A student held up her hand, and the Padre stopped.
"You talked about this before, but I never got if the aura was your soul or not. Is it, I mean?" Elaine Cowell was a thirteen-year-old, but so bright she stayed for all the lessons with the older teens.
The Padre smiled at her. "Good question, Miss Cowell. I wish I had an absolute answer. My gut feeling is that a vital aura is not your soul. I think your soul is something that belongs to you and God, and no one else can interfere with it. I know some people say it is your soul that gets fed on, but there is no way we can ever know that. I think of the vital aura as being another special kind of energy you give off, just as you give off heat and an electromagnetic field."
Elaine fixed her gaze at an invisible point sixteen inches in front of her face, and Valentine sympathized. She was also an orphan; the Reapers had taken her parents five years ago in Wisconsin. She now lived with an aunt who scratched out a living weaving blankets and repairing coats. The others sat in; silence. Whenever the Padre discussed the Facts of Death with the older students, their normal restlessness vanished.
"So why aren't they still around? I thought that energy stuff was what made the Kurians immortal?" another student asked.
"Evidently our Creator decided that no race can live forever, no matter how advanced their science. When they started to die, we think it caused a terrible panic. I wonder if beings who are nearly immortal are more afraid of death, or less? They needed more and more vital aura to keep going, and they cleaned out whole planets in their final years, trying to stave off the inevitable. They probably absorbed all the dinosaurs; the two events seem to have happened at the same time. In their last extremity, they ate each other, but it was all for nothing. They still died. With no one to maintain their portals, the doorways began to shut down over the thousands and thousands of years that followed. But pieces of their knowledge, and the Interworld Tree itself, survived for a new intelligence to find later on."
Thunder rumbled outside, and the rattling of the rain increased.
"So we call the Pre-entities Kurians now?" a young woman asked.
"No. The Kurians come from a race called the Lifeweavers. They found the remnants of the Pre-entity civilization. They pieced some of their history and technology back together and made use of what they could understand, like the barbarians who moved into Rome. We get the word Lifeweaver from their own language; it refers to those of the race who visit other worlds and interpopulate them. Just as man takes his livestock, crops, and orchards with him when he migrates, but is willing to adapt if something better is found, so did the Lifeweavers in their colonization of the Interworld Tree. Lifeweavers live a long, long time... many thousands of years. Some believe they were created by the Pre-entities as builders, but it seems strange that beings with a vital aura as strong as theirs would have survived the extinction throes of the Pre-entities.
"These Lifeweavers reopened the portals to our Earth about the time we were discovering that food tasted better if it was cooked first. Our ancestors worshiped them. Most of them were content to be teachers, but it seems a few wanted to be more. A Lifeweaver can appear to us as a man or woman, or an elephant or a turtle if it wants, so they must have seemed as gods to our poor forefathers. They can put on a new shape as easily as we can change clothes. Maybe they threw thunderbolts for good measure. I think they inspired many of our oldest myths and legends.
"They adopted us in a way. As we grew more and more advanced, they took a few of us to other worlds. I've been told humans are living on other planets even now. If so, I pray their fortune has been better than ours. The Lifeweavers could do anything they wanted with DNA. They could make useful creatures to suit themselves, or modify a species as they required. We know they liked making beautiful birds and fish to decorate their homes; some of these still live on our planet today."
The Padre smiled at them. "Ever seen a picture of a parrot? I think they tinkered with them a little bit." He paused in thought.
Valentine had seen pictures of parrots. Right now the only birds in his mind were pheasants, tender young pheasants rising in a flutter of wings. He could see them in his newly won shotgun sight. He'd heard the Kolchuks' lab-pointer pair had had another litter; maybe he could still get a puppy.
The Padre droned on.
Doyle held up his hand, serious for once. "Sir, why tell us all this now? We've known about vampirism and so on since we were kids. Okay, maybe some of the hows and whys were wrong. What difference does it make how any of it got started? We still have to hike out every summer-and every fall, a couple of families don't come back."
The Padre's face crumbled. He looked ten years older to Valentine.
"No difference, no difference at all. I wish everyday of my life something could make a difference. Mr. Doyle, class, you are young, you've lived with it your whole lives, and it is not such a weight for you. But I remember a different world. People complained a lot about it, but in hindsight it was something like Eden. Why talk about this now? Look at the quotation on the board. Churchill was right. By looking back, we may often see the future. I tell you this because nothing lasts forever, not even those who will do anything to become immortal. They're not. The Kurians will eventually die, just like the Pre-entities. Once an old king paid to have a piece of knowledge carved deep in the side of a monument, something that would always be true. The wisest man of the age told him to carve the words "This, too, shall pass." But who shall pass first, us or them?
"We will not live to see it, but one day the Kurians will be gone, and the Earth will be clean again. If nothing else, I want you to take that certain knowledge from me and carry it with you wherever you go."
The rain left shortly after the rest of Valentine's schoolmates did. He hurried to empty the various bowls, basins, and pails brimming with rainwater from the leaky roof, then headed for the kitchen. Father Max sat at the battered table, staring at the bottom of an empty glass. He was already recorking the jug.
"David, telling that story always makes me need a drink. But the drink I have always wants another to keep it company, and I should not do that. At least not too often." He replaced the jug in its familiar spot on the shelf.
"That stuff's poison, Father. I wouldn't use it to kill rats; it'd be too cruel."
The old man looked up at David, who poured himself the last of the cow's vintage from the morning milking. "Isn't the race today?"
Valentine, now dressed in faded denim shorts and a leather vest, bolted a piece of bread and washed it down with mouthfuls of milk. "Yeah, at four or thereabouts. I'm glad the rain stopped. In fact, I better get moving if I'm going to walk the trail before the race."
"You've been running that trail since April. I'd think you'd know it by now."
"All the rain is going to make the footing different. Might be muddy going up the big hill."
Father Max nodded sagely. "David, did I ever tell you that your parents would have been proud of you?"
Valentine paused for a second as he laced his high moccasins. "Yes. Mostly after you've had a drink. It always makes you soft."
"You're a bit of the best of both of them. You've got his quick thinking and dedication, and enough of your mother's looks and humor and heart to soften his edges. I wish he- they-could see you today. We used to call the last day of school graduation, you know that?"
"Yup. I've seen pictures and everything. A funny hat and a piece of paper that says you know stuff. That would be great, but I want to get us that gun." He moved to the door. "You going to be in the public tent?"
"Yes, blessing the food and watching you collect first prize. Good luck, David."