We told each other our experiences: mine more dramatic than theirs: they had briefly been visited by tempests of snow, which been dissipated almost at once by floods of rain, the earth had shaken and had growled and creaked, some of the mountainsides had fallen and there would be new riverbeds running off the plateau to the oceans.
We pieced together, among us, the following succession of events: The planet had turned over, had been topsy-turvy for some hours, and then righted itself—but not to its old position: Klorathy’s instruments, more sensitive than ours, told him that the axis of the earth was at an angle now and this would mean that as this angled globe revolved about its sun, there would no longer be evenness and regularity in its dispositions of heat and cold, but there would be changes and seasons that we could not yet do more than speculate about. The planet was slightly further away from its sun, too—the Rohandan year would be minimally longer. Many kinds of animals were extinct. The level of the oceans had sharply dropped, because the ice masses of both poles were much enlarged and could be expected to further increase. Cities that had been swallowed by the waters before in previous sudden changes would be visible again… islands that had vanished under the waves might even be visible, glimmering there in shallower seas… and perhaps poor Adalantaland, that vanished happy place, might ring its bells close enough under the surface for voyagers to hear them on quiet days and nights—so we talked, even then, when we were surrounded by mud and flying clouds of steam, and the catastrophe was already receding into the past, becoming another of the sudden reversals of Rohandan condition. But when I used the word “catastrophe” of what had just happened—a not, after all, inconsiderable happening—Klorathy corrected me, saying that the Catastrophe, or, to use the absolutely accurate and correct word, Disaster, meaning an unfortunate alignment of the stars and their forces, could properly be applied to a real misfortune, a true evolutionary setback, namely, the failure of the Lock. I have already hinted at my impatience with Canopean pedantry. As I saw it. As I sometimes even now cannot help seeing it.
I remember my meek enquiry, which was I am afraid all impertinence, to the effect that some might consider recent events to merit that word, and remember Klorathy’s smiling, but firm, reply that: “if one did not use the exact and correct words, then one’s thinking would soon become unclear and confused. The recent events…”—I remember I smiled sarcastically at this little word, “events”—“…did not in any fundamental way alter the nature of Rohanda, whereas the failure of the Lock, and the Shammat delinquency, had affected the planet and would continue to affect it. That a catastrophe, a disaster. This was unfortunate.” And he kept the pressure of his bronze or amber gaze on me, making me accept it.
Which I did. But I was raging with emotion. I thought him cold and dispassionate. I was thinking that being able to view the devastation of a whole planet with such accurate detachment was not likely to he warmly responsive to a close personal relationship: at the time, that my own personal concerns were being intruded by me did not strike me as shameful, though it does now. I have already said that “hindsight” is not the most comfortable of possible views of oneself or of events. The mention of Shammat affected me—I knew of course that it was all guilt. But while I was clear in my mind that our Sirian delinquencies and deceptions that I could not confess to had caused barriers between me and Klorathy, my emotions expressed this in anger and a growing irritation with Klorathy, even a dislike…
I left him and went to my own tent, which was set on a high rock, damp but at least not saturated, and sat there by myself, looking down on the weird scene—the savages dancing and singing, on and on, in the splashing brown water and the mud, illuminated by a moon that appeared fitfully among the tumultuous clouds, and vanished amid the mists and fogs. Ambien I came to talk to me. He was conciliatory and gentle, for he knew how I raged and suffered.
He had wanted very much to leave, before the events that we were not to call a catastrophe. He had become bored with the inactivity of it all. The life of the savages went on, hunting, and curing hides, and eating their stews and their dried meat, and making clothes and ornamenting them. And Klorathy stayed where he. He did not lecture or admonish them. What had happened was that the head man came to Klorathy one evening and sat down and finally asked if he had visited the dwarves, and if there was anything he could tell them—the savages. And Klorathy answered saying that had he indeed visited the little people and that in his view… explaining how he saw things. And then the head man went off and conferred, and days went past, and then he returned and asked again, formally, sitting on the ground near Klorathy, having exchanged courtesies, if Klorathy believed the dwarves could be trusted to keep agreements if they were made—for in the past, so he said, the dwarves had been treacherous and had spilled out of their underground fastnesses and slain the tribes, both men and animals… and Klorathy answered this too, patiently.
What was happening, Ambien I said, was that Klorathy did not make any attempt to communicate what he thought until he was asked a direct question—or until something was said that was in fact a question though it was masked as a comment. And Ambien I then went to Klorathy and enquired if this was indeed a practice of Canopus: and whether Klorathy expected to stay there, living on as he did, with savages, until they asked the right questions… and if this was Klorathy’s expectation, then why did he expect the savages to ask the right questions?
To which Klorathy replied that they would come and ask the necessary questions in their own good time.
And why?
“Because I am here…” was Klorathy’s reply, which irritated Ambien I. Understandably. I felt irritated to the point of fury even listening to this report.
Anyway, Ambien I had wanted to go, but could not, since I had the Sirian transport with me. He had in fact gone off to visit the dwarves again, by himself, another colony of them—a foolhardy thing, which had nearly cost him his life. He had been rescued by the intervention of Klorathy, who had only said, however, that “Sirians as yet lacked a sense of the appropriate.”
Then had begun the “events” that were not to be described as more than that.
At last, I had arrived back, and he, Ambien I, could not express how he felt when he saw the glistening bubble descend through that grey steam, because he had believed me to be dead. And of course it was “a miracle” that I had survived—to use a term from our earlier epochs.
We stayed together that night, in emotional and intellectual intimacy, unwilling to separate, after such a threat that we might never have been together again at all.
We decided to leave Klorathy.
First, having pondered over what Ambien I had said about questions, how they had to be asked, I went to Klorathy and asked bluntly and directly about the Colony 10 colonists, and why we, Sirius, could not use them.
He was sitting at his tent door. I sat near him. We were both on heaps of damp skins… but the clouds of steam were less, the earth was drying, the thundering and trickling and running of the waters already had quietened. It was possible to believe soon these regions would again be dry and high and healthy.
“I have already told you,” said Klorathy, “that these colonists would not be appropriate. Do you understand? Not appropriate for Sirians, for the Sirian circumstances.”