“I’ve wondered, too. But I’m glad they let us in.”
“Because they wanted to let us in. Because they decided it was best to let us in. Not just because they could see no harm in us, but because they wanted us, almost as if they had been waiting all these years for us. Cushing, what did they see in us?”
“Damned if I know,” said Cushing. “Come on. I’m going back to camp.”
Ezra was huddled close to the fire, fast asleep and snoring. Meg sat beside the fire, wrapped in a blanket against the chill of night. Andy stood a little distance off, hip-shot, head drooping, slack-kneed. Across the fire from Meg, Elayne sat bolt upright, feet tucked under her, hands folded in her lap, her face a blank, eyes fixed on nothing.
“So you’re back,” said Meg. “See anything, laddie boy?”
“Not a thing,” said Cushing. He sat down beside her.
“Hungry? I could cook a slice of venison. Might as well eat it while we can. Another day and it won’t be fit to eat.”
“I’ll get something tomorrow,” said Cushing. “There must be deer about.”
“I saw a small herd in a break to the west,” said Rollo.
“Do you want me to cook up a slice?” asked Meg.
Cushing shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“Tomorrow we’ll climb the hill. You have any idea what we’ll find up there?”
“The wardens said there are buildings,” Rollo said. “Where the Sleepers sleep.”
“We can forget about the Sleepers,” Cushing told him. “It’s an old wives’ tale.”
“The wardens built their life upon it,” said Rollo. “You’d think it would have to be more than that. Some slight evidence.”
“Entire bodies of religion have been built on less,” said Cushing.
He picked up a stick of firewood, leaned forward to push the brands of the campfire together. The blaze flared up momentarily and the flare of its light flashed on something that hung in the air just beyond the fire and a short distance above their heads. Cushing reared back in astonishment, the stick of firewood still clutched in his fist.
The thing was cylindrical, three feet long, a foot and a half thick, a fat, stubby torpedo hanging in the air, hanging effortlessly, without wobbling, without any sound, with no ticking or humming that might indicate a mechanism designed to hold it in its place. Along its entire surface, not placed at regular intervals but scattered here and there, were what seemed to be little crystal eyes that glittered in the feeble firelight. The cylinder itself was metal, or seemed to be metal: it had a dull metallic sheen except for the brilliance of the shining eye spots.
“Rollo,” said Cushing, “it’s a relative of yours.”
“I agree,” said Rollo, “that it has a robotic look about it, but cross my heart and hope to die, I’ve never seen one like it.”
And here they were, thought Cushing, sitting here and talking about it, being matter-of-fact about it, while by any rule of commonsense they should be frozen stiff with fear. Although, outrageous as it might be, there was no fearsomeness in it, no menace nor any hint of menace, just a fat, roly-poly clown hanging in the air. Looking at it, for a moment he seemed to conjure up a face, a fatuous, vacantly grinning, impish face that was there one moment, gone the next. There never had been any face, he knew; the face that he had seen was the kind of face that should go with the tubby cylinder suspended in the air.
Ezra mumbled in his sleep, gulping, and turned over, then went back to snoring. Elayne sat stark upright; she had not seen the cylinder, or, seeing it, had not deigned to notice it.
“Can you sense it, Meg?” asked Cushing.
“A nothingness, laddie boy,” she said, “a cluttered nothingness, disorderly, chaotic, uncertain of itself, friendly, eager, like a homeless dog looking for a home…”
“Human?”
“What do you mean, human? It’s not human.”
“Human. Like us. Not alien. Not strange.”
It spoke to them, its words clipped, metallic. There were no moving mouth parts, no indication of where the words came from;—but there was no doubt that it was the tubby hanger-in-the-air that spoke to them.
“There was a purple liquid,” it said. “Not water. Liquid. Heavier than water. Thicker than water. It lay in hollows and then it humped up and flowed across the land. It was a scarlet, sandy land and strange things grew in the scarlet land, barrel-like things and tublike things and ball-like things, but big. Many times bigger than myself. With spines and needles in them that they could see and smell and hear with. And talk, but I can’t remember what they said. There is so much that I cannot remember, that I knew at one time and no longer know. They welcomed the purple liquid that rolled across the land, uphill and downhill—it could go anywhere. It rolled in long waves across the scarlet sand and the barrel-like things and the other things welcomed it with song. Thanksgiving, glad the purple came. Although, why glad, I do not remember. It is hard to think why they should welcome it, for when it passed over living things, they died. Their spines and needles all hung limp and they could no longer talk and they caved in upon themselves and lay stinking in the sun. There was a great red sun that filled half the sky and one could look straight into it, for it was not a hot sun, not a bright sun. The purple flowed across the land, then rested in hollows and the barrel-things and the other things it had not yet passed over sang softly to it, inviting it to come…”
Another voice said, louder than the first, trying to blot out the other, “The stars went round and round, the green star and the blue star, and they moved so fast they were not balls of fire but streaks of fire, and rising in that point in space they circled was a cloud that was alive, taking its energy from the two revolving stars, and I wondered if the stars had been this way always or if the cloud that looked to be all sparkle had made the suns go round and round, the cloud telling the two suns what to do and…”
And yet another voice: “Darkness, and in the darkness a seething that lived upon the darkness and could not abide the light, that took the feeble light I threw at it and ate it, draining the batteries so there was no longer any light, so that I, powerless, fell into the darkness and the seething closed upon me…”
Still another voice: “A purpleness that entrapped me, that took me in and held me and made me a part of it and told me things of long ago, before the universe began…”
“My God,” screamed Meg, “they are all around us!”
