Tuning William - Fuzzy Bones

"So far, so good. The castaway Fuzzies weren't exactly living in the lap of luxury, but they were making do-and they were reproducing at a reasonable rate as they adapted to the alien environment of Zarathustra.

"Then, catastrophe number two arrived."

"An earthquake caused a landslide which buried the mouth of the cave and covered the wrecked ship. Those Fuzzies in the cave were wiped out. The only survivors were the ones who happened to be out gathering nuts or picking the lettuce in the valley. They were completely cut off from all the items of salvage, the remnants of their technology, and their parent culture.

"Now they know nothing of their own history except what is in their own minds.

Hard times and a lot of survival pressure conspire to accelerate the erasing of that memory."

Holloway could tell, from looking around the room, who had already been exposed to this knowledge. The ones who were not looking astonishedly at Ybarra and the visual presentation that accompanied his remarks were obviously the ones who already knew. Little Fuzzy was serenely smoking his pipe.

Starwatcher had his arms folded across his little chest, his legs crossed, and his khaki barracks cover hung on one knee. Diamond was fascinated-because he had only heard the news at the Fuzzy Conference earlier in the afternoon.

"Water from the mountain, though," Ybarra was saying, "continued to leak down through the rocks covering the wreck of the S.S. Fuzzy-and continued to leach titanium compounds down into the valley. There wasn't any more spice, but by this time the native vegetables weren't so bad, and the folks were making do.

"Several centuries passed. The main group of Fuzzies continued to stay in the valley. Colonies that tried to form satellite settlements always died out in a couple of generations. By this time, Fuzzies have forgotten that their metabolisms require titanium and that it is a vital component of their biochemistry. Titanium, as you may or may not know, is very scarce in Zarathustra's crust-except in the soil of Fuzzy Valley."

The tape-chip slowly lap-dissolved into an image of the recorded pickup of the Big Blackwater Project.

"And, now," Ybarra said, "here comes catastrophe number three. The Chartered Zarathustra Company started to drain a half-million square miles of swamp on the coast of Beta. That caused a drought in the Piedmont-where Jack Holloway had a camp in Cold Creek Canyon, near where Cold Creek joined the Snake River.

New maps refer to Cold Creek as Holloway's Run, and a scientific study center has grown up there, along with the Zarathustran Native Protection Force headquarters. The place is now commonly referred to as Holloway Station. The

drought also extended-" He outlined the geography on the projected map with his light-pointer."-into the volcanic foothills and Piedmont of Northern Beta Continent, where we see Fuzzy Valley, north of the Fuzzy Divide.

"The valley dried up for lack of rain. The native vegetation began dying off.

Dry weather for two winters in a row did, however, hatch out a bumper crop of land-prawns. The land-prawns migrated into Big Woods, and, eventually, down across Fuzzy Divide into Deep Woods, since a principal component of their food chain on Zarathustra is the forest moss that bears traces of titanium.

"Land-prawns are about the only thing left that tastes good to Fuzzies, so they followed that general volkerwan-derung southward."

Ybarra switched off his light-pointer and held up the index finger of the hand which still held it. "But, you say, the Upland Fuzzies didn't follow the volkerwanderung, and they have different cultural habits-like large-scale co-operative hunting. Why is that?

"The Upland Fuzzies belong to a different social class. They are mostly descendants of the paramilitary crew of the Fuzzy ship. They long ago forgot why the crew should stick close to the site of the crashed ship-they just know that they should. The 'passenger descendants' are oriented toward individualism, laissez-faire, and those sorts of things. The 'crew descendants' are conditioned to ritualized activities, such as complex teamwork, close-order drill, and such-like.

"Parenthetically, land-prawns aren't native to Zarathustra, either. They also fall under Garrett's Theorem, by virtue of their preference for the Zarathustran moss, which only grades about ten atoms of titanium to the ton.

Land-prawns are native to Fuzzyhome-where they are considered to be a culinary delicacy by Fuzzies. A dozen pairs of them were being shipped to a colony-the location of which we do not know-to be bred in captivity for expensive lobster dinners. On Fuzzyhome, it was well known that there is no hokfusine in land-prawns that can be converted into NFMp. Land-prawns utilized the titanium in their diet in a way that is non-nutritive to Fuzzies, but they taste good.

"With their simpler metabolism and a much less critical need for titanium in the diet, land-prawns managed to spread around quite a bit before the big drought. During the castaway period of Zarathustran Fuzzy history, the Fuzzies became quite adept at killing them-for two reasons. First, they tasted good, and had nourishment in them other than hokfusine. Second, they had to be kept out of the vegetable garden because of the crop damage they do. Thus, land-prawn hunting became a traditional chore of adolescent Fuzzies, and, hence, its universal adeptness among contemporary Fuzzy adults at this point in time, which is not quite three years after the start of the Big Blackwater Project."

After Ybarra called for questions, he sat down. That seemed odd to Jack Hollo way; then he caught on. Napier was answering the questions-unless they were highly technical in nature.

Jack held his pipe in his left hand, a little clumsily, since he wasn't used to it, and since his left arm was in a sling and a cast that prevented articulation of the elbow, and raised his right hand.

Napier rosed suavely and nodded his head in Jack's direction . "Mr.

Commissioner Holloway," he said deferentially.

Jackstood. "Commodore, "he said, "it appears to me the Navy put this all together damned-I mean-in mighty quick order. Are your team and yourself

certain that these deductions are correct?"

"Reasonably so," Napier replied. "Once we figured out how the Fuzzy instruments worked-that was the hardest part, by the way-we found their language to be not greatly different from the native speech of Fuzzy f.

holloway zarathustra. The rest of the reconstruction was fairly simple. There were records, and passenger lists, and freight manifests, and mail, and official reports en route to what we might call the Fuzzy Colonial Office, and reference manuals, and-in short-just about everything you would expect to find on a hypership of the Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines. Something, though, happened to the navigator's station. We don't know where Fuzzyhome is. After a thousand years, there may be no more Fuzzies alive there. Perhaps something happened to Fuzzyhome and its culture-since no rescue vessel ever appeared-so that the Zarathustran Fuzzy is the only surviving example of the race.

But-Fuzzyhome is out there; somewhere."

Holloway was still standing. "How can we find it?" he asked.

"Patiently," Napier said. "Very patiently. We are now logging all the differentials we can isolate between recorded Actual Fuzzy morphology and Zarathustran Fuzzy morphology. By making detailed computer comparisons, we may be able to extrapolate how Fuzzies have evolved on Zarathustra to become slightly different from the parent group, and thus sketch a profile of Fuzzyhome and its star. If we can do that-and don't make any mistakes-then we only have to make physical inspections of-maybe-as few as a hundred thousand star systems before we find Fuzzyhome and make contact with the parent culture. However, none of us in this room should figure on being around to shake hands with Pappy Fuzzy when we finally find him."