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"I am not sure that it's just a statue," The Shemibob said.
Deyv felt like leaving at once. If he'd been alone, he might have. However, if that had been the case, he wouldn't have thought that it might be other than a figure made by the ancients.
"Why do you say that?" Sloosh asked.
"There's no dust on it Also ..."
She swung the device so that they could see the floor' in front of the block. There were footprints in the dust. They led away from and to the block.
"Let's get away from here!" the Yawtl said.
Nobody replied, but Deyv wondered if the others felt their skin prickling coldly, too.
The Shemibob moved the device so that they could see on its screen the thin slab towering behind the block. This bore a gigantic yellow arrow attached at one end to a knob in the center of the slab. In a circle around the arrow were very small characters evenly spaced. These startled Deyv and added to his unease. They were the same figures as those that flew through the sky. They were in the same order if the character at the top was to be the first and those that followed were read toward the right.
A little to the left and below the top character was a knob. The point of the arrow rested against the knob.
"Aha!" The Shemibob said loudly.
A moment later, Sloosh said, "I know what you mean."
Dew asked what they were talking about.
"The hand and the figures constitute a thrigz," Sloosh said. "Your language doesn't have a word for it.
It's a machine to tell the passage of time."
"Be still," the snake-centaur said. "I'm counting."
After a long while, she looked up from the screen.
"One thousand and fifty characters," she said. "Exactly the number of those that have appeared over the
Earth since I've been here and probably long, long before that. Exactly the number of strokes we heard.
These, I presume, came from the time-teller."
"And the hand has stopped," Sloosh said. "Does that mean that time itself ... no, that couldn't be."
"Earth's time is done," she said. "Practically done, anyway. What is a few hundred or even a few thousand more circlings of The Beast to the passage of time this instrument has registered?"
"Then," Sloosh said, "when the hand has passed from one figure to the next, twenty-one million years have passed?"
"Approximately."
"And this machine strikes each such passage?"
"I suppose so."
"But why? What is all this about?"
"That is the type of question which the humans sometimes have asked you. And you have told them that the questions are unanswerable. Therefore, foolish."
Sloosh said, "I am justly reprimanded. My apologies."
"We heard the final telling of the time. The flying figures have come home to roost forever." "Until the new universe is formed," Sloosh said.
Deyv did not understand this. The Shemibob, however, looked as if she comprehended it too well.
"The flying figures," the Yawtl said. "They must have come from someplace in the column. But you'll never be able to open it and see what mechanism makes them, sends them out around the world, pulls them back, shrinks them so they can enter the column. Even if you could, you still wouldn't be able to learn what they mean."
He seemed pleased by this. The Shemibob and the Archkerri might be higher beings, but they too could be mystified. In the presence of this eons-old enigma, they were as helpless as he.
The Shemibob said, "Some of the figures are letters which humans used in their writing from the begi
"But many of the characters are unfamiliar to me. And I believe they were unfamiliar to the great civilizations which saw them floating above in the sky when the Earth rotated more swiftly on its axis.
They probably had more success than I've had in interpreting the message. It must be a message, a spelling out of Earth's doom and, perhaps, the means for escaping the doom."
Sloosh said, "Perhaps. It would have been better if, instead of letters of some alphabet, the sender of the message had used moving pictures. These could have been understood by anyone."
"That does seem the logical thing to do," she said. "Perhaps the figures were designed as directions to
The House. Anybody could follow them to it. In which case, we should be able to see something that will enlighten us."
From somewhere in Deyv's mind a thought seeped out like water that had forced its way up through rock.
"Now I know what you meant when you said that the figures won't go out again until a new universe is formed!" he said. "But ... if the House and its occupant are waiting until then, wouldn't they—perhaps—
have come from an older universe to this one? I mean, couldn't they have survived the death of the universe that existed before ours? They passed unscathed through the fall of all matter and the formation of the giant fireball and its explosion and the formation of this universe? The House is made of something which will outlast the deaths of many worlds!"
Sloosh patted Deyv's shoulder. "Very good. You are learning."
"What nonsense," Hoozisst said. "Why would anyone stay in The House while the Earth was a good place to live in? Surelv, that man, if he is a man and not just a statue, would leave The House to enjoy life. What sense is there in sitting frozen on that chair and only rousing, and that not often, to look out the window?"
"We don't know that he does stay in The House," The Shemibob said. "Of course, that would imply a longevity that makes even mine look as short as a mayfly's existence."
The Yawtl snickered.
"Besides, there is no guarantee that The House would be drawn to a planet," Sloosh said. "It might float through space until it falls with all other matter toward a common point."
"Perhaps," The Shemibob said, "it makes no difference to the tenant."
"The point is," Hoozisst said, "is there anything there that will tell us what the flying figures mean?"
The Shemibob sighed and said, "No."
"Then we've wasted our time and put ourselves in danger for nothing."
"You're too practical, too unimaginative," Sloosh said. "This universe wasn't created for the likes of you."
The Yawtl lifted one lip to show some sharp teeth, but he said nothing.
Deyv looked from the screen into the sombre depths below the window. Was the statue really a human being who woke up now and then after an unimaginably long nap? Who then walked through a hall and into a room that held a window and looked through it to see how the world had changed? And then he walked back to the throne and became a statue again?
What woke him up and what put him to sleep again, that is, turned him back into a stuff that nothing could destroy?
Deyv shook his head, and he shivered.
Sloosh said, "I wonder why the hand on the thrigz is yellow and the figures are blue?"
The Shemibob gave her flapping laugh. "What is the color of time?"
Sloosh buzzed laughter. "I don't know. What is the angle of a thought?"
"Or the temperature of love?"
"Or the rate of acceleration of instinct?"
''Is a dead ray of light gray or blue?"
They burst out laughing again. This was cut off by a cry from the Yawtl. "His finger moved!"
Startled, all looked at the screen.
After a while, Deyv said, "I think I see it move, too." He wanted desperately to get down off the roof and into the vessel.
The Shemibob said, "No, it didn't. You imagined it. So did Hoozisst."
"It's like watching a corpse and thinking you see its chest rise and fall," Vana said. She didn't sound too certain, however.
They kept on looking at the finger with the gold band. There wasn't a sound. It seemed as if the whole world had died.