THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME

John Brunner

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FOREWORD

It is becoming more and more widely accepted that Ice Ages coincide with the passage of the Solar System through the spiral arms of our galaxy. It therefore occurred to me to wonder what would become of a species that evolved intelligence just before their planet’s transit of a gas-cloud far denser than the one in Orion which the Earth has recently—in cosmic terms—traversed.

In my attempt to invent its history I have frequently relied on the advice of Mr. Ian Ridpath, whose prompt and generous aid I gratefully acknowledge.

—JKHB

PROLOGUE

In the center of the huge rotating artificial globe the folk assembled to await retelling of an age-old story.

Before them swam a blur of light. Around them was a waft of pheromones. Then sound began, and images took form.

A sun bloomed, with its retinue of planets, moons and comets. One was the budworld. Slowly—yet how much more swiftly than in the real past!—a wild planet curved out of space towards what had once been their race’s home.

“If only they had known …!” somebody murmured.

“But they did not!” the instructor stressed. “Remember that, throughout the whole of what you are to watch! You are not here to pity them, but to admire!”

PART ONE

THE FIRE
IS LIT

I

Now the sun was down, the barq was growing tired. The current opposing her was swift, and there was a real risk she might be driven against the rocks that beset the channel and puncture her gas-bladders. After countless attempts to sting her into more vigorous activity, the steersman laid by his goad and grumpily tipped into her maw the last barrelful of the fermented fish and seaweed which served to nourish boat, crew and passengers alike. Waiting for the belch that would signal its digestion, he noticed Jing watching from her saddle of lashed planks, as anxious as though his weather-sense were predicting storms, and laughed.

“You won’t be a-dream before we get where we’re bound!” he promised in the coarse northern speech which the foreigner had scarcely yet attuned his hearing to.

It was hard to realize there was anywhere worth traveling to in this barren landscape. Most of the time the shore was veiled with rags of fog, because the water was so much warmer than the air. What a place to choose for studying the sky! Even though, with the sun setting so much earlier every day, it was possible to believe in the legend which had lured him hither: a night that lasted almost half a year. Not that there could ever be total darkness; here, as everywhere, the Bridge of Heaven—what these northerners called the Maker’s Sling—curved in its gleaming arc across the welkin. And, near the horizon, less familiar and altogether awe-inspiring, the New Star was framed in its irregular square of utter black like a jewel on a pad of swart-fun.

But neither that celestial mystery, nor the prospect of going hungry, was what preyed most on the mind of Ayi-Huat Jing, court astrologer and envoy plenipotentiary of His Most Puissant Majesty Waw-Yint, Lord of the Five-Score Islands of Ntah. Compelled by his sworn oath, a whole miserable year ago he had set forth in state, riding the finest mount in his master’s herd and accompanied by forty prongsmen and ten banners inscribed with his rank and status. His mission was to seek out wise folk beyond the mountains that ringed the Lake of Ntah and inquire of them the meaning of the New Star. His countrymen had long imagined that they understood the reason why the heavens changed—for change they definitely did. He carried with him a fat roll of parchment sheets on which had been copied star-maps depicting the sky on the accession-dates of the last score rulers of Ntah, and on the date of every eclipse during their reigns. Sixteen stars were shown on the most recent which in olden times had not been there, and marks recorded others which had appeared and faded in a matter of days. But there had never been one so brilliant, or so long-lasting, or in so black a patch of sky. According to the philosophers of Ntah, right action was reflected in heaven, and sufficient of it earned a diminution of the darkness. Eventually, they promised, the time would come when the heavens would be as bright by night as by day.

And it had happened, and it had ceased, and everyone was grievously disturbed, for blight and plague had followed what should have been a sign of unprecedented good fortune …

Jing’s journey had been fruitless so far, but it was not yet doomed to failure. His store of pearlseeds from the Lake was less than half-exhausted, for they grew stranger and more precious as he traveled, exchangeable for more food and longer lodging, and he had clung to his roll of maps even though in all the lands and cities he had visited he had met only one person who appeared to grasp their significance. He had expected students of heaven-lore as dedicated as himself, libraries too—albeit in alien script on unfamiliar materials—because tradition told of merchants from Geys and Yown and Elgwim who had brought amazing horns, hides, seeds and spices along with boastful tales about the riches of their homelands. What he had actually found …

Half-starved mud-scrabblers incapable of distinguishing dream from reality, ascribing crop-failure, blight and murrain to supernatural beings, imagining they could protect themselves by sacrificing most of what remained to them—whereupon, of course, weakness and fatigue allowed dreams to invade their minds ever further. Madness, madness! Why did not everybody know that the heavens bodied forth an impersonal record of the world below, neither more nor less? How could anybody, in these modern times, credit a god prepared to launch missiles at random with a view to killing people? The welkin shed messages, not murder!

