you know what it means?"

"It's a common word. It means 'never.' Never what?"

"Mikias Mikuam Heffiji Ismar."

"Never to Lose the Finding Place."

"That's me," said Heffiji. "I don't know anything, but I can find everything. Do you want to see?"

"Yes," said Patience.

"Yes," said Reck.

Ruin shrugged.

Heffiji led them back into the rest of the house. Every room was lined with shelves. On the shelves, in no apparent order, were stacks of paper. Rocks or pieces of wood served as paperweights in the rooms where th& glassless windows let in the wind. The whole house was' a library of papers scattered in a meaningless order.

"And you know where everything is?" asked Reck.

"Oh, no. I don't know where anything is, unless you; ask me a question. Then I remember where the answer is, because I remember where I set it down."

"So you can't lead us to anything unless we ask you."

"But if you ask me, I can lead you to everything."

She smiled in pride. "I may have only half a brain, but I remember everything I ever did. All the Wise came by my house, and they all stopped and gave me every answer, and they all asked me every question. And if I didn't have the answer to their question, I kept asking others the same question until one of them could answer it."

Patience started to lift a rock from a stack of papers.

"No!" screamed Heffiji.

Patience set the rock back down.

"If you move anything, how will I find it again?" shouted the dwelf. "Anything you touch will be lost forever and ever and ever! There are a hundred thousand papers in this house! Do you have time to read it all, and remember where each scrap of it is?"

"No," said Patience. "I'm sorry."

"This is my brain!" shouted Heffiji. "I do with this what humans and geblings and gaunts do with your large heads! I let you dwell in it because you will add to my memories. But if you move anything, you might as well burn down the house with me inside, because then I'll be nothing but a dwelf with half a brain and no answers at all, none at all!"

She was weeping. Reck comforted her, the long, many- jointed fingers stroking the dwelf s hair in a swirling pattern like a bird's wing closing. "It's true," said Reck, "humans are like that, they stumble into other people's houses and break and destroy without any thought of the havoc that they wreak."

Patience bore the abuse; she had earned it.

But Ruin took her silence to mean that she hadn't got the point of Reek's remark. "She means that you humans came to this world and ruined it for all of us who were here before you-geblings and dwelfs and gaunts."

Suddenly Heffiji was no longer weeping. She pulled away from Reck with a broad smile on her face. "It's my best answer," she said. "Ask me the question."

"What question?" asked Ruin.

" 'All of us who were here before you,' " she said.

"Ask me."

Ruin tried to decide what question she meant. "All right, who was here before the humans?"

Heffiji jumped up and down with delight. "Wyrms!" she shouted. "Wyrms and wyrms and wyrms!"

"What about geblings, then, if we weren't here when humans arrived?" asked Reck.

"What about them? Too vague-you have to ask a better question than that."

"Where did geblings come from?" she asked.

Heffiji jumped up and down again. "My favorite, my favorite! Come and I'll show you! Come and you'll see!"

She led them up a ladderway into a low and musty attic. Even the geblings had to stoop; Patience had to squat down and waddle along to the farthest corner.

Heffiji gave her lantern to Ruin and took a sheaf of papers from a roof beam. She spread them along the attic floor. Taking back the lantern, she began to read the explanations of the drawings, one by one.

"There is no such thing as a native life form left on this world, and no such thing as Earth life, either, except for human beings themselves," she said.

"That's insane," said Ruin. "Everybody knows that the domesticated plants and animals came from Earth-"

Heffiji held the lantern up to his face. "If you already know all the answers, why did you stop at my house?"

Abashed, he fell silent.

Heffiji recited. "Comparing the genetic material of any plant or animal with the records concerning similar plants or animals preserved from the knowledge brought with mankind from Earth, we find that the original genetic code is still preserved, almost perfectly-but as only a tiny part of a single but vastly larger genetic molecule."

Heffiji pointed to a diagram showing the positions of the Earth species' protein patterns within the single chromosome of the present Imakulata version.

