The Great Hydration

The warm breeze blew in the Analane’s faces as they rode in the Toureen vehicle. Hrityu tried to calm his elation, reminding himself that there was still much to be done. Transport would have to be arranged for the initial supply of eruptionite before the Crome staged their main attack. Also, how difficult might it be to find and purify the chemicals needed for its manufacture? This would have to be talked out with Nussmussa.

Then again, there were the Tlixix to deal with, and their fee to be arranged.

Hrityu reflected that it might be worth applying to the Pavilion of Audience to try to forestall the Crome’s petition.

At his direction Nussmussa sped into the market, wheeled into the vehicle park and flashed past the lines of carriages to halt beside the Analane rover. Hrityu and Kurwer stepped down and went to the rear of their vehide, opening the hidden compartment where they had secreted their precious apparatus.

He blinked as he pulled up the metal panel. He was not sure that he could believe his eyes. Then a horrified sound escaped from his throat. His eyes had not deceived him.

Their invaluable cargo, the radiator and its accompanying receiver upon which the survival of the Analane depended, was gone!

CHAPTER THREE

Poised in an orbit synchronous with the planet’s rotation, the twin speculae of an interferometric telescope looked down from opposite ends of a mile-long extensible rod. Their slightly different images, processed by point-to-point comparison, gave Messrs. Krabbe and Bouche an excellent view of the World Market far below them.

Karl Krabbe twiddled a knob beneath the viewplate. The scene, currently bird’s-eye, shifted and tilted until it was as though one stood on the ground amid the inhabitants. The processor made a fair job of the representation, though the deduced facial features tended to be vague and fuzzy. He focused on a drama in cameo: two thin blue humanoids gesticulated excitedly to a smaller black humanoid. They had opened up the rear of a wheeled vehicle.

He turned to Boris Bouche. “It’s the nearest thing to a town on the whole damned planet! You only find camps and villages anywhere else.”

“That’s because towns are markets, essentially, and this is the only market they have.” Bouche’s voice had an acid quality, easily given to sarcasm. “God, Karl, I have to remind you of enough. Don’t you remember your economics?”

“Sure I remember,” Krabbe retorted testily. “What makes you think I don’t?”

Karl Krabbe was a barrel of a man, his large, ruddy face seeming always about to break into some anguished pronouncement, leaving it lined and anxious. He dressed carelessly and tended to slouch. His partner, Boris Bouche, slender and tall, was neat and compact by comparison, but the dapper impression did not extend to his face. The wide slash of his mouth and the close-set eyes gave him a predatory look. He stepped forward, peering over Krabbe’s shoulder at the plate.

“Here comes one of the bosses.”

Krabbe had panned the focus to the main concourse. One of the lobster-like creatures was being moved from one pavilion to another. A transparent tent covered the motorised dray. Within it, water sprays asperged the bulky, shelled passenger. There was something lordly about the beast’s slow progress through the throng, whiskery stalks waving above the foot traffic.

“If we do any business here, it’s his sort we’ll be dealing with,” Bouche said.

Krabbe grunted. “I mostly like crustaceans in a well-blended sauce.”

“Crustaceans? Yes, I suppose that’s close enough, though you could say he is to a crayfish what we are to … well, there isn’t any mammal as brainless as a crayfish. What we are to a newt, maybe.”

“And on a desert planet. It’s amazing.”

“Not really. It’s just that they’re smart. Wouldn’t you say so, Spencer?”

He craned his neck to the planetologist who stood at the back of the room. Spencer nodded, and came forward.

“Yes, sir. There’s not much doubt that this planet was watery once, perhaps as recently as fifty thousand Earth years ago. Then the water suddenly vanished, for some reason. Castaneda is working on the data now.

“The crustacean-like creatures were the dominant intelligent species of the time, and as far as we can tell they are the only one to have survived the calamity—except, presumably, for whatever fauna or flora they keep as food. Instead, a desert biosphere has arisen, one that doesn’t need water. That the lobsters, as you call them, have managed to maintain some sort of dominance despite their small numbers is a tribute to their tenacity, I would say. They own all the free water on the planet, and conserve it with great care. I imagine they make good any losses by paying other species to process whatever tiny amounts can be extracted from plants and the dead bodies of desert creatures.