His whole course since leaving Ntah had been a succession of horrid shocks. Geys, one of the first cities he had planned to visit, stood abandoned and overgrown, for—so he was told—a flaming prong from the sky had struck a nearby hill and everyone had fled in panic. Moreover, of the escorts and banners who had set out with him (any other of the court officers would have had concubines as well, but Jing was obliged by his calling to accept celibacy) most had deserted on finding how squalid was the world beyond the mountains, while not a few had succumbed, as had his mount, to bad food or foul water.

One alone had survived to accompany him into the branchways of the great city Forb, where first he had encountered learned men as he regarded learning. Yet they were parasites, Jing felt, upon their city’s past, disdainful of sky-shown truths, able only to expound concerning inscriptions and petty relics which they claimed to be older than anything elsewhere. Jing was reticently doubtful, but it was impolitic to speak his mind, partly because he was unfluent in the speech of that region, partly because its masters exercised very real power which he had no wish to see turned against Ntah, and chiefly because of the nature of that power.

His tallness, and the fact that his companion was taller yet, made him remarkable. The nobility bade him to banquets and festivities as a curiosity. It was a time of dearth, as he had discovered on his way; nonetheless, the fare at such events was lavish. It followed that the lords of Forb must control vast domains—not, however, vast enough to satisfy them, as was apparent from the way they spent all their time maneuvering for advantage over one another, and instructed their interpreters to ply Jing with questions concerning weaponry. They were prepared to descend as far as spreading disease among a rival’s crops, than which only the use of wildfire could be baser. Were monsters to be let loose in the peaceful region of Ntah …!

Shuddering, yet determined to pursue his quest, Jing eventually discovered the secret of their dominance. It lay not in their armies, nor their treasuries. It consisted in the deliberate and systematic exploitation of the dreams of those less well-to-do than themselves, a possibility which had never occurred to him, and which the language barrier prevented him from comprehending until a lordling he had disappointed in his hope of brand-new armaments set sacerdotes upon him at his lodgings.

He had frequently seen their like bringing up the tail-end of a noble’s retinue, always gaunt in a manner that contrasted greatly with the glistening plumpness of their masters, and initially he had assumed them to be nothing more than servants: scribes, perhaps, or accountants, though it was hard to conceive how such dream-prone starvelings could be relied on.

Acting, however, more like persons of authority than underlings, these visitors interrogated him concerning Ntah. Pleased to meet anyone prepared to discuss what he thought of as serious subjects, Jing answered honestly, hoping to show that the relationship between Ntah and its satrapies, being sustained by trade in information concerning what the heavens portended, was more civilized than rule by force.

Did he not—they responded in shocked tones—acknowledge the example of the Maker of All, who daily surveyed the world with His all-seeing eye, the sun, and nightly dispatched fiery bolts by way of warning that His way must be adhered to on pain of uttermost destruction? Was he not aware that the arc in the sky was the Maker’s sling, that the Maker’s mantle was what lighted the heavens with the glimmer of marvelous draped colors? Then he was in peril of imminent disaster, and were he still to be in Forb when it overtook him, scores-of-scores of innocent people would be caught up in the catastrophe! He must leave the city at once, or they would execute the Maker’s will upon him themselves!

Jing’s lifelong faith in the beneficence of the universe had been shaken, but he was not about to enter someone else’s fever-dream. He did his best to scorn the warning—until the day when his sole surviving escort, Drakh, was set on by an unknown gang and attacked with weapons such as would never have been permitted in Ntah: prongs steeped in the ichor from a rotting carcass, warranted to poison the slightest cut even though it was not deep enough to let out life.

Now Drakh lay delirious beside him, as for days past, shivering less at the bitter air than the racking of his sickness. He would have been dead but that Jing’s treelord—a Shreeban, well accustomed to being shunned by his Forbish neighbors and mocked by their children when he went abroad—had called a doctor, said to breed the best cleanlickers in the city.

And the doctor had saved not only Drakh’s life (so far, Jing amended wryly, for the licker was weakening and the sorbers it passed repeatedly over his wound were turning yellow) but also the mission they had been sent on. Forgetful of his other clients, he had sat for days greedily studying Jing’s star-maps, mentioning now and then that such-and-such a one of his forebears had claimed to be older than this or that star: heretical information in Forb where the Creation was supposed to have been perfect from the Beginning.

