Toroca watched Babnol constantly, his eyes following the way she moved, the way she gestured, the way she leaned back on her tail, the way her muzzle crinkled when she was amused, the way her eyes narrowed to slits when she was concentrating. The way she breathed. The way she existed.
He longed to reach out, to touch her, to feel the tough texture of her skin, the tiny bumps of her tattoos, the warmth of her flesh. Every time she stepped back from him, opening a territorial buffer between them, it hurt.
It hurt.
The sun sat low on the horizon. It never rose far here in the southern latitudes. A day was brief enough as it was; that the sun never reached the zenith, so that long shadows were cast even at noon, was downright depressing.
It really wasn’t that cold, Toroca realized. Var-Osfik, the Arbiter of the Sequence, had recently approved a new scale of temperature, devised by one of the contemplatives of the holy land of Arj’toolar. On it, the freezing and boiling points of water were separated by one hundred degrees, and the freezing point was designated as zero. Keenir had an elaborate blown-glass tube, filled with colored liquid, that was supposed to indicate the temperature on this scale. No one knew how accurate it was, since it had obviously never been tested at temperatures much below ten degrees — the coldest it normally got even at night on Land. Here it was indicating about twelve degrees below zero at noon, and temperatures of perhaps twenty below at night. (It was hard to get a good reading at night, since the device couldn’t be read in the dark, and the colored liquid began to rise as soon as one brought a lamp flame close to it.) Cold, yes, but not so cold as Toroca had feared. In fact, he was getting quite used to the bracing nature of the air here, and even found it invigorating at times.
Still, the darkness was dispiriting. Toroca understood why the sun never seemed to rise very high in the sky, but that didn’t make it any less dreary. More and more people had taken to being up on deck at noon, to enjoy what little brightness and warmth there was. Conditions were crowded, but everyone strove to keep the mood light. Toward that end, the noontime swapping of jokes on the Dasheter’s foredeck had quickly become a tradition. Since people’s teeth were often chattering from the cold anyway, every joke, even the lamest, got a good reception.
"That’s awful," groaned Toroca in good humor to Biltog, a ship’s mate who had known his father. Biltog had just told the old groaner about the traveling doctor and the shovelmouth, which somehow Toroca had avoided hearing — mercifully, many would say — until now.
Surveyor Bar-Delplas was making a face. "Now, listen to a real joke, Biltog," she said. She saw Babnol coming toward them. "Hey, Babnol!" she called. "What do you call a hornface that’s had too much to eat?"
Babnol looked in her direction briefly, but continued on without a word.
"What’s with her?" Delplas asked Toroca.
"You swished your tail right into it, I’m afraid," said Toroca. "Babnol doesn’t like the word ’hornface.’ "
"Why not?"
Toroca tilted his head in the direction of the departing Babnol. "They called her that when she was a child."
Delplas shrugged, then went on with her joke. But Toroca paid no attention to the punch line, and instead stared after Babnol, all glee gone from him.
"Land ho!"
The shout went up from Biltog, once again up in the lookout bucket.
Except it wasn’t land that was ho. Toroca, Keenir, Babnol, and many others hurried up onto the Dasheter’s foredeck. Biltog’s greater elevation gave him a substantial advantage; it took some time for what he’d spotted to come into view.
For dekadays, the horizon had been nothing but gray water touching mauve sky. But at last there was a line, a bright white line, scintillating in the blazing sun.
As the Dasheter sailed closer, the line expanded into cliffs of bluish-white ice and hard-packed snow. Fissures cut through the ice at places, showing a cool blue interior.
Toroca watched in amazement as a great wall of ice fell away into the water, splashing up giant waves. As they came closer, he could see cracked sheets of ice jostling together along the rim of the solid snow-packed ice cap. He’d had no ideas what he might find here that could be useful for the exodus project, but, at first assessment, it looked like nothing at all was here except ice and snow.
Keenir wouldn’t bring the Dasheter any closer, lest one of the floating pieces of ice pierce its hull. Unfortunately the water here was too deep for the anchor. They sailed along, parallel to the ice edge, searching.
But then Keenir, who had been scanning the ice with his far-seer, motioned for Toroca to come close. He handed him the instrument. The brass tube was bitterly cold; Toroca was indeed thankful now for the strange handgear he’d been given to wear. He rotated the tube to bring the image into focus, then staggered back on his tail.
Something was moving around on the ice.
*19*
Musings of The Watcher
During the 460 million Crucible years it took for the Jijaki to evolve sentience on their world, a lot happened on the Crucible itself. Of those body plans that had originally appeared in that great, explosive diversification, one became predominant — the tube with a head at one end, a spinal cord, and, eventually, paired limbs. Soon the spinal cord was encased in a backbone — an interesting solution, so unlike that of my own ancestors. An age of fishes gave way to an age of amphibians, then one of reptiles.
Brain-body ratios increased as time went by. It seemed clear that eventually, joyously, intelligence would arise on the Crucible as well.
Before it did, though, a new form appeared, living in the shadows of the reptiles, tiny furred creatures that nursed their young.
It was wonderfully, terribly clear what was happening. Both the reptiles and the mammals were on their way to intelligence, and at about the same rate, too — the ratio of brain size to body size was increasing on a simple curve through time, and the scale-clad and fur-bearing creatures were both at the same point on that curve. The brightest of the reptiles and the brightest of the mammals soon had brains of equal, if as yet insignificant, power.
It would still take a long time for real intelligence to develop on this world — some 60 or 70 million Crucible years, I judged. But the mammals had already come up against a dead end. Intelligence, at least in the way these beings were trying to express it, required physical bulk — large, centralized, convoluted brains. The reptiles had long dominated every ecological niche for big animals; the rise of mammalian intelligence had ground to a halt.
Not one, but two potential paths to sentience. Yet only one of them, it seemed, could make it on this world.
I summoned the Jijaki.
The south pole
Toroca, Babnol, and Keenir headed toward the ice in a shore boat. It took Keenir a while to find a suitable place to land. Even so, he wasn’t able to anchor the boat properly, so he had to stay with it to keep it from drifting away and stranding them. Toroca and Babnol, clad from muzzle to tail in their strange, bulky garments, headed out onto the ice pack. The surface was covered with hard snow that cracked or squeaked when they stepped on it. Toroca was amazed at its texture, like frozen waves.
And the brightness! Glaring white, everywhere he looked. He found himself shielding his face with his arm. Even with his eyes narrowed to slits, it was still difficult to see.
As his eyes adjusted to the glare, Toroca was surprised to see that there were insects here: little black things that hopped across the snow. But it wasn’t those that had caught his attention from the deck of the Dasheter, but, rather, the strange creatures visible just ahead.