Hermann moved slowly across the other world.Hermann moved slowly across the other world. He had packed as light has he could, of course, and had his lightweight hiking cane, but his hip still made for frequent stops. For a few days, he made himself be patient. He did not move fast, but this was not a race. This was a process, and he was going to interrogate it, understand it, refine it, until it took him where he needed to go.
But five days brought less understanding than horror. He wandered through the Mediterraneanesque landscape, searching for people or clues. He found no one in the city, and when he walked into the countryside—picking a direction by tossing a coin—he found smaller towns.
These were not so empty.
The city had been empty of people, yes, but not of activity. Black, shimmering silhouettes of gauze haunted the streets. When they saw Hermann coming, they floated away. As the Dust consciousness had promised, he was protected from the Specters. It was in the second village that he saw his first person from this world—a man, standing deadly still. Breathing, but not moving. He did not respond when Hermann spoke, yelled, shook him. He gazed at the wall in front of him with vacant eyes. Hermann knew, with a chill, that this was the work of the Specters.
The next day he saw the children. They were below him in the valley, near a town. The Specters paid them no mind. The children ran, tripped, yelled, scattered, converged. Where they were going, they seemed not to know nor care. He stayed away.
The first people he spoke to, on the fourth day, were an older couple. Hermann had camped at the base of the foothills, sleeping poorly from dreams and a sore back. In the morning, he had awoken to a collie sniffing his pack curiously. The dog had a collar. He followed it up to the farmhouse, in hopes of buying some food—who knew if his money was worth anything?
But the couple had welcomed him in, not hearing of payment. They said they had seen him coming. He was good luck, the man said. Their dog always knew.
They gave him food and drink and promised him a bed. Hermann did not understand why they were so hospitable. Perhaps it was common to their culture. Such cultures existed on his earth. But there was something like relief in their eyes when they spoke to each other, and fear when they looked at him.
When the man finally asked, “Why do the Specters flee from you then, young man?” Hermann realized with cold guilt why they wanted him to stay. Of course, he could not. He could not be a talisman for every frightened adult in this haunted world. He excused himself and went on his way, refusing to take any more of their food.
That night, he lay awake by his dying campfire, staring at the unfamiliar stars. He thought of the collie with an odd twinge of longing for a companion. Hermann was a solitary person by nature, but this was a blighted place, and he would have felt more grounded with company. He thought cynically of his old research partner. He and Oliver had never been close, but their break was still a disappointment.
Hermann had given much thought to what he was doing and why, but as the days had passed and no answer had revealed itself, he had begun to fear there wasn't one. Perhaps all this was a great mistake. Fear of this washed over him until he did not think he would be able to sleep until he had made a definite, definite plan. But he lay still on the ground, watching the last wisps of smoke drift up like Specters taking to the air, and soon he was asleep.
In the dream, he stepped through the window and out onto the roof of his old laboratory building. Lyra was there. She was leaning out from behind a vent. She put her finger to her lips and then beckoned. Hermann hurried after her. Lyra disappeared into the vent, he stepped after, and stepped out onto a moonlit tundra. It was melting. A figure wrapped in furs was hunched on a one-man sled, pulled by two dogs. They struggled in the slushy, muddy snow. Another dog ran alongside. The driver yelped and hooted. “Hurry, hurry, go, go, go!” The aurora fluttered and danced above. Then it transformed, turning to a gold shimmer and transforming into a compass, an hourglass, a skull—Lyra’s symbols—the sky was tearing open—
Hermann was standing on a mountain ridge, looking down at the foothills. The sea was dull in the distance. In the dirt in front of him lay the alethiometer. He picked it up. “Lyra?”
The next day he walked again. He walked upwards: the night had brought no fresh ideas, so he would get a high vantage point and pick a route from there. It was a slow, hot climb. He met no one, not even birds.
Near the top of the dusty trail, Hermann had a flicker of déjà vu. It reminded him of a place in the Pyrenees he had backpacked years ago. With Martin. One of their last trips together.
But when he reached the ridge, almost at sunset, he realized it was not the Pyrenees he was remembering. It was his dream. This ridge was the same one he had seen last night.
