Humans weren't like that. Humans were delicate. Easily smashed up, broken apart. He thought of Esk: a damn fool, but nobody deserved to die like that. And, more than anything else, humans were strange. If Adda were to pluck one of these irritating little nibblers out of his dud eye now and look at it up close, he knew he'd find the same basic design as the average Air-pig: six fins, symmetrically placed, an intake-mouth to the front, jet vents to the rear, six tiny eyes. All Mantle animals were the same, just scaled big and small, or with differences of proportion; the basic features could be recognized even in superficially different creatures like rays.

...Except for humans. There was nothing, no other animal, like a human in all this world.

That wasn't a surprise, of course. Every kid learned at his mother's breast how the Ur-humans had come from somewhere far away — a place much better than this, of course; Adda suspected every human on every world grew up believing that — and had left children here to grow, to be strong, and to join the community of mankind one day, all under the beneficial and all-too-abstract gaze of that multiple God, the Xeelee.

So the Human Beings had been put there. Adda had no doubt about the basic truth of the old story — damn it, you only had to watch humans in flight to see the blinding self-evidence of it — but on the other hand, he thought as he watched the flock of Human Beings soar across the sky, he wouldn't really want to be built like an Air-pig. Fat and round and flying by farts?

Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older. Maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad idea to have been an Air-pig after all.

Adda was the oldest surviving Human Being. He knew what the others thought of him: that he was a sour old fool, too gloomy for his own good. But he didn't care much about that. He hadn't survived longer than any of his contemporaries by accident. But he was, and always had been, essentially a simple man, not gifted with the power over people and language shown by, say, a Logue. Or even a Dura, he thought, even though she mightn't realize it yet. So if he irritated folk with anecdotes of his boyhood... but, even as they laughed at him, if they soaked up any one of the small lessons which had kept him alive... well, that was all right by Adda.

Of course, there were fragments from the past he didn't share with anyone. He'd no doubt, for instance, that the Glitches were changing.