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“Because you’re young,” said Loaf, “you think you understand everything about your own body, and everything about mine. But I’m old enough that I could feel my body slackening, my abilities fading, my strength ebbing, my senses weakening, my memory perforating. Now I see better than I ever could, hear better, I’m stronger, I have more endurance, and my memory has no gaps. I think far more quickly. Almost as quickly as brilliant young boys like you and Rigg.”
“Keep me out of this,” said Rigg softly. Maybe he was joking. Probably not.
“I know what it means to have control of my own body,” said Loaf. “To resist my body’s desires, to decide rationally. When perfectly justified fear would have made me flee the battlefield, I stayed and fought. I have long been master in this house. When Vadesh put this thing on me, then for a few days, a few weeks, I barely clung to that mastery. But I’m in full control again. You’ve never been in control. You don’t know what it feels like, and you certainly aren’t a good judge of other people’s rational control.”
Umbo felt the sting of these words like a blow. He had never known that Loaf held him in such contempt.
“I don’t mean to hurt you,” said Loaf. “I’m simply telling you the truth. There are things that you don’t know, being young. But I know those things. Or at least I know more of them than you. So instead of being suspicious of me, Umbo, why not accept that however I might be changed since getting this mask—and believe me, I have changed, and in more ways than my newfound prettiness—however changed I am, this is who I am now. Whatever I am, I’m still your friend, unless you decide otherwise.”
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Olivenko, indicating the muck still staining Umbo’s waterlogged shirt.
“It’s a shirt,” said Umbo tersely. Did they have to discuss this with Param right there?
“It’s downright fecal,” said Loaf.
“I want a fecal shirt,” said Rigg, feigning envy.
“Go stand near that tree, and you’ll have one,” said Umbo.
“What did you do to provoke him?” asked Param.
“Her,” said Loaf, putting a hand on Umbo’s shoulder to stop him from a sharp retort. “It’s a naked woman. A small woman—barely over a meter tall. But full-grown, from the look of her.”
Umbo’s first angry retort might have been stifled, but he couldn’t leave Param’s assumption unanswered. “And I didn’t provoke her. She just went fecal.”
Param didn’t argue. “There are others hiding nearby, Rigg says, and this one is what they chose to show us. I think this whole encounter is some kind of deception.”
“The poo is real,” said Umbo.
“They were fully clothed seventeen days from now,” said Param. “But right now, they don’t know we’ve seen that. So I think they’re pretending that the local humans are savages, when really they’re completely civilized.”
“I think you’re right,” said Rigg. “The question is, why. They couldn’t have known we were coming—Vadesh couldn’t have notified their expendable yet, because the Vadesh of this moment doesn’t know we’re here.”
“Unless he has ways of knowing that we don’t know about,” said Param.
“If nobody objects,” said Loaf, “I’ll go question her.”
“One look at you,” said Umbo, “and she’ll run away.”
“She’s had more than one look by now,” said Loaf.
“She’s not alone, though,” said Rigg. “Someone else just came up through the trunk of the tree to join her in the branches.”
“Through the trunk of the tree?” asked Olivenko.
“The trees are hollow?” asked Param.
“Look how thick they are,” said Rigg. “And from what I can see of these people’s paths, every tree of that size has had people going down inside them for a century or more.”
“So this is a village,” said Loaf. “And the trees are the houses.”
“The trees are the kind we call oak,” said Rigg. “By the leaves they are, anyway, and the pattern of the branches. But in our wallfold, oaks never grew that thick and squat.”
“So they were bred to be houses,” said Olivenko.
“By these yahoos?” asked Loaf.
“Or by their ancestors,” said Rigg. “What if they reached a high level of civilization in the past and created all kinds of marvelous things, so they never had to work to get food or shelter—everything they needed just grew. So their descendants didn’t need intelligence anymore, and they became tree-dwelling turdthrowers.”