No, he thought, setting down his pack and walking slowly to the tiny creek. His clothes were drenched with sweat. He should have taken a shower at that farmhouse. It was not the same spot as his dream, of course; his brain was just looking for patterns. Nevertheless, his eyes darted around the ground, making sure there was no golden compass lying in the dirt.
Instead, what caught his eye was a silver shimmer. He stopped, then stepped back. A rhombus turned back into a square in the mountain air.
It was another window like the one on Sutherland Avenue.
Heart thumping with excitement, Hermann hurried over. This time, he had time to examine the impossible window. It was invisible from behind, he found, and the sides. He examined the edges—what were they made of? When he touched them, he felt no substance. They were infinitely thin. Yet there it was on the other side. Another world. Forgetting how to disbelieve, he felt a powerful wonder. It was the same wonder he had felt the first time he saw the aurora borealis or the words of the Dust consciousness, glowing on his computer screen.
He collected some water, his pack, and stepped through. Leaving the mountain, he found himself on a rocky outcropping above an extraordinary prairie. The wave of wonder rose higher in his chest. It was unlike any prairie he had ever seen on earth. It was beautiful, a real ocean of grass, deep and lush, every shade of blue and green and yellow and gold, shivering and swishing like a breathing thing.
In the deep blue distance, opposite the setting sun, a forest towered. His eyes struggled to scale the distance and height of what he was seeing. He set down his pack and pulled out his binoculars. Yes, it was a forest: a forest of trees almost twice as large as redwoods, with leaves, not needles. He shook his head in awe. He turned his binoculars to the herd of grazing creatures nearby. There was something odd about them, but he could not quite tell what.
Hermann followed the sound of a creek until he found it. He rolled out his tarp there. That night he slept among the whispering grasses, under alien stars, and he did not dream.
A loud hum woke him. For a moment he had the strangest impression of a guitar string vibrating close to his ear, and then he woke fully to see an enormous bumble bee hovering close by. It was perusing the flowers near his head. Hermann hiked himself up on his elbow. No—it was not a bumble bee. It was a tiny bird, a hummingbird the size of a thimble. He laughed aloud in amazement. The hummingbird lit on a poppy-like flower, making it dip and bounce.
The morning air was beautiful, full of warmth and birdsong. The sun was just coming up, and the dew on the grass was quickly rising in a gauzy mist. Hermann washed in the cool creek, did his morning stretches, and ate some of his last remaining food. He set off toward the trees as the fog evaporated.
The grass was deep, past his knees, and he noted many varieties of different color and texture. Low shrubs with maroon leaves grew in unobtrusive patches among the grass. He saw strange black beetles and a lizard that scuttled away, and many more tiny hummingbirds. Swallow-like birds sailed by, divebombing the grass for bugs he could not see. They flew strangely, he thought, but too fast to examine.
A half an hour later, he was still a ways from the forest. In a sort of dazed disbelief, he kept checking through the binoculars—yes, the trees really were that big. Yes, really. He could hardly imagine the excitement of a biologist discovering this world.
His path soon crossed with a herd of the grazing creatures. They were brown and deer-like, and took little notice of him. It was only when he was a few yards away that Hermann realized what was different about them: their legs. Instead of a spine and four lateral limbs, these creatures were diamond-shaped. They had a leg in the front and back, and two on the sides. When they walked, they rocked side to side.
He gazed in awe. A completely different configuration of life. This world had diverged from his much earlier than the world of the Specters, he speculated. That world had regular humans. But in this world, evolution had decided early on that the diamond shape worked best. Were all animals like this here? He thought of the strangely flapping birds.
The sun rose overhead as he continued on towards the trees. Another surprise awaited him on a rise in the grass. He came out onto what looked, for all the world, like a paved road. A long, black strip of stone, worn smooth. Looking down it, he could see it got wider in some areas and narrower in others. The edges bubbled out irregularly. It was probably an ancient lava flow, he thought. Well, it was certainly easier to walk on. He limped along more steadily towards the forest.
