by John Brunner
"I—I suppose I am," Wellearn confessed.
"Very well, then. We understand each other. Now translate this. It's exactly what Burney most wants to hear. Begin: 'We can't of course speak for all the briq-captains of the Wego, but we will promote with maximum goodwill the advantages of the agreement you suggest, provided that at the end of summer we may take home with us tokens of what benefits may accrue therefrom, such as creshban, better cleanlickers, useful food-seeds, spyglasses and so on. Next spring we'll return with our captains' joint verdict. In the event that it's favorable'—don't look so smug or I'll pray the stars to curse you for being smarter than I thought but not half as smart as you think you are!—'we shall appoint Wellearn to reside here as our agent and spokesman. Thank you!'"
V
At every summer's end the Wego captains came together for a bragmeet where the wise'uns too old to put to sea might judge whose briq had ventured furthest, who fetched the finest load of fish ashore, who brought the rarest newest goods traded with chance-met strangers. It was the high point not only of their year, but the chaplains' also. For generations the latter's influence had been shrinking, particularly since too many stars fell from the sky for most people to look forward to inhabiting one after death. But when it came to matters of ancient tradition, naturally they were called on to preside.
This meet, though, was different. Now there was no boasting, only mourning. On land things had been bad enough, what with crop-failure, floods and landslips, but at sea they were infinitely worse. Braverrant had not returned albeit her master was Boldare, wily in weather-ways. No more had Governature with Gallantrue and Drymantle, nor—next most envied after Tempestamer—Stormock, whose commander had been Cleverule, sole among them to make two-score voyages.
Nor Wavictor, nor Knowater, nor Billowise ... and even Tempestamer herself had not reported back.
Yet weather-sense warned them: the summer was done. The customary congress must convene.
Frost on every tree, snow on the beach above the tide-line, even icefloes—but it was too soon! As Tempestamer closed the last day's gap between her and the waters where she had been broken, uncertainly as though aware something was amiss, Wellearn gazed in horror at the shoreline through drifting mist.
"Captain!" he cried. "Have you ever seen so much ice at this season, or so much fog?"
"Never," answered Skilluck sternly. "Maybe what your friends at Hearthome spoke of is coming true."
"I thought—our friends...?"
"Those who have knowledge sometimes batten on it to gain power," Skilluck said.
"They spoke of partnership, not mastery!"
"What difference, when we are weak and they are strong? Count me the briqs you see at Ushere wharf and argue then!"
Indeed, the fleet numbered half its usual total, and the houses were white with rime and some were tilted owing to landslips, and the sky was dense and gray and the wind bit chill into the inmost tubules of those who lately had enjoyed the warmth of Hearthome.
"What's more, there's nobody to welcome us!" Skilluck blasted, having surveyed the city with his spyglass. "They must have called the bragmeet, giving us up for lost!"
Seizing his goad, he forced Tempestamer to give of her utmost on the final stretch towards her mooring.
Shivering in the branchways, more of the Wego attended the bragmeet than ever in history, and while the wise'uns tried to present the summer's achievements in a flattering light, kept interrupting to ask, "What use is that to us? Can we eat it? Does it help to keep us warm?"
In vain the senior chaplain, by name Knowelkin, strove to maintain formality. The folk mocked the claims of those who had survived the unprecedented summer storms by staying close to home, like Senshower whose Riskall had belied her name by scurrying from inlet to sheltered inlet, like Conqueright who had pledged the reputation of his Catchordes on the chance of garnering vast quantities of fish only to find the schools weren't running where they did. Almost as though they were hungry for news of doom the assembly listened in silence to Toughide and Shrewdesign, who told of icebergs sighted all season long further south than ever known before, fisherfolk driven into mid-ocean clinging to barqs unfit for any but fresh-water work, great trees torn loose by gales and set to drifting with the current, some bearing signs of habitation as though they had formed part of a house, a town or even a city. And when eventually they did make landfall, they reported, they found long tracts of coast abandoned to the dirq and fosq, the icefaw and snowbelong, whose normal range was half-a-score days' journey poleward.
