Taya nodded. “Or at least, have been interpreted that way by people who didn't understand what the original terms meant,” she said. People who came later, who had lost their knowledge of astronomy, could have read descriptions of celestial events to be clashes between deities.
“The same is told all over Azure,” Serephelio said. “First the floods: mountains of water swept over the lowlands and through the valleys. In some places only the mountaintops were untouched. Then the earth shaking and rending, venting its fires. He quoted again: And the beasts of the earth fled. In great numbers they did run in terror, but sanctuary there was none. And the forests did turn to ash and the seas into deserts.” He relit his pipe with a spill from the fire. “All as you described, Taya. Lightning and thunderbolts unending, the survivors perishing beneath torrents of hot rocks that fell from the heavens. Then came the rains that quenched the fires, and afterward the snows. The lands covered by ice, and darkness endured for years. And when it lifted, the directions of the rising and the setting sun, and the courses of the stars, had changed."
Taya looked at Kort. “There's the polar shift that Thinker said might have occurred. Wouldn't something huge that almost collided with Azure do all that? And if it was highly electric, couldn't huge sparks jumping across between it and Azure give you all that lightning?"
Kort shuffled his legs. Narzin opened an eye suspiciously. He still hadn't quite accepted this metal figure in his territory, whose odors were all wrong. “The problem is, you were familiar with the Azurean legends before,” Kort pointed out. “And you learned only a few days ago about Thinker's idea that the poles might have shifted. It could all have been incorporated into something that your mind created. Not deliberately, of course. I'm just saying—well, all right, Skeptic is—that we can't rule it out."
“What about the domes and the tower?” Taya said. “I couldn't have incorporated those, because I've never seen them."
“Exactly, and that's the problem,” Kort replied. “Neither has anyone else."
“It was night time ... somewhere among mountains,” Taya persisted.
“But there's nothing to back it up. None of the things that do have any kind of independent corroboration are new. And the only thing that is original could be a bio-mind invention.” Kort spread his hands.
Taya sought around for a different approach, some item she might have missed, but there was none. The same debate that they had been through on the ice ridge above Icebowl would only repeat itself. She sighed, nodded in resignation, and sat back in her chair, staring at the fire.
Serephelio had listened to these exchanges before and knew that no questions were going to be settled tonight. “It seems our vessel of discovery is aground on sands of conjecture,” he observed. “Allow me, then, to beach alongside it a different craft of my own constructing. Thus, leastwise we can entertain each other while we await together the tide of evidence that will float us off."
“You mean a different theory about what happened to the Ancients?” Taya said.
The seer shook his head. “No, enough has been said of that. A surmising not of what brought about their end, but of what their end brought about. ‘Twas not just the Ancients who were fallen, but all humanity from a perfection that was meant to be, and which had all but been achieved."
Taya frowned. “I'm not sure I understand."
“Nor am I, but continue,” Kort said, staring at Serephilio fixedly.
“You say it is now proved that the Star Children were of Azure born,” Serephelio said.
“The facts seem conclusive,” Kort agreed.
“Aye, the evidence that your system insists on finally attests, whereas I myself have never doubted it.” Serephelio raised a hand. “I don't claim to understand it, mind you, for I am told that Merkon was beyond the circles of stars.” He shrugged. “But so many of your mysteries lie as far beyond the circle of my understanding that adding this as well makes no difference that I would quarrel over.” He looked at them for a second, then took a drink while he retraced his thread.
“Before the Cataclysm, Azure had reached an age of splendor that possibly even Star Children are unable to imagine. These methods that you call science had given its people mastery of the material world. They could create wealth without limit out of rock, through the power that lies locked in matter. They could cross the world in an hour, talk with any person anywhere, and view distant events as they happened. They built cities in the sky, and voyaged in them out among the stars. This much I know more from what you have told than from anything that my own studies on Azure have ever revealed.” Serephelio paused and looked at Taya pointedly.
“But it is my belief that the Ancients achieved more than just this. Besides mastering the secrets of the physical world, they also mastered themselves. They learned to free their minds of the hatreds and jealousies, fear and greed that had reduced Azure to what it had become twenty years ago when you arrived. And in that process their minds were awakened to become capable of insights to truth in ways that have never been known since.... That was the true loss that was suffered with the fall of the Ancients."
This was so close to what Taya herself had thought many times that she felt herself getting visibly excited. “It has to be so,” she said, turning her head appealingly toward Kort. “The things that were predicted.... They knew. Those can't be just coincidences. Even Scientist agrees."
Kort stared at her briefly, then shifted his gaze to Serephelio, rubbing his chin to indicate reservations. “This isn't a different boat that you've arrived in at all, is it?” he said. “It's really another way of supporting Taya's claims. In arguing for the reality of this power of the Ancients, you're suggesting that not quite all of it was lost—that a spark was preserved in the beings that were recreated in Merkon."
Serephelio stared back unwaveringly and nodded. “Very well, so you see through my disguise. But why shouldn't it be so? Have you not confirmed to me this very night that the Ancients were their true progenitors?"
