THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“I see the folk up yonder!” she declared. She did not, but she knew it was what her saviors expected.

There was a puff of excitement from the young people. Aglabec canceled it with a quick gesture.

“You believe at last?” he challenged Chybee.

“How could I not, after all the visions that have come to me?”

“Are you obliged to Ugant for them?”—in a stern commanding tone.

“Ugant? What I’ve been through, all my suffering, was due to her! You saved me, though! You saved me!”

“Then,” said Aglabec with enormous satisfaction, “you must tell us what Ugant is planning, and all the ways in which we can forestall her frightful plot.”

IX

But Aglabec did not begin his interrogation at once, as though afraid that Chybee’s obedience might still be colored by excessive eagerness to please. He had her taken to the home of one of his followers, a certain Olgo. It was neither large nor well kept, but in comparison with the place where she had been incarcerated it was paradise. There she babbled of indebtedness while her sore mantle was tended and food and drink were meted out to her, enough to restore part of her lost bulk, but far from all.

This, though, was only half the treatment he had decided on. Much more important was the fact that by dark and by bright other of his disciples came to visit, and greeted her as one saved for the cause of truth, and sat by her telling wondrous stories about their mental voyages to the planets. Dimly she remembered there was a reason not to believe such yarns, but she was afraid to claw hold of it; she knew, though nobody had said so, that if she expressed the slightest doubt she would be returned to captivity.

Besides, the pheromones inciting to credulity were denser than ever, not only within the house but throughout the psychoplanetarist quarter. Docile under the impact of them, she listened passively as she heard about the vigorous inhabitants of Sunbride, reveling in the brilliance of the solar glare, absorbing and transmuting it until by willpower alone they could sculpture mountain ranges to amuse themselves … or hurl a giant rock on any reckless race that tried to bridge the spatial void.

Others told her of the ancient culture on Swiftyouth, so far advanced that bodies were scarcely necessary to them anymore. There, she learned, budding and death had long been obsolete; perfected minds could don and doff a physical envelope at whim.

Yet more marvels were recounted to her, concerning the giant planets each of which was itself a conscious being, the end-product of craws of years of evolution, so perfectly and so precariously adapted that a single seed from any other world might destroy them, and thus waste the fruit of an age-long study of the universe. (Dimly Chybee realized that this contradicted what she had been told at Hulgrapuk, but that of course was due to Imblot’s heresy.) To such colossal beings even the inhabitants of their own moons were dangerous; therefore the latter had been taught, by channels of mental communication, to rest content with their own little spheres. Awed, yet determined to fulfill their several destinies, they had set about contacting intelligences more like themselves, using techniques the giant worlds had pioneered, with success in every case bar one: this world whose moon was dead.

“Our world!” Chybee whispered, and they praised her for her flawless understanding.

“Perhaps, in the very long ago,” someone said, “our moon too was an abode of life. But arrogant fools down here must have sent a vessel thither. What else can account for it being barren, when none other of the solar family is so except the asteroids, which orbit too close to the sun?”

“Not even they, in one sense,” someone else objected. “We know of life existing in hot gas-glouds, don’t we? I think some of them make use of the asteroids, for purposes we dare not dream of!”

All the listeners murmured, “Very likely!”

And one of them added with a sigh, “What miracles must be taking place in the Major Cluster! What would I not give to eavesdrop on the feelings of a new-budded star!”

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