How could such dream-spawned nonsense survive the appearance of the New Star, which for a score of nights had outshone the Bridge of Heaven, and still after four years loomed brighter than anything except the sun and moon?

It might well not, explained the doctor. As people became more prosperous and better fed, so they naturally grew more capable of telling dream from fact. This led them to mock the sacerdotes, whose power had been decreasing from generation to generation despite their deliberate self-privation. Now they were reduced to claiming that the New Star was a delusion due to the forces of evil, which—they said—dwelt in that bleak zone from which the Maker had banned all stars as a reminder of the lightless eternity to which He could condemn transgressors. But there were those who maintained that one supremely righteous person was to be born—now: must have been—who could hold up a lamp where the Maker had decreed darkness, and lead folk out of mental enslavement.

Looking at the glowplants that draped the walls of his rented home, Jing prompted him to more revelations. Were there none here in the north who studied star-lore?

The chief of them, the doctor said, had taken refuge with the Count of Thorn. Branded by the sacerdotes as victim of a divine curse, that lord had retreated to an arctic fastness where hot springs bubbled out of frozen ground—clear proof, said the sacerdotes, of his commitment to evil, for in the absence of sunlight water could be heated only by fire, the prerogative of the Maker: hence those who usurped it must be on His adversary’s side. Where Thorn had gone, besides, report held that a night might last for half a year, and evil dwelt in darkness, did it not? Yet it was also rumored that those who had followed him were prosperous while everywhere else epidemics were tramping in the pad-marks of famine …

“There has been some kind of change,” the doctor whispered. “My best remedies have ceased to work, and many babies bud off dead or twisted. Also there is a taint in this year’s nuts, and it seems to drive folk mad. If I had more courage I too would go where Thorn has gone … Pay me nothing for the care of your man. Promise only to send news of what they have found out in that ice-bound country. It is a place of ancient wisdom which the sacerdotes interdicted, saying it was dreamstuff. I think they were in error in that also.”

Now Jing, so weary he too was having trouble telling dream from fact, was come to Castle Thorn at the head of the warm channel. The fog parted. The moon was rising, gibbous in its third quarter, and as usual its dark part sparkled.

II

If Forb was old, then Castle Thorn was antique. Guarding the entrance to a bowl-shaped valley, it loomed as large as a city in its own right—not that its whole bulk could be seen from the outcrop of rock serving it as a wharf, despite the glowplants which outlined it at a distance, for its defenses were elaborate and far-reaching. On either bank bomas trembled ready to collapse their spiky branches, while masses of clingweed parted only in response to blasting on a high-pitched whistle. Prongsmen came to hitch the barq’s mooring-tentacles, accompanied by enormous canifangs.

Just before docking Jing had realized that a range of hills on the horizon was gleaming pure white in the moonshine. He had said, “Snow already?”

And the steersman had grunted, “Always.”

So there truly was a place where ice might defy summer. For the first time Jing felt in his inmost tubules how far he was from home.

But there was no time for reflection. A voice was calling to him in city-Forbish: “Hail to the foreigner! I’m told your prongsman is sick. As soon as he’s ashore I’ll see what I can do for him. I’m Scholar Twig, by the way.”

Who was a person of advanced years, his tubby shortness—characteristic of these northerners—aggravated by loss of pressure in his bracing tubules, but his expression alert and manner brisk. Grateful, for Twig was the name the doctor had told him to ask for, Jing returned the greeting.

“How you know I coming?” he demanded.

“Oh, you’ve made news over half the continent,” was the prompt reply. “Sorry we don’t have anyone around who speaks Ntahish, but until you showed up most people thought your homeland was just a legend, you know? Say, is it true you have star-maps going back to the Beginning? How soon can I look at them?”

Groping his way through the rush of words, Jing recalled the protocol which attended ambassadors to Ntah.

“Not I must at once pay respect the lord?”

“He’s dining in the great hall. You’ll meet him in a little. First let me present my colleagues. This is Hedge, this is Bush, this is—”

It was impossible to register so many strangers when he was so fatigued. “But my man-at-arms …?” he ventured.

“Ah, what am I thinking of? Of course, we must get him and you to quarters right away!”

Detailing some junior aides to carry Drakh, Twig led the way at half a trot.

