The Return Messenger

Grujla was a weaver — had been for thirty years — and she sat in Crivsola's workshop flexing her right hand with a puzzled expression. Three days earlier, a heavy loom-beam had fallen across her forearm. The bruising had faded. But something was wrong with her last three fingers.

"I can move them," she said, demonstrating. The fingers curled and straightened obediently. "But I cannot feel them. I picked up a needle this morning and could not tell I was holding it until I looked."

Crivsola pressed the tip of Grujla's smallest finger. "Do you feel that?"

"Nothing."

She pressed harder. Grujla watched her own hand with an expression of mild betrayal.

Two Directions

Crivsola had already established that signals travelled along physical paths through the body. But she had been thinking of the paths as carrying one kind of signal. When the commander in the head said "move your hand," the order travelled outward — from head to hand. Simple enough.

But Grujla's visit forced her to think about the other direction. When you touched something, you felt it. That meant information also travelled inward — from hand to head. The hand reported what it encountered, and the commander received the report.

Signals go both ways. Commands travel outward from the head. Feelings travel inward toward it.

One Path or Two?

The simplest model was that a single path did both jobs. One set of tubes — she pictured them as thin hollow channels, like tiny rivers — carried commands out and feelings back, the way a single road could carry traffic in both directions.

She called this One Path Does Everything.

It was clean. It was simple. And Grujla destroyed it.

The Weaver's Proof

If a single path carried both commands and feelings, then damaging that path should destroy both. Grujla should have lost movement and feeling together. But she had not. Her fingers moved perfectly. They simply reported nothing back.

The loom-beam damaged the feeling-path but left the command-path intact. Therefore, the two paths are separate.

This was the same logic Crivsola had used when studying the two types of blood channels — if you could block one without affecting the other, they were not the same thing. Grujla's injury was an accident of the kind Crivsola could never have arranged deliberately. But nature had run the experiment for her.

The Carrying Mechanism

Tszuvok asked the obvious question. "What are the paths made of? What carries the signal?"

Crivsola had been thinking about this. The body's other transport systems used channels carrying fluid — the blood rivers, the food-tube. It seemed reasonable that signal-paths worked the same way.

The signals probably travel through thin hollow tubes, carried by some kind of fluid — like tiny rivers running from the head to every part of the body and back.

She imagined a network of fine tubes, thinner than the thinnest blood channels, carrying a signalling fluid. Command-fluid flowing outward. Feeling-fluid flowing inward. Two separate sets of tubes, bundled together but distinct — the way two irrigation channels could run side by side without mixing their water.

It was a perfectly reasonable model. It was also wrong — the paths were not hollow, and the signals were not fluid. They were something Crivsola had no way to detect: tiny bursts of a force that would not be understood for thousands of years. But her model captured the essential architecture correctly. Two separate pathways. Two directions. Physical structures carrying physical signals.

The Network

Grujla returned the following week. The feeling in her smallest finger had begun to return — faint, tingling, unreliable. The path, it seemed, was repairing itself. Crivsola noted this carefully. Whatever the signal-paths were made of, they could heal. They were alive, like the frame.

The picture was growing richer. A commander in the head. Signal-paths running outward to carry commands. Signal-paths running inward to carry feelings. Two separate networks, capable of independent damage and independent repair.

But Tszuvok's next question was the one that kept Crivsola up that night. "If the command always starts in the head and travels down — why did you jerk your hand away from that hot pot last week before you even felt the pain?"

She had no answer. Not yet.