"It's a common word. It means 'never.' Never what?"

"Mikias Mikuam Heffiji Ismar."

"Never to Lose the Finding Place."

"That's me," said Heffiji. "I don't know anything, but I can find everything. Do you want to see?"

"Yes," said Patience.

"Yes," said Reck.

Ruin shrugged.

Heffiji led them back into the rest of the house. Every room was lined with shelves. On the shelves, in no apparent order, were stacks of paper. Rocks or pieces of wood served as paperweights in the rooms where th& glassless windows let in the wind. The whole house was' a library of papers scattered in a meaningless order.

"And you know where everything is?" asked Reck.

"Oh, no. I don't know where anything is, unless you; ask me a question. Then I remember where the answer is, because I remember where I set it down."

"So you can't lead us to anything unless we ask you."

"But if you ask me, I can lead you to everything."

She smiled in pride. "I may have only half a brain, but I remember everything I ever did. All the Wise came by my house, and they all stopped and gave me every answer, and they all asked me every question. And if I didn't have the answer to their question, I kept asking others the same question until one of them could answer it."

Patience started to lift a rock from a stack of papers.

"No!" screamed Heffiji.

Patience set the rock back down.

"If you move anything, how will I find it again?" shouted the dwelf. "Anything you touch will be lost forever and ever and ever! There are a hundred thousand papers in this house! Do you have time to read it all, and remember where each scrap of it is?"

"No," said Patience. "I'm sorry."

"This is my brain!" shouted Heffiji. "I do with this what humans and geblings and gaunts do with your large heads! I let you dwell in it because you will add to my memories. But if you move anything, you might as well burn down the house with me inside, because then I'll be nothing but a dwelf with half a brain and no answers at all, none at all!"

She was weeping. Reck comforted her, the long, many- jointed fingers stroking the dwelf s hair in a swirling pattern like a bird's wing closing. "It's true," said Reck, "humans are like that, they stumble into other people's houses and break and destroy without any thought of the havoc that they wreak."

Patience bore the abuse; she had earned it.

But Ruin took her silence to mean that she hadn't got the point of Reek's remark. "She means that you humans came to this world and ruined it for all of us who were here before you-geblings and dwelfs and gaunts."

Suddenly Heffiji was no longer weeping. She pulled away from Reck with a broad smile on her face. "It's my best answer," she said. "Ask me the question."

"What question?" asked Ruin.

" 'All of us who were here before you,' " she said.

"Ask me."

Ruin tried to decide what question she meant. "All right, who was here before the humans?"

Heffiji jumped up and down with delight. "Wyrms!" she shouted. "Wyrms and wyrms and wyrms!"

"What about geblings, then, if we weren't here when humans arrived?" asked Reck.

"What about them? Too vague-you have to ask a better question than that."

"Where did geblings come from?" she asked.

Heffiji jumped up and down again. "My favorite, my favorite! Come and I'll show you! Come and you'll see!"

She led them up a ladderway into a low and musty attic. Even the geblings had to stoop; Patience had to squat down and waddle along to the farthest corner.

Heffiji gave her lantern to Ruin and took a sheaf of papers from a roof beam. She spread them along the attic floor. Taking back the lantern, she began to read the explanations of the drawings, one by one.

"There is no such thing as a native life form left on this world, and no such thing as Earth life, either, except for human beings themselves," she said.

"That's insane," said Ruin. "Everybody knows that the domesticated plants and animals came from Earth-"

Heffiji held the lantern up to his face. "If you already know all the answers, why did you stop at my house?"

Abashed, he fell silent.

Heffiji recited. "Comparing the genetic material of any plant or animal with the records concerning similar plants or animals preserved from the knowledge brought with mankind from Earth, we find that the original genetic code is still preserved, almost perfectly-but as only a tiny part of a single but vastly larger genetic molecule."

Heffiji pointed to a diagram showing the positions of the Earth species' protein patterns within the single chromosome of the present Imakulata version.

"Clearly, the species brought from earth have been taken over or, as is more likely, imitated perfectly by native species that incorporate the genetic material into their own. Since the resulting molecule can theoretically contain hundreds of times as much genetic information as the original Earth species needed, the rest of the genetic material is available for other purposes. Quite possibly, the Imakulata species retain the dormant possibility of adapting again and again to imitate and then replace any competing species. There is even a chance that the Imakulata genetic molecule is complex enough to purposefully control alterations in the genetic material of its own reproductive cells. But whether some rudimentary form of intelligence is present in the genetic molecule or not, our experiments have proven conclusively that in two generations any Imakulata species can perfectly imitate any Earth species. In fact, the Imakulata imitation invariably improves on the Earth original, giving it a competitive edge-shorter gestation or germination times, for example, or markedly faster sexual maturity, or vastly increased numbers of offspring per generation."

Heffiji looked at them piercingly, one at a time. "Well?" she asked. "Do you understand it?"

Patience remembered what Prince Prekeptor had once said to her. "The genetic molecule is the mirror of the will."

Heffiji scowled. "That's religion. I keep those in the cellar."

"We understand," said Ruin.

"You must understand it all. If you have a question, I'll say it again."

They had no questions. Heffiji moved on to a series of drawings of wheat plants and a strange, winged insect.

"Our experiments involved separating the original Earth- species genetic material from common wheat, to see what was left when the currently dominant Earth-genes were gone. The experiments were delicate, and we failed many times, but at last we succeeded in separating the genetic material, and growing Earth wheat and the species that had absorbed and replaced it. The genetic structure of the Earth wheat was identical to the records passed down to us from the original colonists, and yet when it grew we could see no difference in the plant itself from the Imakulata wheat. However, the leftover genetic material from the Imakulata wheat did not produce a plant at all. Instead, it produced a small insectlike flier, with a wormlike body except for three wing-pairs.

It was completely unlike anything we could find in our catalogues from Earth, but possibly similar to what the earliest colony records refer to as 'gnats,' which seemed to disappear from the first colony of Heptam after a few years."

"What does this have to do with geblings?" asked Ruin. "I know more about plants than any human scientist ever did."

Heffiji glared at him. "Go away if you don't want the answers that I give."

Reck touched her brother's cheek. "It isn't that he doesn't understand," she said. "It's that he already understands too well."

Heffiji went on. "We introduced a single Imakulata gnat into a glass box containing a sample of pure Earth wheat that was ready for fertilization. Without a mate, the Imakulata gnat soon began laying thousands of eggs.