Jing could have wished to move more slowly, because nothing had prepared him for the luxury he discerned all about him. The very stones were warm underpad. The gnarled trunks of the castle were thicker than any he had ever seen, and even at this season they were garlanded with scores of useful secondary plants. Steaming ponds rippled to the presence of fish, while fruit he had not tasted the like of since leaving home dangled from overhanging boughs, and everywhere trailed luminescent vines. Through gaps between the boles, as he ascended branch-ways in Twig’s wake, he caught glimpses of a landscape which reminded him achingly of parts of Ntah. He had thought in terms of a mere clawhold on survival, but the valley must support a considerable population. He saw three villages, each with a score of homes, surrounded by barns and clamps large enough to store food for a year—and that was only on one side of the castle. Amazing! His spirits rose.

And further still when Drakh was laid in a comfortable crotch and a maid brought warm drink. Passing him a huskful, Twig said dryly, “In case you’re superstitious about fire, it’s untouched by flame. We keep the bags in a hot spring.”

Jing’s people cared little about fire one way or the other, so he forbore to reply. Whatever its nature, the drink effectively drove away dreams. Meanwhile Twig was inspecting Drakh’s licker and saying in disgust, “This should have been changed days ago! Here!”—to the maid—“take it away and bring one of my own at once. They’re of the same stock,” he added to Jing, “though here we have fewer outlandish poisons they can learn to cope with. Faugh! They do stink, though, don’t they, at that stage?”

Now that Jing’s perceptions were renewed, he had realized that the very air inside the castle stank—something to do with the hot springs, possibly. Never mind. He posed a key question.

“Drakh will live, yes?”

“I’m not a specialist in foreign sicknesses, you know! But … Yes, very probably. I’ll send for juice which can be poured between his mandibles. Wouldn’t care to offer him solid food in his condition.”

Jing nodded sober agreement. Reflex might make him bite off his own limbs.

“Are those your maps?” Twig went on, indicating the rolled parchments. “How I want to examine them! But you must be hungry. Come on, I’ll show you to the hall.”

There, at its very center, the true antiquity of the castle was revealed. Despite the dense clusters of glowplants which draped the walls, Jing could discern how the ever-swelling boles of its constituent bravetrees had lifted many huge rocks to four or five times his own height. Some of them leaned dangerously inward where the trunks arched together. None of the company, however, seemed to be worrying about what might happen if they tumbled down. Perhaps there were no quakes in this frozen zone; the land might stiffen here, as water did, the year around. Yet it was so warm …

He postponed such mysteries in order to take in his surroundings.

The body of the hall was set with carefully tended trencher-stumps, many more than sufficed for the diners, who were three or at most four score in number. Not only were the stumps plumper than any Jing had seen in Forb; they were plentifully garnished with fruit and fungi and strips of meat and fish, while a channel of hollow stems ran past them full of the same liquor Twig had given him. Entrances were at east and west. At the south end a line of peasants waited for their dole: a slice of trencher-wood nipped off by a contemptuous kitchener and a clawful of what had been dismissed by diners at the north. Jing repressed a gasp. Never, even in Ntah, had he seen such lavish hospitality. It was a wonder that the Count’s enemies in Forb had not already marched to deprive him of his riches.

“So many peasants isn’t usual,” murmured Twig.

“I believe well!” Jing exclaimed. “Plainly did I see villages with land enough and many high barns!”

“Except that on the land the trencher-plants are failing,” Twig said, still softly. “Take one of these and transplant it outside, and it turns rotten-yellow. But save your questions until you’ve fed, or you’ll spend a dream-haunted night. Come this way.”

Jing complied, completing his survey of the hall. In a space at the center, children as yet unable to raise themselves upright were playing with a litter of baby canifangs, whose claws were already sharp. Now and then that led to squalling, whereupon a nursh would run to the defense of its charge, mutely seeking a grin of approval from the fathers who sat to left and right. Each had a female companion, and if the latter were in bud made great show of providing for her, but otherwise merely allowed her to bite off a few scraps.

And at the north end sat the Count himself, flanked by two girls, both pretty in the plump northern manner, but neither budding.

The Count was as unlike what Jing had been led to expect as was his castle. He had been convinced by the doctor that he was to meet a great patron of learning, more concerned with wisdom than material wealth. What he saw was a gross figure so far gone in self-indulgence that he required a sitting-pit, whose only concession to stylish behavior was that instead of biting off his trencher-wood he slashed it with a blade the like of which Jing had never seen, made from some dark but shiny and very sharp substance.

“Sit here with my compeers,” Twig muttered. “Eat fast. There may not be long to go. He’s in a surly mood.”