"Clearly, the species brought from earth have been taken over or, as is more likely, imitated perfectly by native species that incorporate the genetic material into their own. Since the resulting molecule can theoretically contain hundreds of times as much genetic information as the original Earth species needed, the rest of the genetic material is available for other purposes. Quite possibly, the Imakulata species retain the dormant possibility of adapting again and again to imitate and then replace any competing species. There is even a chance that the Imakulata genetic molecule is complex enough to purposefully control alterations in the genetic material of its own reproductive cells. But whether some rudimentary form of intelligence is present in the genetic molecule or not, our experiments have proven conclusively that in two generations any Imakulata species can perfectly imitate any Earth species. In fact, the Imakulata imitation invariably improves on the Earth original, giving it a competitive edge-shorter gestation or germination times, for example, or markedly faster sexual maturity, or vastly increased numbers of offspring per generation."

Heffiji looked at them piercingly, one at a time. "Well?" she asked. "Do you understand it?"

Patience remembered what Prince Prekeptor had once said to her. "The genetic molecule is the mirror of the will."

Heffiji scowled. "That's religion. I keep those in the cellar."

"We understand," said Ruin.

"You must understand it all. If you have a question, I'll say it again."

They had no questions. Heffiji moved on to a series of drawings of wheat plants and a strange, winged insect.

"Our experiments involved separating the original Earth- species genetic material from common wheat, to see what was left when the currently dominant Earth-genes were gone. The experiments were delicate, and we failed many times, but at last we succeeded in separating the genetic material, and growing Earth wheat and the species that had absorbed and replaced it. The genetic structure of the Earth wheat was identical to the records passed down to us from the original colonists, and yet when it grew we could see no difference in the plant itself from the Imakulata wheat. However, the leftover genetic material from the Imakulata wheat did not produce a plant at all. Instead, it produced a small insectlike flier, with a wormlike body except for three wing-pairs.

It was completely unlike anything we could find in our catalogues from Earth, but possibly similar to what the earliest colony records refer to as 'gnats,' which seemed to disappear from the first colony of Heptam after a few years."

"What does this have to do with geblings?" asked Ruin. "I know more about plants than any human scientist ever did."

Heffiji glared at him. "Go away if you don't want the answers that I give."

Reck touched her brother's cheek. "It isn't that he doesn't understand," she said. "It's that he already understands too well."

Heffiji went on. "We introduced a single Imakulata gnat into a glass box containing a sample of pure Earth wheat that was ready for fertilization. Without a mate, the Imakulata gnat soon began laying thousands of eggs.

The wheat also ripened and dropped seed. But the Imakulata eggs hatched first. A few of them produced gnats, which began attacking each other savagely until only one was left. Most of the seeds, however, produced an incredible array of strange plants, many of them wheatlike, many of them gnatlike, and most of them hopelessly maladaptive. Only a few grew more than a few centimeters in height before they died. Those that thrived, while they were generally somewhat wheatlike, were still easily distinguishable from the Earth species.

By the time the next generation of Earth wheat germinated and grew, they had already gone to seed, and showed every sign of being new and vigorous species.

We immediately began several other experiments to see if the results were identical."

On to the next drawing. "In the meantime, the sole surviving second-generation gnat mated, not with the new Imakulata species, but with the second generation Earth wheat. This time, most of the gnat's offspring were similar to what we call wheat today-completely indistinguishable from Earth wheat, except for the presence of a single immense genetic molecule which contains all the genetic information from the original Earth wheat. We repeated these results at will. When the second-generation gnat was allowed to reproduce with second-generation-or even tenth- or twentieth-generation Earth wheat-the result was always outwardly identical Imakulata wheat, which reproduced faster and grew more vigorously than either the Earth wheat or the new Imakulata plant species.

In fact, the Imakulata wheat seemed particularly inimical to the new Imakulata nonwheat species. They were destroyed as if by poison within two generations.

