Another voice said, louder than the first, trying to blot out the other, "The stars went round and round, the green star and the blue star, and they moved so fast they were not balls of fire but streaks of fire, and rising in that point in space they circled was a cloud that was alive, taking its energy from the two revolving stars, and I wondered if the stars had been this way always or if the cloud that looked to be all sparkle had made the suns go round and round, the cloud telling the two suns what to do and..
And yet another voice: Darkness, and in the darkness a seething that lived upon the darkness and could not abide the light, that took the feeble light I threw at it and ate it, draining the batteries so there was no longer any light, so that I, powerless, fell into the darkness and the seething closed upon me.
Still another voice: "A purpleness that entrapped me, that took me in and held me and made me a part of it and told me things of long ago, before the universe began
"My God," screamed Meg, "they are all around us!"
And they were. The air seemed full of them, a flock of tubby cylinders that hung above them in the firelight and beyond the firelight, all of them jabbering, each trying to outdo the others.
".. 1 could not talk with them, there was no way to talk with them; they did not think or act or see or hear or feel like me; there was nothing that I had that they had, nothing they had I had… It had one body only, a hideous, terrible body that I cannot describe because my senses and my mind rejected the very horridness of it, that I could not describe even had I not rejected it; but one thing I knew, that it had many minds and these minds conversed with one another and they all talked at me and held me in great pity that I had but one mind…. They were machines but not machines as we are machines, as I am a machine; they were living metals and sentient plastics and they had a spirit that… I was an ant and they did not notice me, they had no idea I was there and I lay there in my antdom and listened to them, experiencing some of what they experienced, not all of it, by any means, for I did not have the knowledge nor the perceptions; like gods they were, and I as dust beneath their feet, although I do not know if they had feet, and I loved them and was terrified by them, both at once…. There was this cancer that spread from world to world, that ate everything it touched, and a voice came out of it and told me, ‘Behold us, we are life. … There was a people; I don't know if I should call them people, but they had all the time there was, creatures to which time meant nothing, for they had conquered time, or maybe only understood it, and had no longer any fear of its tyranny; and they were miserable, for having obliterated it, they had found that they needed time and had tried to get it back, but could not since they had murdered it… ‘I am an exterminator, it told me. ‘I wipe Out life that has no right to be; I wipe clean the worlds that got started wrong, that had no right to be. What would you think if I exterminated you? … There was this race of laughers, laughing in their minds; all they could do was laugh, it was their one reaction to anything at all, although it was a different kind of laughter than I had ever known and there was really not that much for them to laugh about
Babble, babble, babble. Jabber, jabber, jabber. Clatter, clatter, clatter. Disjointed and fragmentary, although if one of them could have been listened to alone, perhaps the story that it told might be comprehensible. But this was impossible— each with its own story to tell insisted on talking while the others talked so that all of them were talking all at once.
By now there were so many of them and the chatter of them so insistent and intermingled that there was no way of hearing anything except an occasional phrase. Cushing found himself unconsciously hunching his shoulders and tucking in his head, hunkering lower to the ground, assuming a protective stance, as if the increasing babble were an actual physical attack.
Ezra tossed in his sleep and sat up, dazed, scrubbing at his eyes with his fists. His mouth moved, but there was so much babble, there were so many other voices, that he could not be heard.
Cushing turned his head to look at Elayne. She sat as she had before, staring out into the night with the sense of seeing nothing. Ezra had said of her, that first day they had stumbled on the two of them, "She is of another world," and that, Cushing thought, must be the explanation—that she dwelt in
two worlds, of which this one, perhaps, was the least important.
Rollo stood on the other side of the fire and there was something wrong about him. Cushing wondered what it was and suddenly he knew: Rollo was alone; Shivering Snake was no longer with him. Thinking back, he tried to recall when he had last seen the snake, and could not be sure.
We are here, Cushing told himself, we are finally here— wherever here might be. Denied access by the wardens, herded by the rocks, let in by the Trees. But before the Trees had let them in, there had been a questioning and a probing, an inquisition, a looking for heresy or sin. Although not probing all of them, perhaps; perhaps only a probing of himself. Certainly not of Meg, for she had helped him when his legs were water and his senses scattered. Not of Ezra, for he had claimed he held a conversation with the Trees. And of Elayne? Of Elayne, who would know? She was a secret person, an exclusive person who shared with no one. Andy? he asked himself. What of Andy, the hunter of water, the killer of rattlesnakes, the battler of bears? He chuckled to himself as he thought of Andy.
Had it been himself alone who had been questioned and examined, the surrogate for all the rest of them, the leader answering for all the rest of them? And in the questioning, in the quest of the dirty fingernails that had pulled the essential being of him apart, what had they found? Something, perhaps, that had persuaded the Trees finally to let them through. He wondered vaguely what that something might have been, and could not know, since he could not know himself.
The babbling stopped of a single instant and the tubby cylinders were gone. Somewhere off in the night a chirping cricket could be heard.
Cushing shook himself, his mind still benumbed by the babble. He felt a physical ache, his entire body aching.
"Someone called them off," said Meg. "Something called them home, reproving them, angry at them."
Elayne said, in her textbook voice, "We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe…
They stopped for their noon rest at the edge of a small grove of trees. Cushing had bagged a deer, which Andy had carried up the slope. Now Cushing and Rollo butchered it and they had their fill of meat.
The going had been hard, uphill all the way, the climb broken by jutting ledges of rocks they had to work their way around, gashed by gullies that time after time forced them to change their course. The dried grass was slippery, making the footing uncertain, and there had been many falls.
Below them the Trees were a dark band of foliage that followed the course of the lower reaches of the butte. Beyond the Trees the high plain was a blur of brown and deeper shadows, thinning out to a lighter, almost silvery hue as it stretched to the horizon. Using the glasses, Cushing saw that now there were more than wardens out on the plains. He could see at least three separate bands, encamped or going about the process of encampment. And these, he knew, must be tribes, or delegations from tribes, perhaps alerted by the wardens as to what had happened. Why, he wondered, should the tribes be moving in? It might mean that the wardens were not a small society of fanatics, as it had seemed, but had the backing of at least some of the western tribes, or were acting for the tribes. The thought worried him, and he decided, as he put the glasses back in their case, to say nothing of it to the others.