Skilluck, captain of the briq Tempestamer, voyages far abroad. Skilled sea-folk spread Jing's texts to the world He sends them with Rainbow, to carry away into the West, in the hopes that someday, this knowledge will spur people to find a way to prevent their certain doom. Desperate to preserve this knowledge they have gained, Jing has all his manuscripts copied. Jing contracts the sickness, but Rainbow is disease-free. Ntah is destroyed by disease and famine, and as winter ends, the plague arrives at Castle Thorn. More pressingly, though, a deadly plague sweeps the world. Jing sees that the world's doom is inevitable. What fuel is there, barring worlds like ours? If we would rather not be fuel for a star, there's no one who can save us but ourselves. He said eventually, "If stars are fire, then new stars happen when fresh fuel is fed to them. He was almost screaming with the fury of his visions, for the countless stars were crashing together in a colossal mass of flame, and the world itself was ripe to be their fuel. " warn the world of what's in store when heaven's fire descends to burn the densest wettest jungle and boil the Lake of Ntah! Vast fires surpassing number of belief loom yonder in the dark and we are cast away upon a fragile barq, this little world, and more and more fires loom and every night the dark is pierced with streaks of fire and what it is we do not know but we must master it or it will utterly consume us! We must pledge ourselves to spare the world the doom of ignorance, not keeping any knowledge private that we've found, but spreading it about to last beyond our lifetimes!" He marveled at what he heard himself say-or rather declaim. Suddenly his head was roaring-loud with revelations, as though he had tapped the sap-run of time. For once his dream faculty might be wiser than his sober and reflective consciousness. But already their new discoveries had made it plain that everyday knowledge was inadequate to analyze the outcome. Imagination was not enough it was handicapped by rational considerations like distance, delay, expenditure of effort, the obstinacy of other people. Jing yielded to a half-guilty, half-ecstatic temptation and let his mind be taken over by the dream-level. It is Jing who taps into his dream-level and makes the crucial breakthough: They examine the planets and discover satellites. Jing and Rainbow use this basic instrument to examine the heavens, and discover that the Maker's Sling is not a solid band of light, but is composed of an uncountable number of densely packed stars. Rainbow and Twig share Jing's interest in the stars, while Keepfire's experiments with flame enable him to produce glass lenses, which Twig uses to invent the telescope. Jing has with him star maps, which show that in addition to the New Star, there are sixteen stars that appear now which did not in years past.Īt Castle Thorn, Jing meets Scholar Twig, Keepfire, and Rainbow, daughter of the Count. The legendary Jing studies the stars and sees the coming doomĪyi-Huat Jing, court astrologer of His Most Puissant Majesty Waw-Yint, travels north from Ntah to the Castle Thorn, to inquire of their learned folk as to the meaning of the New Star: that star which appeared suddenly and for a time out-shone even the Bridge of Heaven. From Sunbride to Sluggard: the planets of the budworld solar system.Barqs, briqs, and junqs: the naming of alien things.They must quit their planet before the inevitable occurs and their species perishes. Stakes so much greater than humanity ever faced: the certain knowledge that their planet, traveling through a crowded region of space, will fall into another star and be consumed as fuel. Combat-stink and weather-sense.Ī people so like us in spirit: the need to unlock the secrets of the universe, to create telescopes and microscopes, to peer into the depths of space and into the mysteries of the living cell.
Treacherous dreamness instead of restorative sleep. Moon, sun, planets, stars.Ī world so unlike ours: The Arc of Heaven, a dense band of stars lighting up the night sky-to the Milky Way what a halogen floodlight is to a dim candle.Ī people so different from humans: pressurized tubules instead of joints and bones. A world so much like Earth: land, sea, wind, rain, snow.
0 kommentar(er)
