“Do you spend most of your time on land?” Awb whispered.
“No more than I can help. I like to travel, I’m good at what I do and get plenty of commissions. Why?”
“Would you accept me as an apprentice?”
“Hmm! I don’t know about that! But”—quickly before he let his mantle slump—”you can help me on shore until Phrallet gets over her present mood. Then we’ll see. Fair?”
“I can’t thank you enough!”
“Then please me by keeping quiet for a bit. Oh, if there were a bit more light…! But this sort of thing needs to be fixed in sound, really. You should be listening: all these recriminations about who betrayed Lesh and her chums by not exploring the far side of the watershed properly!”
Awb composed himself and did his best to concentrate. But all he could think of was how suddenly the blight must have struck if a mere two years before experienced investigators like Drotninch and Byra had found nothing in this area to worry them.
III
Finally a weak conclusion was reached. After the extent of the damage had been assessed, so a report could be sent back to Chisp, an expedition must cross the watershed and test the plants there for infective organisms, even though none had been found over here.
So much could have been agreed straightaway, in Awb’s view, but everybody was so overwrought, making decisions seemed like excessively hard work. He was as affected as anyone else. He felt he ought to be doing something, if only getting better acquainted with the observatory site, but it was still dark, and what could he learn without adequate luminants? Voosla carried seed of a recently developed type that rooted immediately in a shellful of soil and could be carried around draped over a pole, lasting for up to half a score of darks, exactly the kind of thing that was called for in a crisis like this. But nobody had expected a crisis, so none of them had been planted in advance, and even if they were forced now it would be days before they ripened.
In the end he remained inert, pondering a mystery that had often troubled him before.
Why was it that, when the world was generally calm by dark, it was always harder to analyze and act on important memories? Surely the opposite should have been true! Yet it never was. While the sun was down, memories lurked on the edge of consciousness like dormant seeds, only to burst out when there was so much else going on that one would have expected them to be smothered. Oh, they were accessible enough at a time like now … but they didn’t seem to connect to activity.
Awb had been puzzled about this for a long time, for a reason he suspected people from fixed cities would not appreciate. Incomprehensibly, though, when he mentioned it to people on Voosla—Tyngwap the chief librarian, for example, who had custody of not only the city’s history and navigation records, but also data concerning all the shores she had touched—they missed the point of his question too, brushing him aside with some casual reference to the light-level or the local air-pressure.
Which manifestly could have nothing to do with what he was trying to figure out!
Even though cities like Voosla were commanded by experienced weather-guessers, storms sometimes broke out unexpectedly across their course, perhaps precipitated by a meteor; nobody could forecast those, but the sparks they shed through the upper air did often seem to provoke foul weather. If such a thing happened in the dire middle of the dark, the people’s response was as prompt and efficient as by day, and they were quite well able to put off their usual time for rest and reflection. But they never seemed to need to make it up later! Physical exhaustion due to lack of pressure was one thing; it demanded food and drink and that was enough. Mental exhaustion was something else; it gathered in the lower reaches of the mind, and eventually burst out in altered form. Take Phrallet as an example. What she had done this dark, by intervening in the scientists’ debate without knowing the facts, was typical of her excessive need to be active, vocally or otherwise. It didn’t render her unattractive to males, but her fellow she’uns didn’t like her much, and as for the status accorded to mere males ever since it had been established that originally they had been parasitical on females and used them simply to bear their buds…!