It was almost midday when he reached the first tree. It was as wide around as a small house, and surrounded by a thick bed of dead leaves. Hermann waded carefully through, sending up clouds of midges and flies that hummed and buzzed around him. He waved them gently away. Navigating around the enormous roots, he finally reached the trunk. The bark was tawny brown and laciniate. He ran his hands along the ridges, canyons. Around him, the hummingbirds chased the midges and swallows chased the flies. The rustling leaves, hundreds of yards overhead, sighed like a distant seashore.
Hermann set his pack down below the “road,” and wandered deeper into the grove with only his cane and his binoculars. The vaulted grove was not silent, but there was something churchlike about it: the mottled light, the pillars of wood, the hum of life like a choral echo.
Suddenly there came a crash behind him. Hermann whipped around and saw no one—but he heard another crash and saw, further off, something big and round bouncing off the roots of a tree and rolling away.
Now he heard more crashes in the grove. He hurried back towards the road, his free arm over his head.
Safe in the sunlight, he peered back into the shade. Every ten or twenty seconds, one of these round things fell from a tree somewhere. Were they seedpods? One was lying rather close. He darted in, turned it on its side, and rolled it back to the road.
The seedpod was a thick disc, with a depression in the middle, like a jelly doughnut. Here was where it had been attached to the tree, he thought, running his fingers over the dip. The rest of the seedpod was covered with coarse hair, but the middle had a slippery smoothness. He rubbed his fingers together. Oil. Hermann rapped his knuckles against the tough seedpod skin. It was as hard as a coconut, but dense like rubber, and made no echo. It had survived a fall of hundreds of feet without breaking—was it possible to break open? If it was a seedpod, surely it had to be opened somehow?
He rolled the seedpod back towards the grove. It went surprisingly far before friction overcame its momentum. How had this world evolved? Natural roads? Skyscraper trees? If only he knew anything about evolutionary biology. You have been preparing for this journey as long as you have lived. Had he? Had they picked the wrong scientist? The wrong man?
It was then he heard the rumbling in the distance.
Hermann hurried to his pack and pulled it among the roots of the nearest tree, then sank down to a crouch. Peering over the enormous root, he scanned the horizon. There, up the road. A herd? Something was approaching in a cloud of dust. He looked through his binoculars. It was moving too fast and smooth for the small grazers he had seen, or indeed any running thing. He had the most bizarre impression of a motorcycle gang.
Not wanting to be spotted, he ducked down before his eyes could make sense of what he was seeing. They were almost there. He heard them—they were slowing down. They were stopping. Why? What were they riding? And what were they? He had to look.
Hermann peered cautiously around the root. The group was about fifty yards away. For a second he disbelieved his eyes more than even the skyscraper trees or the window between worlds, for these four-legged, diamond-backed creatures were riding on wheels. Wheels? No animal could evolve wheels—a diamond body, certainly, but a wheel was impossible, a wheel is completely separate from the axle, and you can’t, you couldn’t—
One of them was rolling towards the seedpod he had moved. He saw that they were similar to the grazers in size and shape, but with small horns and short, elephant-esque trunks. Quiet, musical sounds came from their trunks, which they moved expressively. Were they speaking to each other? They were gray, almost bluish, and they had bright, energetic eyes, which darted around, looking. Looking for him.
And now that one was coming closer to him, he saw with a shock of understanding, they were not riding on wheels. It was the seedpods. They used the seedpods as wheels.
Hermann realized he had been spotted. His confusion had snapped so quickly to satisfying revelation that he was caught off-guard. So he stepped out, holding his hands up in peace.
But these creatures did not have hands. Not sure what else to do to communicate his pacifism, he set down his cane.
The creature closest cooed inquisitively, then set two feet down and dropped their seedpod wheels. They stood before him on four clawed feet.
“Hello,” said Hermann.
The others rolled up behind the first. Their faces were strange, but they looked at him with obvious interest. Up close, there was no doubt—these creatures were intelligent.
“Hermann,” he said, putting a hand on his chest.
The one closest stepped, claws clicking on the stone, and reached out with their trunk.
“Ermin,” said the creature, touching the hand on his chest.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Ooareyoo,” said the creature.
“I’m Hermann,” he said. “A human.”
