Gotoit admired the line of bodies, conveyed her admiration with strokes and chirrups to Lucky and the kittens, and only then helped Saturday bag the night’s catch and walk with it around the eastern edge of the settlement to the temple.
“What does Birribat Shum need all these for,” Gotoit wanted to know. “Usually he only wants one or two at a time.”
“Birribat Shum is pushing the mycelium all the way to Settlement Three,” said Saturday with a slight air of self-importance. “You know, to join the one that’s growing there. He says it works better when all the parts are linked up. Ferfs have something in them that he needs. Something different from human waste. We could probably find out what it is and supply it directly if we had to. On the other hand, humans have something in them that was missing before. Once the Gods used up all they brought with them, they couldn’t go on any longer. That’s why the Departed died.”
“The God didn’t die for a long time after humans got here, not the last one.”
“It took a while. It had to get to know us before it could make the right kinds of spores for the next one.”
Gotoit shook her head and jiggled the sack. “How do you know all that stuff?”
Saturday looked uncertain. How did she know? “I just do,” she said at last. “I’m the One Who, so I guess that’s why.”
“Well, it’s still a lot of ferfs.”
“A lot of work for the cats.”
“It doesn’t matter. Lucky doesn’t mind so long as she doesn’t have to carry each one over here individually.”
“She told you that, did she,” Saturday laughed.
Gotoit was not annoyed at the question, but neither did she disregard it. “Of course she told me I’d have to carry them over. Didn’t Birribat tell you he needed them? Didn’t I tell Lucky? Of course Lucky told me.”
• By noon of the last day they had determined to spend upon their survey, Shan and Bombi and Volsa had reconciled themselves to turning the whole matter over to the machines. By dusk of that same day, they had changed their minds.
The land at the top of the escarpment was relatively flat, though it had been cut by river valleys over the millenia, and the resultant cuts had been worn into gentle slopes by wind and rain and the burrowing of creatures small and large. This terrain was forested with the distinctive escarpment trees, slender trunks which rose twenty feet or so into the air and then exploded into a spherical puff of foliage, from the top of which another trunk emerged, and another puff, and another trunk yet, and so on, to a height of eight or nine puffs at about two hundred feet. From a distance the trees resembled fuzzy green beads strung on thick vertical needles. Because of their resemblance to the ancient art of topiary, the trees were called Topes, as a class, though there were at least twenty different species easily distinguishable by the layman.
The villages of the Departed had been set in clearings, which, remarkably, remained mostly clear of trees even after all the time that had passed since they were built. The temples of the Departed, however, were set among the trees. The new thing, which the Damzels found quite by accident, was in what they assumed to be a meteor crater, a raised lip of stone which made a ragged circle around the enclosed flattened space.
Volsa, bored with villages and temples, had walked into the woods to admire the undulant surface above, where the foliage spheres interlocked to create a solid ceiling of feathery puffs. The land rose before her, culminating in a low rocky wall, which she climbed, bemused, thinking how different air smelted when there were many things growing in it. Beyond the wall, the area was only lightly wooded, the trunks so sparsely scattered that from where she was standing atop the stones she could see the entire circle which enclosed the radiating mounds at the center of the space.
She walked their length, their circumference. The individual mounds were perhaps a hundred feet long, radiating from a common center. There were eleven. Her recording instrument, which had a detachable probe point, told her the mounds were not covering anything on the preset list of recognizable substances—though this bit of information seemed doubtful, with digital figures quivering and needles darting restlessly across the faces of dials.
“Bombi,” she said urgently into her communicator. “Shan. Come here. I’ve found something.”
When they came over the wall a few moment’s later, she was standing in the fifty-foot circle at the center of the radiating mounds, trying to make sense of the readings she was getting.
Bombi stared. “Artifact?” he asked at last.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Artifact would be stone, or metal, wouldn’t it? The same kinds of materials they built their houses and temples out of? We’ve set these machines to recognize all those substances, in all their modest variations.”
“Maybe your probe simply isn’t deep enough. There’s a longer one in the flier.”
“Well, get it. We’ll try.”
As they did, without success. Whatever the things were, buried there under the soil, they were not what the Damzels had expected to find. Nor did they have any idea whether these starburst mounds had anything at all to do with Ancient Monuments.
• Samasnier Girat left a note on China’s door saying he was thinking of her. China knew what he meant. He wanted to try again.
China surprised herself by considering it. Certainly she had sworn never to be with Sam in anything but an official capacity again. They got along all right as workmates. Certainly she had meant it, at the time. After all, he had made her miserable with his picky-picking at her all the time. Asking her strange questions. Demanding answers, when she didn’t even know what he was talking about. Saying things like “Well, think about it,”
