“Maybe they found a different way of going to the stars. This might be the place, after all.”
Cushing shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“But this place is important. It has to be important. Why else would it be guarded by the Trees? Why were the wardens out there?”
“We’ll find out,” said Cushing. “We’ll try to find out.”
Meg shivered. “I have a funny feeling in my bones,” she said. “As if we shouldn’t be here. As if we’re out of place. I can feel those big buildings looking down at us, wondering who we are and why we’re here. When I look at them, I go all over goose pimples.”
A voice said, “Here, let me do that.”
Meg looked up. Elayne was bending over her, reaching for the pan.
“That’s all right,” said Meg. “I can manage it.”
“You’ve been doing it all the time,” said Elayne. “Doing all the cooking. I haven’t done a thing. Let me do my part.”
“All right,” said Meg. “Thank you, lass. I’m tired.”
She rose from her crouch, moved over to a stone bench and sat down. Cushing sat beside her.
“What was that?” he asked. “What is going on? Can she be getting human?”
“I don’t know,” said Meg. “But whatever the reason, I’m glad. I’m bone tired. It’s been a long, hard trip. Although I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m glad we’re here, uneasy as I may be about it.”
“Don’t let the uneasiness get you down,” he said. “It will seem different in the morning.”
When they came in at Elayne’s call to supper, Ezra roused himself from his communion with the roses and joined them. He wagged his head in perplexity. “I do not understand at all,” he said, “the things the roses tell me. There is about them a sense of ancientness, of far places, of time for which there is no counting. As if they were trying to push me to the edge of the universe, from which I could look out upon eternity and infinity, and then they ask me what I see and I cannot tell them, because there is too much to see. There are powerful forces here and mysteries that no man can fathom.…”
He went on and on, mumbling in a rambling way as he ate the meal. No one interrupted him; no one asked him questions. Cushing found himself not even listening.
Hours later, Cushing woke. The others were asleep. The fire had burned to a few glowing embers. Andy stood a little way off, head hanging, either fast asleep upon his feet or dozing.
Cushing threw aside his blanket and rose to his feet. The night had turned chilly, and overhead the wind made a hollow booming among the brilliant stars. The moon had set, but the buildings were a ghostly white in the feeble starlight.
Moving off, he walked in the direction of the City, stopped to face it, his eyes traveling up the clifflike face of it. I could do without you, he told the City, the words dribbling in his mind. I have no liking for you. I did not set out to find you.
Too big, he thought, too big, wondering if he, in that moment, might be thinking as other men had thought when they struck the blow that had toppled that great, impersonal technology that had engulfed and overwhelmed them.
Striking, they had toppled a way of life that had become abhorrent to them, but instead of replacing it with another way of life, they had left an emptiness, a vacuum in which it was impossible to exist, retreating back to an older existence, back almost to where they’d started, as a man might go back to old roots to seek a new beginning. But they had made no beginning; they had simply stood in place, perhaps content for a while to lick their wounds and rest, to catch their breath again. They had caught their breath and rested and the wounds had healed and they still had stood in place—for centuries they had not moved. Perhaps fearful of moving, fearful that if they moved, they would create another monster that in time to come they’d also have to destroy, asking themselves how many false starts a race might be allowed.
Although, he knew, he was romanticizing, philosophizing on insufficient grounds. The trouble had been that the people after the Collapse had not thought at all. Bruised and battered after all the years of progress, they had simply huddled, and were huddling still.
And this great building—or perhaps many buildings, each masking the other, so that there seemed but one building—what could it be, standing here in a place that was a wilderness and had always been a wilderness? A special structure, built for a specific reason, perhaps a mysterious and secretive reason, guarded as it was by the Trees and the living stones? So far, there was no clue as to what might be the reason. Nor a clue to the Trees and stones. And none, for that matter, to the Followers and to Shivering Snake.
He walked slowly across the esplanade toward the City. Directly ahead of him rose two great towers, square-built and solid, endowed with no architectural foolishness, guarding a darkness that could be either a shadow or a door.
As he drew closer, he could see that it was a door and that it was open. A short and shallow flight of stone stairs led up to the door, and as he began to climb them, he saw a flash of light in the darkness that lay beyond the door. He halted and stood breathless, watching, but the flash was not repeated.
The door was larger than he’d thought, twenty feet wide or more, and rising to a height of forty feet or so. It opened into a place of darkness. Reaching it, he stood undecided for a moment, then moved through it, shuffling his feet to guard against any drop or irregularity in the floor.
A few feet inside, he stopped again and waited for his eyes to adapt, but the darkness was so deep that little adaptation was possible. The best that he could do was make out certain graduations in the darkness, the darker loom of objects that stood along the walls of the corridor through which he moved.
Then, ahead of him, a light flashed, and then another, and after that many flashes of light, strange, quivering, looping lights that sparkled rather than shone, and, after a moment of near panic, he knew what they were: hundreds of shivering snakes, dancing in the darkness of a room that opened off the corridor.
