Once loosed into the world, Luz said as he sat there, the makers spread out to any creature, high or low. Your Ila came here with resources we now count primitive. She shaped the beshti to be what they are. She shaped men to survive the harshness of this world. Now we in turn shape you.

“I tell you I don’t understand. You’re saying the Ila has these things in her, that she put in everyone alive. But you put different ones in me, and where I go, I shed them and other creatures take them up and they have them. So how am I different than the Ila? How are you different?”

You aren’t. And I’m not. That’s the point, isn’t it?

“Damned nonsense,” he said to her in the dream.

But this is the tricky part. Her makers have fitted men and beasts not only to live in this world… but to destroy the ondat. That’s what the ondat fear: a buried instruction. That’s why they insist on raining destruction down. Nanoceles can simply be hidden, a small handful of makers that won’t breed without a signal to do so, and that signal may come from outside, or inside themselves, and it may come today, or tomorrow, or in a hundred years. Do you see why they should worry?

He lay feeling the tides of pain, the waves of burning fever, deep in listening, in the deafening wind, in the thump of the canvas. He listened so hard he became remote from the chill, and the wind, and the pain.

But if the world changes, Luz said, the makers change. Life changes life. Life changes the makers. It must. It’s what they do. Change the world and you change all its parts. Change the world and you change all that the makers do. To so alter this world that the rules of survival are utterly changed—that’s the way the ondat intend to destroy the Ilias creation and scour it clean of all life. But we persuaded them we need to be here. They know nothing of guilt. Nothing of repentance. Nothing of redemption. They aren’t like us. But they do know need, and they know we’re more dangerous to them than the Ila, if we wished them harm. They need our knowledge to repair what the Ila’s kind have done to them, and to win that knowledge, and not to have us do again what the Ila did, they’ve come to an agreement with us. That’s the fine point of the matter. On that your life rests. Hers rests. All this world rests. Do you understand that?

“No, I don’t. Not at all.”

In his dream he tried to look away from the breeding dots, the red and the blue and the yellow dots, endlessly fluttering and spiraling, and in them he could not find the sky.