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“You can’t waste it,” she said. The creature looked at her, and Ofelia was sure it wanted to argue, as her children had. She had no intention of arguing. She wanted to find some way to communicate with these creatures, some sound they could both make. “Cooler,” she said, laying her hand on it. “Cooler—makes things cold.” The creature stared, as always. She moved to the stove. “Stove,” she said. “Makes thing hot. Hot . . . cold.”

The creature fumbled at the cooler latch, opened it, and waved its hand in the direction of the downward flow of cold air. The sound it made was neither cooler nor cold, but it did begin with a harsh consonant that Ofelia thought might be an attempt at a “kuh.” Somewhat to her surprise, it closed the door.

“Cooler,” Ofelia said again. “Cold.”

“Kuh.”

Well, it would do. It was a start. Babies started that way, one sound at a time. It moved to the stove, held its hand safely above it. Now what? Should she say “stove” or “hot”? She had always said “hot” to babies, but these weren’t babies. It grunted, clearly impatient. She might not know the words, but she had a lifetime’s experience with impatience.

“Hot,” she said, emphasizing the initial sound. “Hot.”

“Kuh.” It patted at the cooler.

They knew nothing. They would not know that flour came from grain, and the grain from grasses, from the seeds of wheat grown in the little walled plots to protect them from sheep and cattle. They would not know about cutting the grain, beating the gathered stalks to release the seeds, winnowing the seeds to remove the chaff. Or perhaps they did know that much; perhaps they harvested this world’s equivalent of grass in much the same way. Ofelia wondered how much they did know, and how she could find out. Were any of those things hanging from the belts and straps the equivalent of sickle and shears?

She remembered that in the first years of the colony, long ago, the colonists had had to do it all by hand. The machines were too busy fabricating parts for other machines, for building materials, for cloth and crockery. She and the others had cleared and weeded and harvested with hand tools that gave them blisters and sore backs. Later, the fabricator had turned out little harvesters that fit even in the smallest enclosures and could cut the grain faster than women with sickles. The fabricator could convert rough grain to coarse or fine flour, with the waste material remade into a variety of forms. Even though she had grown up in a city, with store-bought foods, she had been almost awed by the little machines, the first harvest that she didn’t have to do all by hand.

Would these creatures be awed? Did they believe in magic? Or would they take it all for granted?

The conversation began when the People first found the city ran alongside a dozen others. Was this the same kind of monster? It wore no clothes on its feet, and little on its body. Yet it had the short soft toes of the invaders, thieves, nest-destroyers. It had five of those toes, and five on the upper limbs. It had white hair instead of dark on its head, but the same arrangement of holes and protuberances.

It is the same. There is the scar where the flying monsters landed.

It is not the same. It is alone; it has white on top.

It is interesting. It does things strangely.

It is a monster, what did you expect?

It is not a hunter. Is it prey?

We cannot eat it. We can watch it.

Soft skin. Wrinkles. Things hang loose.

Things! Ornaments, seed-eater!

Ornaments. It had ornaments hanging on it, ornaments it changed from day to day. What did that mean? A way of counting, a way of responding to the weather? Who could tell? Worth watching, worth learning from. If more came, they would know more about them.

And so much else to learn from. All those tools, containers, fasteners, noisy boxes, picture boxes. They had drummed to an agreement that no one would touch or handle the obvious triggers except for those the monster demonstrated and offered to them: the light, the water. Hot boxes, cold boxes.

If it had not been for the monster’s ornaments, they might have believed monsters cared only for boxes: they lived in boxes, kept things in boxes, cooked food in hot boxes, kept food in cold boxes, had pictures and noises in boxes. Some of the People carved boxes of bone or wood, or made them of the skins of grasseaters. But sacks and gourds were more comfortable to travel with. Only those who chose to live in permanent nest grounds had big boxes.

That picture box. It is like the bird’s seeing.

?

The bird, the high bird—higher and higher. Things look small, but the bird sees far.

That high?

The flying monsters scarred the sky. What if they actually cut through it? That far up, they could see all the world at once.