The Crucible of Time

by John Brunner

  "The Fleet's new commander," the Doq was saying in a rasping voice, "has sent word that he wishes to examine the famous novelties of our city: to wit, the pumps which have enabled us to withstand the encroachments of the sea. But that is not the only reason for the presence of a stranger. Immediately on the demise of our late brother Chelp, our brother Iddromane advanced Yockerbow's claim to be his replacement. Without his aid, the boles of this hall might be shriveling under the impact of salt water. Moreover, he is city-born and none has been found to speak a word against him. It would certainly be fitting were he to join us in the ranks of the Jingfired."

  But this was incredible! How could Arranth's prediction possibly be right, when the aura of everybody present was so wrong? Besides, Yockerbow had no ambitions in that direction, whatever plans his spouse might have.

  A murmur of conversation had broken out. Enjoying silence with a clatter of his mandibles, the Doq continued.

  "There is, however, an alternative opinion. Because it is without precedent we have agreed that Yockerbow shall be present when it is put to the vote. It has been suggested that Barratong be inducted to make up the minyum. Some say he is of the commonalty. True, but he has attained the counterpart of noble status. It is known that the Great Fleet is increasing so fast because from every continent—let alone the islands—folk are flocking to him like cloudcrawlers at migration-time. His declared intention, we are told, is to make us all citizens of a global community. Those among us who are concerned with the future limitations of Ripar, its dependence not only on what others bring us from inland or abroad but on the natural process of weather and climate, faced with the undeniable rise in sea-level which is now putting us to such shifts, should be the first to applaud! And nowhere in the ancient scriptures is it laid down that our Order must be confined to city-budded persons!"

  Chill certainty pervaded Yockerbow. He had been drawn into an argument the rights and wrongs of which the Doq had already decided in his own mind, but which other of the peers had doubts about. Now all were looking at him expectantly. What should he say? Should he risk the disfavor of the Doq? Knowing nothing of the intrigues of the Order, he felt hopeless. Hoping for guidance, he glanced at Iddromane, but—as ever—he was preserving perfect impassivity.

  Well, then, he must trust to his own feelings, and even though he was sure Arranth would be angry with him afterwards, he could deal with that problem when it arose.

  "Speak freely!" the Doq urged. "In meetings of the Order neither dissimulation nor subterfuge is permitted!"

  Thus instructed, Yockerbow had the temerity to rise to his full height.

  "Within or without the compass of your Order," he declared, "you can rely on me to serve our city. So if by inducting Barratong you may hope to enlist his support for our welfare in the future, I say do it!"

  The resultant exudations, in the close air of the hall, made Yockerbow feel as though he were lost at sea and a storm were bearing down on him. Yet, though there was still no sign from Iddromane, the Doq was regarding him benignly.

  "Well said!" he announced. "Iddromane, you deserve credit for proposing to the Order someone who can take the long view! Be it then resolved that during his visit we invite the admiral of the Great Fleet to join the Jingfired, inasmuch as what he is doing is in accord with our ultimate aims!"

  When the Doq had retired, some of the Order came to clasp claws with Yockerbow and compliment him on his selflessness; others departed wearing scowls. Bewildered, he made shift to answer politely, having only the vaguest notion of what he was supposed to have done right.

  III

  Never had Arranth been in such a rage! It was futile for Yockerbow to try and calm her; all she could say, over and over, was, "You had the chance to join the Order of the Jingfired, and you turned it down!"

  He countered in his most reasonable tones that he had had no assurance of being elected—that if he had been by a bare majority he would have made himself enemies for life instead of, as it turned out, enjoying the patronage of the Doq—that the administrative duties such rank entailed would have interfered with his work. She refused to listen. She merely repeated facts which he already knew, as though he were some dull-witted youngling who should have been spotted by the eugenic courts.