“Amerman, ayooman,” they repeated. One of the others made a noise that for all the world sounded like a chortle, and then the whole group was laughing.
Laughing! There was no doubt it was laughter: their heads tossed, their trunks waved. Half dazed, Hermann laughed too. He thought of William Hazlitt—Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. If they could laugh, then they were not animals.
Standing was becoming uncomfortable so as their laughter subsided, he picked up his cane and leant on it. One of them drew close and sniffed questioningly at his hand on the handle. The tip of their trunk moved as expressively as a hand, and as gently, feeling his knuckles. He held out his other hand and they handled it with curiosity.
“Oh—are you smelling the oil?” he said, realizing. “I handled your seedpod.” He pointed at the one in the grove.
“Seepot,” the creature echoed, a smile apparent in their voice.
Hermann nodded, smiling too.
“I suppose if we can both speak, more or less the same, we can communicate,” he said. “What are you called?”
The one examining his hand looked inquisitive.
He rethought the inquiry: “Hermann,” he said again, pointing to himself.
“Ermann.”
“Hermann.”
“Hermann.”
He nodded. Then he pointed at them.
The first one said something, it sounded like three syllables to Hermann, but he wasn’t sure he caught it. Then, again: Mulefa.
“Mulefa,” he repeated tentatively.
Again they laughed, trilling. One nudged the one who had spoken, as if to tease. Mulefa, they repeated after him, laughing. He supposed he had gotten it just wrong enough. That was alright. He smiled breathlessly. Between himself and the mulefa there arose an amiable alliance, one that lasted from that day on.
He wanted to ask more, about the history of their world and the method of their movement. But the one who had removed their wheels was replacing them, preparing to leave. He saw a seedpod being lifted by two into the saddle-backpack on a third’s back. The one re-mounting hooked their front and back claws into their two wheels, and then pushed gently with their two lateral feet, rolling over to Hermann.
Was this goodbye?
No, for this one was kneeling unmistakably. Two others were picking up his pack, putting it onto someone’s back. Their intent was clear: come with us. Hermann hesitated. He had ridden a horse once or twice, and it had not been pleasant. But there was no other way, and there could not possibly be anything more interesting than getting to know these creatures. No—not creatures. People. They were alien, but they were as much people as he was, and both wanted to learn about the other. So with awkward care, he climbed on the offered back.
With excited, musical chatter, the mulefa gathered up, and then set off. They flew out of the grove in a moment, down the road, picking up momentum with shocking speed, moving farther in minutes than Hermann had all day. They sailed on under the sun, sending up dust in their wake. When they swung around curves or dropped down a slight incline, some of them whooped in unmistakable joy. This was their way of life, but clearly, they enjoyed it deeply.
For Hermann’s part, he was hanging on as tight as he could. They flew at a terrifying pace, and he had nothing to hold onto but his bearer’s neck. He did not even trust his own legs to grip. He bent tensely, wanting to lower his center of gravity and reduce wind resistance. His hip and back were not going to be happy with him tomorrow.
They sped down the highway towards the sinking sun. As dusk began to fall, they flew down a long slope, past a stand of the great trees, and he saw a river shimmer in the valley. In the distance, he thought he could see an ocean or lake. Soon he could see where they were heading: a settlement. In almost no time, they were rolling to a halt before the intersection of river and highway, and his bearer was kneeling for him to climb off again.
He did so stiffly, thanking his—acquaintance? Friend? He held out a hand tentatively, and they touched it with their trunk amiably, seeming to understand his gratitude.
“Atal,” they said.
“Atal,” Hermann repeated, as the one carrying his rucksack trundled over.
Atal laughed brightly, and touched his hand again. “Atal!” said the one carrying his rucksack, joining the joke, and Hermann took the pack, thanking them too. His hip was aching but his mind was racing. He untied his cane from the side and followed them into the settlement.
It was abuzz with evening activity. Some mulefa were carrying brush to feed cooking fires, others were bringing nets from the direction of the river, nets filled with fish. He saw some weaving in the front yards of their homes, and children playing nearby, no wheels, running in the awkward canter of this world. Fire, wheels, built homes—this was a civilization, a people. Hermann wondered if they had writing, and if he could be taught to read it.
