The Crucible of Time

by John Brunner

  To which Axwep: "The city's growing fractious, as though she senses something amiss. Could be a taint in the water; we're well into the estuarial zone. I'd be inclined to hold off until sunrise. It won't mean too much of a delay, and it'll give us a chance to feed and rest the musculators. I can send a pitchen ahead to explain why we aren't landing at once."

  Drotninch pondered, and one could almost scent her indecision ... but, like most landlivers nowadays, she coated her torso with neutralizing perfumes. It had become a mark of good manners, and those—as Awb knew from his few visits to shore—were far from a luxury in the overcrowded conditions of a fixed city. Life at sea, in his view, was superior; if Axwep noted an accumulation of combat-stink she needed only to consult her weather-sense about what course to set and let a fresh breeze calm things down.

  Finally the scholar signed agreement, and Axwep issued the necessary orders. The group dispersed, some to tend the musculators, others to prepare the pitchen. Slowly, owing to her colossal bulk, the city ceased to thrash the water. The group of interlinked junqs around which she was built exuded relief, for even in calm weather they disliked being brought near land, perhaps owing to some ancestral fear of being stranded on a beach or dashed against rocks. Not, naturally, that they could do anything against the resistless force of the musculators.

  When it was uncaged the pitchen seemed equally unhappy, as though it too were alarmed by the dark shore, but that was fanciful nonsense, since it did not depend on sight—indeed it possessed no eye, and reacted solely to magnetic fields, like the ancient northfinders which had died off during the Northern Freeze. When it was dropped overside with Axwep's message tied to its claws, it set out obediently enough for the place it had been conditioned to regard as home, leaving patches of phosphorescence to mark each of its leaps. Watching it go, Awb reflected what a benefit its kind had proved to be, especially since they had been modified to follow canals and winding inland channels as well as pursuing a direct course across open water. He wished he knew who had been the first to domesticate pitchens, but during the Age of Multiplication people had been much more concerned with staying alive and sane than with keeping records of who invented what.

  "That's much better!" said a she'un's voice behind him, and he lowered reflexively as Thilling swarmed down an adjacent branchway with, as ever, her image-fixer at the ready. "Maybe now I'll get the chance to cut a few new lenses! I've lost count of how many got spoiled when a wave disturbed me while I was trimming them, and I do so want to catch everything that happens when we go ashore ... And what's wrong with you, young'un? You seem worried."

  "I never saw a coast so dark before!" Awb blurted.

  "Hmm! I did! Once I was sent to cover an epidemic on Blotherotch— went in with a medical team looking for the causative organism, assigned to picture the victims for future reference. Some of the folk there had turned so dreamish, they imagined they could prolong their lives by eating luminants, and they'd absolutely stripped the area. It was ghastly. Still, we got away safely, and now we're all immune against that disease. On the other claw..."

  She hesitated. Greatly daring, he prompted her.

  "Oh, I was only going to say: we've discovered cures for so many disorders including infertility, it seems incredible there should be a brand-new one, least of all one that can afflict an entire countryside— people and animals and plants as well!"

  "Is that really what we can look forward to finding?"

  "You're asking me? I never set pad here, haven't even had a sight of the nervograp messages that got through before the link failed. Phrallet must know more about those than I do; doesn't she tell you anything?"

  "As little as possible," Awb muttered. He was always embarrassed when someone mentioned his budder, who flaunted her five bud-scars in a manner most people regarded as indecent and seemed to think that because Axwep only had four she had the better claim to be Voosla's mayor.

  "Well, you should pester her more," Thilling said, loading a sensitive sheet into her fixer. As much to herself as him, she added, "I wish I'd had tune to graft a new lens on this thing, because I'm sure there's a saltwater blister somewhere, but with dawn so close I'll have to make do ... Keep your eye skinned, young'un. If what I've been told is reliable, we should be in for a treat. Look yonder, where I'm pointing."