"What we brought home from our voyage," Toughide concluded soberly, "was no better than what we'd have got had we made due north."
The company shifted uneasily, but the chaplains preened. Now the meeting had settled down, they could remind themselves how hunger and anxiety invariably drove folk back to the faith and customs of their ancestors.
But suddenly a roar cut through the soughing of icy wind among the boughs.
"Who dared to summon a bragmeet without Skilluck? What misbudded moron told you Tempestamer would not ride out the worst of storms? Let him stand forth who called the meet before I came!"
And the furious captain stomped into the center of the gathering, healthy-tall—taller than any Wego mariner in living memory—followed by Strongrip and Sharprong and someone whom the company had difficulty in recognizing: Wellearn. But a Wellearn transformed, bigger, huskier, and infinitely more self-confident than the callow youth who had set forth in spring.
Knowelkin shrank reflexively at Skilluck's intrusion, all the more because he and his companions were so obviously in good fettle. The captain fixed him with a glare.
"You!" he said accusingly. "You took it on yourself to say I must be given up for lost!"
"Not I!" the chaplain babbled, casting around for a way of escape, for combat-stink from Skilluck filled the air and he was weakened by fasting.
"Liar!" hurled Toughide. "You insisted on the meet being held when we captains said to wait a while! You understand the calendar—you know the normal end of summer!"
"But summer this year ended early! Surely a skilled seafarer—"
"We've been in latitudes where there is no winter!" Wellearn shouted.
"That's right!" Skilluck set himself back on his pads, claws poised. "Nor any hunger, either! Look at us! Think we're sick—weak—crazy— dreamlost? See any creshmarks on us? But I see one on you!" Reaching out quicker than Knowelkin could dodge, he nipped the chaplain's mantle and provoked a squeal of pain.
"Thought so," the captain said with satisfaction. "Always the way, isn't it? When things get hard, instead of reasoning and working, you prefer to retreat into dreamness! Strongrip, make him drink a dose of creshban and see sense!"
"Best thing any briq from Ushere ever carried home," the seaman grunted, holding aloft a Hearthomer nutshell. "A certain remedy for cresh!"
That provoked a stir of excitement among the crowd.
"But," Strongrip continued, "do you think we should waste it on this idiot? After all, he's been starving himself like Blestar—deliberately— and Blestar was the only one of us it didn't save!"
"That's a point," said Skilluck ruminatively. "Very well, let them be the ones to go without. It'd be a fit punishment for the way they've insulted us."
"You have a cure for cresh?" Knowelkin whispered, voicing what all present wanted to hear.
"Not we, but allies that we've made in the far south. They've offered us as much as we need—they have plenty!—in return for letting some of their wise'uns travel on our briqs to spread their knowledge. And don't think creshban is the only trick they have under their mantles! Oh no! We've brought back marvels which ... But move over, you! Senior chaplain or not, you're a dreamsick fool and it's your own fault and Wellearn is worth a score like you! Move, before I rip your mantle into tatters!"
For an instant it seemed that Knowelkin would defy the captain out of pride; then he humbly crumpled to half normal height and padded aside. Wel
learn found himself at a loss. Was he really meant to take over and preside at a bragmeet, youth that he was?
"Well, go on!" Skilluck rasped. "Or I'll start thinking you're as silly as Knowelkin! Speak out!"
"What shall I tell them?"
"Everything! Everything! I never imagined things would come to so grievous a pass this year. Next year maybe, or the year after ... but it's upon us, and the land is in the claw of ice, and if another summer comes it could be our last chance to move to friendly country. The briqs which survive may already not be enough to shift us all! Hadn't you thought of that?"
Wellearn hadn't, but he pretended, and gave a grave nod of acquiescence as he took over the spot vacated by Knowelkin. After so long among the Hearthomers he felt like a giant compared to his own people ... as tall as Jing!
