“Is it possible we evolved somewhere else? — a place where the Wind did not blow so strongly, where it was possible to walk upright?”

“What sort of place? And how could we have got here from there?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the pattern of the bones, the biochemistry, is unmistakable.”

“Idle speculation, Babo, won’t germinate a single seed.”

“A Farmer’s practical reply,” he said sadly. “But we are surrounded by mystery, Manekato. The Astrologers hope that your mission will settle some of these fundamental quandaries. Oh, please keep climbing, dear Mane! We are soon there, and I will tell you everything.”

With bad grace, clinging to the rungs with feet and hands, she continued her ascent.

They reached a platform, open to the sky. But there was no breeze, and the air felt as warm as it had inside the tower.

Babo walked around nervously, peering into the sky. “It is darkling already. Our days are short, because the planet spins quickly — did you ever reflect on that. Mane? It didn’t have to be so. Earth could spin more slowly, and we would have leisurely days, and — oh, look!” He pointed with a long stabbing finger. “Look, a star!”

She peered up awkwardly. There was a single bright star, close to the zenith, set against the deepening blue of the sky.

“How strange,” Babo breathed, “that before the first tentative Mappings no human eye saw a star.”

Manekato grunted. “What of it? Stars are trivial. You don’t need to see them.”

That was true, of course. Every child was expected to figure out the stars.

When Manekato was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of objects: a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other things. And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.

Of course the results of such trials varied — in fact the variations were often interesting, offering insights into scientific understanding, the nature of reality, the psychology of the developing mind. But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies. Even though they had never seen a single star.

Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.

“Ah, but the detail is everything,” Babo said, “and that you can never predict, of course. That and the beauty. That was quite unexpected, to me. Oh, and one other thing. The emptiness of the universe…”

Manekato’s childhood cohort, like most others, had concluded — groping with an intuition of uniformity — that if this world was inhabited, and the universe was large — well, then, there must be many inhabited planets. She recalled what a great and unwelcome surprise it had been to learn that that was not true: that, as far as could be discerned, the universe was empty of the organization that would have marked the work of intelligence.

“It is a deep, ancient mystery,” Babo said. “Why do we see no Farms in the sky? Of course we are a sedentary species, content to cultivate our Farms. But not every species need have the same imperatives as us. Imagine an acquisitive species, that covets the territory of others.”

She thought it through quickly. “That is outlandish and unlikely. Such a species would surely destroy itself in fratricidal battles, as the illogic of its nature worked itself out.”

“Perhaps. But wouldn’t we see the flaring of the wars, the mighty ruins they left behind? We should see them. Mane.”

She snapped, “Babo, get to the point.”

He sighed and came to squat before her. Gently he groomed her, picking imaginary insects from her coat, as he had when they were children. “Mane, dear Mane, the Astrologers have read the stars…”

The word “astrology’, in Manekato’s ancient, rich language, derived from older roots meaning “the word of the stars’. Here astrology had absorbed astronomy and physics and other disciplines; here astrology was no superstition, no foolishness, but one of the fundamental sciences. For if the universe was empty of mind save for humans, then the courses of the stars could have no meaning save for their role in the affairs of humanity.

And now, Babo said, the Astrologers, peering into the sky and poring over records dozens of millennia deep, had discerned a looming threat.

Joshua:

Mary was in oestrus. The scent of her seemed to fill the air of the hut, and the head of every man.

Joshua longed for the time of her blood to pass, and she and the other women could recede to the grey periphery of his awareness. For the deep ache aroused by Mary distracted him from the great conundrum which plagued him.

Over and over he thought of the great blue wings he had seen falling from the sky, bearing that fat black and white seed to its unknown fate in the forest at the top of the cliff. He had never seen such a thing before. What was it?

Joshua’s was a world that did not countenance change. And yet, a stubborn awareness told him, there was change. Once the people had lived on the Grey Earth. Now they lived here. So the past contained a change. And now the black and white seed had fallen from the sky, and whatever grew from it surely marked change to come in the future as well.

Change in the past, change in the future.

Joshua, helplessly conservative himself, had an instinctive grasp of parsimony: his world contained two extraordinary events — Grey Earth and sky seed — and surely they must be linked. But how? The elements of the conundrum revolved in his head.

Joshua had solved puzzles before.

Once, as a boy, he had found a place where Abel, his older brother, had knapped out a burin. It was just a patch of dune where stone flakes were scattered, in a rough triangle that showed where Abel had sat. Joshua had picked over the debris, curious. Later, in the hut, he had found the discarded burin itself. It was a fine piece of work, slender and sharp, and yet fitting easily into Joshua’s small hand. And he remembered the spall outside.

He sat where his brother had sat — one leg outstretched, the other tucked underneath. He reached for bits of the spall, and tried to fit them back onto the finished tool. One after another he found flakes that nestled closely into the hollows and valleys of the tool, and then more flakes which clustered around them.

Soon there were more flakes than he could hold in his hands, so he put down his assemblage carefully, and climbed a little way up the cliff behind the hut. He found a young tree sprouting from a hollow, and bled it of sap. With the sticky stuff cradled in his hands he ran back to his workplace, and began to fix the flakes to the tool with dabs of the sap. The sap clung to his fingers, and soon the whole thing was a sticky mess. But he persisted, ignoring the sun that climbed steadily into the sky.

At last he had used up almost all the large flakes he could find on the ground, and there was nothing left there but a little dust. And he had almost reassembled the cobble from which the burin had been carved.

Shouting with excitement he ran into the hut, cradling his reconstruction. But he had received a baffled response. Abel had picked at the sticky assemblage of flakes, saying, “What, what?”

A cobble was a cobble, until it was turned into a tool, and then the cobble no longer existed. Just as Jacob had been a man until he died, and then there was only a mass of meat and bones, soon to be devoured by the worms. To turn a tool back into a cobble was almost as strange to the people as if Joshua had tried to turn Jacob’s bones back into the man himself.

Eventually Abel crushed the little stone jigsaw. The gummy flakes stuck to his hand, and he brushed them off on the dusty ground, growling irritably.

But in some corner of his spacious cranium Joshua had never forgotten how he had solved the puzzle of the shattered cobble. Now, as he pondered the puzzle of the multiple earths and the falling seed, Joshua found that long-ago jigsaw cobble pricking his memory.