  Awb complied, but still all he could make out, even with his telescope, was a vague patch of black-on-blacker. In the south-east the first hint of dawn was coloring the air, not nearly enough as yet to dun the Arc of Heaven, let alone the Major Cluster. There was a bank of dense cloud to the north, veiling any aurora there might be, and that surprised him, for visibility in this region was reputed the best in the hemisphere; why else choose it for the World Observatory?

  On the other claw, no place on the planet was immune from what happened next. A streak of yellow light slashed out of the east, and at its tip a fireball exploded, scattering trails of luminance across a quarter of the welkin. Caught by surprise, Thilling uttered a curse.

  "That's spoiled my leaf good and proper! Young'un, keep looking, and warn me if I'm apt to miss anything!"

  Hastily she threw away the sheet she had been mounting in the fixer, and peeled another from the stack.

  By this time Awb was beginning to guess at what she meant. The flash of the meteor had revealed something outlined against the northern clouds. He had had too brief a glimpse to make out details, but there was only one thing it could be: Fangsharp Peak, on top of which the observatory was being grown. Of course, since it was so much higher than the surrounding land, it was bound to catch the sun's rays first. So—

  "Quick!" he cried, suddenly aware that all about them the branchways were alive with folk scrambling to seek a vantage point and watch the unique spectacle. Barely in time Thilling leveled her fixer.

  The sky grew brighter, though the land and sea remained virtually featureless. The world paused in expectation. And there it came!

  On the very crest of the mountain, so high above them that it looked as though a huge and jagged rock were floating in mid-air, a single shaft of sunlight rested.

  It was the most awe-inspiring event that Awb had ever seen. Without intention, he found himself counting his own pulsations to find out how long the sight would last: three, four, five, six—

  It was over, and the sky was turning daytime blue, and he could see the whole mountain. Its flanks were scarred where the natural vegetation had been stripped away in favor of what would be needed to support the observatory. Guide-cables for construction floaters swooped down to either side. A passenger-carrying floater, five bladders glistening, was descending slowly from the top. Awb had never seen one so close; usually they passed over at pressure-height, mere sparkles to the unaided eye.

  Axwep and Drotninch returned to the lookout platform, and waited along with everybody else until full daylight also overspread the shore, revealing a stark, discolored mass of shriveled foliage.

  "That's worse than what we were warned to expect," muttered Thilling as she stored away her exposed sheets. Awb was about to reply, when—

  "Look!" somebody screamed.

  On the top of the peak something was moving. No: the top of the peak itself was moving! It was cracking apart, it was shedding chunks of rock, it was tilting, it was sliding and rasping and collapsing and slamming down with horrible slowness in an inexorable paradigm of disaster. The guide-cables snapped, the passenger floater leapt up the air like a frightened pitchen taking off from a wave-top, the new plants on the mountainside vanished in a cloud of dust and boulders, so all at once that Awb could not take everything in.

  The avalanche subsided into a monstrous scree, blocking a canal that led from the base of the mountain to the shore along which, presumably, rubble had been carried to create the sheltering mole now visible between the city and the land, the first stage in preparation for a full-scale harbor. All the seafarers stood transfixed with horror as the dawn breeze carried off the dust.

  But fro
m the shore, incurious and dull as mere animals, most of them sickly and with their mantles ulcerated, a few natives gazed at the city before dismissing it as incomprehensible and setting off to seek food in the shallows.

  What Awb found most appalling, as he strove to hold his telescope steady, was that not a single one among them made for the scene of the catastrophe, to find out whether anybody lay in need of help.

  II

  "Of course we know what happened," said Lesh, so weary she could scarcely flex her mantle, let alone stand upright. "It's another of the unforeseen disasters that bid fair to wreck our project! Without our noticing, a pumptree shoot invaded a slanting crevice and expanded there, turning the crevice into a crack and the crack into a split. Finally it sprang a leak. Water by itself might not have made the rock slide, but mixed with nice greasy sap—smash! You can see the way it must have gone quite clearly from the air. But what we now have to find out is why. Pumptrees simply aren't supposed to act like that!"

