Out of starfield coming, fire womb seeking.
Fire it finds, rock wallowing, fume reeking.
Oh, Corojumi, openers of space;
Bojusdiaga, burrower of walls;
She has need of birthing place.
Wheeooo, she falls
Quaggima she cries …
Something, something …
Bojusdiaga, singer of the sun;
Oh, Corojumi, dancers of bright skies;
He has done and I have done.
I cannot rise.
His Timmy had sung it to him when he was a tiny boy. His Timmy, the one who had cuddled him and fed him. The song trailed away, unfinished. The singers moved from the fire, leaving it to burn itself out. They left Mouche, bewitched, his mind full of the song he knew and the shapes he knew. Timmys.
Curving one hand protectively around the flame of his candle, he returned the way he had come, losing himself more than once and finding his way by trial and error. At the entrance to his own room he found a peek hole that allowed him to see if anyone had come to visit while he had gone. They had not. Mouche let himself into his suite and closed the passage behind him.
He threw himself into bed still enchanted, wakened by sensation into a troubling apprehension. Probably no one now in House Genevois had ever seen the Timmys dancing. Would Madame have watched, ever? Would Simon? Only he, Mouche, knew what they did there, and he admitted to himself with a return of his earlier dread that those he had seen were indeed the beings who did not exist, the ones no one ever … ever let themselves see, the ones never mentioned.
And yet, one of them had sung to him a long time ago. His own Timmy had sung the song of Quaggima, the interloper, the song of Niasa, Summer Snake. His own Timmy had told him stories of the great four-eyed Eiger, the bird who sees and knows all. He remembered Joggiwagga, the moon dragons, the setters up of stones.
And it wasn’t just him! The revelation came in an instant! Virtually every mankind baby on Newholme had been sung to sleep with “Niasa’s Lullaby”—the song of the Summer Snake to its baby in the egg; every child had heard the stories of great Bofusdiaga and the many Corojumi. As adults, though they had been forced to forget the singers, surely they could not forget the songs.
They had been taught to forget, just as Mouche had. They had gone to school in order to learn to forget. It was permitted for babies to believe in Timmys, but essential that adults should not. For adults, it was forbidden for Timmys to exist. They were a figment. Imaginary playmates. Hallucinatory nursemaids. Though every child in the classroom had been reared by Timmys, when one reached age seven, Timmys no longer were.
The teachers had explained, so patiently. There were no Timmys when the people had first moved onto Newholme. Then, some time later, suddenly people had started seeing Timmys. There they were, everywhere, like mice, or bunchbeetles, listening under windows, camping outside people’s houses, gathering at various seasons beside the river where the hills resounded to the sound of their music and the scrape of their dancing feet. It was inexplicable, but there they were, able to speak a few words of the people’s language, calling to one another, tim-tim, tim-tim, able to explain that they were here in the kwi, the outside, and eager to be tim-timidi, useful.
Where had they come from?
“Dosha. Lau.”
Who had sent them?
“Dosha-lauhazhala-baimoi.”
No matter how they tried to explain, no one could understand what they meant. A few linguistically talented persons who struggled to understand them, believed they were saying they had been sent by something or someone, but that they had never seen whatever or whoever it was that had sent them. Some people of a scientific bent believed they were animals, and they took some of the tim-tim apart to find, in their amazement, that the tim-tim had no brains! Creatures without brains were obviously not real, intelligent creatures. No creature could be considered real if it did not have a brain. They were, therefore, hallucinatory.
All this, Mouche learned in infant school, as all small children learned. Though he had been tended by a Timmy since birth, cuddled and fed and sung to by that swaddled form, closer to him than his mother or father, kinder to him than either, he could not acknowledge that fact for grown up people did not see them.