Explanations of the dual-species theory met with mockery. Reasoned arguments about numbers versus resources met with boredom. Here and there a few people still remembered sanity and begged to be taken away on Flapper’s back, but the couriers were forbidden to carry passengers, and anyhow it seemed better to leave them where they were in the hope that sense might after all prevail. At Klong, a month after leaving Bowock, Tenthag first encountered an outburst of religion, and trembled to the core of his pith. So dreamness could take a new grip on the folk even before the actual onset of the population explosion. Mere rumor had sufficed, at least in this one land…
He fidgeted with the urge to make for Neesos, but defied it. He must make his own obeisance to reason—his own sacrifice, whatever a sacrifice might be.
By dark especially, while Flapper broke the water into glowing ripples as she fed on drifting weed and occasional fish, he stared achingly at the sky wherever it was clear of cloud and wondered about voyages across space. Were there living creatures in that ocean of oceans? Watching a comet bloom out of a dim and distant blur, it was hard not to make comparison with a plant sprouting under the influence of summer. Marking the dark-by-dark progress of the planets, it was tempting beyond belief to imagine other beings capable of transforming inert matter into something that could feel, and react, and devise and plan and—make mistakes…
In ancient times, he had been told, some folk held that when the welkin shed its fleeting streaks it was a means of signaling, which no one here below could understand. With all his pith he wished he could send back a message of his own:
“Help us, strangers! Help us! We’re in danger!”
Budded in the year called Two-red-stars-turn-blue, Tenthag sought comfort in the unaltered patterns of the sky, and found none. For they weren’t unaltered.
As though to harbinger the shock the folk must bear, the dark before the bright that saw him at his bud-place was lighted by a singular event.
One of those very stars, on the fringe of the Major Cluster, which had gone to blue from red, changed yet again. A hint of yellow touched it. It seemed brighter … but a cloud drifted across it, and there was no way of being sure about the outcome before dawn.
VIII
But where was everybody?
Goading Flapper into the bay that covered the site of Prefs, Tenthag surveyed the vicinity with his telescope. Normally by dawn the fisherfolk would be launching gorborangs, and sand-collectors loading raw material for the glass-furnace. Because it had been so long since he left here, he had been prepared for some changes, but not for this feeling of vacancy which set his weather-sense to full alert.
Leaving the porp to browse, he waded ashore carrying the last of his copies of Gveest’s food-data. As soon as he was clear of the water, he shouted with all the force of his mantle.
There was no answer.
Becoming more and more alarmed, he padded along familiar tracks— how often had he come this way with Fifthorch, to swim from the gentle beach and sometimes dive for relics?—noting with dismay how well-tended clusters of food-plants had been let run wild. He came across sleds of the kind used to bring home sand, abandoned by the path; creepers were twining over them in a way that indicated they must have been dumped a moonlong ago, at least. And his forebear’s mirror, source of Neesos’s prosperity, was pointing at nowhere.
Shortly, breasting a rise, he came in sight of the little town at the center of the island, sheltered in a hollow against the worst of winter weather. Here at last were people, though nothing like as many as he would have expected. Draped on slanting branches, or lying under rocky overhangs for protection against the morning sunlight, they were listening to someone talking in a loud rough voice. Before he drew close enough to make out what was being said, Tenthag had already discerned that they were surrounded by all the goods they could assemble, be it foodstuffs or glassware or seed-stock or objects salvaged from Prefs.