by John Brunner
"No more than I can help. I like to travel, I'm good at what I do and get plenty of commissions. Why?"
"Would you accept me as an apprentice?"
"Hmm! I don't know about that! But"—quickly before he let his mantle slump—"you can help me on shore until Phrallet gets over her present mood. Then we'll see. Fair?"
"I can't thank you enough!"
"Then please me by keeping quiet for a bit. Oh, if there were a bit more light...! But this sort of thing needs to be fixed in sound, really. You should be listening: all these recriminations about who betrayed Lesh and her chums by not exploring the far side of the watershed properly!"
Awb composed himself and did his best to concentrate. But all he could think of was how suddenly the blight must have struck if a mere two years before experienced investigators like Drotninch and Byra had found nothing in this area to worry them.
III
Finally a weak conclusion was reached. After the extent of the damage had been assessed, so a report could be sent back to Chisp, an expedition must cross the watershed and test the plants there for infective organisms, even though none had been found over here.
So much could have been agreed straightaway, in Awb's view, but everybody was so overwrought, making decisions seemed like excessively hard work. He was as affected as anyone else. He felt he ought to be doing something, if only getting better acquainted with the observatory site, but it was still dark, and what could he learn without adequate luminants? Voosla carried seed of a recently developed type that rooted immediately in a shellful of soil and could be carried around draped over a pole, lasting for up to half a score of darks, exactly the kind of thing that was called for in a crisis like this. But nobody had expected a crisis, so none of them had been planted in advance, and even if they were forced now it would be days before they ripened.
In the end he remained inert, pondering a mystery that had often troubled him before.
Why was it that, when the world was generally calm by dark, it was always harder to analyze and act on important memories? Surely the opposite should have been true! Yet it never was. While the sun was down, memories lurked on the edge of consciousness like dormant seeds, only to burst out when there was so much else going on that one would have expected them to be smothered. Oh, they were accessible enough at a time like now ... but they didn't seem to connect to activity.
Awb had been puzzled about this for a long time, for a reason he suspected people from fixed cities would not appreciate. Incomprehensibly, though, when he mentioned it to people on Voosla—Tyngwap the chief librarian, for example, who had custody of not only the city's history and navigation records, but also data concerning all the shores she had touched—they missed the point of his question too, brushing him aside with some casual reference to the light-level or the local air-pressure.
Which manifestly could have nothing to do with what he was trying to figure out!
Even though cities like Voosla were commanded by experienced weather-guessers, storms sometimes broke out unexpectedly across their course, perhaps precipitated by a meteor; nobody could forecast those, but the sparks they shed through the upper air did often seem to provoke foul weather. If such a thing happened in the dire middle of the dark, the people's response was as prompt and efficient as by day, and they were quite well able to put off their usual time for rest and reflection. But they never seemed to need to make it up later! Physical exhaustion due to lack of pressure was one thing; it demanded food and drink and that was enough. Mental exhaustion was something else; it gathered in the lower reaches of the mind, and eventually burst out in altered form. Take Phrallet as an example. What she had done this dark, by intervening in the scientists' debate without knowing the facts, was typical of her excessive need to be active, vocally or otherwise. It didn't render her unattractive to males, but her fellow she'uns didn't like her much, and as for the status accorded to mere males ever since it had been established that originally they had been parasitical on females and used them simply to bear their buds...!
Well, only the fact that inbreeding rapidly led to deformity had prevented cities like Voosla, and probably fixed cities as well, from reducing males to simple tokens, like certain lower animals whose symbiosis must go back so far in the history of evolution that even the finest modern techniques could not recover a single independently viable male cell. Luckily—from Awb's point of view—it had early been shown, in the light of Gveest's pioneering work (and he was male and some said had betrayed his kind!), that species lacking the constant chemical renewal due to symbiosis were precisely those most vulnerable to climatic change. Where were the snowbelongs of yesterday, hunted to extinction as soon as the Great Thaw overtook them? Where were the canifangs, pride of the earliest bioscientists—not that they called themselves by any such name in that far past? They had been deliberately made to specialize, and they died out. The list was long: northfinders, hoverers, fosq, dirq, some exploited by folk for their own ends, some simply unable to compete when their range was invaded by a more vigorous rival or even a rash of Gveest's new plants!