And they were. The air seemed full of them, a flock of tubby cylinders that hung above them in the firelight and beyond the firelight, all of them jabbering, each trying to outdo the others.
“…I could not talk with them, there was no way to talk with them; they did not think or act or see or hear or feel like me; there was nothing that I had that they had, nothing they had I had…It had one body only, a hideous, terrible body that I cannot describe because my senses and my mind rejected the very horridness of it, that I could not describe even had I not rejected it; but one thing I knew, that it had many minds and these minds conversed with one another and they all talked at me and held me in great pity that I had but one mind…They were machines but not machines as we are machines, as I am a machine; they were living metals and sentient plastics and they had a spirit that…I was an ant and they did not notice me, they had no idea I was there and I lay there in my antdom and listened to them, experiencing some of what they experienced, not all of it, by any means, for I did not have the knowledge nor the perceptions; like gods they were, and I as dust beneath their feet, although I do not know if they had feet, and I loved them and was terrified by them, both at once…There was this cancer that spread from world to world, that ate everything it touched, and a voice came out of it and told me, ‘Behold us, we are life.’…There was a people; I don’t know if I should call them people, but they had all the time there was, creatures to which time meant nothing, for they had conquered time, or maybe only understood it, and had no longer any fear of its tyranny; and they were mise
rable, for having obliterated it, they had found that they needed time and had tried to get it back, but could not since they had murdered it…‘I am an exterminator,’ it told me. ‘I wipe out life that has no right to be; I wipe clean the worlds that got started wrong, that had no right to be. What would you think if I exterminated you?’…There was this race of laughers, laughing in their minds; all they could do was laugh, it was their one reaction to anything at all, although it was a different kind of laughter than I had ever known and there was really not that much for them to laugh about…”
Babble, babble, babble. Jabber, jabber, jabber. Clatter, clatter, clatter. Disjointed and fragmentary, although if one of them could have been listened to alone, perhaps the story that it told might be comprehensible. But this was impossible—each with its own story to tell insisted on talking while the others talked so that all of them were talking all at once.
By now there were so many of them and the chatter of them so insistent and intermingled that there was no way of hearing anything except an occasional phrase. Cushing found himself unconsciously hunching his shoulders and tucking in his head, hunkering lower to the ground, assuming a protective stance, as if the increasing babble were an actual physical attack.
Ezra tossed in his sleep and sat up, dazed, scrubbing at his eyes with his fists. His mouth moved, but there was so much babble, there were so many other voices, that he could not be heard.
Cushing turned his head to look at Elayne. She sat as she had before, staring out into the night with the sense of seeing nothing. Ezra had said of her, that first day they had stumbled on the two of them, “She is of another world,” and that, Cushing thought, must be the explanation—that she dwelt in two worlds, of which this one, perhaps, was the least important.
Rollo stood on the other side of the fire and there was something wrong about him. Cushing wondered what it was and suddenly he knew: Rollo was alone; Shivering Snake was no longer with him. Thinking back, he tried to recall when he had last seen the snake, and could not be sure.
We are here, Cushing told himself, we are finally here—wherever here might be. Denied access by the wardens, herded by the rocks, let in by the Trees. But before the Trees had let them in, there had been a questioning and a probing, an inquisition, a looking for heresy or sin. Although not probing all of them, perhaps; perhaps only a probing of himself. Certainly not of Meg, for she had helped him when his legs were water and his senses scattered. Not of Ezra, for he had claimed he held a conversation with the Trees. And of Elayne? Of Elayne, who would know? She was a secret person, an exclusive person who shared with no one. Andy? he asked himself. What of Andy, the hunter of water, the killer of rattlesnakes, the battler of bears? He chuckled to himself as he thought of Andy.
Had it been himself alone who had been questioned and examined, the surrogate for all the rest of them, the leader answering for all the rest of them? And in the questioning, in the quest of the dirty fingernails that had pulled the essential being of him apart, what had they found? Something, perhaps, that had persuaded the Trees finally to let them through. He wondered vaguely what that something might have been, and could not know, since he could not know himself.
The babbling stopped of a single instant and the tubby cylinders were gone. Somewhere off in the night a chirping cricket could be heard.
Cushing shook himself, his mind still benumbed by the babble. He felt a physical ache, his entire body aching.
“Someone called them off,” said Meg. “Something called them home, reproving them, angry at them.”
