by John Brunner
"Then there's nothing more to be said," grumbled Iddromane, and signaled his musicians to play louder.
V
Yockerbow and Arranth were not the only new recruits to depart with the Fleet. Here, as at every city the junqs had visited since Barratong assumed command, scores of other people—mainly young—had decided that life at home was too dull for them, and they would rather risk the unknown dangers of the sea than endure the predictable monotony of Ripar.
Seventeen of them had survived interrogation by Barratong's deputies, and the peers were not averse to letting them go; the city's population was beginning to strain its resources, so they did not insist on an equal exchange.
Dawn of the fifth day saw the junqs turn outward-bound again—vibrating with hunger by now, yet perfectly drilled. Sedate, majestic, they adopted an echelon formation such that when they came on schools of fish or floating weed there would always be at least a little left even for the younglings that held the rearmost station. Thus impeccably aligned, they beat their way north.
"Is this like what you were expecting?" Yockerbow murmured to Arranth as they clung to the haodah of the banner junq and wondered how long it would be before they could imitate the unfeigned self-confidence of the children who casually disregarded the motion of the waves.
"Not at all!" she moaned. "And I persuaded Iddromane to let me have a first-rate telescope, too, thinking I might make useful observations! How can one study stars from such a fluctuating platform?"
The greatest shock of all, however, was to follow. Who could have guessed that the admiral of the Great Fleet of the Eastern Sea was bored and lonely?
Oh, bored perhaps. After one's sub-commanders had flawlessly executed every maneuver required of them for half a lifetime—after putting in at ports of call on every shore of the world's largest ocean—after dealing with people of different cultures, languages and customs for so long—yes, one would expect him to lose the sharpness of his prong. Yet ... lonely? When volunteers flocked to join him at every stopover, and even in mid-ocean, as was shortly manifest when the Fleet was accosted by fish-hunters risking their own lives and those of their barqs, only to be turned back to shore disappointed? No, it was incredible!
Nonetheless, it proved to be the case. Yockerbow found out the second dark of the voyage, when chief navigator Ulgrim—amused, apparently, to meet not only a landsider but a female with at least a smidgin of skylore—had taken Arranth to the stern for a practical discussion. It was a fine clear night, with little wind, and only a clawful of falling stars. The Great Branch gleamed in all its magnificence, and the Smoke of the New Star was clearly discernible, at least as bright as the glowvines of a city they were passing to the westward. The glowvines on the junqs themselves were shielded, for fear of attracting hawqs or yowls; they were rarely fully exposed, as Yockerbow had been told, except when approaching shore or when the fleet needed to keep in contact during a gale.
And there was Yockerbow, more from courtesy than choice, alone with Barratong at the prow, while the rest of the crew amused themselves with a game that involved casting lots.
"Chance..." the admiral mused, making obvious reference to the gamesters. "Well, one can see why people tossed on the ocean by a life-tune of storms may hew to notions such as luck, but—You, Master Inventor! Do you believe your great achievements were the fruit of accident?"
Cautiously, for the "great achievements" were far behind, Barratong having concluded that his pumps could not easily be adapted for use on a junq, Yockerbow answered, "I think luck must be a different phenomenon from chance. I think the world goes about its own business, and those who are ripe to respond do so, much as a fertile plant catches the spores of its kin from a favorable breeze."
"Diplomatic as ever!" said the admiral sourly. "How I wish you'd speak your mind openly! If you only knew how I hunger for someone who might amaze me—startle me by voicing one of my own ideas without being prompted! Better yet, mention something I never dreamed of even when I was half-starved as a youth, plodding from city to city in search of knowledge and instruction!"
"Is that how you began your career?" Yockerbow ventured.