Beyond them, too, according to the latest accounts, there had been ancestral creatures without names, which pastudiers labeled using Ancient Forbish, receding to the very dawn of time.
Did they think? Did they reason? Certainly they left no message for the future, which was a mark of the folk; as long ago as the age of legendary Jing, means had been found to warn posterity about the menace looming in the sky. Without such aids, probably the Age of Multiplication would have proved a disaster—
No, not necessarily, Awb corrected himself. Eventually the truth could have been rediscovered. But perhaps there would have been less reason to go in search of it, and by the time it was once more chanced on it might have been too late: the sun might be being drawn inexorably into some new star, up there in the Major Cluster ... He tipped his eye in search of it, and was astonished to realize that it was nowhere to be seen; the sky was blue, and everybody was dispersing to daylight duties.
What was Thilling apt to think of him if he stayed here mooning? Hastily he scrambled to his pads and set out after her. It was a vast effort to catch up, since his pressure yesterday had been so badly lowered, but he struggled on, reminding himself that all effort was made the more worthwhile by knowing how the ancestors had dedicated their lives to the survival of descendants they could never meet.
The first part of the bright was spent in making a careful record of the damage caused by the landslide, and Awb followed Thilling from place to place carrying bulky light-tight packs of the sensitized sheets she still referred to as "leaves" in memory of a more primitive technology. For the first time he gained a proper impression of the complexity of the work that had gone into creating the site for the observatory. Planning it must have been even harder than, say, founding a new fixed city, what with digging the canal to carry broken rock and make the mole, stringing the floater-cables, supplying food and accommodation for the workers, all of whom had had to be recruited at a distance and were used to a high standard of living. Several times he heard it vainly wished that the natives could have been enlisted, but today, again, they went about their own animal business, apparently incapable even of wondering about this intrusion into their placid world. If any of them had indeed been killed by the landslide, they showed no signs of grief.
Moreover there were mounts and draftimals to provide for, the musculators and cutinates, the floaters themselves constantly in need of the right nourishment to replenish the light gas in their bladders ... Awb knew perfectly well that when they first joined Voosla the people from Chisp had occasionally had difficulty finding their way around on her numerous levels, but he couldn't help feeling that, if they were accustomed to places like this, they ought to have found so small a city comparatively simple.
When the sun was at its highest—not very high in these latitudes, of course—Lesh gathered her companions on the top of the scree caused by the landslide, and starte
d working out how long it might take to clear away. Already draftimals were dragging musculators towards it, along with grabbers and scoopers.
This spot afforded a splendid prospect of the area including the bay where Voosla was lying, minus her giqs, all of which had been detached and were now spread as far as the horizon. Delighted, Thilling used up her stock of sheets in fixing a view in each direction, returned them to their pack, and asked Awb to take them back to the city and bring replacements. Nervously, because he had no wish to encounter Phrallet, but equally none to disappoint Thilling, he complied.
It took him a long time to regain the shore because the usual branchways were decaying, like so much of the vegetation on this blighted coast, and he had to stay on the ground most of the way. The stink of rotting foliage was all-pervasive, and he wondered how the people working here could bear it.
Coming in sight of the sea again, he discovered that a strange briq had entered the bay. She must have been just around the western headland when he looked before, because she was of a type by no means speedy, the broad northern breed called variously smaq or luqqra much in favor for carrying bulky freight. Voosla had crossed a number of them during the couple of brights prior to landfall.
As she touched the side of the city, Axwep came to greet her commander, and by the tune Awb arrived they were deep in conversation.
