“Our mistake, you see,” said the Parents, “because he has come to believe that he is a god.”

In his hands the Great One held an oval object, shimmering in the sunlight, and all around the Great One the people were crying out, pointing, cheering, bowing to him, and calling out their praise. All around them in the windows of the high buildings and towers were faces turned to see the Great One. People stood way above on the rooftops looking down on the freshly turned field that lay ready for the object which the Great One now planted in the moist, fragrant soil.

Suddenly everyone was singing, singing in a rolling wordless melody. People put their arms around one another and began to sway as they sang. Kapetria put her arm around Derek, her familiar smile flashing warmly on him. And Derek held tight to Garekyn. And the fountains poured forth their water, raining down on the oval as the oval began to grow larger and larger and then to break open, its thin casing peeled back as if into a collection of petals out of which the great tall glistening shoots began to grow.

“But does the singing make it happen?” Derek asked Kapetria.

“No, beloved,” she said. “It’s entirely chemical. All of this is chemical. Everything you see here is chemical. But don’t you see the genius of it? He is making the common people feel a part of it; he has given them a ritual so that they are united in it. Oh, he has been so clever, so very clever.”

The Great One stood back with his thumbs hooked in his leather belt watching them all as they sang and danced, his eyes moving up the towers across from him to the thousands of beings clustered on all those terraces and in all those windows. How proud he was, how happy. Tears hovered in his eyes. He stood there, weight on his left foot, the other leg relaxed, his long blue tunic hanging loose around him, such richly colored wool, splendidly stitched with golden acorns at the hem, and so bright the buckle that sparkled on his belt and the buckles on his shoulders. How he gloried in it, and then his eyes fixed on Derek and even for Derek he smiled.

Amel.

The great clear shoots of luracastria were spreading out now, broadening, growing thicker, and then transforming themselves into great sheets of clear shimmering material rising higher and higher and growing wider and wider as the immense surrounding crowd began to cheer as well as sing.