Thinking to make polite conversation, Jing said, “Has two lovely shes, this lord. Is of the children many to him credit?”

The scholar’s colleagues, Bush, Hedge and so on—names doubtless adopted, in accordance with local custom, when they took service with the Count—froze in unison. Twig whispered forcefully, “Never speak of that where he might overhear! No matter how many women he takes, there is no outcome and never has been, except … See the cripple?”

Previously overlooked, there sat a girl by herself, her expression glum. She leaned to one side as though she had been struck by an assassin’s prong. Yet she bore a visible resemblance to the Count, and she was passably handsome by the standards of Ntah where the mere fact of her being a noble’s daughter would have assured her of suitors. She was alone, though, as if she were an un-mated or visiting male. Had he again misunderstood some local convention?

Twig was continuing between gobbles of food. “She’s the reason I’m here—eat, eat for pity’s sake because any moment he’s going to order up the evening’s entertainment which is bound to include you and over there”—with a nod towards a trio of emaciated persons whom Jing identified with a sinking feeling as sacerdotes—“are a bunch of charlatans who would dearly have liked to sink claws in you before I did except that I put it about I wasn’t expecting you before the last boat of autumn in ten days’ time. Anyway, Rainbow—who is much brighter than you’d imagine just looking at her—is his sole offspring. Naturally what he wants is a cure for infertility and an assurance that his line won’t die out. So our real work keeps getting interrupted while we invent another specious promise for him.”

For someone afraid of being overheard, Twig was speaking remarkably freely. But Jing was confused. “You not try read his future from stars?” he hazarded. “You not think possible?”

“Oh, it may well be! But before we can work out what the sky is telling us, we must first understand what’s going on up there. My view, you see, is that fire above and fire below are alike in essence, so that until we comprehend what fire can do we shan’t know what it is doing, and in consequence—Oh-oh. He’s stopped eating, which means the rest of us have to do the same. If you haven’t had enough to keep you dreamfree I can smuggle something to your quarters later. Right now, though, you’re apt to be what’s served him next!”

In fact it didn’t happen quite so quickly. With a spring like a stabberclaw pouncing out of jungle overgrowth, a girl draped in glitterweed erupted from shadow. She proved to be a juggler, and to the accompaniment of a shrill pipe made full use of the hall’s height by tossing little flying creatures into the air and luring them back in graceful swooping curves.

“She came in on the first spring boat,” Twig muttered, “and is going away tomorrow—considerably richer! Even though she didn’t cure the Count’s problem, he must have had a degree of pleasure from her company …”

Certainly the performance improved the Count’s humor; when it was over he joined in the clacking of applause.

“We have a foreign guest among us!” he roared at last. “Let him make himself known!”

“Do exactly as I do!” Twig instructed. “First you—”

“No!” Jing said with unexpected resolve. “I make like in my country to my lord!”

And strode forward fully upright, not letting the least hint of pressure leak from his tubules. Arriving in front of the Count, he paid him the Ntahish compliment of overtopping him yet shielding his mandibles.

“I bring greeting from Ntah,” he said in his best Forbish. “Too, I bring pearlseeds, finest of sort, each to grow ten score like self. Permit to give as signing gratitude he let share knowledge of scholars here!”

And extended what was in fact his best remaining seed.

For an instant the Count seemed afraid to touch it. Then one of his treasurers, who stood by, darted forward to examine it. He reported that it was indeed first-class.

Finally the Count condescended to take it into his own claw, and a murmur of surprise passed around the company. Jing realized he must have committed another breach of etiquette. But there was no help for that.

“You have no manners, fellow,” the Count grunted. “Still, if your knowledge is as valuable as your pearlseed, you may consider yourself welcome. I’ll talk with you when Twig has taught you how to address a nobleman!”

He hauled himself to his pads and lumbered off.

“Well, you got away with that,” Twig murmured, arriving at Jing’s side. “But you’ve pressurized a lot of enemies. Not one of them would dare to stand full height before the Count, and they claim to have authority from the Maker Himself!”

Indeed, the three sacerdotes he had earlier designated charlatans were glowering from the far side of the hall as though they would cheerfully have torn Jing mantle from torso.

III

“And here is where we study the stars,” said Lady Rainbow.

