“No,” Vera agreed. “We don’t fight. Not with knives and guns. But when we’ve agreed that something ought to be done, or not done, we get very stubborn. And when that meets up with another stubbornness, it can make a kind of war, a struggle of ideas, the only kind of war anybody ever wins. You see?”
Luz evidently did not.
“Well,” Vera said comfortably, “you will see.”
4
The ringtree of Victoria led a double life. It began as a single, fast-growing seedling with serrated red leaves. When it matured it flowered lavishly with large, honey-colored blossoms. Wotsits and other small flying creatures, attracted by the sweet-tasting petals, ate them, and while doing so fertilized the bitter-flavored heart of the flower with pollen caught on their fur, scales, wings, or vanes. The fertilized remnant of the flower curled itself up into a hard-shelled seed. There might be hundreds of these on the tree, but they dried up and dropped off, one after another, leaving at last one single seed on a high central branch. This seed, hard and ill-flavored, grew and grew while its tree weakened and withered, until the leafless branches drooped sadly beneath the big, heavy, black ball of the seed. Then, some afternoon when the autumn sun shone through gaps in the rainclouds, the seed performed its extraordinary feat: time-ripened and sun-warmed, it exploded. It went off with a bang that could be heard for miles. A cloud of dust and fragments rose and drifted slowly off across the hills. All was over, apparently, with the ringtree.
But in a circle around the central stem, several hundred seedlets, exploded from the shell, were burrowing themselves with energy down into the damp rich dirt. A year later the shoots were already competing for root-room; the less hardy ones died. Ten years later, and for a century or two after that, from twenty to sixty copper-leaved trees stood in a perfect ring about the long-vanished central stem. Branch and root, they stood apart, yet touching, forty ringtrees, one tree-ring. Once every eight or ten years they flowered and bore a small edible fruit, the seeds of which were excreted by wotsits, pouchbats, farfallies, tree-coneys, and other fruit lovers. Dropped in the right spot, a seed germinated and produced the single tree; and it the single seed; and the cycle was repeated, from ringtree to tree-ring, timelessly.
Where the soil was favorable the rings grew interlocking, but otherwise no large plants grew in the central circle of each ring, only grasses, moss, and ferns. Very old rings so exhausted their central ground that it might sink and form a hollow, which filled with ground seepage and with rain, and the circle of high, old dark-red trees was then mirrored in the still water of a central pool. The center of a tree-ring was always a quiet place. The ancient, pool-centered rings were the most quiet, the most strange.
The Meeting House of Shantih stood outside town in a vale which contained such a ring: forty-six trees rearing their columnar trunks and bronze crowns around a silent circle of water, rough with rain, or cloud-gray, or bright with sunlight flashing through red foliage from a sky briefly clear. Roots of the trees grew gnarled at the water’s edge, making seats for the solitary contemplater. A single pair of herons lived in the Meeting-House Ring. The Victorian heron was not a heron; it was not even a bird. To describe their new world the exiles had had only words from their old world. The creatures that lived by the pools, one pair to a pool, were stilt-legged, pale-gray fish eaters: so they were herons. The first generation had known that they were not really herons, that they were not birds, nor reptiles, nor mammals. The following generations did not know what they were not, but did, in a way, know what they were. They were herons.
They seemed to live as long as the trees. Nobody had ever seen a baby heron, or an egg. Sometimes they danced, but if a mating followed the dance it was in the secrecy of the wilderness night, unseen. Silent, angular, elegant, they nested in the drifts of red leaves among the roots, and fished for water creatures in the shallows, and gazed across the pool at human beings with large, round eyes as colorless as water. They showed no fear of man, but never allowed a close approach.
The settlers of Victoria had never yet come upon any large land animal. The biggest herbivore was the coney, a fat slow rabbity beast with fine waterproof scales all over it; the biggest predator was the larva, red-eyed and shark-toothed, half a meter long. In captivity the larvas bit and screeched in insane frenzy till they died; the coneys refused to eat, lay down quietly, and died. There were big creatures in the sea; “whales” came into Songe Bay and were caught for food every summer; out at sea beasts huger than the whales had been seen, enormous, like writhing islands. The whales were not whales, but what the monsters were or were not, nobody knew. They never came near fishing boats. And the beasts of the plains and forests never came near, either. They did not run away. They simply kept their distance. They watched for a while, with clear eyes, and then moved away, ignoring the stranger.
Only the bright-winged farfallies and the wotsits ever consented to come near. Caged, a farfallie folded its wings and died; but if you put out honey for it, it might set up housekeeping on your roof, constructing there the little nest-like rain-cup in which, being semiaquatic, it slept. Wotsits evidently trusted in their peculiar ability to look like something else every few minutes. Occasionally they showed a positive desire to fly round and round a human being, or even to sit on him. Their shape-changing had in it an element of eye-fooling, perhaps of hypnosis, and Lev had sometimes wondered if the wotsits liked to use human beings to practice their tricks on. In any case, if you caged a wotsit, it turned into a shapeless brown lump like a clod of dirt, and after two or three hours, died.
None of the creatures of Victoria would be tamed, would live with man. None of them would approach him. They evaded; they slipped away, into the rain-shadowed, sweet-scented forests, or into the deep sea, or into death. They had nothing to do with man. He was a stranger. He did not belong.
“I had a cat,” Lev’s grandmother used to tell him, long ago. “A fat, gray cat with fur like the softest, softest treesilk. He had black stripes on his legs, and green eyes. He’d jump up on my lap, and put his nose under my ear, so I could hear him, and purr, and purr—like this!” The old lady would make a deep, soft, rumbling noise, to which the little boy listened with intense delight.
“What did he say when he was hungry, Nana?” He held his breath.
“PRRREEOWW! PRRREEOWW!”
She laughed, and he laughed.
There was only one another. The voices, the faces, the hands, the holding arms, of one’s own kind. The other people, the other aliens.
Outside the doors, beyond the small plowed fields, lay the wilderness, the endless world of hills and red leaves and mist, where no voice spoke. To speak, there, no matter what you said, was to say, “I am a stranger.”
“Some day,” the child said, “I’ll go and explore the whole world.”
It was a new idea he had had, and he was full of it. He was going to make maps, and everything. But Nana wasn’t listening. She had the sad look. He knew what to do about that. He came up quietly next to her and nuzzled in her neck below the ear, saying, “Prrrrr … .”
“Is that my cat Mino? Hello, Mino! Why,” she said, “it isn’t Mino, it’s Levuchka! What a surprise!”
He sat on her lap. Her large, old, brown arms were around him. On each wrist she wore a bangle of fine red soapstone. Her son Alexander, Sasha, Lev’s father, had carved them for her. “Manacles,” he had said when he gave them to her on her birthday. “Victoria manacles, Mama.” And all the grown-ups had laughed, but Nana had had the sad look while she laughed.
“Nana. Was Mino Mino’s name?”
“Of course, silly.”