But if the folk of Foro ignored the stratification of time, the Philosophers, like HuroEldon, exploited it.
The Philosophers marketed knowledge. In their own community far down the slope, their lives, slowed by time, were stretched out. The Philosophers devoted their extended existences to recovering some of the wisdom that had been lost during the Caress, through study and patient archaeology. And they made their living by selling that learning back to those who had lost it. Thus HuroEldon had ascended grandly from his redshifted keep to instruct the people of Foro on how to turn their growing town from a heaped-up clutter into a functioning city with common services like water supplies and sewage, how to reclaim the ancient canal system to irrigate their fields, and so on; he could then step forward across time to advise on such projects as they were carried out.
Celi came to realise that this gift of knowledge was essential. It was only a few generations since the Forons had begun to grope their way out of the fog of fearful superstition that had been the enduring legacy of civilisation’s fall in the Formidable Caress. And it was even less time since the deeper psychological shock of that fall had begun to fade: the edge of the Shelf was still lined by the remains of funeral pyres, where the citizens of Foro, despairing of a future in which another Caress must inevitably shatter all they had built, had burned all their learning with them when they died.
But however useful his advice, for Forons, who prided themselves on their egalitarian instincts, it was hard to stomach Huro’s arrogance. That lecture on creationism had been a gift by Huro, rich with too much knowledge, a bauble tossed carelessly away by a man come to advise on sewage. His manner had been infuriating, let alone the content of his lecture.
And Huro had deflected Celi’s young life just as casually.
In the end, Celi did speak to the Natural Philosopher after the lecture. And within days he was assigned to Dela, the town’s physician, to begin his apprenticeship as a doctor. It all happened so quickly, his whole life upset. When he thought this over, Celi found he resented it, but he knew he would not step off the path he had chosen – or rather, that the Philosopher had chosen for him.
But when HuroEldon called on him again, long after that fateful night in the town hall, Celi found it hard to hide his nervousness.
HuroEldon walked grandly through Celi’s study. In his Philosopher’s cloak Huro was magnificent in this shabby background. He inspected Celi’s notes, carefully scraped onto spindling-skin parchment, and pored over an area he called Celi’s ‘laboratory’, an array of herbs, fluids and minerals labelled and annotated.
Five years had worn away. Celi, now twenty-one, was growing into his role in the town, as a practising physician – and as husband to Qaia, and expectant father of her first baby. But for HuroEldon, who had returned to his redshifted community of Philosophers, less than a year had passed.
‘I’m grateful that you called on me,’ Celi said stiffly.
‘I wanted to see how the town’s bright-eyed young doctor was progressing. It is always amusing to skip forward in time, so to speak, and see how such stories as yours have played out.’
‘I’m not a doctor yet,’ Celi said. ‘I’m still learning.’
‘That will never cease, I hope.’
‘And Dela is still working—’
‘That old witch! Oh, Dela has the charm, she knows the right words to murmur when Effigies go spiralling up from the dying. But you have something far more important than that.’ Huro tapped Celi’s temple. ‘A mind, my boy. That and your spirit, your doggedness. I saw it in you even during that night in the town hall.’
‘I’m surprised you remember it . . .’ But for Huro it wasn’t long ago at all. ‘Your lecture made a great impression on me.’
‘Obviously,’ Huro said dismissively.
‘It wasn’t you showing off your knowledge that intrigued me,’ Celi said, irritated. ‘It was Bera.’
‘Who? Oh, the little girl on the butcher’s slab. What use is all the knowledge in the world, you asked, if it can’t save a child from the Blight?’ He waved a hand at Celi’s home-made laboratory. ‘I can see you’ve devoted yourself to the cause. But the Blight won’t be wrestled into submission, will it?’
No, it wouldn’t. That was why Celi had asked to see HuroEldon.
Celi was already a competent physician. He could deliver babies, stitch up wounds, set broken limbs and comfort the dying, and he had acquired basic knowledge of the vectors of infection, of antisepsis and antibiotics. Much of this learning, preserved and sold by the Philosophers, was rumoured to be very old.
But Celi had also learned that there was nothing anybody could do about the Blight.
It showed up as a skin discolouration first, like a burn. This stage could last a year, even more. But eventually it got into your lungs, and within three days you were dead. None of Dela’s medicines could fight it; it was only rigid quarantine procedures that kept it from overwhelming the community altogether.
What frustrated Celi was that he was sure a cure for the Blight was achievable. As he had visited case after case, Celi had made notes of the folk medicines he encountered, concocted from animal blood, plant roots and seeds, mineral salts – potions and salves born out of desperation. The surprising thing was that some of these remedies showed signs of slowing the disease. Somewhere in all these ingredients was a cure, he became convinced.
But finding that cure was a tremendous challenge. There were no full-time scientists here; Foro wasn’t rich enough to afford them. And a little systematic thought demonstrated that there were simply too many combinations of ingredients and relative concentrations to be tested, even if Celi were to dedicate himself to the project full time – which, as one of Foro’s two doctors, was quite impossible.
And now HuroEldon, who he had hoped would be a source of old wisdom on the Blight, dismissively told him it was all futile anyhow. ‘We live in a world in which time is stratified, remember. Time flows faster the higher you go—’
‘I understand that,’ Celi said testily.
‘Do you? That’s impressive. I don’t. And you must also understand, my boy, that organisms change – especially the pesky little brutes that bring us diseases. The Blight can transmit itself through blood, or spittle, or through the air. Whatever we do, a subset of the Blight’s disease vectors can always waft up into the blue where, accelerated in time, they can mutate, faster than we can hope to match them with our remedies. You see? It’s thus a fundamental feature of our world that disease is always beyond our control.’ He shrugged massive shoulders. ‘One must simply accept the losses.’
Celi could not fault the Philosopher’s logic. But on some level, he saw, Huro simply did not care that it was impossible to defeat the Blight. Perhaps this was a legacy of the past. HuroEldon’s very name was a relic of the complicated compound nomenclature once adopted by the aristocracy of Foro, while Celi’s was a blunt Attic name. Even generations after the rebellion, in Huro’s heart he still thought he was better than Celi, better than the swarming townspeople Celi tended. Celi kept such thoughts to himself.
Huro seemed to be growing bored. ‘You’re wasting your time here, you know. There are much more intriguing questions for a mind like yours to address.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as the subject of that lecture of mine: the indisputable fact that the whole of our world is a made thing, or at least assembled from disparate components, from blue to red, top to bottom. We’ve plenty of evidence beyond spindling skeletons. Why, we believe that the very stratification of time is an artefact.’