The Crucible of Time

by John Brunner

  The meeting had assembled before sundown. Darkness overtook it while Awb was still answering questions. Suddenly Thilling noticed that something was distracting the crowd, and everyone was glancing upward. Copying their example, she realized why. There was a small yellow comet in the sky, but that was commonplace; what had drawn their gaze was a meteor storm, a horde of bright brief streaks coming by scores at a time.

  She thought for a moment about challenging Awb to deny that that was a reminder of the doom the planet faced, another promise of the dense gas-cloud the sun was drifting towards. But she lacked the courage.

  She remained meekly where she was until he was done, and then— equally meekly—made her way towards him, surrounded by a gaggle of his admirers. Most were young she'uns, doubtless hoping for a bud from so famous a teacher.

  In old age her own sterility had become a source of gall to Thilling; she strove not to let it prey on her pith.

  There was little chance, though, of actually reaching Awb in this small but dense throng, for everyone was respectfully lowering as they clustered about him, leaving no gaps for passage. Hating to make herself conspicuous, but seeing no alternative, she did the opposite and erected to full height ... such as it was at her age.

  "Awb, it's Thilling! Do you remember me? We used to know each other many years ago!"

  There was a startled pause, and all eyes turned on her. A whiff of hostility reached her—how dare this old'un claim acquaintance with the master? But then Awb replied, in a gruffer and lower voice than when addressing the crowd.

  "I remember you. Wait until the rest have gone."

  And he dismissed them with gentle shooing motions of his mantle. Disappointed but compliant, they wandered off.

  When they were alone but for two thick-set individuals who appeared to be his permanent attendants, his age-dimmed eye surveyed her from crest to pad.

  "Oh, yes. It is the same Thilling in spite of the time that's passed. Your voice has changed, but so has mine, I imagine ... Tell me, are you still subject to your delusion about being able to recruit people to the Jingfired?"

  Delusion?

  For an instant Thilling, who had devoted her entire life to the cause she regarded as the greatest in history, wished she might hurl herself bodily at him, shred his mantle with claws and mandibles before his companions could prevent her. But she conquered the impulse, as she had overcome so many before, and a gust of wind dispersed her betraying anger-stink.

  With careful effort she said, "Why do you call it a delusion?"

  He stiffened back, again examining her curiously. "Hmm! Persistent, I gather! Well, if you've come for help, I might perhaps—"

  "You haven't answered my question. As once, long ago, you failed to answer another."

  Missing the allusion, he countered, "Does it really call for an answer? But for the sake of an old friendship, I'll offer one."

  Friendship? Is that what he calls it now? When he begged to be made my apprentice, and ran away as soon as he knew his budder was dead and couldn't plague him anymore?

  But Thilling feigned composure in spite of all.

  "How life has treated you, I'm unaware, though I suspect unkindly. For myself, I've forced it to treat me well, with the result that I'm now acquainted with the Councils of the Jingflred in every city on every continent and every ocean. They send embassies to me seeking advice and guidance, they anxiously await the appearance of Voosla on the horizon, they take my words and convert them into action—with what advantages to all, you may observe." A large gesture to indicate the globe. "Not one of those people has ever mentioned you. But don't worry. I've kept your affliction secret for the most part, though I confess I may now and then have referred to it during some of my lectures, purely as an illustrative example, you understand."

  Everything came clear to Thilling on the instant. Of course! He had confused her with Byra ... Her voice level, she said, "I take it you have studied Jinglore, then?"

  "To some extent"—in an offclaw tone. "It does furnish a store of poetic metaphors and images, which may help us the better to understand our experience of dreamness. But that's all."

  "I regret to say you're wrong. Just as wrong as you are about my so-called 'delusion.' " She moved so close that, had she been a total stranger, the trespass on his private space would have been an insult, and continued before the bodyguards could intervene.