"There's somebody who can probably tell us," the mayor said, interrupting herself. "Awb! Do you know where Lesh is?"
"When I left, she was on top of the rockpile trying to work out how long it will take to clear," Awb called back.
"Will you be going back there?"
"Yes, I'm on an errand for Thilling."
"Then you can carry a message. Come here. This is Eupril; she's from the quarry down-coast which we passed the dark before last."
Awb remembered that being pointed out to him, at a spot where luminants grew normally. He had never seen a quarry, but he knew about such places where specially developed microorganisms were used to break up rock and concentrate valuable elements to enrich poor soil, or even to extract metals. In ancient times, it was said, the folk had employed fire for similar purposes: however, during the Age of Multiplication fire had fallen out of use except for very special purposes, because most burnable substances were far too valuable for other applications. Most people nowadays were terrified of it. Sometimes, far out at sea, one could smell smoke on the wind, and the Vooslans would mutter sympathy for the poor landlivers whose homes and crops were going up in flames.
"I don't suppose it'll do much good," Eupril said sardonically. She was thickset, with the forceful voice of one used to calling over long distances, rather like Axwep. "I've warned and warned those people that they picked a bad site for this observatory of theirs. We surveyed it when we first came up here, and though there were a lot of useful minerals we decided against prospecting further. We didn't like the look of the natives, nor what we found the other side of the ridge. People who won't listen make my pith ache, you know? Of course, when we saw a chunk had fallen off the mountain, we thought we'd better come and see if they needed help. We have no other way of finding out. Used to have a nervograp link, but it went bad on us."
"From the same blight that's spoiling everything else?" Awb suggested.
"Now that's the other reason I'm here," Eupril said. "We have news for Lesh. It's not a blight. It's a poison."
"How can you be sure?" Axwep demanded. "I mean, I know the people here haven't been able to isolate a causative organism yet, but there's a lot of talk about germs you can't see even with the best microscope, that go through the finest filters and can still do damage—"
"We're sure," Eupril cut in. "Who'd know better than a concentration specialist? Matter of fact, we've been worrying about something of the sort ever since they warned us they were going to tap water from beyond the ridge and discharge it here, because there's a current that follows the coast and washes right down to our place. Still, they claimed it was only going to be for a year or two, and a bit of extra fresh water might conceivably have been an advantage, because we use a lot of cutinates and even with our best salt-precipitators they tend to wear out pretty quickly. So we didn't raise as much objection as we should have, what with the delay involved in sending a delegation to Chisp and the rigid attitude of the Jingfired. Everybody knows they think they're incapable of making a mistake, hm? Bunch of arrogant knowalls, that lot!"
She shrugged with her entire mantle. "Anyway, nothing much happened last year, so we more or less stopped worrying. This season, though, our concentration-cultures have started to die off, and our cutinates are developing blisters like we never saw before, and just the other day we finally traced the problem. Of course we thought it was disease at first. It's not. It's definitely a poison that's coming to us in solution, in the water, and even diluted as it is when it reaches the quarry it's deadly dangerous. We don't have anything that can resist it. Our toughest precipitators turn black and rot within a month."
Stunned, Awb said, "Mayor, I think this is something Lesh ought to hear personally. I mean, I couldn't possibly repeat such an important message and be sure of getting all the details right."
"That's not the message," said Axwep with gentle irony. "The message I meant was simply a request to get here as quickly as she can. I'm sure you can manage to relay that much!"
"Probably not," said a harsh voice, and Phrallet appeared, swarming along the nearest slanting branchway. "Even if he is of my own budding, I wouldn't trust him to find his way from one side of Voosla to the other!"
Furious, Awb reared back, holding up the pack of image-sheets like a shield. "Thilling trusts me!" he blurted. "She sent me to bring a fresh batch of these for her!"
"Instead of which you're standing about gossiping?"
"But—!"
