The incident left him gloomy all morning, but it was not Etowan Elacca's nature to remain downcast for long, and by afternoon he had obtained a hundred packets of sensitivo seeds from the local nursery: he could not buy the plants themselves, of course, since they would never survive a transplanting. He spent the next day planting the seeds himself. In six or eight weeks there would be no sign of what had occurred. He regarded the event as no more than a minor mystery, which perhaps he would someday solve, more likely not; and he put the matter from his mind.

A day or two later came another oddity: the purple rain. A strange event, but harmless. Everyone said the same thing: "Winds must be changing, to blow the skuvva this far west!" The stain lasted less than a day, and then another rainshower, of a more usual kind, rinsed everything clean. That event, too, Etowan Elacca put quickly from his mind.

The niyk trees, though—

He was supervising the plucking of the glein fruit, some days after the purple rain, when the senior foreman, a leathery-looking, unexcitable Ghayrog named Simoost, came to him in what was, for Simoost, amazing agitation—serpentine hair madly tangling, forked tongue flickering as though trying to escape from his mouth—and cried, "The niyk! The niyk!"

The grayish-white leaves of niyk trees are pencil-shaped, and stand erect in sparse clumps at the ends of black two-inch stems, as though they had been turned upright by some sudden electric shock. Since the tree is so slender and its branches are so few and angular, this upturning of the leaves gives it a curious thorny look that makes a niyk tree unmistakable even at a great distance. Now, as Etowan Elacca ran with Simoost toward the grove, he saw while still hundreds of yards away that something had occurred that he would not have thought possible: every leaf on every niyk tree had turned downward, as though they were not niyks but some sort of weeping tanigale or halatinga!

"Yesterday they were fine," Simoost said. "This morning they were fine! But now—now—"

Etowan Elacca reached the first group of five niyks and put his hand to the nearest trunk. It felt strangely light; he pushed and the tree gave way, dry roots ripping easily from the ground. He pushed a second, a third.

"Dead," he said.

"The leaves—" said Simoost. "Even a dead niyk still keeps its leaves facing up. Yet these—I've never seen anything like this—"

"Not a natural death," Etowan Elacca murmured. "Something new, Simoost."

He ran from group to group, shoving the trees over; and by the third group he was no longer running, and by the fifth he was walking very slowly indeed, with his head bowed.

"Dead—all dead—my beautiful niyks—"

The whole grove was gone. They had died as niyks die, swiftly, all moisture fleeing their spongy stems; but an entire grove of niyks planted in staggered fashion over a ten-year cycle should not die all at once, and the strange behavior of the leaves was inexplicable.