His thoughts had been drifting for a while when he suddenly felt a breeze that had nothing to do with the local weather. Kit halted and looked around. Not too far ahead of him, glowing faintly in the indistinct light, Kit saw a huge long saurian shape making its way across the plain toward him from the spot where she’d appeared, all elbows and lashing tail and big toothy head.
“Mam!” Kit said as she came up to him. “What’re you doing here?”
“Came to see you,” Mamvish said. “I have a little time off. Nita and I were talking this afternoon while I was making rounds on all the gate complexes, and she made me promise to stop by.”
Kit smiled. “Well, okay. How’re you holding up?”
Mamvish slumped down onto the grassy ground beside him. “All right, I suppose,” she said. “It’s so amazing to have a few minutes to myself, I can hardly remember what it’s like. It’s been power feed, power feed, day and night: keeping that thing in one piece for the moment.” She rotated an eye in Thesba’s direction. “Not much thinking in that kind of work, not much challenge…”
Kit sat down beside her head and looked in the direction from which he’d been walking. He’d gotten off his original line, so that the distant light of the gating complex wasn’t blocked. “Mamvish,” he said, “why?”
Mamvish hissed out a sigh. “Everybody’s question at this point,” she said, “for a thousand values of ‘why’. Which one are you chasing?”
“The ‘why’ as in ‘why don’t all these Tevaralti want to get out of here?’”
Another long sigh, a sound like a steam train venting. “It’s hard to be absolutely certain,” Mamvish said, “but I think it’s most likely something to do with the way their species interacts with the planet’s kernel.”
She put her head down on her foreclaws, a weary gesture, and cocked her portside eye at Kit. “It’s always unique,” she said, “a species’ connection to its world, and to the One. The Tevaralti had a seshtev, a perceived-revelation-of-intent, some time back—”
The Speech-word she used to translate the Tevaralti word “seshtev”, methenlet, was the shortest of the formulations that the Speech used to designate what on Earth people might have called a “group religious experience”. “I looked into it once when I first started consulting here, but it doesn’t seem to translate well, even into the Speech,” Mamvish said. “That’s not unusual, though: often these things don’t.”
“‘Some time back?’” Kit said.
Mamvish waved her tail. “A millennium or so. Not that long ago really, when you consider the age of their civilization. Anyway, the core of this experience seemed to be a sort of realization that the species needed to be ‘of one mind’.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “One of them said that to me today.”
“Now there are a lot of ways that can look…”
“Especially depending on who’s making the mind up.”
“True,” Mamvish said. “But this particular opinion, or set of opinions about the way they should live their lives, seemed to spread fairly quickly across the planet—probably secondary to their empathic-symbiotic linkage with one another. That’s been in place for many millennia, and it’s probably one of the major factors in their planetary civilization as a whole being so long-lived. Probably it originally developed very early in the evolution of the Tevaralti species as a survival mechanism. Tevaralti who were part of the linkage were better protected against predators, perhaps, or better able to find places where food was plentiful and living conditions otherwise favored them.”
“So more of them survived to have more Tevaralti who had the symbiotic linkage, yeah?” Kit said. “And now they all do.”
“To greater or lesser degrees, yes.” Mamvish said. “There’s some variation in its presence and prevalence among world populations. Some clans or nation-regions possess the symbiotic sense more acutely, some less. But local variations aside, in the long run it’s been advantageous for them. Cultural changes that on other planets would most likely only have taken effect secondary to warfare, on Tevaral would take hold simply because of the symbiotic connection among groups that were in relatively close physical proximity to one another—say on the same continent.”
“So this religious experience spread through the linkage?”
“Partly. But also by normal cultural exchange. Overall, the concept of ‘being of one mind’ settled in without too much fuss. And it seems not to have been a bad thing for them, by and large. Certainly they’ve not had a war since it happened.”
“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…”