“Ghosts,” breathed Tony. “Mother …”
“No,” she said, tears on her cheeks at the sight of the lovers. “Holos, Tony. They left them here. The projectors must be somewhere in the trees.”
“They gave them to one another,” Mainoa said. “Toward the end. When there were fewer and fewer of them. To keep the last survivors company.”
“How do you know?”
“I was told,” he said, “just now. And it fits in with other things I have learned since we had lunch together that day at Opal Hill.”
“The language …” Marjorie turned to him, eyes wide.
“The language, yes.”
“I was so eager to get away, to find Stella, I never thought to ask—“
“The great machines at Semling have chewed on the problem, chewed and swallowed and spat it out again. The machines can translate the books of the Arbai. Some. Oh, half, let us say. Half they can read. The other half they can guess at. The clue was there in the vines on the doors. Where we had never thought to look.”
“And the carved doors themselves?”
“They can read those as well.”
“What do they say?”
Brother Mainoa shook his head, trying to laugh, the laugh becoming a cough which bent him double. ‘They say the Arbai died as they lived, true to their philosophy.”
“Here?”
“There on the plain they died quickly. Here in the trees they died slowly. Their philosophy prevented their killing any intelligent thing. In their city on the plain, the Hippae had slaughtered their kinfolk. Those who lived in this summer city among the trees could not go back to live there safely. They did not wish to die. So they lived out one last summer here, and when winter came they slowly died here, knowing that in all the universe they were the last of their people.”
“How long ago?”
“Centuries. Grassian centuries.”
She looked around her at the woven buildings and shook her head.
“Not possible These structures would not last- The trees would grow; eventually they would die and fall. These woven roadways would rot away.”
“Not if they were renewed, hour by hour, day by day. Not if they were mended.”
“By whom?”
“Yes, Marjorie, by whom? We all wonder, don’t we. Yes. I think we will meet them very soon.”
Rillibee led them along the woven streets. Before them the way widened, expanding into a broad platform with rococo railings and spiraled pillars supporting a wide witch’s hat of a roof.
The town square, Marjorie thought. The village green. The meeting hall, open to the air, to the wind and the sound of birds. All around it shadowy figures walked and danced and saluted one another, shadows so thickly cast that for a moment the humans thought the mighty figure padding toward them from across the platform was another shadow. When they saw that it was not, they drew together, Tony reaching for the knife he carried.
“No,” said Brother Mainoa, putting his hand on the boy’s arm. “No.” He walked forward to see what he had so often longed to see with his eyes instead of his mind. “No. He won’t hurt us.”
They saw an expanse of trembling skin over eyes they could not quite see. Fangs, or something like fangs, in a gleam of blued ivory. Flaring wings of hair, doubly flaring violet auroras, like spurts of cold lightning.
Brother Mainoa murmured, head down, as though he addressed a hierarch, “We are honored.”
The being crouched. It gave the impression of nodding. Paws curled—no—hands curled upon the braided walkway. Hands which seemed for an instant to have three fingers and opposed, furry thumbs. Behind maned shoulders lay an armored expanse of mottled hide and callused plates, seen only for an instant, or perhaps not seen at all. It was an impression only, gone too quickly to define. They could not describe it except to say it was not like anything else, not like any earth creature, not like any Grassian creature except itself. The proportions were wrong. The legs were not the usual thing one thought of as legs.
Brother Mainoa confronted this mirage with an expression of awed interest, blinking rapidly, as they all were, trying to clear their vision. “Perceiving you for the first time has made me wonder what evolutionary tangle led to the development of this ferocious aspect,” he murmured, eyes down.