Kort seemed to think for a second. “Only in the sense that they were both formed by the same genetic codes. What you're saying would mean that this ability somehow resides in certain genetic combinations. All Scientist did was find out how to express the codes. If they contained this power that you're talking about, shouldn't it be even more in evidence here on Azure? If several instances arose among the fewer than fifty individuals that were created on Merkon, then in a population of millions of Azureans...” Kort stopped as he saw that Serephelio was already shaking his head.
“The potential was there,” Serephelio said. “But potential is does not always become the reality. The potential for the tree is in the seed; but ‘expressing’ it—to use your own term—requires earth, water, and sunlight.
“The Ancients not only created the means of producing unlimited wealth; they used that wealth wisely. They used it to free their lives from the want and toil that had kept them functioning at a brute level of existence, little removed from the animal. Or perhaps it was the release from want that enabled them to become wise. Either way, the result was the same: They discovered the way to achieve peace in themselves and with the universe. And that was the earth and the water and the sunlight that the seed needed to put out roots and grow."
Taya could see the analogy in its completeness now. “That's what you're telling us was really lost here on Azure,” she said. “The potential never disappeared."
“Why should it? The...” Serephelio glanced questioningly at Kort.
“Codes,” Kort supplied.
“...the codes were still the same."
Taya completed: “But after the Cataclysm, the conditions for expressing it no longer existed."
Serephelio nodded. “Nothing mattered beyond survival,” he said solemnly. “There was total reversion to the level of the beast. Those who learned to kill and to take, without mercy or compassion, would maybe live to see the sun again—some of them. Giving quarter to the woman or children of another wa
s to rob food from one's own. And by this law was fashioned the Azure to which you returned."
There was no need for him to spell out the rest, or for Taya to comment. Did any other vestige of the civilization of the Ancients still exist out there among the stars in some shape or form? There was no way of telling. But in one tiny speck of the universe at least, the life that Azure had once known in all its fullness had been revived again, and had come home.
Serephelio concluded, “But that which once was has been returned to us, and the world is learning again the ways of wisdom and gentleness. All that Azure became shall flourish one day again."
Kort interlaced his fingers, studied them, and looked up after a respectful silence. “Fine sailing words. But your boat is still beached,” he pointed out.
“Bah!” Serephelio waved a hand. “I weary of sitting in grounded boats of reason. Join me and soar with birds."
“How should I do that?” Kort asked.
“Believe what I say and share the wonder of it."
“But how can I? What evidence do I have that what you say is true?"
Serephelio pointed a finger at Taya. “The evidence is sitting there, right next to you,” he said.
* * * *
Not unexpectedly, the expedition that the machines sent to Azure's moon turned up more new questions than it answered. The first was that of the moon's origin. The surface composition was of a very different mix from Azure's rocks, and doubts immediately sprang up as to whether the two bodies had even formed in the same region of the Vaxis system. Thinker advanced one possibility after another, all of which were promptly holed by Scientist or Skeptic, and so far the issue wasn't even close to being resolved.
A question that the endeavor did settle was that the moon had indeed been disturbed massively in recent times. Thermal gradients in the surface layers, along with the measured seismic and volcanic activity were consistent with such a notion, but not conclusive since they could have been the result of radioactive heat sources in the interior. However, the evidence of widespread lava flows and intensive meteorite bombardment in comparatively recent times decided it. How was it known that these events had taken place relatively recently? From the remains of the advanced civilization that had existed there and been obliterated, which were scattered all over the moon's surface. Those, of course, were the sources of the radio and radar reflections that had attracted the machines’ attention and aroused their curiosity in the first place.
And that was where the three domes and the tower were eventually discovered four months later. They were as Taya had described: broken and pounded under the meteorite storm, the remains almost completely buried in solidified lava. The black sky and the stars that she had seen had been part of a moonscape, not night time in any part of Azure at all.
Serephelio died the following year, satisfied and content, although no answer had yet been offered to the final question of what had brought about the Cataclysm.
* * * *
The first comet to be observed since Merkon's arrival at Vaxis appeared in the outer parts of the star's planetary system six months later. Although considerably smaller than the body estimated to have ended the civilization of the Ancients, it possessed all the necessary characteristics: It was volatile, breaking up into an incandescent halo and streamers of rock and gas as it approached the sun; it was massive, with a high metallic content; it was enormously energetic electrically. Scientist calculated that a similar object large enough to have caused upheavals of the violence indicated across Azure and its moon could have generated enough heat through currents induced in the planet's metal-bearing rocks to evaporate the oceans to a depth of hundreds of feet. Rapid cooling following the absorption of dust into Azure's atmosphere would account for the massive precipitation as rain and snow, and the ensuing ice cover. Although Serephelio hadn't lived to see the comet, at Taya's insistence it was named after him.
Nyelise and Eltry were married soon afterward, before it had faded from the night sky.
Kort, after much thought, reflection, and talking with Taya, extended his composite personality to incorporate parts of Mystic along with the others. There could be, he told Skeptic, no arguing with the evidence.
END
* * *
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