“But—” Rainbow began, and clipped off the words. Mutely she appealed to her companions, who could envisage as well as she the effect of looking at the sun through nearly perfect lenses.
Twig, however, was oblivious. He breathed, “To see the sun once with these would be enough to sacrifice my sight for!”
“Oh, shut up!” Jing roared. They shrank back as he erupted to his full height, every muscle and tubule in his body at maximum tension. “You’re talking like a senile fool, and I speak to you as a sworn friend! Don’t you think your eyesight will be useful tomorrow, too? What we need is a way to look at the sun without going blind!” He rounded on Keepfire. “Would you give up all vision for one fleeting glimpse of the sun? You’d rather see it over and over, wouldn’t you?”
Alarmed, Keepfire signaled vigorous agreement.
“Very well, then!” Jing relaxed into a more courteous posture, but still tenser than his usual stance among friends. “What do we know of which makes a scene darker without blurring detail? In Ntah old folk some-tunes protected their sight on a sunny day”—he used the past tense unconsciously, and later thought of it as a premonition—”by using thin gray shells. But those deformed the image. Well?”
There was a long pause. At last Rainbow said, “You find membranes inside furnimals that are no good for parchment because you can see through to the other side.”
Shine clacked his claws. “Yes! And stretching them can make them thinner still, yet they diminish light!”
“They make everything yellower!” Twig objected, and at once caught himself. “Ah, but the thinner, the clearer! So if we put several one behind another, and take away each in turn until the eye hurts … Jing, I’m pleased to be your friend! Once again you see to the core of the matter when I spring to premature conclusions.”
“If you want to honor someone, honor Keepfire,” Jing said, and reached a decision not foreshadowed by intention. Taking the new beautiful lenses one in either claw, he shrank from his overweening posture to the lowest he could contrive without pain, and remained there while he uttered unpremeditated words.
“You know and I know, without putting it to the test, that these will reveal to us yet more amazing private knowledge. It should not be private; it would not be private, had anybody else within this castle shared our interest. But it is so, and must not remain so. Already we have learned so much, I want to share our findings with Ntah. The dullwits of Forb and every other city I traversed to come here ought to have their eyes opened—no? Even if like your fellow sacerdotes, Shine, they decline to take advantage, do they not deserve to have this knowledge pointed out to them?”
Shine shouted, “Yes—yes!”
Thus encouraged, Jing yielded to a half-guilty, half-ecstatic temptation and let his mind be taken over by the dream-level Imagination was not enough; it was handicapped by rational considerations like distance, delay, expenditure of effort, the obstinacy of other people. But already their new discoveries had made it plain that everyday knowledge was inadequate to analyze the outcome. For once his dream faculty might be wiser than his sober and reflective consciousness.
Suddenly his head was roaring-loud with revelations, as though he had tapped the sap-run of time. He marveled at what he heard himself say— or rather declaim.
“Oh-hya-na-ut thra-t-ywat insk-y-trt ah-bng-llytr-heethwa ibyong hr-ph-tnwef-r heesh-llytr-kwu-qtr-annibyong—ah, but I tackle poorly this speech of foreigners and wish I could say what is needful in the speech of the folk I grew up among! But I am far away and lonely beyond bearing so now my community is these who welcome me as friends and I speak to them and to the world because I overflow with knowledge born of fire! I have been set alight like dry crops on a distant hill and the scent of smoke from what I know must carry on the wind and warn the world of what’s in store when heaven’s fire descends to burn the densest wettest jungle and boil the Lake of Ntah! Vast fires surpassing number or belief loom yonder in the dark and we are cast away upon a fragile barq, this little world, and more and more fires loom and every night the dark is pierced with streaks of fire and what it is we do not know but we must master it or it will utterly consume us! We must pledge ourselves to spare the world the doom of ignorance, not keeping any knowledge private that we’ve found, but spreading it about to last beyond our lifetimes! You three and I must make a vow together, and in token of it take half another’s name. The half is fire! It leaves a crust of duty ash but in another season it may turn to life anew and so our world must do although the prong of heaven strike us down! Take the vow, I beg you, I beseech you, and let not our secret knowledge vanish from the minds of those who on this lost and drifting orb hope to make something greater than themselves!”