It had been a long trek to the top of this peak, the northernmost of those girdling the round valley. Their path had followed the river which eventually created the channel used by boats from the south. It had not one source, but many, far underground or beyond the hills, and then it spread out to become a marsh from which issued bubbles of foul-smelling gas. Passage through a bed of sand cleansed it, and thereafter it was partitioned into many small channels to irrigate stands of fungi, useful trees, and pastures on which grazed meatimals and furnimals. Also it filled the castle fish-ponds, and even after such multiple exploitation it was warm enough to keep the channel ice-free save in the dead of winter. The whole area was a marvel and a mystery. It was even said that further north yet there were pools of liquid rock which bubbled like water, but Jing was not prepared to credit that until he saw it with his own eye.

Despite her deformity, Rainbow had set a punishing pace, as though trying to prove something to herself, and Twig had been left far behind on the rocky path. He was in a bad temper anyway, for he had hoped to show off his laboratory first, where he claimed he was making amazing transformations by the use of heat, but Rainbow had insisted on coming here before sunset, and Jing did want to visit the observatory above all else.

However, he was finding it a disappointment. It was a mere depression in the rock. Walbushes had been trained to make a circular windbreak, and their rhizomes formed crude steps enabling one to look over the top for near-horizon observations. A pumptree whose taproot reached down to a stream of hot water grew in the center where on bitter nights one might lean against it for warmth. A few lashed-together poles indicated important lines-of-sight. Apart from that—nothing.

At first Jing just wandered about, praising the splendid view here offered of Castle Thorn and the adjoining settlements. There were more than he had imagined: almost a score. But when Twig finally reached the top, panting, he could contain himself no longer.

“Where your instruments?” he asked in bewilderment.

“Oh, we bring them up as required,” was the blank reply. “What do you do—keep them in a chest on the spot?”

Thinking of the timber orrery which had been his pride and joy, twice his own height and moved by a pithed water-worm whose mindless course was daily diverted by dams and sluices so as to keep the painted symbols of the sun, moon and planets in perfect concordance with heaven, Jing was about to say, “We don’t bother with instruments small enough to carry!”

But it would have been unmannerly.

Sensing his disquiet, Twig seized on a probable explanation. “I know what you’re tempted to say—with all that steam rising from our warm pools, how can anyone see the stars? You just wait until the winter wind from the north spills down this valley! It wipes away mist like a rainstorm washing out tracks in mud! Of course, sometimes it brings snow, but for four-score nights in any regular year we get the most brilliant sight of heaven anyone could wish for, and as for the aurorae …!”

Touching Rainbow familiarly, he added, “And you’ll be here to watch it all, won’t you?”

“You must forgive Twig,” she said, instantly regal. “He has known me since childhood and often treats me as though I were still a youngling. But it’s true I spend most of my time here during the winter. I have no greater purpose in life than to decipher the message of the stars. I want to know why I’m accursed!”

Embarrassed by her intensity, Jing glanced nervously at her escorting prongsman, without whom she was forbidden to walk abroad, and wished he could utter something reassuring about Twig’s abilities. But the words would have rung hollow. He had pored over Jing’s star-maps, cursing his failing sight which he blamed on excessive study of the sun—in which Jing sympathized with him, for his own eye was not as keen as it had been—and exclaimed at their detail, particularly because they showed an area of the southern sky which he had never seen. All he had to offer in exchange, though, were a few score parchments bearing scrappy notes about eclipses and planetary orbits, based on the assumption that the world was stationary, which had been superseded in Ntah ten-score years ago, and some uninspiring remarks about the New Star. It was clear that his real interest lay in what he could himself affect, in his laboratory, and his vaunted theory of the fire above was plausibly a scrap from a childhood dream. Jing was unimpressed.

He said eventually, “Lady, where I from is not believed curses anymore. We hold, as sky tend to fill more with star, so perfectness of life increase down here.” And damned his clumsiness in this alien speech.

“That’s all very well if you admit the heavens change,” said Twig bluffly. “But we’re beset with idiots who are so attached to their dreams they can go on claiming they don’t, when a month of square meals would show them better!”

He meant the sacerdotes, who—as Jing had learned—had been sent to Castle Thorn unwillingly, in the hope of winning the Count back to their “true faith,” and were growing desperate at their lack of success even among the peasants, because everyone in this valley was well enough nourished to tell dream from fact. One rumor had it that they were spreading blight on the trencher-plants, but surely no one could descend that far! Although some of the lords of Forb …

Disregarding Twig, Rainbow was addressing Jing again. “You say I can’t be cursed?”

“Is not curse can come from brightness, only darkness. More exact, is working out pattern—I say right pattern, yes?—coming towards ideal, and new thing have different shape. You noble-born, you perhaps a sign of change in world.”

