The Crucible of Time Read online

  Jing and Rainbow debated long about the matter as soon as they realized that the little stars shuttling back and forth beside the planets must in fact be revolving around them, moon-fashion. By that stage Jing's prized star-charts were little more than memoranda; he already knew there was a lifetime's work in filling the gaps the unaided eye had left. The perspectives opened up to him were terrifying. Because if there were any number of different up-and-downs, then not only must the planets be worlds like the world, with their own—plural!—moons, but the sun, whose planets circled it like moons, might be circling something greater yet, and ... and ... It was dizzying to contemplate!

  At least the moon lent them clues. Observations at the full showed that the sparkles visible on the dark part of its disc were only a fraction of what was actually going on. Flash after brilliant flash came and went seemingly at random, lacking even the momentary trace which followed a meteor. And here again Keepfire proved to possess unexpected insight. Shown the moon through his original lenses, he said at once, "It's like when I make a fire!"

  And it was. By this time they had all watched his trick of striking rocks together and catching a spark on a tuft of shredded calamar.

  Striking...

  Jing felt he was being not so much struck as battered. It had been hard enough to accept the distances he had been taught about in childhood, necessary to let Sunbride race around the sun, the world stride around it, and the outer planets follow at their own respective speeds. What to make of a cosmos in which scores-of-scores-of-scores-of-scores (but it was pointless to try and count the stars in the Sling) of not just suns but their accompanying planets must be allowed for? If the sacerdotes were right in claiming that their sacred stones had fallen from heaven, and they were so tiny, could those brilliant lights above also be minute? Shine suggested as much, for he desperately wanted not to forsake all his former beliefs; in particular he clung to the notion that the New Star must indicate some great event in the world below. During a late snowstorm, however, Jing set him to making calculations based on the new observations, couched in the Ntahish symbols which were wieldier than what obtained in the north, and the results overwhelmed the poor exsacerdote, even though he had been properly fed for moonlongs past and learned to separate dream from fantasy as never before in his young life. They demonstrated beyond doubt that in order to leave room for planetary motions the lights in the sky must be not only far off but enormous. Did not a lantern fade to imperceptibility, no matter how skillfully you bred your gleamers, almost before its bearer was out of hearing? And when one added in an extra fact which Shine himself had drawn to their attention—that Swiftyouth sometimes appeared out of round, as though attempting phases like the moon's—there was precisely one explanation which fitted the evidence. The universe must be full of suns, and therefore presumably of planets too faint and far away for even their precious lenses to reveal.

  A cosmic hierarchy of fire evolved in Jing's imagination: from the Sling compound of giant stars down to the briefest spark made by clashing rocks. Something pervaded all of them, something luminous, hurtful, transient, imponderable, yet capable of being fixed and leaving traces. Perhaps it penetrated everything! Was it the same force which made treetrunks strong enough to lift gigantic boulders, the same which brought forth blossoms, fruit and nuts? It might be, surely, for fire shone brightly and so did glowplants and glitterweed although they were cold to the touch and in color much like Stumpalong or Sluggard. So was there a connection? Suppose it was a matter of speed; suppose the slowness of plant-growth, and of the outer planets, meant cool, and the rapidity of flame meant hot: what did that imply about the stars? Remaining visibly the same for countless scores of years, must they not also be cool? Yet did not some of them now and then flare up? What about the bright streaks that nightly laced the firmament—must they not be cool, because manifestly the air was warm only when the sun had long shone on it? Yet Shine declared that those who had come on one of the Maker's sling-stones immediately after it landed invariably stated that it was too hot to touch, and indeed the surrounding area was often charred! What fantastic link was there between light and heat?

