"Patience," whispered someone behind her/She knew the voice, knew that Reek's hand was reaching for her shoulder, and reached up her own hand to touch. And yes, it was there, the soft fur of the gebling hand. For a moment she thought that perhaps she had felt Reek's proximity through the othermind. But no; it could only be her instinct as an assassin, to know when a hand was reaching for her. She could not hope ever to take part in the gebling community.
"Reck," she said.
"We were afraid we'd carry a madwoman with us into Cranning."
"A madwoman should stay here. After all, this is a madhouse."
Reck laughed. "Not really. These geblings came to rebuild Heffiji's house, to keep the learning of humankind safe."
"How did you call them?"
"Oh, the gebling king is known. Not by face or name-no, when they see us here they think we're just two more geblings who were summoned and came. But in the othermind, they know the call of the gebling king."
"Do they come from Cranning?"
"I don't think so. We called, and the nearest geblings heard it and passed on the call. As more and more took it up, it got stronger, until we knew we had enough. We're not Unwyrm. Our own call, alone, could never reach from here to Cranning."
"It's good of you to keep this house alive."
"This house has done the impossible. It has humbled my beloved brother Ruin. All the ideas that Heffiji has saved here. Ruin's made a pest of himself, questioning her, dogging her heels from answer to answer. He's hardly known a human in his life, and for obvious reasons he's never known any of the Wise. Now, though, he's seen what human minds can do at their best."
"If he ever wants to know us at our worst, he has only to take the scepter," said Patience.
"Not likely," said Reck. "We used to pity you humans for your solitude. Well, I pitied you, and he despised you. But now, well, he keeps telling me that solitude is the foundation of true wisdom, that all the brilliant thoughts in this house come as the desperate cry of one human being to another, saying, Know me, live with me in the world of my mind."
"It's a very poetic thought."
"I told him he's lovesick-he's fallen in love with the human race. But you know how it is. I've never hated humans the way he has, and so I'm not quite so impressed when I find out that not all humans are worthless."
Reck walked to the chair on the other side of the fire.
"It's funny," said Patience. "I kept dreaming about houses. Different houses that I needed to take care of.
Sometimes Heffiji's house and sometimes my father's house, and sometimes Heptagon House. Sometimes the house where my mother was killed."
Reck looked thoughtful. There were footsteps on the stair. Ruin padded into the room. Patience noticed at once that he was no longer naked. He wore short trousers.
A step toward accepting human civilization.
"Why did you call me?" he asked.
Reck turned to him, beckoned him closer. There was no one else in the room, but still it was better not to talk too loudly, not when they were saying things that could reveal who they were before they wanted to. "She heard our call," said Reck.
Ruin looked at Patience, as if analyzing a strange new herb he had just noticed on the forest floor. "The need to come fix a very important house? And where it was?"
"I saw paths sometimes, I never knew where from or where to. But always in the distance I could see the house burning, and I knew I had to hurry-"
Reck shook her head. "There was nothing about fire in our call."
"We don't even see images," added Ruin. "The othermind isn't that precise."
But Patience was excited at the thought that she might have experienced the gebling othermind in her own body. E She wouldn't let these small objections disprove it. "I'm not a gebling, and my brain may translate things into images that I can understand. I may be more of a gebling than you think. I remember the othermind. I remember, feeling all the other geblings, and the map of Cranning.
And besides, I have the scepter now. Maybe that lets me feel your call."
Reck stroked her tongue with the long nail of her thumb. "No," she said. "Heptarchs have borne the mindstone before, but they have never heard the call of the king to the people."
Ruin cocked his head, studying Patience's face. "If it; isn't the mindstone, then perhaps Unwyrm's call has i made her more sensitive, so she hears what no human could hear before."
Reck raised a finger. "Remember, though. No Heptarch has ever worn the mindstone so close to Cranning. When the other geblings took up the call, to pass it on, perhaps it grew strong enough for her to hear."
"It was nothing like Unwyrm's call," said Patience.
"That is so clear and powerful."
"Unwyrm is much better at it than we are. Our human nature. It weakens us." Reck sounded a little resentful.
"Do you wish that you had no human parent?"
Reck laughed bitterly. "Do you think the wyrms look any prettier to us? Nobody gave us a choice of ancestors."
"I saw it," said Patience. And she told them of the birth of the first geblings. Ruin made her slow down, tell every detail. He listened with his eyes closed, as if by concentrating on the sound of her choice he could conjure up the memories that the geblings had lost forever when they lost the mindstone of the kings.
When Patience told how the infant Unwyrm killed his mother, Ruin nodded. "Yes, yes," he said. "It wasn't murder. He had to eat the crystal, you see. To know all that she knew."
"We're more discreet now," said Reck. "We're more human. We wait until our parents die naturally. It means we have more life on our own before becoming our parents. But there's nothing unnatural about a child eating its parent's memory, not on Imakulata."
Patience went on with the story, with all she could remember of the life of the first geblings. And ended when the last of the gebling kings to bear this mindstone found the corpse of the last living wyrm. Humans had burned it to death.
"Of course," said Reck. "If it's strange and frightening, kill it. The human credo."