  "How would your followers react to the news that you who preach the need for perfect relationships rejoiced at your budder's death, or to being told how you broke your apprentice's pledge? Or to learning how you, who boast of saving the sanity of others, have become so senile as to confuse me with Byra, may she rest in peace? She too was silly enough to assume that city-bosses who call themselves Jingfired actually are so. But they're not. If your memory isn't totally wrecked, if you have any shred of conscience left, you'll recall my telling you when you pleaded to become my apprentice that it's no use trying to guess who the Jingfired actually are. You have to know."

  After that she fully expected the bodyguards to close on her and drag her away. But they hesitated; an aura of uncertainty was exuding from their master.

  At long last he said, not looking at her, but towards the sky where the rain of meteors had now redoubled, "So it's come to this. A voice has spoken from my past which I can neither challenge nor deny."

  Hope leapt up in her pith. For an instant she thought she had already won.

  But the hope was dashed when he relaxed with a sigh, and continued: "Such a long-lasting and intractable psychosis is probably beyond even my methods, which normally prove so successful. Still, for old friendship's sake I can at least attempt to show you where you went astray."

  He added to the attendants, "Scholar Thilling will be my guest at dinner. Apologize to those who have prior claims on my time, but meeting someone from one's younghood is a rare event. And perhaps good may come of it in the long run."

  X

  If there was one thing Thilling could reluctantly admire about Awb now, it was his skill in keeping up appearances. He closed the gap between them and by embracing her contrived to transfer some of the pheromone-masking perfumes he wore on his torso, leaving the bodyguards confused.

  Then he led her along the branchways to a bower where the city's finest foods were lovingly tended by experts who—so he told her— claimed to inherit their knowledge from someone who had studied under Gveest.

  But if he expected to impress her by boasting, he was wrong. Nothing could more have firmed her determination than this display of the luxury Awb had attained through corrupting the minds of the younger generation. Had she not needed food to power the argument she foresaw as inescapable, she would have voiced her contempt of his tactics; as it was, she resignedly filled her maw and, confident that even yet he would never have been trained in the Jingfired's techniques of dark-use, waited until he chose to speak again.

  Eventually, replete, he let himself slump on his branch and said, "So you thought you could threaten me by raking up my past, did you? That must be because you envy the course my life has taken."

  "On the contrary!" she snapped. "Thanks to the images I made on that dam banked with yellow mud, I went on to share in some of the most notable discoveries of this or any age. Have you no faintest notion what marvels lie in the secret pith of matter? Because of my skills, I was close at claw when Eupril first separated the heavy elements which break up of their own accord. I was there when Lesh—"

  "It hasn't made amends for being sterile," he cut in.

  "Oh, because it was an obsession with Phrallet you think everything can be reduced to whether or not one has budded!" retorted Thilling. "Let me remind you—"

  He raised a claw. "If you're going to quote Jinglore at me, be warned that others have tried without effect."

  "I have no intention of it. I was about to say that in your attempts to atone for hating Phrallet, you saw no alternative but to outdo Jing and Yockerbow and Tenthag and the other heroes of
the past. You're not equipped to."

  Awb had had much practice at appearing resignedly wise. Adopting the appropriate expression, he said, "If each age is to surpass its forepadders, then some individual must respond to its unique and particular challenge. In the present epoch ... Well, you see the truth all around you."

  "In other words, you think that your success in turning people inward upon themselves, making them preoccupied with their personal motives and reactions, is the response best fitted to the plight we find ourselves in?"

  Awb curled his mantle into a patronizing smile.

  "Very interesting," Thilling murmured, resorting to the ultimate line of attack which the Jingfired had prepared for her. "This fits superbly with Yegbrot's studies of the effect of radioactivity on nerve-pith, which demonstrate how even temporary exposure can derange the system."

  She refrained from mentioning how much she hated Yegbrot's ruthlessness, which stemmed directly from Phrallet's original proposal. If only Awb had chosen to attack the fact that nowadays psychologists were using experimental subjects deliberately rendered mindless by pithing...

  In the act of reaching for a fresh and succulent fungus he checked and twisted towards her, glaring. "How dare you accuse me of being insane?"

