“Take our chemistry. We live in water. Everything seems to dissolve in water, to some extent. How do we confine a chemical test to the crucible we put it in? How do we maintain a solution at one dilution? I don’t know. Every avenue leads me to the same stone door. We’re thinking creatures, Lavon, but there’s something drastically wrong in the way we think about this universe we live in. It just doesn’t seem to lead to results.”
Lavon pushed back his floating hair futilely. “Maybe you’re thinking about the wrong results. We’ve had no trouble with warfare, or crops, or practical things like that. If we can’t create much heat, well, most of us won’t miss it; we don’t need any. What’s the other universe supposed to be like, the one our ancestors lived in? Is it any better than this one?”
“I don’t know,” Shar admitted. “It was so different that it’s hard to compare the two. The metal plates tell a story about men who were travelling from one place to another in a container that moved by itself. The only analogy I can think of is the shallops of diatom shells that our youngsters use to sled along the thermocline; but evidently what’s meant is something much bigger.
“I picture a huge shallop, closed on all sides, big enough to hold many people—maybe twenty or thirty. It had to travel for generations through some kind of space where there wasn’t any water to breathe, so that the people had to carry their own water and renew it constantly. There were no seasons; no ice formed on the sky, because there wasn’t any sky in a closed shallop.
“Then the shallop was wrecked somehow. The people in it knew they were going to die. They made us, and put us here, as if we were their children. Because they had to die, they wrote their story on the plates, to tell us what had happened. I suppose we’d understand it better if we had the plate Shar III lost during the war, but we don’t.”
“The whole thing sounds like a parable,” Lavon said, shrugging. “Or a song. I can see why you don’t understand it. What I can’t see is why you bother to try.”
“Because of the plates,” Shar said. “You’ve handled them yourself now, so you know that we’ve nothing like them. We have crude, impure metals we’ve hammered out, metals that last for a while and then decay. But the plates shine on, generation after generation. They don’t change; our hammers and our graving tools break against them; the little heat we can generate leaves them unharmed. Those plates weren’t formed in our universe— and that one fact makes every word on them important to me. Someone went to a great deal of trouble to make those plates indestructible, and to give them to us. Someone to whom the word ‘stars’ was important enough to be worth fourteen repetitions, despite the fact that the word doesn’t seem to mean anything.”
Lavon stood up once more.
“All these extra universes and huge shallops and meaningless words—I can’t say that they don’t exist, but I don’t see what difference it makes,” he said. “The Shars of a few generations ago spent their whole lives breeding better algae crops for us, and showing us how to cultivate them, instead of living haphazardly on bacteria. Farther back, the Shars devised war engines, and war plans. All that was work worth doing. The Lavons of those days evidently got along without the metal plates and their puzzles, and saw to it that the Shars did, too. Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to the plates, if you like them better than crop improvement—but I think they ought to be thrown away.”
“All right,” Shar said, shrugging. “If you don’t want them, that ends the traditional interview. We’ll go our—”
There was a rising drone from the table-top. The Para was lifting itself, waves of motion passing over its cilia, like the waves which went silently across the fruiting stalks of the fields of delicate fungi with which the bottom was planted. It had been so silent that Lavon had forgotten it; he could tell that Shar had, too.
“This is a great decision,” the waves of sound washing from the creature throbbed. “Every proto has heard it, and agrees with it. We have been afraid of these metal plates for a long time, afraid that men would learn to understand them and to follow what they say to some secret place, leaving the protos. Now we are not afraid.”
“There wasn’t anything to be afraid of,” Lavon said indulgently.
“No Lavon before you had ever said so,” the Para said. “We are glad. We will throw the plates away.”
With that, the shining creature swooped toward the embrasure. With it, it bore away the remaining plates, which had been resting under it on the table-top, suspended delicately in the curved tips of its supple ventral cilia. Inside its pellucid body, vacuoles swelled to increase its buoyancy and enable it to carry the heavy weight.
With a cry, Shar plunged toward the window.
“Stop, Para!”
But Para was already gone, so swiftly that it had not even heard the call. Shar twisted his body and brought up on one shoulder against the tower wall. He said nothing. His face was enough. Lavon could not look into it for more than an instant.
The shadows of the two men began to move slowly along the uneven cobbled floor. The Noc descended toward them from the vault, its single thick tentacle stirring the water, its internal light flaring and fading irregularly. It, too, drifted through the window after its cousin, and sank slowly away toward the bottom. Gently its living glow dimmed, flickered in the depths, and winked out.
For many days, Lavon was able to avoid thinking much about the loss. There was already a great deal of work to be done. Maintenance of the castles, which had been built by the now-extinct Eaters rather than by human hands, was a never-ending task. The thousand dichotomously-branching wings tended to crumble with time, especially at their bases where they sprouted from one another, and no Shar had yet come forward with a mortar as good as the rotifer-spittle which had once held them together. In addition, the breaking through of windows and the construction of chambers in the early days had been haphazard and often unsound. The instinctive architecture of the Eaters, after all, had not been meant to meet the needs of human occupants.
And then there were the crops. Men no longer fed precariously upon passing bacteria snatched to the mouth; now there were the drifting mats of specific water-fungi and algae, and the mycelia on the bottom, rich and nourishing, which had been bred by five generations of Shars. These had to be tended constantly to keep the strains pure, and to keep the older and less intelligent species of the protos from grazing on them. In this latter task, to be sure, the more intricate and far-seeing proto types cooperated, but men were needed to supervise.
There had been a time, after the war with the Eaters, when it had been customary to prey upon the slow-moving and stupid diatoms, whose exquisite and fragile glass shells were so easily burst, and who were unable to learn that a friendly voice did not necessarily mean a friend. There were still people who would crack open a diatom when no one else was looking, but they were regarded as barbarians, to the puzzlement of the protos. The blurred and simple-minded speech of the gorgeously engraved plants had brought them into the category of pets—a concept which the protos were unable to grasp, especially since men admitted diatoms on the half-frustrule were delicious.
Lavon had had to agree, very early, that the distinction was tiny. After all, humans did eat the desmids, which differed from the diatoms only in three particulars: their shells were flexible, they could not move (and for that matter neither could all but a few groups of diatoms), and they did not speak. Yet to Lavon, as to most men, there did seem to be some kind of distinction, whether the protos could see it or not, and that was that. Under the circumstance he felt that it was a part of his duty, as the hereditary leader of men, to protect the diatoms from the few who poached on them, in defiance of custom, in the high levels of the sunlit sky.