Yet it was by now certain that, assuming the people would not refuse to relinquish their supposed priority in all these technical matters from airships to telescopes, a community like this held the potential the travellers had been hunting for.

  Nine days after their arrival, their mental anguish came to a crisis. As usual, Roff and Zayla-who were childless and could spend as long as they liked every day with the visitors-had come to share their evening meal of deep pies steaming-hot from the oven and little cakes dripping with honey. They were mannerly, and had never seemed irked by the way in which the travellers could keep secrets by talking in Chalyth and Creohan’s language, which Paro-mni and Kiong-la understood adequately, rather than in the latter’s tongue which the natives here could follow if it was spoken slowly enough.

  Tonight, however, Roff and Zayla seemed tense, and the reason emerged when Roff spoke up suddenly with an air of not being able to contain himself any longer.

  “Friends! Excuse my bluntness, but there’s a problem which has been burning my mind since the first time we clapped eyes on you out in the forest, when you talked knowledgeably of airships yet maintained you’d never seen one apart from ours! We know from our friends that you’ve done the same to all of them in turn-dropped tantalising hints of improbable information, then closed up as though ice had formed across your mouths! The suspense has become unbearable. I must, must ask you outright: are you from some far-off city where all our achievements have long ago been surpassed, so that you patronise us as children playing games?”

  The travellers exchanged uneasy glances. Realising that no one else was willing to respond, Creohan did so, and hoped as he spoke that he was capable of phrasing what he wanted to say without causing offence.

  “No, we would never patronise you. We admire your achievements tremendously, and all the more for a reason which I shall try to explain in due time. First, though, let me be as blunt as you, and inquire what you know about the origins of your community and of those others you have contacted, such as the forest-people.”

  “Little!” Zayla said crisply. “Our written records go back only three to four centuries, though we suspect they include scraps of information from much earlier. As nearly as we can tell, our forefathers wandered out of the west, having lost most of their possessions and the majority of their original number while crossing the volcanic range we’ve told you about. Encountering the impassable forest, they settled here for lack of alternatives, and since they resigned themselves to calling this area home, we’ve done what we can to free ourselves from the artificial constraints imposed on us. That’s our people’s history encapsulated. Why?”

  “Were the forest-people already there?” Creohan asked.

  “We believe so. Certainly it was not only the density of the trees which impeded our ancestors’ progress.”

  “And you know nothing of the place they came from?”

  “Almost nothing.” Zayla started. “Why, do you know something of it?”

  “Probably.” Creohan gave a sigh. “At least that makes one thing clear—how your community could be so in ignorance of the past. People who had been driven from home for some unknown cause, then decimated by crossing hostile terrain, might very easily forget a high percentage of their former knowledge. Yet you preserved one thing, and that may yet be the salvation of Earth. You have a practical, determined, no-nonsense attitude towards the facts of human existence which as I told you we admire very greatly.”

  He glanced at his fellow-travellers. “Well, do I speak out?” he inquired.

  There were nods: Chalyth first, then the others.

  “I wish I did not have to tell you this,” Creohan said sincerely, turning back to Roff and Zayla. “But you’ll forgive me, I think, when I explain how much is at stake.

  “Your airship, to begin with: you wanted to know how I could speak so exactly about its capabilites when I’d never before seen one. Well, it was because there have been literally millions of them in earlier ages. Similarly, I know that your friend Yade the astronomer has been chewing his nails over my accidental remarks about the stars. I know about them because I’ve made a lifetime study of them with instruments far superior to his. And, in particular, I know that one of them bids fair to destroy our Earth unless some means is found to prevent it.”

  Roff had been stranded at the moment of an earlier sentence, and now muttered, “Millions? Millions of airships like mine?”

  But Zayla had listened to the end of Creohan’s statement. She took hold of her man’s hand and commanded him to pay attention, jutting forth her chin as though to defy a blow.

  XXVI

  When Creohan had concluded his recital, Roff was almost exploding with suppressed anger. Leaping to his feet, he paced back and forth along the room, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  “Time could not have played a fouler trick on us!” he burst out. “To think that everything we’ve ever dreamed of—Yade’s telescopes, Schrap’s machinery, our airships, everything—has been done over and over again, and infinitely better! Why, we might as well let that star wipe us out! At least it would mean that no one else had to taste the bitterness of this discovery!”

  “No!” exclaimed Zayla, likewise rising and catching at him with both hands. “You’re wrong, Roff—you’re more wrong than I ever thought you could be! Don’t you see how fortunate we are?”

  “Fortunate?” Roff gave a harsh laugh. “Oh yes! We have the luck of a man who slaves his entire life away to build a dam and protect his house from flood, only to find the river running dry!”

  “No! Oh, Roff, won’t you listen to me? Creohan and Chalyth and their friends have gone to great trouble to explain it all very clearly, and all you’ve done is seal your ears because someone ages ago did what you’ve done by standing on the shoulders of forgotten giants. Well, it’s our turn to enjoy the same advantages!”

  With an effort Roff mastered himself. He halted his pacing, let his hands fall limp to his sides, and shrugged. “Very well. Show me how.”

