Read Online Spinneret by Timothy Zahn - Free Book Online Page A

village of Wright, where the mined minerals would eventually be separated and purified. The road from there to Unie bordered both the bay and the Wright-Unie farming area, and Meredith spent several minutes talking about the special fertilization being used. He broke off the monologue when Beaeki explained that his race had little interest in plant cultivation; on Rooshrike worlds, with solar energy up to thirty times more abundant than on Earth, keeping the flora cut back was more of a problem than persuading it to grow. The fish nurseries near Unie were far more to his interest, inducing him even to stop the vehicle and get out. Squatting by the offshore mesh pens, whose tops barely cleared the surface of the water, he peered into the depths as Meredith described how the metal-rich runoff from the Crosse fields would be carried by the river to the bay, where it would presumably allow the growth of algae and more complex plants to which the penned fish would have access.
    â€œYou go to great lengths for such a useless world,” Beaeki commented as they headed toward Ceres.
    â€œIt may be the only other one we ever have,” Meredith said sourly, “if the Ctencri are to be believed. Besides, we humans are very big on challenges.”
    They made a fast circuit of Ceres—where, thankfully, the workers were sticking to business today—looked at Teardrop Lake, and then headed south to Crosse, at the junction of whose rivers a second fish nursery was located.
    And through it all, Meredith learned a great deal about the Rooshrike.
    They were a young race, relatively speaking, technologically anywhere from eighty to three hundred years behind the other starfaring races of the region. As junior members of the six-nation trading association, they had chafed somewhat under the perceived condescension of the older races, particularly that of the Ctencri, and while they had rapidly built an empire of twenty colonies and bases, they had always had the feeling none of the others really took them seriously. Though Beaeki never actually said so, Meredith got the distinct impression the Rooshrike were relieved that the beings from Earth were taking their former place at the bottom of the pecking order.
    â€œNice that at least no one’s all that much more advanced technologically than all the others,” Meredith noted at one point. “Still seems sort of odd, though, considering all the time that’s been available for life to develop in.”
    â€œAn accident of nature,” Beaeki said, gazing out the side window as he drove. “Approximately one hundred forty million years ago a supernova saturated this part of space with enhanced cosmic radiation, resulting in rapid mutation of disease organisms, destruction of high-atmosphere protective regions, and direct large-creature destruction via tissue damage. Those peoples capable of survival lost nearly all technology; the few who survived are more primitive now than even your people.”
    â€œI would have thought some of their knowledge would have survived with them.”
    â€œBut the material base did not. Too much of their metal was already in forms too difficult for a primitive technology to extract.”
    Meredith swallowed. Metal again; metal, and lack of same. Just what his low-flying morale needed to hear about.
    â€œOther more advanced races are reputed to exist,” Beaeki continued. “But they are far away and few have seen them. They show as little interest in us as we do in the non-space-going peoples within this region.”
    â€œUm.” Probably, Meredith thought, just as well.
    He probed for information about the other nearby races, too, but here he had somewhat less success. Whether Beaeki simply wasn’t interested in talking about their trading partners or whether the Rooshrike had learned the folly of giving away useful information for free Meredith didn’t know. Still, he managed to get the races’