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Amber light glowed. Hordes of somber glowering figures came into view along the walls, that frantic population of monstrous carvings. Hresh caught his breath in an involuntary reaction of amazement, and sharp, stale, strange air filled his lungs.
Ahead of him lay the device of the knobs and levers. He ran to it.
Quickly he drew the Barak Dayir from its pouch, and quickly he seized it with his sensing-organ. Immediately the strange music of the stone flooded his soul, distant chimes and a languorous roar punctuated by sharp stabs of brazen clangor.
He understood better now how to control the device. This time there were no storms. This time he did not soar toward the heavens, but instead extended the zone of his perceptions laterally in all directions, so that he spread out to encompass the entire city of Vengiboneeza. His tingling mind felt the structure of the city as a series of interlocking circles, hundreds of them both great and small, which he perceived as clearly as though they were no more than half a dozen straight lines scratched on the floor. Brilliant points of hot red light blazed at many places along the circles.
Hresh would investigate those points of light at another time. His task now was the machine of knobs and levers. Grasping the same knobs he had seized before — he could see the mark of his own hands’ heat on them from the last visit, a vivid throbbing yellow pulsation — he squeezed them with all his strength.
An irresistible force instantly took him and swept him up and carried him like a mote of dust into another realm.
The Great World erupted into glorious life all about him.
He was still in Vengiboneeza, but it was no longer Vengiboneeza of the ruins. Once more it was Vengiboneeza as it had been, the living city; but this time the vision was no fleeting one. It was vivid and tangible, with the unarguable density of the utterly real.
The city glistened with the hot sheen of its vitality, and he was everywhere in it, floating down all the streets at once, an unseen observer in the central marketplace, on the marble quays by lakeside, in the villas on the green slopes of the hill district.
I am there, he thought. I am truly there. I have been drawn down through the abyss and whirlpool of time like a dust mote through a straw, and thrust into the heart of the Great World.
He wondered if it would ever be possible for him to return to his own world.
He realized that he didn’t care.
Wherever he looked he saw throngs of the sapphire-eyes folk. They moved calmly, confidently, strolling arm in arm. And why shouldn’t they be confident and calm? They were masters of the world. Hresh looked upon them with awe. What great terrifying beasts they were, with their enormous jaws and their myriad gleaming teeth and their rough green scales and their bulging sapphire-blue eyes! How they swaggered about the streets on their powerful fleshy hind legs, propped up by those huge thick tails! And yet they could not truly be thought of as beasts, however fearsome they looked. The light of keen intelligence burned in the strange eyes. The long heads rose in startling domes, and Hresh felt the power of the large brains ticking within them.
A cold sluggish fluid that was like blood, but not blood at all, bathed those great brains. But the minds of the sapphire-eyes folk were neither sluggish nor cold. Hresh felt the thunder of those minds pounding against him from all sides. Merchants, poets, philosophers, sages, masters of the sciences and the wisdoms: they all were hard at work, recording, analyzing, comprehending, at every moment of the day and the night. He saw even more clearly than he had before what work it was to create and sustain a great civilization like this: how much thought was necessary, how much information must be gathered and stored and disseminated, how intricate the webwork of pla
And why, he wondered, had they allowed themselves to die of the Long Winter, when surely they had had the power to fend off the disaster that was coming upon their world?
And he saw that the other five of the Six Peoples were represented in this lost ancient Vengiboneeza also.
Here were hjjk-folk, chilly and aloof, keeping close together in files of fifty or a hundred, like ants. Hresh sensed the dry rustle of their bleak thoughts, the click-clatter of their hard, brittle souls. It was easy to detest them. There was no singleness to them, no individuality. Each was part of the larger entity that was the group of hjjk-folk, and each group was part of the race of hjjk-folk as a totality.
From them radiated the stern conviction of their own enduring superiority. We will be here after you are gone, the hjjk-folk a
Here too were the vegetals, the delicate flower-folk, gathering in little groups on su
By what miracle had it happened, Hresh wondered, that plants had learned to speak and walk about? He was able to look within the souls of these vegetals and see the knotty fibers and sinews of true brains, little hard clumps nestling in the protected place where their head-petals joined their central stems. In his trek across the plains he had not encountered plants that had minds; but of course these vegetals that he saw were ancient creatures. Their kind had been swept away by the bitter storms of the Long Winter, and perhaps nothing like them had been capable of surviving into the era of the People.
The mechanicals were much in evidence. Hresh saw them hard at work in every district of the city, those massive dome-headed, jointed-legged metal beings. They were constructing, repairing, cleansing, demolishing. So they were the servants of the sapphire-eyes; and yet they had clear, strong minds and a sharp awareness of their own existence. Machines they might be, but to Hresh they were more comprehensible than the hjjk-folk. Each was an individual, with a distinct identity and no little pride in that identity.
A scarcer group were the sea-lords, but this, Hresh realized, must be owing to the difficulties they experienced in getting about on land. They were sleek brown tight-furred beings, tapered in a graceful way, with robust frames and flipperlike limbs. Plainly they were creatures of the water, though they breathed the air of Vengiboneeza with no sign of discomfort. Each was installed in a cu
On and on he drifted, and the Great World glittered about him in the fullness of its brightness. What had existed only as the blurred memory of a memory in the oldest pages of the chronicles was alive for him. For him there was no time outside the time of his vision. This was the world as it had been before the disaster; this was the world at the summit of its highest civilization, when miracles were everyday things.