They led him past the huts to the center of town, where many mulefa gathered around him with interest. He could hear the ones who had brought him explaining in their musical tones, and wondered what they were saying. So began the strangest week of his life.
The mulefa were a lively and orderly society, and they were eager to fit him into it. Every day was a whirlwind of teaching and learning, careful demonstrations, and slowly but surely improving linguistic communication. The mulefa spoke with a combination of words and trunk gestures, which Hermann began to imitate with his arm. This worked well enough, and he soon had a basic vocabulary of everyday objects and activities, even if abstract ideas and the grammatical structure were still beyond his reach.
As a people, they were the mulefa but an individual was a zalif. Like humans they had two sexes and most lived in monogamous couples. There were a few kids in the town, kids being those under ten who did not yet use the seedpod wheels. Hermann kept an eye out for same-sex couples, but could not actually tell the difference between the sexes on sight; it did not seem to have much bearing on their roles either.
Atal the young she-zalif took him along on her duties. Their first project was home repair—there was a disused hut near the river that they wanted him to stay in, but they had to restore it first. So they taught Hermann how they built: a circle of vertical wooden beams, coated with a wattle-and-daub mixture, and a roof of thatched straw. This straw had to be replaced often, on all the houses, and they were excited to discover that Hermann could climb up on the roof and do it much more quickly (they could not climb). He was not the quickest climber by human standards, but he felt a warmth at being useful to them in this way.
When they were not working on the hut, Atal was teaching him about fishing, which was her main duty. He helped with fishing in the river, and some out by the ocean he had seen on arrival. In the heat of the afternoon, they would sit in the shade and repair the nets or weave new ones, and talk. The mulefa had to work in pairs, weaving the twine between their trunks. At first, Hermann was excited to show how he could do it by himself, perhaps even faster than two, because he had two hands. But he quickly realized the social and emotional value of their teamworking policy, and from then on he worked with a partner. This was also the best time for conversation, and as Hermann’s vocabulary grew, he wrote down as many words as he could.
As fascinated as he was by their differences, he was still hesitant about examining the physiology of his hosts. They had no such shyness about him. They were fascinated by Hermann’s strange autonomy, his trunkless face, and especially his hands. With their trunks, which had two prehensile projections as deft as his fingers, they examined his numerous digits and joints. He demonstrated for many enchanted mulefa how he tied a knot or handled his pocketknife. One afternoon Hermann dug a coin out of his rucksack and did the sleight of hand tricks he had learned as a child, to the delight of the mulefa kids. The children were also very interested in his shiny metal cane, the mulefa having no metalworking. Hermann realized one day that they viewed his cane as a wheel, a necessary tool for human transportation. It was logical, to them, for two legs did not seem stable without a support.
He tried to show that the cane was man-made, not a natural growth in harmonious evolution. Of course it is built, said Atal, finally realizing what he was trying to say. Nothing like this grows. She turned to a zalif friend and said something to him, and he replied—Hermann caught the words maybe and wood and craft. Atal turned back to Hermann. Would you like to make a stick from our wood? It is tough—it bends but does not break. Hermann gladly agreed.
The next day, a zalif named Anku took him to one of the many groves they maintained. This part of the forest had smaller trees, which the mulefa used for wood and sap. He took Hermann to a pile of felled saplings, drying out in the sun. With much gesturing and half-communicating, Anku advised him in picking one.
Back in town, Anku showed him his curved stone blade, specialized for cutting and carving this wood. He demonstrated the whittling for Hermann, and then let him try. Hermann cut the bark away and whittled, over the next few days, until the stick was skinny enough. The handle was a severed, twisted branch at the top—it was this irregularity that had made them choose this sapling. When that was done, Anku showed him the lacquer they made from sap. Many layers made a shiny, durable surface. With various oxides, they could make the sap dull or matte, or even tinted. Hermann became interested in a strange quality of the transparent lacquer—it doubled things, the same way as Iceland Spar. He asked Anku if they had any clear lacquer with no back, and Anku showed him a small block. Indeed, it split the rays. Hermann held his hand behind it and watched two left hands tilt through the glass. Over the next few days, he painted and gently sanded ten layers of transparent lacquer onto his new cane. Through the doubled shine, the wood grain became as dense as a fingerprint.