"Humans do what they have to do," said Ruin. Reck grinned wickedly and winked at Patience, as if to say, See how my brother has become a humanophile! "The wyrms did what they had to do," said Ruin. "They knew the humans could and would kill them all, with their machines. What do you do when the enemy is too strong to destroy? You become the enemy."
"Oh, yes, everybody's doing what their genes tell them to do," said Patience.
"If they hadn't chosen to mate with humans," said Reck, "we wouldn't exist. We can hardly condemn the choice they made."
"But you see, Heptarch, we geblings are not what they decided to become," said Ruin. "We're the castoffs of the second generation, the failed experiments, the doomed hybrids, the pitiful grotesques. Dwelfs with no brain. Gaunts with no will. We geblings, we came close.
But not a perfect match. It's the next generation that will be the perfect match, while we are meant to die."
"It's not as if anyone planned it," said Patience. "Its the way life evolved here on Imakulata."
"When you put it that way," said Reck, "it makes you want to bound up to Unwyrm and have his babies, doesn't it?"
"With all due respect to the wisdom of our most ancient forebears," said Ruin, "the gebling king has decided not to go along with the plan."
"We are wyrm enough to feel the life of every other gebling," said Reck, "and human enough to have an individual will to survive. As far as we're concerned, the adaptive process went far enough when it produced us and the gaunts and dwelfs."
"We are the heirs of the wyrms," said Ruin. "Different from humans, but enough like you to live alongside you. The genes of the wyrms are best preserved in us.
Not in the perfect copy that Unwyrm means to make."
"We are allies in this war," said Patience. Impulsively she slid from her chair, sat on the floor before the fire, leaning against Reek's legs, her head resting on the gebling's knee. "I remember living gebling lives. I w
ant you to survive as much as I want human beings to live."
Reck stroked her hair. "I have come to know you as I've known no other human being but one. I would regret it if the only way to stop Unwyrm were to kill you, too."
"But you would do it," said Patience.
"If there be no other way, I will."
"And if there be no other way," said Patience, "I want you to."
She happened, as she said it, to look back to the door.
Angel stood there, his hands on the jambs on either side.
The look on Angel's face said that he had overheard their conversation and that he would not consent to Patience's death.
And for the first time it occurred to Patience that Angel might have no intention of obeying her when it came to the final battle with Unwyrm. Angel had his own plans, and however much he might call her Heptarch, he still thought of her as a child under his tutelage.
A chill swept over Patience as she thought. What if I have to kill you, Angel, in order to do what I must do?
He could not have seen what she thought in the expression of her face, but weak as she was she could not hide the shudder. He saw it. Wordlessly he went back outside, closing the door behind him.
If Reck and Ruin noticed the momentary byplay, they did not comment on it. Perhaps it was because Reck felt her shudder that she asked, "Are you strong enough to go on?"
"What strength does it take?" asked Patience. "I'm sane, I think, and so we can go as soon as the work here is finished."
"Then we can go now. There's no need to wait here for the house to be done. It will be finished whether we're here or not. Besides, we can supervise it, in a general sort of way, without being here at all."
Reck got up.
"Wait," said Patience. "I wanted to ask you. Will.
He was watching at the foot of my bed when I woke up."
Reck shrugged. "Will does what he wants."
"How long had he been there?"
"I don't know. Whenever I've noticed him, he was either coming from or going to your room."
Ruin chuckled. "He's a human male, after all, and you only came out of your boy disguise when I operated on you. Perhaps he likes looking at you. He's been celibate for a long time."
Patience was disconcerted for a moment, to think of Will perhaps desiring her as a woman. Then she realized Ruin was joking. She laughed-
"Don't laugh," said Reck. "I gave up trying to decipher Will's mind long ago, however, so my guess is almost worthless. He does what he wants. But I doubt he thought of having you, Child. I've never seen him want anything for himself. His life is nothing but service."
"A natural slave," said Ruin.
"No one could ever own him," said Reck. "He serves, but only where he thinks service is needed. I think that secretly he believes he's Kristos. Isn't that what the human god is supposed to be? The servant of all?"
"I'm a Skeptic," said Patience. "I don't pay attention to religion."
"Well, like it or not, religion pays attention to you," said Reck. "If you come out of this alive, you'll be lucky if they don't claim you're the Kristos."
"She's as good a choice as anyone," said Ruin.
"Or why not you?" said Patience. "That would stand them on their ear, to have a gebling savior."
Ruin laughed. "Why not? The goblin Kristos."
Patience laughed with him. As she did, she felt the Cranning call strengthen within her, as if it had been holding back, during her long madness, but had now awakened with the sound of her laughter. Lust for Unwyrm burned within her. She called for Sken, and Sken and Will readied the boat that afternoon. And in the morning, Patience herself took River's jar from the mantle piece.
"Wake up," she said to him.
He slowly opened his eyes, then clicked twice and made a kissing sound. The monkey scampered into the room almost at once, and began pumping the bellows frantically. "About time," River said. "About bloody time, what do you think I had them save my head for, to watch while a bunch of goblins redecorate a dullfish house? Get me down to the boat, and you may rest assured that I'll remember this as the worst, the stupidest voyage of my life!"