“But if change is coming, nobody will prepare to meet it,” Twig said, growing suddenly serious. “With the trunks of Forb and other ancient cities rotting around them, people shout ever louder that it can’t be happening. They’d rather retreat from reality into the mental mire from which—one supposes—our ancestors must have emerged. You don’t think Lady Rainbow is accursed. Well, I don’t either, or if she is then it’s a funny kind of curse, because I never met a girl with a sharper mind than hers! But most people want everything, including their children, to conform to the standards of the past.”

“My father’s like that,” Rainbow sighed.

“He’s a prime example,” Twig agreed, careless of the listening prongsman. “He thinks always in terms of tomorrow copying today. But our world—I should say our continent—is constantly in flux; when it’s not a drought it’s a plague, when it’s not a murrain it’s a population shift … Where you come from, Jing, how does your nation stay stable even though you admit the heavens themselves can change? I want to know the secret of that stability!”

“I want to know what twisted my father!” snapped Rainbow. “Bent outwardly I may be, but he must be deformed within!”

Aware of being caught up in events he had not bargained for, Jing thought to turn Rainbow a compliment. He said, “But is still possible to him descendants, not? Surprise to me lady is not match often with persons of quality, being intelligent and of famous family.”

Later, Twig explained that to speak of a noblewoman being paired was something one did not do within hearing of the party concerned. For the time being he merely changed the subject with an over-loud interruption.

“Now come and see what’s really interesting about the work we’re doing!”

Yet, although she declined to accompany them to the laboratory, the lady herself seemed rather flattered than upset.

This time their path wound eastward to the place where the hot river broke out of shattered rocks. Alongside it a tunnel led into the core of a low hill, uttering an appalling stench. Yet the heat and humidity reminded Jing’s weather-sense of home, and inside there were adequate glowplants and twining creepers to cling to when the going became treacherous. Sighing, he consented to enter.

When he was half choking in the foul air, they emerged into a cavern shaped like a vast frozen bubble, at whose center water gushed up literally boiling. Here Hedge, Bush and the rest were at work, or more exactly directing a group of ill-favored peasants to do their work for them. They paused to greet their visitor, and Twig singled out one husky fellow who sank to half his normal height in the cringing northern fashion.

“This is Keepfire! Tell Master Jing what you think of this home of yours, Keepfire!”

“Oh, it’s very good, very safe,” the peasant declared. “Warm in the worst winter, and food always grows. Better here than over the hill, sir!”

Jing was prepared to accept that. Anything must be preferable to being turned loose to fend for oneself in the barren waste to the north, where no plants grew and there was a constant risk from icefaws and snowbelongs, which colonized the bodies of their prey to nourish their brood-mass. Twig had described the process in revolting detail.

Having surveyed the cavern and made little sense of what he saw, Jing demanded, “What exact you do here?”

“We’re testing whatever we can lay claws on, first in hot water, then on rock to protect it from flame, then in flame itself. We make records of the results, and from them we hope to figure out what fire actually can do.”

To Jing, fire was something viewed from far off, veiled in smoke and to be avoided, and flame was a conjurer’s trick to amuse children on celebration days. More cynically than he had intended—but he was growing weary and dreams were invading his mind again—he said, “You are proving something it does?”

Stung, Twig reached up to a rocky ledge and produced a smooth heavy lump which shone red-brown.

“Seen anything like this before? Or this?”

Another strange object, more massive and yellower.

Realization dawned. “Ah, these are metals, yes? You find in water?” Sometimes in the streams which fed the lake of Ntah placer-nuggets turned up, softer than stone ought to be, which after repeated hammering showed similar coloration.

“Not at all! This is what we get when we burn certain plants and then reheat their ash. Don’t you think some of the essence of fire must have remained in these lumps? Look how they gleam! But I should have asked—what do you already know about fire?”

“Is to us not well known. In dry land is danger for plants, homes, people. But in Ntah is air damp same like here. Is down in this cave possible flame?”

His doubt was plain. Twig snorted.

“I thought so! The more I hear, the more I become convinced we must be the only people in the world seriously investigating fire. Either they think it’s blasphemous because it’s reserved to the heavens, or they’re as wrong as you about the way it works. Let a humble peasant show you better. Keepfire, make a flame for the visitor!”

Chuckling, the peasant rushed to a recess in the cavern wall. From it he produced articles which Jing’s poor sight failed to make out in the dimness.

