
yelled and leaped, and occasionally fell to fierce quarreling. As Manuel watched, one of them, a little
smaller than the rest, slowed down, aged and died. It fell to the sand, revealing itself as a
chimpanzee-sized humanoid with a large head, hairless, very thin.
“Ya-heeeee!”
The Quicklies arrived. Manuel felt the usual nervous tightening of the throat. He gulped and with his foot
pushed the parrot fish toward an area of blurred disturbance in the sand. Then he snatched his foot away.
You couldn't be too careful, and despite his skepticism about Chine's theories, he couldn't suppress the
vision of his foot becoming instantly skeletal, gleaming white.
In fact the fish became skeletal. He never saw the Quicklies eat them: One second the iridescent scales
were glowing in the moist air, the next second the bones lay dispersed in little heaps, the flesh absorbed
into the Quicklies’ phenomenal metabolism.
Then, as happened sometimes, some of the creatures began to stand comparatively still, watching him,
blinking with unbelievable rapidity, so that their big eyes appeared out of focus. The outline of their
bodies was blurred too, since it is not possible for Quicklies to stand completely motionless.
They babbled at him in the thin rattle of sound that he'd never been able to understand. It seemed to him
that they talked faster every time he met them, and he had a scary thought: Maybe they were in fact
speeding up toward the point where they simply became invisible and were able to do completely as they
pleased.
They were sitting down! This was something new. One by one each upright form disappeared, to be
instantly replaced by a sitting one. They sat in a circle, watching the Simulator with wide eyes. One
keeled over and died, its outline firming up. It was an old, old man, tiny and pathetic, not in the least
threatening. The body remained for a moment, then disappeared. Manuel refused to consider what had
happened to it. The other Quicklies continued to watch the Simulator.
The colors of Manuel's mind-painting played. They swirled in a curious helical pattern like smoke or
clouds. They were turquoise and gray, joyful and sad, and they were reflected at the lower part of the
painting in a way that suggested wet sand and sea and things found and lost. They were wonderful and
unique in each moment, and they represented the perfect amalgam of art and technology—the strange
mind of a young dreaming Wild Human named Manuel and the invention of some long-forgotten scientist
who had found how to give substance to those dreams.
And the Quicklies were crying.
They sat blinking and blurred, and it was odd to see the tears running down those joggling faces just like
normal tears, just as slow and trickling. The Quicklies sat there aging, using up the few precious hours of
their lives in contemplation of Manuel's masterpiece, while they cried at the beauty of it. And yet—so it
always is with art—they were not satisfied. One of them was trying to communicate with Manuel. She
raised her hand. She was a middle-aged female and she spoke with excruciating care—and each syllable
took her a subjective month to say. But her meaning reached the boy. For the first time ever, a Quickly
had spoken to him. She spoke, and she died, carried away in late middle age by some undiagnosed
disease that ran its course in two seconds.
She had said:It needs more love.
The Rainbow—Earth's great computer that sees everything and knows everything and still has not run
down—recorded that scene. And over the millennia to come, historians would puzzle over that moment
and speculate on the identity of that determined little Quickly who devoted her last years to one purpose,