something much bigger.
“I picture a huge shallop, closed on all sides, big enough
to hold many peoplemaybe twenty or thirty. It had to
– travel for generations through some kind of medium where
there wasn’t any water to breathe, so the people had to carry
their own water and renew it constantly. There were no
seasons; no ice formed on the sky, because there couldn’t be
any sky in a closed shallop; and so there was no spore
formation.
“Then the shallop was wrecked somehow. The people in it
knew they were going to die. They made us, and put us here,
as if we were their children. Because they had to die, they
wrote their story on the plates, to tell us what had happened.
I suppose we’d Understand it better if we had the plate Shar I
lost during the warbut we don’t.”
“The whole thing sounds like a parable,” Lavon said, shrug-
ging. “Or a song. I can see why you don’t understand it.
What I can’t see is why you bother to try.”
“Because of the plate,” Shar said. “You’ve handled it your-
self now, so you know that we’ve nothing like it. We have
crude, impure metals we’ve hammered out, metals that last
for a while and then decay. But the plate shines on, genera-
tion after generation. It doesn’t change; our hammers and
our graving tools break against it; the little heat we can gen-
erate leaves it unharmed. That plate wasn’t formed in our
universeand that one fact makes every word on it impor-
tant to me. Someone went to a great deal of trouble to make
those plates indestructible, and to give them to us. Someone