At every eruption, with each fissure that opened wide enough to be seen from that fantastic height, he felt a strange sinking in his heart. His throat was dry, and there was an odd pressure behind his eyes.
He watched silently, every once in a while letting the thought They didn't know when to ask for help filter through his mind.
The Group of Deciders huddled in the blasted Council Hall. The floor—what was left of the inlaid tiles—shivered and heaved. Beyond the twisted lattices of the windows they could hear the mighty rending of the planet as it opened and swallowed all that stood.
Within an hour of the first eruptions, so quickly and with such fury that there had been no time for preparation, almost three-fifths of their race had been decimated.
The cities Kes and Uykvabask and Laylor had gone under with roaring flames and the scraping of stone against flesh. The Great Ocean had exploded with a red-hot bubbling and roared onto the land, washing everything before it. The lava flows raced Eastward to the Ceremonial Grounds and Westward to the Hunting Preserve. Everywhere the ground opened without warning or reason, and life sank beneath the earth.
Wrong, the Group of Deciders admitted in their last refuge. We were wrong we have been foolish we have rejected our only salvation we must prepare the group-mind send our plea for aid into space speak to the outsiders ask them to help us.
They thought their instructions away from themselves, to their kin across Diamore's blasted face. Prepare! Join! Speak to the outsiders!
And when they had gathered together every last Diamorai, with more dying as they joined the chain, with the feel of agony radiating through the group-mind, the message weakly rose. Tentatively it probed at the inner surface of Diamore's atmosphere.
The power was, perhaps, insufficient to reach the spaceship. Three-fifths of the Diamoraii were lost to the group-mind.