The Earth wheat sometimes lingered as long as six generations before being utterly replaced. However, when the second-generation gnat was not allowed to reproduce with later Earth wheat, the Imakulata wheat never appeared.

Instead, the new Imakulata species and the Earth wheat continued to breed true to form, with no further cross-breeding between species. This process of complete replacement within two generations may have repeated itself many times with every Earth species brought with the colonists except, of course, humankind itself, which has shown no changes in its chromosomal patterns."

And that was all.

"You never got to the geblings," said Ruin triumphantly.

"We asked you about geblings, but you never got to them."

Heffiji stalked off with the lantern. Of course they followed. But she did not lead them down the stairs.

Instead, she found another few papers and laid them out.

There were four drawings, each drawn and labeled by the same hand. One was labeled "Human Genetic Molecules."

The other three were labeled "humanlike sections" of gebling, dwelt, and gaunt genetic molecules.

In each case, the human genetic patterns were all imbedded within a single long molecule, just as the Earth wheat patterns had been incorporated in the single genetic molecule of all the Imakulata plants.

Heffiji could hardly contain her delight. "They didn't know it! I was the one who put it together, I was the one who knew that both of these were the answers to the same question! And when I saw humans and geblings together, I knew that you were the ones who needed to have this answer." She grinned. "That's why I cheated and gave hints."

"It isn't true!" shouted Ruin. "We are not just failed copies of humans!"

He flung out his hand as if to throw Heffiji's brass lantern to the floor. Both Reck and Patience caught his arm before he could do it.

"Are you trying to burn down this house?" demanded Reck.

"We are the original inhabitants of this world, and they are the interlopers! We are not descended from humans! They have usurped our world from us!"

Patience spoke to him quietly. "Ruin, you're right.

Even if half your heritage is human, the other half is not.

The other half is native. To imitate us was part of your nature. Whatever your ancestors were before humans came to Imakulata, it was their nature to absorb and adapt. What you are today is the fulfillment of what your ancestors had to become, if they were to be true to themselves."

"And what were we before?" asked Reck. The question was rhetorical. But again Heffiji ran off with the lantern, this time clattering down the ladder. They had no choice but to follow as she ran through the house, shouting, "I know I know! I know I know!"

They found her in the great room, where Will once again stood by the door, while Angel sat in the seat by the fire. Heffiji was holding a large paper, which contained four versions of the same drawing. She kept reciting the words written at the top of the page: "Most likely reconstruction of large segmented animals found at Rameling and Wissick sites."

It was a large wormlike animal with vestigial wings that fanned out just like geblings' fingers, with a head as proportionately tiny as the head of a dwelf, and with a body as long and lithe as a gaunt. Its belly looked loose and open, as if loose sections of bowel were protruding.

When Heffiji at last quieted down, Angel spoke softly from his place by the fire. "Wyrms," he said. "The earliest colonists called them that, and killed them all, even though there was evidence that they lived communally and buried their dead. They were too frightening, they awakened too many human fears. And now they're extinct."

"Except one," said Patience. "That's what Unwyrm is, isn't he? The last of the wyrms."

"Not quite," said Ruin, who looked exhausted and defeated. "We geblings named him, didn't we? Unwyrm.

Not-wyrm. Not our father; our brother. We didn't remember that he looked like this, didn't remember what a wyrm was. But now it's clear enough. Just like the second-generation gnat that killed off the other gnats and waited to mate again with the Earth wheat. That's what Unwyrm is doing. Waiting to mate again with a human being."

"The seventh seventh seventh daughter," murmured Angel. "I told you not to come."

"A new human species to replace the old," said Reck. "And to destroy the others-gaunt, dwelf, and gebling."

"Why did he wait so long?" asked Patience. "The gnat finished the process in the very next generation.

Why did Unwyrm wait 343 generations for me?"

Heffiji was crestfallen. "I don't have the answer to everything, you know."