Karg heaved a deep sigh. “I was looking forward to it, I really was! And now I’ve lost my chance forever.”
“Surely not! After your pad has grown back”—Albumarak could still not mention that promise without a hint of awe in her voice, for it bespoke medical techniques far surpassing those boasted of at Fregwil— “they won’t want to waste someone with your special talents and training.”
“Oh, I gather Yull impressed everybody mightily with her reference to regrowth, but the process is actually still in the experimental stage, and in any case you don’t get the feeling back. And every square clawide of my body was pressed into service to control the hauq, and the purifiers, and the maneuvering pumps, and the farspeakers and the rest. No, I had my chance, and a meteorite stole it once for all.”
“So what will you do now—go back to underwater work?”
“I could, I suppose; it isn’t so demanding … But I’d rather not. I think I’ll stay on at the space-site. I gather Yull told you that we’re going to have to abandon our existing plans and try another course.”
“Yes, but…” Albumarak clacked her mandibles dolefully. “You said your regrowth techniques are still at the experimental stage. The same is true of our loss-free circuits. They still take ages to grow—we’d been working on the one which we demonstrated at the Sparkshow ever since the last Festival of Science—and they haven’t yet been proved under field conditions. For all we can tell, they may be vulnerable to disease, funqi, wild beasts, parasitic plants…”
“Yes, it seems more than a padlong from demonstration of a pilot version to what Yull is talking about. Even so, a fresh eye cast on the principle … What is it?”
“The principle? Well … Well, how much do you know about sparkforce?”
Karg shrugged; she felt the branches stir. “Take it for granted that I know a little about a lot of things.”
“Yes, you’d have to, wouldn’t you?” Embarrassed again, Albumarak went on hastily. “What she seems to have in mind isn’t even at the experimental level yet. It’s a mere oddment, a curiosity. It depends on using sparkforce charges to repel each other.”
“I thought that must be it, but if you did put such a huge charge on one of our cylinders, then … Hmm! Wait a moment; I think I see how it might be done. If there were some way to alternate the kinds of repulsion—Ach! I’m taking an infusion to control my pain, and my mind is still too foggy for constructive reasoning. But I’ll remember to mention my idea to Yull in the morning.”
He shifted in the crotch, turning his eye on her. “Did you get enough to eat this sundown?”
“As much as I wanted.”
“If you didn’t eat properly, you may find your mind is as sluggish as mine when you arrive in Slah. It can take quite a long time to adjust to local dark and bright after traveling to a different continent at today’s speeds—Oh, hark at me! I hadn’t set pad on a foreign continent myself before my crash. I’m not the person to lecture you. But I thought it was worth mentioning.”
“How would you have coped in space, then? There isn’t a dark-bright cycle up there!”
“In the orbit I was supposed to follow, there would have been, but six or seven times as fast as a regular day. I didn’t expect any trouble, though. Deep underwater you have no dark-bright cycle at all, and I lived through that.”
“What exactly were you to do out there?”
Karg stretched again, and a hint of agony discolored his pheromones, but it lasted only a moment.
“Bring together two of our automatic orbital cylinders and connect their ecosystems, then work inside them for a while, making sure everything was going as well as the farspeakers indicate. We do seem to have beaten one major problem: we’ve developed plants that purge themselves of deleterious mutations due to radiation. Some of them have been through four or five score generations without losing their identity, and should still be fit to eat. But of course there may be changes too tiny for our monitors to locate and report on. How I wish we could get to the moon and back! We need samples of the vegetation up there in the worst way!”