Didn’t you learn something of value there, her parents asked, something that we could not have taught you?
As they spoke, Lichen realized she knew the answer her parents wanted. They didn’t want to hear about mending circuits or about loneliness. They wanted desperately to know that they had done the right thing and that her life was better and happier because of it.
Lichen was not sure that she could tell them that. Was she better off for having been sent away?
Well, she thought, if I hadn’t been sent to school, I wouldn’t have known how to rewire those carp-eyed people. But if I hadn’t been sent to school, I wouldn’t have run away, and they wouldn’t have chased me.
Who knows? she said to her parents, finally. Would I be who I am if I wasn’t me?
Perhaps your brothers can tell you, said her mother.
VI. She Visits Her Brothers
Her parents told her how to find the spot in which her brothers were now living. Then they led her to a patch of bare ground and told her to dig. She dug through a crust of hard-scrabble dirt and found that the earth got softer below. Then, with a lurch, her spade broke through into a hole, and she could see an ocean of stars beneath her. She looked up at her parents in surprise, and lost her balance. Lichen fell down into the stars, into the night beneath the stars, and into the modern countryside she had left the day before, landing in a pile of hemlock branches that broke her fall. She looked back up toward her parents. The hole was closing, and her parents were peering down at her with kindly concern. She thought she saw them wave as the hole disappeared, leaving nothing but stars overhead.
How strange, thought Lichen. Are there more worlds nested inside this one? Wondering about this, she fell asleep.
When she woke up under the hemlock tree, it was morning. Following her parents’ instructions, she walked to the area where her brothers lived. It wasn’t in the woods at all, but in town, on a street of small, cheaply made cottages.
She knocked at the door of the first cottage, the one belonging to her oldest brother, but he wouldn’t let her in. Then she knocked at the door of the second cottage, belonging to her next-oldest brother, but he told her to come back later. Finally, she knocked at the cottage door of the brother who was closest to her own age, and he opened the door and invited her inside.
Lichen was surprised by how small the house was, and how uncomfortable — stuffy, cold, and crammed with dirty electronic equipment in stages of disrepair. Her brother didn’t look so different. His face was the same, except for a fringe of fingers like a beard along the ridge of his jaw.
His wife, a worried-looking woman with a very small second head looking over her left shoulder, frowned at Lichen, and the tiny face refused to meet her eyes. Two skinny, snuffling toddlers whined and grabbed at their mother’s skirt. They had not been visibly altered.
After a few polite remarks had been exchanged, her brother asked her about school. Lichen tried to give a neutral answer, but as she talked, her brother’s manner changed and the tone of his voice became surly. She had been allowed to go away to school when they were forced to stay home as drudges. What made her so important anyway?
She had lived a life of luxury, working only four hours a day, learning to read and figure for another four, and having the rest of the day to sleep in a nice, soft bed and do what she wanted, while they stayed home, working hard, often hungry, forced into dreary work for little money.
Listening to her brother, Lichen got angry. She quickly gave him her view of his life, in which he lived comfortably from season to season, working with their father, going to dances and parties. Eating mussels and berries, potatoes, bread fried in fat.
Her brother looked annoyed at first. Then he smiled, and Lichen smiled too. He chuckled, and Lichen did also. And then they both started laughing. They laughed until the tears ran down their faces, until their sides ached, until the brother’s wife stuck her heads into the room to see what spirit had taken possession of them.
If there is a moral to be derived from this — and it gives pleasure to storytellers to derive a moral, whether the listener needs it or not — it is that we should be careful in our estimate of how happy everyone else is, and of how miserable we are ourselves.
VII. The Whale Figures It Out
After they talked, Lichen and her brother went for a walk along the cliff above the beach, because Lichen wanted to see all the things that had changed since she had been there as a child.
She asked about the whale-shaped rock.
It was in the way, he said. The carp-eyed people were building something very important, and trees and rocks had been cleared from the land and dumped on the beach.
In fact, he said, it ought to be down there, right around that point. Lichen ran ahead. But there was no whale-shaped rock down below. She waited until her brother caught up, and together they looked around. There was no trace of it.
Maybe they broke it up, he suggested.
Suddenly, there came a loud splash from the water, and a cold shower of salt spray drenched them from head to foot. A killer whale leaped in the water below them. The whale swam close to shore and called Lichen’s name. It was her rock.
Lichen looked down from the edge of the cliff, and the whale told her his story.
When the carp-eyed people moved the rock, the whale explained, he was released from the spell of the Changer and leaped back into the ocean.
I splashed those jellyeyes, said the whale, splashed them good. They were wet when I finished with them, I’ll tell you. It made their circuits work funny, and they waved goodbye as I swam off.
I have figured it out, said the whale. This is a time like that of the Changer. The jellyeyes changed our home and made it theirs. It may be that this is what our world will be like for a long time, or it may be that new changers will come to prey upon these. But a time will come when there is an end to change, and the earth itself will cast the changers aside.
Climb onto my back, he said to Lichen, and we will wait this out until things shift back in our favor.
Lichen leaped down onto the whale.
At the first touch of Lichen to his back, the whale turned to rock, and so did Lichen and her brother. Some say that the three of them can be seen there even now, a bare rock on the cliff and a lichen-covered one at the shoreline, waiting for the time when the earth will awaken and shake the changers off like fleas.
VIII. Her Ambitions
Now, that’s how the story is told by some devices, but that is not at all what happened. Lichen did not leap onto the whale, and the whale did not turn into a rock. I know this for a fact.
When the whale told Lichen his story about changers coming one after the other to disrupt the lives of humans and animals and even the lives of things that were neither human nor animal, Lichen realized that the time had come for her to cast aside the lies by which she had been living and to grasp the truth.
She thought about her childhood, and all that had happened to her since. She thought about the retooled people, shuffling happily through their lives. And she thought about the way she had changed those carp-eyed people around.
No, she said to the whale. Don’t go back. Come with me, and we’ll change ourselves around. We’ll rewire the carp-eyed people. We’ll remake this land for the better, or maybe for the worse.