And that gave him his opening. Maintaining his maximum height, trying to imitate in Wegan the style and manner of Burney and others who addressed council meetings at Hearthome, he began.
"Teachers like Knowelkin—and even my late mentor Blestar who has gone, let's hope, to make a star shine brighter!—told us to believe there never was a real person called Jing! They've encouraged us to be obedient and small-minded by saying there never was a man who understood the stars and made their nature manifest by transforming dull rock into marvelous new substances! With the evidence of spyglasses and metal blades to contradict it, we chose to accept this nonsense!
"But we have met followers of Jing who actually possess his scriptures, and I've read them and copied extracts for our use! Thanks to what Jing taught, the city of Hearthome is the richest on its continent! By studying Jing's principles the folk there have arrived at creshban and other medicines—they've bred mounts that go on land as our briqs swim the sea" (thank you, Embery! he added silently) "—they live in houses which make ours look like hovels—they have such wealth that a bunch of sick seafarers stranded there by accident might each repose in his own bower, recovering with the aid of a cure their own folk might not need in fivescore years of which they yet keep stock for chance-come travelers..."
Gradually, as he talked, Wellearn let himself be taken over by imagination, such that in his present state of vitality it would not shade into mere dreamness. He painted a picture of a glorious future to grow from the joint seed of the Hearthomers and the Wego. Some of his audience, he noted with dismay, had ceased to listen the moment he spoke of Jing as a real person; others, however, less parched by cold and shrunken by privation, were clinging with their remaining strength to wisps of hope.
Concentrating on the latter, he concluded with a splendid peroration that sent echoes ringing among the rigid branches and ice-stiffened foliage.
Yet only a few of his hearers clacked their claws, and after a pause Toughide said, "So you're asking us to pile aboard our remaining briqs and set forth now?"
"Of course not!" Skilluck roared. "But next year could see our last and only chance to move to a warm and welcoming land! If you won't hark to the boy—excuse me, Wellearn!—if you won't hark to the young man, then trust in me who came home after Knowelkin told you I was dead!"
For a moment Wellearn thought his forcefulness had won the crowd over, but the idea of quitting the land where the Wego had lived since time immemorial was too great to be digested all at once, and the assembly dispersed without reaching a decision. Vastly disappointed, Wellearn slumped to four-fifths height while watching them depart.
"Excellently done," said Skilluck softly at his side.
"I thought I'd failed!" Wellearn countered. "At any rate I don't see them clustering around us to vote Tempestamer the wise'uns' prize for the past summer!"
"Oh—prizes!" Skilluck said contemptuously. "To be remembered in a score-of-score years: that's something else. Until I saw how few briqs had made it back to Ushere, all I could think of was how the Hearthomers might cheat us. Now I've felt in my tubules how right they are about the grip of ice. It's time for a heroic gesture, and since someone's got to make one, it might as well be us. If we can get enough of the folk to emigrate next spring, one day they'll talk of us as we do of Jing. I felt this as truth. I couldn't have expressed it. You did. That's why I say you made a great success of it."
"Captain," Wellearn muttered, "I never respected anything so much before as your present honesty. I'm glad to find I guessed right after all but what you've just said—"
"Save it," Skilluck broke in. "And don't worry about persuading the rest of the folk around to our course. A few score days of cold and hunger will take care of that."
"I wish I could share your optimism," Wellearn sighed. "Yet I greatly fear that some of those who refused to listen did so not because they suspected us of lying, but because misery has already taken them past the reach of reason."
VI
"Uncle," Embery said musingly to Chard, "do you think Wellearn will come back?"
Grousing at the annual need to adjust the mountings of his telescopes because the branches they rested on had swollen in the rainy season, her fat and fussy uncle finally pronounced himself satisfied with the work of his apprentices. Since it was again too cloudy at the zenith for serious star-study, he ordered the instruments to be trained on the skyline.
