"If so," said Meg, "a well-guarded legend. I have never heard of it. The city tribes back home, I'm sure, never heard of
it.
"The best legends," said Cushing, "might be the best guarded. So sacred, perhaps, that no one ever spoke aloud of them."
The next day, Rollo went with them for another tour of the City. They found nothing new. The wails stood up straight and inscrutable. There was no indication of any life.
Late in the afternoon, Ezra and Elayne returned to camp. They came in footsore and limping, clearly worn out.
"Here, sit down," said Meg, "and rest yourselves. Lie down if you want to. We have water and I'll cook some meat. If you want to sleep a while before you eat.
Ezra croaked at them, "The Trees would not let us through. No argument can budge them. They will not tell us why. But they would talk of other things. They talked of ancestral memories, their ancestral memories. On another planet, in some other solar system, very far from here. They had a name for it, but it was a complicated name with many syllables, and I failed to catch it and did not want to ask again, for it seemed of no importance. Even if we knew the name, it would be of no use to us. They either had forgotten how they got here or did not want to tell us, although I think they may not know. I'm not sure they ever saw the planet that they talked of. They were talking, I think, of ancestral memories, facial memories, carried forward from one generation to the next."
"You are certain of this?" asked Cushing. "Their saying they came from another planet?"
"I am very certain," Ezra said. "There is no question of it. They talked to me of the planet, as a man marooned in some strange place would talk about the country of his boyhood. They showed the planet to me-admittedly, a very fuzzy picture, but one could recognize certain features of it. An idealized picture, I am certain. I think of it as a pink world-you know, the delicate pink of apple blossoms in the early spring, blowing on a hill against a deep-blue sky. Not only was the color of the world pink, but the feel of it. I know I'm not telling this too well, but that's how it seemed to me. A glad world—not a happy world, but a glad world."
"Gould it be?" asked Cushing. "Could it be that men did go to the stars, to this pink world, bringing back with them the seeds of the Trees?"
"And," said Meg, "the Followers and the Shivering Snakes? The living stones as well? For these things cannot be of this world of ours. There is no way they could be natives of this world."
"And if all of this is true," said Rollo, "then this, after all, may be the Place of Going to the Stars."
Cushing shook his head. "There are no launching pads. We would have found them if there had been any. And so remote, so far from all the sources of supply. The economics of such a place as this would be illogical."
"Perhaps," said Rollo, "a certain amount of illogic could make a certain sense.
"Not in a technological world," said Cushing. "Not in the kind of world that sent men to the stars."
That night, after Ezra and Elayne were sound asleep, Rollo disappeared on another walkabout, and with Andy off to gambol with the Followers, Cushing said to Meg, "One thing keeps bothering me. Something that the Team told us. There is something else here, they said. Something other than the A and B. Something hidden, something we should find."
Meg nodded. "Perhaps, laddie boy," she said. "Perhaps there's a deal to find. But how do we go about it? Has that driving, adventurous brain of yours come up with a fresh idea?
"You sensed the living rock," said Cushing, "that night long ago. You sensed the Followers. They were a crowd, you said. A conglomerate of many different people, all the people they had ever met. You sensed that the robotic brain still lived. Without half trying, you sensed all these things. You knew I was sleeping in the lilac thicket."
"I've told you and told you, time and time again," she said, "that I'm a piss-poor witch. I'm nothing but an old bag who used her feeble talents to keep life within her body and ill-wishers off her back. A dowdy old bitch, vicious and without ethics, who owes you, laddie buck, more than I ever can repay you for taking me on this great adventure."
"Without half trying," said Cushing, "just as a flippant, everyday exercise of your talents
"There's Elayne. She's the one you should be—"
"Not Elayne. Her talents are of a different kind. She gets the big picture, the overview. You get down to basics; you can handle detail. You see the nuts and bolts, sense what is taking place."
"Mad you are," she said. "Madder than a hare."
"Will you do it, Meg?"
"It would be a waste of time."
"We've got to crack this puzzle. We have to know what's going on. If we don't want to stay here forever, penned upon this butte."
"Okay. Tomorrow, then. Just to show you are wrong. If you have the time to waste."
"I have time to waste, said Cushing. "I have nothing more to do with it."
She didn't want to do it, but, she told herself, she had to try, if for no other reason than to get it over with. As well, she was afraid to try it, because then she might learn the true smallness of her powers. If she had any powers at all. Although, she told herself, with slim comfort, she had done certain things.
"I hope," she said to Cushing, "that you are satisfied."
The early morning sun lit the great metal doors, embossed with symbolic figures that meant nothing to her. The stone towers that rose on either side and above the doors were forbidding in their solidness. She gained the impression, as she and the others stood there, at the foot of the shallow stone steps that went up to the door, that the entire building was frowning down upon them.
The Team had said that there was something somewhere behind the doors, somewhere in the City, but they had not known what it was and now it was her job to find out. It was an impossible task, she knew, and she would not have even tried, but laddie boy had faith in her and she could not let him down. The others, she knew, had no faith in her, for she had given them no reason. She looked at Elayne and, for a moment, thought she could glimpse in the other woman's eyes a hint of quiet amusement, although, God knows, she told herself, there is none to know what might be in Elayne's vacant eyes.
She dropped to her knees and settled comfortably, her haunches resting on her heels. She tried to make her mind reach out, easily at first, not pushing too hard, driving out, gently, the tendrils of her mind, seeking, probing, as the tendrils of a climbing vine might seek out crevices in the wall on which it climbed. She sensed the hardness of the stone, the polished toughness of the metal, and then was through them, into the emptiness beyond. And there was something there.
The tendrils pulled back as they touched the strangeness of it—a sort of thing (or things) she had never known before, that no one had ever known before. Not a thing, she told herself, but many slippery different things that had no definition. That would not define themselves, she realized, as her mind veered away from them, because they were not alive, or at least seemed to have no life, although there was no doubt that they were entities of some sort. A tingling fear went through her—a shuddering, a loathing—as if there were spiders there, a billion scurrying spiders with swollen, distended bodies, and legs covered with quivering black hairs. A scream welled in her throat, but she choked it back. They can't hurt me, she told herself; they can't reach me; they're in there and I'm out here.
She thrust her mind at them and was in the midst of them, and now that she was there, she knew they weren't spiders, that there was no harm in them, for they were not alive. But despite the fact of their being lifeless, they somehow held a meaning. That was senseless, she knew. How could something lifeless hold a meaning, or many tiny lifeless things hold many, many meanings? For she was surrounded and engulfed by the meanings of them, little lifeless meanings that whispered vaguely at her, thrusting themselves forward, pressing themselves against her, seeking her attention. She sensed the countless buzzings of many tiny energies, and within her mind, fleeting images built up momentarily, then faded, fading almost as soon as they had formed—not one of them, but hordes of them, like a swarm of gnats flying in a shaft of sunlight, not really seeing them, but knowing they were there by the glint of light off the vibrations of their wings.