If they had clothes on, they were transparent, but clothes or no clothes, they looked nothing like human schoolgirls. I wasn’t sure they were girls at all. They could be…just themselves, not male or female.
“What are they?” I asked.
“They’re nyzeemi,” said Falija. “At least that’s what they are in our language. I just found this place this morning, and when I got back, I looked in your encyclopedia to see if you had anything like them. You don’t. Nyzeemi aren’t human, or female, or mythical.”
“Where did they come from?” Glory asked her. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never seen them.”
“You’ve lived back there, but never here, in their world,” Falija said. “Though we’re not actually in their world. We’re just inside a way-gate. It’s something like the window above the cemetery, where we went to see the dancers. You get to that one by jumping off the rock between the thimble-apple trees.”
Bamber shook his head. “Falija, how did you know about the gates?”
She said, “My people use way-gates to go back and forth. They’re instantaneous. If you can see way-gates, you can move around the galaxy like moving around your house. My people came here through a way-gate. It was all in my mother-brain.”
Glory blurted, “You didn’t come in a spaceship?”
Falija laughed, a kind of purr-hiccup, a prrrit prrrit prrrit, with the pitch going up at the end of each syllable. “From Chottem, where my parents came from, it would take several years to get to Tercis in a spaceship. Spaceships go through wormholes to get from one planet to another, but not all places are connected by wormholes. Really big spaceships, with lots of power, can generate their own wormholes and the protective field that lets people go through without getting scrambled.
“Way-gates are different. There’s no other kind of space involved, they just step across folds, if you know right where they are. My mother-mind remembers hundreds of them. Why did you think they came in a spaceship?”
“I just supposed it,” Glory told her. “Your people sure didn’t come from anyplace on Tercis that I’d ever heard about.”
“No,” Falija admitted. “And neither did those men who are hunting for me. They probably came through a wormhole, and something evil sent them after you three.”
“Me!” Glory squealed like a snared gaboon.
“Glory?” I blurted, sounding just as surprised.
Falija nodded seriously. “I think so,” she said. “Maybe it’s more like a feeling because you and Glory and Bamber…all three of you are part of my duty.”
I, of course, with my usual arrogance, had been assuming that Falija was part of mine, so this set me back on my heels.
“Why me or Bamber?” Glory asked.
“I don’t know why,” Falija said. “Do you know why, Grandma? I’ve seen you biting your lips a lot lately, as though you were thinking.”
I shook my head. “I have no idea, Falija. And since I’m usually thinking something or other, lip-biting is more or less a constant.”
She turned and pointed to the trees below. “It’s selection time. The nyzeemi are picking their trees. They have to do it while the trees are still young, so they can grow old together…”
Behind the young trees, the forest stretched endlessly away in ranks of hills before jagged lines of mountains against blue distances. Some little way back from the clearing, at the end of a glade, a grove of huge old trees towered above the others, only their leaves shivering, for the branches were too huge to be moved by the wind. I happened be to be looking at them as several old nyzeemi melted out of the bark and wandered out into the clearing, followed by others. They weren’t as thin as the young ones, they moved more stiffly, they were wrinkly and aged, with twisty arms and long, long fingers. The old ones spoke to the young ones, pointing at the trees, their clouded heads nodding.
“They’re advising the young ones whom to pick,” said Falija.
“All the trees I see are from old Earth,” I said. “Earth sent tree seeds with our colonies, so it must be a colony planet down there.”
Falija considered this. “I suppose that could be, but considering the size of those trees down below, it’s more likely the seeds came from Earth thousands of years ago, when there were still forests on Earth.”
“It’s so beautiful,” Glory whispered.
Falija whispered, “There’s an ubioque down there who keeps the moss soft and the waterfall beautiful, just to attract nyzeemi for the trees.”
“There’s an ubi-thingy for every place?”
Falija shook her head. “Only beautiful, natural places. There were ubioques on Earth, but once their habitat was gone, they died…”
She stopped suddenly, her ears pricking. All the wind and murmur sounds from below had stopped. We heard something approaching: loud, inappropriate, a hideous clamor like rocks bashing together. Falija whispered, “It can’t see us, but it might be able to hear us. Be still.”
The nyzeemi vanished. The wind dropped. The trees drooped in absolute quiet. The soft purling of the waterfall was lost in the clamor as a long, gray thing like a huge, lumpy snake came bashing through the trees.
“The people here call it a gizzardile,” whispered Falija. “This is a huge one, and those lumps are the stones inside it that it uses to mash up the creatures it swallows.”
The gizzardile attempted to coil itself into
