“Why did you do it?” asked Sunk. “And why did you have to put this disease into the genome?”

  In one dream, the alien gave a long explanation in language so technical that Sunk could understand only bits of it, until at last he began to waken and realized that all the words were nonsense. Only a dream, he understood. I’m not really talking to the aliens, and so there will be no answers.

  But in another dream, they said, “We did not put in the disease, my love; the disease just happens, the way the common cold happened with the last great leap of your genome. The new species wants, at the deepest genetic level, to wipe out all competition. Like secretions from the roots of a plant, to inhibit the growth of plants from the same species. This is my air, this is my sunlight, this is my soil and my water, you will not steal them from me.”

  There was no dream in which the aliens answered his first question: Why did you do it? Why did you send this new genome to us, engraved into the skin of a hollow ship?

  Finally Sunk awoke fully. Awoke enough to feel the warmth of air through open windows, though there was still shade to keep off the direct light of the sun.

  “His eyes are open,” said Cal.

  “Welcome back, Father,” said March.

  “The others?” asked Sunk.

  “You are the last to awaken,” said Cal.

  “They’re still weak, but all are a live,” said March. “The plague is released when the gestational sac is broken, and we think that the disease matured inside Darling’s eggshell and emerged in a much milder form than the virus from a sac that’s broken immediately upon expulsion from the uterus.”

  “So it causes less harm,” said Cal. “But it still may confer all the immunities. When our babies go full term in the womb and the pouch, then humans are not much harmed by the disease, and are powerfully blessed by it.”

  Cal and March assured their parents that they had already passed all their memories of Darling’s successful incubation to their faraway twins. No one had really understood that the sac was an egg, and Cal and March had only guessed it because all the earlier babies had died. Now they would all have a good chance of survival.

  March and Cal had been far from Oldest, but Darling was now the eldest of her generation to survive.

  Audny soon discovered that the new genome, with the extra pairs of chromosomes, held true in the baby’s ova. This new egg-birthing primate species was the end product of this round of genetic change, with March’s and Cal’s genome being only the intermediate stage.

  “Now we’ll find out what it was like for you,” said March to Audny. “Raising babies that are much smarter than we are.”

  “You will not find out,” said Audny.

  March smiled. “We never raised normal human babies, or saw them raised,” she said. “So we can’t compare.”

  “We had hundreds of generations of experience and lore to rely on,” said Audny, “and suddenly it didn’t help us at all. You have no such support. You have to invent it all. And why should Darling be all that different from you?”

  Given how troublesome it was to get Darling not to climb on everything that held still, they all agreed that it was a mercy that the levitation and flying didn’t begin until she was nearly five.

  “We intermediates,” said Cal to March one day. “A single generation, before the kinetics. We’ll leave no trace in the archeological record.”

  “We’re inheriting a culture that writes and reads obsessively,” said March. “We won’t be forgotten.”

  “Why do I feel so real?” asked Cal. “If we’re meant only to be a temporary measure, like the lock of a canal, to raise the barge of humanity up one level, and then be left behind—”

  “Life is life,” said March. “Our children will live on after us, and theirs after them. Each generation’s life is different from those before and after, and each is real and good.”

  “But when we die, our kind is gone.”

  “That has always been true, generation after generation,” Sunk told them wearily. “You make the best of your little life, while you have it. Then everybody leaves you behind. Nothing in the alien genome changed that.”

  But it did change it. Death was postponed for each of them almost a thousand years, like Methuselah. Each of them lived to see at least ten generations born. Cal and March lived to see the last of the original humans die: Nels and Beleza’s generation. And Darling and her siblings lived to bury their parents.

  “Why do we bury them?” Darling’s seventh-great grandson asked her.

  “It shows respect and honor, in a manner that their generation would have understood,” Darling replied.

  “But all the humans are gone now,” said the boy.

  “We still speak their languages,” said Darling. “We still wear their clothing and live in their houses. Their culture lives on in us.”

  “Tell me stories of the humans, Grandma Darling,” said the boy. “You’re the last who remembers them.”

  “And you’re the last who cares,” she said.

  “Oh, no I’m not,” said the boy. “I’ll remember all your stories and tell the little ones.”

  “That is a good use of some of the thousand years of your life,” said Darling. “But for now, my dear, fly home.”

  Naysayers

  Alvin wasn’t in much of a hurry, or he and Arthur Stuart would’ve jumped over Turkey Creek and continued on their way. But Alvin was using this trip to quiz young Arthur on his times tables. Or debating Cuvier’s theory of catastrophism and how it stacked up to uniformitarianism. Or the poor crop of candidates for the upcoming presidential election.

  So they was poking along about three miles away from Lake Erie, where the farms were fewer and the woods sometimes came right up to both sides of a creek. Even now, late in August, there was a brisk flow of water in Turkey Creek, and just as Alvin was thinking, This would make a pretty dependable mill race, they came out of the trees and right where it ought to be, there was a mill.

  Except it wasn’t, not anymore, because the wheel was gone. But everything else was right, including the diversion dam and the channel to carry the water with all its force over the nonexistent wheel.