"Hush, girl," he said absently. "In a little I can show you moon-rise like you never saw it before."
"But do you?" Embery persisted.
"With all the joint advantages that will flow from our alliance with his folk, why not?"
"Father says he doesn't think the captain trusted us."
"Just as long as that briq carried them home safely—and who's to say she couldn't if she lived out the awful storm which drove her here?—then you may rely on the powers of persuasion displayed by your young friend to bring more of their fleet here, and, if nothing else, the captain's greed ... Ah, thank you!"—to the senior apprentice for advising him that the first telescope was properly set. "Now, my dear, come here. Before moon-rise, because this direction is fairly clear, I'd like to show you what they used to call the New Star. Ever since, more than a score-of-score years ago—"
Embery stamped her pad. "Uncle, I'm not some ignorant youngling from the city school, you know!"
He blinked at her. "No need to be offensive, niece! Of course I know you've looked at it before, but I want to share a new discovery with you, and I don't believe you've understood half the implications of what I've tried to teach you."
"I have so!"
"Then tell me how the world can grow cooler even though the sun seems to be getting warmer—and I've worked out why!"
"For the same reason it's better in full sunlight to have a light mantle than a dark one! Reflection!"
But Embery's mood changed even before he could compliment her on a lesson well remembered, and she said, "You think you've worked out why? You never told me that! Go on!"
And she cuddled up alongside him much as she used to do when she was barely strong enough to stand upright, so that he had to lift her to the ocular of his telescopes.
Chuckling, Chard said, "That's more like my Baby Rainbow! I used to call you that, you know, until you took offense and said it was ridiculous to use the name of Jing's lady—"
"I still think so!" she interrupted. "Come to the sharp end of the prong!"
"Very well." Chard settled back comfortably. "My line of reasoning goes this way. We have seen, in the place of the so-called New Star, nothing but a cloud of bright gas for many generations. Yet every now and then we have recorded a sort of wave passing through it, and comparison of notes made recently with those made just after the first proper telescopes were constructed allows us to hypothesize that the sudden addition of a large amount of new fuel to the fire of a star causes an outburst of colossal proportions, as when one drops a boulder into shallow water. There are splashes!"
"You've told me this before!" Embery complained.
"Ah—but what about the matter that gets splashed?"
She thought about that for a little. Eventually she said, frowning
with concentration, "It must spread out, over huge distances. And it must get thinner as it goes."
"Correct! Even so...?"
"Even so, when it reaches another star—Oh!" She stared upright in excitement. "You think a splash from the New Star has got this far?"
"It would explain a lot of things," Chard murmured, looking smugger than an astronomer of his age and distinction had any right to. "Above all, it would explain very well indeed why there are more and more stars falling from heaven—which of course aren't actually stars—at the same time as the sun is growing warmer."
"But this could be terrible!" Embery exclaimed. "Because the matter must have spread out very thin on its way here, so if it's only the first bit that's got to us, then—"
"There may be more to come," Chard confirmed. "And we have no way of telling whether there will be so much that it screens out sunlight, or enough to heat up the sun so that ice will melt again, or as much as we've had already with nothing to follow. Whatever happens, though, the Wego are due for the most appalling trouble. So could we be if the ice melted after forming, all at once. We'd need their help to rescue us if the level of the sea rose. Who knows how much water has already been frozen up? But we keep hearing from the fisherfolk that they have to go further and further every year to cast their nets deep ... Oh, every way it makes sense to ally ourselves with the Wego! Whether they agree is another matter. I mean, they may be as ignorant of the effects of a polar melting as most of our own folk are of the effects of freezing! When I climbed the Snowcap Range..."
Embery sighed. Her uncle was about to launch into one of his self-congratulatory reminiscences. There was no hope of hearing more, as yet, about his new theory, so it would be best to distract him.
"Isn't it time for me to look through the telescope?" she offered.
"Of course! Of course! And I want you particularly to take note of—"