"What else but the quest for knowledge would tempt a sane person away from a comfortable home? What else would persuade a landsider to take to the ocean, except the chance of getting to meet more strangers in a shorter time? Oh, I've sat with scholars in a score of famous cities, listening eagerly to what they purported to teach the world, and after a few years I realized: no one is making new discoveries any more! My sub-commanders long refused to visit Ripar, because last time the Fleet came so far north the junqs were set on by a gulletfish following the drift of the bergs, and two were lost. I acceded for a while, until I heard rumors about the Order of the Jingfired, and even then I held back until reports of your pumps reached me. I never expected them to be useful aboard a junq, but it was an excuse to swing the support of other commanders behind me. Then the absence of bergs during our trip this year came to my aid, and now they are agreed that if I've been successful so far the chances are good that I'll continue to be so. Myself, I can't but doubt it. And I have no one I can turn to for sane counsel."
The last words were added in so low a tone that at first Yockerbow was unsure whether to reply. At length he made his mind up.
"Admiral, I recognize you for a visionary. Such folk have always encountered difficulties. In my humble way, I've done the same. But—well, since it wasn't truly news of my inventions which drew you to Ripar, I deduce it was the hope that the Order of the Jingfired possessed data that you lacked."
"Was I to know there would be a vacancy in the Order when I chose to turn up? The decision to head north this year was already taken."
"Then"—boldly—"how did you plan to obtain the Order's secrets?"
There was a long interval during which one of the outlying scouts reported a huge float of qrill, and the entire Fleet altered course fractionally to take advantage of it. When Barratong replied, there were loud squelching noises in the banner junq's maw, and now and then the whole of her body rippled longitudinally and let go a puff of foul-smelling gas.
"Had I not been inducted to the Order," the admiral said at last as though the interruption had not happened, "I did plan to choose Iddromane as my hostage for this voyage, or some other scholar well grounded in the so-called 'secrets' of the Order. I'd have relied on his terror during the first storm we met to make him reveal—"
Pride in his own city made Yockerbow risk breaking in. "It wouldn't have worked!"
"It wouldn't have been worth it," Barratong retorted sourly.
Yockerbow was shaken. "You mean there's nothing worth knowing in what they teach you?"
"I wouldn't say nothing," came the judicious answer. "I do accept that, acting as they do to preserve lore garnered in the far past, they have succeeded in assuring the transfer from generation to generation of certain indispensable facts. Of those you meet on the branchways of Ripar, or Grench or Clophical, come to that, or any city, or even as you pass from junq to junq of the Great Fleet, how many folk would you rely on finding whom you could talk to about what really matters—the nature of the universe, the fires of heaven and how they correspond with those down here, the beginning and the end of everything? Hmm? Many would be prepared to debate with you on any such subject, but how few would have solid evidence to back their views!"
"I always thought," Yockerbow admitted, "the Order of the Jingfired did have evidence."
"They claim to have, but when you ask for it, it can't be produced!" Barratong exclaimed. "I'm ready to believe, for instance, that long ago one of the stars in the sky blazed up until it outshone the sun. I can see the cloud of glowing gas they still call its Smoke—it's right there, isn't it? What I want to know, though, is why that happened, and why it hasn't happened since! And then there are elderly folk among my own people who say that when they were budded certain stars were not so bright as they are now ... but who's to define what 'bright' mean
s? Can the members of your Order tell me that? They swear in principle they could—if only they had certain ancient star-maps which were spoiled by a flood! But when I asked for them they hadn't even kept fragments and tatters which I could have shown to Ulgrim!"
He concluded that tirade on a fierce tone, and a second later continued in a much milder voice, as though reminded about Arranth by his reference to his chief navigator.
"They said at Ripar that your buds don't take."
Yockerbow curled his mantle before he could stop himself, and a waft of combat-stink fouled the salty air. Aghast at his bad manners, he was on the point of prostrating himself when he realized that the remark had been made in the matter-of-fact fashion of an equal speaking to an equal. Flattered, he confirmed its truth.
