Old Shar set down the thick, ragged-edged metal plate at last, and gazed instead out the window of the castle, apparently resting his eyes on the glowing green-gold obscurity of the summer waters. In the soft fluorescence which played down upon him, from the Noc dozing impassively in the groined vault of the chamber, Lavon could see that he was in fact a young man. His face was so delicately formed as to suggest that it had not been many seasons since he had first emerged from his spore.
But of course there had been no real reason to have expected an old man. All the Shars had been referred to traditionally as “old” Shar. The reason, like the reasons for everything else, had been forgotten, but the custom had persisted. The adjective at least gave weight and dignity to the office—that of the center of wisdom of all the people, as each Lavon had been the center of authority.
The present Shar belonged to the generation XVI, and hence would have to be at least two seasons younger than Lavon himself. If he was old, it was only in knowledge.
“Lavon, I’m going to have to be honest with you,” Shar said at last, still looking out of the tall, irregular window. “You’ve come to me at your maturity for the secrets on the metal plates, just as your predecessors did to mine. I can give some of them to you—but for the most part, I don’t know what they mean.”
“After so many generations?” Lavon asked, surprised. “Wasn’t it Shar III who first found out how to read them?”
The young man turned and looked at Lavon with eyes made dark and wide by the depths into which they had been staring. “I can read what’s on the plates, but most of it seems to make no sense. Worst of all, the plates are incomplete. You didn’t know that? They are. One of them was lost in a battle during the final war with the Eaters, while these castles were still in their hands.”
“What am I here for, then?” Lavon said. “Isn’t there anything of value on the remaining plates? Do they really contain ‘the wisdom of the Creators’, or is that myth?”
“No. No, it’s true,” Shar said slowly, “as far as it goes.”
He paused, and both men turned and gazed at the ghostly creature which had appeared suddenly outside the window. Then Shar said gravely, “Come in, Para.”
The slipper-shaped organism, nearly transparent except for the thousands of black-and-silver granules and frothy bubbles which packed its interior, glided into the chamber and hovered, with a muted whirring of cilia. For a moment it remained silent, probably speaking telepathically to the Noc floating in the vault, after the ceremoifious fashion of all the protos. No human had ever intercepted one of these colloquies, but there was no doubt about their reality; humans had used protos for long-range communication for generations.
Then the Para’s cilia buzzed once more. Each separate hair-like process vibrated at an independent, changing rate; the resulting sound waves spread through the water, intermodulating, reinforcing or cancelling each other. The aggregate wave-front, by the time it reached human ears, was eerie but recognizable human speech.
“We are arrived, according to the custom.”
“And welcome,” said Shar. “Lavon, let’s leave this matter of the plates for a while, until you hear what Para has to say; that’s a part of the knowledge Lavons must have as they come into their office, and it comes before the plates. I can give you some hints of what we are. First Para has to tell you something about what we aren’t.”
Lavon nodded, willingly enough, and watched the proto as it settled gently to the surface of the hewn table at which Shar had been sitting. There was in the entity such a perfection and economy of organization, such a grace and surety of movement, that he could hardly believe in his own new-won maturity. Para, like all the protos, made him feel unfinished.
“We know that in this universe there is logically no place for man,” the gleaming, now immobile cylinder upon the table droned abruptly. “Our memory is the common property of all our races. It reaches back to a time when there were no such creatures as men here, nor any even remotely like men. It remembers also that once upon a day there were men here, suddenly, and in some numbers. Their spores littered the bottom; we found the spores only a short time after our season’s Awakening, and inside them we saw the forms of men, slumbering.
“Then men shattered their spores and emerged. At first they seemed helpless, and the Eaters devoured them by scores, as in those days they devoured anything that moved. But that soon ended. Men were intelligent, active. And they were gifted with a trait, a character, possessed by no other creature in this world. Not even the savage Eaters had it. Men organized us to exterminate the Eaters, and therein lay the difference. Men had initiative. We have the word now, which you gave us, and we apply it, but we still do not know what the thing is that it labels.”
“You fought beside us,” Lavon said.
“Gladly. We would never have thought of that war by ourselves, but it was good and brought good. Yet we wondered. We saw that men were poor swimmers, poor walkers, poor crawlers, poor climbers. We saw that men were formed to make and use tools, a concept we still do not understand, for so wonderful a gift is largely wasted in this universe, and there is no other. What good are tool-useful members such as the hands of men? We do not know. It seems plain that so radical a thing should lead to a much greater rulership over the world than has, in fact, proven to be possible for men.”
Lavon’s head was spinning. “Para, I had no notion that you people were philosophers.”
“The protos are old,” Shar said. He had again turned to look out the window, his hands locked behind his back. “They aren’t philosophers, Lavon, but they are remorseless logicians. Listen to Para.”
“To this reasoning there could be but one outcome,” the Para said. “Our strange ally, Man, was like nothing else in this universe. He was and is unfitted for it. He does not belong here; he has been—adopted. This drives us to think that there are other universes besides this one, but where these universes might lie, and what their properties might be, it is impossible to imagine. We have no imagination, as men know.”
Was the creature being ironic? Lavon could not tell. He said slowly: “Other universes? How could that be true?”
“We do not know,” the Para’s uninfected voice hummed.
Shar had resumed sitting on the window sill, clasping his knees, watching the come and go of dim shapes in the lighted gulf. “It is quite true,” he said. “What is written on the plates makes it plain. I’ll tell you what they say.
“We were made, Lavon. We were made by men who were not as we are, but men who were our ancestors all the same. They were caught in some disaster, and they made us, and put us here in our universe—so that, even though they had to die, the race of men would live.”
Lavon surged up from the woven spyrogyra mat upon which he had been sitting. “You must think I’m a fool!”
“No. You’re our Lavon; you have a right to know the facts. Make what you like of them.” Shar swung his webbed toes back into the chamber. “What I’ve told you may be hard to believe, but it seems to be so; what Para says backs it up. Out unfitness to live here is self-evident:
“The past four Shars discovered that we won’t get any farther in our studies until we learn how to control heat. We’ve produced enough heat chemically to show that even the water around us changes when the temperature gets high enough. But there we’re stopped.”
“Why?”
“Because heat produced in open water is carried off as rapidly as it’s produced. Once we tried to enclose that heat, and we blew up a whole tube of the castle and killed everything in range; the shock was terrible. We measured the pressures that were involved in that explosion, and we discovered that no substance we know could have resisted them. Theory suggests some stronger substances— but we need heat to form them!