Though it would take longer to run the thief down, the Archkerri made its capture inevitable. His presence assured them that they couldn't lose the trail.

Still, the time Sloosh took in finding and eating food continued to be a trial to Deyv. The Archkerri's mouth was concealed beneath the leaves on the "chest" of the upper body. Finding that out had been a shock to Deyv. It had seemed grotesque and also a little frightening. His grandmother had told him about a monster which was human-shaped, unlike Sloosh, but which had its mouth on its breast, and its diet was confined to human children. As a child, Deyv had been threatened with it when he didn't behave.

Sloosh would eat meat, including the rottenest carrion, when it was available. But mostly he ate fruit and vegetables, and he required great amounts of these. To speed up the search for food, the two humans would forage the edge of the jungle. They'd woven some large baskets from reeds, and they used them to store the fruit. Thus, they could walk faster, feeding Sloosh from the baskets. But collecting the food took much time, too.

"You are quite wrong about the Yawtl stealing my soul egg," Sloosh said. "We Archkerri don't have such things. Eggs are for humans only. Indeed, they're an ancient human invention. I don't know why the ancients made the soul-egg trees, but they must have had what seemed to them good reasons. My people wear a crystal which Vana's people call caqghwoonma. It is as large as your head but much better shaped. It's a prism included within six equal rhombic faces. It can be mined, since it grows underground, unlike the soul-egg trees, which grow mostly above the surface. These crystals are rare, which is one of fifteen reasons I was in the area of Vana's tribe area looking for them."

'Wait a minute," Deyv said. "Your tribe doesn't live in the same area as her people?"

"I don't have a tribe. That's a primitive social unit we Archkerri grew out of long ago. No, I was there to investigate. After a long time—"

"How long a time?"

Vana said, "He appeared when I was a child, shortly after I was weaned. But he left shortly before I did.

He couldn't find any caqghwoonma, and he'd found out everything else he wanted to know. Whatever that was. What I think is-"

"Impatience is the mark of a retarded mind," Sloosh said. "And interrupting a person is a mark of impatience and of a great ego. Let me continue. The crystal rhombohedron is an invention of my people.

It shows moving pictures. These are the electrical constructs of the thoughts of the vegetable world. You see —I hope you see—all plants contain ancestral impressions. And all the units of the vegetable world together constitute one body. One mind, I should say to be exact. Though so far the distinction between body and mind has not been satisfactorily made.

"But I must not give you the wrong idea. We Archkerri are not part of this mind. We're sentients, therefore individuals, though not in the same sense you are such. That is because, though of vegetable origin, we Archkerri are half-protein. If we weren't, we'd be as immobile as that tree there and dependent upon the radiation from the sky and—but I digress.

"The rhombohedra are our means for communicating, or, rather, I should say, for receiving the 'thoughts'

or impressions of the vegetable world. If we communicated, they, it, would also have to be sentient.

Communication is a two-way gate."

What Sloosh said, in essence, was that the crystals could tap and then process the ancestral impressions in the cells of vegetable life. The crystals showed visual interpretations of past and present events.

Deyv was staggered by this revelation. "You mean, if you had your crystal now, you could tell us exactly where the thief is?"

"Not exactly. But the general area, yes."

"Well," Deyv said, "if this crystal can show you such events, why didn't you know the Yawtl was going to steal your crystal?"

"An excellent question. But one characteristic of us Archkerri is that we tend to get wrapped up in certain problems. When that happens, we often don't notice what's going on around us. I did see the

Yawtl in my crystal, but I didn't pay him much attention. After all, the crystal doesn't read the minds of flesh people.

"Furthermore, I have to sleep, unfortunately, and the Yawtl crept up on me and removed the neck-cord, which was attached to my crystal. Of course, when I woke up, I knew everything about the theft. A lot of good that did me then."

"You have no idea why the Yawtl took our eggs and your crystal?" Deyv asked.

"I could find out if I backtracked the thief and if the backtrack didn't fade out too soon. That would be silly. It will be much faster to run him down and then ask him. I could also contact my vegetable brothers and find out. But that process would take a very long time. Besides, I don't have the crystal to do this."

The Archkerri then fell into a reverie from which he didn't want to be roused. Some part of his mind must have been conscious of the outside world, though. He didn't wander off the road. And when he was offered fruit, his hand came out and stuffed it into his mouth.

Deyv asked Vana why the tribes in her land hadn't attacked Sloosh when he first appeared.

"We thought he was a demon or perhaps a god or goddess in a strange form," she said. "By the time we found out he wasn't, we knew he wasn't dangerous. Besides, he told us a lot of things which we found interesting." She paused, then said, "Some of them were frightening. For instance, the world will soon end."

SHE said this so calmly that Deyv wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly.

"What do you mean? The world will end? How? When?"

"Ask Sloosh. He knows about it. I don't really understand it."

The Archkerri was quite willing to enlighten him. It -took, however, a number of conversations before

Deyv could visualize what he described. Even then, he wasn't sure that the pictures in his mind corresponded to reality.

He told Sloosh this, and Sloosh replied, "No one, not even I, can see reality. Our senses filter it out to make sense of it. We make constructs with which we can deal. To see the genuine reality, that is, the totality of it, requires the mind of one who made it. If any Person did make it."

Deyv didn't understand this, and he wasn't sure that Sloosh did either. No matter. He was convinced that what Sloosh told him, the section of reality he described, was true. He had the good sense not to tell

Sloosh that, since the Archkerri would then have gone into a long disquisition on the nature of truth.

According to Sloosh, the world had started out as an unimaginably large ball of fire and an equally unimaginable amount of empty space. Really empty, with nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a speck of dust, in it. Or perhaps, Sloosh said, there was only the ball of fire, containing all the matter there was.

Which meant that there was only a tiny bit of empty space around it—if any. Then, when the ball exploded, its matter created space as it expanded outward. Or perhaps it expanded inward. Where there was no space, there was no "direction" out or in.

Whether the space was created as the ball blew out or in, or there was already a vast empty nothing for it to explode in, made no difference. Except to Sloosh and his kind. What did matter was that the ball of matter tore itself apart when it blew up.

"What was the ball before it was on fire?" Deyv asked.

"I'll get to that in due time. Please be patient."

The material ejected by the explosion thinned out as it flew through space. It cooled, and it became dust.

Some pieces of dust were larger than others. These attracted smaller pieces, and many of them began, to form larger bodies. These drew to them still more pieces. Eventually, dust pieces spread throughout the space and among these the bigger ones kept on collecting more matter until the space around them was emptied of most matter.