Heart halfway up his throat, he headed for the door and reached it. Standing in it, neither in nor out, he could see the room, or half see it, a place of large dimensions with a massive table set in the middle of it, the room lighted in a flickering manner by the zany loopings of the zany snakes; and standing at the head of the table, a form that did not seem to be a man, but a form that was suggestive of a man.
Cushing tried to speak, but the words dried up before he could get them out and shattered into a dust that seemed to coat his mouth and throat, and when he tried to speak again, he found that he could not remember what he had meant to say, and even if he had been able to, he could not have spoken.
A soft hand touched his arm and Elayne’s voice sounded. “Here we stand on the edge of eternity,” she said. “One step and we’ll be into eternity and it would reveal itself to us. Cannot you feel it?”
He shook his head abjectly. He was feeling nothing except a terrible numbness that so paralyzed him he doubted he would ever be able to move from the spot where he was rooted.
He was able, with an effort, to turn his head slightly to one side, and he saw her standing there beside him, slim and straight in the tattered, smudged robe that once had been white, but was no longer. In the flicker of the snakes her face and its emptiness were more terrible than he had ever seen it, a frightening, soul-withering face, but his basic numbness precluded further fright and he looked upon the face without a quiver of emotion, simply noting to himself the utter horror of it.
Her voice, however, was clear and precise. There was no emotion in it, not a tremor, as she said, “As my grandfather told us, as the plants had told him, eternity is here. It lies within our grasp. It is just beyond our fingertips. It is a strange condition, unlike the eternity we have thought about—a place with neither time nor space, for there is not room in it for either time or space. It is an all-encompassing endlessness that never had a beginning and will not have an end. Embedded in it are all those things that h
ave happened or are about to happen.…” Then she gasped and her grip on Cushing’s arm tightened until he could feel her nails cutting deep into his flesh. She sobbed, “It’s not like that at all. That was only superficial. It is a place—no, not a place …” She sagged and Cushing caught her as she slumped, holding her upright.
The figure at the head of the table stood unmoving. Cushing looked at it across the intervening space and it looked back at him out of gleaming eyes that sparkled in the dazzle of the light supplied by the spinning, twisting snakes.
Elayne sagged, her legs buckling under her. Cushing swept her up in his arms and turned about, heading for the door. He felt the eyes of the figure at the table’s head burning into him, but he did not turn his head. He stumbled out the door and down the corridor until he had passed through the outer door and down the steps onto the esplanade. There he stopped and let Elayne down, and her knees did not buckle under her. She stood erect, clinging to him for support. In the pale starlight, her vacant face held a stricken look.
Off to one side came a clatter of hoofs, and switching his head about, Cushing saw that it was Andy, prancing and gamboling in a mad abandon, neck bowed, tail straight out behind him, dancing on the paving stones. For a moment it seemed that he was alone; then Cushing saw the others—faint shadows in the starlight, running madly with him like a pack of joyous wolves, circling him and leaping over him, running underneath his belly, leaping up playfully to confront him and fawn on him, as a pack of puppies might play with a delightedly shrieking four-year-old.
Elayne jerked away from him and began to run, back toward the camp, running silently, robe fluttering behind her. Cushing pounded after her, but she outdistanced him. Meg rose up from the camp and confronted her, grappling with her to halt the frenzied flight.
“What’s the matter with her, laddie boy?” asked Meg as he came up. “What have you done to her?”
“Not a thing,” said Cushing. “She just saw reality, is all. We were inside the City and she was delivering some of that insipid nonsense, mostly about eternity, she has been spouting all the time, and then—”
“You were in the City?”
“Yes, of course,” said Cushing. “They left the door wide open.”
Elayne had sunk to her ritual position, feet tucked under her, hands folded in her lap, head bowed. Ezra, fumbling out of his blanket, was fussing over her.
“What did you find in there?” asked Meg. “And what has got into Andy?”
“He’s dancing with a gaggle of Followers,” said Cushing. “Never mind about him. He’s making out all right.”
“And Rollo? Where is Rollo?”
“Damned if I know,” said Cushing. “He is never here when we have need of him. Just ambling about.”
A cylinder appeared in the air above them, hanging motionless, its receptors gleaming at them.
“Go away,” said Cushing. “Right now, we don’t need another story.”
“No story have I to tell you,” said the gossiper. “I carry information for you. I have a message from the A and R.”
“The A and R?”
“The Ancient and Revered. He said for me to tell you that the City is closed to you. He said to say we have no time to waste on a group of gaping tourists.”
“Well, that’s all right,” said Meg. “We aren’t gaping tourists, but we’ll be glad to leave.”
“That you cannot do,” said the gossiper. “That will not be allowed. You are not to leave; for if you do, you will carry foolish tales with you, and that we do not want.”
“So,” said Cushing, “we are not allowed to leave and the City is closed to us. What do you expect us to do?”
“That is up to you,” said the gossiper. “It is no concern of ours.”
