Lying with two of his concubines in his bed of animal skins, the fisher king was also kept awake by a hectic stream of thoughts. His mind was no less quick than Clancy’s but it worked in a very different way. Clancy thought like an acrobat, a tightrope walker, nimbly balancing above the void. But the king moved between large solid chunks of certainty. Annihilation was an external threat to be fought off, not an existential hole inside.
He thought of the power of the strange prince in his sphere. He thought about his own sacred bloodline and the kingdom which sustained it. All his life he had deftly managed threats from other island powers, defeating some in war, making allies of others through exchanges of gifts or slaves, or bonds of marriage. But how to play a visitor who came not from across the sea in the longboat but down from the sky in a kind of silver moon?
He woke one of the concubines. (He was a widower and had never remarried).
“Fetch me my chamberlain. I want to take his advice!”
“There are three kinds of knowledge,” Clancy said, “let’s call them Deep Knowledge, Slow Knowledge and Quick Knowledge. Deep Knowledge is the stuff which has been hardwired into our brains by evolution itself; the stuff we are born with, the stuff that animals have. It changes in the light of experience, like other knowledge, but only over millions of years. Slow Knowledge is the accumulation of traditions and traditional techniques passed down from generation to generation. It too changes, evolving gradually as some traditions fade and others are slowly elaborated. But, at the conscious level, those who transmit Slow Knowledge see themselves not as innovators but as preservers of wisdom from the past. Quick knowledge is the short cut we have latterly acquired in the form of science, a way of speeding up the trial and error process by making it systematic and self-conscious. It is a thousand, a million times quicker than Slow Knowledge, and a billion, billion times speedier than Deep Knowledge. But unlike them it works by objectivity, by stepping outside a thing.
“Deep, Slow and Quick: we could equate them to rock and sea and air. Rock doesn’t move perceptibly at all. Sea moves but stays within its bounds…”
He laughed, “More wine, Com, this is good. Get this: Metropolitans are creatures of air, analytical, empirical, technological; lost worlders are typically creatures of the sea. They all are, but these guys here are literally so. So here’s the book title: The Meeting of Sky and Sea. See? It ties in with the king’s origin myth!”
“That was a marriage of sky and sea,” observed Com.
Clancy had retired for the night on a headland overlooking a wide bay, with a coastal village of wattle huts squatted near the water’s edge. But when he woke in the morning there was no sea in sight. A plain of mud and rocks and pools stretched as far as the horizon and groups of tiny figures could be seen wandering all over it with baskets on their backs.
The moon was on the far side of the planet, taking the ocean with it. The sky was open and blue. And when he climbed down the steps of Sphere (watched by a small crowd which had been waiting there since dawn) Clancy found that he was appreciably heavier than he had been the previous day.
Followed closely by the fascinated crowd – made up mainly of children and old people – Clancy went down from the headland to what had been the bay. A group of women were just coming off the mud flats with their baskets laden with shellfish. He smiled at them and started to walk out himself onto the mud.
Behind him came gasps and stifled incredulous laughs.
Clancy stopped.
“Is there a problem?” Clancy had Com ask. (Everyone was diverted for a while by the wondrous talking egg). “Is there some danger that I should be aware of?”
“No, no danger,” they answered.
But why then the amazement? Why the laughter? They stared, incredulous.
“Because you are a man!” someone burst out at length.
Clancy was momentarily nonplussed, then he gave a little laugh of recognition.
“I’ve got it Com. Their reaction is exactly the one I would get if I headed into the women’s toilets in some shopping mall and didn’t seem to realise I was doing anything wrong.”
He addressed the crowd.
“So men don’t go on the mud when the tide is out?”
People laughed more easily now, certain that he was merely teasing them.
“These things are different where I come from,” said Clancy. “You’re telling me that only women here go out on the mud?”
A very old woman came forward.
“Only women of course. That is a woman’s realm. Surely that is obvious?”
“And a man’s realm is where?”
The woman was irritated, feeling he was making a fool of her.
“To men belongs the sea under the moon,” she snapped, withdrawing back into the crowd.
“Sky and sea, sky and sea,” muttered Clancy to Com, “it’s coming together nicely.”
The book was the thing for him. Reality was simply the raw material.
That night the king piled the choicest pieces of meat on Clancy’s plate and filled his mug again and again with a thick brew of fermented seaweed. Clancy’s stomach groaned in anticipation of a night struggling to unlock the unfamiliar proteins of an alien biological line, but he acted the appreciative guest, telling tales of Metropolis and other worlds, and listening politely as the king’s poets sang in praise of their mighty lord, the ‘moon-tall whale-slayer, gatherer of islands, favoured son of sky and sea.’
As he lay inside Sphere in the early hours, trying to get rest if not actual sleep, Clancy became aware of a new sound coming from outside – a creaking, snapping sound – and he got up to investigate.
He emerged to an astonishing sight. Over at the eastern horizon, the enormous moon was rising over a returning sea. Brilliant turbulent water, luminous with pink moonlight, was sweeping towards him across the vast dark space where the women had yesterday hunted for crabs.
But the creaking, snapping sound was much nearer to hand.
“What is that?” Clancy asked.
The king had posted a warrior as guard-of-honour to Clancy’s sphere and the man was now sleepily scrambling to his feet.
“What is that sound?” Clancy asked him, holding out Com, his yellow egg.
The sound was so ordinary to the man that he could not immediately understand what it was that Clancy meant. Then he shrugged.
“It’s the moon tugging at the rocks.”
“Of course,” exclaimed Clancy, “of course. With a moon that size, even the rocks have tides that can be felt.”
He walked to the edge of the headland. He heard another creaking below him and a little stone dislodged itself and rattled down the precipice.
“Lunar erosion,” he observed with a smile.
The warrior had come up beside him.
“It tugs at your soul too,” he volunteered. “Makes you long for things which you don’t even know what they are. No wonder the women stay indoors under the moon. It tugs and tugs at you and if you’re not careful, it’ll pull your soul right out of you and you’ll be another ghost up there in that dead dry place and never again know the sea and the solid land.”
Having made this speech, the young man nodded firmly and wandered back to his post at the foot of Clancy’s steps.
“Wow,” breathed Clancy, “good stuff! Did you record all that?”
Of course Com had.
The moon had nearly cleared the horizon now. It towered above the world. The wattle huts below were bathed in its soft pink light and the water once more filled up the bay.