  Vainly Jing sought to convey his thinking to his companions. He was as fluent now in spoken Forbish as Rainbow in the use of Ntahish numbers. She, though, had not yet escaped her original obsession; she had only come around to the view that it was pointless to try and read from the heavens the true reason for her deformity, because if there were so many invisible stars there might be one for everybody, and you could waste a lifetime seeking out your own. Before leaving home, or even as recently as the first time he looked at the sky through lenses, Jing might have considered such an argument valid; since getting over Drakh's death, however, he had experienced preternatural clarity of thought, and ideas which for half his life he had treated as rational had been consigned to memory, reclassified as imaginary or as dreamstuff. Perhaps this was due to the plain but nourishing diet he was eating; perhaps it had something to do with the monotonous environment of the long night, when he was free from the cyclic shock of sunrise and sunset; it didn't matter. What counted was that he could now clearly envisage other worlds. What a plethora of individuals might not inhabit all those planets, seen and unseen! What marvels might he yonder in the dark, more astonishing to him than Ntah to those who knew only Castle Thorn!

  And what daunting celestial oceans of knowledge remained to be traversed, when by happenstance a humble peasant could open people's eyes to the miracles inherent in plain sand!

  "We'll learn more of the answers," Twig kept promising in what he intended as a tone of comfort, "when the sun rises again. Darkness makes one's mind dull ... as the saying goes!"

  Yet Jing's was not, nor Shine's. Could this be due to their constant intake of starfire? Could the mind as well be driven by the mysterious force? Was that why Keepfire, shut away in his foul-smelling cavern, believing in nothing and nobody save his traditional lore, was able to choose and pursue a course of action when Jing's mind was foggy with whirling symbols? Hedge and Bush became angrier and angrier with him, and subsided into sulky grumbling, so that no more new results emerged from the laboratory. Yet Keepfire worried on, and polished and pondered and talked to himself and polished some more, and...

  And on that spring day when the sun's disc cleared the horizon entire for the first tune since fall, he came in triumph to Twig and Jing and Rainbow, and unfolded a scrap of the softest icefaw-hide, and revealed a pair of lenses of such impeccable shape that all the results of nature, or of early pourings, faded into insignificance.

  Proudly he said, "Do I not bring the gift you wanted most? So I'll ask for what I want. You have shown me stars. They are little fires like the ones I understand. Now I want to see the biggest fire. Show me the sun!"

  "But—" Rainbow began, and clipped off the words. Mutely she appealed to her companions, who could envisage as well as she the effect of looking at the sun through nearly perfect lenses.

  Twig, however, was oblivious. He breathed, "To see the sun once with these would be enough to sacrifice my sight for!"

  "Oh, shut up!" Jing roared. They shrank back as he erupted to his full height, every muscle and tubule in his body at maximum tension. "You're talking like a senile fool, and I speak to you as a sworn friend! Don't you think your eyesight will be useful tomorrow, too? What we need is a way to look at the sun without going blind!" He rounded on Keepfire. "Would you give up all vision for one fleeting glimpse of the sun? You'd rather see it over and over, wouldn't you?"

  Alarmed, Keepfire signaled vigorous agreement.

  "Very well, then!" Jing relaxed into a more courteous posture, but still tenser than his usual stance among friends. "What do we know of which makes a scene darker without blurring detail? In Ntah old folk some-tunes protected their sight on a sunny day"—he used the past tense unconsciously, and later thought of it as a premonition—"by using thin gray shells. But those deformed the image. Well?"

  There was a long p
ause. At last Rainbow said, "You find membranes inside furnimals that are no good for parchment because you can see through to the other side."

  Shine clacked his claws. "Yes! And stretching them can make them thinner still, yet they diminish light!"

  "They make everything yellower!" Twig objected, and at once caught himself. "Ah, but the thinner, the clearer! So if we put several one behind another, and take away each in turn until the eye hurts ... Jing, I'm pleased to be your friend! Once again you see to the core of the matter when I spring to premature conclusions."

  "If you want to honor someone, honor Keepfire," Jing said, and reached a decision not foreshadowed by intention. Taking the new beautiful lenses one in either claw, he shrank from his overweening posture to the lowest he could contrive without pain, and remained there while he uttered unpremeditated words.

