THE CATERPILLARS QUESTION

"I don't know," he said. "I could guess. It's possible that the radiator was designed to be a weapon but it had some unforeseen side effects, unexpected by-products. One was that the shadows created by the radiator accidentally opened the way to ... what do I call it? Heaven? A parallel universe? I don't know what it is, but it exists.

"If the Makers made the radiators, they would have ignored the shadows after a few of them ventured into the shadows and didn't come back. Not to their knowledge, anyway. They would've had no idea they had serendipitously opened the gates of Heaven or whatever you want to call it. Anyway, what good would it have done them if they had known? Except maybe the certainty that death is not the end."

Even that, he thought, is not certain. What if the world into which we dived is just one that affects the minds of intruders? It's so alien to us that we can't comprehend it; its physical structure or whatever is beyond human understanding. So, the mind constructs something that can be understood, something it desires more than anything else. An afterlife. What the mind can't grasp, it interprets as something else.

If this was so, it would have to be an effect that a humans interpreted as the same. Otherwise, why would Tappy have shared his hallucinations, if they were such?

He was the ever-skeptical rationalist. Tappy, however, once over her tears, was certain that she had been, even if for a short time, in the place where the dead lived. Perhaps she was right. She might have a deeper rationality. Whatever "deeper rationality" meant. In any event, he was not going to try to invalidate her belief. She took great comfort in it, and she needed all she could get.

And ... His thought was interrupted by a coldness thrilling through him' Wait a moment! Just hold up! How had he overlooked it? But he had been numb, still was somewhat, and he could be forgiven for forgetting.

"Tappy!" he said. "Your mother! How could you be sure that that woman is your dead mother? I was told by your relatives when I picked you up that you'd never known your mother! I didn't ask them why not. I just took their word. But if you'd never known her, if she died at birth or something, how would you know her?"

She stared at him, then said, "I remember her now. Those fingers on my face ... her voice. I knew nothing of her until that moment. Then I remembered her, it all came back. I was three years old when I last saw her. I'd been sleeping ... where was it? Our little house on the edge of the town called Tappuah.

Tappuah means the place of apples. Something like that. I can still remember that wonderful smell from the orchards. The humans that lived there had come from another place, I don't know where.

There were many honkers, too, traders mostly, but I played with their children, and I learned their language. I was happy there.

Then, one night, I was awakened. My parents told me to keep quiet. I didn't know what was going on, but I was frightened. So scared that I didn't make a peep.

"Then I was being carried by my father through darkness. I think it was the forest up in the hills by the town. All of a sudden, a great light from above shone through the big trees. A very, ver-Y loud voice, must've been from a loudspeaker in an aircraft, said something about surrendering. But my parents kept on ru

She choked. It was a minute or so before she could continue.

"Then there was a different light, a scarlet-colored beam that swept through the forest and cut through trees. They fell with a terrible sound. By then, I was screaming despite my mother's commands to keep quiet. Then I heard shouts, men yelling. They must have been the Gaol humans who were hunting us. My father stopped and put me into a hole in a tree. He told me to stand still and not move an inch. Otherwise, I'd fall into the shaft behind me.

I was standing on a very narrow ledge and hanging on with all my strength to the edge of the hole. The lights got brighter, but the scarlet ray quit coming. Maybe it had been turned off. And then my father turned to help my mother into the hole. But. - ."

She broke into a long and loud weeping. Jack put his arm around her and held her until she could talk again. Her face against his breast, she said, "Oh, God! Then there was a glare, and I could see that my mother had fallen onto the ground. Her legs were cut off. Her blood was spouting out of the stumps, spraying my father's legs. I was still screaming. Then my father grabbed me with one hand and lifted me up by my clothes and got halfway into the hole. He knew, I suppose, that the Gaol wouldn't shoot at him while he was very close to me. They didn't want to kill me and then have to start searching for the Imago again.

"My father held me in his arms, and he jumped. We fell down the shaft, not very far, I think, and then we were suddenly in bright daylight. He landed with his knees bent-strange how that little detail sticks in my mind-and he staggered. But he put me down and pulled a beamer from his belt and shot its ray upward. I remember just glimpsing a ledge projecting out over the top of the cliff. We must have dropped through a gate in the stone. He blew up the projection with the ray. There must've been explosives or something inside the shaft in the other world. Anyway, it exploded and, I suppose, destroyed the gate. The rocks and the dust rained over us, but my father covered me with his body. He was hurt protecting me, though not bad enough so he couldn't lift me and carry me off. I was still screaming with terror and with grief for my mother."

She paused, doubtless to scan the memories that had surged up from the unconscious, breaking loose through the barrier there. -Ihen she spoke again, her voice less quivery.

"I remember now, though it's vague, being in a great cavern complex before we went to Tappuah. Maybe it was the same as the one we were in. I don't know. Anyway, it's coming back, part of it, anyway. It was there I first learned honkerese and English, the English which humans speak on the planet. After a while, we went to Tappuah. Maybe the pressure from the Gaol was off, and my parents thought it was safe to live with humans again. They must've been sick from being under the ground. must've longed for the open air and the sunlight. I know now that my parents and a few other humans and some honkers were part of a secret organization dedicated to fighting the Gaol. Plotting against them, anyway."

She was silent again. When she resumed speaking, she talked with a low voice and in broken phrases. It was as if she were sweeping the fragments of the life she remembered into a basket, then was picking up the pieces from the basket without regard to order.

"Once, I overheard my parents talking. They were saying something about the light that glowed from me when I was born, a light that lasted for an hour or so. By that, they knew that the Imago was inside me. Of course, I didn't know what the Imago was, and I forgot all about it when my mother was killed. That wiped out all my memory of my infancy and early childhood. Later, I forgot my life from the time my mother was killed to the time the airplane crashed and killed my father and crippled me. I could not talk after that. My tongue seemed frozen. Along with much else that was frozen. I lived, but I was half-dead.

"When you came along, you started the thawing out. I began to live again, though not fully. But I knew that you were the person I'd been waiting for to love me."

Father, mother, and lover squeezed into rly- person, Jack thought.

Also, the knight in shining white armor who rode up to rescue her.

In reality, the Doubtful Knight.

He said, "Your so-called relatives who raised you, Melvin and Michaela Daw, were they part of the anti-Gaol organization?"