area in the south where currents, winds, or some other unknown factor allowed a frighteningly small colony of Breathers to survive. But nature would not allow defeat. A world was solidity, reality, and to comprehend the solidity and the reality life, a thinking brain, was required. To envision a world without life was to negate the basic purpose of all creation. No, the Breathers would adapt; they would learn to live atop the thick, heavy water. Life would go on. And someday the New One would be born and the last remaining resources of this depleted planet would produce dynamic life springing exuberantly upward. The thoughts of Red Earth the Far Seer ran on as he lay slumped into his rack, huge chest moving only occasionally, red gills lying idle, since the air of the establishment was pure. All around him, in enclosures lining the walls, were the Breathers, eating, growing, breeding, using their small, half plant, half insect bodies to return to the air the life-giving particles that, in turn, found their way into Red Earth's system. In the night no star shone. The satellite, unseen by light-sensing organs, moved only in Red Earth's senses. He did not stir until it was at the zenith. Then he rose and advanced to Deepsoft's chamber on thin, short legs that extended from small hips below a flat belly and the huge, bulbous mass of his chest. His hide was thick, and deep gray in color. His shoulders tapered upward into the cone-shaped knob of his head in which there were two orifices: the small, round feeding mouth and the hairy maw of his breather. On the side of his head just above his shoulders, were his gill slits, which now exhaled his body poisons, cleansing his lungs for an extended period of nonbreathing. Deepsoft fed on the broth of life, the universal energy concentrate distilled at the Eastern Group Establishment from the green slime source of the sea. After she was fed, she seized one of Red Earth's fingers. She smiled, holding it tightly. He lowered the protective railing and joined her. She made sounds of pleasure and Red Earth blanked his thoughts, yielding to pleasure as she cooed in response to his givings of sensation. II As chance would have it, Rack the Healer was given his free time as the storms moved down from the cool north at the end of sun circle. Growing Tree the Far Seer assigned a Power Giver who was also finished with her duty to transport Rack to his home area. In preparation Rack breathed deeply, voided his gill sacks of rejected vapors, and closed off. He used stored air until the perpetual clouds were a blanket of color below them and the Power Giver thoughtfully sent a picture letting Rack know that the air here was nontoxic. Rack's huge chest heaved as his lungs breathed the thin but delicious mixture. His pleasure communicated to the Power Giver and she laughed. Above them the sun was a deadly furnace, taking its toll. Rack's large scales made an audible clattering noise as they rose to form small deflection areas. He knew that the hide of the Power Giver was being penetrated and he was momentarily saddened. Yet it was the nature of things. He would be the last to suggest to the freedom-loving Power Giver that she confine her flight to lower levels, where the thick atmosphere would shield her relatively fragile body from the deadly projectiles. Had he been born a Power Giver, he knew he too would seek the exultation of being able to soar above the heavy gases to see and, to smell the thin, pure air. It was, he suspected, ample compensation. All life eventually ended, and the price of pleasure was death. Still in his rare transports inside the power field of one of these fragile, beautiful beings, it always sobered him to feel her depleting her very substance to obtain the energy needed to lock into the planet's magnetic field and thereby negate the pull of the earth in soaring flight far above the curve of the planet. When she landed him near his establishment in the area of Red Earth the Far Seer he bowed gratefully. She was away with a joyous leap, fading quickly into the purpling air. She would need to find rest and protection soon, for the yellow haze was thickening. His establishment was precisely as he had left it at the beginning of the summer when he had gone to fulfill his duty as a gatherer of the slime source, the pulpy plants growing on the floor of the shallow, inshore seas. He vented the accumulated poisons from his gills and breathed the clean, rich air. In his absence the Breathers had literally overloaded the dome with good air and it was sheer luxury to fall heavily into his rack and feel life being pumped into all his storage cells as he worked his huge chest like a bellows, breathing with sheer extravagance. He slept long and peacefully and awoke to take his fill of the broth. He stretched his long, agile legs, took in huge lungfuls of his rich air, and made an audible sound of pleasure. His Breathers were healthy and producing happily. In his absence, of course, they had been regularly monitored by Red Earth, but Rack double-checked their enclosures. He found that the feeding channels to the outside were slightly corroded and he cleaned them carefully. After cleaning the entry port and lock he discovered his housekeeping tasks were finished. Already bored he wandered about his establishment aimlessly. Healers were, in general, a restless lot and Rack was no exception. As a youth, he had caused considerable concern among his teachers by exhibiting a startling lack of direction or ambition. His name derived from a picture assigned to him by his mother because