THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“But at just about the tune the New Star is said to have exploded, wherever and whatever it may have been—I’m no astronomer, but they say it was somewhere around the Major Cluster—something provoked the ‘female’ species into yet another round of mimicry. It must have been a valid defense technique at some point in the far past, but extending it has cost them and us our reproductive capability. Tenthag, when Pletrow confronted you, were you not shocked at how male her exudates appeared?”

“I was,” said Pletrow before Tenthag could answer. “It’s the survival of us all that is at stake. New friend!”—she spoke as she advanced on Tenthag, mantle open in the most intimate of all postures—”do help Gveest! Don’t turn him down! I cringe before you and invoke your aid!”

Suiting her actions to her speech, she shrank to two-fifths of her normal height, and bent to touch the courier’s pads.

“It is other than my familiar duty,” Tenthag achieved at last. “But I was instructed to put myself at Gveest’s disposal absolutely, so—”

Pletrow uttered a cry of joy, and as she rose scratched the underside of Tenthag’s mantle, which by reflex he had opened as to greet her. Before he could even react to the trivial pain, the threatened storm broke over Ognorit, and the house’s retracted leaves unfolded, shutting out the sky, so as to channel the precious water to the ditch around its roots.

Instantly there was a clamor from the animals outside, for they knew this gift from heaven would result in an explosion of funqi and other food.

“Long ago,” said Gveest, during the brief dark before the house’s luminants responded, “there must have been a clash between symbiosis and extinction. Our ancestors preferred symbiosis, so we have to accept it. But the natural system was so delicate, so fragile, that even the explosion of a distant star could ruin it. It’s up to us to create a better, tougher one. And this gift from you, Tenthag”—he held aloft the scrap of mantle-skin which Pletrow had passed to him—”may provide us with the information that we need. If it does,” he concluded dryly, “they’ll remember you one day as a savior like Jing!”

“And if it does,” Pletrow promised as the luminants grew brighter, “I’ll make amends to you for that small theft of your own substance. I want—oh, how I want!—to bear a bud!”

She clutched him to her for a moment, and then the company dispersed, leaving Tenthag alone with his mind in tumult.

V

In its way, Ognorit proved to be a greater wonderland for Tenthag even than Bowock on the day of his arrival there. Never had he seen a place where everything was so single-mindedly dedicated to one common goal. The island was a maze of experimental farms, pens for livestock, streams and rivers dammed to isolate breeding populations of fresh-water fish, salt-water pools above tide-level kept full by musculator pumps … and everywhere there were exposed fossils, revealed when thin sheets of compacted clay or slate had been painstakingly separated. He was able to taste for himself how ancestral forms differed from modern ones, though the faint organic traces were evaporating on exposure to the air.

“If only we left behind something more durable than claws and mandibles!” said Pletrow wryly; to compensate for her irascibility she had undertaken to act as his guide, and was proving an agreeable companion. Gveest, once possessed of the tissue-sample he had asked for, had vanished into his laboratory, barely emerging for a bite of food at darkfall. “Suppose,” she went on, “we’d had solid shells like mollusqs, or at least supporting frames like gigants! But I suppose the lesson to be learned is that the plastic life-forms do better in a changing environment. Once you develop rigidity you’re at risk of extinction.”

But aren’t we? Tenthag suppressed the thought, and merely requested evidence for Gveest’s amazing claim about the male and female of the folk actually being separate species.

Much of what Pletrow offered in answer, Tenthag had already partly grasped. Until he went to Bowock, he had been unacquainted with ideas like “symbiosis” and “commensalism”; however, as soon as they were spelled out in terms of, for example, the secondary growths on a junq’s back, he instantly recognized how well they matched ordinary observation. And the notion of plasticity was not at all foreign to him. Since childhood he had known about creatures which seemed not to mind what part of them performed what service. If one took care not to dislodge it from the rock where it had settled, one could literally turn a sponqe inside-out, and the inner surface that had been its gut would become a mantle, and vice versa. But he was astonished by a demonstration Pletrow performed for him with a brollican, a mindless drifting creature from the local ocean, avoided by the folk because of the poison stings that trapped the fish it preyed on. To indicate how far back in the evolutionary chain symbiosis must reach, she carefully peeled one of the things apart, dividing it into half a score of entities so unalike one could not have guessed at a connection between them. Then she tossed food into the pool, and within a day each portion had regenerated what it had been deprived of.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *