The Crucible of Time

by John Brunner

  "I wish," said Yockerbow, scarcely realizing he had spoken audibly, "I'd never left Ripar. I'd rather have been here to tend my pumps, to learn their limitations and escape to high ground where I might have built them anew and much improved."

  "Somebody will," said Arranth with assurance. "Now your task is to wander the world teaching those who need to know how it was done, just as mine is to explain the star-maps that—thanks to Barratong—have been preserved. You never respected the Order of the Jingfired, and you had some justification, I suppose, given that you devised new methods not envisaged by its ancient wisdom. But I always did, even when I was angry at the way intrigue and self-seeking tarnished its ideals. And if Barratong, who at first mocked it, has come around to my point of view—well!"

  Acid rose in Yockerbow's maw. He was minded to utter cruel truths, for she had not truly respected the Order, only envied its members, wanted her spouse to be inducted for the glory of it. He meant to tax her with her ridiculous adoption of crossed strands of sparkleweed in imitation of an admiral's baldrics, seeking petty temporary fame by setting a trend.

  Yet he could not. This last appalling year had altered her. The first signs had already been apparent when she spoke with such authority of the discoveries she had made with Ulgrim. Now she had grown used to being someone other than her old self. In a way not even she could have foreseen, she had fulfilled her ambition and become the admiral's lady.

  Who was this new strange person who confidently claimed to understand the actions of the stars?

  Not his spouse. Not anymore...

  So leave her the luxury of self-deception, that she might the better convince the few who, like her and Barratong, could see beyond the current crisis. For his part, he had information about techniques that would be useful everywhere when folk settled on new lands and needed fresh water drawn from a distance, or irrigation systems, or means to lift a heavy load. Suppose, for instance, there were other creatures than cutinates whose muscles could be isolated and made to grow...

  All of a sudden he felt as though a great burden had been taken from him. His mind cleared. Without his realizing, his life had been spent in the shadow of those allegedly greater than himself. They were nothing of the sort; they were merely more powerful. And the power they wielded was puny compared to Barratong's, yet the admiral was ultimately humble before the marvels of the boundless universe, which—Arranth said— now threatened them with something no Great Fleet, no member of the Jingfired, no person whatsoever could defy: a cloud of stars and interstellar gas that must be burning at temperatures unmatched by any furnace.

  Compared to the cosmos, everyone was equal. Everyone was a bud of this small planet. Either everyone must work together, or in a few score generations there would be no one.

  A flock of cloudcrawlers was passing. He looked up, wondering whether in their serial migration might be sought the secret of survival.

  But he knew too little. Still, he had about half his life before him; there could well be tune to find out what had been discovered or invented on other continents, as well as by the People of the Sea. The most amazing chance could, as he realized, lead to practical results, and whatever chance itself might be, it had already supplied the most important information.

  "The past can communicate with the future," he said aloud. "And we're the past."

  "Yes, of course," said Barratong. "We have to devise gongs and banners in order to signal our successors as the Fleet does. At every port we shall leave copies of the star-maps, ancient and modern; at every port we shall leave ashore folk who, having fled drowned cities, want to start anew on land with foreign knowledge ... We dare not let blind fortune alter the world without hindrance. We too must play our part in changing it. Ulgrim, call a general meet. Today I purpose to divide the Fleet, and the planet."

  X

  The ice's burden lifted swiftly from the northern lands, and new huge rivers carved their course through what had been dry plains. Gigantic floods drowned forests and the creatures living in them; meantime, the ocean-level marked new records every spring. What had been land-bridges turned to open channels; what had been island-chains were strings of shoals.

  But most important of all, the weight of frozen water had held down a necessary, long-impending shift of one continental plate against another. Part of the Great Thaw was due to absorption by the sun of a wisp of interstellar gas which for a brief while had helped to mask its radiation. The local space was temporarily clear now, and extra warmth was piercing the atmosphere because fewer dust-motes were falling from the sky to serve as nuclei around which drops of rain or hailstones might develop, and the long ice-age had inhibited production of natural nuclei due to vegetation or the smoke of wildfire.

  Another reason for the Thaw, however, was to be sought in the conversion of kinetic energy to heat. Around the north pole there were geysers and volcanoes testifying to the presence of magma near the crust. Patient, they had waited out the period during which so monstrous a mass of ice lay over them that all their heat could serve to do was make a glacier slide or melt a summer valley for migrating flighters. The continental plates which powered them, however, were on a different and grander scale. No ice could long have resisted their padlong-per-year progress, and the added solar warmth did no more than hasten what was inevitable.

  The ice-cap shattered in a laq of seizures, each one casting loose a craw of bergs. Lava leaking from far underground met open water and solidified and then was cast high into the air when water turned to steam. Plume followed eruption followed temblor, and at every stage more water streamed back from the arctic plateau to the ocean.

  Somehow the separated Fleets survived, even though their business became, first and foremost, mere survival, and their admiral's vision of immediate salvation was eroded by the giant waves that unpredictably rushed from the north and, later, from the south as well, where there was no such enormous valley as the one which had penned in the Salty Sea to deliver its new water all at once.

