She tried to concentrate, to bring her mental tendrils down to sharper focuses that could spear and hold at least one of the little dancing images, to seize upon and hold it long enough to make out what it was. She felt, as if from far away, as if it were happening to someone other than herself, the sweat upon her forehead and running down her face. She bent even farther forward, squeezing her upper torso down against her thighs, concentrating her body into a smaller space, as if by this concentration she could concentrate her powers. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, trying to block out all light, to form within her mind a black mental screen upon which she could bring into focus one of the shimmering gnats that danced within her head.
The images did seem to sharpen, but they still danced and flitted, the glitter still came off the whirring wings, masking the half forms that she forced them to take, dim and shadowy, with no real definition. It was no use, she thought; she had driven herself as far as she could go and then had failed. There was something there, some subtle strangeness, but she could not grasp it.
She collapsed, pitching forward, rolling over on her side, still compressed into a fetal position. She let her eyes come open and dimly saw Cushing bending over her.
She whispered at him. "I'm all right, laddie boy. There is something there, but I could not catch it. I could not sharpen it, bring it into focus."
He knelt beside her and half lifted her, holding her in his arms. "It's all right, Meg," he said. "You did what you could."
"If I'd had my crystal ball," she whispered.
"Your crystal ball?"
"Yes. I had one. I left it back at home. I never did place much faith in it. It was just window dressing."
"You think it would have helped you?"
"Maybe. It would help me concentrate. I had trouble concentrating."
The others stood around, watching the two of them. Andy shuffled in closer, stretching out his long neck to snuffle at Meg. She patted his nose. "He always worries about me," she said. "He thinks it's his job to take care of me.
She pulled herself away from Cushing and sat up.
"Give me a little time," she said. "Then I'll try again."
"You don't have to," Cushing said.
"I have to. The Team was right. There is something there." The great stone walls rose up against the cloudless sky— stolid, mocking, hostile. High in the blueness a great bird, reduced by distance to a fly-sized speck, appeared to hang motionless.
"Bugs," she said. "A million little bugs. Scurrying. Buzzing. Like ants, like spiders, like gnats. All the time moving. Confused. And so was I. Never so confused."
Elayne spoke in her hard, cold voice. "I could help," she said.
"Deane, you stay out of this," said Meg. "I have trouble enough without you butting in."
She got to her knees again, settled back so her haunches rested on her heels.
"This is the last go I have at it," she said. "Absolutely the last. If it doesn't work this time, that's the end of it."
It was easier this time. There was no need of breaking through the stone and metal. Immediately, once again, she was with the spiders and the gnats. And, this time, the gnats flew in patterns, forming symbols that she could glimpse, but never clearly and never with an understanding, although it seemed to her that the understanding was just a hairsbreadth beyond perception. If she could only drive in a little closer, if somehow she could slow the dancing of the gnats or retard the scurry of the spiders, then it seemed to her that she might catch and hold some small bit of understanding. For there must be purpose in them; there must be a reason they flew or scurried as they did. It could not all be random; there must be reason somewhere in the tapestry they wove. She tried to drive in, and for an instant the mad dance of the gnats slowed its tempo, and in that instant she felt the happiness, the sudden rose-glow of happiness so deep and pure that it was a psychic shock, rocking her back on her mental heels, engulfing her in the abandoned sweetness of
it. But even as she knew it, she knew as well that it was somehow wrong—that it was immoral, if not illegal, to know so deep a happiness. And in the instant that she thought that, there came to her the knowing of what was wrong with it. It was, she knew instinctively, a manufactured happiness, a synthetic happiness; and her groping, confused mind caught a fleeting image of a complicated set of symbols that might explain the happiness, that might even cause the happiness. All this within so short a span of time that it was scarcely measurable; then the happiness was gone, and despite the synthetic nature of it, the place seemed bleak and cold and hard without it, an emptiness despite the fact that it was still inhabited by a billion billion insects that she knew weren't really insects but only something that her human mind translated into insects. Moaning, she sought for the happiness again; phoney as it might be, it was a thing she needed, with an hysterical desperation, to touch again, to hold it only for a moment, to know the rose-glow of it. She could not continue in the drabness that was the world without it. Moaning piteously, she reached out for it and had it once again, but even as her mind's fingers touched it, the rose-glow slipped away and was gone again.
From far away, from another world, someone spoke to her, a voice that she once had known but could not identify. "Here, Meg," it said, "here is your crystal ball."
She felt the hardness and the roundness of the ball placed between her palms, and, opening her eyes a slit, saw the polished brightness of it, shining in the rays of the morning sun.
Another mind exploded and impacted in her mind—a cold, sharp, dark mind that screamed in triumph and relief, as if the thing that it had awaited had finally happened, while at the same time shrinking back in fear against the gross reality of a condition it had not known for centuries piled on centuries, that it had forgotten, that it had lost all hope of regaining and that now it found thrust so forcefully upon it.
The unsuspected mind clung to her mind, fastening upon it as the one security it knew, clinging desperately, afraid of being alone again, of being thrust back into the darkness and the cold. It clung to her mind in frantic desperation. It ran along the projections of her mind into that place where spiders and gnats cavorted. It recoiled for a fraction of a second, then drove in, taking her mind with it, deep into the swarm of glittering wings and frantic hairy legs, and as it did, the wings and legs were gone, the spiders and the gnats were gone, and out of the whirlpool of uncertainty and confusion came an orderliness that was as confusing as the spiders and gnats. An orderliness that was confusing because it was, in most parts, incomprehensible, a marshaling and a sorting of configurations that even in their neatness seemed to have no meaning.
Then the meanings came—half meanings, guessed meanings, shadowy and fragmented, but solid and real in the shadow and the fragments. They piled into her mind, overwhelming it, clogging it, so that she only caught a part of them, as a person listening to a conversation delivered in so rapid-fire a manner that only one word in twenty could be heard. But beyond all this she grasped for a moment the larger context of it, of all of it—a seething mass of knowledge that seemed to fill and overflow the universe, all the questions answered that ever had been asked.