  “It’s simple!” Zayla’s dark eyes were alight with excitement. “A new thing has come into the world within the past millennium, and it’s not these—these Trees of History themselves, which the Umftiti people conceived thirty thousand years ago, and which were carried far enough over the face of the globe to have reached Creohan’s city and there been used as a kind of psychological drug. No, it’s the systematic exploitation of the information they provide, mapping it, analysing it, comparing one period with another and drawing conclusions—”

  “But I understood Creohan to say that the people where Paro-mni and Kiong-la come from won’t have any truck with mere material devices; they’d rather fry alive than besmirch their dignity!”

  “Yes, but we wouldn’t!” Zayla almost shouted. “And Kiong-la’s grandfather promised all the help Creohan and his friends wanted!”

  Her voice dropped, and a strain of tenderness coloured it.

  “Beloved, you and I have lived together long enough for me to know how desperately you chafe against the narrow boundaries of our life. We’re shut in here, by volcanoes, forest, desert, ice-packs. Wasn’t it to mock those barriers that you thought of flying over them?”

  Roff gave a reluctant nod.

  “Well now! With knowledge of the successes and failures of almost a hundred thousand years to draw on, don’t you think you’ll live to fly not only through the local air, but clear around the world—perhaps even out into space? We’re young yet, you and I, and neither of us is stupid. Nor is Schrap, nor is Yade, nor are all our friends. What’s been done once can be done again.”

  “No, it can’t,” Roff snapped. “Creohan told us: there have been techniques based on resources which no longer exist. The buried forests they called ‘coal’, for example, and the mineral oils which used to be mined from far underground—all those were prodigally squandered and no trace of them remains.”

  “But the sun still shines, the wind still blows,” Creohan said. “A magnet still draws iron and a current will still flow along a wire, the same gases abound in the air as when men drew on the processes which power the sun for their heat and light and transportation. The energy-flow of the universe is not something that’s changed by the passage of a mere hundred millennia.”

  He could read in Roff’s face the man’s increasing desire to be convinced. At length words emerged that foreshadowed eventual agreement, and relief followed.

  “But—but a star like our sun, only bluer… Does that not also mean hotter? I seem to remember that Yade—”

  “No, in all respects very like our sun,” Creohan cut in. “Bluer because of its velocity of approach, that’s all.”

  “Even so, a sun …” Roff licked his lips. “How can we whose idea of a grand and memorable achievement is to float a hundred feet in the air and paddle against a light breeze set ourselves such a fantastic goal?”

  “It will not be the first time that a group of inspired men have jumped from walking to spaceflight within living memory,” Paro-mni said. “And those others had no stronger pole to vault by than myths, legends and dreams.”

  “Yet you yourselves have told us that in eighty thousand years of the past no people could be found with the ability to divert a star!”

  “Of course not,” Zayla said. With composure she resumed her seat, folding her hands in her lap. “That was left for us to undertake. It’s the thing we can do which no one has done before.”

  Moments of silence leaked away while Roff stared at his wife in wonderment. “You’re right,” he said at last. “You’re right and I was wrong. Nonetheless, all the people we shall need to carry out the task—where are they to be had? Not in Paro-mni’s city, where they sit soft-handed and smile at the doom of Earth, nor in Creohan’s, where they have no better use for the knowledge of history than to indulge their own private fancies, nor—”

  “You’ll find them,” Chalyth said unexpectedly. She leaned forward from her place beside Creohan, giving his hand a squeeze. “I once said jokingly to Creohan that it was as though Earth herself was on our side because our cause is good. It’s no longer a joke. How this can be, why this can be, I dare not guess, but it’s the truth. Even in such a ridiculous matter as the meteors which forecast our passage over the forest we mistakenly thought would prove a barrier.” She shook her head, and waves rippled down her long dark tresses. “I’ve thought about this, over and over again, and I’ve wondered whether perhaps those same subtle deformations of the spatial fabric which convey memories of past times to students exploring a Tree of History may not also contain a—an element of will, an active desire that Earth should be preserved. Right or wrong, we have the evidence. Yes, you will find the people whom you need.”

  “I wish I could share your certainty,” sighed Creohan.

  “Of one thing you may be certain,” Roff declared, and approached him, extending his hand. “We shall do our part—I promise you that. Our citizens will decline to go down to the dark without at least having attempted something that is uniquely ours.”

  “Does it not make you glad for our species, Creohan?” said Hoo, days later, when they two and Chalyth stood on the balcony of Lugya’s high tower watching rainclouds gather above the volcanoes to the west. Kiong-la and Paro-mni knew more about the recent history of this region than their companions, who had started their temporal investigations in the already distant age of the Lymarians; accordingly they were better able to contribute to a study of available resources, such as ore and water.

  “How so?” Creohan muttered.

