how minute, we find a small piece of ourselves. How then, in doing one thing only, can we hope to become whole … ?’ ” Nevertheless as time went on, more and more villagers seemed to spend all their time outdoors, while others labored in their houses. The flax field was expanded after a time, and it seemed that half of all households were engaged in the production of cloth, more than anyone could wear. After a time also, the first peddlers appeared, trading copper kettles, steel implements, and books.
*
That first square of fabric, which Mayadonna Bey had displayed before the council, was the one that Deccan Blendish had thumbtacked to his wall. He had bought it in a shop of curios and handicrafts, and he carried it with him on the train from Charn. He left the city on the morning of September twelfth, one of the first passengers on the new rail link to Cochinoor.
How quickly, once the process started, the forest was being opened up! His journey, over much of the same country that Mr. Sarnath had traveled so laboriously, took him twenty days. But even that was a long time for someone who had never been anywhere, and it included many hours of worry. He had no idea what he would find. His research on the Treganu unravelers had uncovered many contradictions. He had found portraits from the Caladonian civil service, from midwinter of the year 00015, which were horrible—revealing alien, grotesque, inhuman features. Yet forty thousand days later, by midsummer of the same year, the faces which stared out of the pages of official documents and travelers’ sketches were mournful, softened, regularized, not far out of the range of normal human variation.
The drawings of the Treganu themselves, while tending toward the abstract, did not suggest anything monstrous. Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel anxious, and some of the most frequent reports—for example that they had no blood, but only a white powder sifting through their veins—were certainly bizarre. And yet the skeletal record did not preclude (to say the least) a common proto-human ancestor.
From Mayalung he had to walk three days over a new road, under an old rain, worrying all the way. Yet gradually all feeling subsided in the wet mud; on his arrival, if he hadn’t been so sick, he might have felt relieved. He might have been proud of his most optimistic predictions, proud of the preliminary sketches he had made of thin, frail, hairless, tailless men and women, with flat, impassive faces. But instead he felt a vague kind of regret, which time only made worse. By the middle of September he felt nothing but remorse that he had come. Though perhaps, rather than any presage of catastrophe, he was just disappointed not to be the first.
One evening, sick and disoriented, he stood on the veranda of the house of elders and watched the rain fall down upon the village in the trees. The veranda ran the circuit of the house, which was built on stilts above the level of the neighboring roofs. From where he stood he could see the whole village spread out in a circle around him: the small, simple houses of bamboo and palm, the different colors of the patchwork fields, the black shadow of the forest. Even under the grey sky the largest paddy was an intense shade of green, and in the middle of it, Deccan Blendish could see the leader of the team of agricultural consultants whose arrival in the village had preceded his. The man was standing under an umbrella, arms akimbo, legs spread wide. He was surrounded by a group of slighter figures, farmers from the village, huddled disconsolately in their wicker capes.
In back of Deccan Blendish, in the room that had once been the master’s and that now contained his statue and his altar, he could hear a murmured conversation. “It is because we work to separate the web of truth into its component strands,” said Langur Bey. “That is why they call us that. ‘Unravelers.’ It is not a word we use ourselves.”
The elders
*
That first square of fabric, which Mayadonna Bey had displayed before the council, was the one that Deccan Blendish had thumbtacked to his wall. He had bought it in a shop of curios and handicrafts, and he carried it with him on the train from Charn. He left the city on the morning of September twelfth, one of the first passengers on the new rail link to Cochinoor.
How quickly, once the process started, the forest was being opened up! His journey, over much of the same country that Mr. Sarnath had traveled so laboriously, took him twenty days. But even that was a long time for someone who had never been anywhere, and it included many hours of worry. He had no idea what he would find. His research on the Treganu unravelers had uncovered many contradictions. He had found portraits from the Caladonian civil service, from midwinter of the year 00015, which were horrible—revealing alien, grotesque, inhuman features. Yet forty thousand days later, by midsummer of the same year, the faces which stared out of the pages of official documents and travelers’ sketches were mournful, softened, regularized, not far out of the range of normal human variation.
The drawings of the Treganu themselves, while tending toward the abstract, did not suggest anything monstrous. Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel anxious, and some of the most frequent reports—for example that they had no blood, but only a white powder sifting through their veins—were certainly bizarre. And yet the skeletal record did not preclude (to say the least) a common proto-human ancestor.
From Mayalung he had to walk three days over a new road, under an old rain, worrying all the way. Yet gradually all feeling subsided in the wet mud; on his arrival, if he hadn’t been so sick, he might have felt relieved. He might have been proud of his most optimistic predictions, proud of the preliminary sketches he had made of thin, frail, hairless, tailless men and women, with flat, impassive faces. But instead he felt a vague kind of regret, which time only made worse. By the middle of September he felt nothing but remorse that he had come. Though perhaps, rather than any presage of catastrophe, he was just disappointed not to be the first.
One evening, sick and disoriented, he stood on the veranda of the house of elders and watched the rain fall down upon the village in the trees. The veranda ran the circuit of the house, which was built on stilts above the level of the neighboring roofs. From where he stood he could see the whole village spread out in a circle around him: the small, simple houses of bamboo and palm, the different colors of the patchwork fields, the black shadow of the forest. Even under the grey sky the largest paddy was an intense shade of green, and in the middle of it, Deccan Blendish could see the leader of the team of agricultural consultants whose arrival in the village had preceded his. The man was standing under an umbrella, arms akimbo, legs spread wide. He was surrounded by a group of slighter figures, farmers from the village, huddled disconsolately in their wicker capes.
In back of Deccan Blendish, in the room that had once been the master’s and that now contained his statue and his altar, he could hear a murmured conversation. “It is because we work to separate the web of truth into its component strands,” said Langur Bey. “That is why they call us that. ‘Unravelers.’ It is not a word we use ourselves.”
The elders
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