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— you know that? You taught them love, with your Simulator. They’d never known love before, and for a while it calmed them. They were docile for many days after you left. But then …” She shrugged, and her breasts rose under the sapa cloth. “Now, they’re at war.”
    Indeed, the situation seemed to be worsening. Two opposing mobs had become evident, hordes of skittering shadows at either end of the beach. A major conflict was about to take place. Meanwhile, one Quickly was busy nearby on a lone project. He darted to and fro, occasionally sitting. A shapeless, shifting mount of some unknown material rose in front of him, and he seemed to be working on it.
    “Me, a god?” said Manuel wonderingly.
    “Love …” muttered Dad Ose. He was shocked. Love was something that people didn’t talk about. Love was an artificial extension of sex that had — so legend had it — been the downfall of the First Variety of Man. Ana was known to be outspoken, but this was going too far.
    “Have you ever wondered just what the Quicklies are?” asked Ana.
    “They’re God’s creatures,” replied Dad Ose shortly.
    “Human or animal?”
    “Animal, of course.”
    “Maybe we’d understand the Quicklies better if we thought that point through,” said Ana.
    Manuel was watching the mound grow into a small tower. “I think it makes no difference,” he said. The busy Quickly kept flitting across to him, looking at him, darting away. Now the two armies were quieter and a number of Quicklies were clearly visible, sitting down. Others came to view the tower for a brief instant before rejoining their factions. The waves had stilled. The little tower leaned to the north and glowed with pale light, becoming brighter as evening deepened. It was about a meter high, shaped like a child’s crude sandcastle, but not made from sand. Rather, it was built from one of those unidentifiable substances that the Quicklies invented from time to time and then forgot. The Quickly was now building another tower close to the first. Another Quickly, viewing the construction, dropped suddenly dead. The armies waited.
    Two hugemisshapen figures were walking down the beach toward them, coming from the north.
    The three people, who would soon be joined by two more, stood there in the darkening evening, each busy with his own thoughts. Manuel, the dreaming youth, thought of romance and, strangely, a face he’d never seen and a name he’d never heard. He’d dreamed about this face last night. At first it had been Belinda; then it was a different face, dark where Belinda was fair, with brown eyes where Belinda’s were blue.
    “Who are you?” he’d asked.
    And she’d grinned, elfin, mischievous, and said, “Elizabeth.”
    The clarity of this vision had remained with him all day.
    Dad Ose was struggling to understand love and the Quicklies, sick at his own ignorance. It wouldn’t have mattered if nobody else had been able to understand the world around them; that was the will of God. But somehow he felt other people understood more than he. Even Manuel seemed to sense dimensions to existence that he, Dad Ose, would never know. And all that traveling recently, of which he would say nothing …
    And Ana, now. Little better than a whore, so men said — yet she made him feel small; she seemed possessed of a wisdom far beyond his ken …
    Ana’s own thoughts during those moments are not known.
    Three people, then, watching the Quicklies preparing for war while one lone Quickly built twin towers that glowed in the dark. Thinking there was nothing unusual in what they saw. The Quicklies were the Quicklies, and they often did strange things.
    The little towers leaned toward each other. Each was slightly bowed, so that if they met — and it looked as though they soon might — they would form a curved arch. The base of each tower spread into a pedestal, but the towers themselves were of consistent diameter, and smooth. There was a tension in them. They