  "You know and I know, without putting it to the test, that these will reveal to us yet more amazing private knowledge. It should not be private; it would not be private, had anybody else within this castle shared our interest. But it is so, and must not remain so. Already we have learned so much, I want to share our findings with Ntah. The dullwits of Forb and every other city I traversed to come here ought to have their eyes opened—no? Even if like your fellow sacerdotes, Shine, they decline to take advantage, do they not deserve to have this knowledge pointed out to them?"

  Shine shouted, "Yes—yes!"

  Thus encouraged, Jing yielded to a half-guilty, half-ecstatic temptation and let his mind be taken over by the dream-level Imagination was not enough; it was handicapped by rational considerations like distance, delay, expenditure of effort, the obstinacy of other people. But already their new discoveries had made it plain that everyday knowledge was inadequate to analyze the outcome. For once his dream faculty might be wiser than his sober and reflective consciousness.

  Suddenly his head was roaring-loud with revelations, as though he had tapped the sap-run of time. He marveled at what he heard himself say— or rather declaim.

  "Oh-hya-na-ut thra-t-ywat insk-y-trt ah-bng-llytr-heethwa ibyong hr-ph-tnwef-r heesh-llytr-kwu-qtr-annibyong—ah, but I tackle poorly this speech of foreigners and wish I could say what is needful in the speech of the folk I grew up among! But I am far away and lonely beyond bearing so now my community is these who welcome me as friends and I speak to them and to the world because I overflow with knowledge born of fire! I have been set alight like dry crops on a distant hill and the scent of smoke from what I know must carry on the wind and warn the world of what's in store when heaven's fire descends to burn the densest wettest jungle and boil the Lake of Ntah! Vast fires surpassing number or belief loom yonder in the dark and we are cast away upon a fragile barq, this little world, and more and more fires loom and every night the dark is pierced with streaks of fire and what it is we do not know but we must master it or it will utterly consume us! We must pledge ourselves to spare the world the doom of ignorance, not keeping any knowledge private that we've found, but spreading it about to last beyond our lifetimes! You three and I must make a vow together, and in token of it take half another's name. The half is fire! It leaves a crust of duty ash but in another season it may turn to life anew and so our world must do although the prong of heaven strike us down! Take the vow, I beg you, I beseech you, and let not our secret knowledge vanish from the minds of those who on this lost and drifting orb hope to make something greater than themselves!"

  He was almost screaming with the fury of his visions, for the countless stars were crashing together in a colossal mass of flame, and the world itself was ripe to be their fuel.

  Fuel—?

  Abruptly he was back to normal consciousness, and wanted to say something quiet and ordinary, though perfused with unexpected insight, but he could not, for Shine was clutching his claw and crying at the top of his voice.

  "I know now what the New Star signified! One is come among us who has wisdom we have never guessed! I'll take the extra name and vow my service!"

  "I too!" Old Twig was lowering himself, though his agony was plain. "You have united fire above and fire below and we must tell the world your teaching!"

  Last, Rainbow, awkwardly, with her lopsided gait, drew close and said, "I vow the same. For what it's worth I'll bind my followers as well."

  There was a pause. She looked at him uncertainly and said at long last, "Jing...?"

  The tempest of impressions was fading from his mind. He rose, a little shyly, as though embarrassed. She said again, "Jing!" And continued: "What did you see? What did you see?"

  But it was useless to try and describe everything that had so briefly stormed into awareness. He said eventually, "If stars are fire, then new stars happen when fresh fuel is fed to them. What fuel is there, barring worlds like ours? If we would rather not be fuel for a star, there's no one who can save us but ourselves ... I've dreamed. It's made me weary. I must rest."

  VII

  That evening Rainbow sent for Keepfire to share food publicly with them and cement their compact, which the peasant did nervously yet with obvious glee. This act made Shine a formal enemy of the other sacerdotes; it was, however, scarcely necessary, since he had long disdained the asceticism they relied on to make their dreams vivid. Afterwards Jing found his companions hanging on his every word as though he were indeed the ultimately righteous person harbingered by the New Star. He did his best to dissuade them, but the force of his vision had profoundly affected them, and it was useless. He resigned himself to being adulated. When they pressed him for some new revelation, all he was able to say was what they must already have known: "It will be spring tomorrow."

