“There is no need to beat among the bushes,” said #2. “It seems to us you may be able to abstract an answer more readily than we, and it is our hope that once you have it, you would, in all friendliness, be pleased to share it with us. It seems to us the answer, if there is one, which we doubt exceedingly, is locked within this City. As natives of this planet, you might have a better chance of finding it than we, who are travel-worn aliens, battered by our doubts and inadequacies.”
“Fat chance,” said Cushing. “We are locked out of the City and, supposedly, marooned here. We are forbidden by the A and R to leave.”
“We thought you had said you had not seen the A and R.”
“We haven’t. He sent a message to us by one of his gossipers.”
“The nasty little thing was malicious about it,” Meg told them.
“That sounds like the A and R,” said #1. “A sophisticated old gentleman, but at times a testy one.”
“A gentleman, you say? Could the A and R be human?”
“No, of course he’s not,” said #2. “We told you. He’s a robot. You must know of robots. There is one who is a member of your party.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said Cushing. “There was something standing at the table’s head. It looked like a man and yet not like a man. It could have been a robot. It could have been the A and R.”
“Did you speak to it?”
“No, I did not speak to it. There were too many other things.…”
“You should have spoken to it.”
“Dammit, I know I should have spoken to it, but I didn’t. Now it is too late. The A and R is inside the City and we can’t get to him.”
“It’s not only the A and R,” said #1. “There is something else shut up behind those walls. We know not directly of it. We but suspicion it. We have only recepted it.”
“You mean that you have sensed it.”
“That is right,” said #1. “Our feeling of it is most unreliable, but it is all that we can tell you.”
Cushing and Meg went back at the end of the day to the deserted camp. A little later, Andy came ambling in to greet them. There was no sign of the other three. Ezra and Elayne had gone down the butte to talk with the Trees, and Rollo had simply wandered off.
“We know now, laddie buck,” said Meg. “The A and R meant exactly what he said. The City’s closed to us.”
“It was that damn Elayne,” said Cushing. “She was gushing this eternity stuff that she has a hangup on.…”
“You’re too harsh with her,” said Meg. “Her brain may be a little addled, but she has a certain power. I am sure she has. She lives in another world, on another level. She sees and hears things we do not see and hear. And anyhow, it does no good to talk about it now. What are we going to do if we can’t get off this butte?”
“I’m not ready to give up yet,” said Cushing. “If we want to get out of here, we’ll find a way.”
“Whatever happened to the Place of Stars,” she asked, “that we started out to find? How did we go wrong?”
“We went wrong,” said Cushing, “because we were going blind. We grabbed at every rumor that we heard, at all the campfire stories that Rollo had picked up. It wasn’t Rollo’s fault. It was mine. I was too anxious. I was too ready to accept anything I heard.”
Rollo came in shortly after dark. He squatted down beside the other two and sat staring at the fire.
“I didn’t find much,” he said. “I found a quarry over to the west, where the rock was quarried for the City. I found an old road that led off to the southwest, built and used before the Trees were planted. Now the Trees close off the road. I tried to get through them and there was no getting through. I tried in several places. They simply build a wall against you. Maybe a hundred men with axes could get through, but we haven’t got a hundred men with axes.”
“Even with axes,” said Meg, “I doubt we would get through.”
“The tribes are gathering,” said Rollo. “The plains off to the east and south are simply black with them, and more coming all the time. The word must have traveled fast.”
“What I can’t understand,” said Cushing, “is why they should be gathering. There were the wardens, of course, but I thought they were just a few small bands of deluded fanatics.”
“Perhaps not so deluded,” said Meg. “You don’t keep a watch for centuries out of pure delusion.”
“You think this place is important? That important?”
“It has to be,” said Meg. “It is so big. It took so much work and time to build it. And it’s so well protected. Men, even men in the old machine days, would not have spent so much time and effort.…”
“Yes, I know,” said Cushing. “I wonder what it is. Why it’s here. If there were only some way for us to dig out the meaning of it.”
“The gathering of the tribes,” said Rollo, “argues that it may be more important than we know. It was not just the wardens alone. They were backed by the tribes. Maybe sent here and kept here by the tribes. There may be a legend.…”
“If so,” said Meg, “a well-guarded legend. I have never heard of it. The city tribes back home, I’m sure, never heard of it.”
“The best legends,” said Cushing, “might be the best guarded. So sacred, perhaps, that no one ever spoke aloud of them.”
The next day, Rollo went with them for another tour of the City. They found nothing new. The walls stood up straight and inscrutable. There was no indication of any life.
Late in the afternoon, Ezra and Elayne returned to camp. They came in footsore and limping, clearly worn out.
“Here, sit down,” said Meg, “and rest yourselves. Lie down if you want to. We have water and I’ll cook some meat. If you want to sleep awhile before you eat …”
Ezra croaked at them, “The Trees would not let us through. No argument can budge them. They will not tell us why. But they would talk of other things. They talked of ancestral memories, their ancestral memories. On another planet, in some other solar system, very far from here. They had a name for it, but it was a complicated name with many syllables, and I failed to catch it and did not want to ask again, for it seemed of no importance. Even if we knew the name, it would be of no use to us. They either had forgotten how they got here or did not want to tell us, although I think they may not know. I’m not sure they ever saw the planet that they talked of. They were talking, I think, of ancestral memories. Racial memories, carried forward from one generation to the next.”
“You are certain of this?” asked Cushing. “Their saying they came from another planet?”
“I am very certain,” Ezra said. “There is no question of it. They talked to me of the planet, as a man marooned in some strange place would talk about the country of his boyhood. They showed the planet to me—admittedly, a very fuzzy picture, but one could recognize certain features of it. An idealized picture, I am certain. I think of it as a pink world—you know, the delicate pink of apple blossoms in the early spring, blowing on a hill against a deep-blue sky. Not only was the color of the world pink, but the feel of it. I know I’m not telling this too well, but that’s how it seemed to me. A glad world—not a happy world, but a glad world.”
“Could it be?” asked Cushing. “Could it be that men did go to the stars, to this pink world, bringing back with them the seeds of the Trees?”
“And,” said Meg, “the Followers and the Shivering Snakes? The living stones as well? For these things cannot be of this world of ours. There is no way they could be natives of this world.”
“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 worl
d,” 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.