The Crucible of Time

by John Brunner

  Despite its multiplying marvels, though, which rendered public notice-slabs essential—announcing everything from goods for trade through new discoveries seeking application to appeals for volunteer assistance— there was a taint in Bowock's air, an exudate of anxiety verging on alarm. It was known that scores-of-scores-of-scores of years remained before the ultimate crisis, and few doubted their species' ability to find a means of escape, were they granted sufficient time.

  In principle, they should be. Disease was almost unknown here and in other wealthy lands; crop-blights and murrains were held in check; everyone had food adequate to ensure rational thinking; maggors and wivvils and slugs were controlled by their own natural parasites—oh, the achievements of the Bowockers were astonishing!

  But Nemora had not taken his bud, or anyone's. His first frightened question, so long ago, so far away, on the dark beach of Neesos, was one which everybody now was asking. Indeed, it had been Nemora's commendation of his instant insight which had secured him his appointment as a courier-to-be.

  Hence his excitement at the challenging future he could look forward to was tempered by the sad gray shadow of a nearer doom. He tried to lose himself in training and caring for the porp assigned to him, modestly named Flapper, but even as he carried out his first solo missions—which should have been the high point of his life so far—he was constantly worrying about the folk he had left behind on Neesos, condemned to grow old and die without a single youngling to follow them.

  He felt a little like a traitor.

  "It is Neesos that you hail from, isn't it?" said the harsh familiar voice of Dippid, doyen of the couriers.

  Tenthag glanced round. He was in the pleasant, cool, green-lit arbor of the porp pens, formed by a maze of root-stalks where the city's trees spanned the estuary of a little river. Porps became docile automatically in fresh water, a fact first observed at Bowock when one of them was driven hither from the open sea for an entirely different purpose, and between voyages they had to be carefully retained.

  Alert at mention of his home, he dared to hope for a moment that he was to be sent back there. Giving Flapper a final caress, he swarmed up the nearest root-stalk to confront Dippid ... who promptly dashed the notion.

  "The stuff that Nemora brought back from the trip when she met you: it seems to have borne fruit. You know about the work that Scholar Gveest is doing?"

  Tenthag scoured his pith, and memory answered. "Oh! Not much, I'm afraid——just that he's making some highly promising studies on a lonely island. It's an example of information, trade in which has not been maximized," he added, daring.

  But it was a stock joke, and Dippid acknowledged it with a gruff chuckle.

  "People's hopes must not be inflated prematurely," was his sententious answer. "But ... Well, we've had a message from him. He believes he's on the verge of a breakthrough. What he needs, though, is someone from Neesos to calibrate his tests against."

  "Why? What sort of tests?"

  "You know what it was that they recovered from the sea-bed at Prefs?"

  "I'm not sure I do. I—ah—always got the impression I was supposed not to inquire. Even Nemora was elusive when I asked about it. So..."

  Dippid squeezed a sigh. "Yes, you judged correctly. I sometimes wish I didn't know what Gveest is working on, because if he fails, who can succeed? But enough of that." He drew himself up to a formal stance.

  "Here's your commission from the Council of the Jingfired, boy. You're to make with all speed for the island Ognorit, and put yourself at Gveest's entire disposal."

  "Did you say Ognorit?"

  "I did indeed. What of it?"

  "But that's south of the equator, isn't it—part of the Lugomannic Archipelago?"

  "You've learned your geography well!"—with irony. "But I've never been into the southern hemisphere before!" "There's a first time for everything," Dippid snapped, and clacked his mandibles impatiently. "And if what Gveest is doing turns out wrong, it would be a great advantage to have the equatorial gales between us and Ognorit! Don't ask what I mean by that. Just put to sea. You'll find out soon enough."

  It was by far the longest voyage Tenthag had undertaken, and he often wished that Flapper were as swift as Scudder. But each bright-time she pursued her steady way, and each dark she fed and gathered strength anew. She might not be particularly quick, but she was trustworthy, and never turned aside, not even when all her instincts tempted her to run off with a school of wild'uns, or follow a sharq's trail of murder across a shoal of errinq, or flee from the suspected presence of a feroq, the traditional enemy of porps. Little by little he was able to relax.

  Cronthid went by, and Hegu, and Southmost Cape, and another day saw them entering the Worldround Ocean, that huge sea where currents flowed around the planet uninterrupted by continental masses. Once it had been different; the Great Thaw had altered everything. Tenthag watched the patterns in the sky change as they drove south, and felt in his inmost tubules, for the first time, that he did truly live on a vast globe adrift in space.

  He had to apply all his navigational skills to the correction of Flapper's course; her impulse was to follow odor-patterns and temperature-gradients. He was obliged to ply his goad more often than he liked, but she responded, though she grew a trifle sullen.

  Stars he had never seen were their guide now. But he had been well taught, and felt relieved to find his instructors' maps reflected in reality.

  Islands loomed and faded, but he ignored them save to check his calculations. Then came a major problem: rafts of rotting weed, each alive with its own population of wild creatures, and uttering pestilential swarms of mustiqs. Someone had forgotten to advise him that it was the southern breeding-season ... though, of course, he should in principle have known. Itching, swollen, worried by the way they clustered on Flapper's mantle, he was overjoyed when he raised a squadron of free junqs belonging to the People of the Sea. They were much less pleased than he by the encounter, for they regarded the Bowocker courier service as having cheated them of their ancestral rights; for scores-of-scores of years it had been their sole prerogative to trade in information, ever since the days of the Greatest Fleet created by Admiral Barratong.

  Tenthag, though, was empowered to issue certain credits redeemable at Bowock and its allied cities, and some of them ensured the chance of pairing. Like every other branch of the folk, the People of the Sea were growing frightened at the fewness of their buddings, so he was able to convince them to part with a couple of spuderlets. Within half a day Flapper was protected from prow to tail by a dense and sticky web, and so was he; it made life easier to watch the baffled mustiqs fidget and struggle in their death-throes. Also they were a useful adjunct to his stock of yelg, and rather tasty.

  Then came a storm.

  It blew and poured and pelted down for a dark and a bright and a dark, and when it cleared Tenthag was more scared than ever he had been in his young life. He had clung to Flapper—who seemed almost to exult in the violence of the waves—and his stores were safe under her saddle and the spuderlets had made themselves a shelter out of their own web-stuff, and all seemed properly in order but for one crucial point:

  Where had the tempest driven them?

  There were islands low on the horizon when dawn broke. It was self-insulting for a courier to ask the way, but there seemed to be no alternative. He goaded Flapper towards a cluster of small barqs putting to sea under the wan morning sky, their riders trailing lines and nets for fish.

  When he hailed them, they said, "Ognorit? Why, it's half a day's swim due south!"

  Half a day? The storm had done him favors, then! Even the fabled Scudder—growing old now—could have brought Nemora to this spot no quicker!

  He was already preening when his porp rushed into a narrow bay between two rocky headlands, and an old, coarse-mantled figure padded into the shallows to shout at him.

  "You'll be the courier from Neesos that I asked for! It's amazing that you're here so soon—though I suppo
se you actually started from Bowock, didn't you? Welcome, anyway! Come ashore! I'm Scholar Gveest, in case you need a name to tell me apart from all the animals!"

  IV

  The meaning of that cryptic statement was brought home to Tenthag as soon as he had set Flapper to browse—a duty he discharged meticulously despite Gveest's obvious impatience.

  Then, heading inland in the scholar's pad-marks, he found himself assailed by hordes of wild creatures. Some leapt; some slithered; some sidled; some moved with sucking sounds as they adhered and freed themselves. Gveest was not afraid of them, and therefore Tenthag was not. But what could they possibly be?

