In the middle of the square stood Ears, up to his waist in grass and shrouded in lilac mist; his palms were raised, his eyes glassy and there was foam on his lips. Around him crowded curious toddlers, listening and watching, open-mouthed; this spectacle never wearied them. Kandid also stopped to listen, and the toddlers scattered like leaves.
"Into the battle new..." burbled Ears in a metallic voice. "Successful movement... extensive areas of peace ... new detachments of Maidens... Calm and Amalgamation..."
Kandid passed on. Since that morning, his head had been reasonably clear, and he felt he could think, and bsgan to consider who he was, this Ears, and what his function was. There was some point now in such speculation, since Kandid now knew something, and sometimes it even seemed that he knew a great deal, if not everything. Every village had its Ears, we've got one, New Village has, and the old man used to brag of how special the Ears had been in the now mushroomy village. No doubt there had been a time when many people knew what the Accession was, and understood what successes were being referred to; then, very likely, they had been concerned to inform everybody about it, or had assumed they were concerned, later it dawned that a whole lot of people could perfectly well be done without, that all these villages were - a mistake, the villagers no more than sheep ... that occurred when it was discovered how to control the lilac mist, and the first deadlings emerged from the lilac clouds ... and the first villages found themselves at the bottom of the first triangular lakes ... and the first detachments of Maidens appeared... The Ears had remained and the tradition had survived, something that wasn't wiped out because they had simply forgotten about it. A pointless tradition, as pointless as this whole forest, as all these artificial monsters and cities, which spawned destruction, and these terrible hoyden-amazons, priestesses of parthenogenesis, cruel and complacent mistresses of the virus, sovereigns of the forest, fresh-water plump ... and this vast activity in the jungle all these Great Harrowings, and Swampings, undertakings monstrous in their absurdity... His ideas flowed freely almost, even automatically, for the last month they had managed to carve for themselves permanent channels and Kandid knew in advance what emotions would spring up in him the next second. In our village this is called "thinking." Here, now doubts would come up... I saw nothing after all. I encountered three forest witches. Plenty of strange things in the forest. I saw the destruction of a deceptive village, a hill resembling a factory of living creatures, hellish violence done to an armchewer ... destruction, factory, violence... Those words are mine, my concepts. Even for Nava destruction isn't destruction, it's the Accession ... but I know what the Accession is. To me it's terrible, revolting, and all because to me it's alien, and perhaps one should say not "a cruel and senseless driving of the forest over people," but "a systematic, superbly organized, precisely thought-out drive of the new against the old," "a well-timed and matured, abundantly powerful offensive of the new against the rotten, hopeless, old order..." Not a perversion, but a revolution. The natural order of things, a natural order I regard from the outside, with the partial view of a stranger who understands nothing and by virtue of that fact, imagines that he knows it all and that he has a right to judge. Just like a little boy indignant at the nasty cock for trampling the poor hen...
He looked back at Ears. Ears was sitting in the grass with his customary dazed look, turning his head, endeavoring to recall who and where he was. A living radio receiver. So, there must be living transmitters ... and living mechanisms and living machines, yes, the deadlings for example... Well now, why, why doesn't all this, so superbly thought-up, so superbly organized, rouse in me a shred of sympathy - only disgust and loathing...
Buster came up noiselessly behind him and clapped him between the shoulder blades.
