culture for the outside wall in a line ten paces out from the cliff base,
curving inward at its ends to close off the frontage of a dry cave. Then he had
laid out the baselines of the interior walls to provide a living and dining
area, a workroom, and a library, and while carefully nurturing with methane
solutions gathered from the forest, and pruning and shaping of the windows and
doorways while the walls grew upward and merged into a half-dome overhead, he
had enlarged the cave at the rear into a second workroom and a storeroom. The
doors and window fittings had grown from secondary cultures grafted inio the
structure when the frames had stabilized at their correct shapes and sizes, and
the larger furnishings from premolded miniatures purchased in the city, A
conduit of forest piping diverted running methane from the stream, and a power
line strung from a nearby distribution mast provided all the comforts of home
recharging. To provide the rustic finish that suited his taste, Thirg had lined
the walls with polished alloy sheets obtained from the rolling mill a mile
farther downstream, and laid the floors with ceramic bricks and lengths of
girder from a partly decomposed foundry that he had come across while walking
near the stacking meadows just below the cabinet assembly line on the slopes
overlooking the north side of the river.
One morning Thirg was sitting outside his house on a stump of steel forging,
pondering the mysteries of life while he watched a phosphor-bronze bearing
collector buzzing and chattering to itself as it poked and rummaged among a pile
of undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. It was a species of a general
family of collector animals that a naturalist friend had spent a lifetime
cataloguing and classifying—discreetly since such inquisitiveness could lead to
trouble with the authorities if it was brought to the attention of the priests.
Like all its related species, it selected just one type of metal composition by
sniffing the emissions from a tiny spot that it vaporized with a needle laser,
and then only from samples of a particular size and shape, and delivered its
trophies to the nearest conveyor to be carried off to other parts of the forest.
Thirg’s friend had spent many hours following components through miles of
forming, processing, and finishing stations to the assembly places where animals
came to life, and observing the furnaces that devoured reject components and
excreted pure materials from which new components were manufactured; he had
drawn elaborate charts depicting the merging and branching patterns by which
components and sub-assemblies flowed through the forest; and he had dismantled
hundreds of dead animals and other machines in an attempt to trace where their
organs and constituent parts had come from, via what routes, and where the raw
materials had originated. But even with the findings of generations of earlier
naturalists to build on, the work was barely begun. The intricate, interlocking,
mutually interdependent pathways by which Nature recycled its materials as it
constantly renewed the living world were so bewildering that Thirg sometimes
suspected that, despite all the effort, hardly a fraction of the whole had been
glimpsed yet, let alone comprehended. It was fascinating to think that one of
the scraps of metal being sorted by the collector that he was watching now might
be found twelve-brights later inside the rotor mounting of a centrifuge located
miles away, or perhaps in the wheel bearings of a dead plastics-browser on the
other side of Kroaxia.
Although Tbirg had never elected to start a family of his own, his natural
curiosity had led him at times to the places where subassemblies of robeings—the
unique, self-aware species to which he belonged— came together for final
assembly. He had watched in awed fascination as the embryos grew to their final
forms and shapes while anxious parents scurried back and forth to make sure all
the parts were available and all the requirements of the assembly machines
satisfied, and he had shared their elation when the new robeing was at last
activated and departed trustingly with the proud couple to its new home to begin
the process of learning language, behavior, customs, and all the other things