THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“Then chance them, on a route you never dared before! It’s better than the certainty of plague!” Rounding on the prongsmen, Twig ordered them to prod loose the barq’s tentacles despite her groans of hunger.

“Won’t you come with us?” Rainbow shouted. “Even if—”

“Your father’s dead. Your husband told me he would rather you did not watch him follow the same course.” Twig descended to the wharf’s edge and gently touched her claw. “No, Shine is to take care of you now. I’ve had my life, as Jing had his. If only we could read the stars more clearly, we might know why. But what you bear with you will instruct the future. You are the wife, my lady, of the greatest man it’s been my privilege to know. Create a posterity for him. If the bud fails, then do so anyhow. I cannot; I’m old and weak and I must resign myself to facts.”

“If by some miracle—”

“Qat has told us positively there are no miracles with this disease. Only if the sac ruptures to the outside like mine … and Jing’s did not.”

“Couldn’t you have made it rupture?”

“That too was tried, in Ntah. It always failed.”

The steersman was glancing nervously from one to other of them. He said, “If this woman has the plague-mark on her—”

“No, she does not!” Twig flared. “That’s precisely why we want to get her out of here! You have pay for twenty voyages! Go as far as you can, go anywhere you can, and deliver our message to the world. Next time, perhaps, we may know enough about the universe to conquer such a plague! But without the information that you carry, someone else in the far future will have to start all over again! Oh, get under way, will you? The castle will be stormed within the day!”

The steersman flogged the barq’s tentacles, and they unwillingly let go their grip; she put about and made down-channel. Watching, Keepfire— who had had the chance to travel with Rainbow, but refused because he feared the water more than fire—said, “Do you think, sir, that our work has gone to waste?”

“I sometimes fear it, sometimes think it can’t,” was Twig’s reply. “Sometimes I feel it’s like the seed funqi sow on the spring wind, so numerous that a few at least must find a lodging in good ground; sometimes I can imagine it being like a trencher-plant, at risk from unknown kinds of blight predicted or maybe not predicted by the New Star … At all events I know one thing. We are to consign the remains of Master Jing to your hot pool, instead of to a pool with fishes in or the roots of a tree.”

Startled, Keepfire said, “This is to do more honor to me and my family? Sir, it’s already been enough!”

“Not honor,” Twig sighed. “He said when he still possessed some trace of rationality that he’d been told how hot pools can break up a dead animal. Did Hedge or Bush mention this, or was it you?”

“I think I did!” said Keepfire with a trace of pride.

“He wants to die more completely than anyone before, dissolved if possible into his finest shreds. He wants to leave a legacy of health and information, and not a rotting body to convey more plague. Come with me. He said he had chosen to die on the departure of his wife, and when we enter his chamber we shall find a corpse for sure.”

“But we shall dream of him,” said Keepfire, following. “We shall make sure he is dreamed of for all time.”

PART TWO

FUSING AND REFUSING

I

After half a score of days the storm was over. Weather-sense and a familiar, reassuring noise lured Skilluck back from the dreamness whither he had been driven by exposure, privation and sheer terror. Slackening his mantle, he relaxed his death-grip on the pole he had clung to while he was reduced to primitive reflexes, concerned only to escape the fury of the elements as his ancestors might have hidden from a predator larger than themselves.

The sound he had recognized was the unmistakable munch-and-slurp of Tempestamer feeding.

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