When the Doq had retired, some of the Order came to clasp claws with Yockerbow and compliment him on his selflessness; others departed wearing scowls. Bewildered, he made shift to answer politely, having only the vaguest notion of what he was supposed to have done right.
III
Never had Arranth been in such a rage! It was futile for Yockerbow to try and calm her; all she could say, over and over, was, “You had the chance to join the Order of the Jingfired, and you turned it down!”
He countered in his most reasonable tones that he had had no assurance of being elected—that if he had been by a bare majority he would have made himself enemies for life instead of, as it turned out, enjoying the patronage of the Doq—that the administrative duties such rank entailed would have interfered with his work. She refused to listen. She merely repeated facts which he already knew, as though he were some dull-witted youngling who should have been spotted by the eugenic courts.
“The Order is so old, no one can tell when it began! They say it dates back before the Northern Freeze! Its articles have been copied and copied until scarcely anyone can read them—but I’m sure I could, if I had the chance, and I’d have had it if you weren’t a fool! Or maybe I ought to call you a coward! The path to secret wisdom lay before you, and you turned aside!”
“My dear, what’s supposed to be so secret?” he rejoined. “You told me how your cousin Rafflek, who was then attendant on the Doq, reported what he overheard them saying during an induction rite: “The stars aren’t fixed, and sometimes they blaze up!’ So much you could be told by any of your friends who study sky-lore!”
“That’s not the point!”
“I say it is! All right, some stars aren’t stars but only planets, and our world is one of them. All right, other stars may be suns with planets of their own—I see no reason why not! But saying they’re inhabited is about as useful as telling me that something’s happening in the Antipads, or something happened in the far past! Without means of either communicating with these folk, or visiting them, what good is there in making such a statement?”
“That doesn’t mean they don’t exist!”
“Well, no, of course it doesn’t—”
“And even if we can’t communicate with the past, the past can communicate with us, and often does so without intention! Your pumps have sucked up ancient tools in the harbor, and scholars like Chimple and Verayze have worked out how the folk of that distant day employed them! So I’m right and you’re wrong!”
As usual, Yockerbow subsided with a sigh, though he still wanted to attack her logic. It was, after all, true that his spouse was highly regarded in intellectual circles, though he did sometimes wonder whether it was because she really displayed such an outstanding knowledge of astronomy and archeology, or whether it was due rather to her slender grace and flawless mantle…
No, that was unworthy. But, for the life of him, he could not share her obsession with the improvable! You didn’t need a telescope to discern how the moon’s turning, and to some extent the sun’s, affected the tides, for instance. But the planets obviously did not; records of water-level had been kept for so long that any such phenomenon must by now be manifest. Therefore the night sky was a mere backdrop to the world’s events, and even if there were reasoning beings on other planets, without a way to contact them their existence was irrelevant. Certain authorities claimed there were creatures in the sun, what was more! They argued that the celebrated dark spots on its brilliant surface indicated a cool zone below a layer of white-hot air. And there were dark and light areas on the moon, too, which the same people held to be seas and continents. Given their chance, as Arranth wished, they would have imposed their convictions as dogma on all Ripar!
Perhaps he should wait on the Public Eugenicist and accuse his predecessor of authorizing a mistaken pairing. Things would have been so much simpler had they budded…