Controlling himself with extreme effort, Tenthag said, “If Gveest’s research is successful, and his techniques can be applied to—to us, what will it involve?”
“Modification of another permanent symbiote that will survive transmission into our own bodies by way of the food we eat, and then restore the original bud-reaction.”
For a moment the scope of the plan took the air from Tenthag’s mantle. Eventually he husked, “But what about numbers? Gveest himself has said it will be necessary to build up the food-supply—that he had to do it here before trying his methods on vulps and snaqs and so on. Suppose we do suddenly find we can produce buds, if not every time, then twice as often as before, five times, half-a-score times: might we not outstrip our resources?”
“Gveest plans to give us new delicious foods. You’ve tasted some. But in any case…”
She fixed him with so piercing a glare it transfixed him to the inmost tubule, and her voice was like a prong as she concluded:
“Let the future take care of itself! I only know one thing! I mean to bear a bud before I die!”
VI
After so long a delay that Tenthag was afraid he might lose control over Flapper, who should either have departed on a new voyage or been retamed in fresh water, Gveest emerged weary but triumphant from his laboratory to announce he had no further need of Tenthag’s presence.
“We’ve successfully established a reproducible strain of your cells,” he explained. “That will furnish us with all the data we require. You’ve performed an invaluable service, Master Courier! Permit us, in return, to re-equip your porp.”
“Thank you, but I’m content with the growths that she already bears,” was Tenthag’s stiff reply. “Besides…”
He hesitated, not wanting to be tactless to this elderly scholar who was, after all, an uncontested genius and on the verge of a breakthrough which might benefit the whole planet.
Might…
It was pointless, though, trying to elude Gveest’s weather-sense. Dryly he said, “You’re concerned about the probable success of my work. Pietrow told me. That’s why I’m disappointed that you won’t let me refit your porp. Now we shall have to signal the People of the Sea and let them spread the first stage of our techniques.”
“I—I seem to have misunderstood something,” said Tenthag slowly.
“So you do, and I’m surprised.” Gveest turned to pad up and down along the stretch of beach where they had met, glancing now and then towards Flapper, fretful at her long confinement in the shallows. “I know as well as anybody that, unless we vastly increase our food resources first, doubling or trebling the rate of budding could lead to dreadful consequences. But we’re not the only people who’ve been working on this problem, you realize. There are outstanding scientists among the People of the Sea, just to begin with, who may be more anxious than we are for personal glorification because their traditional role has been undermined by couriers.”
Tenthag clenched his mantle as the implications struck him.
“You want to start by publishing your methods of improving crops,” he suggested at length.
“Naturally. But the People of the Sea don’t keep farms, do they—save on certain islands that they use as temporary bases when the weather’s bad? Besides, we landlivers far outnumber them now.”
“Is that true? I had the impression—”
“Oh, yes. We’ve confirmed it over and over. Harvesting what they’re used to thinking of as the inexhaustible resources of the sea, they grew very numerous indeed so long as they were benefiting from the interbreeding that followed the Great Thaw. But little by little their population has dwindled, too. Had it not, would there have been a chance to set up the Couriers’ Guild, or a need to do so?”
“I’ve heard that they no longer recruit as many junqs and briqs as formerly,” Tenthag admitted.
“They aren’t there. Those are life-forms almost as advanced as we ourselves, and subject to the same worldwide problem. What we must do is publish news of what we now know how to do to mounts and draftimals—because unproved transport will be imperative—and also to the creatures which our ancestors once used as food.”