It was no good. All his life he had found it impossible to get his budder to take him seriously. Clamping his mandibles tight shut, he muttered an apology to Axwep, who seemed mildly amused—a reaction calculated to irritate Phrallet still further—and hastened in the direction of Thilling's bower.
IV
The first thing Axwep asked Lesh when the latter returned to Voosla— annoyed at the interruption even though Awb had done his utmost to explain its reason—was whether water was still being drawn from beyond the ridge; if so, the city should be moved.
"All our cutinates got crushed by the rockfall," was her curt reply. "They're not pumping anything right now, and in fact I'm not sure they'll survive. Now what's all this about, Eupril?"
The concentration expert sighed. "Oh, I know you suspect our people of wanting to drive you away because we have designs on this site for our own purposes, but that's untrue and unfair! I came with proof of the danger you're in. Carry on like you're doing, and those toughtrees you're planting on the peak will turn as rotten as everything else. Then what will become of your telescopes?"
"Proof? Let's see it!" Lesh snapped.
"I'd rather present the evidence in proper order. You're supposed to have a ripe bunch of experts here now, or so Axwep tells me. Maybe some of them will be a bit less—ah—emotionally committed. Let them be the judges."
For a second it seemed that Lesh was going to yield to rage; then, resignedly, she slumped to four-fifths height.
"Very well, I'll send for Drotninch and the rest. But where are we going to get the water we need if we can't take it from across the ridge?" With sudden optimism: "Maybe from the sea! You can let us have some of your salt-precipitators!"
"They're dead or dying," Eupril answered. "We've had to order fresh stock, and it'll be months before we have any to spare."
Thilling, never one to miss important news, had accompanied Lesh back to the city, and stood beside Awb listening keenly. Now, however, she muttered, "This could go on for ages. Come with me. You said you'd like to be my apprentice, so let's see if you can learn to trim a lens while I develop the images I've caught so far."
Excited, he followed her
down into the very core of the city, where the junqs fretted and throbbed, dreamlost perhaps in visions of their ancestral freedom. Here a small dark bower had been assigned to the picturist, which she could make entirely light-tight. Judging by the stink of juices and concentrates which blew from it when she finished work, it must be very unpleasant in there. Awb began to have second thoughts. But he willingly accepted the blade she gave him, and paid total attention when she demonstrated how to cut loose the full-grown lenses that bulged from the plants she had hung to nearby branches.
"Here are the measurements for a mid-range lens," she said. "Try this kind first. If you spoil one I shan't mind. If you spoil two, I'll be disappointed. If three—well, I'll probably part you torso from mantle! Understood?"
Awb signed yes.
"Get on with it, then. Go back where there's better light. And take your time. I may not be through with this lot before sundown."
And indeed the sun was touching the horizon when she rejoined him. He had completed two of the lenses, and the second was flawless as near as he could tell, but he waited on her verdict nervously.
"Hmm! Very good!" she pronounced, surprised and pleased. "More than I can say about the one I have on the fixer at the moment. I mean, look at these, will you?"
She flourished a selection of the sheets she had exposed in the morning. Awb examined them. To his untutored eye they appeared satisfactory, and he said so.
"No, look again! Here, here, here!"—each time with a jab of her claw. "There's a blur, there's a smear, there's a streak ... At first I thought the fixer must be leaking light, but I've checked and doublechecked. I suppose there must be a blister in the lens, but I can't locate it."
Awb ventured, "But then wouldn't the blurs always reappear in the same place? And these don't."
Taken aback, she said, "Give those back to me ... Hmm! I wonder if it could have to do with the angle of incidence of the light—No, that wouldn't fit either. And most of the early ones, come to think of it, are all right. It's only from about the point where we climbed up the rockfall that I started having trouble. Maybe a wind-blown drop on the lens, but I was careful to shield it ... Oh, I can't figure it out, unless..." She fixed him with a stern glare. "You didn't drop the leaf-pack by any chance?"