“Long before anyone came here from as far south as Forb,” Twig said softly, “Keepfire’s ancestors were priests of a cult which now has vanished—based on dreams, of course. But they found out some very practical techniques.”

“What he do?”

“It’s so simple you wouldn’t believe it. I didn’t when I first came here. He uses dry fungus-spores, and a calamar soaked in fish-oil, and two rocks. Not just ordinary rock, a kind that has some of the fire-essence in it. Watch!”

Something sparkled. A flame leapt up, taller than himself, and Jing jumped back in alarm. He risked tumbling into the hot pool; Twig caught him, uttering a sour laugh.

“Doesn’t that impress you?”

“I guess so …” Jing was trembling. “But what to do with? Is not same fire and in—as in sky! Is under the ground!”

Twig said with authority, “The idea that fire belongs to the sky is false. Using it, we’ve made—not grown but made—things that were never in the world before.”

“Did you make Count’s blade?” Jing ventured, prepared to be impressed.

“Oh, no. That’s a natural rock you find a lot of around here. But it too must have fire in its essence, or heat at any rate. It seems to be like this stuff.” Twig reached to another ledge and brought down a clawful of smooth transparent objects shaped like half a raindrop, most bluish, some greenish, one or two clear. “The peasants’ children use these for playthings. They hate me because I take away the best ones for more important use. On a fine day you can catch sunfire with them and set light to a dry calamar or a dead leaf. What better proof could there be of my opinions? Look, here’s a particularly clear one!”

To Jing’s touch the droplet was relatively cool, so he could not imagine how fire could be trapped within. All of a sudden, however, as he was inspecting it, he noticed something remarkable. At a certain distance he could see his claw through it, only enlarged.

“It make big!” he breathed.

“Oh, that too! But it’s no use holding it up to the sky. Every youngling in the valley must have tried that, and me too, I confess. But it won’t make the moon or stars any plainer, and as for looking at the sun—well!”

“I can have, please? Not to start fires. Is good for look my star-maps.”

Twig started. He said in an altered voice, “Now, why didn’t I think of that? But of course I never saw maps like yours before, with such fine detail … Sure, take it. We keep finding them all the time. Now we’d best get back to the castle.”

He padded away, exuding an aura of annoyance.

This was no astrologer: Jing was satisfied on that point. Maybe when it came to trying this or that in a fire Twig’s record-keeping might be accurate, but given he could overlook such an obvious use for a magnifying drop it seemed unlikely. Anyhow, what value could his data have? It was inconceivable that fire in heaven could be identical with fire underground!

So perhaps there were several kinds of fire? And surely there must be some way of enlarging the heavens if it could be done at close range …?

Jing sighed heavily. He had to make an immediate decision: whether to remain here in the hope that studying the stars uninterruptedly for longer than he had imagined possible would bring unexpected insights, or leave by the final autumn boat. But the continent was already in the grip of winter; he could scarcely reach home any sooner, if he left now, than if he stayed until spring. And Waw-Yint would certainly not forgive him for abandoning his mission. He was not one to be bought off with such petty marvels as a magnifying drop. True, he was old, and by now might well be dead—

Shocked at his own disloyalty, Jing firmly canceled such thoughts. No, he must remain, and if necessary next year carry on beyond the ocean, riding one of the half-legendary’ giant barqs of which they spoke in Yown and Forb … if they were not compounded of dreams.

Besides, this magnifier … It had seized his imagination, an ideal tool for astrologers hampered only by its present imperfection. He had been brought up to believe that perfection inhered in everything, even people; it needed only to be sought out.

Just before entering the castle again, Twig turned to him and said bluffly, “Put what I know about the world below together with what you know about the sky, and we might get somewhere one of these days, right? Shall we try?”

It was a formal invitation not just to collaborate but to make friends. Jing felt obliged to treat it as such, despite his reservations concerning Twig’s researches. They locked claws accordingly.

Later, Jing reflected it was as well they concluded their compact at that juncture, for the first person to meet them within the castle reported Drakh’s death; the best of Twig’s cleanlickers had failed to purify his wound. Grief at being shorn of his last Ntahish companion might have driven him to dreamness and made him reject Twig-friend because of Twig-physician. Yet no blame could attach save to those who had stabbed Drakh a month’s journey ago.

When, in compliance with local custom, they consigned Drakh’s remains to a pullulating pond surrounding a handsome blazetree, Twig spoke much about loneliness and isolation, and Jing was touched and grateful.

As though the funeral were a significant occasion, the Maker’s Sling delivered a cast of long bright streaks across the zenith.

But that was apt to happen any night.