The leader among the leaders stepped forward.
“The children who tend to you like to boast about you,” she began. “They claim that each of your minds is bottomless, that everything you see is etched in hard coral. So tell us what you remember. Tell us about Those Who Made Everything?”
Emotions ran hot inside the Eight. Urgent words and the staring faces triggered old thoughts and utter nonsense. Too many answers offered themselves. Eight fierce, terrified wills battled for the giant mouth, and what emerged was dense, passionate, and convoluted—much of it wrapped inside eight vanished languages.
During earlier days, visitors like these might pull out a few words that seemed familiar. There was illumination and comfort in the Eight’s nonsense—any sound that might prove a tiny personal concern. Or people would hear nothing but a mess and then return home. In those days, patience was in charge. Inertia was the pilot. Nothing needed to be different tomorrow; nothing needed to be changed. But now the tree-walkers had a warrior in the making, and they had a human-like creature with his own magic, and what if the clever monkeys also found the missing child, that ghostly phantom that wandered the wilderness?
But that was before. Every past moment was different. What happened now could not have been more important, which was why the Eight focused remarkably well, agreeing on one clear answer, if only for a few breaths.
In the papio tongue, they proclaimed, “The Creators are dead.”
“But we know this already,” said the leader, rocking forward on hands as well as her toes.
“And the Creators looked like you,” said the Eight.
“Why would they look any other way?” the woman asked in return. “Why make this world and not put your face on its rulers?”
“But they created nothing,” said the Eight.
“Who created nothing?”
“The ones you keep misnaming,” they said. “If they deserve a name, you should call them ‘The Destroyers.’ ”
Nobody understood. Each word was known, but the implications were too strange, too enormous. Even the Eight were as lost and foolish as everyone else, listening helplessly as the words bubbled out of the long graceless mouth.
The mouth stopped working again.
A few of the papio said, “Blasphemers.”
They were the ones who hurried to their wheeled vehicles and drove away, wanting to be as far from this madness as possible.
The other papio walked slowly to their vehicles, but they didn’t leave. With their backs to the Eight, quiet voices spoke about possibilities and plans. Twice the doctor woman came close to those people, attempting to join the conversation. Twice she was told to step away and not approach her patient either. Then the government people finished, a bargain finally struck, and they called to the doctor and gave her explicit instructions, causing her face to turn stiff and sorry.
She came up the face of the reef, up into the shadows where the corona’s child liked to sit, a dash-and-ash mat underfoot and the entire world stretched out before their two enormous golden eyes.
“Did you hear them?” she asked.
They had only two ears, but those ears were huge and sensitive, pulling in sounds from everywhere.
“We heard nothing,” said the clumsy voice.
She laughed at them.
“Liars,” she said.
Better than any other adult, she understood them. Tired from the climb, she sat at the edge of the mat. A pair of young boys was approaching, carrying dried rockworms and soggy tomalots. She turned and said, “Leave the baskets and go. Wait for me below.”
Boys never liked to be told what to do. This was something the Eight had noticed. But the children respected the woman. In fact, they liked to boast to the giant that she was the best doctor in the papio world, which meant the entire world. Tree-walkers were stupid little monkeys, said those boys, and of course their monkey doctors were idiots.
“Go now,” she snapped at the boys.
They grudgingly set their baskets on the mat and galloped off.
To her patient, the doctor said, “I have quite a lot to tell you.”
“We heard every word,” they said.
“I know what you heard, and that’s why I won’t repeat their idiot noise. They want me to spell out the possibilities, but I don’t need to spell anything. You understand their plans. Their plans look awful to the nine of us, yes. But my impressions and my frustrations aren’t worth much at all.”
The Eight waited, and the woman said nothing.
Then the long mouth opened, each of them trying to move the huge pink tongue.
She saw the struggle, and she laughed sadly.
They stopped moving, still as the coral beneath them.
“First of all,” she said. “You must, must, must change. I know your circumstances are difficult. I can’t imagine how it would feel, sharing my skull with seven brilliant souls. But this is not a natural arrangement. I told you that long ago and every day since. I think each of you were eaten by the corona but not killed. That stomach was an acidic oven, but you survived. I can’t guess how you managed, but you survived as one body, round as a green nut, and after so much time in that awful state, under pressure, in the worst hell, you were joined. And even after all of my work, I still can’t count how many ways in which you are fused into One.
“But you aren’t One.
“Being many might be wonderful, but I don’t see the wonderful standing before me. And you plainly need to be reminded that we aren’t lying inside a hot acid bath. The trap around you is far worse than any corona’s stomach. From this moment on, your existence will be in question, and that assumes just one of you takes charge of the body and your voice.”
“But that can’t be done,” one of the Eight said, and another said, and then several more. “We’ve tried and failed and failed again. Quit demanding the impossible.”
They spoke the same words, but the tongue and mouth created only a gush of angry, slurring words.
“I don’t care which one of you leads,” the doctor claimed, even though they suspected who was her favorite.
The giant body slumped down on the mat, each soul defending its pieces.
“And that isn’t all of my news,” said the doctor.
None of them wanted to listen. They were sick of papios and their noises. But the doctor’s admonishments were followed by silence and a hard stern stare that caught everyone by surprise.
The giant head rose.
One mind asked, “What do you have to tell?”
“I am like you now,” she said.
“Like us how?”
“I’m more than one.” The woman put her weight on her feet, hands lifting, lifting away the clothes around her chest. “A second entity lives inside me. It’s vigorous and enduring. By all evidence, it took root inside my left breast before spreading to other places, and it should outlive me by a moment or two. Or if someone takes these cells and cultivates them, my companion can live forever.”
They didn’t have words or any useful thoughts.
“Cancer,” she said, exposing the rib-rich chest and the surviving breast and the mutilations masked by padding and vanity. “The cancer is killing me.”
In that instant, each one of them loved her.
“I’m going home soon to die, and you’ll be left here inside the world, and the world is a monster’s stomach too.”
A long slow noise leaked out of them.
“And no,” she continued, “I won’t tell you who should rule that body of yours. But if you keep acting like a crazy beast squatting in the shadows, then my people will have no choice but action.”
She covered her wounds, weeping quietly.
“Believing there’s no choice is the same as having no choice,” she warned. “Can any one of you see that?”
The Archon was elsewhere. Diamond asked when she would return, but nobody seemed to know. Good was riding on Diamond’s left shoulder, growling out of habit. Tar`ro had placed himself beside the boy, growling with purpose. When one of his armed colleagues approached, presumably to help protect their charge, Tar`ro said, “You’ll want to give me distance.”