We were wasting our time by trying to thwart her. But if Chebeya's right-and how can I tell how much truth a raveler knows?-if she's right, then the Keeper can be influenced, not by rebels but by her most loyal friends. So Akmaro may have been blocking her just as Chebeya said, and the things he's telling the Keeper now-maybe the logjam will be broken."
"Either that or not. How can I know?"
"I think that it's possible that when it comes time to break the impasse, the Keeper may have use for me."
"Someone will have a dream. That's how the Keeper works. You'll see the dream, you'll tell me, and we'll figure out if there's something in it that the Keeper wants me to do."
"I haven't had a true dream since I saw myself as a gardener in the sky. That came true long ago, and I don't expect to have another dream."
"Yes, well, I'd like to think the Keeper had something to say to me, of course. I'm as vain as the next person."
"It doesn't work that way. I'm not tired yet."
She left the launch and wandered in the cold night air in her garden, routinely noticing the growth of the plants, the relative preponderance of one species over another, the amount of brachiation, the size of the foliage. The Oversoul entered her observations into the ship's computer as notes. They had long since stopped commenting on the irony that a computer program designed to govern a world was now acting as scribe for a lone biologist.
The Oversoul began to talk to her.
"Didn't you notice that about four hundred years ago?"
"Forty million years you waited on Harmony, and now you're impatient?"
"You were running things, you mean. If something was planned, it was because you were doing the planning. And then people started having dreams that didn't come from you. Made you a little uneasy, didn't it?"
"That's how it is for us all the time."
"Whatever the Keeper does, she does it faster than light, she does it no matter how far away a person is. It suggests such enormous power. Such knowledge, such... wisdom. And yet she is so delicate, intervening so little, really. Giving us such freedom. Respecting our choices. Listening to us. Listening to needs and desires we don't even know we have."
"Organic, then? With very powerful tools?"
"Or perhaps she found it and loved it and decided she wanted to help. On her own, unassigned, unrequested."
"Now you're a critic."
"That's the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings."