'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, 'e 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!
'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 ay 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 traveling 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 yearly turnover; no ice forming on the sky, because there wasn't any sky in a closed shallop; no spore formation.
'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, 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 and on, generation after generation. They don't change; our hammers and 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 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. I'm ready to think that if our makers repeated the word even twice on a record that seems likely to last forever, it's important for us to know what it means.'
'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. 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 off bacteria. That was work worth doing. The Lavons of those days evidently got along without the metal plates, 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 improve- ment, 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 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 from Shar's startlement 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 behind. Now we are not afraid.'
'There wasn't anything to be afraid of,' Lavon said indulgently.
'No Lavon before you had said so,' 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 cilia. With a cry, Shar plunged through the water toward the opening.
'Stop, Para!'
But Para was already gone, so swiftly that he 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 at it for more than an instant.
The shadows of the two men moved slowly along the uneven cobbled floor. The Noc descended toward them from the vault, its single thick jentacle 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, winked out.
II
For many days, Lavon was able to avoid thinking much about the loss. There was always a great deal of work to be done. Maintenance of the Castles, which had been built by the now-extinct Eaters, was a never-ending task. The thousand dichotomously branching wings tended to crumble, especially at their bases where they sprouted from each other, and no Shar had yet come forward with a mortar as good as the rotifer-spittle which had once held the together. In addition, the breaking through of windows and the construe tion of chambers in the early days had been haphazard and often un sound. The instinctive architecture of the rotifers, 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; now there were the drifting mats of specific water- fungi, 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 farseeing 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 utterly unable to grasp, especially since men admitted that 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 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 circumstances he felt that it was a part of his duty, as a leader of men, to protect the diatoms from the occasional poachers who browsed upon them, in defiance of custom, in the high levels of the sunlit sky.
Yet Lavon found it impossible to keep himself busy enough to forge that moment when the last clues to Man's origin and destination ha been seized and borne away into dim space.
It might be possible to ask Para for the return of the plates, explain that a mistake had been made. The protos were creatures of implacable logic, but they respected Man, were used to illogic in Man, and might reverse their decision if pressed—
