He uttered the concluding words softly and with reluctance. Tenthag instantly recognized the logic underlying them, but his inmost being was revolted.
“Are we to go back to the ways of savages?” he cried. “I know folk sometimes do in the grip of famine, but for scores-of-scores of years we’ve fed well enough from civilized resources—”
“You eat fish and wingets, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, but they’re as mindless as plants! I’d never kill a land-creature for food—or a porp like Flapper!”
“We may well have no choice.” Gveest was abruptly stern. “We must decide between extinction—slow, but certain—and an increase in our breeding-rate. If we opt for the latter, we must make provision to save ourselves from famine due to overpopulation. Think, think! If twice as many buds appear in the next generation, those raising and catching food will just suffice to keep us all well fed—assuming, as I mentioned, better transportation. But if the figure isn’t twice, but half-a-score times more … what then?”
Tenthag’s pulsations seemed to stop completely for a moment. He said in an awed whisper, “You think your work has paid off so completely?”
“Think?”—with a harsh chuckle. “Beyond my wildest dreams! I now see how to grow a bud from every pairing!”
“This is because of me?”
“Yes, what we learned from you made all the difference. You haven’t seen Pletrow the past few days, have you?”
“Ah—no, I haven’t! She said she was busy with some new research, and I’m used to being by myself, so…”
“She, who never took a bud before, has taken mine, and it’s a female, exactly as my theories predicted. Now will you let us re-equip your porp? I should remind you: you’re bound by the couriers’ oath to distribute whatever information you are given, and there are folk the world around who could learn just by looking at what we plan to graft on her a means to multiply a score of different food-plants! We want—we need to have that information running ahead of any news about transforming animals … like us!”
A terrible chill bit deep into Tenthag’s vitals, but his voice was quite controlled as he replied.
“It is not, as you point out, my place to act as censor. I’ll leave that to the Order of the Jingfired. I’m amazed, though, that you want to send off one courier, not laqs of us! Surely this is something every expert in life-studies ought to hear of right away!”
“All the experts on the planet may not be enough, but if we fail … Who’d care, if an unpeopled globe crashed on a star? We must have seen it happen countless times! Maybe the New Star itself was some such event! Come, bring Rapper to the fresh-water pool on the east coast. She will be tamer there, and you can retrain her while the grafts are taking.”
And, as Tenthag numbly moved to comply, he ended, “But what I said about certain people being able, just by looking, to judge our achievement where plants are concerned, may also hold good for animals and for ourselves. The news you spread will be enough to bring the People of the Sea hither in a year or two. I hope it won’t be sooner. The resources of the ocean are no less limited than those of the land, and I greatly fear what would happen were our nomads, already saddened by the fading of their ancient glory, to seize on my techniques before they understood the repercussions. For the time being, therefore, you will be our sole link to the outer world, and Bowock the sole place where all the facts are known.”
“But,” Tenthag confessed to the Council of the Jingfired a month later, “all Gveest’s wise precautions went for nothing. On my outward voyage, beset by mustiqs, I had traded Bowocker credits for a pair of spuders, as you know. Returning, I was accosted by the same fleet, and it appears that rumors of Gveest’s success had already reached them. I was faced with the choice between redeeming Bowocker credits against new knowledge—which, I respectfully remind the councilors, is the ultimate justification for their existence—or attempting to dishonor them, and Bowock, by making my escape. The fleet consisted of about a score of junqs, and a few were young and very fast. Not only would I have been trapped for certain; my action would have brought the credibility of Bowock into disrepute. I maintain I had no alternative but to honor the Bowocker pledge.”