THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

He fell silent, and waited trembling for the verdict. It was very quiet here in the Grand West Arbor of Bowock; the plashing of waves underpad, where only a mat of roots separated the assembly from ocean ripples, was louder than the distant sound of the city’s business. A few bright-colored wingets darted from bloom to bloom; otherwise there was no visible motion beneath the canopy of leaves.

Until the Master of the Order stirred. He was very old, and spoke in a wheezing tone when he spoke at all. His name was known to everyone— it was Iyosc—but this was the first time Tenthag had set eye on him. For years he had been sedentary, like an adult cutinate, incapable of mustering pressure to move his bulk unaided. Yet, it was said, his intellect was unimpaired. Now was the time for that opinion to be confirmed.

“It would have been better,” he said at last, “had the credibility of Bowock gone to rot.”

A unison rush of horror emanated from the company. Tenthag could not stop himself from cringing to half normal height.

“But the courier is only a courier,” Iyosc went on, “and not to blame. It is we, the Order of the Jingfired, who have failed in our duty. We, who supposedly have the clearest insight of all the folk, equipped with the best information and the most modern methods of communicating it, should have foreseen that a solitary courier crossing the Worldround Ocean might be accosted twice by the same squadron of the People of the Sea. Where is Dippid, chief of the couriers? Stand forth!”

Dippid complied, looking as troubled as Tenthag felt.

“We lay a new task on you,” Iyosc husked. “Abandon all your others. News of what can be done, thanks to Gveest’s research, with food-plants and—yes!—animals must outstrip news of what can now be done to people! I speak with uttermost reluctance; like Barratong, who forged the Greatest Fleet in the years before the Thaw, and created the foundations of the modern world, I have hankered all my life after the chance to plant a bud … and always failed. Now it’s too late. But the notion of two, three, five taking in place of one fills me with terror. Long have I studied the history of the folk; well do I comprehend how, when starvation looms, our vaunted rationality flows away like silt washing out of an estuary, to be lost on the bottom mud! Nothing but our powers of reason will save us when the claws of the universe clamp on our world and crack it like a nut! For the far-distant survival of the species, we should have risked loss of confidence in the credits that we issue. Now we are doomed beyond chance of redemption!”

A murmur of furious disagreement took its rise, and he clacked his mandibles for silence. It fell reluctantly.

“Oh, yes! There are many among you who are young enough to benefit—as you imagine—from Gveest’s achievement! But are you creating the farms and fields, the forests and the fish-pens, which will be needed to support the monstrous horde of younglings that must follow? Where would you be right now, if you had to support five times the population of Bowock from its existing area? And don’t think you won’t! As soon as the word gets abroad that the secret of fertility is known here, won’t crowds of frustrated strangers quit the countryside and the service of the sea, and concentrate here to await a miracle? We’re none of us so absolutely rational as to have forgone all hope of miracles! Besides, by this time it’s beyond doubt that the People of the Sea must have landed on Ognorit and appropriated Gveest’s techniques.”

“No! No!” Tenthag shouted, but realized even as he closed his mantle that Iyosc had seen deeper than he to the core of the matter.

The Master of the Order bent his bleary old gaze on the young courier.

“Yes, yes!” he responded with gentle mockery. “And I still say you were not to blame. You weren’t brought up, any more than I or the rest of us, to react in terms such as the People of the Sea are used to. We tend to think more rigidly; we draw metaphors from rock and glass and metal, all the solid changes in the world that fire can wreak. Theirs is the universe of water, forever in flux, forever fluid. They will not heed the strict conditions we’d apply; they’ll rush ahead as on the back of a swift junq, and exclaim with pleasure at the sparkle of her snout-wave. Yet some of them are clever scientists. I’ll wager it won’t be longer than a year before we learn that they are trading Gveest’s discovery to just those poor communities which are least fitted to fill extra maws!”

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