The Timmys were not the only thinking beings who remembered old times in the evening. Aloft on her balcony, D’Jevier remembered, not what she herself had seen, but what she had read in the secret journals of the Hags.
When the second settlement arrived, there were no Timmys. Years went by, and suddenly, there were Timmys, intelligent seeming beings. Speaking beings. And if they belonged here, mankind did not, according to Haraldson, so mankind had tried to drive them away.
The Timmys stayed. The Timmys gathered in great mobs to dance. There, on their dancing grounds, mankind had killed them, piling their corpses in stacks to be burned.
It hadn’t worked. For every Timmy killed, another arrived, and they still danced. They also started doing things for people: washing clothes, weeding gardens, cleaning dwellings.
Meantime, the mankind population grew slowly, and since the people were too few to do everything that needed doing, they began to depend upon the labor of the Timmys. In no time at all, the Timmys became the cleaners and cultivators and carriers. The Timmys became the miners and millers and child-minders. They were ubiquitous and industrious about mankind’s business, but they still danced. When they danced, they did not work.
Now their dancing was regarded as a dereliction of duty rather than an opportunity for slaughter, and once again mankind had interfered. Though the Timmys were never mentioned in either written or spoken edicts, “the sound of drums” had been forbidden, as had the “unprofitable shuffling of feet.” “Coordinated and frivolous movement” had been tabooed, as well, and there had been more than a few cases of maiming and murdering of Timmys in an effort to enforce the rule.
Mankind had always had a propensity for trying to govern the ungovernable and to control what was uncontrollable. Mankind had always relied upon laws and rules to direct those drives that did not care about laws or rules. Pragmatism had at last prevailed. Mankind upon Newholme had conceded that creatures who did not exist, who had no brains, could not be expected to modify their behavior to accord with mankind’s desires. Indeed, one Hag had been heard to say in confidence that forbidding the Timmys to dance was like forbidding a horse to piss. The horse would do it, somehow or other, somewhere or other, and though inconvenient and embarrassing, the best thing to do was ignore it.
The Timmys who had overheard this comment from their spyholes in the walls were not offended. Well, they nodded, it is time these folk saw sense.
Still the Timmys danced. The Hags knew it. The Men of Business knew it. They did not know why. Only the Timmys knew why.
Now and then they filled their courtyards or canyons or lava tubes with whirling dedications to zoological or botanical divinity, with ecstatic miming of many wondrous creatures. Now and then they did the slow omturtle dance, accomplished in pauses and silences; now and then the twirling rapture of the Great Eiger, the windbird, the four-eyed flier, who saw all, who knew all. Now and then was mimed the circular sliming of Joggiwagga, the moon dragons, simulated by stroked tambours and the throb of water drums. Now and then was the reed dance done, and that of the quiowhat tree and the little fluttery dances of all the beings-who-do-not-know-them-selves, the fishy swimmers and birdy things and lesser vegetables who, unlike the Timmys, were not individually made by Kaorugi the Builder but were allowed to reproduce independently to serve as food for all creatures.
All these dances were done for enjoyment, and for practice.
For sometimes mere enjoyment gave way to necessity. Sometimes Niasa, summer-snake-in-the-egg, who dreamed of life, would become restless. Whenever this happened, Timmys did the little amusement dances for Her-Who-Hatches-Niasa, small simple dances, the first ones the Corojumi had created for Her. Then, every decade or so, when the moons lined up and pulled roughly, Niasa-in-the-egg would almost be wakened, and for these times more powerful and hypnotic amusement dances were needed, with many rehearsal sessions beforetime. Many Timmys were required for these, but the dance was always done for Her on time, and however restless it might be, Niasa slept on, dreaming as it had done forever.