“And if all of this is true,” said Rollo, “then this, after all, may be the Place of Going to the Stars.”
Cushing shook his head. “There are no launching pads. We would have found them if there had been any. And so remote, so far from all the sources of supply. The economics of such a place as this would be illogical.”
“Perhaps,” said Rollo, “a certain amount of illogic could make a certain sense.”
“Not in a technological world,” said Cushing. “Not in the kind of world that sent men to the stars.”
That night, after Ezra and Elayne were sound asleep, Rollo disappeared on another walkabout, and with Andy off to gambol with the Followers, Cushing said to Meg, “One thing keeps bothering me. Something that the Team told us. There is something else here, they said. Something other than the A and R. Something hidden, something we should find.”
Meg nodded. “Perhaps, laddie boy,” she said. “Perhaps there’s a deal to find. But how do we go about it? Has that driving, adventurous brain of yours come up with a fresh idea?”
“You sensed the living rock,” said Cushing, “that night long ago. You sensed the Followers. They were a crowd, you said. A conglomerate of many different people, all the people they had ever met. You sensed that the robotic brain still lived. Without half trying, you sensed all these things. You knew I was sleeping in the lilac thicket.”
“I’ve told you and told you, time and time again,” she said, “that I’m a piss-poor witch. I’m nothing but an old bag who used her feeble talents to keep life within her body and ill-wishers off her back. A dowdy old bitch, vicious and without ethics, who owes you, laddie buck, more than I ever can repay you for taking me on this great adventure.”
“Without half trying,” said Cushing, “just as a flippant, everyday exercise of your talents…”
“There’s Elayne. She’s the one you should be—”
“Not Elayne. Her talents are of a different kind. She gets the big picture, the overview. You get down to basics; you can handle detail. You see the nuts and bolts, sense what is taking place.”
“Mad you are,” she said. “Madder than a hare.”
“Will you do it, Meg?”
“It would be a waste of time.”
“We’ve got to crack this puzzle. We have to know what’s going on. If we don’t want to stay here forever, penned upon this butte.”
“Okay. Tomorrow, then. Just to show you you are wrong. If you have the time to waste.”
“I have time to waste,” said Cushing. “I have nothing more to do with it.”
22
She didn’t want to do it, but, she told herself, she had to try, if for no other reason than to get it over with. As well, she was afraid to try it, because then she might learn the true smallness of her powers. If she had any powers at all. Although, she told herself, with slim comfort, she had done certain things.
“I hope,” she said to Cushing, “that you are satisfied.”
The early morning sun lit the great metal doors, embossed with symbolic figures that meant nothing to her. The stone towers that rose on either side and above the doors were forbidding in their solidness. She gained the impression, as she and the others stood there, at the foot of the shallow stone steps that went up to the door, that the entire building was frowning down upon them.
The Team had said that there was something somewhere behind the doors, somewhere in the City, but they had not known what it was and now it was her job to find out. It was an impossible task, she knew, and she would not have even tried, but laddie boy had faith in her and she could not let him down. The others, she knew, had no faith in her, for she had given them no reason. She looked at Elayne and, for a moment, thought she could glimpse in the other woman’s eyes a hint of quiet amusement, although, God knows, she told herself, there is none to know what might be in Elayne’s vacant eyes.
She dropped to her knees and settled comfortably, her haunches resting on her heels. She tried to make her mind reach out, easily at first, not pushing too hard, driving out, gently, the tendrils of her mind, seeking, probing, as the tendrils of a climbing vine might seek out crevices in the wall on which it climbed. She sensed the hardness of the stone, the polished toughness of the metal, and then was through them, into the emptiness beyond. And there was something there.
