“You’re not serious!” Dahlaine exclaimed.

“Very serious, brother dear. It was the voice of Mother Sea, and that seems to suggest that the whale might have been something other than an ordinary whale as well, wouldn’t you say?”

“She’s never done that before,” Dahlaine said in a very troubled voice.

“You’re being obvious again, Dahlaine,” Zelana said. “I think we’d better step around her very carefully until we get a better idea of what she’s doing and why. Mother Sea’s the central force of the whole world, so let’s stay on the good side of her.”

“What happened next?” Dahlaine asked.

“Eleria had a dream, naturally. Evidently, that was the whole idea. In some peculiar way, that pearl’s the essence of Mother Sea’s awareness. Her tides still rise and fall, and her waves wash the shores of Father Earth, but she’s awake now. I’m almost positive that the pearl, which is really Mother Sea incarnate, dictated Eleria’s dream, image by image.”

“Did Eleria tell you about her dream?”

“Of course she did. Why do you think I’m here?”

“What did the dream involve?”

“The world,” Zelana replied. “Eleria saw it when it was still on fire, before the continents separated and before life began. Then she saw the continents move away from each other and watched living things crawl up out of Mother Sea. She saw the big lizards roam the world, and the falling star that killed them all. She was aware of us and of the others—the ones who are asleep now—and somehow she knew about the Vlagh. She saw the age of ice and then the more recent man-things. As closely as I can determine, she dreamt all the way from the beginning up until the day before yesterday.”

“She managed to dream all of that in one night?” Dahlaine said incredulously.

“She had help, Dahlaine. I’m sure that the pearl was guiding her step by step. I think we’d better advise our alternates what’s afoot here. Our cycle’s very nearly reached its conclusion, and our alternates will be waking soon. We’d better warn them that the crisis we’ve been expecting since the beginning’s very likely to boil to the top during their cycle.”

“That’s assuming that it doesn’t come before our cycle’s finished,” Dahlaine said. “I think that we’d all better get together and thrash this out. Why don’t you go fetch Aracia, and I’ll see if I can run Veltan down. We need to make some decisions, and we might not have much time.”

“It shall be as thou hast commanded, my dear, dear brother,” Zelana replied with exaggerated formality.

“Do you have to do that, Zelana?” he said with a pained sort of expression.

“When you’re being obvious, yes. Go get Veltan, Dahlaine, and I’ll see if I can pry holy Aracia out of that silly temple of hers. Do we want to meet here?”

“I think we’d better. It’s more secluded than the other places—except for yours, of course. We could meet there, I suppose, but Veltan doesn’t like to swim. And let’s keep the Dreamers away from our meeting. We don’t want to contaminate their visions.”

Zelana went up out of Dahlaine’s cave and probed the northern sky until she found a wind that suited her purpose, and then she rose up through the chill northern air to join with the obliging wind, to ride it on down in a southeasterly direction toward Aracia’s Domain.

The arrival of the later variety of people had elevated Aracia’s opinion of herself quite noticeably. Until their appearance, Aracia had seemed sensible enough—a little vain, perhaps, but not unbearably so. The later people, unlike the more brutish early ones, had religious yearnings, and they longed for gods.

Aracia had thought that was very nice of them, and she’d been more than happy to oblige. She’d suggested that a fancy dwelling where she could stay while she was looking after them might be appropriate, so her people built one for her—several, actually. The first one had been a bit crude, since it had been constructed primarily of logs. It had been all right for a while, but the wind blew through the cracks, and the dirt floor grew muddy during the spring rains.

Aracia had then suggested stone blocks instead of logs, and the people who served her labored long and hard to build a dwelling for her that was almost as comfortable as Zelana’s grotto or Dahlaine’s cave. And now Aracia of the East dwelt in her splendid though drafty palace-temple with servants by the score to tell her how wonderful she was and how beautiful and how they could not possibly get along without her—and if it wasn’t too much trouble, could she turn that fellow who’d been so insulting the other day into a toad and maybe make it rain because the oats really needed some water along about now, but not too much rain, since that made everything all muddy.

Zelana descended through the crisp autumn air to the marble dome of her sister’s temple and adjusted her eyes to look through the polished marble at Aracia’s regal throne room. It was sheathed in palest marble, of course, and there were tall columns around its outer edge, and red drapes behind Aracia’s golden throne.

Aracia was garbed in a regal gown, and she wore a regal crown of gold and a regal sort of expression on her face.

A fat man garbed in black linen vestments and a tediously ornate miter was standing before Aracia’s throne, delivering a tiresome oration of praise.

Aracia, Zelana noticed, seemed to hang on the fat man’s every word.

Although she knew that it would be terribly impolite, Zelana simply couldn’t resist a sudden impulse.

The fat orator broke off suddenly when Zelana, clad only in filmy gauze, abruptly appeared out of nowhere before the throne of her elder sister. Several plump, overfed servants fainted dead away, and a few of the more theologically inclined began to contemplate revisions of several articles of the faith.

Aracia gasped. “Cover yourself, Zelana!” she said sharply.

“What for, dear sister?” Zelana said. “I’m immune to the weather, and I don’t have any defects that I want to hide. If you want to wrap yourself in that silly-looking cocoon, that’s your business, but I don’t think it’ll turn you into a butterfly.”

“Have you no modesty?”

“Of course not. I’m perfect. Didn’t you know that? Dahlaine needs to see us—now. Leave your Dreamer here, though. He’ll explain why when we join him.”

“If Dahlaine wants to explain something to me, he can come here and do it,” Aracia said. “I will not bow down to him in that grubby hole in the ground where he lives.”