It was the most awe-inspiring event that Awb had ever seen. Without intention, he found himself counting his own pulsations to find out how long the sight would last: three, four, five, six—
It was over, and the sky was turning daytime blue, and he could see the whole mountain. Its flanks were scarred where the natural vegetation had been stripped away in favor of what would be needed to support the observatory. Guide-cables for construction floaters swooped down to either side. A passenger-carrying floater, five bladders glistening, was descending slowly from the top. Awb had never seen one so close; usually they passed over at pressure-height, mere sparkles to the unaided eye.
Axwep and Drotninch returned to the lookout platform, and waited along with everybody else until full daylight also overspread the shore, revealing a stark, discolored mass of shriveled foliage.
“That’s worse than what we were warned to expect,” muttered Thilling as she stored away her exposed sheets. Awb was about to reply, when—
“Look!” somebody screamed.
On the top of the peak something was moving. No: the top of the peak itself was moving! It was cracking apart, it was shedding chunks of rock, it was tilting, it was sliding and rasping and collapsing and slamming down with horrible slowness in an inexorable paradigm of disaster. The guide-cables snapped, the passenger floater leapt up the air like a frightened pitchen taking off from a wave-top, the new plants on the mountainside vanished in a cloud of dust and boulders, so all at once that Awb could not take everything in.
The avalanche subsided into a monstrous scree, blocking a canal that led from the base of the mountain to the shore along which, presumably, rubble had been carried to create the sheltering mole now visible between the city and the land, the first stage in preparation for a full-scale harbor. All the seafarers stood transfixed with horror as the dawn breeze carried off the dust.
But from the shore, incurious and dull as mere animals, most of them sickly and with their mantles ulcerated, a few natives gazed at the city before dismissing it as incomprehensible and setting off to seek food in the shallows.
What Awb found most appalling, as he strove to hold his telescope steady, was that not a single one among them made for the scene of the catastrophe, to find out whether anybody lay in need of help.
II
“Of course we know what happened,” said Lesh, so weary she could scarcely flex her mantle, let alone stand upright. “It’s another of the unforeseen disasters that bid fair to wreck our project! Without our noticing, a pumptree shoot invaded a slanting crevice and expanded there, turning the crevice into a crack and the crack into a split. Finally it sprang a leak. Water by itself might not have made the rock slide, but mixed with nice greasy sap—smash! You can see the way it must have gone quite clearly from the air. But what we now have to find out is why. Pumptrees simply aren’t supposed to act like that!”
She was the resident chief designer for the observatory project. She and a couple of assistants had been all dark on the mountain-top investigating reports of irregular pulsation in the pumptrees. About the time Voosla hove in sight they had concluded the trouble was due to nothing worse than irritation caused by the topsoil they were carrying in the form of slurry, which necessarily contained a trace of sand and gravel. The roots of the toughtrees which would eventually form a foundation for the large telescopes needed more nutriment than they could extract from bare rock, at least if they were to grow to usable size in less than a score of years. Besides, the intention was to keep the peak in more or less its original form, and toughtrees certainly did erode rock, given time.
Down below there was plenty of rich fertile dirt, and it had seemed like a brilliant shortcut to mix it with water and render it liquid enough for pumptrees to transport it upward. This was not entirely a new technique; something similar had been attempted recently in desert-reclamation.