She was tiny beside them.

Every papio as small, and the clever monkeys scrambling through trees were smaller still.

The woman first visited the outpost soon after the Eight were discovered. She was one body among the government dignitaries and important scientists—the quiet assistant to a high-ranking doctor. That man didn’t like the Eight. He saw an abomination and the need for hard measures, and that’s why he was quickly sent away. The initial examination was hers, and with important people watching, she worked with her eyes and fingers, then razors and swords and a sequence of increasingly elaborate machines, exploring the conundrum that the Creators had bestowed on humanity.

Eight creatures lived inside a bag of sloppy, ill-ordered flesh. Maybe they were together at the beginning of everything, or maybe they merged inside the corona’s stomach. There was no way to know. Piercing the skin with sound and metal, the doctor identified each enduring mind as well as the different flavors of meat. In those days, the Eight had a few sloppy eyes and ears, temporary limbs and no working stomach. They were close to helpless when the doctor bathed them with sugar water and injected pulverized meat inside them. Despite that miserable diet, they managed to grow, gaining insights and little talents as the body became huge. Their first good hands were tendrils. They made holes that pretended to be mouths. Then through the force of clumsy shared wills, they created muscle and various stomachs, and a kind of bone appeared inside that knotted confused flesh, defining arms and legs and ribs and the interlocking disks that joined into one broad backbone wrapped around eight distinct spines, each springing from a mind with its own voice.

The tendrils vanished and the holes healed. A skull formed around two giant golden eyes. Several hundreds of days passed before their body appeared finished. That was the body that the doctor admired—a looming papio-inspired frame from which came an avalanche of a voice.

Selected people came to stand before the Eight, and in one fashion or another, every visitor begged to know what the Eight knew.

What the Eight understood was confusion and a gnawing sense of loss. But words didn’t have bones. Words were difficult to tame, and nothing they said emerged in the proper ways.

“What is your oldest memory?” the papio asked.

No memory felt true. They might have been trapped inside the corona for ten days or ten million days. And before that they could have been sitting on the laps of the Creators, giving advice about the building of the world. The bitter truth was that the Eight could make any claim, sing any wild brag, but they wouldn’t know enough even to guess if they were lying.

Vagueness and mystery were reliable ways to make the papio unhappy.

Patience grew even thinner when the Diamond boy emerged from his room. The doctor happened to be gone that day, having some distant errand to walk. Diamond boy came straight to this place, as if searching for the Eight. But he wanted only his father, and King followed him. King and Diamond were individuals, not alloys. Each had one voice and a single personality, and they could run fast in a straight line, and they didn’t waste any time with riddles, and they didn’t fall silent because the voices inside them were fighting to control the world’s largest tongue.

King and Diamond were gone before the doctor returned.

Important people came with her. Leaders and old thinkers squatted before the giant Eight, arms crossed, tough feet set against the reef. “You’re gifts from the Creators,” they said. “That much is undeniable. And belonging to the Creators means that you once stood in their presence, even if that was ten billion billion days ago.”

A thread of logic lay in those words, narrow and seductive.

The Eight stared at the papio. Each face showed terror and amazement, resignation and despair, while incoherent rages hunted for any worthwhile target. The audience was a multitude, and they were disorganized, and nobody dared call the papio insane.

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.