To have waited since the dawn of the universe for these creatures to emerge, and then to be shunned—it was more than I could bear. For a brief time, I thought to hurtle asteroids at their world, for it was only because of my intervention that they existed at all. But that thought passed, and instead I formulated another sentence. It took me close to a Jijaki year to do it, and doing it that quickly taxed my powers to the utmost. “Please talk to me,” was all I said.
And, at last, they did. The broadcasts resumed, with major transmitters on all landmasses sending up a message. Most replied in the same language form I had used, but a few, apparently partisans of another form, and feeling it deserved equal consideration, replied in one of the geographic variants. “Who are you?” they said.
I told them. Reaction was mixed, and it took me some time to figure it all out. One broadcast frequency was given over to what I eventually realized was a religion, in worship of me. Others engaged me in dialog, showing me how to send visual signals in a more efficient method, using a simple binary code that I could blink out much more quickly than I could form letters in the sky. Eventually the normal cacophony of broadcasts resumed, including even Kijititatak Gikta. Within a short time, the general populace had largely lost interest in me.
But I soon had work for my Jijaki to do.
Back at the base camp, Toroca thoroughly washed the strange blue artifact in the waters crashing against the beach. It became clear that there was a seam running around the object’s widest part. At four places, little gray tabs seemed to be protruding through slots, as if the two halves of the unit were held together by the pressure they exerted. Toroca extended his fingerclaws and used them to depress the tabs one at a time. They did indeed give a bit, but as soon as he stopped pressing upon them, they popped back out. Next he tried to depress them all simultaneously. It was difficult to do so, and one of the tabs resisted his pressure, but at last the casing popped open.
Toroca was disappointed. He’d expected to see enormously complex gearworks within the thing’s smooth blue shell. Instead it seemed to contain no moving parts at alclass="underline" a tight packing of solid cubes, a cylinder of some kind of metal, and two mutually perpendicular flat boards covered with geometric patterns in red and black and gold. Connecting the crammed components were flexible strands of some material as clear as glass.
But no moving parts.
What the object had been used for remained a mystery. How it worked was also elusive. But slowly it dawned on Toroca that this was not a disappointing discovery—not at all. Rather, he’d learned something that had never occurred to him, or, he was sure, to anyone else: it was possible to build devices that surely did complex work without resorting to mechanics. Solid blocks could do—what, he did not know. But they could do something. And Quintaglio engineers would eventually be able to figure out what they did, and how they did it. And knowing that such devices were possible—laying the egg of that idea in their heads—might let them develop similar devices themselves kilodays before they would have stumbled on the concept on their own.
Layers.
Layers of rock.
Layers of mystery.
Standing on the beach at sunset, Toroca’s eye roamed over the cliff face, searching.
The sacred scrolls were written two thousand kilodays ago.
And they said the world was created five thousand kilodays before that.
But the erosion here and, now that he thought about it, almost everywhere in Land that he’d been would have taken more than seven thousand kilodays to happen. Much more. Jodor’s tree, clinging to the precipice—
—like Toroca’s preconceptions.
A Quintaglio might live for seventy kilodays or so. But it would have taken far, far more than one hundred lifetimes to deposit the layers he was now looking at. Indeed, just to accumulate the fifteen vertical paces of rock between the Bookmark layer and the top of the cliff would take far longer than that—
—and add to that whatever amount of time it took for those layers to get pushed up into the sky, until they towered overhead as they did now…
Staring up at the cliff face, Toroca felt a wave of vertigo.
The world was old, inconceivably ancient.
And even life, although it had appeared very recently in the overall geologic record, must have arisen much more than seven thousand kilodays ago.
Layers of mystery. Toroca exhaled noisily.
The sacred scrolls described a gradual unfolding. First plants, then plant-eaters, then carnivores.
The rocks showed nothing like that. In them, all forms of life appeared simultaneously.
All.
The sacred scrolls must be wrong, not just about the age of the world, but about the sequence of events.
Toroca was reminded again of how the layers of sediment that made up this towering cliff looked like the pages of a massive book seen edge-on. If only he could open that book, browse through the pages, see, really see, what had happened.
And, in his hand, heavy, indestructible… the blue object, the six-fingered artifact, the thing.
He knew where it fit in: right near the top, just below the Bookmark layer.
What he didn’t know yet was how it fit in.
But he would figure it out, he would peel back the layers, he would uncover the truth.
The chill wind cut him. As always, darkness came quickly.
But it would not last for long.
*11*
I felt some odd stirrings today, a kind of excitement I hadn’t really known before. That I was reacting to some pheromones, as when on the hunt, seemed obvious, but we were not hunting. No, I was simply waiting in an anteroom for an appointment. The only other person in the room was my sister, Haldan.
It was she. I was reacting to her.
She must be coming into receptivity. I’d have thought her too young—she was just sixteen, after all, and estrus normally began in one’s eighteenth kiloday, but, then again, these things were not written in stone.
My reaction was slight, as if she was not yet fully in heat, but rather was just beginning to be open. Perhaps she herself wasn’t yet aware of it.
I didn’t like the effect it had on me. There was something inappropriate about it. Yes, I was eager to mate myself, but, somehow, to mate with my sister seemed wrong.
Without a word, I got up and hurried from the room, terrified that my dewlap would puff in front of her.
In the last moments of his life, the irony was not lost on Mek-Lastoon, the bloodpriest of Pack Tablo. Oh, the circumstances were not quite reversed. Here, it was a mob of adults chasing a single other adult—him—instead of him, the purple robe of his priesthood swirling about his body, chasing squealing egglings.
But the ending would be the same.
Lastoon’s triple-clawed feet threw up globs of mud as he continued to run, his back held almost parallel to the ground, his thick, muscular tail outstretched behind him.
He was surprised that he could still think clearly. Surely those pursuing him were now deep in dagamant, the killing rage clouding their thoughts. But all Lastoon felt was fear, naked and raw.