The tendrils pulled back as they touched the strangeness of it—a sort of thing (or things) she had never known before, that no one had ever known before. Not a thing, she told herself, but many slippery different things that had no definition. That would not define themselves, she realized, as her mind veered away from them, because they were not alive, or at least seemed to have no life, although there was no doubt that they were entities of some sort. A tingling fear went through her—a shuddering, a loathing—as if there were spiders there, a billion scurrying spiders with swollen, distended bodies, and legs covered with quivering black hairs. A scream welled in her throat, but she choked it back. They can’t hurt me, she told herself; they can’t reach me; they’re in there and I’m out here.
She thrust her mind at them and was in the midst of them, and now that she was there, she knew they weren’t spiders, that there was no harm in them, for they were not alive. But despite the fact of their being lifeless, they somehow held a meaning. That was senseless, she knew. How could something lifeless hold a meaning, or many tiny lifeless things hold many, many meanings? For she was surrounded and engulfed by the meanings of them, little lifeless meanings that whispered vaguely at her, thrusting themselves forward, pressing themselves against her, seeking her attention. She sensed the countless buzzings of many tiny energies, and within her mind, fleeting images built up momentarily, then faded, fading almost as soon as they had formed—not one of them, but hordes of them, like a swarm of gnats flying in a shaft of sunlight, not really seeing them, but knowing they were there by the glint of light off the vibrations of their wings.
She tried to concentrate, to bring her mental tendrils down to sharper focuses that could spear and hold at least one of the little dancing images, to seize upon and hold it long enough to make out what it was. She felt, as if from far away, as if it were happening to someone other than herself, the sweat upon her forehead and running down her face. She bent even farther forward, squeezing her upper torso down against her thighs, concentrating her body into a smaller space, as if by this concentration she could concentrate her powers. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, trying to block out all light, to form within her mind a black mental screen upon which she could bring into focus one of the shimmering gnats that danced within her head.
The images did seem to sharpen, but they still danced and flitted, the glitter still came off the whirring wings, masking the half forms that she forced them to take, dim and shadowy, with no real definition. It was no use, she thought; she had driven herself as far as she could go and then had failed. There was something there, some subtle strangeness, but she could not grasp it.
She collapsed, pitching forward, rolling over on her side, still compressed into a fetal position. She let her eyes come open and dimly saw Cushing bending over her.
She whispered at him. “I’m all right, laddie boy. There is something there, but I could not catch it. I could not sharpen it, bring it into focus.”
He knelt beside her and half lifted her, holding her in his arms. “It’s all right, Meg,” he said. “You did what you could.”
“If I’d had my crystal ball,” she whispered.
“Your crystal ball?”
“Yes. I had one. I left it back at home. I never did place much faith in it. It was just window dressing.”
“You think it would have helped you?”
“Maybe. It would help me concentrate. I had trouble concentrating.”
The others stood around, watching the two of them. Andy shuffled in closer, stretching out his long neck to snuffle at Meg. She patted his nose. “He always worries about me,” she said. “He thinks it’s his job to take care of me
.”
She pulled herself away from Cushing and sat up.
“Give me a little time,” she said. “Then I’ll try again.”
“You don’t have to,” Cushing said.
“I have to. The Team was right. There is something there.”
The great stone walls rose up against the cloudless sky—stolid, mocking, hostile. High in the blueness a great bird, reduced by distance to a fly-sized speck, appeared to hang motionless.
“Bugs,” she said. “A million little bugs. Scurrying. Buzzing. Like ants, like spiders, like gnats. All the time moving. Confused. And so was I. Never so confused.”
Elayne spoke in her hard, cold voice. “I could help,” she said.
“Dearie, you stay out of this,” said Meg. “I have trouble enough without you butting in.”
She got to her knees again, settled back so her haunches rested on her heels.
“This is the last go I have at it,” she said. “Absolutely the last. If it doesn’t work this time, that’s the end of it.”
