From the front of other boat a green glow swam upon the river. Mouche knew this was Flowing Green, that she led him to his destiny, that she knew he followed willingly even though he hadn’t wanted to approach her, not really. So far … so far nothing had happened to disenchant him, but if it did … oh, he would feel … feel so …
“What?” asked Ornery, leaning toward him. “You look as though you had lost your last shoelace and the race about to start.”
Mouche managed a smile. “I was thinking how wonderful … how wonderful they are.” He gestured, making it clear who he meant.
“They always were,” said Ornery. “I always thought so.”
“You’ve both seen them?” Questioner asked. “I mean, without their coverings.”
“Not recently,” Ornery admitted. “But when I was a child, of course I saw them. They didn’t wrap themselves up with us. Not when we were little.”
“Mine did, mostly,” Mouche confessed. “We had such a little place to live. Unless we were out in the woods, then my Timmy would take off her wrappers.”
“Her wrappers? You knew she was female?”
“No! of course not.” Mouche subsided into a new fit of guilt. Thinking of Timmys as male or female was also forbidden. “We weren’t supposed to wonder about them, or to think of them being families or having babies or anything.”
Ornery snorted. “Oh, well. Supposed to! We’re supposed to be veiled, but on ships we aren’t. We’re supposed not to see Timmys, but we don’t trip over them, so we must really see them, right? You can drive yourself crazy with stuff you’re not supposed to.”
“And women aren’t supposed to be … running around loose,” murmured Mouche in a slightly angry tone.
Surprisingly, Ornery grinned. “Right. Not supposed to.”
From behind them, the Questioner murmured, “And girls aren’t supposed to pretend to be boys, but I doubt you’re the first.”
“How did you know?” Ornery asked, jaw dropping.
“I can smell you, child. My sense of smell is copied from Old Earther canines. Differentiating between sexes is nothing. I can also tell about how old you are, where you’ve been and what you’ve been eating recently, what your state of health is, and what was in the soap you last used.”
“Can you tell where we’re going?” asked Ornery in a slightly sarcastic voice.
“From the fact that water runs down hill, I assume we go down,” she said. “Somewhere this streamlet runs into a river, and that, I should imagine, runs eventually into an underground sea. I believe so, for seas figure in the legends of this place and because Mouchidi’s little friend has told us we will cross them.”
Mouche flushed. “She isn’t my … my friend.”
“Ornery is right, you know. She isn’t a she, either.”
Astonished, Mouche tried to turn around, a maneuver that set the little boat bobbing. A Timmy voice came clearly through the darkness. “Still, sit, you make peevish Joggiwagga!”
Without moving, Mouche said, “She isn’t? I mean, it isn’t?”
Questioner murmured, “It isn’t, no. Is the one leading us the one you’ve been watching?”
Mouche nodded miserably. “One of them. I call her … it, Flowing Green.”
“Because of the hair, of course. Flowing Green is very attractive to you, is it not? Tim, not. I think we will find they do not say him, her, he, she, but merely tim. Mankind proposes, tim-tim disposes.”
“No sexes?” drawled Ornery, with a sidelong glance at Mouche. “That should simplify things.”
“Not really,” murmured Questioner. “Reproduction of nonsexual beings will inevitably have its own complications. We simply don’t know what they are, yet.”
Questioner dimmed her light to the slightest, reddish glow, watching in fascination as the luminescence around them continued to grow brighter. The surroundings were in no sense illuminated. Much of their environment appeared as patches of darkness outlined or interrupted by strings, shades, lines, or clouds of light ranging from pale yellow through all possible greens to deep blue. Part of this, Questioner knew, was due to her reduced light and their own eyes adjusting to the lower levels of illumination, but part was a real increase in luminosity and a shift in color toward the slightly longer wave lengths. One did not actually see a rock, one saw a fuzzy angular yellow outline around a black patch partly filled in by pale green with blue prominences that one could decode as a rock. The green fangs that hung above them had been deposited there ages ago by water leaching through limestone. The green glow in the boat ahead of them was brighter now, and occasionally Questioner could detect twin silver eyes peering at them from within it as well as from other, accompanying glows, various shades from amber through blue. Flowing Green was not alone.