Such matters, though, the Bowockers were secretive about. To those who asked for information concerning them they named an impossibly high price. Anyway, there was scant need for such devices here.
Otherwise they were not unfriendly, and came ashore by dark to chat, share food and otherwise socialize; a few of them knew songs and tales, or played instruments, and became tolerably popular. Inevitably, too, there were pairings, but none resulted in a bud, although Tenthag desperately hoped they might. He was tired of being the permanently youngest.
The same problem apparently beset Bowock, though. Now and then the divers, ashore to recover from the toll exacted by their work, would grow confidential after sampling the powerful local araq, and admit that at home there were too few buds to keep up the population, despite contacts with other cities and the People of the Sea. Some went so far as to wonder aloud what they were doing all this for, if in a few score-of-score years there might be no one left to enjoy the knowledge. But they kept on regardless.
What precisely the knowledge was that they hoped to garner from the broken fragments they brought up, the folk of Neesos could not imagine. Little organic material resisted the erosion of salt water; tides and currents had scattered what did endure, like blades, lenses and the burnt-clay formers used to compel houseplants to grow into the desired shape. Within a couple of months most people stopped wondering, and treated the strangers as a familiar feature of the locality.
Tenthag was almost the only exception.
Nonetheless, the day came when some most exciting discovery was made—to judge by the noisy celebrations the pastudiers spent a whole dark in—and shortly afterwards a single rider arrived mounted on a sea-beast such as nobody had ever sighted in these latitudes before. She was unbelievably swift in the water, casting up a snout-wave that broke in rainbow spray, and nearly as large as the smaller junqs, but with a tiny saddle and virtually no secondary plants. She had an appetite of her own, though, and a huge one. Cast loose to browse in the next bay to where the pastudiers were working, she gulped and chomped and gobbled and gulped again the whole dark long. When they were asked about her, the strangers said she was an unpithed porp, specially bred for high-speed travel.
The idea of a porp, even a tame one, in the local waters was not calculated to appeal to the folk of Neesos. Schools of such creatures were reputed to strip vast areas clear of weed and drive away the sorts of fish the folk depended on. However, the Bowockers promised that she would leave again at dawn, carrying important news. What kind of news, they as usual declined to say.
By now there was a feeling among the folk that they should be entitled to a share in the pastudiers’ discoveries, and Fifthorch’s parents were among the loudest with complaints, although they personally did nothing to cultivate the visitors’ acquaintance and laid all the responsibility on Ninthag and Thirdusk. The night when the porp was feeding, Tenthag grew sufficiently irritated by Fifthorch’s automatic repetition of his father’s arguments to counter them with some of Ninthag’s. The result was a quarrel, and the older boy went storming off.
Alone in the dark, under the bright-sown canopy which was as ever shedding sparkling starlets, Tenthag turned despondently towards the beach. He was so lost in a mix of imagination, memory and dream that he was startled when a female voice addressed him.
“Hello! Come to admire my porp? I understand you people don’t tame any sea-creatures but kyqs, right?”
Taken aback, he glanced around and spotted the person who had spoken: a she’un only some half-score years his senior, relaxing in a pit in the sand.
This was the rider who had made so spectacular an entry into the bay? But by comparison with the monstrous beast she rode, she was puny! Even erect, she would be a padlong below him, and he was not fully grown.
“We—uh—we don’t know much about them,” he forced out as soon as enough pressure returned to his mantle. “Certainly taming porps is a new idea to us.”