“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 carried 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…