THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

Sometimes the settlers found relics of the far past in the shallow waters around Neesos, and they too served for trading purposes, mysterious though their nature might be to the modern mind. In consequence, it was into a community more prosperous than its isolation might have suggested that Tenthag—half a score of generations in direct succession from Agnis himself—was budded in the year called Two-red-stars-turn-blue.

But the community was so small that the People of the Sea were rarely able to trade what they most wanted and needed at Neesos: stock with which to cross-breed themselves. They had sampled every genetic line on the island, and every line, in turn, was already spiked with some of the travelers’ ichor.

Long-lived, reasonably content, the folk of Neesos were resigned to budding being rare. It was not until three quarter-score of years had slipped away that they began to notice:

There has been no new bud since Tenthag.

As soon as they realized he was “special” the folk of Neesos started to pamper the boy, which he found no fun at all, for it meant he was forever being prohibited from doing the things the other young’uns enjoyed. The old’uns said “protected,” but it amounted to the same boring thing.

Yet his slightly older companions were contemptuous of his youth, and very shortly there was only one left for him to play with. The rest had gone on to the pretence of being grown-up, although their matings led to no offspring. Tenthag wished achingly that they would, to release him from his confinement in a web of concern.

Still, his father Ninthag was a perennial optimist and, despite the pleas of Sixthon who had budded Tenthag for him and never childed with anybody else, he was happy to turn a blind eye when his son did what in olden times all young’uns were accustomed to—go swimming out of storm-season on the northern coast—along with Fifthorch, who was next-to-youngest.

Here there were beaches sown with rocks defining the trace of what had been Prefs, the port serving crag-beset Thenai in the days before the water-level rose a score of padlongs. Great ocean-going briqs and junqs had unloaded here, revealing marvels brought from half the world away, and sometimes odd bits and pieces that had proved unsalable had been tossed overside before the fleets returned to sea. Young’uns sought for them, trapping as much air as possible beneath their mantles before they dived, in the hope of retrieving artifacts intact. But that had been in the old days. Now only scraps were to be found, at least at any level they could reach.

Nonetheless Fifthorch spent as much time as he was spared from his apprenticeship at the general trade of glassworking, plunging and basking around the northern shore, and perforce Tenthag tagged along. He did not really like Fifthorch, but there was no alternative; he so hated being fussed over and petted by the old’uns.

Eventually, they all assumed, he would fall into the standard pattern of the island’s folk, and were its population to die out, someone else would take it over. That was the way it had been since time immemorial, and even though a few stars might turn color, life down here was not expected to alter very much. The age of changes seemed to be long past, bar the occasional shift of weather.

It did sometimes puzzle Tenthag why, if nothing was to change worth mentioning, there should be so many relics of a different past lying just off shore. But when he tried to talk about this to the old’uns they were always busy with something else, and if he voiced his private anxieties to Fifthorch, the latter mocked him, quoting what he had been told by his own father, who despised the Jingtexts.

“The form of now is permanent,” he would insist. “If there were changes in the past, it must have been because what passed for people then were only animals. We were set here by the Evolver to use and exploit the lower orders. Now we know how to do it—we have gorborangs to catch fish for us, we have kyqs to ride on when we put to sea, we eat enough to let us tell reality from dreamness, we live a proper life that must not be disturbed! And nothing can, and nothing will, disturb it!”

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