Conway. It fits both the facts as we know them and the type of emotional
radiation received from the beings.”
“I agree,” Murchison said. “I, too, found difficulty in accepting the extreme
length of this group entity, but the idea of a wise old head acting as guide and
mentor to an as yet unknown number of young tails is much easier to believe.
However, I can’t help remembering that it was the head segments which suffered
most of the casualties. Perhaps the head is no longer as wise as it should have
been and an awful lot of vital knowledge has been lost to this multiplegroup
entity.”
Colonel Okaussie waited for a moment to see if anyone in the medical team would
speak, then he cleared his throat and said, “Maybe not, ma’am. Most of the head
segments who were killed in the collision were very close to the stern and to
the ship’s control and propulsion centres. One could reasonably expect that
these segments were the beings charged with the responsibility for operating the
ship and carrying out the landing maneuvers, functions which are now the
responsibility of the Monitor Corps. It is likely that the scientist and teacher
seg-
ments were positioned a little farther back in the chain and the majority of the
casualties were suffered by the vessel’s crew, whose specialist knowledge would
no longer be of vital importance to the colonization project after the vessel
had landed.” Before Murchison could reply Naydrad gave an impatient, modulated
growl which translated as “Why don’t we stop talking and get on with the job?”
The screen which had been used to communicate with the CRLTs was continuously
displaying distant and close-up views of spacesuited figures of various
physiological classifications busily at work on the final stages of the
coilship’s reassembly. Conway could not decide whether Descartes’^ commanding
officer was screening the material to be helpful and informative or as a means
of suggesting, very subtly, that the medical team display a similar degree of
industry. The attempt was a failure in either event, Conway thought, because the
Rhabwar medics were far too busy to look at Okaussie’s pictures. They were
concentrating instead on measuring and remeasuring the features on the CRLT
interfaces and charting with their scanners the paths of underlying blood
vessels and the distribution of the nerve ganglia. And with great care and
accuracy they were marking the areas where surgical intervention was possible
without causing either a major hemorrhage or sensory impairment.
It was slow, tedious work and visually not very dramatic. Colonel Okaussie could
be forgiven for thinking that the ambulance ship personnel had gone to sleep on
the job.
“Friend Conway,” Prilicla said at one particularly awkward stage, “the physical
differences between these two entities are so marked that I cannot help
wondering if they belong to different subspecies.”
All of Con way’s attention at that moment was concentrated on what seemed to be
the main sphinctor muscle on the rear interface of the forward CRLT, so that by
the time he was ready to reply Murchison had done it for him.
“In a sense you are right, Doctor Prilicla,” she said. “It is a natural result
of their method of reproduction. Think of this forward CRLT when it was the last
and female link in its group-entity chain. In due time it grew to maturity and,
still attached
to its parent, it was fertilized by the male head of another group entity. Its
own infant grew and became mature and in turn produced another, and the process
continued with different male heads adding their individual sets of genes at
every stage. ‘The physical connection between any given CRLT and its offspring
is perfect,” she continued, “and perfect fusion may even be possible between a
parent and its grandchild or greatgrandchild. But the effect of different males
fertilizing each new endlink in the chain would be cumulative. So it is
understandable when you think about it, Doctor, that the differences between
the fusion interfaces of these two, which were separated by seventeen
intervening segments, are considerable.”
“Thank you, friend Murchison,” Prilicla said. “My brain seems not to be
functioning properly.”
“Probably,” Murchison replied in a sympathetic tone, “because your brain is