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-generati
on-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.
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