VIII

 

 

“Might as well use my entire stock of leaves on this,” Thilling told Awb as dawn broke. “If anything more important turns up during the trip, I shan’t want to know … We’ll time the job by the sun; every score degrees it moves, we bring in one batch of ’em. Leave the bower set up so I can develop them as they come in.”

Still baffled by the implied question the picturist expected him to answer, Awb helped her to lay out unexposed sheets by groups of five along the dam. But he found himself far more fascinated by what was happening in and on the lake. It was impossible to see more than a padlong below the surface, but here and there bubbles rose, and drifts of steam puffed up, and peculiar pale blue water-walkers scuttled hither and thither, avoiding the hottest spots but far more active than their cousins on cool rivers. As soon as Thilling let him go, he gathered up a few and offered them to Byra, who was packing every available container with specimens of flora and fauna.

“Where from exactly?” she demanded. “Near the dam? But how far from it?”

Why, she was a worse precisian than Axwep trying to balance Voosla’s food-and-people accounts! But Awb preserved a courteous meekness.

“Between four and five padlongs from the thickest part of the yellow mud, where the bubbles rise most often.”

“Hmm! That’ll do very well! One thing I must give you, young’un: you have a keen eye on you. Yesterday that mutated winget, now this lot … What I’d really like to find, though, is a thriving root-mass of the spillway plants. We need some clue to resistance against this poison. Without that I don’t know what we’ll do.”

But could any resistance be found to it among the folk? What if the only possible adjustment they could make in this region was the one adopted by the natives, able to feed and breed but nothing more?

However, Awb kept such thoughts to himself. After all, the scientists did have behind them the resources of one of the planet’s greatest centers of knowledge.

It was time to take Thilling the first batch of exposed leaves. When he delivered them, she said, “Drotninch wants you to collect samples of the yellow mud. She’s going to load one of the mounts with it. I told her to make sure it’s the one furthest from my stuff.”

“How did yesterday’s images come out?” Awb inquired.

“What makes you think they came out at all?” Thilling countered sourly, but fanned a quarter-score of them for his inspection. All were weirdly streaked and smeared.

“What am I looking at?” Awb whispered.

“Something scarcely any eye has seen before,” was the muttered answer. “The telescopes they meant to build on Fangsharp Peak were supposed to gather so much light from such faint sources, no one could possibly sit and register it. So they planned to make them deliver their light to sheets like these, using astrotropes whose growth is controllable to a laqth of a clawide to keep the image steady. Oh, the effort they’ve wasted on breeding those ’tropes!”

“You sound as though the observatory is never going to be built, not here, not anywhere!” Awb cried.

“Maybe it won’t. Because the only time I saw patternless faults like these on an unexposed image-leaf …”

She shook her mantle, returning the sheets to their pack. “It makes common-type sense, doesn’t it, to grow observatories on mountain-tops? There are four or five such, and I’m an advisor to the one near Chisp. They called me in because even when they’re using the finest leaves things go wrong. There are smudges, there are blurs, there are distortions. Often they spoil a whole dark’s work, especially when the telescope is aimed at the Major Cluster.”

“What causes them?” Awb clenched his claws.

“We think it’s tiny particles of matter blasted out from the new stars forming so far away. And they carry with them something of the terrible stellar heat. At any rate, they burn their way into the leaves. But I never imagined that something at the bottom of a valley … Hmm!”

As though struck by sudden insight, she turned back to the dark-bower, intent on developing the latest sheets.

“Go get Drotninch’s mud-samples,” she ordered. “But remember to time the next lot of leaves, too.”

Awb hastened to comply. At least, down by the dam, he could be sure of avoiding Phrallet, who still seemed to harbour the suspicion that her heat-sore pads were owed to some sinister plot by Drotninch and the other scientists.

 

But there was something amiss.

He fought the knowledge for a long while, digging up the yellow mud, collecting the rest of the leaves at proper intervals and bringing them to the dark-bower, making himself as useful as he could to everybody.

Then, tiny as a falling star viewed through the wrong end of a spyglass, a spark crossed his eye.

Puzzled, he looked for more, but found only a red trace across his field of vision, rather as though he had gazed too long at something very bright but very narrow, like—

Like what? There was nothing it was like at all.

Simultaneously he became aware of a sensation akin to an itch, except that it wasn’t one. It was just as annoying, but he couldn’t work out where it was, other than very vaguely. And whoever heard of an itch in red-level pith, anyway? Determinedly he went on with his work, and shortly was rewarded by spotting another mutated water-walker, not blue this time, but pure white.

He dived after it and trapped it in his mandibles, and bore it to Byra in triumph.

Standing by as she inspected it under the microscope, he heard her say irritably, “Stop fidgeting, young’un! You look as though a mustiq got under your mantle … Oh, this is even more ridiculous than the last one! I don’t see how it can survive, let alone reproduce itself!”

He scarcely noticed the last comment. A mustiq under his mantle? Yes, that was a little like it. He’d been twitching without realizing until he had his attention drawn to it. He was pulsating out of rhythm with himself; instead of the normal ratios between mantle-ripple, gut-shift, breath-drawing, ichor-peristalsis and eye-flick which he was accustomed to, in the perfect proportions of bass, third, fifth, seventh and octave, he was shuddering as though about to burst.

