Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“Okay,” Kit said. He could see the attractions of that.

“But after this seshtev, something unusual happened,” Mamvish said. “That aspect of the Tevaralti mindset actually set itself into the planet’s kernel, as part of the bundle of structures defining what life here meant for the resident species.” She cocked that left-hand eye at Kit again. “Maybe this isn’t all that surprising, in retrospect; their star flared when their civilization was quite young.”

Kit’s mouth went dry. “Like Wellakh?”

“Oh, no, nothing like! Not at all a serious flare, by comparison with that, Powers be thanked.” Mamvish shook herself all over. “Yet enough to cause fairly uncomfortable climatic alterations in the short term. Now perhaps you know that the Tevaralti cultures, worldwide, had already shared a very deep sense that this world was made for them—that it was the right place for them to be.”

“I was looking at their history,” Kit said. “For a species who developed space travel pretty early on, it surprised me that they weren’t doing more of it.”

Mamvish swung her tail in agreement. “That’s true. There are a number of scales that we used to grade the tendency of a species to walk the High Road, and this particular sense of attachment has positioned them toward the lower end of these scales. But after that flare event, the Tevaralti’s sense of how close their world had been to being changed forever set in very deep, and started manifesting itself as an intention not to let their world be hurt that way again. There was also a sense that they had a more general caretaker role that they’d been neglecting: a feeling that they needed to take better care of the other species sharing this world with them. So when such a widespread belief, shared and grown over many generations, settled itself into the planet’s kernel, well, probably nobody should have been surprised. And because the Tevaralti got very close to some of the more actively sentient species here over that period of time, the kernel-based aspects of the seshtev communicated themselves to these other species too.”

This was getting a bit beyond Kit. Kernel theory was more Nita’s specialty, and even at her level of study—which in her more frustrated moods she described as “well-meaning but clueless beginner”—she tended to lose him when she started talking kernel business. “So you really think this is why so many of the Tevaralti don’t want to leave?”

“It could very well be,” Mamvish said, and blew out a breath. “But without being sure, there’s no way we can safely do anything about it. Now there’s no time to be sure. And even if we were sure… it’s not like this is something one would dare try to operate on from outside. It’s far too dangerous, especially at a crisis time like this. Assuming we knew for certain that this was what was going on with the Tevaralti kernel, not even their Planetary would willingly touch the problem without extended study. And by that time…” She angled her head toward the lowering glow of Thesba, now half-set and only partially visible through the blowing clouds.

“Yeah,” Kit muttered.

“Best we concentrate on handling the problem we can handle,” Mamvish said. “Though it’s so frustrating…”

She sighed, sounding somewhat downhearted. I wish there was something I could do to make her feel better… Kit thought

But then something occurred to him. “Mamvish,” Kit said, “I’ve got something for you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It’s back in my puptent.” He got up to walk back. “I’ll go get it. Just wait here—”

“What in the worlds for?” she said, levering herself up again on all those legs, her hide suddenly running blue-hot with Speech-characters.

And between one blink and the next the two of them were standing behind the stone circle. Kit shook his head and laughed. “You are so smooth when you do that,” he said. “Just wait here, I’ll get the thing.”

It only took him a few moments in his puptent to find it. She might as well have it, Kit thought, because at this rate there won’t be enough saltines to use much of it on. And if I’m right about this…

He popped out again and trotted back through the circle to her, holding out a plastic bottle for her to examine. “Here,” Kit said, “I thought maybe you might like this.”

Mamvish rotated that eye at it curiously, then sniffed. And that eye suddenly fixed on the red container with its white label with much, much more interest. “What… Wait. This smells like…” She blinked at him. “Is this made… of tomatoes?”

“Well, yeah. A lot of ketchup is.” Originally he’d thought all of it was, but his Mama had started pulling down cookbooks to set him straight on the concept. Apparently tomato ketchup was a relatively recent development.

“And this is… for me?”

“Well, yeah, Mam, why not?”

She stamped all her feet in sequence in what Kit realized from the sunny yellow of the Speech-characters suddenly roiling under her hide was a gesture of flummoxed delight. “Why are you all so good to me?!”

Kit had to laugh. “Well, why wouldn’t we be?” And then the laugh turned rueful. “You do so much, you work so hard… I have a feeling people don’t say thank you to you enough.”

“The Powers thank me,” Mamvish said. “The work thanks me. That’s as it should be.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, “but other people should do it too. A lot more. So… Here. You want to try some?”

“Do you think I should?” The barely-repressed excitement in her voice made her sound like a kid who’d been invited to open presents early on Christmas.

“Sure,” Kit said. And then, looking at the bottle in his hand and turning it over to look at the back label, he paused. “Then again, it’s not pure tomatoes. Might be smart if you checked the other ingredients. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they put in our food…”

“Well, naturally.”

“Okay, let me talk these out…” Kit pulled out his manual, paged through it to one of the active analysis pages, and laid the ketchup bottle on top of the page. Immediately the various molecules and compounds involved in the ketchup began laying themselves out in structural form just above the ground around them, a bright spill of glowing stick-and-ball structures. “So that complex over there,” Kit said pointing at one of these while he read down the text readout on the page, “that’s the tomatoes. It’s a concentrate—they render them down first. Then this is the vinegar—”

“Is there a generic name?”

“Oh, yeah. Acetic acid. Then the salt—that’s sodium chloride—”

“A fair amount of it in there.”

“Yeah, you should hear my mama about it. The people who make these prepared foods use it as a flavor enhancer. Kind of overuse it, actually. Is that okay for you?”

Mamvish waved her tail around. “It’s all right, I can instruct my metabolism to pay extra attention to it on the way through. It won’t cause any trouble.”

“Okay. And then these—” Kit waved his hand at another series of compounds. “They’ve just said ‘natural flavorings’ here, I think to keep their competition from finding out what they put in this stuff to make it taste the way it does. They’re all vegetable extracts, looks like. “

“Those all look fine,” Mamvish said. “And then this one—”

“Onion powder,” Kit said. “An onion’s a vegetable too, kind of a sharp flavored one. This thing,” and he pointed at another molecule—a couple of benzene rings with various hydrocarbons hanging off them—“this is a sweetener, it replaces one that has more calories.” He squinted at the manual. “One, six-dichloro, one, six-di-deoxy… whatever! The short name’s sucralose. And this last one, ‘spices’, that’s the company who made this getting all secretive again. Looks like there’s paprika in it, that comes from another vegetable—”