  “Use to be a working mill,” said Arthur Stuart. “Cause there’s the pieces of the wheel.”

  It was a dirty piece of destruction, all the spokes and blades broken up and half burnt. “Looks like somebody didn’t like this miller and made sure to put him out of business,” said Arthur Stuart.

  Alvin couldn’t argue. But the sun was getting low, and they couldn’t see a town nearby, and either somebody was living in that millhouse or they wasn’t, but Alvin knew that if he told them he was a miller’s son, there’d be a place for him and Arthur Stuart to spend the night.

  There was a place, but there wasn’t a soul to ask, so they accepted the roof and walls as if nature had made them, and ate a bit of the bread and cheese they’d earned by fixing a busted axle over on the downs near Walnut Creek at noontime.

  Like usual, the hardest part about the job had been to get the wagon’s owner to go away long enough that Alvin could fix the thing without the fellow seeing how he did it, since folks often got themselves in a lather about it if they got to think Alvin was doing it by hexery. You trying to put a curse on me and my trade?

  Alvin could never get folks to understand that what he did wasn’t magicking, it was just getting his doodlebug inside the axle and lining things up so they held together nice and tight and the hubs would turn on the axle nice and smooth. It wasn’t a curse or even a prayer, it was just letting the iron and the wood know what was needed and helping them get it done. Seemed like the more Alvin tried to explain it, the more upset they got.

  So nowadays, it was Arthur Stuart’s job to pretend to twist his ankle or retch or start batting away imaginary wasps or something, and while their back was turned Alvin would stand there not moving a muscle while his doodlebug showed him how things was, and by the time they came back the job was done. “It wasn’t as broke as you thought it was,” said Alvin. “It was pretty easy to get it back in line, and I’m thinking it’ll hold up at least long enough to get you home.”

  Truth was, when Alvin fixed something made of metal, it wasn’t going to wear out or break again till long after the owner was dead. But that was certainly long enough to get the man home to his family, and Alvin figured it was all right to accept the man’s offer of the food he had left over from his journey, seeing how he’d be home in Girard before nightfall.

  In the morning they finished the bread and cheese and Alvin was all for going on their way, because he had an idea of getting up into the mountains so he could come down again in the Hio Valley and maybe call in at Hatrack River and see how Peggy was doing.

  But instead Arthur Stuart starts laughing and Alvin says what’s so funny, and Arthur Stuart says you know you can’t go on until you find out what happened to this mill so let’s just get started and not pretend to discuss whether or not to ask around.

  That’s why they walked on downstream and passed two more mills, both done the same way as the first one, and not a farmhouse standing anywhere near to Turkey Creek even though it was clean water and only a fool builds his house so he has to haul water any farther than he needs to.

  Finally they came to a fine-looking brick building that was not and never had been a mill. In fact it had that look of substance that said it was meant to be either a bank or a school. But it was neither.

  “This is the town jail now,” said the man at the door, “and you got no business here.”

  “Jail? You got all the criminals in Irrakwa locked up in here? Bigger than any jail I ever seen, and I been to Philadelphia and Kingstown, Carthage and Dekane.”

  “Well it’s bigger than we need, all right,” said the man at the door, “seeing it was built to be a college, but it’s a jail now, and there’s enough folks locked up here for public safety that we don’t wish it any smaller.”

  “I’m sorry to hear of a college that failed,” said Alvin. “My wife’s a schoolteacher and—”

  “Never said it failed,” said the man at the door. “It just moved.”

  Arthur Stuart laughed. “If it moved, how come it’s still here?”

  “You know it ain’t legal to own no black child in Irrakwa,” said the man at the door.

  “Then it’s a good thing that Arthur Stuart here is free,” said Alvin, “and my ward, and almost a man, so pretty soon I won’t have to drag him along with me on my travels.”

  “He’d never find his way home without me,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “The college,” said the man at the door, looking at Arthur Stuart as if he’d never seen an uppity half-black youth before, “has a new building about a half mile down, after that point of land and well away from the water.”

  “Away from the water?” asked Alvin. “Turkey Creek has a good flow, but we ain’t that far from the source, so even with snowmelt and rain put together, I bet you never had a flood reached even as high as this . . . jail.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “You a naysayer?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Alvin.

  “Sometimes he says nay, and sometimes he says aye or yea,” said Arthur Stuart. “And sometimes he makes sense, but it’s pretty unpredictable.”

  “Just thinking you might be careful talking about how floodwater can only get this high or that high,” said the man at the door. “Folks locked up inside, they’re all naysayers. Do you get my drift?”

  “I’m just a stranger as knows something about water in other places,” said Alvin, “but I don’t pretend to know anything about Turkey Creek apart from what my eyes tell me, so I’d be curious to find out what it is that misguided people might say nay to.”

  “It’s scientist stuff,” said the man at the door, “so you can’t hardly expect to understand it.”

  “So it comes from the college,” said Alvin.

  “It comes from Professor Rea, him being the dean of the college, not to mention the world’s foremost expert on how water gets called and how water gets shunned.”