Having his maw empty for so long, for the first time in his life, was proving to be a very odd experience indeed.

Yet if hunger were the sole explanation (and surely he hadn’t gone without for long enough?)—Oh, NO!

POISONED???

 

He peeled apart from himself, much like the brollicans that teachers on Voosla grew excited about when they chanced across a shoal of them so large the city had no time to eat the lot before a few could be salvaged for educational purposes. For scores-of-scores of years they had been providing real-time evidence for symbiosis, the phenomenon that underlay the folk’s modern predicament.

Coevolution … said something from the deep red level of his consciousness, but everyone knew that that level didn’t deal in speech, only in hunger and breeding-need and the repair of vital organs.

(But who had told him that was true? Maybe someone would come along to tell him different, like Thilling! Maybe the exercises she had promised him, concerning dark-use, didn’t refer only to outside-dark but inside-dark as well …)

In the distance, though very close in time, like right now:

“Help!” (It was Byra’s voice.) “Drotninch, Thilling, Phrallet, anybody! Awb’s gone dreamish!”

Dreamish? Me? Me …?

But he didn’t know who he was any longer. There wasn’t a “myself” controlling the physical envelope known as Awb. There was a muddle of memory and imagination, a chaotic slew of information and sensory input, and what trace of identity did remain—thanks to his having been budded on a small but wealthy city, where no one in living memory had gone dreamish through simple hunger—was capable of no more than observation: as it were, “So this is what must have happened to our poor ancestors who multiplied themselves without making provision for proper nourishment! I’m amazed they ever clawed their way back out of the mental swamp they fell in, regardless of Gveest’s’ best efforts, or the Jingfired’s!”

Then even that last vestige of himself dissolved, and his pith started to react as though he were his own remotest forebear, assailed by predatory gigants and striking out at random in the faint hope that at least his body might block one monster’s maw and choke it to death.

It took three of them to subdue his violent flailing.

 

Late that dark Thilling lay in a tree-crotch well away from the dam, which her images had convinced her was the chief source of danger, while the scientists wrangled among themselves. Awb had been temporarily quieted; Lesh had dispatched two of her assistants to find fruit and funqi from which nourishing juices could be extracted, at a safe distance from the lake, and herself administered a calmative from the first-aid pack she had brought. It was to be hoped that his youth and slightness of build accounted for his extreme vulnerability to—to whatever had afflicted him. At any rate the rest of them seemed to be in fair shape, with the exception, Thilling reflected cynically, of Phrallet, who was on the verge of hysteria. She kept saying over and over, “We must get out of here! We must go back at once! Who knows what damage is being wrought in our very pith? My pads are still hurting, you know!”

And when she found her companions ignoring that line of argument, she tried cajolement: “If only for the sake of my youngest budling, we must go back! Oh, I know I’m sometimes hard on him, but really I do care for him, and if he dies because of this …”

At which the others simply turned their backs in the most insulting fashion possible. So for some while now she had been sulking, which at least allowed the rest of them to debate the core of the problem.

Drotninch was saying, “I’m coming around to the conclusion that we not only have to deal with the poison per se, but also with its effects on living organisms, including disease germs. You know there’s a theory that the New Star triggered off the latest round of female mimicry, the one which made so many of us too like males to bud anymore. Given what Thilling has told us about the resemblance between what she finds on her image-sheets and what happens when sheets are exposed at high altitude—”

Lesh cut in. “I’ve heard that theory, and to me it smacks of the rankest astrological superstition!”

Byra said heavily, “There’s only one way of settling the matter. We’re going to have to study this poison in vivo. Right now, of course, we only have one subject: Awb. But it’s beyond a doubt that some at least of the same effect must be working in all of us.”

Rousing from her apathy, Phrallet shouted, “What do you want us to do—stay here until we all collapse the way he did? You must be out of your pith! Anyway, I won’t let you treat a budling of mine like a laboratory animal!”

Doing her best to disregard the interruption, Byra went on, “We can extrapolate from cutinates to some extent, of course, and I’ve taken samples from the mount that died, and with luck the rest of them will have been affected—”

“With luck?” Lesh echoed sardonically. “When I need every mount and draftimal I can lay claws on to rescue my expensive equipment from the observatory site? You’re not killing any of my beasts for your researches, I’m afraid! In any case, mounts aren’t enough like us, are they?”

Sighing, Byra admitted as much. “We’ll have to rely on what we can learn by studying Awb, then, and since of course we all hope he’ll make a quick recovery, that may not be very much. Still, we can call for volunteers who’ve been in the area since the project started, and that may help.”

“You can get all the specimens you need,” Phrallet said. “Why haven’t you thought it through? If studying the poison in a living person means saving our lives—I mean Awb’s life—you could just kidnap a few of the natives. They’re worthless for anything else, aren’t they?”

Thilling clenched her mantle in horror. Surely this group of civilized scientists must reject so hideous a notion out of claw? But no! To her infinite dismay she realized they were taking it seriously. Byra said after a pause, “It would certainly be very useful.”

And Lesh chimed in: “We have plenty of nets! I’ll get my staff on the job the moment we return!”

In that moment Thilling realized that she despised Phrallet more completely than anyone she had ever met or even heard of.

And what would Awb say when he learned that his life had been spared at such revolting cost?

But perhaps he would care no more than his budder.