"Nor do mine," said Barratong, staring across the water where the new-risen moon was creating a path of brightness for others to follow— not the Fleet. "Your lady wishes me to join with her, and I shall with pleasure, but don't expect the offspring you can't give her. Were I capable, my line would be among the greatest in history. But the only thing that keeps the Fleet in being—the only thing that helps so many cities to survive around the shores of the eastern ocean—is the fact that a first-time mating between strangers takes more often than not, so your seventeen from Ripar will engender enough progeny to keep us going for quite some while ... Oh, Yockerbow, I almost look forward to the tumult the great melting will entail! We must stir the folk around more! Little by little, thanks to our habit of choosing either sea or land, either drom or junq, either this or that, we are breeding apart! And the same holds for the inventions made in one place or another! Do you know about the longwayspeakers that they have at Grench? No? I thought not. But think what use you could have made at Ripar of a means to communicate simply by beating on a distended bladder in a patterned code, comprehensible to somebody the other side of a mountain range: they can do that! And they can signal orders at Clophical by using trained and brightly colored wingets which make patterns that are visible from end to end of the valley, but they don't survive being taken out to sea. And the use they could make of your pumps at Gowg...! Do you see what I mean?"
Yockerbow certainly did, but already he was lost in contemplation of the possibilities. He stood silent for a long while, until Barratong roused him with a nudge, pointing to the north.
"Look yonder! What can the Jingfired tell me about that—hmm?"
For an instant Yockerbow thought he must be watching a drift of cloudcrawlers on their migration route; some species displayed bright flashes from time to time, and occasionally they synchronized to make bright polychrome bands. But this was much too blue, and too near the horizon, and anyway the season was wrong.
"Tonight the sky is clearer than I ever saw it," said Barratong. "You're looking at the aurora round the pole. I've been told that when one draws close enough it reaches to the apex of the sky. Not that anyone has seen it in all its glory since the Northern Freeze—but on this trip we shall! Even my sub-commanders don't know what I have in mind, friend Yockerbow, but on this voyage I mean to break all records for a northern swim, and go where nobody has dared to venture since the ice claimed what was habitable land. I want to witness the rebudding of the continents! Don't you?"
VI
After a few days of steady northward travel, they made the first of many detours. Fog and mist did not deceive the northfinders carried by the Fleet, but this tune a violent storm lay across their course. At about the same tune the sea became noticeably cooler, as though chilled by melting ice. Paradoxically, however, at the same time it started to teem with a wider range of life-forms than could be found in the waters nearer Ripar, from the tiniest qrill which Barratong scooped up in a shell and showed to Yockerbow through a single-lensed microscope that magnified better than ten-score tunes, up to giant schools of sharq. The Fleet accorded these a respectfully wide berth also, not because they were a threat themselves, but because they in turn were hunted by the fiercest predator in these waters, the huge and solitary gulletfish whose mindless charge could rupture the tubules of even the largest junq. For amusement, elderly mariners jelled the ichor of the new recruits by regaling them with tales of what it was like to meet a gulletfish in mid-ocean and try to make it charge a barbed prong. It was worst in the dark, they said, when all one had to guide the eye was the ripple of phosphorescence as it rounded to for yet another onslaught.
"How rich in life the planet is!" murmured Yockerbow, and Barratong gave him a sardonic dip.
"Who says only this planet? Some think the stars may be alive, or harbor life, because living creatures are always warmer than their environment! Myself, though, I suspect the reason we don't find such a plethora of fish in tropical waters is that life requires a differential of heat, the way your pumps require a differential of level, and as the water becomes warmer the task of survival grows harder, just as when it grows extremely cold. What about that?"
Yockerbow felt he would never grow accustomed to the way the admiral kept tossing out provocative ideas, even though he was modest about the source of them, and always gave credit to anonymous scholars said to have been met in distant places. By this time, however, Yockerbow was beginning to doubt their existence. Barratong combined his restless genius with a diffidence more proper to a shy young apprentice.
He said after a pause for thought, "It makes sense to invoke a limit at either end of any scale of events. Just as there is no life in solid ice, so there is probably none in the stars. After all, a living creature which is trapped in wildfire dies, and certain persons have conducted experiments wherein a small animal and some burning fuel were closed up together, and the animal died and the fuel did not burn out."
"I've heard of such cruelty," Barratong said musingly. "I personally would not care to witness it, but I'm glad in a sense that someone could bear to ... Ah, there is so much to know, my friend! And so much that has already been discovered in one place, yet never conveyed to another! But we have spoken of such matters already."
"As we have," rumbled Ulgrim, approaching from the stern with Arranth—somehow shyly—following him. "Admiral, do we plan to put in at any harbors before we reach the polar circle? The lady has convinced me that it would be of interest were I to peek through her big spyglass on stable ground."
Behind his back Arranth gave a moue, as to tell Yockerbow, "See? There are some who respect my learning even if you don't!"
Whether Barratong noticed or not, he gave no sign. He merely chaffed Ulgrim, who was still tall but whose mantle showed the tell-tale wrinklings of age.
"What youth and good looks may do to reform a character! You never cared to come ashore with me in other climes to hear what the local philosophers had to say, or view their instruments and their experiments! Lady Arranth, I bow to you; whatever else you may be schooled in, you certainly display a vast knowledge of people's nature! But the answer's no!"
Abruptly he extended to his maximum height, a third or more above his usual stature, and even though this brought him barely equal with Yockerbow and Ulgrim, the effect was as shocking as though he had grown taller than mythical Jing. One more element was added to Yockerbow's understanding of this admiral's dominance over his enormous Fleet.
"We go ashore next time on land newly exposed by the retreating ice! We stocked the junqs with food enough to see us through the trip—their drink-bladders are bulging—no blight or mold afflicts the food-plants— and we have medicines for every conceivable ill! For all I know, the landfall we next make may be shrouded under so much cloud you can't see stars—but never mind! We already know how the ice when it melts reveals wonders from far distant in time, so the wonders that are distant in space may take care of themselves for this season! The stars are slow to bloom and fade, but you and I are not. Time enough for your observations next whiter, if the Fleet remains in the far north and we are compelled to he up a while, which I suspect ... But tell me, though, old companion"—this as he imperceptibly resumed his
normal pressure— "what's excited you anew about the stars you've known so well for so long?"
Embarrassed, but putting a bold countenance on matters, Ulgrim said bluffly, "She speaks of stars which I can't see, and yet they're there. More than once since leaving Ripar, when the water was most calm, I've thought I could discern them—an eleventh in the cluster of the Half-Score Wingets, another at the focus of the Welkin City ... And of such a color, too: a strange deep red! Yet when I look again—!"
"Master Navigator," Yockerbow said, "have you ever seen a bar of metal heated in a fire until it melts?"
"I never had time for such landsiders' tricks!"
"I know: one dare not carry or use fire aboard a junq. Yet fact is fact. The metal starts to glow in the dark red; afterwards it becomes orange, and yellow, and green—which we see clearest—and then shades through blue to white, just like the rainbow. Eventually it can be made to glow like the sun itself. It follows that a hotter or a cooler star..."
His words trailed away, for Barratong was scowling.
"I thought you were never inducted to the Order of the Jingfired!" he said in an accusatory tone. v "What does that have to do with it?" Arranth demanded before Yockerbow could reply. "Had I but the means, I'd show you all this with a glass prism!"
"It is as I feared!" Barratong raged, and began to pace back and forth along the poop of the haodah, spuming at every turn so violently one thought he might blister his pads. "Your vaunted Order possesses no truly secret knowledge! Do you realize that the heating of a metal bar is the chief symbol of their most private ritual?"
There was a moment of dead silence, save for the slap-and-hush of waves against the junq's broad flank and the meep-meep of a flighter and its young which were following the Fleet in hope of scavenging carrion or floating dung.
