“Don’t push her, Ellel,” urged Mitty.
“I don’t suppose a few days more really matters,” commented Ander offhandedly. “The shuttle isn’t quite ready, in any case.”
Ellel jerked her head toward the doors, signaling Qualary to go.
Berkli turned from his revulsion at the walkers to his more recent annoyance. “Taking hostages was a nasty thing to do, Ellel It was uncivilized, even for you. Where are you holding them?”
“Why? Do you want to see them?”
He grinned at her, knowing it infuriated her. “As a matter of fact, yes. I understand one of them is an Oracle. I don’t often have an opportunity to get a prediction about important things, such as a shuttle trip into space.”
“Trust you to fall prey to superstition!” she sneered. “By all means, Berkli. They’re being held in the meeting room.”
“A bit luxurious for prisoners, isn’t it?”
“It’s convenient,” she snapped. “Accessible. In case I think of some question I want answered in the middle of the night. In case I want a prophecy of my own!”
Berkli, with Mitty trailing along, went to the meeting room and found that no food or drink or beds had been provided, an oversight typical of Ellel. She would overlook the simplest of human needs and then wonder why people were uncooperative. Berkli summoned Domer staff members and had them equip the room both with the necessities for a lengthy stay and with the luxuries to make that stay bearable.
“Thank you,” said Oracle, who seemed to have appointed herself spokesperson. “You have our gratitude.”
“I apologize for my colleague,” Mitty said. “She overlooks details.” He excused himself and departed, looking troubled.
“He doesn’t like this,” said Oracle.
“No. But he’s not a fighter,” murmured Berkli. “Mitty will go a long way to avoid confrontation. He eschews evil, but he won’t take up arms against it.”
“Can you tell us what this is about?” Oracle asked.
“You are the Oracle, why don’t you tell me?” Berkli challenged her.
“I can do that without foresight,” she said. “Orphan—that is, Olly—was brought here to do something Quince Ellel cannot do. It has something to do with a journey into space. It is something Olly might choose not to do, and we have been brought here to guarantee her cooperation.”
“That took no oracular talent?”
“No. I merely listened to the talk that was going on around us this morning,” she replied. “I can extrapolate from that. Quince Ellel longs for the stars, though she will settle for an empire on earth, with herself as Empress.”
“You foresee this.”
“I judge that it is true from what I see of her. Not all the archetypes are in the villages, Dome-man. Some of them still walk among ordinary men. And sometimes I do not need to foresee. Sometimes I need merely look and listen to learn interesting things. Such as the fact that the cities are gone.”
“What cities?” he asked, suspiciously. “The last cities,” she replied “Those few that were left in manland. I thought you here in the Place of Power kept track of the status of the world and its peoples.”
He furrowed his brow. He hadn’t looked at the information console for days. Had anyone looked at it lately? With all this triumphant strutting that had been going on, it was likely no one had looked at it in some time. Perhaps he’d been the last one, and he certainly hadn’t paid any attention to the cities.
Oracle nodded at him, as though she read his thoughts. “The cities are gone,” she said. “Fantis and Echinot and all the rest. The plague has walked through them, winnowing their populace, separating the grain from the chaff, consuming the chaff while the grain was flung outward, into the villages, into the farms. Now on all this continent, the cities are as though they had never been. Now we have only towns, as in Artemisia, where people are known to one another. There is neighborhood once again, where before were only unknown men doing evil to faceless victims.”
He gaped at her, and she smiled in return. “You needn’t take my word for it. Verify it for yourself.”
Leaving the luxurious room at a laborious trot, Berkli went down the long, polished corridor to the Dome. The lift chair sat empty against the wall, but before he could sit down in it, Ellel and several of her walkers came upon him.
“And where do you think you’re going?” she asked him. “I need to check the data Ellel, did you know—” “You need to check nothing.” “Someone needs to!”
“No. You have meddled with my affairs once too often,” she snapped. “I’m confining you to your quarters!”
“You are what?” he gasped, choking down laughter.
She turned and stalked away. He laughed out loud until the walkers took hold of him, carried him to his own quarters, then shut him in. They stood outside and would not let him out again. He bathed first, to get rid of the stink of them and because Mitty had said their touch was dangerous. Then he sat beside the window, staring out in bemused fury. Of all the Domers, he was the only one who knew the cities had died. And he wondered if it made any difference to anyone.
CummyNup Chingero, on his slow and meandering way south, had encountered this one and that one who had escaped from the cities as he had, this one and that one who had been immune to the plague or who had been of abstemious habit and had not caught it. To these men, and women, CummyNup spoke fondly of Abasio the Cat, Abasio the Clever, Abasio the finest and first among men.
Somewhat to his astonishment, Sybbis spoke even more eloquently than he. Abasio was tall, and strong, and handsome. Abasio was a prince, a warrior, a mighty lord. Abasio was the kind of men other men should follow. She, Sybbis, was his consort and was carrying his child.
CummyNup was more than a little peeved at this claim, and he challenged her about it. How could she claim Abasio as the father of her child?
Because, she said. She had put it together from things she’d heard in Fantis before Old Chief Purple slit Kerf’s throat for him. And from things CummyNup had told her back at Wise Rocks Farm. And from things she herself had observed when she got pregnant.
