Zhinsinura broke and ate her nut with calm absorption. "You see," she said, "the angels at long last got the joke: that as long as women struggled to use their time properly and join the terrific enterprises of the angels, there was nothing to fear, but as soon as the women shut up, as Mother Tom told them to shut up, then the angels' enterprises were in terrible danger. So what they did was to send some two or three to Mother Tom's garden, this garden, and kill her. Mother Tom was near eighty then. And they killed her.
"If you were to tell a story about ancient times," she went on, "you would say that the day the angels killed Mother Tom in her garden was that day in winter which is the shortest, the day on which winter begins in earnest, but the day too after which the days, however slowly, begin to lengthen toward spring. Because, in her long life, Mother Tom had finally got herself understood by the women she loved, the angels for a long time thought the bird was dead. The ice grew thick - but the river was deeper; the ice was silent, and the river spoke only to itself, all unheard.
"The river spoke about Mother Tom. It was in those days that this picture was made, to remember her by, and a thousand like it, which women kept. They said of Mother Tom: when she was dark she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air.
"About the things Mother Tom had said. About what was to come, which their men came home every night from planning for and struggling with and failing against and using their time properly to defeat: and they remembered Mother Tom's advice, when the men talked: shut up.
"About gardens and clothes and the difficulties of food and how the lights kept going out. About their children and which was most beautiful, and Money stories, and what to do when the lights went out for good. About the latest of the angels' wonders and how it seemed that soon there would be nothing impossible and their men could give them everything they wanted.
"Everything they wanted." Zhinsinura passed her hand over her eyes and touched the box in which Mother Tom waved endlessly. "I would have been dark, dark, dark, then; am dark to think it. How hard, how hard! To be time's tool when those who think themselves time's masters tell endless, useless tales to bind it, tales which even if the women understood they could never contradict. To watch your kind like a sick cat eat and be not satisfied, to gorge and cough up worms. And still shut up. And never know, any more than any tool can, when the need for you will come - or if perhaps you have been wrong, and your task is not after all simply the satisfaction of that endless angel hunger, is not after all Everything you Wanted. It wasn't Mother Tom, no, and she had known it wouldn't be - it was that long fire that made time's tool, endlessly shaping it in the flame of dark and light until its task was ready.
"To the angels, the Storm was the darkest time since our kind began: for what does ice know about spring? And though the League was full-grown then, and all their stories learned by heart when they gathered here for the first time after the fall of the Law and the Gummint, here on this floor in Service City and in a thousand places like it; and though they remembered Mother Tom, and knew now what she meant, and knew somewhat what to do to begin to help - though they knew all this, yet they were not light then. For remember, children, remember: for all that the women of the League knew better, for all their dark and light, they too were angels themselves. Never forget that, for it is their greatest glory. I have felt them meeting here then, in those days: and I know that whatever skills they had, it was terror, dark, and panic that they felt; and that whatever they created later, they knew that their task just then was mostly to watch the angels die. For with a sound like weeping and laughter, the ice had parted in the sun."
The women before Zhinsinura, some of them, had listened intently, chins in hands; others had been preoccupied with hushing children, or nudging cats away, or changing their places for better ones. The children played at distracting each other, as children do when serious things are said. For it was an old, old story, after all, and heard hundreds of times; this was only the day in April when the List chose to tell it all together. I had listened perhaps more intently than any of them.
Mother Tom in her garden raised her hand, waved, lowered her hand.
"We who are the League's child," said Zhinsinura, "and who remember Mother Tom - we who feel those ancient women still to be here, here, where they guarded and dispensed the food that once burdened the thousand shelves long since gone; where they made medicines to save lives now long over; to where they returned from their journeys with stories and angels' things which remain here still; where their plans were laid, and where the old agreements were come to which made the world the way it is today; and where in the end that struggle was resigned - we don't forget, though we regret nothing, as no one in old age regrets the death of a parent long ago.
"If you were to tell a story of the days in which the League grew to be the Long League of famous memory, you would say that a cat is curious when it's not comfortable. That their curiosity found the secrets of medicine's daughters and all the angels' medicines, we are grateful. That it uncovered the four dead men, most horrid of all the angels' secrets, and destroyed them, we shudder at: and praise their courage. That it learned Dr. Boots and so came to know dark and light as we do, well, what is there to say? But the League as it was is gone; the curiosity is satisfied; the struggle over. Dark or light, the world is lighter than it was."
She shook her head, smiling, and brushed shell crumbs from her lap. "Yet think of it," she said, smiling wider and looking out over them, who caught her smile, "only think of it long enough to feel how odd it is, children, how odd in the end, far, far more odd than either happy or sad. May comes now, and that communion: the oddest of all. I want no one's secret: only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!"
On the faces around me, as Zhinsinura asked, it seemed to dawn on them: the one thing I had known and they had not, seemingly. There was even a ripple of laughter that rose here and caught there, grew deep among the men and died away as our evening song did. Their laughter at the oddness of it was the first time they had seemed like ordinary people - I mean like truthful speakers - since I had come there.
In their laughter, it seemed, that day came to an end. The rain would go on till night, or through the night; in the silver glimmer of it the afternoon was already dark. Zhinsinura still sat, with Mother Tom before her, and broke nuts to eat, while the rest of us stretched and moved, walked and talked again.
I made my way to where Once a Day sat before the box inside which Mother Tom stood waving. It had grown dimmer in that garden, and Mother Tom's eternal wave moved more slowly. Because Once a Day still watched it, I watched it.
"What did she mean," I asked, "when she said 'May comes, and that communion'?"
"She meant our letters from Dr. Boots," Once a Day said, her eyes not leaving the box.
There was a flowering tree in the garden, and now, close to it, I could see that there was a tiny cat curled up at her big feet. Mother Tom's hand rose, and a petal began to drift from the tree. Her hand rose high and waved; the petal reached the ground; Mother Tom smiled, and the cat at her feet closed its eyes peacefully. Mother Tom lowered her hand; her smile faded as her hand came to rest against her side. Then the whole garden seemed to give a minute shake. Mother Tom's face became set and grim and apprehensive, the cat's eyes were suddenly open and alert. Her hand rose, in the same way; her face lightened to a smile, the cat's eyes began to close - and another petal fell from the tree, exactly then.