It was easier this time. There was no need of breaking through the stone and metal. Immediately, once again, she was with the spiders and the gnats. And, this time, the gnats flew in patterns, forming symbols that she could glimpse, but never clearly and never with an understanding, although it seemed to her that the understanding was just a hairsbreadth beyond perception. If she could only drive in a little closer, if somehow she could slow the dancing of the gnats or retard the scurry of the spiders, then it seemed to her that she might catch and hold some small bit of understanding. For there must be purpose in them; there must be a reason they flew or scurried as they did. It could not all be random; there must be reason somewhere in the tapestry they wove. She tried to drive in, and for an instant the mad dance of the gnats slowed its tempo, and in that instant she felt the happiness, the sudden rose-glow of happiness so deep and pure that it was a psychic shock, rocking her back on her mental heels, engulfing her in the abandoned sweetness of it. But even as she knew it, she knew as well that it was somehow wrong—that it was immoral, if not illegal, to know so deep a happiness. And in the instant that she thought that, there came to her the knowing of what was wrong with it. It was, she knew instinctively, a manufactured happiness, a synthetic happiness; and her groping, confused mind caught a fleeting image of a complicated set of symbols that might explain the happiness, that might even cause the happiness. All this within so short a span of time that it was scarcely measurable; then the happiness was gone, and despite the synthetic nature of it, the place seemed bleak and cold and hard without it, an emptiness despite the fact that it was still inhabited by a billion billion insects that she knew weren’t really insects but only something that her human mind translated into insects. Moaning, she sought for the happiness again; phoney as it might be, it was a thing she needed, with an hysterical desperation, to touch again, to hold it only for a moment, to know the rose-glow of it. She could not continue in the drabness that was the world without it. Moaning piteously, she reached out for it and had it once again, but even as her mind’s fingers touched it, the rose-glow slipped away and was gone again.
From far away, from another world, someone spoke to her, a voice that she once had known but could not identify. “Here, Meg,” it said, “here is your crystal ball.”
She felt the hardness and the roundness of the ball placed between her palms, and, opening her eyes a slit, saw the polished brightness of it, shining in the rays of the morning sun.
Another mind exploded and impacted in her mind—a cold, sharp, dark mind that screamed in triumph and relief, as if the thing that it had awaited had finally happened, while at the same time shrinking back in fear against the gross reality of a condition it had not known for centuries piled on centuries, that it had forgotten, that it had lost all hope of regaining and that now it found thrust so forcefully upon it.
The unsuspected mind clung to her mind, fastening upon it as the one security it knew, clinging desperately, afraid of being alone again, of being thrust back into the darkness and the cold. It clung to her mind in frantic desperation. It ran along the projections of her mind into that place where spiders and gnats cavorted. It recoiled for a fraction of a second, then drove in, taking her mind with it, deep into the swarm of glittering wings and frantic hairy legs, and as it did, the wings and legs were gone, the spiders and the gnats were gone, and out of the whirlpool of uncertainty and confusion came an orderliness that was as confusing as the spiders and gnats. An orderliness that was confusing because it was, in most parts, incomprehensible, a marshaling and a sorting of configurations that even in their neatness seemed to have no meaning.
Then the meanings came—half meanings, guessed meanings, shadowy and fragmented, but solid and real in the shadow and the fragments. They piled into her mind, overwhelming it, clogging it, so that she only caught a part of them, as a person listening to a conversation delivered in so rapid-fire a manner that only one word in twenty could be heard. But beyond all this she grasped for a moment the larger context of it, of all of it—a seething mass of knowledge that seemed to fill and overflow the universe, all the questions answered that ever had been asked.
Her mind snapped back, retracting from the overpowering mass of answers, and her eyes came open. The crystal ball fell from her hands and rolled off her lap, to bounce upon the stony pavement. She saw that it was no crystal ball, but the robotic brain case that Rollo had carried in his sack. She reached out and stroked it with her fingers, murmuring at it, soothing it, aghast at what she’d done. To awaken it, to let it know it was not alone, to raise a hope that could not be carried out—that, she told herself, was a cruelty that could never be erased, for which there could be no recompense. To wake it for a moment, then plunge it back again into the loneliness and the dark, to touch it for a moment and then to let it go. She picked it up and cuddled it against her breasts, as a mother might a child.