The cane was beautiful, with a nicely twisted handle and a perfectly balanced weight. This small project raised many questions for Hermann. He had been there two weeks, but still had a limited understanding of the mulefa’s place in this world, and of their history. They maintained the grazing herds, the fish, the fruit trees; they were a conscious part of their ecosystem. It seemed they maintained the wheel-pod trees as well, but he did not understand how. The trees were too large to harvest for lumber, and the seedpods were not food, they were just transport. How did their seeds spread, then?
He also had a limited understanding of his own role, his own journey. He was not certain how long he should stay among these people, learning their ways. To be sure, he wanted to stay—stay for the foreseeable future, learn as much as he could, complete his dictionary and his evolutionary picture. Stay away from the Cave, the grinding illogic of the hunt for Shadows. In the drifting period before sleep, he felt instinctively that he was in the right place; when he was awake, his mind told him he only wanted that to be true.
Something was still missing.
Unexpectedly one day, Hermann got an answer to one of his questions: how the wheel-pod trees were planted. An adult was rolling through town when with a squelching crack her seedpod broke. Hermann hurried over, but she was not hurt or even surprised. She said she had been waiting for this for some weeks. Her seedpod had been starting to get pliable. She offered it to him, and using both hands, he pried it open and poured out the seeds. They were round and flat, reminiscent of pumpkin seeds, but as large as a milk bottle cap. He helped her collect each seed, and bring them to the storehouse of seedpods, where the caretaker of that storehouse took them. These would be carefully planted, he explained.
That evening, Hermann watched Atal doing her daily wheel maintenance with much closer interest. So this was how their ecosystem balanced: the trees dropped their impenetrable seedpods, which the mulefa softened until they could be planted. But they could not be softened without the wear of riding them, which was impossible without the roads. He found it exceptionally surprising that a three-way interdependency could co-evolve, and was not sure he understood it, but he was not an evolutionary biologist. He watched Atal examine the rim of her seedpod for wear, and considered the many-worlds theory. Possibilities, branching into new universes. He had only seen three worlds, but accepting the theory as correct, it made some sense. This unlikely world existed because many failed versions existed in parallel. Perhaps in one world the volcanoes had not created such perfect roads, and the seedpods had grown with weak enough skins to propagate on their own. Perhaps in another, the mulefa claws did not grow so perfectly perpendicular and support their leg musculature so well, and they could not ride the seedpods. Mulefa children could not ride the wheels until they were about ten. Then they became part of this cycle.
At his prompting, Atal tried to explain the interdependence between the wheel-pod trees and the mulefa. They depended on each other equally. She pointed to the depression in her wheel, indicating he should touch it. He rubbed it with his finger, feeling the slippery oil again, fragrant and almost frictionless. He did not think he understood completely, but she seemed to be saying the interdependence came down to the oil. It is the center of our thinking and feeling, or maybe of all thinking and feeling—and the young ones couldn’t use the wheels because they could not absorb the oil. Did she mean that literally? Or did it mean understanding? Hermann tried to ask, but their conversation moved as slow as usual, and he was left with more questions.
But that was the stuff of his life. He found the questions frustrating but fascinating, the mystery branching and branching before him, too many iterations for him to ever travel down each one.
It was at the end of his second week that Hermann began dreaming again. Normally he was not a man to interpret such things as signs, but he had been sent into a parallel universe by a supernatural force and his frame of reference was a little shaken. To his instincts, this read as a bad sign.
He dreamed of a fleet of white sailboats attacking the shore, storming the town in the form of enormous swans. He dreamed of a shadowy figure, sometimes with a wolf-like shape beside it, stalking the blue prairie. He dreamed of fire consuming the whole trunk of a wheel-pod tree, clawing its way up until the tower of flame stretched higher than the eye could see.
The sailboat dreams became nightly until the unthinkable happened. They came true.
