When she departed after dawn, she left behind a transformed Tenthag, who knew beyond a doubt what he wanted to make of his life. To the dark with glassworking! He was determined to be like Nemora: a courier.
III
Later Tenthag concluded ruefully that if he’d realized how much he had to learn, he would probably have changed his mind. Life on Neesos had not prepared him for the complexity of the modern world, and particularly not for Bowock with its eleven score-of-scores of people, its houses every one of which was different (for the city itself served as a biological laboratory and experimental farm), and its ferment of novelty and invention.
Despite its multiplying marvels, though, which rendered public notice-slabs essential—announcing everything from goods for trade through new discoveries seeking application to appeals for volunteer assistance— there was a taint in Bowock’s air, an exudate of anxiety verging on alarm. It was known that scores-of-scores-of-scores of years remained before the ultimate crisis, and few doubted their species’ ability to find a means of escape, were they granted sufficient time.
In principle, they should be. Disease was almost unknown here and in other wealthy lands; crop-blights and murrains were held in check; everyone had food adequate to ensure rational thinking; maggors and wivvils and slugs were controlled by their own natural parasites—oh, the achievements of the Bowockers were astonishing!
But Nemora had not taken his bud, or anyone’s. His first frightened question, so long ago, so far away, on the dark beach of Neesos, was one which everybody now was asking. Indeed, it had been Nemora’s commendation of his instant insight which had secured him his appointment as a courier-to-be.
Hence his excitement at the challenging future he could look forward to was tempered by the sad gray shadow of a nearer doom. He tried to lose himself in training and caring for the porp assigned to him, modestly named Flapper, but even as he carried out his first solo missions—which should have been the high point of his life so far—he was constantly worrying about the folk he had left behind on Neesos, condemned to grow old and die without a single youngling to follow them.
He felt a little like a traitor.
“It is Neesos that you hail from, isn’t it?” said the harsh familiar voice of Dippid, doyen of the couriers.
Tenthag glanced round. He was in the pleasant, cool, green-lit arbor of the porp pens, formed by a maze of root-stalks where the city’s trees spanned the estuary of a little river. Porps became docile automatically in fresh water, a fact first observed at Bowock when one of them was driven hither from the open sea for an entirely different purpose, and between voyages they had to be carefully retained.
Alert at mention of his home, he dared to hope for a moment that he was to be sent back there. Giving Flapper a final caress, he swarmed up the nearest root-stalk to confront Dippid … who promptly dashed the notion.
“The stuff that Nemora brought back from the trip when she met you: it seems to have borne fruit. You know about the work that Scholar Gveest is doing?”
Tenthag scoured his pith, and memory answered. “Oh! Not much, I’m afraid——just that he’s making some highly promising studies on a lonely island. It’s an example of information, trade in which has not been maximized,” he added, daring.
But it was a stock joke, and Dippid acknowledged it with a gruff chuckle.
“People’s hopes must not be inflated prematurely,” was his sententious answer. “But … Well, we’ve had a message from him. He believes he’s on the verge of a breakthrough. What he needs, though, is someone from Neesos to calibrate his tests against.”
“Why? What sort of tests?”
“You know what it was that they recovered from the sea-bed at Prefs?”
“I’m not sure I do. I—ah—always got the impression I was supposed not to inquire. Even Nemora was elusive when I asked about it. So…”
Dippid squeezed a sigh. “Yes, you judged correctly. I sometimes wish I didn’t know what Gveest is working on, because if he fails, who can succeed? But enough of that.” He drew himself up to a formal stance.