  "The Order is so old, no one can tell when it began! They say it dates back before the Northern Freeze! Its articles have been copied and copied until scarcely anyone can read them—but I'm sure I could, if I had the chance, and I'd have had it if you weren't a fool! Or maybe I ought to call you a coward! The path to secret wisdom lay before you, and you turned aside!"

  "My dear, what's supposed to be so secret?" he rejoined. "You told me how your cousin Rafflek, who was then attendant on the Doq, reported what he overheard them saying during an induction rite: "The stars aren't fixed, and sometimes they blaze up!' So much you could be told by any of your friends who study sky-lore!"

  "That's not the point!"

  "I say it is! All right, some stars aren't stars but only planets, and our world is one of them. All right, other stars may be suns with planets of their own—I see no reason why not! But saying they're inhabited is about as useful as telling me that something's happening in the Antipads, or something happened in the far past! Without means of either communicating with these folk, or visiting them, what good is there in making such a statement?"

  "That doesn't mean they don't exist!"

  "Well, no, of course it doesn't—"

  "And even if we can't communicate with the past, the past can communicate with us, and often does so without intention! Your pumps have sucked up ancient tools in the harbor, and scholars like Chimple and Verayze have worked out how the folk of that distant day employed them! So I'm right and you're wrong!"

  As usual, Yockerbow subsided with a sigh, though he still wanted to attack her logic. It was, after all, true that his spouse was highly regarded in intellectual circles, though he did sometimes wonder whether it was because she really displayed such an outstanding knowledge of astronomy and archeology, or whether it was due rather to her slender grace and flawless mantle...

  No, that was unworthy. But, for the life of him, he could not share her obsession with the improvable! You didn't need a telescope to discern how the moon's turning, and to some extent the sun's, affected the tides, for instance. But the planets obviously did not; records of water-level had been kept for so long that any such phenomenon must by now be manifest. Therefore the night sky was a mere backdrop to the world's events, and even if there were reasoning beings on other planets, without a way to contact them their existence was irrelevant. Certain authorities claimed there were creatures in the sun, what was more! They argued that the celebrated dark spots on its brilliant surface indicated a cool zone below a layer of white-hot air. And there were dark and light areas on the moon, too, which the same people held to be seas and continents. Given their chance, as Arranth wished, they would have imposed their convictions as dogma on all Ripar!

  Perhaps he should wait on the Public Eugenicist and accuse his predecessor of authorizing a mistaken pairing. Things would have been so much simpler had they budded...

  Yet he could not imagine living alone, and what other spouse could he find who was so stimulating, even though she was infuriating in equal measure?

  Finally, to his vast relief, she lost patience, and made for the exit.

  "I'm going to Observatory Hill!" she announced. "And while I'm up there, you can think about this! I look forward to meeting Barratong! I gather he recognizes merit in a female when he finds it! Maybe I can still fulfill my old ambition, and tour the globe aboard his banner junq!"

  And off she flounced.

  As the screen of creepers around their bower rustled back into place, Yockerbow comforted himself with the reflection that in the past a night of stargazing had always calmed her mind.

  He could not, though, wholly persuade himself that the past was going to be any guide to the future.

  But there was
work to be done if the admiral was to admire the latest achievement of his beloved city. And he did love Ripar. He could conceive of no more splendid vista than the parallel ranks of giantrees which flanked its access to the ocean, no more colorful sight than the massed bundifloras ringing the lagoon, no sweeter perfume than what drifted up at nightfall from the folilonges as they closed until the dawn.

  And he, for all his youth and diffidence, had saved Ripar, thanks to nothing better than sheer curiosity.

  At least, that was his own opinion of what he'd done. Others seemed awestruck by what he regarded as obvious, and talked about his brilliance, even his genius. Yet anybody, in his view, might have done the same, given the opportunity. He was not even the first to try and protect Ripar by means of pumps. All along this coast, and far inland, folk made use of syphonids. Their huge and hollow stems could be trained, with patience, so that they might supply a settlement that lacked nothing else with fresh water from a distant lake, albeit there was higher ground between. But in cool weather their action grew sluggish, and sometimes air-locks developed in the stems and the flow failed.

