“My mother gave me my ability to dance,” said Ellin angrily.
“Pff,” said the Timmy. “And who gave her? Ah? Her mother passed it to her, and her mother passed it to her, and so back to the ooze. Planet and time gave dancing. Squirrels in trees dance. Horses dance in meadows. Birds dance in air. Snakes dance in the dust. Your mother did not invent it, she only inherited abilities to do it. So, she inherited well, but she did not do it herself.”
“You’re saying my mother gave me nothing?” Ellin was outraged, almost shrieking.
“What your mother can give you, maybe, is recipe for chicken soup. Apple pie. Maybe she invented that.”
“What are you meaning, chicken soup … “ choked Bao.
The Timmy cocked his head far to the side, stretching his neck, a very unmankindlike gesture. “We hear Hags talk of chicken soup. Any kind of soup. This one recipe from this mother and that one from other mother, but even so, soups taste much alike. Timmy have recipes also. Many good things. You ask Mouche. We made great good smells and flavors for Mouche.”
“Mouche the gardener?” cried Bao.
“Mouchidi, the one the Corojum has sent for.”
After that, Ellin was too angry and Bao was too confused or bemused to ask any more questions, and very soon the swimmer began to swim much faster, with a great rushing-splashing noise along its sides, far too much noise to talk at all. Bao and Ellin settled into a comfortable hollow, stuffed bits of Ellin’s bread into their ears, and let the rocking movement slowly lull them back to sleep.
51—Madame Meets A Messenger
Madame and the two Hags had chosen to sit in the rear of the inflatable boat. Simon and Calvy and the three remaining Haggers sat two on each side and one in front. They were so busy listening to the silence that they did not speak at all, and they floated on the small river for what seemed to them some considerable time before the tunnel narrowed, the water began to rush, and they found themselves plunging through the same narrow throat of stone the prior expedition had traversed, into the same larger river and across it, where the boat ricocheted violently off the tunnel wall.
“I suppose we’re sure everyone went this way,” murmured D’Jev-ier, as the Haggers and Calvy g’Valdet tried to paddle the boat back into the center of the stream.
“We saw their tracks on the sand. We saw the impressions made by at least two boats,” muttered Calvy, fighting his desire to curse at the Haggers, who persisted in paddling against one another’s efforts so that the clumsy boat spun lazily around as the current caught it.
“Let me,” said Madame, moving to the place across the boat from Calvy and taking the oar from the Hagger there. “Watch me,” she said to him. “It is necessary to coordinate the strokes or we go nowhere.”
“Now where did you pick that up?” said Calvy in an interested tone.
“My friends and I do a bit of wilderness walking,” said Madame, concentrating on her paddling. “And canoeing.”
Among Simon, Madame, and Calvy, they managed to turn the boat so that it faced downstream and keep it there with only occasional dips of the paddles. When Madame thought the Haggers had the idea, she gave up her paddle and returned to the company of the Hags.
“Have you met the Questioner?” Calvy asked over his shoulder.
“We have,” said Onsofruct. “A very civil contraption.”
“Civil on the outside, but she wasn’t fooled,” said D’Jevier. “She knew something. Maybe everything. I thought we might sidetrack her onto the threat posed by the volcanoes, but she made it clear she knew what we were up to.”
“You mean the Timmys?” Calvy asked.
“Oh, definitely the Timmys,” D’Jevier acknowledged. “She had these two young Earthers with her, very open-faced and so milky-lipped that one might think them moments from mama’s breast, but they turned out to be quite perceptive. I should have expected that. She’d scarcely have brought them, otherwise.”
“How do you read all this, Madame?” Calvy asked over his shoulder. “This current journey of ours?”