He scolded all the way down the hill. Only the rocking of the boat in the water stilled him; then he sang the most curious song to the river, a song without words, without even much of a melody. The song of a man returned to his body at last, the ecstasy of once again wearing his own arms and legs, of once again being himself. River restored to the river.
They cast off from Heffiji's ramshackle dock and sailed north on the last of the autumn wind. Patience could feel Unwyrm rejoicing that she was coming to him once again. This month of waiting must have been hard for him, not knowing what it was that kept her, not knowing if she was injured, or had gained strength to resist him, or had been captured. Now she was coming to him once again, and he made her body tremble with the pleasure of it.
Chapter 14. VIGILANT
PATIENCE KNEW THAT THE SCENERY UPRIVER OF Heffiji's house was identical to the scenery they had already passed.
The same massive oaks, the same beech and maple, ash and pine. But she knew more now. She was more. She could remember some of the earliest Heptarchs as little children, learning long catalogues of flora and fauna, all neatly split between native and Earthborn.
Oak and maple are Earthborn, so are ash and pine.
Beech and palm and fern are native, but were named for similar Earth species. Scrubnut, hotberry, glassfruit, and web are native; walnut is from Earth.
Like many of her earliest ancestors, Patience now saw clear divisions between Imakulata's native life and the life brought in the starship, and she began to understand the origin of the ancient enmity between humans and the intelligent natives they despised. They were ugly, strange, dangerous from the human point of view, while humans and the plants they had brought with them were safe and beautiful.
Yet Patience could also see what none of her ancestors had seen. Even though she could remember the world as it was seen by the fifth Heptarch, she had no memory of an alien world. The forests of Imakulata, by the fifth generation, had become exactly as they were today, almost entirely Earthborn.
And yet not Earthborn at all. The native species had not been replaced. They had merely put on disguises and become, in appearance, the Earthborn plants that the humans nurtured. What was the oak before? A little flying bug, a worm, a seaweed, an airborne virus on a fleck of dust? The whole world was in disguise, every living thing pretending to be homely and comfortable for the humans who supposed themselves masters of the world. Everything that truly belonged to human beings had been kidnapped, murdered, and replaced with mocks and moles. Patience imagined she could see through the disguise of the deer that drank at water's edge and bounded lightly away at their noisy approach. She pictured the secret self of an oak as a hideous, deformed baby leering wickedly at her from the heart of the tree. Changelings, a world of changelings, all conspiring against us, lulling us into complacency, until the moment that they finally begin to replace us, too.
She shuddered. And she imagined that Unwyrm whispered to her with the desires of her body. Come to me, come and bear my children, my children, my changelings, we'll steal into every house in the world, you and I, and creep to the children's beds. We'll lay our little wyrmling into the cradle, and watch as it changes shapes to look just like the human baby lying there. Then we'll take the human baby, carry it outside, slit its throat and toss it in my bag.
A thousand bags, each emptied into a garden, where the leering oaks suck the last dregs of life from the desiccated flesh. Patience thought she walked through the garden, brittle bones crackling under her feet, watching where her husband emptied another bag, then looked at her with his tiny wyrm's head and said, "The last. That's the last of them. There's only one human child left in all the world." He took a living baby out of his bag, its terrified eyes looking hopelessly up at her, and graciously offered to let her dine.
Instead, she ran away, to a place
where the ground was soft and forgiving to her feet; to a small hut in the forest, where she could hear a mother crooning to her child. Here is a place we missed, she thought. A child that lives on. I'll protect it, I'll hide it from Unwyrm, and he'll grow up and thrive and kill the changelings-
She peered into the window and saw the baby, and he was beautiful, his delicate fingers wrapped around his mother's thumb, his mouth making sweet sucking motions.
Live, she said silently to the child. Live and be strong, for you are the last.
Then the child winked at her and leered.
Angel shook her awake. "You screamed," he said.
"Sorry," she whispered. She held to the gunnel and looked across the water at the trees. None of them seemed any different. Her dream had been nonsense. If it looks like an oak, if it cuts like an oak, if you can build with it like an oak, what does it matter that it has one immense genetic molecule, instead of many small ones? What does it matter if the deer is only half deer, and the other half of its bloodline is some strange creature of Imakulata?
Life is life, form is form.
Except my life. My form. That must be preserved.
Unwyrm's improved version of humanity is the death of the old, flawed, lonely, but beautiful Earthborn people.
My people.
Come, hurry, hurry, come, spoke Unwyrm's passion.
"Look," said Angel. "River sent Ruin up the mast, and he saw it at the last bend of the river. Skyfoot. For a few minutes, we can see it even from the deck."
Patience got up. Despite what she'd been through on this journey, her body still responded quickly. She was alert and strong in a moment. My body doesn't know I'm three hundred generations old, she thought. My body thinks that I'm a young woman. My body still thinks I have a future of my own.
Skyfoot was a shadow just topping the distant trees on a long, straight stretch of river.
"If the forest weren't so tall," said Angel, "we would have seen it a week before we reached Heffiji's house, instead of three days after leaving it."
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