The Stone God Awakens

The trouble was that the Freudian dictum had never been proved to be true and, second, the subconscious of people descended from cats (if they were from cats) might differ from those of people descended from apes.

Whatever the interpretation of her dream, it was evident that she was worried about human females. Yet he had never given her any reason to consider him anything other than a god. Or to consider herself as any more than a good assistant to a god, even if the god was fond of her.

"Are you all right now?" he said. "Do you think you could get back to sleep?"

She nodded.

"Then you had better get back up into your bed."

She was silent for a moment. Her body had stiffened under his hand. She said quietly, "Very well, my Lord. I did not mean to offend you."

"You did not offend me," he said. He thought he should not add anything. He might weaken and ask her to stay with him. He needed some comforting of his own.

She climbed out of his bed and went up the ladder into her own. He lay for what seemed a long while, while the tired and anxious Wufea, Wagarondit and Alkunquib snored, stirred or muttered around him. What would tomorrow bring? Today, rather, since it surely would be dawn soon.

He felt as if he were swinging in the cradle of time. Time. No one understood it, no one could explain it. Time was more mysterious than God. God could be understood, God was thought of as being like a man. But Time was not at all understood, its essence and origin not even lightly touched as it went by.

He was swinging in the cradle of time. He was the ten-million-year-old baby. Maybe the ten-billion-year-old baby. Ten million years. No other living creature had endured such a passage of time whatever time was, and yet ten million or ten billion years were nothing in time. Nothing. He had endured—not lived—ten million years, and he must die soon. And if he did—when he did—he might as well have never lived. He would be no more than some miscarriage that had occurred in some subhuman two million years before he was born. Just as much and no more, and what good was life for him? Or for anybody?

He tried to shunt this train of thought off into oblivion. He was alive, and this sort of philosophising was useless, even if inevitable for a sentient. Even the less intelligent of human beings must surely think of the futility of individual life and of the incomprehensibility of time at least once in his/her life. But to dwell on such thoughts was neurotic. Life was its own answer, question and answer wrapped up in one skin.

If only he could sleep ... he awoke with the opening of the great doors and the thumping of the huge feet of entering Neshgai. And then he ate breakfast and took a shower (his people abstaining) and used his knife to scrape off his few whiskers. He only had to shave about every third day and this task took only a minute. He did not know if his Indian genes were responsible for this hairlessness or if there were also other factors.

He shed his clothes, which were too dirty and torn to wear, and gave them to Awina to wash and repair. He stuck his knife into the pocket on the side of the kilt a slave gave him, put on new sandals, and followed Gooshgoozh out of the room. The others were not invited; the big doors closed in their faces.

The interior of the enormous four-story building was as ornately carved and as brightly painted as the exterior. There were many human slaves in the wide and lofty corridors but very few soldiers. Most of the guards were twelve-foot high Neshgai with leather helmets wrapped in brilliant scarlet turbans and holding spears that looked like young pine trees and shields on which were painted X's inside broken circles. They came to attention when Gooshgoozh neared them and ground the butts of the spears with a resounding noise into the marble floors.

Gooshgoozh led Ulysses down many halls and up two flights of winding marble stairs with exquisitely carved handrails and then down more corridors which opened onto vast rooms with massive bejewelled furniture and painted bejewelled statuary. He saw a great number of Neshgai females. These were between eight and nine feet tall and totally lacked the little tusks. They wore kilts and long jewelled earrings and, occasionally, a ring or ornament inserted into the skin on the side of their proboscises. Their breasts were below their chests and were, like those of all the sentient females he had seen, fully developed whether the female was nursing or not. They emanated a powerful and pleasing perfume, and the young ones painted their faces.

At last they paused before a door of some rich red colour and dense grain. It bore a number of figures and symbols in alto-relief. The guards before it saluted Gooshgoozh. One opened the doors, and Ulysses was led into a cavernous room which had many shelves with books and a few chairs in front of a gigantic desk and chair. A Neshgai, wearing rimless glasses and a conical tall cap of paper painted with a number of symbols, sat behind the desk.

This was Shegnif, the Grand Vizier.

A moment later, Ghlikh was ushered into the room by an officer. He was gri

Shegnif asked Ulysses some questions in a voice deep even for the thunderous-throated Neshgai. Ulysses answered them without hesitation and truthfully. They were mainly requests for his name, where he came from, were there others like him, and so on. But when he said that he came from another time, perhaps ten million years ago, and that a lightning stroke had "depetrified" him, and that he had come here through The Tree itself, Shegnif seemed to be struck with a lightning bolt himself. Ghlikh did not like this reaction; he lost his grin and began to shift uneasily on his big bony feet.

After a long silence broken only by the stomach rumblings of the three Neshgai, Shegnif removed his great round spectacles and polished them with a cloth the size of a large throw rug. He put them back on and bent over his desk to look at the human standing before him.

"Either you are a liar," he said, "or an agent of The Tree. Or, just possibly, you are telling the truth."

He spoke to Ghlikh. "Tell me, Batwings. Is he telling the truth?"

Ghlikh seemed to shrink within himself. He looked at Ulysses and then back to Shegnif. It was obvious that he could not make up his mind whether to denounce Ulysses as a liar or to admit that his story was true. He would want to discredit the human, but if he tried and failed, then he would be discredited. Perhaps being discredited among the Neshgai meant death, which would account for the sweat over his body in this cool morning.

"Well?" Shegnif said.

The advantage lay with Ghlikh, since he was known to Shegnif. On the other hand, Shegnif may have had his suspicions about Ghlikh and his kind.

His remark about "an agent of The Tree" must mean that he considered The Tree to be an entity, a hostile one. If this were so, then he must have his ideas about Ghlikh's motives, since he must also know that the bat-people lived in The Tree. Or did he know that? The Dhulhulikh could have told him they came from the other side of The Tree, and he would have had no way of checking up on them. At least not until Ulysses showed up.

"I do not know if he lies or not," Ghlikh said. "He told me that he was the stone god come to life, but I did not see him come to life."

"Have you seen the stone god of the Wufea?"

"Yes."

"And did you see the stone god after this man appeared?"

"No," Ghlikh said hesitantly. "But then I did not look in the temple to see if he was still there. I took his word for it, though I should not have done so."