  She was the resident chief designer for the observatory project. She and a couple of assistants had been all dark on the mountain-top investigating reports of irregular pulsation in the pumptrees. About the time Voosla hove in sight they had concluded the trouble was due to nothing worse than irritation caused by the topsoil they were carrying in the form of slurry, which necessarily contained a trace of sand and gravel. The roots of the toughtrees which would eventually form a foundation for the large telescopes needed more nutriment than they could extract from bare rock, at least if they were to grow to usable size in less than a score of years. Besides, the intention was to keep the peak in more or less its original form, and toughtrees certainly did erode rock, given time.

  Down below there was plenty of rich fertile dirt, and it had seemed like a brilliant shortcut to mix it with water and render it liquid enough for pumptrees to transport it upward. This was not entirely a new technique; something similar had been attempted recently in desert-reclamation.

  So Lesh and her companions had remounted their floater, to take advantage of the coolness of the gas in its bladders before sunshine increased its buoyancy and obliged them to have it hauled down, and that lucky chance had spared their lives. In fact, as things had turned out, everybody was safely accounted for, except perhaps a few natives, and they were so stupid they could rarely be taught to answer their names. Still, the harm done was severe enough.

  "It's set us back years!" Lesh mourned.

  "Well, I did warn in my original report, when the site was first surveyed, that there must be something amiss in this area!" That was from Drotninch's elderly colleague Byra, hunching forward.

  "You didn't lay much stress on the point, then," Drotninch countered. "As I recall, you concluded that 'the abnormalities found fall within a range of normal variation comparable to that in the Lugomannic Archipelago!' "

  Other voices were instantly raised. Awb recognized Phrallet's—trust her to poke a claw in, he thought morosely—but none of the others. It was dark again now, and even though a few luminants had been brought from Voosla it was hard to make out anybody's features, here on the gritty beach beside the unfinished mole.

  In any case, he was too worn out to care. So much had happened, he was half-convinced he had wandered into dreamness and would recover to be told he was suffering from fever and delirium. He wanted to have imagined what he had witnessed today, the stench of shock and misery exuded by the people working here as they surveyed the rain of years of effort. At his age he had scarcely begun to conceive ambitions, let alone put them into practice, and he had been stabbed to the pith on realizing how trivial an oversight could cause such a calamity. That vast mound of shattered rock blocking the canal; that dismal garland of carefully tended plants now dangling over the new precipice so high above; those tangled cables which only yesterday had guided massive loads up and down Fangsharp Peak...

  Too many images, too much emotion. He let his mind wander and made no attempt to follow the discussion.

  Then, unexpectedly, he heard Axwep's boom of authority, and reflex snatched his full attention, just as though they were in mid-ocean with a line-squall looming.

  "Now that's enough of this wrangling!" the mayor rasped. "I thought we were bringing cool-minded scientists here! I'd like to see a bunch like you put in charge of a city when one of her incorporated junqs turns rogue and has to be shed because you can't kill her without attracting sharqs or feroqs! Fancy trying to keep your musculators working when rogue ichor's leaking through the circulation, hmm? If you can't cling to your drifting wits when you're not even in danger of your lives, it's a poor lookout for your project anyhow! So shut up, will you? And that goes for you as well, Phrallet! I don't care how much of the voyage you spent chatting up our guests while I was busy running Voosla—you can't possibly know enough about the problem to discuss it. Even Drotninch hasn't been here for two years, remember."

  The direct insult provoked Phrallet to a reeking fury, and she rose to full height in a way that proved she had worked little, if at all, during the bright-time; none of the others present had pressure left to match her. For an instant she imagined she was at an advantage.

  Then, suddenly, she realized that those nearest her were all landlivers, perfumed against such a naked show of emotion, and they were shuffling away from her in distaste. With a muttered curse she stormed back to the city, splashing loudly off the end of the mole.