21
Three days later they knew that what the gossiper had said was true. Meg and Cushing had toured the City, looking for a means of getting into it. They found none. There were doors, a lot of doors, but all were closed and locked. The windows, and there were few of them, were no lower than the second or third floors. The few they were able to reach were locked as well and constructed of something other than glass, impossible to break. What was more, they were opaque and there was no way of looking through them. Ventilating shafts, of which there were only a few, were baffled in such a manner that they offered no opportunity of crawling through them.
The City was much larger than it had appeared, and it was, they found, a single building with many wings; in fact, with wings added on to wings, so the scheme of construction, at times, became confusing. The heights of the divers wings varied, some only five or six stories tall, others rising to twenty stories or more. The entire structure was flanked all the way around by the stone-paved esplanade.
Except for one occasion, on the second day, they saw no one. On that second day, late in the afternoon, they had come upon the Team, apparently waiting for them when they came around the corner of one of the many wings.
Meg and Cushing stopped in astonishment, yet somewhat glad at meeting something with which they could communicate. The two great globes rolled forward to meet them, their eyes floating randomly. When they reached one of the stone benches, they stopped to wait for the humans to come up.
#1 boomed at them in his drumlike voice. “Please to sit down and rest yourselves, as we note is the custom of your kind. Then it will be possible to have communication very much at leisure.”
“We have been wondering,” Meg said, “what had happened to you. That day we talked, you left in something of a hurry.”
“We have been cogitating,” said #2, “and very much disturbed by the thing you told us—the question that you asked.”
“You mean,” said Cushing, “What comes after man?”
“That is it,” said #1, “and it was not the concept that was so disturbing to us, but that it could be asked of any race about itself. This is much at odds with the viewpoint of the A and R, who seems quite convinced that your race will recover from the late catastrophe and rise again to greater heights than you have ever known before. By any chance, have you met the A and R?”
“No,” Cushing said, “we haven’t.”
“Ah, then,” said #2, “to return to the question that you asked. Can you explain to us how you came to ask it? To say of something else that in time it will be superseded by some other form of life is only logical, but for a species to entertain the idea that it will be superseded argues a sophistication that we had not considered possible.”
“To answer that one,” said Cushing, “is really very simple. Such a speculation is only commonsense and is quite in line with evolutionary mechanics. Life forms rise to dominance because of certain survival factors. On this planet, through the ages, there have been many dominant races. Man rose to his dominance because of intelligence, but geological history argues that he will not remain dominant forever. And once that is recognized, the question naturally rises as to what will come after him. What, we might ask, has a greater survival value than intelligence? And though we cannot answer, we know there must be something. As a matter of fact, it might seem that intelligence has turned out to have poor survival value.”
“And you do not protest?” asked #2. “You do not pound your chest in anger? You do not tear your hair? You do not grow weak and panicky at the thought the day will come when there will be none of you, that in the universe there will be nothing like you, that there will be none to remember or to mourn you?”
“Hell, no,” said Cushing. “No, of course we don’t.”
“You can so disregard your own personal reactions,” said #2, “as to actually speculate upon what will follow you?”
“I think,” said Meg, “it might be fun to know.”
“We fail to comprehend,” said #1. “This fun you speak about. What do you mean by ‘fun’?”
“You mean, poor things,” cried Meg, “that you never have any fun? That you don’t know what we mean by ‘fun’?”
“We catch the concept
barely,” said #2, “although perhaps imperfectly. It is something we have not heretofore encountered. We find it hard to understand that any being could derive even the slightest satisfaction in regarding its own extinction.”
“Well,” said Cushing, “we aren’t extinct as yet. We may have a few more years.”
“But you don’t do anything about it.”
“Not actively,” said Cushing. “Not now. Perhaps not at any time. We just try to get along. But, now, suppose you tell us—do you have even an inkling of an answer to the question that we asked? What does come after us?”
“It’s a question we can’t answer,” said #1, “although since you spoke of it to us, we have given thought to it. The A and R contends that the race will continue. But we think the A and R is wrong. We have seen other planets where the dominant races have fallen and that was the end of it. There was nothing that gave promise of coming after them.”
“Perhaps,” said Cushing, “you weren’t able to hang around long enough. It might take some time for another form of life to move in, to fill the vacuum.”
“We don’t know about that,” said #2. “It was something that did not greatly concern us; it was a factor, actually, that we never once considered. It fell outside the area of our study. You understand, the two of us have spent a lifetime on the study of certain crisis points resulting in the terminations of technological societies. On many other planets we have found a classic pattern. The technology builds up to a certain point and then destroys itself and the race that built it. We were about to return to our home planet and inscribe our report when we happened on this planet and the doubt crept in.…”
“The doubt crept in,” said #1, “because of the evasiveness and the stubbornness of the A and R. He refuses to admit the obvious. He pretends, sometimes convincingly, to hold fast to the faith that your human race will rise again, that it is unconquerable, that it has a built-in spirit that will not accept defeat. He talks obliquely about what he calls a phoenix rising from its ashes, an allusion that escapes us in its entirety.”