  “Well, he’s the man I want to meet,” said Alvin.

  “Too bad for you,” said the man at the door, “cause he’s off in Philadelphia right now, showing other scientists about his findings and warning them about the danger and all.”

  “Well, here I got my hopes up that I might learn something, and now I’m disappointed,” said Alvin, with as much sincerity as he could muster. He made a little hand sign to let Arthur Stuart know that this would be a very bad time for him to make fun.

  “I expect somebody else at the college might be able to explain it in terms that you can understand,” said the man at the door.

  Again, Alvin made the hand sign and for once Arthur Stuart obeyed him. Since people assuming they were uneducated yokels always set Arthur Stuart off like a mockingbird, Alvin figured it was the fact that this was now a jail for naysayers that prompted him to keep quiet.

  In a few minutes they set out downstream toward the town, heeding the man’s advice that they stay well away from Turkey Creek, because the ground was boggy and could suck a man’s boots right off his feet.

  “Sounds like they got a powerful fear of water around here,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “More like they got a powerful fear of folks who say ‘nay,’” said Alvin. “As to water, I’ve had some pretty bad experiences with it myself, over the years, so I don’t mock those as has respect for that element.”

  They crested the rise, and there before them was a little hamlet dominated by a new brick building which was still being built around the backside, and which wasn’t half so fine as the one now serving as a jail. But the houses and shops and the college itself were all well up the slope, while down nearer the water, Alvin could see where the foundations of houses used to be, and where level streets had grown only one summer’s worth of grass.

  “Folks went to a lot of trouble to make those streets down there,” said Arthur Stuart, “where they can be flat and smooth. Nothing half so good up higher on the slope, and nothing level at all.”

  “They moved this village in a hurry,” said Alvin, “and they moved it away from the water, so I think we need to find out what cataclysm they’re expecting.”

  “Can’t be another flood like Noah’s,” said Arthur Stuart, “cause it covered even the high ground, and besides, we still got rainbows so God’s not going to flood the world again.”

  “I think you oughtn’t to speculate on what can and can’t be, lessen you get taken for a naysayer,” said Alvin, and when Arthur Stuart whooped, Alvin said sternly, “Ain’t joking now, lad.”

  They ate a bit at the only working tavern, paying with a bit of cash money since Alvin didn’t want to take the time to earn his bread by labor. He wanted to find somebody to explain all that hard science to him, so he’d understand why they were afraid of a flood only a mile downstream from the source of Turkey Creek.

  First person they ran into at the college was a genial old fellow who was overseeing the bricklayers on the east side of the building. “You’d think they imagined that the back of the building was invisible, the careless way they let the wall drift out of plumb and the bricks line up all higgledy-piggledy,” said the man once he and Alvin and Arthur Stuart was sitting on chairs in a decent-size lecture hall. “I’m Enos Walker,” he said, “and no, it’s never Professor Walker, because there’s only one professor at Rea College, and that’s Professor Rea himself. I’m a mere lecturer and so you have the honor of calling me Mister Walker or even, if you’re feeling neighborly, plain old Enos.”

  “We’re just wondering how much you’d charge for a bit of lecturing today,” said Alvin. “And by ‘today’ I mean here and now, and with luck no more than an hour’s worth, or less.”

  “We’re between school terms, and with all my scholars off helping with preparations for winter, I have time on my hands and language so welled up in my head that I’d be grateful for a chance to let some of it out, to relieve the pressure.”

  “I think he means there’s no charge for talking,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “That is exactly what I mean, and I’m glad of a man who can say things straight out.”

  “That’s Arthur Stuart for you,” said Alvin. “And now he’ll be silent and listen, I wager, while you explain to us why this town seems to think a deluge is coming, and anybody who doubts it gets tagged as a naysayer and plunked into a jail that used to be a college.”

  “Man at the jail said it was a science thing,” said Arthur Stuart, “so I wonder if you lecture about the right kind of science.”

  “Well I don’t,” said Enos Walker, “because we only need one professor of elementology. My expertise is somewhere between mathematics and metaphysics.”

  “Not much overlap there,” said Alvin.

  “None at all,” said Enos. “Like I said, I’m somewhere between them, and not properly inside either one. But I do know enough about Professor Rea’s science to explain what he’s been warning folks about.”

  “I hope it’s simple enough for me to understand,” said Alvin.

  “Oh, my version of it is simple, all right,” said Enos. “I’ll be interested to see what you make of it.”

  And it was pretty simple. It seemed that Professor Rea had discovered a theory, which he was now certain was an absolute fact, that when mills ran on water power, they called to the water and brought on terrible floods. So mills were declared to be a danger to anyone living near any water that they drew power from.

  “So that’s why all the wheels were taken off the mills on Turkey Creek and broken up and burnt,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Professor Rea never said to do any damage to anybody’s property,” said Enos Walker. “In fact, he said that the mills on Turkey Creek had already done so much harm that it would be a hundred years at least before the danger of mill-made flooding would be gone, so there was hardly any point in taking them down, as long as they weren’t turning anymore.”