ever. The sky, he
explained pompously, was a great mystery that only an adept might
communicate to another. He meant that he didn't know about it, Dave
gathered. Everything, it turned out, was either a mystery or a rumor.
He also had a habit of sucking his thumb when pressed too hard for
details.

"But you must have heard some guesses about what started the cracks in
the sky?" Dave suggested.

"Oh, indeed, that is common knowledge," Sersa Garm admitted. He changed
thumbs while he considered. "'Twas an experiment most noble, but through
mischance going sadly awry. A great Sather made the sun remain in one
place too long, and the heat became too great. It was like the Classic
experiment--"

"How hot is your sun?"

There was a long pause. Then Sather Germ shrugged. "'Tis a great
mystery. Suffice to say it has no true heat, but does send forth an
activating principle against the phlogiston layer, which being excited
grows vengeful against the air ... but you have not the training to
understand."

"Okay, so they didn't tell you, if they knew." Dave stared up at the
sun, trying to guess. The light looked about like what he was used to,
where the sky was still whole. North light still was like what a color
photographer would consider 5500 deg. Kelvin, so the sun must be pretty hot.
Hot enough to melt anything he knew about. "What's the melting point of
this sky material?"

He never did manage to make Sather Garm understand what a melting point
was. But he found that one of the solutions tried had been the bleeding
of eleven certified virgins for seven days. When the blood was mixed
with dragonfeathers and frogsdown and melded with a genuine
philosopher's stone, they had used it to ink in the right path of the
planets of a diagram. It had failed. The sky had cracked and a piece had
fallen into the vessel of blood, killing a Sather who was less than two
thousand years old.

"Two thousand?" Dave asked. "How old is Sather Karf?"

"None remembers truly. He has always been the Sather Karf--at least ten
thousand years or more. To attain the art of a Sather is the work of a
score of centuries, usually."

That Sather had been in sad shape, it seemed. No one had been able to
revive him, though bringing the dead back to life when the body was
reasonably intact was routine magic that even a sersa could perform. It
was after that they'd begun conjuring back to Dave's world for all the
other experts.

"All whose true names th