  On the coast, cutinates had also long been exploited. These were sessile creatures like immobile junqs that fed above the tide-line by trapping small game in sticky tentacles, yet to digest what they caught required salt water, which they sucked up from inshore shallows and trapped by means of flap-like valves. Fisherfolk would agitate one of them at low tide by offering it a scrap of meat, then gather stranded fish from drying pools as the water was pumped away.

  Yockerbow's interest had been attracted to cutinates when he was still a youngling barely able to hold himself upright, by the odd fact that no matter how far inland the creatures might reach (and some attained many score padlongs) they never exceeded a certain height above sea-level, as though some invisible barrier extended over them.

  Once, long ago, someone had thought of forcibly connecting a cutinate to a syphonid, so that any air-bubbles which formed in the latter would be driven out by the water-pressure. The project failed; for one thing, the syphonid rotted where it was connected to the cutinate, and for another, the cutinate would only pass water so salt it was useless for either drinking or irrigation.

  But the young Yockerbow was excited by the idea of finding practical applications for these abundant creatures. When he discovered that airlocks in syphonids always developed at exactly the same height above water-level as was represented by the limit of the cutinates' spread, he was so astonished that he determined to solve the mystery.

  The key came to him when, after a violent storm, he found a cutinate that had been ripped open lengthways, so that its internal tube was no longer watertight. Yet it was far from dead; still having one end in the sea and—fortuitously—the other in a pool left by the heavy rain, it was pulsing regularly in a final reflex spasm.

  Yockerbow contrived a blade from a broken flinq with two sharp edges, cut away the longest intact muscles, and carried it home, along with a mugshell full of seawater. To the surprise of his family, he was able to demonstrate that the cutinate's activity depended less on its intrinsic vitality, as the scholars of the city were accustomed to assume, than on the simple relation between salt and fresh water. And then he discovered that, if vegetable material or scraps of meat were steeped in the fresh water, the muscle could actually be made to grow...

  Lofty and remote, Iddromane came to hear about his work, and sent a messenger to inquire about it, who was sufficiently impressed to suggest that his master invite Yockerbow to wait on him. That was their only private meeting; they had crossed one another's path frequently since, but always at formal events such as season-rites or disposition-meets.

  Iddromane's influence, however, was such that when he timidly put forward his idea that detached muscles might do useful work in pumping away flood-water from the city's outermost sea-wall, Yockerbow was overwhelmed with offers of assistance. There were several false starts; at first, for example, he imagined he could overcome the height problem by arranging the muscles to squeeze a succession of ascending bladders with flap-valves in between. That worked after a fashion, but the bladders kept rupturing and synchronization proved impossible. After a year of trial and error—mostly error—he was about ready to give up when one disconsolate day he was wandering along the shore and noticed a long thin log which the retreating tide had stranded so that its heavy root end lay on one side of an outcropping rock and its thin light spike end on the other. The rock was closer to the root than the spike; as the water withdrew, there came a moment when the log was exactly balanced, and hung with both ends clear of the ground.

  Then a mass of wet mud fell away from the roots and the balance was disturbed and the log tilted towards its spike end and shortly rolled off the rock. But Yockerbow had seen enough.

  A month later, he had the first pumping-cluster of cutinate muscles at work. Grouped so close together they had to synchronize, they shrank in unison to half their normal length, then relaxed again, exerting a force that five-score strong adults could not outdo. By way of a precisely fulcrumed log, they pulled a plunger sliding inside a dead, dried syphonid, which led to the bottom of a tidal pool. At the top of its travel, the plunger passed a flap-valve lashed to the side of the tube, and water spilled through and ran off back to the ocean.