  Often overloaded, so they were forced to land unwilling riders on half-sunken islands in the hope at least their mountain peaks might rise above the water when the oceans calmed; often driven off course by storms such as nobody had seen in living memory; often picking their cautious way over what had been a land-mass a scant year or two ago, searching for anything which might be useful, be it edible carrion or a batch of tools and instruments which would float; often rescuing survivors from a sunken city most of whom were starved into dreamness already and having to make the harsh decision that they must be again abandoned, for their sanity was poisoned past all hope of cure; often—once the barriers between the eastern and the western oceans had been breached— confronting herds of wild briqs, savage in a way that junqs had never been and panicked by an amazing explosion of gulletfish, so that they had to reinvent on the basis of legend and guesswork the means to pith a briq, with the minor consolation that if the attempt failed there would at least be food for the folk on board, and the major drawback that the taint of their own land's ichor in the water drove the other briqs frantic with terror; often near despair and redeemed only by messages from another luckier Little Fleet, with an achievement to boast about such as the safe delivery of a group of scholars to an upland refuge...

  The People of the Sea endured the horrors of the Thaw and by miracles preserved the vision Barratong bequeathed to them.

  Meantime, the landsiders moved along the tracks and paths available.

  Confronted by the rising water, they summoned droms and other mounts and loaded them, and struggled up steep mountainsides, collecting useful seeds and spores. Again and again the caravans were overwhelmed by hunger or sickness caught from murrained water, or trapped on a valley path when floods came rushing down. Desperate, some resorted to the use of fresh-water barqs, only to see them wilt and die when salt afflicted their tubules.

  A few, however, found a way to safety, and after cautious negotiation settled on high ground near existing hamlet
s, being eventually made welcome because they had brought new food-plants and, above all, because they offered the chance of fertile first-time matings to communities whose numbers were diminishing.

  Following the caravans, though often having to invent new routes, discontented wandering scholars trudged from town to new town seeking their lost equals, each bearing something of what had been known in a city sunk beneath the waves or lost when a hillside slumped into the sea. Occasionally they borrowed the services of the tramp junqs which, after the dispersal of the Lesser Fleets, traveled in groups of three or four and traded as best they could along inlets of the sea that formerly had been mountain passes or river-valleys. The hegemony of the People of the Sea endured, but the mixing of the landsiders resulted, almost at once, in an explosion of population, for instead of one pairing in several score producing a bud, suddenly five took, or even seven, and wise persons argued about miscegenation, and proper diet, and the influence of privation, and it seemed that most of them must be at least partly correct.

  The sea-level stabilized. Those fortunate astronomers who had access to long-term brightness records for the sun admitted cautiously that it looked as though the extra heat due to infalling matter was over. Those who had preserved their presence of mind during the period of violent quakes, devising means to mark and measure the trembling of the land, noted with satisfaction that it shook only now and then, and hilltops seldom broke loose anymore. Such scientists, when they met them, the People of the Sea declared to be Jingfired, and gave them copies of the ancient star-maps. It was a mere token, for the donors scarcely understood what the maps recorded, yet they were seeds of knowledge, after their fashion. The skies cleared, and there was no longer a gritty stench when the wind blew from the north. Daringly, a few started to maintain that an outburst of volcanic dust had protected life on the planet from the worst effects of increased solar radiation ... but it was at best a guess, lacking evidence.

  When the world settled back to an even keel, explorers set forth once more who employed techniques that once had been the private property of jealous cities: means to signal across vast distances, means to preserve knowledge by multiplying it in countless copies; medicines to cure common illnesses, others to master strange rare disorders; tools for tasks that most people had never dreamed of undertaking; seeds so treated they would yield edible fruit simply by being soaked in salty water when required; vegetable parchments that changed color when light shone on them, which placed at the proper distance from a lens would fix an image; juices and saps which served to bind together plant and rock, or glass and metal; vessels not of wood or hide but melted sand, not exactly glass but stiffer, wherein a fire might safely be lighted on the back of a junq without the creature suffering...

  Tricks and ideas, hints and suggestions, cross-fertilized and bred faster than the population. A means was needed that would match one invention, to be exchanged, against another. After much fierce debate, it was agreed that persons schooled in the desired technique should be the unit, and the surviving Little Fleets should carry them for longer or shorter periods among the folk requesting the new knowledge. By now, however, many of the new cities had their own research groups, not to mention their own miniature Fleets and the system rapidly broke down.

  It made no odds. The time was past when one city might strive for superiority over its neighbors. The impulse was for sharing, because over all of them loomed the threat which they could now read directly from the sky. Even the southmost of the settlements, shielded from all the new stars in the Smoke, accepted it. Beyond a doubt the day would dawn when the folk, in order to survive, must quit their world.

  How, naturally, none yet knew...

  As for the banner junq of the Great Fleet of the Eastern Sea, her last recorded trace was when they brought to Yockerbow, old then and shrunken-mantled, a bundle found among jetsam on what had been the slopes of a mountain inland from Clophical, and now was a steep beach beset by trees. His name was inscribed on it three times. The finders located him without trouble; he was famous, because he had become the lord and leader of a scientific community not quite like what he, Barratong and Arranth had envisaged, but near enough. Scholars flocked to him from every land, and new discoveries and new inventions flooded out as water had poured forth when the ice-wall broke and loosed the Salty Sea.