he had seemed content to spend all his time in the sleeprack, his mind in contact with any available Keeper, probing into the accumulated lore of the race with an idle curiosity. If he had been interested in knowledge for the sake of learning rather than for its entertainment value, his teachers had argued, his constant Keeper contact would have been justified. But Rack had not been interested in dry facts such as the positions of the sister worlds, survival factors, and the state of the native Breather population in the southern seas. Instead he had delved deeply into the mind banks of the oldest Keepers, wanting to hear the ancient lore regarding the origin of the race, asking stupid questions about the Old Ones. Once he had incurred the wrath of a Far Seer when he tied up the minds of three Keepers at once with questions regarding reported findings of hard-material nuggets. Red Earth discovered that he was unable to record observations because Rack was monopolizing his personal Keeper. Monitoring the contact, he was chagrined to discover that the young Healer was seriously interested in trying to gather enough information to make it possible for him to amass a personal hoard of hard-material nuggets. To Red Earth, hard-material nuggets were interesting and had often led to speculative discussions regarding the talents and abilities of the Old Ones, but they were totally useless. It was true that in the lands across the eastern sea hard-material nuggets were used as a reward for services rendered by duty-driven citizens, but there were many strange things about those who inhabited the land beyond the sea. Red Earth did not want to see his area become involved in the useless accumulation of valueless objects. He had reprimanded Rack the Healer severely, had recommended an educational tour of gathering fresh slime-source plants from the chill waters of the far north, and had been pleased to find that Rack had matured when he returned. On only one other occasion had Rack displeased the Far Seers. In his first tour out of the Eastern Group Establishment, his work output had been seriously low on certain days. Red Earth discovered that once again Rack was probing the storage mind of Growing Tree's Keeper about the Old Ones and in particular about the sunken city of Nar. Where Rack had found that particular bit of folk legend was a puzzle for Red Earth, for all such pseudoinformation had long before been erased from the mind banks. Perhaps Rack had discovered it hidden in some Keeper's mind where it had been filed out of context and he had searched for the nonexistent sunken city to the detriment of his slime-source quota. During a long session with Rack, Red Earth had tried to impress on him the importance of responsibility, duty to the race, and the need to bend every effort toward survival. Too long had the Far Seers been alone in the knowledge that life on the planet was precarious at best. And at first Red Earth had thought that Rack's inquiring mind was receptive. He listened carefully to Red Earth's summary of conditions, agreed that one should not waste one's energies in chasing the ghosts of the Old Ones but should, instead, search for ways, however small, of improving conditions. «We are the results of evolution,» Red Earth told him. Rack received a picture of a period of sun circles so vast and so protracted, the images of sun circles extending back and back, that his mind was not capable of seeing the whole. «All of us—Far Seers, Healers, Keepers, Power Givers
—are the logical results of life, the end results to this time. Nature, in her wisdom, has created in us the ability to cope with the problems of a dying planet, but she has not made the task an easy one. It is up to us to help as we await her next move.» Such talk did indeed interest Rack. He was, after all, involved in life. But still there was something in him that drove him to question the ways of his world. Was the ultimate pleasure service to one's race? If so, why did every Far Seer have at least one Keeper? Not solely for the purpose of storing information in the blank portion of the Keeper's mind. No. Rack, like all Healers, spied like a curious child, and often saw the Far Seers lost in their own pleasure, using the bodies of the Keepers. It was a pleasure alien to the nature of a Healer, of course, and it was indulged in with an amusing regularity. To a Healer, curiosity was the source of pleasure, and as he matured, Rack discovered that he was never reprimanded when he did his duty and saved the titillation of his curiosity for his free time. He reasoned that he was as much entitled to his pleasure as Red Earth was to his. During his free periods he filled his mind with the dim legends of the Old Ones and engaged in what the Far Seers looked on as Healer weakness, rambling on his long, mobile legs over the wide, empty space of the area. His ability to heal the damage he suffered from the hard projectiles and the toxic gases gave him mobility. His curiosity and his wanderlust sent him to the thin frost of the far north, to the steamy heat of the middle regions, to the waters of the west. He scaled mountains on the way, crossed a great river and climbed the broken face of the rift to the west of the river. In a box made of the Material, were the treasured results of his travels: two hard-material nuggets, one the size of his thumb ball, the other tiny, almost invisible. The large one was heavy in his palm, and irregularly shaped. It could be scratched with a sharp, extra hard piece of the Material and it held an endless fascination for
