We crossed the smaller stream with only minor difficulty. Gaufers do not like wet feet, and they had to be blindfolded to be led over. They could no doubt feel the wetness as well as see it, but evidently feeling it and seeing it were two different things. Lutha brought the last one across, pausing beside me to say, “It seems so natural to have them here.”
“Why wouldn’t they be here?” I asked, surprised.
“They are the first living animals I have ever seen, Saluez. The first I have ever touched!”
“There are no animals on Central?”
“None at all. No animals. No trees. No grassy meadows. No water running freely. It is a very different place from here.”
I gaped, unable to imagine it.
“Like one big building with many, many rooms,” she said softly. “Even the seas are covered over, for that is where our food is raised.”
I considered the gaufers, really seeing them for the first time. They smelled warm and earthy, their muzzles were soft and their bodies sleek. What would it be like never to see any living creature but one’s own kind?
“They think,” she said. “I was surprised at that.”
“Of course they think!”
“On a homo-normed world, we never consider that. We don’t consider animals at all, and certainly we don’t consider that they can think. But the gaufers … they have their own order of precedence, allowing them to interact without constant conflict. They have their own habits of alertness, one keeping watch while others eat, one standing apart, head high, while others drink. They have even a kind of sympathy, for when the lead left one injured his leg slightly, the others gave way and let him have the best spot to lie down.”
She had noticed more than I!
“They like to be scratched just behind the ears, for it’s an itchy place they have difficulty reaching for themselves. They do it for one another, turn about. They know each one of us. They don’t like Leelson and Trompe. Every time one of the men comes toward them, they make whuffing noises with their nostrils. They like you and me, Saluez, for they butt us with their heads as they do one another when they are content. Leely, they ignore. He climbs all over them and they seem not even to notice. Perhaps that’s the way they treat their own young.”
As we went on I thought about what she had said, for there had been something wondering in her voice, like a person under enchantment. Not that I have had much experience with enchantment, but our old stories are full of it.
We moved onto peaceful meadows where a soft wind tossed the grasses into long rollers of shaded silver, a placid, utterly beautiful landscape. This wide valley was green, all green, and I, too, began to feel enchanted at the wonder of it. I had never seen so much grass! It beckoned to be embraced, and I did so, pulling a plumy clump toward me, smelling the fragrance of it.
I turned to find Lutha beside me, holding out her hand. I took it. We stood so, smelling the grasses, while the wagon moved on. Her hand was warm in mine, and comforting. Finally we had to run, hand in hand, to catch up with the others.
We followed the river until it entered a steeply walled channel through a shallow rise, and there we turned a little eastward to climb the hill. Our view southward was blocked until we reached the top, but once there, a new world opened out. Canyon walls retreated on either side, leaving room for endless emerald meadows. The river curved first left, then right, and beyond this scribble of flowing silver was yet another loop in which a building stood.
“How artful,” said Leelson.
“How appropriate,” murmured Lutha.
“It’s a temple, isn’t it,” said Trompe.
The building was circular, made of wood and plaster. The pillars surrounding it were the trunks of great trees, smoothed and ringed with gold. The shallow dome was ribbed with wood and gilded with gold, as was its central pinnacle. All around the building were smoothly plastered pediments, aisles of huge wooden columns, and shallow flights of wide, smooth steps that descended to a surrounding plaza from which paving led in all directions, an enormous spiderweb of narrow roads. It was like nothing else on Dinadh. I might have been on some other world!