  “Why, that there should still be people born nowadays who have the—the magnificent arrogance to defy the universe!” Hoo grinned in the depths of his beard. “I’m so grateful to you both for kicking me out of my home valley! There it was so easy to imagine that, if indeed there were any other survivors of our race, they too must be trapped as my family is in the rote rehearsal of actions made meaningless by the passage of the centuries. Yet you’ve brought me among people who are curious, possessed of initiative, determined, inclined to question everything that occurs around them. I’ve never been so happy in my life, nor dared to dream of being so.”

  There was a silence. Puzzled, he went on in a challenging tone, “Do you not agree? How can you not agree? Have you not fulfilled the purpose for which you set out from your own home—you and Chalyth both? Two good centuries of study and development, especially once Roff has carried out his intention of sending a monster airship-load of trained technicians to burrow through the accumulated data of the past in the Trees of History: won’t that suffice? If it doesn’t, will anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Creohan sighed. “I can’t feel sure of anything any more.”

  “Come now!” Hoo nudged Chalyth. “You, girl! Can’t you make your man see some sense? I’ve told him over and over: he set out to bring information to someone who could make ‘ use of it and act accordingly, and he did so. He’s probably been more successful in achieving his ambitions than anyone else currently alive on this worn old plane of ours.”

  “That’s exactly where the trouble lies,” Chalyth said quietly, and Creohan gave her a wan smile to show his appreciation of her insight. “It isn’t good for anyone to achieve so colossal an ambition so readily.”

  “Readily! Don’t you realise how fine a thread your lives hung by? Arrheeharr was within the ace of shooting you down because he thought you had been pilfering our meat; the little brown lord would cheerfully have beheaded you but for the intervention of your underwater friend; we found only two people in the whole of Kiong-binu’s city who were willing to act on what we told them, and if we’d found none at all, which was perfectly possible, we’d have been chased away to wander at random and maybe to starve far from human society; the tree-people might have speared us and bled us to death for the sake of their leaf-and-branch idol… ! You call that achieving your goal readily’? Then I’d like to know what you think of as being difficult!”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Creohan said wearily. “Perhaps the root of the problem is in the different ways we came upon our common quest. Madal was well satisfied to discover people to whom she could give of her talents and warmth, and be sure in return that the gift was not despised. You wanted a sense of purpose relevant to today, not to a long-ago age. And so, too, do Kiong-la and Paro-mni—that’s why they’re driving themselves night and day to answer the ceaseless questions our new friends here keep putting to them. They’re dissatisfied with knowledge for its own sake, the precise opposite of someone like Neng-idu who would have been content to compile his grand history of humanity and see it burned up the day the final page was written.”

  “Fair enough,” Hoo nodded. “The universe was here before we were, and presumably it’ll go on after we depart, but I see no reason to hasten or even tolerate our threatened demise. So how was your approach to this matter unique?”

  “Because I’m not content either with the past or with the present,” Creohan said. “I think I know now what persuaded me to accept Chalyth’s challenge and set forth blindly over [ land and sea. I’m looking for something relevant to the v future.”

  “To the future?” Hoo cried. “But you have it here! Care for the safety of Earth: isn’t that—?”

  “It’s no use my trying to explain,” Creohan interrupted. He looked desperate at the futility of conveying his true feelings.

  “Obviously not! A hundred thousand years, nearly, of the past to study and draw upon, and—”

  “And how much of the future?” Creohan shouted. “We’ve . been here for a single tick of the celestial clock, that we can find out about! For two million years before we started to keep records of our acts, there were creatures on this planet who made fire, shaped tools, used grunts and gestures that foreshadowed speech! They too were men, my friend, and yet they had as little inkling of us as we have of those who will come after.”

  Hoo nodded. “True enough. Nonetheless, I am as I said content. There isn’t going to be a future if we’re blotted out. You’ve accomplished what you first set out to do, and I simply cannot understand your restiveness.”

  “We accomplished what we first set out to do,” Chalyth agreed. “But not what we later set out to do, after we’d learned the extent of our former ignorance through the Trees of History.”

  Creohan stared at her in mingled delight and astonishment, and she concluded to him alone, forgetful of Hoo.

  “Was that not to go westward until we came to the mountain told of in so many legends? We have done all we can for these people by snowing them the necessary task to engage their skills. Now we are free to go on to the very end.”

  XXVII

  Dropping into the lee of a boulder for shelter from the bitter wind, Creohan thought of saying that he was very tired, but his mouth was as parched as a desert, and in any case Chalyth must be equally weary. The going had become worse, and worse, and then worse again, until for the past three days they had seen neither water nor any living thing bar a few lichens. Man had not dwelt in this region for countless centuries; it was a vast bum-scar on the face of Earth, bleak, racked with temblors and sifted over with ash, where the vain attempts of life to re-establish itself were repeatedly wiped out by rockfalls and outbursts of lava. The air stank of brimstone, and the sky was a louring yellow-grey.

  Suppose, Creohan had often thought, that the mountain they sought had been eroded away, or laid low by one of the frequent earthquakes? Suppose, still more alarmingly, that it remained and would prove when they reached it to be nothing but a stark unclimbable crag? They did not even know if the man of the Umftiti had won to it a mere thirty thousand years before, and whatever it was that had made it of such vast importance must have taken place at least thrice so long ago…

 

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