CummyNup had to agree, it sounded like Abasio, knife slash, bullet pucker, and all. He couldn’t get over it. She had been a virgin when Kerf got her, which meant she’d stayed a virgin until Abasio had her, which meant she was Abasio’s woman and his alone.
“ ’Cept for that time in the barn back at Wise Rocks,” CummyNup was so injudicious as to remark.
That, so said Sybbis, had been his good fortune and she’d done it only because it was necessary, so he’d bring her along. She certainly couldn’t stay at Wise Rocks Farm in safety while her lover, consort, king, and lord was down in the southlands someplace, running into all sorts of monsters and stuff, now could she?
Many of those who heard CummyNup’s stories about Abasio were men at loose ends with no particular plans for the future. Some of them were ex-gangers who, at Sybbis’s insistence, shaved their heads and wore long white leather vests with a cat-head on the back to show they were all followers of the absent but no doubt potent Abasio. In the meantime, CummyNup was their captain, and he accumulated several hundred followers in this manner.
One night, while he was standing watch, more or less alone because he enjoyed it, he was approached by a coyote who came up to him and wished him good evening.
CummyNup was not much surprised. Being a cityman, he knew very little about the natural world. It would not really have surprised him if a spider had crawled out of its hole and greeted him in ganger lingo. So he wished the Coyote a good evening in return, and the two of them fell to talking.
When CummyNup said he and his group were searching for Abasio the Cat, the Coyote asked if that would be the Abasio who was once a Purple Abasio who traveled south in a dyer’s wagon?
Yes, said CummyNup, that was the Abasio. Why then, said the Coyote, he’d be happy to tell CummyNup where Abasio might be found: there to the southwest where the mountain cut a broken li
ne into the stars. He pointed with a paw, and CummyNup marked the place against the morning.
When morning came, he told the assembled men and women that he had had a revelation during the night. Actually, he started to tell them about the Coyote, but he knew there were skeptics in the group, so the information took the form of a revelation. Either way, the several hundred men who were following CummyNup all agreed to march toward the mountain where Abasio awaited them.
Wide Mountain Mother found a cloth-wrapped package on her doorstep. The cloth had tooth-holes in it, and inside was a letter from Arakny. The missive was somewhat moist and also pierced with tooth-holes, but not unreadable. When Mother had read the first page, she felt she understood the tooth-holes, but when she read further, she felt she understood nothing at all.
Hurriedly, she sent messengers up the hill to the men’s houses. After conferring with the warriors and her own council, she sent messengers out in all directions. By mid-afternoon, the people of Artemisia were gathering outside the town, and by nightfall, a throng of them, headed by feathered warriors, set off westward toward the Place of Power.
“What did Arakny say?” one of Wide Mountain Mother’s daughters asked, this one also a librarian.
“She said she had seen the thrones,” Mother answered, without expression. “She said she does not know whether they are intelligent machines or monstrous beings. In either case, she fears what they may intend.”
CHAPTER 14
In a quiet garden of Gaddi House, Olly told Tom she wanted to see the old man.
“My Herkimer-Lurkimer,” she said, “who owes me an explanation, at the very least.” She laughed, a little bitterly. “Oh, yes If he’s my Herkimer - Lurkimer.”
“He told us he was,” murmured Arakny.
“If that’s true, then I was a child here, where you say the thrones are,” she murmured. “I’ve dreamed of thrones Was that because I saw them as a child?”
“Perhaps,” said Tom “That could be so.”
“No doubt seeing them again will refresh my memory.” She rubbed her forehead fretfully. “Can I see them before I see him? Can you show them to me, Tom?” Tom assented, though grudgingly.
“Do you want to go with us?” Olly asked the others.
Arakny shook her head. Even Abasio had trouble meeting her eyes.
He said gravely, “I’ll go with you if you ask me, Olly, but only because you ask!”
Arakny threw up her hands. “I may as well go along.”
They went by a longer route than Abasio and Arakny remembered from their previous trip, though it may have only seemed so because Olly stopped so many times along the way—stopped to put her hands on closed doors, to feel the walls, to listen for sounds, to sniff, as though she smelled something they could not.
“How does it make you feel?” Abasio asked her.
Olly stopped dead, her mouth working. “How does it make me feel! All this, you mean? It makes me feel like a chip on a river! Washed along, willy-nilly. It makes me feel as Oracle must have felt, sent away as a child because of what she was, of what she could do! It makes me feel trapped and desperate! That’s how I feel.”
Abasio reached out for her, but she shuddered away from him, her face closed and angry.
He said, “I only meant, does it seem familiar?”
Olly breathed deeply, calming herself. “Yes I suppose it’s familiar Mostly it smells familiar. But also, I feel I almost know what’s behind these doors, that any minute I’ll remember.” She dropped her eyes. “If I want to remember.”
“The place depresses me,” Abasio said awkwardly. “It makes me itchy.”
“Oppressed,” said Arakny. “There is something here that is … not …” Her voice trailed away disconsolately.
“Not human,” agreed Olly, turning to their guide. “Would you agree, Tom?”
