THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

Well, only the fact that inbreeding rapidly led to deformity had prevented cities like Voosla, and probably fixed cities as well, from reducing males to simple tokens, like certain lower animals whose symbiosis must go back so far in the history of evolution that even the finest modern techniques could not recover a single independently viable male cell. Luckily—from Awb’s point of view—it had early been shown, in the light of Gveest’s pioneering work (and he was male and some said had betrayed his kind!), that species lacking the constant chemical renewal due to symbiosis were precisely those most vulnerable to climatic change. Where were the snowbelongs of yesterday, hunted to extinction as soon as the Great Thaw overtook them? Where were the canifangs, pride of the earliest bioscientists—not that they called themselves by any such name in that far past? They had been deliberately made to specialize, and they died out. The list was long: northfinders, hoverers, fosq, dirq, some exploited by folk for their own ends, some simply unable to compete when their range was invaded by a more vigorous rival or even a rash of Gveest’s new plants!

Beyond them, too, according to the latest accounts, there had been ancestral creatures without names, which pastudiers labeled using Ancient Forbish, receding to the very dawn of time.

Did they think? Did they reason? Certainly they left no message for the future, which was a mark of the folk; as long ago as the age of legendary Jing, means had been found to warn posterity about the menace looming in the sky. Without such aids, probably the Age of Multiplication would have proved a disaster—

No, not necessarily, Awb corrected himself. Eventually the truth could have been rediscovered. But perhaps there would have been less reason to go in search of it, and by the time it was once more chanced on it might have been too late: the sun might be being drawn inexorably into some new star, up there in the Major Cluster … He tipped his eye in search of it, and was astonished to realize that it was nowhere to be seen; the sky was blue, and everybody was dispersing to daylight duties.

What was Thilling apt to think of him if he stayed here mooning? Hastily he scrambled to his pads and set out after her. It was a vast effort to catch up, since his pressure yesterday had been so badly lowered, but he struggled on, reminding himself that all effort was made the more worthwhile by knowing how the ancestors had dedicated their lives to the survival of descendants they could never meet.

The first part of the bright was spent in making a careful record of the damage caused by the landslide, and Awb followed Thilling from place to place carrying bulky light-tight packs of the sensitized sheets she still referred to as “leaves” in memory of a more primitive technology. For the first time he gained a proper impression of the complexity of the work that had gone into creating the site for the observatory. Planning it must have been even harder than, say, founding a new fixed city, what with digging the canal to carry broken rock and make the mole, stringing the floater-cables, supplying food and accommodation for the workers, all of whom had had to be recruited at a distance and were used to a high standard of living. Several times he heard it vainly wished that the natives could have been enlisted, but today, again, they went about their own animal business, apparently incapable even of wondering about this intrusion into their placid world. If any of them had indeed been killed by the landslide, they showed no signs of grief.

Moreover there were mounts and draftimals to provide for, the musculators and cutinates, the floaters themselves constantly in need of the right nourishment to replenish the light gas in their bladders … Awb knew perfectly well that when they first joined Voosla the people from Chisp had occasionally had difficulty finding their way around on her numerous levels, but he couldn’t help feeling that, if they were accustomed to places like this, they ought to have found so small a city comparatively simple.