Elayne said, in her textbook voice, “We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe…”
19
They stopped for their noon rest at the edge of a small grove of trees. Cushing had bagged a deer, which Andy had carried up the slope. Now Cushing and Rollo butchered it and they had their fill of meat.
The going had been hard, uphill all the way, the climb broken by jutting ledges of rocks they had to work their way around, gashed by gullies that time after time forced them to change their course. The dried grass was slippery, making the footing uncertain, and there had been many falls.
Below them the Trees were a dark band of foliage that followed the course of the lower reaches of the butte. Beyond the Trees the high plain was a blur of brown and deeper shadows, thinning out to a lighter, almost silvery hue as it stretched to the horizon. Using the glasses, Cushing saw that now there were more than wardens out on the plains. He could see at least three separate bands, encamped or going about the process of encampment. And these, he knew, must be tribes, or delegations from tribes, perhaps alerted by the wardens as to what had happened. Why, he wondered, should the tribes be moving in? It might mean that the wardens were not a small society of fanatics, as it had seemed, but had the backing of at least some of the western tribes, or were acting for the tribes. The thought worried him, and he decided, as he put the glasses back in their case, to say nothing of it to the others.
There was as yet no sign of the buildings that had been glimpsed through the glasses several days before and that the wardens had said were there. Ahead of them lay only the everlasting slope that they must climb.
“Maybe before the day is over,” Rollo said, “we may be in sight of the buildings.”
“I hope so,” Meg told him. “My feet are getting sore with all this climbing.”
The only signs of life they saw were the herd of deer from which Cushing had made his kill, a few long-eared rabbits, a lone marmot that had whistled at them from its ledge of rock, and an eagle that sailed in circles high against the blueness of the sky. The tubby cylinders had not reappeared.
In the middle of the afternoon, as they were toiling up an unusually steep and treacherously grass-slicked slope, they saw the spheres. There were two of them, looking like iridescent soap bubbles, rolling cautiously down the slope toward them. They were a considerable distance off, and as the little band stopped to watch them, the two spheres came to a halt on a fairly level bench at the top of the slope.
From where he stood, Cushing tried to make out what they were. Judging the distance he was from them, he gained the impression they might stand six feet tall. They seemed smooth and polished, perfectly rounded and with no sense of mass; insubstantial beings—and beings because there seemed in his mind no question that they were alive.
Meg had been looking at them through the glasses and now she took them from her face.
“They have eyes,” she said. “Floating eyes. Or, at least, they look like eyes and they float all about the surface.”
She held out the glasses to him, but he shook his head. “Let’s go up,” he said, “and find out what they are.”
The spheres waited for them as they climbed. When they reached the bench on which the spheres rested, they found themselves no more than twenty feet from their visitors.
As Meg had said, the spheres were possessed of eyes that were scattered all about their surfaces, moving from time to time to new positions.
Cushing walked toward them, with Meg close beside him, the others staying in the rear. The spheres, Cushing saw, were about the size that he had estimated. Except for the eyes, they seemed to have no other organs that were visible.
Six feet from them, Cushing and Meg halted, and for a moment nothing happened. Then one of the spheres made a sound that was a cross between a rumble and a hum. Curiously, it sounded as if the sphere had cleared its throat.
The sphere rumbled once again and this time the rumble defined itself into booming speech. The words were the kind that a drum would make had a drum been able to put together words.
“You are humans, are you not?” it asked. “By humans, we mean—”
“I know what you mean,” said Cushing. “Yes, we are human beings.?
??
“You are the intelligent species that is native to this planet?”
“That is right,” said Cushing.
“You are the dominant life form?”
“That’s correct,” said Cushing.
“Then allow me,” said the sphere, “to introduce ourselves. We are a team of investigators who come from many light years distant. I am Number One and this one that stands beside me is termed Number Two. Not that one of us is first or the other second, but simply to give us both identity.”
“Well, that is fine,” said Cushing, “and we are pleased to meet you. But would you mind telling me what you are investigating?”
“Not at all,” said #1. “In fact, we’d be most happy to, for we have some hope that you may be able to shed light upon some questions that puzzle us exceedingly. Our field of study is the technological civilizations, none of which seem to be viable for any length of time. They carry within themselves the seeds of their destruction. On other planets we have visited where technology has failed, that seems to have been the end of it. The technology fails and the race that had devised and lived by it then fails as well. It goes down to barbarism and it does not rise again, and on the face of it that has happened here. For more than a thousand years the humans of this planet have lived in barbarism and give all signs that they will so continue, but the A and R assures us that it is not so, that the race has failed time and time again and after a certain period of rest and recuperation has risen to even greater heights. As so, says the A and R, will be the pattern of this failure…”
“You are talking riddles,” said Cushing. “Who is this A and R?”
“Why, he is the Ancient and Revered, the A and R for short. He is a robot and a gentleman and—”
“We have with us a robot,” Cushing said. “Rollo, please step forward and meet these new friends of ours. Our company also includes a horse.”
“We know of horses,” said #2 in a deprecatory tone. “They are animals. But we did not know—”