Chapter 22

"I know you said this could happen, Amanda, but I still can't believe they'd actually refuse us!" said Heisinger.

The humans were gathered in the pavilion watching as the Edenites industriously helped assemble the first load to be ferried back to the Ark. This would be, as they'd long planned, mostly soil along with a few basic horticultural specimens. The massive bays of the mothership would have to be conditioned into a reasonable approximation of Eden's surface before they'd be ready to accept animals of any sort.

Paulssen and Watesi had been pressed into service as operators of the massive earthmoving equipment the second shuttle had brought down to them, and much of the loading was by direct transfer into the shuttle. The crew of Edenites, nearly fifty strong, were shoveling up spillage and packing the transferred soil and foliage efficiently into the lander bay. Once the shuttle reached the mothership the whole exercise would be reversed, with Insheida and Umbyoto running the equipment on that end, and then the unloaded lander would return for more. It would take the first two of their three weeks to complete this portion of the process.

"I'd truly hoped it wouldn't come to this," Meiersdottir said.

"They're so stubborn!" burst out Heisinger. "They keep insisting that they can survive what's coming, and they can't!"

"I'm afraid it was I who gave them the idea, with my talk about miracles," Amuri broke in. "I can't tell you how sorry I am that I said what I did."

"Well, it didn't help, but I don't think it was just that, 'Sheda," Meiersdottir told him. "They seem to have it in their heads as an idée fixe that they can't coexist with us. I knew they felt a bit that way, it's why I thought it was important that I come with you on the Ark"—she nodded to Heisinger and Igwanda—"but I thought the prospect of the entire race dying out, along with my presence as one they trusted, could overcome that. It seems I was wrong, on both counts."

"You left the door open, Grandmother," said Igwanda. "Do you think there's any chance they might reconsider?"

"I don't know, Carlie," she replied. "We can always hope right up to the last. But ... well, I hate to say it, but I doubt they well. That think-together of theirs, it's a tremendously powerful processor, something for which we have no comparison. It lets them make almost in­stantaneous decisions, and usually they don't think twice. I really am afraid we're going to have to settle for, well, a consolation prize."

"I don't want a 'consolation prize!'" Heisinger cried out, actually stamping her foot. "I want the real thing. Dammit, you know we wouldn't have done all this just to bring back a few animals and plants! We did it for them, and they just won't see it."

"Yes, Alicia, I know," said Meiersdottir soothingly—or as soothingly as she could, given her own acute disappointment. "But you have to realize that even this much is a tremendous step forward for them."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, when Carlos and I and your great-grandfather and all the others first got here they looked at 'singles' as some sort of lower life-form," she explained. "Maybe something of the way that we look at, oh, oysters or mushrooms or whatever. If you couldn't think together as they do, meld your minds, you were food or not-food and that was all. Or 'teachers, ' as they tried to make us that first time we had to fight them off, but still so far beneath them as to be of no real consequence. They had absolutely no notion of friendship with anything but themselves. Do you see?"

"No."

"What I mean is that they were undiluted sociopaths. When we see it on Earth we call it psychosis, a severe mental disorder. But they learned. It was slow, but they wanted to learn, wanted to go beyond themselves. We taught them, first, that 'singles' could also think; your grandfather, Carlie, taught them that when he beat them that first time. And they began to break through, to realize there was more to living than simply their own cozy little think-together, and that think-together wasn't the only way of living, and of intelligence."

"How does that relate to this?" asked Heisinger.

"Once they could see beyond themselves their world expanded, expanded very fast. First they became our friends, and by friends I mean they accepted us as their equals, maybe even their betters. But then they extended it exponentially, learning that the other Eden animals around them, even the plants, weren't inconsequential either. It's that awareness, which is really brand new to them, that made this new Gagugakhing tell us to take the other creatures of Eden with us, to preserve them, save them. They care now about what else lives in their world. They didn't before, it was all just resources to them, everything, the animals, the plants, all of it no different than the iron they mined and so on. And we taught them that. I just wish we could have finished the lesson, showed them that we, too, can be good life companions, or at least acceptable ones."