“You are not alone,” she told it. “I’ll stay with you.” Not knowing, as she spoke the words, if she could or not. In that time of doubt she felt its mind again—no longer cold, no longer alone or dark, a warmth of sudden comradeship, an overflowing of abject gratitude.
Above her the great metal doors were opening. In them stood a robot, a larger and more massive machine than Rollo, but very much akin to him.
“I’m called the Ancient and Revered,” the robot told them. “Won’t you please come in? I should like to talk with you.”
23
They sat at the table in the room where Cushing and Elayne had first met the A and R, but this time there was light from a candle that stood at one end of the table. There were Shivering Snakes as well, but not as many as there had been that first time, and those that were there stayed close against the ceiling, looping and spinning and making damn fools of themselves.
The A and R sat down ponderously in the chair at the table’s head and the others of them took chairs and ranged themselves on either side. Meg laid the robot’s brain case on the table in front of her and kept both hands upon it, not really holding it but just letting it know that she was there. Every now and then she felt the presence probing gently at her mind, perhaps simply to assure itself that she had not deserted it. Andy stood in the doorway, half in the room, half out, his head drooping but watching everything. Behind him in the corridor fluttered the gray shapes of his pals the Followers.
The A and R settled himself comfortably in the chair and looked at them for a long time before he spoke, as if he might be evaluating them, perhaps debating with himself the question of whether he might have made a mistake in inviting them to this conference.
Finally, he spoke. “I am pleased,” he said, “to welcome you to the Place of Going to the Stars.”
Cushing hit the table with his open hand. “Cut out the fairy tales,” he yelled. “This can’t be the Place of Going to the Stars. There are no launching pads. In a place like this the logistics would be impossible.”
“Mr. Cushing,” the
A and R said gently, “if you’ll allow me to explain. No launching pads, you say. Of course there are no launching pads. Have you ever tried to calculate the problems of going to the stars? How far they are, the time that it would take to reach them, the shortness of a human life?”
“I’ve read the literature,” said Cushing. “The library at the university—”
“You read the speculations,” said the A and R. “You read what was written about going to the stars centuries before there was any possibility of going to the stars. Written when men had reached no farther into space than the moon and Mars.”
“That is right, but—”
“You read about cryogenics: freezing the passengers and then reviving them. You read the controversies about faster-than-light. You read the hopefulness of human colonies planted on the earthlike planets of other solar systems.”
“Some of it might have worked,” said Cushing stubbornly. “Men, in time, would have found better ways to do it.”
“They did,” said the A and R. “Some men did go to some of the nearby stars. They found many things that were interesting. They brought back the seeds from which sprouted the belt of Trees that rings in this butte. They brought back the living rocks, the Shivering Snakes and the Followers, all of which you’ve seen. But it was impractical. It was too costly and the time factor was too great. You speak of logistics, and the logistics of sending human beings to the stars were wrong. Once you get into a technological system, once it’s actually in operation, you find what’s wrong with it. Your perspectives change and your goals tend to shift about. You ask yourself what you really want, what you’re trying to accomplish, what values can be found in the effort you are making. We asked this of ourselves once we started going to the stars and the conclusion was that the actual landing on another planet of another solar system was, in itself, of not too great a value. There was glory, of course, and satisfaction, and we learned some things of value, but the process was too slow; it took too long. If we could have sent out a thousand ships, each pointed toward a different point in space, the returns would have been speeded up. It would have taken as long, but with that many ships there would have been a steady feedback of results, after a wait of a few hundred years, as the ships began coming back, one by one. But we could not send out a thousand ships. The economy would not withstand that sort of strain. And once you had sent out a thousand ships, you’d have to keep on building them and sending them out to keep the pipeline full. We knew we did not have the resources to do anything like that and we knew we didn’t have the time, for some of our social scientists were warning us of the Collapse that finally overtook us. So we asked ourselves—we were forced to ask ourselves—what we were really looking for. And the answer seemed to be that we were seeking information.