“We go ashore next time on land newly exposed by the retreating ice! We stocked the junqs with food enough to see us through the trip—their drink-bladders are bulging—no blight or mold afflicts the food-plants— and we have medicines for every conceivable ill! For all I know, the landfall we next make may be shrouded under so much cloud you can’t see stars—but never mind! We already know how the ice when it melts reveals wonders from far distant in time, so the wonders that are distant in space may take care of themselves for this season! The stars are slow to bloom and fade, but you and I are not. Time enough for your observations next whiter, if the Fleet remains in the far north and we are compelled to he up a while, which I suspect … But tell me, though, old companion”—this as he imperceptibly resumed his normal pressure— “what’s excited you anew about the stars you’ve known so well for so long?”
Embarrassed, but putting a bold countenance on matters, Ulgrim said bluffly, “She speaks of stars which I can’t see, and yet they’re there. More than once since leaving Ripar, when the water was most calm, I’ve thought I could discern them—an eleventh in the cluster of the Half-Score Wingets, another at the focus of the Welkin City … And of such a color, too: a strange deep red! Yet when I look again—!”
“Master Navigator,” Yockerbow said, “have you ever seen a bar of metal heated in a fire until it melts?”
“I never had time for such landsiders’ tricks!”
“I know: one dare not carry or use fire aboard a junq. Yet fact is fact. The metal starts to glow in the dark red; afterwards it becomes orange, and yellow, and green—which we see clearest—and then shades through blue to white, just like the rainbow. Eventually it can be made to glow like the sun itself. It follows that a hotter or a cooler star…”
His words trailed away, for Barratong was scowling.
“I thought you were never inducted to the Order of the Jingfired!” he said in an accusatory tone. v “What does that have to do with it?” Arranth demanded before Yockerbow could reply. “Had I but the means, I’d show you all this with a glass prism!”
“It is as I feared!” Barratong raged, and began to pace back and forth along the poop of the haodah, spuming at every turn so violently one thought he might blister his pads. “Your vaunted Order possesses no truly secret knowledge! Do you realize that the heating of a metal bar is the chief symbol of their most private ritual?”
There was a moment of dead silence, save for the slap-and-hush of waves against the junq’s broad flank and the meep-meep of a flighter and its young which were following the Fleet in hope of scavenging carrion or floating dung.
All of a sudden Yockerbow started to laugh. As soon as he could he recovered his voice and said, “Admiral—excuse me, because this is truly too silly—but you were right the first time, and this time you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter that someone else knows the inmost secret of the Jingfired ritual. What counts is that Ulgrim didn’t.”
“I think I see what you mean,” said Barratong, and a waft of anger-stink blew away as he mastered himself. “Clarify!”
“How long ago was such a truth discovered, that may prove to be valid even in the case of the stars? Well before the Northern Freeze, we may be sure! What happened following the onset of it? Why, people driven crazy by hunger and despair felled great civilizations which otherwise might well by now have shown us things we regard as impossible—you might, for instance, have your spuder-web to catch the moon! But nobody among the Fleet would dare to undertake the necessary research because a fire literally cannot be lighted on a junq! Hence no metal—no glass—no melted rocks—no anything of the kind which pertains to such realities!”
He was downwind of Barratong as the Fleet bore into a strong northerly breeze. Whether it was because he scented the admiral’s enthusiasm, or because the newly exposed lands which the ice had reluctantly let go were emanating signals from those who had once occupied them, he never knew. But in that moment he was as great a visionary as the admiral.