  Abruptly he caught on. He recognized them, or at any rate the majority; it was just that he had never seen more than one or two of them before in the same place. Whoever heard of six vulps in a group, or nine snaqs, or a good half-score of jenneqs, or such an uncountable gang of glepperts?

  His tubules throbbed with astonishment. Whatever Gveest was doing, it had resulted in a most amazing change of these species' usual habits!

  And the house he was taken to, on a crest dominating the whole of the island, reflected the same luxuriance. There were trees and food-plants massed together in quantities that would not have shamed Bowock itself, or any rich city in the north. Suddenly reacting to hunger despite his intake of yelg and mustiqs, Tenthag could not help signaling the fact, and Gveest invited him to eat his fill.

  "Be careful, though," he warned. "Some of the funqi in particular may be rotten."

  Edible food, left to rot? It was incredible! Was Gveest here alone? No, that couldn't be the explanation; here came two, three, five other people whose names he barely registered as he crammed his maw.

  Belatedly he realized that his journey had made him sufficiently undernourished to exhibit bad manners, and he quit gobbling in embarrassment, but Gveest and his companions reacted with courteous tolerance.

  "You got here with such speed," the scholar said, "we can't begrudge recuperation time. My colleague Dvish, the archaeologist, informed me that the courier who brought away his precious discoveries from Neesos also surprised his party. The efficiency of the Guild remains admirable."

  Though as soon as they learn to string nervograps from continent to continent, and convey images along them...

  Tenthag clawed back the thought. It was bitter for him to admit that, in his amazement at the greater world, he had committed his life to what might shortly become an obsolescent relic of the past. But pretense was useless when dealing with a weather-sense as keen as Gveest's; the scholar must be a match for Nemora, for he was going on, "And despite your worries, there will be need for courier-service for a long, long while. Regardless of the principle of maximizing trade in knowledge, some things are too fraught with implications to be turned loose ... yet. That's why you're here."

  Confused, Tenthag said, "I expected to bear away news of some great discovery you've made!"

  The party surrounding Gveest exchanged glances. At length one of them—a woman, whose name he faintly recalled as Pletrow—said, "It's not what you're to take away that matters right now. It's what you brought!"

  "But I brought nothing but myself!"

  "Exactly."

  After a pause for reflection, Tenthag still found no sense in the remark. Moreover she, or someone, was exuding a hint of patronizingness, which in his still-fatigued condition was intolerable. He rose to full height.

  "I am obliged to remind you," he forced out, "that a courier is not obliged to wait around on anyone's convenience. Unless you have data in urgent need of transmission—"

  "We sent for you not because you're a courier but because you're from Neesos!" Ill-tempered, Pletrow strove to overtop him, and nearly made it. The air suddenly reeked of combat-stink.

  "Calm!" Gveest roared. "Calm, and let me finish!"

  Always there was this sense of being on the verge of calamity, and for no sound reason ... In past times, so it was taught, only male-and-male came into conflict; Pletrow's exudations, though, were as fierce as any Tenthag had encountered. But a timely breeze bore the stench away.

  "We had expected," Gveest said in an apologetic tone, "that any courier sent here would be fully briefed about our work."

  "Even the chief courier told me he wished he didn't know about it," Tenthag retorted. "So I didn't inquire!"

  "Then you'd better make yourself comfortable, for when I explain you'll have a shock. The rest of you, too," Gveest added, and his companions swarmed to nearby branches, leaving a place of honor to Tenthag at the center.

  Lapsing into what, by the way he fitted it, must be his own favorite crotch, the scholar looked musingly at the patches of sky showing between the tangled upper stems of his house. The fisherfolk's estimate of half a day's swim had been based on the southern meaning of "day"— one dark plus one bright—and the sun had set about the time Tenthag came ashore. Clouds were gathering, portending another storm, but as yet many stars were to be seen, and some were falling.

  "Are you surprised to find so many animals here?"

  "Ah ... At first I was. I wondered how this island could support so many. But now I've seen how much food you have—some of it even going bad—I imagine it's all the result of your research, on plants as well as animals."