  A breakthrough!

  "But I didn't. My mission is merely to establish whether your regrettably successful attempt to distract the best of our young'uns from the branchway that alone can lead to the survival of our species is due to perversity or injury. I now conclude the latter. So you're not to blame."

  Recovering, he chuckled. "You're a classic case of the type I so often invoke in lectures: a sterile she'un determined to project a surrogate immortality on the rest of us because she can't produce her own buds. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is. And there are many who would pay handsomely for so accurate a diagnosis from Scholar Awb!"

  "Yet you sense my authority, don't you?" she countered. "Despite smearing me with that repulsive muck you wear!"

  He clattered his mandibles in amusement. "The more you say, the more you support my theory that people like you at some stage lost the ability to distinguish input due to the real world from what stems out of imagination and hence ultimately dreamness. How I wish I had a way to transcribe this conversation! It would confirm—"

  "You'd like a recordimal, you mean."

  "Well, out of courtesy I didn't bring one along, but if you'd permit it, certainly I—"

  "Do you know who invented the recordimal?"

  "No, I don't believe I was ever told," he answered, taking care as usual to protect his ego by not admitting he might have forgotten. "Who?"

  "I was at her side during its development. Byra! With whom you won't stop confusing me!"

  "That," Awb murmured, "must be because if anyone out of our group at the observatory had devised such a useful tool, I'd have expected it to be you. Sure you aren't being modest?" He settled down with the comfortable air of one who, having turned a neat compliment, was expecting to be paid in kind.

  But she reacted otherwise, sure now of her ascendancy.

  "Once I hoped you'd find the answer to a question I never put to you. I was hoping you might say of your own accord what I once said, like all the Jingfired—the true Jingfired!—and declare that you wanted to devote your life to ensuring that we can overcome the worst the universe can throw at us. Don't interrupt!"—as he showed signs of doing so. "I know what answer you'd give now, and it's the same you'd have given then, had you been honest enough. In your own words, you're a classic case. Yegbrot could tell me to a fraction of a clawide where particles of stumpium and sluggium have settled in your pith. But the real damage had been done already. Lesh died, Eupril died, Byra died, but to the last they fought to understand why, and to save others from the same fate! Whereas you've given up, for the sake of making over countless scores of young'uns into worshipers of Awb!"

  By mustering her resources of contempt-stink, she had finally made an impression on him. He said at length, "But you seem to be claiming that I'm responsible for what Phrallet suggested. At that time, though, I was sick and mindless, remember. And I detest the cost of our recent advances in chemistry and medicine! Of course, I suppose you make out that the benefits outweigh—"

  "I do not! What would we have lost if we hadn't kidnapped the natives and experimented on them? Half-a-score years at worst, until we could duplicate isolated cells, create synthetic ichor, grow pith in isolation the way we grow nervograps! But if we'd done that, you'd be dead, wouldn't you? You'd have missed your chance to scorn my friends who've invented intercontinental nervograps and freight-pitchens and recordimals and now are set to outdo floaters by attaining controlled atmospheric flight, a first pad-mark on the road to space! By all their work, you're as unimpressed as by a pebble on a pathway!"

  Breathing hard, she subsided, wondering whether what she had said had registered, or whether the terrible metal from the accidental stumpium pile at the river-dam had lodged in too many crucial junctions of his nerve-pith.

  And also how many of his followers, when they inveighed against fumes and furnaces, were doing so because they had reason on their side rather than because the very metals that experimenters now were working with had deformed their thoughts.

  Her own as well...?

  The possibility was too fearful to think about. She shut it resolutely away.

  Her weather-sense was signaling danger, but she put it down to feedback from the reek of tension she and Awb were generating, about which other clients of the food-bower had started to complain. At their insistence, the roof of leaves was being folded back. Perhaps, Thilling thought, she might exploit the incontrovertible reality of the sky to make Awb see sense ... but discovered, even as she glanced upward, that that hope too was vain.

