“We don’t know the full extent of the ingredients used to create you,” said Amel. “Believe me. We do study the blood, skin tissue, and other biopsied tissue from the Replimoids we have here who are willing, but we really don’t know what they used to achieve what they have done. It is still possible they used humans from this planet as part of their process, and that they have lied about this.”

“So they might have taken brain tissue from humans,” I suggested. “They might have taken substantial amounts of brain tissue to make us?”

“Yes,” he said. “That is one way of putting it.”

“They led us to believe,” said Garekyn, “that we were wholly grown from Earth elements in a way that did not involve parts of living human beings. At least that is how I understood them.”

“Yes, but they told you I was such a freshly developed Replimoid, too, didn’t they?” Amel smiled. It was a bitter smile.

“Yes, they did,” I said.

Amel rose, which was obviously the signal for us to rise too, and he put his arms around Derek and held him warmly. “You are splendid creations,” he said in a low reverent voice, “whoever made you and for whatever purpose. You are splendid.” Then he offered each of us the same embrace and we felt a fever emanating from him, and also we felt his suffering. We felt the energy of his suffering, the energy of the pain he was experiencing due to all he had laid out in plain words for us.

“You are like music,” he said looking at us, including all of us in an open gesture of his right hand. “A man or woman carves a flute from a piece of wood and brings it to the lips and breathes into it a deep feeling, and out comes an astonishing sound, a sound which surprises everyone even the musician, and then the sound develops and grows and is splendid and is a new thing, a thing born of the feeling inside the man or woman who made the flute and dared to breathe into it. You are like this. Your souls are like this. The Bravennans don’t know what they have achieved. I picture them lazing about their rooms full of picture walls, drunk and drowsy and gorging on the suffering they are viewing. Enough. You are their gift to me, though they can’t know it.”

There were tears in his eyes. He gestured for us to go.

And as we left him, there was no doubt in our minds, none whatsoever, that he had told us the truth and that he represented all that was good of which we knew; he was, in sum, the most nearly perfect being we had ever encountered, and we had Atalantaya to back up this conviction. And our time in the Wilderness lands amongst the tribes he’d influenced only underscored it more.