  "You're quite correct. It seemed essential to improve the food-supply before—" Gveest checked suddenly. "Ah, I should have asked you first: do you know what Dvish recovered from the underwater site at Prefs?"

  "The people who dived there wanted too much for the information," Tenthag answered sourly. "And since I joined the Guild the Order of the Jingfired have decreed it a restricted question."

  "Hmm! Well, I suppose they have their reasons, but I for one don't accept them, so I'll tell you. During the years prior to the Great Thaw, the people there—presumably having noticed that ice could preserve food for a long time against rotting—became sufficiently starved to imagine that living creatures, including the folk, could also be preserved and, at some future time, perhaps resurrected. Nonsense, of course! But they were so deranged, even after the Thaw began, they went right on trying to find ways of insuring a dead body against decomposition. And one of their late techniques, if it didn't work for a whole body, did work for individual cells. We found a mated pair, sealed so tightly against air and water that we were able to extract—You know what I mean by cells?"

  "Why, of course! The little creatures that circulate in our ichor and can be seen under a microscope!"

  "Ah, yes—your people make good magnifiers, don't they? Good, that saves another lengthy exposition ... Excuse me; it's been so long since I talked to anyone not already familiar with our work." Gveest drew himself inward, not upward, into a mode of extreme concentration. Frowning from edge to edge of his mantle, he continued, "But that's only one kind of cell. Our entire tissue is composed of them. And even they are composed of still smaller organisms. And, like everything else, they're subject to change."

  This was so opposed to what he had learned as a child, Tenthag found himself holding his pulsation with the effort of paying attention.

  "And the same is true of all the creatures on the planet, that we've so far studied. Above all, there was one enormous change, which judging by the fossil record—You know what I mean by fossils?"

  There had been few at Neesos, but other couriers had carried examples around the globe, including, now Tenthag thought of it, some from this very island. He nodded.

  "Good. As I was about to say: there was one gigantic change, apparently around the time of the outburst of the New Star, which affected all creatures everywhere. We came to Ognorit because it's one of the few peaks of the pre-Thaw continents where many relics of lost animals can be dug up. Better still, some local species endured and adapted. They offer proof that we're descended from primitive life-forms. Marooned on islands like this one, creatures recognizable in basic form on the continents are changing almost as we watch, in order to fill niches in the ecology which were vacated by ot
her species killed off by the Freeze or the Thaw. We mainly haven't changed because, thanks to the People of the Sea, we were protected against the worst effect of those disasters. But even though we don't know how some event far off in the void of space can affect our very bodies, something evidently did. There was a brief period when we were multiplying rapidly, owing to the miscegenation which the Thaw engendered. It served to disguise a terrible underlying truth, but now there's no more hope of fooling ourselves. We are afraid— aren't we?—that we may die out."

  Hearing it put in such blunt terms, Tenthag could not prevent himself from shrinking.

  Rising, starting to pad back and forth like Nemora on that distant beach at Neesos, the scholar continued with a wry twist of his mantle.

  "Yet for a species that has the power to reason about a doom written in the stars, it's an unjust fate! Have we not thought—not dreamed, but reasoned—about surviving even if our planet goes to fuel a star? Have we not contemplated that destiny since the legendary days of Jing and Rainbow? That's what drove me here to work on my theory ... which, I hope against hope, has proved to be valid."

  Calm again, Pletrow said, "You're right, if anybody can be absolutely right in this chaotic universe."

  "Thank you for that reassurance. But we must clarify our reason for demanding samples of a Neesan mantle."

  "Mine?" Tenthag could achieve no more than a squeak.

  "Yes, Master Courier: yours. It is imperative." Gveest turned half-aside, as if ashamed, although his exudates continued to signal arrogant self-confidence. "You are of the only stock on the planet isolated enough to let us make the comparisons necessary if we are to advance our success with lower animals and improve the reproduction of our own kind. We must know exactly what sort of changes have taken place, because we intend to reverse them."