  And good riddance, Awb thought. He had long wished that something of the sort might happen. Of course, like everyone else, he would have hoped to love his budder ... but did she like him? Had she liked any of her offspring? True, it was a custom in every floating city to trade off young'uns to communities where, for some reason, the fertility treatment had not properly taken, or been counteracted in emergency, but she never stopped boasting about what splendid bargains she had struck for her four eldest ... all of whom were she'uns.

  Awb's mantle clenched around him. So were three of Axwep's—and they were still in the city, one studying, two working on the secondary plants. The mayor didn't object to their presence. But Phrallet could all too easily have seen her buds as potential rivals, and that would explain so much, so much!

  Oh, if only he had been budded to somebody like Thilling! But the picturist must be sterile; she had no bud-scars at all.

  A faint idea hovered at the edge of his awareness, in that dim zone where memory, imagination and reason blurred together. He was far too tired to pursue it, though, and turned his mind back to the discussion. Axwep was presiding over it now, directing its course like a commander of old at the bragmeets recounted in ancient legend.

  She was saying: "So when you first came here, and heard about peculiar plants and deformed animals, you found no actual evidence, correct?"

  "The nearest reports," Byra confirmed, "were from several padlonglaqs away. The local vegetation displayed some unusual features, but that's often the way with modified Gveestian secondaries, isn't it?"

  "What about the natives? I haven't seen much of them, but they strike me as very peculiar indeed!"

  Axwep's thrust went home. Byra broke off in confusion. But Drotninch spoke up bluffly.

  "It was regarded by the Council of the Jingfired as a great advantage that the folk hereabouts were unlikely to protest at our intrusion!"

  There was a murmur of approval from the assembled scientists, growing restive at the mayor's intervention.

  "I thought so too," Lesh said suddenly. "But now I don't. Oh, it's very well for you lot to argue in such terms, comfortable at home in Chisp! What do you think it's been like for us, though, surrounded by people we can't even talk to? It's been preying on my pith, I tell you straight, and I don't think I'm the only one."

  Seizing her chance, Axwep said, "Can you relate the loss of your luminants to any particular event? Or the failure of your nervograps? After all, when you first arrived everything seemed normal except for the people. What did you do that might have—oh, I don't know!—imported a new infect
ion from beyond the hills, say?"

  There was a pause. Lesh said at last, with reluctance, "Well, I have wondered about..."

  "Go on!"

  "Well, we do require a lot of fresh water, you know, and we were running short the winter before last, because it freezes so hard around here, and one of our aerial surveys noted that a stream just the other side of the local watershed was still free of ice. So last spring we tapped it with some quick-growing cutinates, and by the end of the summer we had a good supply. It's lasted through the winter exactly as we planned. But in any case, what could that have to do with the sudden blight we've suffered? We're all trained personnel, and we have the most modern medical knowledge, and—"

  "Nobody's told me," Axwep cut in, "but I'll wager that the local folk have long been accustomed to collecting food from beyond the watershed. Correct?"

  "Ah ... Yes, I believe so."

  "Because the vegetation there is lusher, or better to eat, or superior in some other way? Or don't you know?"

  "I already told you: some of the Gveestian secondaries are unfamiliar, but we're on the edge of a climatic boundary, so I suppose the cold—"

  "It's time to stop supposing and start thinking," murmured a soft voice at Awb's side, and Thilling settled close to him. "No need to explain what's going on. I can guess, even though it's taken me until now to get all my images developed. They practically tell the story by themselves ... Say, wasn't it Phrallet I sensed passing me on the way here? What's with her? She was reeking!"

  Awb summed up the reason, and Thilling clacked her mandibles in sympathy.

  "It's not going to be much fun for you on Voosla for the foreseeable future, is it?"

  That was it. That was the hint he needed to complete the idea which had been so elusive before. Even though life at sea was preferable, life anywhere in company with so foul-tempered a budder...

  "Do you spend most of your time on land?" Awb whispered.