“We sent for you not because you’re a courier but because you’re from Neesos!” Ill-tempered, Pletrow strove to overtop him, and nearly made it. The air suddenly reeked of combat-stink.
“Calm!” Gveest roared. “Calm, and let me finish!”
Always there was this sense of being on the verge of calamity, and for no sound reason … In past times, so it was taught, only male-and-male came into conflict; Pletrow’s exudations, though, were as fierce as any Tenthag had encountered. But a timely breeze bore the stench away.
“We had expected,” Gveest said in an apologetic tone, “that any courier sent here would be fully briefed about our work.”
“Even the chief courier told me he wished he didn’t know about it,” Tenthag retorted. “So I didn’t inquire!”
“Then you’d better make yourself comfortable, for when I explain you’ll have a shock. The rest of you, too,” Gveest added, and his companions swarmed to nearby branches, leaving a place of honor to Tenthag at the center.
Lapsing into what, by the way he fitted it, must be his own favorite crotch, the scholar looked musingly at the patches of sky showing between the tangled upper stems of his house. The fisherfolk’s estimate of half a day’s swim had been based on the southern meaning of “day”— one dark plus one bright—and the sun had set about the time Tenthag came ashore. Clouds were gathering, portending another storm, but as yet many stars were to be seen, and some were falling.
“Are you surprised to find so many animals here?”
“Ah … At first I was. I wondered how this island could support so many. But now I’ve seen how much food you have—some of it even going bad—I imagine it’s all the result of your research, on plants as well as animals.”
“You’re quite correct. It seemed essential to improve the food-supply before—” Gveest checked suddenly. “Ah, I should have asked you first: do you know what Dvish recovered from the underwater site at Prefs?”
“The people who dived there wanted too much for the information,” Tenthag answered sourly. “And since I joined the Guild the Order of the Jingfired have decreed it a restricted question.”
“Hmm! Well, I suppose they have their reasons, but I for one don’t accept them, so I’ll tell you. During the years prior to the Great Thaw, the people there—presumably having noticed that ice could preserve food for a long time against rotting—became sufficiently starved to imagine that living creatures, including the folk, could also be preserved and, at some future time, perhaps resurrected. Nonsense, of course! But they were so deranged, even after the Thaw began, they went right on trying to find ways of insuring a dead body against decomposition. And one of their late techniques, if it didn’t work for a whole body, did work for individual cells. We found a mated pair, sealed so tightly against air and water that we were able to extract—You know what I mean by cells?”
“Why, of course! The little creatures that circulate in our ichor and can be seen under a microscope!”
“Ah, yes—your people make good magnifiers, don’t they? Good, that saves another lengthy exposition … Excuse me; it’s been so long since I talked to anyone not already familiar with our work.” Gveest drew himself inward, not upward, into a mode of extreme concentration. Frowning from edge to edge of his mantle, he continued, “But that’s only one kind of cell. Our entire tissue is composed of them. And even they are composed of still smaller organisms. And, like everything else, they’re subject to change.”
This was so opposed to what he had learned as a child, Tenthag found himself holding his pulsation with the effort of paying attention.
“And the same is true of all the creatures on the planet, that we’ve so far studied. Above all, there was one enormous change, which judging by the fossil record—You know what I mean by fossils?”
There had been few at Neesos, but other couriers had carried examples around the globe, including, now Tenthag thought of it, some from this very island. He nodded.
“Good. As I was about to say: there was one gigantic change, apparently around the time of the outburst of the New Star, which affected all creatures everywhere. We came to Ognorit because it’s one of the few peaks of the pre-Thaw continents where many relics of lost animals can be dug up. Better still, some local species endured and adapted. They offer proof that we’re descended from primitive life-forms. Marooned on islands like this one, creatures recognizable in basic form on the continents are changing almost as we watch, in order to fill niches in the ecology which were vacated by other species killed off by the Freeze or the Thaw. We mainly haven’t changed because, thanks to the People of the Sea, we were protected against the worst effect of those disasters. But even though we don’t know how some event far off in the void of space can affect our very bodies, something evidently did. There was a brief period when we were multiplying rapidly, owing to the miscegenation which the Thaw engendered. It served to disguise a terrible underlying truth, but now there’s no more hope of fooling ourselves. We are afraid— aren’t we?—that we may die out.”