  Further revelations from the sky, though, were delayed. Warm air from the south, drawn in by the constant thermals rising above the valley, met the still-frozen ground beyond the mountains, and fog and cloud veiled the sun. The ice which had temporarily blocked the access channel began to fracture with noises like a gigant snapping trees, and Jing was moderately content to occupy himself by preparing a detailed report of their discoveries for the doctor in Forb, which he planned to send south by the first barq of spring.

  It arrived, and like the one which had brought him and Drakh, it carried a sick passenger.

  Leaving Rainbow to polish his final draft, Jing went to the wharf to see the barq come in. He was unprepared to hear a voice hail him in Ntahish.

  "It is the Honorable Jing? Here am I, Ah-ni Qat!"

  Supported by two youthful aides, a boy and a girl, a stooped yet familiar figure limped ashore. Jing said disbelievingly, "The son of my dear friend the Vizier?"

  For he remembered Qat as a sprightly youth, and this personage looked so old and moved so slowly ... and his skin was patched with ugly scars.

  "Indeed, indeed! All whiter I've struggled across this snowbound continent because at Forb I heard rumors concerning your whereabouts. I'd not have had the endurance to continue but that my father laid on me the duty of seeking you out and telling you: Ntah is no more!"

  For an instant Jing stood frozen. Then he said uncertainly, "Young friend, you're sick. You're ruled by dreams."

  "Would that I were," Qat whispered. "After your departure plague ran wild among us. Never were such horrors witnessed by a living eye! People died where they stood, their bodies fell into the lake and river until the water grew so foul the very fish were poisoned. Those who survived lost their reason and fled under the lash of horrid dreams. Most went south. I doubt they escaped like me and my companions. Our northern route must have saved us. It seems the plague loves heat."

  "Your father—" Jing began.

  "Died among the first. So did Lord Waw-Yint. There is no use in speaking of his heir. Ntah is a land of rotting carcasses, and all who used to live there have run away."

  Qat's girl companion uttered a groan of misery. Jing said slowly, "We must find you quarters. The Count has treated me kindly, as has his daughter. You will be made welcome."

  Surrounded by the high-piled parchments on which he was record
ing their discoveries, Jing sat blindly staring at the overcast sky. His mind was fuller of despair than ever in his life before; he wanted to renounce consciousness and retreat to dreams, where Ntah would last for all eternity and its glory never fade.

  Behind him creepers rustled. A soft familiar voice said, "Is it true about your homeland?"

  He did not turn. "Yes, Lady Rainbow. If Qat says so, he speaks the truth. I no longer have a home."

  "You have made one here," she said. "By your kindness to me from the beginning, when first you told me I was not after all accursed; when you said you were surprised I had not found mates in spite of my misshapenness; when you opened my sight to a heaven full of so many stars it's absurd for any one of us petty beings to count on reading his or her fate up yonder—Oh, Jing!" Spreading her mantle, she embraced him as he made to rise. "You have caused me to love you, poor twisted creature that I am! Let me prove that you have a home wherever I am and for as long as I may live!"

  She hesitated, and added in an altered voice, "That is, if you do not find me totally repulsive."

  There was a moment of absolute stillness. Jing looked at her, and saw through her outward form, to the bright keen mind within. And his oath of celibacy was to lost Ntah...

  They were both very clumsy, but they found it funny, and afterwards he was able to say, in full possession of his rational faculties, "But your father? He cares nothing for our work, and may despise me."

  "He is sad and sick and this winter has shown him he too can grow old. He has spoken much about over-close breeding, as one sees with canifangs, and has even mentioned the idea of a grandchild. Inwardly I think I may be normal, and most certainly you and I cannot be cousins to any degree. We shall find out. If not—so be it."