“You do me wrong,” said Ezra. “I was the one who got us through the Trees. I spoke to them and they opened a way for us; then I spoke to them again and they let us out.”
“That’s your version,” said Cushing. “Mine is that Meg got us in, then got us out again. All you did was mumble.”
“Laddie boy,” said Meg, “let’s not quarrel among ourselves. It doesn’t really matter who got us through the Trees. The important thing is they did let us through.”
Elayne looked at Cushing and for once her eyes had no blankness in them. They were cold with hatred. “You have never liked us,” she said. “You have patronized us, made fun of us. I’m sorry that we joined you.”
“Now, now, my pet,” said Ezra, “we all are under tension, but the tension now is gone, or should be. I’ll admit that I may have been over-clowning to a small degree, although I swear to you that my belief in my own ability has not faded; that I believe, as always, that I can talk with plants. I did talk with the Trees; I swear I talked with them and they talked to me. In a different way from the way any plant has ever talked with me before. A sharper conversation, not all of which I understood, a great part of which I did not understand. They talked of concepts that I have never heard before, and though I knew they were new and important, I could grasp but the very edges of them. They looked deep inside of me and let me look, for a little distance, into them. It was as if they were examining me—not my body but my soul—and offered me a chance to do the same with them. But I did not know how to go about it; even with them trying to show me, I did not know the way to go about it.”
“Space is an illusion,” said Elayne, speaking in a precise textbook voice, as if she were speaking not to them, nor indeed to anyone, but was merely reciting something that she knew or had newly learned, speaking as if it were a litany. “Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any wonder, no longer any doubt; for the simplicity of it all lies before us—the simplicity … the simplicity … the simplicity …”
Her voice ran down on the single word and she lapsed into silence. She sat staring out beyond the campfire circle, her hands folded in her lap, her face again assuming the look of horrifying emptiness and terrible innocence.
The rest of them sat silent, stricken, and from somewhere a chill came off the slope of ground above them and held them motionless with an uncomprehending dread.
Cushing shook himself, asked in a strained voice, “What was that all about?”
Ezra made a motion of resignation. “I don’t know. She has never done a thing like that before.”
“Poor child,” said Meg.
Ezra spoke angrily. “I’ve told you before, I tell you now: never pity her; rather, it is she who should pity us.”
Meg said, “No pity was intended.”
“There are more wardens out there,” said Rollo. “A new band of them just showed up. Six or seven, this time. And from far to the east there seems to be others coming in. A great dust cloud, but I can see no more.”
“It was a shame about the wardens,” said Meg. “We messed them up after all their years of watching. All those generations and no one had ever got through.”
“Perhaps there has never been anyone before who wanted to,” said Rollo.
“That may be true,” said Meg. “No one who wanted to get through as badly as we wanted to. No one with a purpose.”
“If it hadn’t been for the bear,” said Rollo, “we might not have made it, either. The bear provided a distraction. And they lost their horses. They were naked and defenseless without the horses.”
“The bear shook them up,” said Ezra. “No man in his right mind goes against a bear with nothing but a spear.”
“I’m not a man,” said Rollo, reasonably, “and I was not alone. Cushing put some arrows in the beast and even Andy came in on the kill.”
“My arrows did nothing,” said Cushing. “They only irritated him.”
He rose from where he was sitting and went up the slope, climbing until the campfire was no more than a small red eye glowing in the dusk. He found a small rock-ledge that cropped out from the slope, and sat upon it. The dusk was deepening into night. The Trees were a hump of blackness and out beyond them what must have been the campfires of the wardens flickered on and off, sometimes visible, sometimes not.
Sitting on the ledge, Cushing felt an uneasy peace. After miles of river valley and of high dry plains, they had finally reached the place where they were going. The goal had been reached and the daily expectation of reaching it had vanished and there seemed to be little to fill the void that was left by the lapsing of the expectations. He wondered about that, a bit confused. When one reached a goal, there should be, if nothing else, at least self-congratulation.
Below him, something grated on a stone, and when he looked in that direction, he made out the dull gleam of something moving. Watching, he saw that it was Rollo.
The robot came up the last few paces and without a word sat down on the ledge beside Cushing. They sat for a moment in silence; then Cushing said, “Back there, a while ago, you called me boss. You should not have done that. I’m not any boss.”
“It just slipped out,” said Rollo. “You ran a good safari—is that the right word? I heard someone use it once. And you got us here.”
“I’ve been sitting here and thinking about getting here,” said Cushing. “Worrying a little about it.”
“You shouldn’t be doing any worrying,” said Rollo. This is the Place of Going to the Stars.”
“That’s what I’m worrying about. I’m not so sure it is. It’s something, but I’m fairly sure it’s not the Place of Stars. Look, to go to the stars, to send ships into space, you need launching pads. This is not the kind of place to build launching pads. Up on top of the butte, perhaps, if there is any level ground up there, you might build launching pads. But why on top of a butte? The height of the land would be no advantage. The job of getting materials up to the launching site … It would be ridiculous to put pads up there when out on the plains you have thousands of acres of level ground.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Rollo. “I don’t know about such things.”
“I do,” said Cushing. “Back at the university, I read about the moon shots and the Mars shots and all the other shots. There were a number of articles and books that told how it was done, and it was not done from atop a hill.”
“The Trees,” said Rollo. “Someone put the Trees around the butte—all around the butte—to protect whatever may be here. Maybe before the Time of Trouble, the people got up in arms against going to the stars.”
“That might have been so,” said Cushing. “Protection might have been needed in the last few hundred years or so before the world blew up, but they could have put the Trees around level ground just as well.”
“Place of Going to the Stars or not,” said Rollo, “there is something here, something protected by the Trees.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. But it was the Place of Stars I wanted.”
“The thing that bothers me is why they passed us through. The Trees, I mean. They could have kept us out. The rocks were out there waiting. All the Trees would have had to do was give the word, and the rocks would have moved in and flattened us.”
“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, f
ast 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 miserable, 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, althou
gh 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.