Wilvia smiled at the dragon charmingly. “Only through great sacrifice, Keeper.”
“Patience,” said M’urgi.
“Labor,” said Mar-agern.
“And torment,” Ongamar offered.
Naumi shook his head. “Only by doing our duty, but the how is not as important as the why, Keeper—”
“—which is to heal our people,” interrupted Gretamara.
The little man hummed, the ants hummed, the tree hummed. “I have not been near creatures in a very long time. The rule is, one must have a bell and a gate, but I thought I’d made both very difficult indeed. Yet here you are. What have I to do with you? Who are you?”
“The human race,” I said.
M’urgi added, “You have our history in your smoke.”
“Oh, yes,” it said, peering at us with myriad eyes. “You’re not very old, and you’re quite ignorant.”
“We are imperfect,” said Gretamara to the ants, who had flown together in a swarm before her. “We are lacking. We have no memory of what we were, and thus no reach toward what we may become. We desperately need to know our past, but in all the universe only the Keeper has the racial memory of mankind.”
“That is true. I have the histories of every race, every kind, all the move-about, reproduce creatures, and also those of others that have lived without moving or creating. I have the secret lives of stones and the memories of stars. I have the initial impetus, the births of all galaxies, the deaths of a good many. I have millions of years of some races and a few moments of others. Their souls are here.”
“Their souls?” faltered Ongamar. “Of every creature?”
“Is each of you a creature?” asked Keeper.
“That’s a trick question,” Naumi said quickly. “We couldn’t have found you if we each were a separate creature. No, all of us are one creature.”
“I know that,” said Keeper. “All of you are human, and billions more are human, and all humans are one creature, sharing one soul. Yes. And one for birds, and one for the dinosaur…”
“One soul for the dinosaur?” asked Mar-agern. “Then one soul for the umoxen, as well?”
“Oh, an enormous, ramified soul for umox, going back to the very beginning of life on its planet. Umox arose from a star race that went before, as the soul of Bird arose from the soul of Dinosaur. The soul of the scurrying lizard inhabits every warm-blooded winged thing, the soul of the brachiating gibberer inhabits the soul of man, and the soul of great singers and sages inhabits the soul of umox and chitterlain…Oh, yes. Keeper has seen this. Keeper has perceived it.”
“But no…no soul for each of us?” asked Margaret.
The man turned his head, the tree turned a twig toward her, each leaf an eye that seemed to look into her heart.
“Each of you?” the Keeper asked. “One brief life of limited experience, barely informed? Full of false starts, marred by misinformation, rife with regret? Much given to embarrassment and sorrow, lit here and there, if you are lucky, with delight. Do you really want to spend an eternity being only that? What of the lives you’ve lived within your minds, and what of your other selves in other worlds? Each time you make a choice, your universe splits. One of you does one thing, one of you does the other. One of you goes on to fulfillment and joy, the other is mired in pain and anxiety, each in a separate world, but they are all you…
“All the fragments, all the sundered parts come here, melded then into a single me-ness with all possibilities realized, all pains endured, all joys delighted in, one mind containing all that it was and could have been or hoped to be or imagined itself to have been!
“You need not go back to fix it, Margaret. In some world, you did fix it! You need not go back to unsay it, Mar-agern. In some world, it was unsaid. Ongamar, in some life it was untouched. And when you are assembled, you will know it, in that everlasting instant…” Keeper paused, stared, as if dreaming.
“An everlasting instant?” whispered Naumi.
“That instant when the whole being that is you is aware of itself as a whole and dances together upon the green meadows of eternity in a dance that seems endless…”
“Only that instant?” asked Wilvia longingly.
“Long enough for you to know! Once you know, you know. Once you are complete, you are complete forever. And all that, every moment of every day of every lifetime, makes only one leaflet growing on the sprig of humanity. Still, that leaflet is one I keep forever…”
Everything became very still. All movement stopped. The Keeper swelled in size: “The Gentherans sent you here, did they not?”
“The Gentherans are our friends,” said Gretamara.
“Keeper knows that. You are here because of them, and because my daughter, the Gardener, has espoused your cause. You are here because she and her friends conspired so that nature’s laws might be broken without disobeying me. Ah, she is clever, my daughter. Wily, too. And now she sends you here, telling you what?”
“Telling us nothing,” said Wilvia in her most queenly voice. “Except that we may die in the attempt. We have agreed to that, even if this plea is fruitless. It is a chance we took to benefit our people.”
Keeper seemed to ponder this before replying. “Who is to say the memory of all mankind would work for you as you believe it will? What do other races think? Perhaps they would prefer you fade and die, becoming only a footnote in my journal. Who would speak for you?”
“We would,” said someone outside the circle. Margaret looked over her shoulder. “Falija,” she murmured.
“Falija,” the little person affirmed. “Together with a number of our people, Keeper.” She murmured their names as they came into view, a great many of them, gathering into a ring around the seven. “My parents, their Gibbekot and Gentheran friends, their friends of other races who have found humans to be worth the