  Across the welkin slashed a giant ball of light: vast, eye-searing, shedding lesser streaks on its way to—where? The Worldround Ocean, with a little luck, rather than dry land. Yet even there—!

  Oh, so much like what the astronomers had predicted from the images she had fixed on sheet after sensitive sheet!

  Preserving her pride to the last, she rose while Awb—the poor vainglorious victim of a chance mishap, who had been poisoned in his mind before he was poisoned in his pith, yet whom the future would not forgive for contaminating a later generation with his falsehoods—was still struggling to deny the reality of this event.

  "The real world has one resource our minds do not," said Thilling loudly and clearly. "It can always chasten us with a discovery we couldn't plan for, like the exploding atoms which spoiled the leaves you brought me from the dam—remember? Well, now it's curing us of arrogance again. This is a tenet of the Jingfired, Awb: not the shabby shams whom you're so proud to know, who usurp the name in cities round the world, but us, the secret ones, who work and slave and hope and always seem to find a fool like you to block our way—"

  She got that far, thanks to her greater skill in dark-use, before the noise arrived: a terrible noise such as must last have been heard when the ice packs broke up after the Great Thaw, worse than the worst growling of a pack of snowbelongs when they crawled into lonely settlements in search of folk to feed their broodmass.

  Already the officers of Voosla were issuing orders: cut loose from shore and who cares if we kill our musculators, get into open water at all costs and stay afloat, signal the giqs and hope to pick them up while we're under way...

  It was all well and correctly done, and Axwep, had she survived, would have been proud, and even Phrallet—so thought Thilling in the grayness of uncalled-for memory—might have relented in her constant criticism.

  But it was too late. Like her errand to Awb, it was far too late.

  The meteor outmassed a score of Vooslas. It boiled and smashed the ocean all at once, and raised a giant wall of water round its impact point that nearly but not quite outraced the sound of its arrival. Every coast that fringed the ocean shattered under the rock-hard water-hammer; Voosla herself was c
arried screaming far inland in a catastrophic shambles of plants and people, which for a crazy instant made Thilling think of what it must be like to fly...

  "Comet! Comet!" she heard, and moaned, "Fools!" with the last pressure in her body before the blast exploded her.

  Speech ended. Thought endured longer, enough for her to think: Had it not been for Awb ... No, that's unfair. When we escape to space those like him, poisoned by no fault of their own, must still be a part of us, because who can say what other poisons await us out there...?

  Not Thilling; she dissolved into the dark, while steam and dust and shreds of what had been the folk and all they cherished set off on their stratospheric journey round the globe.

  It was to last more than a score of years.

  PART SIX

  HAMMER

  AND

  ANVIL

  I

  "Your business?" said the house in a tone as frosty as a polar winter. Then followed a dull and reflex hiss as its vocalizing bladders automatically refilled.

  At first Chybee was too startled to respond. This magnificent home had overwhelmed her even as she approached: its towering crest, its ramifying branches garlanded with countless luminants, its far-spread webs designed to protect the occupants against wingets and add their minuscule contribution to the pool of organic matter at its roots, cleverly programmed to withdraw before a visitor so that they would not be torn— all, all reflected such luxury as far surpassed her youthful experience.

  But then her whole trip to and through this incredible city had been a revelation. She had heard about, had seen pictures of, the metropolis of Slah, and met travelers whom business or curiosity had lured hither. Nothing, though, had prepared her for the reality of her first-ever transcontinental flight, or the jobs she had been obliged to undertake to pay her way, constantly terrified that they would make her too late. No description could have matched the sensation of being carried pell-mell amid treetops by the scampering inverted fury of a dolmusq, with its eighteen tentacles snatching at whatever support was offered and its body straining under the weight of two-score passengers. Nor could anyone have conveyed to her the combined impact of the crowds, the noise, and the universal stench compound of pheromones, smoke from the industrial area to the west, and the reek of all the material that must go to rot in order to support the homes and food-plants of this most gigantic of cities. Never in all of history had there been one to match it, neither by land nor by sea—likely, not even in the age of legend.