He was kneeling on the roof of someone’s house, repairing the thatch, when he noticed white shapes out at sea. They got larger with shocking speed, and when the déjà vu hit, Hermann thought, Am I dreaming?
“My god,” he said aloud.
The zalif below was picking up some reeds to pass to him.
Hermann, he said. What are you seeing?
Hermann tore his eyes away from the white sail shapes, which were moving unmistakably for the river mouth. How to say it? Tall, white, many, moving fast, he signaled desperately. He was awake, but the nightmare horror gripped him.
But the zalif knew exactly what he meant. He whirled around to trumpet alarm to his town. In a moment the alarm spread, and the whole town was gathered in the center. Hermann watched in fear as the boats reached the river and began to come ashore.
Hermann! Come! Atal called. Tualapi! Tualapi!
“But...” They were coming. He scrambled down.
As the tualapi approached Hermann realized they were birds, just like his dream—but they were massive, snow white with strong black legs and those beautiful wings, one in the front, one in the back. The flock moved up the bank and towards the town with malicious, cohesive grace, like a fighter jet formation.
The rest of the town was hurrying to the road, climbing onto their wheels and beating the ground to take flight. Come, come! Atal was calling. Hermann finally reached her. He climbed as fast as he could onto her back and already she was pushing off with her feet. They flew away up the highway behind the rest of the town.
Holding on as best he could, Hermann turned back to look at their town. The tualapi had almost reached it. There were almost forty of them. They seemed to entertain the idea of a chase for a moment, but gave up, their legs not so fast on land.
So instead they sacked the town. With their powerful beaks they beat against the buildings, stabbing into doors until they broke open. They flung food out the doors and onto the street, breaking open sacks of grain and seed and fruit. With snarls and growls devoured whatever they could, tossing the rest in the dirt. It was the work of minutes.
When they had eaten, they destroyed all else they could. They found the seedpod storehouse and tried valiantly to destroy those, but they were too tough. The mulefa around Hermann shivered and murmured with worry as they watched them hurl the seedpods to the ground, peck and stab and scratch—all to no avail. Frustrated, or delighting in the destruction, they rolled some into the river. Atal moaned, watching.
In their final act of vileness, the flock squatted over their destruction and voided their bowels. Hermann gazed in disgust as they waddled away, leaving pools of green and white all over the heaps of wood and thatch, the smell wafting up the hill. In a moment they sailed downstream and back to the sea from where they’d come.
Angry and upset and above all concerned, the townsfolk rolled back downhill. We build again, Hermann said to them. I help. But they were most concerned about the seedpods. There had been fifteen in the storehouse—the tualapi had flung all but two out to sea. Hermann gazed anxiously through his binoculars, and spotted a wheel on the sandbank in the riverbend.
He hurried down to the river and, seeing no alternative, stripped to his underwear and swam across with a rope. The mulefa watched nervously on shore. They never swam, always taking care to keep their feet dry even when fishing. He reached the sandbank, where he found not one but five seedpods. He strung them along the rope, fastened it to his waist, and swam back with them floating alongside. They thanked him profusely, and anxiously helped him get warm again.
That night, round the fire, they explained.
The tualapi attacks were becoming more frequent and though, yes, they could rebuild, it was the loss of seedpods that troubled them. Years ago, there had been many seedpods from plentiful trees. The cycle of life had held the mulefa and their trees in prosperous orbit. Something had gone wrong, somehow—good disappearing from the world, it seemed they said—and the wheel-pod trees had begun to die. All their care and attention was doing nothing to stop it.
Hermann sat with this for a moment, feeling their anxious despair, their fear for their way of life. Then he tried to explain about his dreams. The mulefa word was night-picture, and they took them seriously. I saw night-pictures, he said. Tualapi. Many nights. I did not understand. Surprised, but interested, the mulefa asked him to share his dreams in the future. Hermann had some misgivings, but these were their beliefs, not his, so he did not feel it wrong to put the dreams in their hands.
They did not have long to wait.