  "Here is," he said when he had opened the bundle—with assistance, for his pressure was now weak—"the original glass tube which held the ancient star-maps. I wonder what happened to the maps themselves. Not that it matters; we've found other better copies. What map, though, could show me where to find my lost lady Arranth? What chart could guide me to my old friend Barratong? ... Oh, take this thing to the museum, will you? I have much work to do, and little time."

  PART FOUR

  BREAKING

  THE MOLD

  I

  Few communities on the planet were more isolated than the settlement at Neesos, a dark-and-a-bright's swim from the mainland. Once the island had been linked to it by a narrow isthmus passable even at high tide, but the Great Thaw had drowned that along with most of its fertile land, and for scores of years it was visited solely by fisherfolk riding kyqs with their trained gorborangs perched on the saddle-branches like dull red fruit. There were still sandbanks, though, and tradition held that in the past such sand had furnished excellent glass. A certain Agnis eventually made an expedition thither and, finding the tale correct, set about producing magnifiers.

  However, he did so at a time when a chillward shift in the weather had led to a revival of religion. Made hungry by the failure of staple crops, the folk were as ever victimized by those who, by starving themselves voluntarily, claimed to obtain visions of a higher reality. In truth, so Agnis charged, what they craved was power over others, and they hoped to gain it by preventing the public from directly consulting the Jingtexts, wherein might be sought solutions to all worldly woes ... not, naturally, that every humble person might aspire to read the ancient teachings without guidance, for they were couched in archaic symbols, a far cry from the crisp and simple script used for modern messages, and the speech itself had changed almost beyond recognition.

  This did not content the relidges, eager as they were to draw down everybody to that mental level where reason was indistinguishable from dreamness. Sight was the first mode of perception to be diminished by famine, as weather-sense was the last, but it was in vain for Agnis to argue that by providing artificial aid he was encouraging the spiritual advancement of the folk. The relidges countered by saying it made them more vulnerable to the rationalist writings now being distributed in countless copies thanks to the invention, by some foreigner beyond the horizon, of a vegetable which could be made to ooze blackish stains on a dry absorbent leaf in exact imitation of any mark inscribed on its rind.

  Images had long been fixable, at least in one color; soon, it was claimed, means would be found to reproduce them as well.

  Despairing, Agnis gathered his family and a few supporters and made for Neesos with the town's entire stock of burnable wood. The cool phase of the climatic shift, far from enough to reinitiate the Northern Freeze, did not prevent the sky being bright over this region for almost half the year, and when the sun was up its rays could be focused. Using his pilfered fuel, Agnis cast a giant mirror and with it melted colossal quantities of sand. This served to fabricate spyglasses of outstanding quality, such as lured not only fisherfolk but even the all-powerful People of the Sea. Shortly his village was better off than the town its inhabitants had quit, since the latter had little left worth trading for.

  Sometimes the settlers found relics of the far past in the shallow waters around Neesos, and they too served for trading purposes, mysterious though their nature might be to the modern mind. In consequence, it was into a community more prosperous than its isolation might have suggested that Tenthag—half a score of generations in direct succession from Agnis himself—was budded in the year called Two-red-stars-turn-blue.

>   But the community was so small that the People of the Sea were rarely able to trade what they most wanted and needed at Neesos: stock with which to cross-breed themselves. They had sampled every genetic line on the island, and every line, in turn, was already spiked with some of the travelers' ichor.

  Long-lived, reasonably content, the folk of Neesos were resigned to budding being rare. It was not until three quarter-score of years had slipped away that they began to notice:

  There has been no new bud since Tenthag.

  As soon as they realized he was "special" the folk of Neesos started to pamper the boy, which he found no fun at all, for it meant he was forever being prohibited from doing the things the other young'uns enjoyed. The old'uns said "protected," but it amounted to the same boring thing.

  Yet his slightly older companions were contemptuous of his youth, and very shortly there was only one left for him to play with. The rest had gone on to the pretence of being grown-up, although their matings led to no offspring. Tenthag wished achingly that they would, to release him from his confinement in a web of concern.

  Still, his father Ninthag was a perennial optimist and, despite the pleas of Sixthon who had budded Tenthag for him and never childed with anybody else, he was happy to turn a blind eye when his son did what in olden times all young'uns were accustomed to—go swimming out of storm-season on the northern coast—along with Fifthorch, who was next-to-youngest.

  Here there were beaches sown with rocks defining the trace of what had been Prefs, the port serving crag-beset Thenai in the days before the water-level rose a score of padlongs. Great ocean-going briqs and junqs had unloaded here, revealing marvels brought from half the world away, and sometimes odd bits and pieces that had proved unsalable had been tossed overside before the fleets returned to sea. Young'uns sought for them, trapping as much air as possible beneath their mantles before they dived, in the hope of retrieving artifacts intact. But that had been in the old days. Now only scraps were to be found, at least at any level they could reach.