THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“Yet we can bring our knowledge all together!” he declared, and his weather-sense confirmed that he had safely picked a course into imagination, steering well clear of dangerous dreamness. “Knowledge borrowed from past time will guide us to the future we deserve for all the troubles we’ve endured! There must be suffering—would I knew why! I don’t believe the stars decree it, for they’re so remote they might as well be cool and stiff like arctic rocks, yet they can blaze up, and I don’t want to think it’s simply because they suck into themselves the vital force from planets like ours where life exists between the limits set by ice and fire!”

“Say it’s because of ignorance,” offered Ulgrim, and at once looked surprised at his own improbably philosophical suggestion.

“Yes! Yes!”—from Barratong. “Have we not found remains of animals such as none of us had seen or heard of? Have we not then encountered similar beasts in strange new waters? And are we ourselves not different from our ancestors? It follows that if the stars blaze up it must be for a reason we shan’t comprehend until we work out why there are creatures—or were—unknown to us on this small planet!”

“We understand each other,” Yockerbow said soberly. “I was so afraid when you invited us to come with you…”

“Ah, but we’re all bound on one quest,” Barratong stabbed. “Some of us seek an answer to a single mystery—you, Yockerbow! You wanted to find out why syphonids and cutinates could never pump water above a certain level. On the way to a solution, you saved your city from being washed away. You still don’t know all the reasons why the original phenomenon presented, but you have suspicions, don’t you? And Arranth has just drawn my dear old partner whom I’ve trusted in storm and floe-time, trusted under the onslaught of heaven’s crashing meteorites— drawn him too by some miracle into the charmed circle where I hoped to lure him long ago” (this with a dip to her) “and for that I thank you, ma’am—”

Yockerbow was half-afraid the admiral had lost track of his own peroration, but he was wrong, for he concluded it magnificently.

“And here we are together on the sole straight course which any of our people ought to choose! All of us a little angry with the universe because it seems to want to mislead us—all of us determined to find an answer to at least one mystery before our time runs out—all of us resigned to the certainty that we shall uncover many other mysteries in the solving of our own! Perhaps the time may come when there are no more questions to be asked; if that is so, that’s when the world will end!”

VII

Cooler it became, and cooler … yet not cold. No frost-rime formed this season on the rigging of the haodahs, and the junqs themselves responded briskly to the increasing iciness of the water, as though they needed by activity to keep the ichor coursing in their tubules. Awed, those who rode them as they trespassed among bergs and floes under an amazing pale blue sky watched the bare brown land on either side slip by, and marked where it was suddenly not bare, as though the sun had charmed plants out of rock.

“We are approaching the polar circle,” Barratong said. “We are the first to come by sea in who can say how long? But we are not the first of all. See how the flighters whirl who brought new life to these mud-flats!”

Watching their graceful swoops, as they glided back and forth and sometimes failed of their prey so they had to whip the water and achieve enough velocity to take off again, Yockerbow said, “How can they eat enough to fly?”

“Sometimes,” said Barratong, “they can’t, or so I was informed by a fisherman whom we rescued in mid-ocean the summer before last. They breed on high bluffs and launch their offspring into air by laqs at a tune when they burst the brood-sac. Those which catch enough wingets and flyspores grow; they soar and mate on the upgusts; then they hunger for what’s in the water, and if they’re large and fast enough they snatch the surface-breeding fish. If not—well, they can use up what fat they’ve stored and spring back into air from the crest of a rising wave. But this fish-hunter had many times trapped those which did so, and always found them lean and scant and taint of flesh. It’s my view that flighters’ natural zone is the air; by contact with either land—except to breed—or sea, they are diminished of their powers. Witness the fact that out of every brood-sac a score or two survive. And is not the same phenomenon apparent in ourselves? Had you and I, and all the other so-called worthy persons, bred at every pairing, would we not by now by laqs and craws have overswarmed the pitiful resources of the Age of Freeze? How many more of the folk could Ripar have supported before either they started to starve off into dreamness or some epidemic sickness rushed through them like a flame in dry brushwood? Hmm?”

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