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But I noted that in what the Queen was telling me were inaccuracies. Slight divergences from prescription. It was a disturbing experience for me to sit quietly listening while this competent and friendly lady explained to me the conduct that must be followed on Adalantaland to preserve health, sanity, and correct thinking, when I was using the same laws of conduct myself… but using them not exactly in the same ma
The Queen wanted to know what part of Rohanda I came from, and I spoke to her of the Southern Continents, of which she had heard. In fact her mariners had visited the coasts of both—this interested me, of course, and from what she said, it seemed that these coasts had been explored by them. But recently she had forbidden voyages far afield: there was disquiet and alarm abroad, had I not felt it? People had not spoken to me of their fears and forebodings? Well, if not, that was because I was a foreigner and it would be discourteous to spread such unhappy states of mind. But as for her, the Queen, and the other Mothers who governed this land, they felt that indeed there was reason to fear. Had I not heard of the great earthquakes that had swallowed whole cities down southwards? Of storms and tempests where normally the climate was equable… So she talked, her blue eyes, which reminded me of the seas I been hovering over only a few R-days before, roaming restlessly about, worried, full of trouble… and I was experiencing a lesson in the relative, for she was in fear for her culture, her beautiful land, while I had recently been contemplating the destruction of planets, cities, cultures, realms—and flying over large tracts of earthquake-devastated landscape in a frame of mind not far off from that used for contemplating the overthrow of termite-queendom, or the extinction of a type of animal for some reason or other.
I left Adalantaland regretfully and travelled slowly to the coast where I had left my space bubble, not wanting to leave this realm of such lush and full fields, such orchards and gardens, so many orderly and well-kept towns—and not wanting to say goodbye either to these handsome people. I was thinking, as I went, about their third precept, that they must not take more than they could use, for it seemed to me to go to the heart of the Sirian dilemma… who should use what and when and what for? Above all what for!
The scene that I saw when I looked down from my space bubble, and the thoughts in my mind then are very clear to me: it is because after the “events,” as soon as I knew that everything I surveyed was chaos and desolation, I took pains to retrieve my mental picture of it all so that it was clear in my mind, ready for instant recall.
I could see a great deal: below me the fair and smiling islands of those blessed latitudes… on one hand the great ocean that spread to the Northern Continent, with its unstable family of islands, now all visible and alive… to the north, the little patch of ice and snow whose very existence showed the sensitive nature of Rohanda’s relation with her sun… southwards the coasts of the main landmass stretched—at first balmy and delightful, then rocky and parched—to the burning regions of the middle latitudes… and inland from these coasts, the vastnesses of the mainland itself, where I had never been, though Ambien I had. I longed to see them. Such forests and jungles were there!—so he said: he had darted back and forth across and about in his spacecraft and even so advantaged had found it impossible to easily mark the bounds of these forests. The beasts in the forests!—such a multitude of them and such a variety of species, some of them even now unknown to us. And beyond the forests, on great plateaux under blue and crystal skies, the cities that Ambien I spoke of. These were not the mathematical cities of the Great Time, but were remarkable and amazing places, often with systems of government unknown to us, some of them benign and comfortable to live in, and some tyra
I did not know what was happening to me. We have all of us experienced those shadows from the future we call “premonitions.” I was not unfamiliar with them. It seemed as if I was inside a black stuffy room or invisible prison, where it was hard to draw breath, and from where I looked down on those brilliant scenes of sea and land that seemed to baffle and reject my sight, because of my state of mind. I kept thinking of Klorathy’s warning… just as the thought formed that his warnings were filling me with something I had only just recognised as terror, it happened…
What happened?
I have been asked often enough by our historians, delighted that just for once they had an actual eyewitness to such an event. And I always find this first moment hard.
There was an absolute stillness that seemed to freeze all of the scene below me. The air chilled—all at once, and instantaneously. I looked wildly around into the skies around me, with their Rohandan clouds and blue spaces—and could see nothing. Yet I was stilled, checked, silenced in all my being.
Suddenly—only that is not the word for the instantaneous nature of this happening—I was in total darkness, with the stars swinging about around me. I was in starlight. And now the stillness had been succeeded by a hissing roar. I looked down to see if the scene under me had also been vanished away, and saw that I was in movement—my craft was being spun about so that I could not see steadily. Yet I was able to make out the coastlands of the main landmass, and the islands, one of which was Adalantaland. My mind was clear only in flashes—as if lightning lit a landscape and then left it dark. This is why I had no coherent idea then of what was happening. Moments of intense clarity, when I was able to work out that Rohanda had turned over on itself, as a globe in a decelerating spin may wobble over—an understanding that this need no more affect the tiny inhabitants on its surface than the microbes of a child’s ball know that they are in violent and agitated movement as the ball is flung from hand to hand and bounced here and there, but continue complacently with their little lives—calculations of how this reversal of the planet might affect it… all this went on in my mind in those moments of brilliant thought, when that mind in fact worked at a level I have not known since, in between periods of black extinction.
I had no idea how long this thing went on, and can only say now that it was for some hours—so our astronomers have calculated. Suddenly—and again I have to emphasise that this word ca