The assassin crept through the trees, ducking behind flying buttress roots. In his hand, there was a long stick. Hermann realized it was a rifle. He struck out, but the assassin was already on him, crushing his windpipe. Where is the girl, he hissed. Hermann gasped silently, unable to answer. He raised an arm to strike Hermann with the back of his hand, and Hermann saw a shimmer of metal on his finger—a ring—when he brought it down, Hermann saw a cross before it struck him in the mouth. The girl!
When Hermann woke, the shadow still seemed to crouch over him. It followed him all morning. The cross ring was an especially obvious and unwelcome bit of symbolism from his subconscious, he felt. But he dutifully reported the dream, trying his best with the details. He did not know “ring” so he pointed to the metal band on a married zalif’s horn and then to his finger. They hummed and discussed, thanking him for telling them.
That afternoon, while weaving, Hermann tried to explain his disinclination to trust dreams to Atal. Roundaboutly he explained his work as a scientist and his studies on dark matter. As he got into the story, of the research, the skulls, the girl, the Cave, and the communication with the Dust, he felt a strong twinge. It was again that feeling that something was wrong—that he was in the right place, but that something was amiss. This was a feeling too abstract to trust, yet he wished he had brought his equipment, something to study, anything.
Atal caught his meaning much better than he expected. Yes, we know of this and she said a word similar to voice, meaning, Hermann guessed, consciousness. We call it... light.
Light? Hermann repeated uncertainly.
No, not light, Atal replied. She said the word again, more slowly. It sounded like sraf. It is like the light on the ocean at sunset, in small ripples, the gold shimmer. We call it that name, but it is a make-like.
Make-like was how they expressed ‘metaphor.’
Hermann said, This... sraf? It is not real light, but you call it that because it looks like light?
Yes, Atal said. All mulefa have this. You have it too. It was how we knew you were like us, not like the grazers or the birds or the lizards, who do not. Even though you look so strange and deformed, you are like us, because you have sraf.
Hermann’s mind was racing. They could see it? Shadows? But they called it "light"—just another difference in their species’ outlooks. Do you know where it comes from? he asked excitedly.
From us, and from the oil, said Atal, meaning the oil from the seedpod wheels.
From you?
When we are adults. But we would not have it without the oil from the wheels. Atal explained, When we are old enough to use the wheels, we absorb the oil through our claws. It began thousands of years ago, when the first zalif hooked her claw through the seedpod and was awoken. This gave us memory, wakefulness.
How did it happen?
One day a creature with no name discovered a seedpod and began to play, and as she played, she saw a snake curl through the hole and the snake said—
A snake spoke?
No, of course. It is a make-like. In the story, the snake said, ‘What do you know? What do you remember? What do you see ahead?’ and she said ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’ So the snake said, ‘Put your foot through the hole in the seedpod where I was playing, and you will become wise.’ So she put a foot in where the snake had been. And the oil entered her blood and helped her see more clearly than before, and the first thing she saw was the sraf. She was so delighted that she wanted to share it at once with her kindred. They discovered that they knew who they were, they knew they were mulefa and not grazers. They gave each other names. They named themselves mulefa. They named the seed tree, and all the creatures and plants.
Because they could see, said Hermann.
Yes. And so would their children, because as more seedpods fell, they showed their children how to use them. And when the children were old enough to ride the wheels, they began to generate the sraf as well, and the sraf came back with the oil and stayed with them. So they saw that they had to plant more seedpod trees for the sake of the oil, but the pods were so hard that they seldom germinated. So the first mulefa saw what they must do to help the trees, which was to ride on the wheels and break them, so mulefa and seedpod trees have always lived together.
This was fascinating of course, but Hermann’s mind had grabbed on to the seeing question. He had never thought there was a way to see Dust. How did the mulefa do it? He knew something about optics, so if he could design a lens, perhaps...
Before he could continue this line of thought, a knot of anxious mulefa rode up to them.
Hermann, they said. Something has been found. You must come.
Riding among them on the saddle they had been engineering for him, Hermann flew out of town. They took him past a wheel-pod forest, across a stretch of savannah, towards a herd of grazers. Their nerves were contagious. They reached a herd of grazers and set him down gently. Hovering behind, they followed him through the shuffling animals. There, a foot above the grass, was a window. Lying in front of it was a large dog, and next to it, on his back, was a man.