  Much development work followed; in particular, the cords attached to the plunger kept breaking, so that Iddromane had to authorize the dispatch of an agent to bargain for a batch of spuder-web—doubtless thereby arousing the interest of Barratong, for only his factors were entitled to market the webs on this side of the ocean. That problem solved, means had to be found of ensuring that the plunger dropped back to the bottom of its course without jamming halfway; again, that called for an agent to travel abroad in search of cleb, the astonishing wax which, pressed upon from the side, was as rigid as oaq, yet allowed anything to glide over its surface be it as rough as rasper-skin.

  With a ring of flexible hide around it, the plunger on its web-strand slid back and forth as easily as might be hoped for, and every pulse of the combined muscles could raise the volume of a person in the form of water.

  But the purchase of cleb had also been notified to Barratong, and beyond a doubt that must have been what decided him to call here after so long an absence of the Fleet. For now travelers came to gape at the ranked batteries of pumps which, working night and day, protected Ripar from the ravages of the ocean. As often as the tide flooded salt water into the outer lagoon, where it was trapped behind a succession of graded banks, so often did the pumps expel it and allow fresh water back to keep the giantrees in health. A few were wilting, even so, but very few, and the routine difference in water-level was a half-score padlongs.

  To Yockerbow's intense annoyance, though, people who ought to have known better—including some members of Iddromane's entourage—expected him to increase this margin indefinitely. To them he spoke as vainly as to Arranth. He said, "I've tried to raise water further than the height represented by the limit of cutinate growth, and it won't work." Not even Arranth believed him; she was more and more rude to him nowadays, and he felt certain it was because he "wouldn't" improve his pumps.

  And nobody shared his excitement at the probable implications of his discovery. It seemed to him that the only explanation must be that air was pressing down the water in a pump-tube, so when the weight of water lifted matched the weight of the overlying air, it would rise no further. He had contrived some elegant demonstrations of the theory, using clear glass tubes supplied by one of Iddromane's associates, but not even Arranth would take them seriously. She believed, as everybody did, that air had neither weight nor—what would follow—limitations to its upward extent. Solid substances had much weight; liquids, rather less, because they incorporated more fire; but air's must be negligible, because it filled the universe and neither obstructed nor slowed down the planets. And if the stars were fire, and fire could not burn without air—as was proven by covering good dry fuel, afte
r setting it alight, with something impervious—then there must be air around the stars.

  "But just suppose," he argued vainly, "that starfire is different from regular fire—"

  "Now you're asking me to believe something much more ridiculous than that the planets are inhabited!" Arranth would crow in triumph, and that was always where the discussion ended, because he had no counter to that.

  So, having unproved his pumps as far as they would go, he was turning his attention to other matters. He was trying to make a connection between fire and mere heat; he was testing everything known to create warmth, especially rubbing, and he was approaching a theory to explain the brightness of the stones that fell from heaven. It was generally accepted that the glowing streaks which nightly crossed the sky were of the same nature as the lumps of hot rock that were sometimes found at the probable point of impact of one of them. Burning rock? Well, rock could be melted, and if air contained more of the principle of fire the higher one went...

  It was tolerably logical, that idea. Yet it failed to satisfy Yockerbow, and on the occasions when he had joined Arranth at the observatory on the high hill to the east of Ripar, where there were many good telescopes and files of records extending back nine-score years—it should have been far longer, but a disastrous winter had flooded the pit where earlier records were stored, and they rotted—he always came away disappointed. Some of the astronomers listened to his ideas politely, but in the end they always made it clear that to them he was no more than a lowly artisan, whereas they were refined and erudite scholars.

  It was their disrespect which had hardened his view of them, rather than any secure belief that their explanations of the stars were wrong. Essentially, he could not accept the probability of such people being completely right.

  And, little by little, he was formulating concepts which he knew made better sense. Suppose he had broached them to the Order of the Jingfired, after insisting on being inducted as Iddromane proposed...?