Hearing it put in such blunt terms, Tenthag could not prevent himself from shrinking.
Rising, starting to pad back and forth like Nemora on that distant beach at Neesos, the scholar continued with a wry twist of his mantle.
“Yet for a species that has the power to reason about a doom written in the stars, it’s an unjust fate! Have we not thought—not dreamed, but reasoned—about surviving even if our planet goes to fuel a star? Have we not contemplated that destiny since the legendary days of Jing and Rainbow? That’s what drove me here to work on my theory … which, I hope against hope, has proved to be valid.”
Calm again, Pletrow said, “You’re right, if anybody can be absolutely right in this chaotic universe.”
“Thank you for that reassurance. But we must clarify our reason for demanding samples of a Neesan mantle.”
“Mine?” Tenthag could achieve no more than a squeak.
“Yes, Master Courier: yours. It is imperative.” Gveest turned half-aside, as if ashamed, although his exudates continued to signal arrogant self-confidence. “You are of the only stock on the planet isolated enough to let us make the comparisons necessary if we are to advance our success with lower animals and improve the reproduction of our own kind. We must know exactly what sort of changes have taken place, because we intend to reverse them.”
Tenthag sat stunned. It was as grandiose a notion as he had ever dreamed of, and he was hearing it stated in real time, in real life, as cold potential fact.
He husked at last, “I’m not sure, even yet, what it is you want of me!”
“About as much of your mantle as Pletrow could scrape off with one claw … Ah, but a final and important question: do you recognize this lady as one of your own species?”
Gveest came to a halt directly confronting Tenthag, and waited.
“Of—of course!”
“But I’m not,” said Pletrow, and descended from her branch to stand by Gveest.
“But I could pair with you!” Tenthag exclaimed, beginning to be more afraid than even at the height of the storm on his way hither.
“That’s so. But we wouldn’t bud.”
“How can you be sure? I know mostly it doesn’t happen nowadays, and I myself was the last on Neesos, but—Oh, no!”
Fragments of what he had learned by chance during his time as a novice courier came together in memory and made terrible sense. He waited, passive, for the truth to be spelled out.
Gveest announced it in a rasping voice.
“Here, and elsewhere around the planet, we have tasted the fossil record. We hunted above all for our common ancestors. We haven’t found them. What we have found, and the discovery at Neesos was its final proof, is two separate species which evolved in total symbiosis. You and I, Tenthag, can’t reproduce without the mediation of that species which evolved with us and gradually took over the role of bearing our young. We must have been in the closest competition, craws of years ago, equally matched rivals for supremacy. One species, though, opted for acceptance of the other’s buds, while mimicking to perfection its behavior—as far as speech, as writing, as intelligence! And we aren’t alone in this! Why, for example, does one only tame female barqs—briqs—junqs—porps? Those are the malleable, the pliant ones, who adopted the same course as what we call our females, at about the same time in the far past as we were establishing our rule over dry land! We are the highest orders of what some folk are pleased to call ‘creation’—though if indeed some divine force called us into existence, I personally would have been glad to give that personage a bit of good advice!”
He was pulsing so hard, Pletrow turned to him in alarm and laid a friendly claw on his back. In a moment he recovered, and spoke normally.
“Well, anyway!” he resumed. “We hypothesize that in the early stages it was approximately an even chance whether implantation of a bud resulted in offspring for the ‘male’ version, the implanter, or the recipient, whose hormones were provoked into reproductive mode by impregnation and sometimes outdid the invader, thereby budding a female. We know parasitic organisms, especially among jenneqs, which still depend on the host’s hormones to activate their buds; sometimes they lie dormant for a score or more of years!
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