"There should be," Cushing told her. "Fifteen hundred years ago or more, men went to the moon and Mars. They wouldn't have stopped with that. They'd have gone farther out. But this is not the right kind of place. They'd have had to have launching pads, and it's ridiculous to build launching pads up here. Up here, it would be difficult to transport the sort of support such a base would need."
"Maybe they found a different way of going to the stars. This might be the place, after all."
Cushing shook his head. "I don't think so."
"But this place is important. It has to be important. Why else would it be guarded by the Trees? Why were the wardens out there?"
"We'll find out," said Cushing. "We'll try to find out."
Meg shivered. "I have a funny feeling in my bones," she said. "As if we shouldn't be here. As if we're out of place. Jean feel those big buildings looking down at us, wondering who we are and why we're here. When I look at them, I go all over goose pimples."
A voice said, "Here, let me do that."
Meg looked up. Elayne was bending over her, reaching for the pan.
"That's all right," said Meg. "I can manage it."
"You've been doing it all the time," said Elayne. "Doing all the cooking. I haven't done a thing. Let me do my part."
"All right," said Meg. "Thank you, lass. I'm tired."
She rose from her crouch, moved over to a stone bench and sat down. Cushing sat beside her.
"What was that?" he asked. "What is going on? Can she be getting human?"
"I don't know," said Meg. "But whatever the reason, I'm glad. I'm bone tired. It's been a long, hard trip. Although I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I'm glad we're here, uneasy as I may be about it."
"Don't let the uneasiness get you down," he said. "It will seem different in the morning."
When they came in at Elayne's call to supper, Ezra roused himself from his communion with the roses and joined them. He wagged his head in perplexity. "I do not understand at all," he said, "the things the roses tell me. There is about them a sense of ancientness, of far places, of time for which there is no counting. As if they were trying to push me to the edge of the universe, from which I could look out upon eternity and infinity, and then they ask me what I see and I cannot tell them, because there is too much to see. There are powerful forces here and mysteries that no man can fathom
He went on and on, mumbling in a rambling way as he ate the meal. No one interrupted him; no one asked him questions. Cushing found himself not even listening.
Hours later, Cushing woke. The others were asleep. The fire had burned to a few glowing embers. Andy stood a little way off, head hanging, either fast asleep upon his feet or dozing.
Cushing threw aside his blanket and rose to his feet. The night had turned chilly, and overhead the wind made a hollow booming among the brilliant stars. The moon had set, but the buildings were a ghostly white in the feeble starlight.
Moving off, he walked in the direction of the City, stopped to face it, his eyes traveling up the cliff like face of it. I could do without you, he told the City, the words dribbling in his mind. I have no liking for you. I did not set out to find you.
Too big, he thought, too big, wondering if he, in that moment, might be thinking as other men had thought when they struck the blow that had toppled that great, impersonal technology that had engulfed and overwhelmed them.
Striking, they had toppled a way of life that had become abhorrent to them, but instead of replacing it with another way of life, they had left an emptiness, a vacuum in which it was impossible to exist, retreating back to an older existence, back almost to where they'd started, as a man might go back to old roots to seek a new beginning. But they had made no beginning; they had simply stood in place, perhaps content for a while to lick their wounds and rest, to catch their breath again. They had caught their breath and rested and the wounds had healed and they still had stood in place—for centuries they had not moved. Perhaps fearful of moving, fearful that if they moved, they would create another monster that in time to come they'd also have to destroy, asking themselves how many false starts a race might be allowed.
Although, he knew, he was romanticizing, philosophizing on insufficient grounds. The trouble had been that the people after the Collapse had not thought at all. Bruised and battered after all the years of progress, they had simply huddled, and were huddling still.
And this great building—or perhaps many buildings, each masking the other, so that there seemed but one building— what could it be, standing here in a place that was a wilderness and had always been a wilderness? A special structure, built for a specific reason, perhaps a mysterious and secretive reason, guarded as it was by the Trees and the living stones? So far, there was no clue as to what might be the reason. Nor a clue to the Trees and stones. And none, for that matter, to the Followers and to Shivering Snake.
He walked slowly across the esplanade toward the City. Directly ahead of him rose two great towers, square-built and solid, endowed with no architectural foolishness, guarding a darkness that could be either a shadow or a door.
As he drew closer, he could see that it was a door and that it was open. A short and shallow flight of stone stairs led up to the door, and as he began to climb them, he saw a flash of light in the darkness that lay beyond the door. He halted and stood breathless, watching, but the flash was not repeated.
The door was larger than he'd thought, twenty feet wide or more, and rising to a height of forty feet or so. It opened into a place of darkness. Reaching it, he stood undecided for a moment, then moved through it, shuffling his feet to guard against any drop or irregularity in the floor.
A few feet inside, he stopped again and waited for his eyes to adapt, but the darkness was so deep that little adaptation was possible. The best that he could do was make out certain graduations in the darkness, the darker loom of objects that stood along the walls of the corridor through which he moved.
Then, ahead of him, a light flashed, and then another, and after that many flashes of light, strange, quivering, looping lights that sparkled rather than shone, and, after a moment of near panic, he knew what they were: hundreds of shivering snakes, dancing in the darkness of a room that opened off the corridor.
Heart halfway up his throat, he headed for the door and reached it. Standing in it, neither in nor out, he could see the room, or half see it, a place of large dimensions with a massive table set in the middle of it, the room lighted in a flickering manner by the zany loopings of the zany snakes; and standing at the head of the table, a form that did not seem to be a man, but a form that was suggestive of a man.
Cushing tried to speak, but the words dried up before he could get them out and shattered into a dust that seemed to coat his mouth and throat, and when he tried to speak again, he found that he could not remember what he had meant to say, and even if he had been able to, he could not have spoken.
A soft hand touched his arm and Elayne's voice sounded. "Here we stand on the edge of eternity," she said. "One step and we'll be into eternity and it would reveal itself to us. Cannot you feel it?"
He shook his head abjectly. He was feeling nothing except a terrible numbness that so paralyzed him he doubted he would ever be able to move from the spot where he was rooted.
He was able, with an effort, to turn his head slightly to one side, and he saw her standing there beside him, slim and straight in the tattered, smudged robe that once had been white, but was no longer. In the flicker of the snakes her face and its emptiness were more terrible than he had ever seen it, a frightening, soul-withering face, but his basic numbness precluded further fright and he looked upon the face without a quiver of emotion, simply noting to himself the utter horror of