He shook his head, annoyed. He would not agree. “I’ve been a Gaddir since I was a child I’ve never had any sense it was not a human thing to be.”
“Coyote said something about our needing to think of intelligence as human,” Olly told him, staring through him. “So if we find intelligence, we assume humanity goes with it That’s our protection, isn’t it?”
“Protection against what?” he demanded.
“Against having to learn to communicate with others, who think differently than we do.” She squeezed his arm and urged him on.
They came at last to the designated door, which Tom opened while Olly stood at his shoulder, nodding, murmuring, as though committing the procedure to memory. The three stood aside to let her enter.
Without a moment’s pause she went swiftly along the wheel tracks, losing herself among the clustered pillars, leaving the other three to shift uncomfortably behind her.
Tom thrust his hands deep into his pockets, hunching his shoulders against the chill. Arakny shivered in the same surge of lonely cold Abasio merely shut his eyes and listened.
Eventually they heard a sharp cracking, then a creaking, as of something opening. These inanimate sounds were followed by what might have been a voice. If it was a voice, it was not Olly’s but that of someone larger, someone, thought Abasio, more female. All they actually heard was a questioning murmur with a periodic upturn.
“……..?”
“Who?” whispered Tom.
“Hunagor,” grated Arakny. “Who else?”
“Hunagor is dead!” said Tom, his voice shaking.
“To you, to me, yes. But we’re not Gaddirs. Maybe she’s not dead to Olly.”
The murmurs stopped, to be succeeded by others, lower, below the level of any human voice.
“.……?” “..……..”
“I suppose that’s Werra,” said Abasio, trying without success to sound flippant.
Neither of them answered. They merely stood, waiting for the voices to stop. When the murmurings ended, however, other sounds began and continued: draggings, crashings, distant reverberations, and echoes, as of mighty portals opening to disclose impossible vacancies beyond. And at last came a great, sure humming as of a mighty engine turning.
Then even that faded away into dusty silence.
Footsteps.
Olly came from among the pillars to join them. They searched her face, finding there a deadly quiet, but no other difference.
Tom shut the huge door behind them, and they returned as they had come, pausing at a turn in the corridor as Olly fell behind. They turned to see her standing before one of the massive doors, ankle-deep in the dust drift that lay before it.
“You can go back,” she said to them.
“You don’t need me to guide you?” Tom croaked.
“No. I can find my way.”
“You can get in there?”
“I believe I can, yes. Before I see Herkimer-Lurkimer, I need to see this. Go on, I’ll be all right.”
She ran her fingers across the word that was graven deeply into the door, reading it as much with her fingers as her eyes. Graven over and over, ornamentally, cursively, in a thousand alphabets: Werra. Werra. Werra.
Tom drew them away, but they heard the rending of the door opening behind them as they went.
“They always open,” said Tom, tonelessly. “Even when it’s been … ten thousand years. They screech and squeal, they make a racket, but they always open. Sometimes I think they were brought here, maybe from the stars, aeons ago. Or grew here, like great trees.” He flushed, as though ashamed of this outburst, compressed his lips, and said nothing more as they returned to occupied space.
As they entered their suite, Abasio found himself seeing the rooms with strange eyes. Why did these spaces seem unfamiliar and odd? Should corner meet corner like this? Should floors be softened like this? Should there be a place to sit, a place to lie down? A place to prepare food and serve it? An arrangement for cleaning oneself and one’s possessions? Rooms Human rooms. Rooms that would speak of human needs even to something alien and totally strange.
As other rooms might speak of
other creatures As the throne room spoke of other beings. An alien space.
Arakny went into the next room and shut the door behind her. Abasio dropped heavily into the nearest chair, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. He tried to think of nothing at all, but his mind kept going back to the great chairs, trying to imagine their occupants as alive and speaking.
He opened his eyes to find Olly watching him from the door.
“It didn’t take long,” she said “I just wanted to look at the—at what’s there.”
He sat up. “Olly, what’s this all about?”
She sat beside him on the low arm of the chair, putting her arm around his shoulders, her head against his. “When I was at your grandpa’s farm, he talked about his windmill. He told us he had built a device, a heavy little wheel that turns only when the wind is very strong. It shuts down the mechanism so it doesn’t flail itself to nothing.”
“I know,” said Abasio. “Grandpa’s automatic shutdown system. I used to climb up there to oil it, when I was a boy.”
“One might think of these—these thrones as something similar to that wheel. They’re a device also, a shutdown latch that takes over when life is threatened. They’re also living things. They swim in time, not dying as we do, but living on, epoch after epoch. They may have looked quite different when they were new, but over the aeons they’ve accreted. They may have been ignorant when they were first made, but now they know things we don’t know. No. That’s not right. No, what they do is, they accept things we won’t accept. And that makes them frightening to us. We’re used to believing we’re the only intelligent beings around and that our reality is the only one.”
Her voice faded into silence. Abasio swallowed painfully. “But Tom says Hunagor and Werra were human.”
“Well, they were. They were human agents, but there have been other agents who weren’t human. And all those other agents have been absorbed into the primordial thing, the throne, the angel, the whatever.”
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