DARK IS THE SUN

26

THE Archkerri trotted elephantinely up to them.

"He was trying to tell me that the gateway was moving," he said. "It apparently has been moving very slowly all along. That would, I think, be because the aggregation of matter in space, which makes the gateway, is also changing in density and location. The end of the log was about to slip off when I started over it!"

He buzzed the equivalent of "Whew!"

"I don't know if that hairy-faced man intended to come back over the log or if he just wanted to take one last look at this universe. Whatever the reason, it is indeed fortunate that he emerged. Otherwise, I would have dropped quite a distance. I am tough but not tough enough to survive a fall from that altitude."

"I wonder where that water came from," Deyv said.

"I've a theory about that, which I'll tell you about later. It involves a satellite of Earth and its effect upon the ocean. I'm more interested in that man. He was wearing garments which I've seen depicted in my prism, but men wore them only during a brief period early in their history. That was an unimaginable number of sleep-times ago, unimaginable to you, I mean.

"Why was he wearing them? And the hair on his face? Men haven't had facial hair for a thousand times a thousand times four hundred sleep-times. Obviously, then, the man is by no means our contemporary. If not, then what is he? It is most puzzling, very engaging."

"I think he was a demon who assumed the form of an ancient," Deyv said.

Sloosh buzzed scornful contempt.

"That's more believable than that he could be an ancient who'd lived since man's early days," Deyv said.

For five sleep-times, the shimmering continued to spill water at regular intervals. Then it ceased. Sloosh made a rope to which he tied a heavy rock. He heaved it through the shimmering, where it remained.

Then he tied the other end of the rope to a tree trunk. Two more sleep-times passed, the rope tightened, and the rock fell out of the shimmering.

"It's moving," the plant-man said. "Upward at an angle."

In the meantime, he had gone down to the base of the cliff above which the shimmering hovered. He tasted the water that had fallen from it.

"Salty. The ocean there, if it is an ocean and not a lake, contains salt. So did Earth's at one time and several times after that. Perhaps that other planet in that other universe is a young one. That doesn't mean that if we should get through another gateway, we'll find ourselves in the world to which this gateway is the entrance. There must be many universes, and so there can be different gateways to these."

Sloosh finally decided that the hairy-faced stranger had not originated in Earth's universe. It seemed to him highly unlikely that he had come on purpose to this island to enter the gateway. How could he know there was one here? Not only that, but a thorough search of the shore had failed to yield any craft which he might have used to get to the island.

Therefore, the man had come into this world from the neighboring one.

"But he cut down a tree here to make a log-bridge to get to the gateway," Deyv said. "He didn't make one in his world to get to ours,"

"No. What must have happened is that he came through from his world when the gateway was much lower in ours than when we found it. The gateway ascended afterward, and he had to cut a log here to get back."

The Archkerri was worried that the gateway which Feersh said was in The Shemibob's land might no longer be there. It, too, must be changing location. Or it might even have disappeared.

Meanwhile, Sloosh also looked the dead sailship-beast over very carefully. For a while, he'd thought that perhaps they could right it, launch it, and sail it back to the mainland. He gave up the idea when he considered the labor it would take to do all this.

Deyv organized the slaves and Feersh's family to make boats. In a comparatively short time they had four dugouts of varying sizes, each fitted with a mast and sail. But these were swept away when an earthquake shook the island, which was followed sometime later by a tremendous sea wave. They all had to flee to higher ground to save themselves. The carcass of the sail-beast was also carried far out and, presumably, sunk. The upper part of the cliff near the shimmering broke off during the quake and fell to its base. About a fourth of the trees on the island were uprooted.

Sometime during the near-catastrophe, the shimmering pivoted a half-circle. Sloosh was the first to see this. He came huffing and puffing into the camp from the other side of the island.

"If you stand behind the shimmering, you can't see it," he buzzed. "You have to go around to the other side for it to be visible."

"So what does that mean?" Vana asked.

"What it means is that we may have passed other shimmerings and not seen them because we were on the wrong side. And the same thing may happen in the future. It is most disconcerting. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about it."

Deyv and Vana listened politely and then resumed making a second dugout. They had no intention of going through a gateway unless someone forced them, and then they'd have to be thrown through. Also, they had decided that this time the boats would not be a community venture. They would make their own, and if the others didn't want to, so much the worse for them.

When Deyv and Vana weren't working on the boat, hunting, eating, or sleeping, they stood on a promontory and watched the sail-beasts. From their observations they were convinced that they could sail against the wind, too.

Once, Sloosh came up to stand beside them while they watched.

"Those white slugs you see on their decks are the young of those beasts," he said. "The larvae, in fact.

After a certain amount of time, the larvae change form and go into the sea. They metamorphose into small duplicates of the mother. After a while, they become adults. The male beasts fight for the females, and the wi

"How do they manage to mate?" Vana asked.

"I don't know. I do have three different speculations, though."

In his circuitous way, Sloosh was leading up to a lecture on the tharakorm. These, he said, were sailshipbeasts of the air. Well, not really animals, since they were composed of viri, and they didn't mate. But they were, in a way, higher on the evolutionary ladder than their oceanic animal analogs.

"What has been happening in the last stages of Earth's existence is that Nature, or the Creator, or call it what you will, has burst out with many previously unknown life-forms. It has done this, I'm convinced, so that some life will be saved from the final catastrophe. Animals that had never given rise to any form of sapiency are now doing so. Take the Yawtl, for instance. He comes from a species that once was confined to quadrupedal locomotion. A very successful form in its place, but still it seemed impossible that it would ever evolve into a biped with fingers and a thumb and a brain the size of man's. Yet, here it is. Too late, unfortunately, because the Yawtl, though it is self-conscious and intelligent, doesn't have time to evolve a brain which can figure out a way to save itself from the holocaust.

"But for that matter, man, who's been on Earth far far longer than the Yawtl, doesn't seem to have the intelligence to save himself either. Though I may be wrong.

"Then there is the Tsimmanbul. It developed from a highly intelligent sea-mammal. In fact, it had a sapiency the equal of man's when man first evolved from the ape. But it couldn't use it, at least not as man did, because of its environment and its form, which kept it from the land. Until recently, anyway.