To Maggie Walsh, Frazer said, “Does Specktowsky say anything about walking on water? It would be useful, right now. That river looks damn deep to me, and we already decided we couldn’t take the chance of trying to cross it.”
“The river may not be there either,” Seth Morley said.
“It’s there,” Russell said. He walked toward it, stopped at its edge, bent down and lifted out a temporary handful of water.
“Seriously,” Betty Jo Berm said, “does Specktowsky say anything about walking on water?”
“It can be done,” Maggie Walsh said, “but only if the person or persons are in the presence of the Deity. The Deity would have to lead him—or them—across; otherwise they’d sink and drown.”
Ignatz Thugg said, “Maybe Mr. Russell is the Deity.” To Russell he said, “Are you a Manifestation of the Deity? Come here to help us? Are you, specifically, the Walker-on-Earth?”
“Afraid not,” Russell said in his reasonable, neutral voice.
“Lead us across the water,” Seth Morley said to him.
“I can’t,” Russell said. “I’m a man just like you.”
“Try,” Seth Morley said.
“It’s strange,” Russell said, “that you would think I’m the Walker-on-Earth. It’s happened before. Probably because of the nomadic existence I lead. I’m always showing up as a stranger, and if I do anything right—which is rare—then someone gets the bright idea that I’m the third Manifestation of the Deity.”
“Maybe you are,” Seth Morley said, scrutinizing him keenly; he tried to recall how the Walker had looked when he had revealed himself back at Tekel Upharsin. There was little resemblance. And yet—the odd intuition, to an extent, remained with him. It had come to him with no warning: one moment he had accepted Russell as an ordinary man and then all at once he had felt himself to be in the presence of the Deity. And it lingered; it did not completely go away.
“I’d know if I was,” Russell pointed out.
“Maybe you do know,” Maggie Walsh said. “Maybe Mr. Morley is right.” She, too, scrutinized Russell, who looked now a little embarrassed. “If you are,” she said, “we will know eventually.”
“Have you ever seen the Walker?” Russell asked her.
“No.”
“I am not he,” Russell said.
“Let’s just wade into the goddam water and see if we can make the other side,” Thugg said impatiently. “If it’s too deep then the hell with it; we’ll turn back. Here I go.” He strode toward the river and into it; his legs disappeared in the opaque blue-gray water. He continued on and, by degrees, the others followed after him.
They reached the far side with no trouble. All across, the river remained shallow. Feeling chagrined the six of them—and Russell—stood together, slapping water from their clothing. It had come up to their waists and no farther.
“Ignatz Thugg,” Frazer said. “Manifestation of the Deity. Equipped to ford rivers and battle typhoons. I never guessed.”
“Up yours,” Thugg said.
To Maggie Walsh, Russell said suddenly, “Pray.”
“For what?”
“For the veil of illusion to rise to expose the reality beneath.”
“May I do it silently?” she asked. Russell nodded. “Thank you,” she said, and turned her back to the group; she stood for a time, hands folded, her head bowed, and then she turned back. “I did as well as I could,” she informed them. She looked happier, now, Seth Morley noticed. Maybe, temporarily, she had forgotten about Susie Smart.
A tremendous pulsation throbbed nearby.
“I can hear it,” Seth Morley said, and felt fear. Enormous, instinctive fear.
A hundred yards away a gray wall rose up into the smoky haze of the midday sky. Pounding, vibrating, the wall creaked as if alive… while, above it, spires squirted wastes in the form of dark clouds. Further wastes, from enormous pipes, gurgled into the river. Gurgled and gurgled and never ceased.
They had found the Building.
9
“So now we can see it,” Seth Morley said. At last. It makes a noise, he thought, like a thousand cosmic babies dropping an endless number of giant pot lids onto a titanic concrete floor. What are they doing in there? he asked himself, and started toward the front face of the structure, to see what was inscribed over the entrance.
“Noisy, isn’t it?” Wade Frazer shouted.
“Yes,” he said, and was unable to hear his own voice over the stupendous racket of the Building.
He followed a paved road that led along the side of the structure; the others tagged after him, some of them holding their ears. Now he came out in front, shielded his eyes and peered up, focused on the raised surface above the closed sliding doors.
That much noise from a winery? he asked himself. It makes no sense.
A small door bore a sign reading: Customers’ entrance to wine and cheese tasting room. Holy smoke, he said to himself, the thought of cheese drifting through his mind and burnishing all the shiny parts of his conscious attention. I ought to go in, he said to himself. Apparently it’s free, although they like you to buy a couple of bottles before you leave. But you don’t have to.
Too bad, he thought, that Ben Tallchief isn’t here. With his great interest in alcoholic beverages this would constitute, for him, a fantastic discovery.
“Wait!” Maggie Walsh called from behind him. “Don’t go in!”
His hand on the customers’ door, he half-turned, wondering what was the matter.
Maggie Walsh peeped up into the splendor of the sun and saw mixed with its remarkably strong rays a glimmer of words. She traced the letters with her finger, trying to stabilize them. What does it say? she asked herself. What message does it have for us, with all we yearn to know?
“Wait!” she called to Seth Morley, who stood with his hand on a small door marked: Customers’ entrance. “Don’t go in!”
“Why not?” he yelled back.
“We don’t know what it is!” She came breathlessly up beside him. The great structure shimmered in the mobile sunlight which spilled and dribbled over its higher surfaces. As if one could walk up on a single mote, she said to herself longingly. A carrier to the universal self: made partly of this world, partly of the next. Wittery. A place where knowledge is accumulated? But it made too much noise to be a book and tape and microfilm depository. Where witty conversations take place? Perhaps the essences of man’s wit were being distilled within; she might find herself immersed in the wit of Dr. Johnson, of Voltaire.
But wit did not mean humor. It meant perspicacity. It meant the most fundamental form of intelligence coupled with a certain amount of grace. But, over all, the capacity of man to possess absolute knowledge.
If I go in there, she thought, I will learn all that man can know in this interstice of dimensions. I must go in. She hurried up to Seth Morley, nodding. “Open the door,” she said. “We must go inside the wittery; we’ve got to learn what is in there.”
Ambling after them, regarding their agitation with distinguished irony, Wade Frazer perceived the legend incised above the closed, vast doors of the Building.
At first he was perplexed. He could decipher the letters and thus make out the word. But he had not the foggiest notion as to the meaning of the word.
“I don’t get it,” he said to Seth Morley and the religious fanatic of the colony, Mag the Hag. He strained once more to see, wondering if his problem lay in a psychological ambivalence; perhaps on some lower level he did not really desire to know what the letters spelled. So he had garbled it, to foil his own maneuvering.
Wait, he thought. I think I know what a stoppery is. It is based on the Celtic, I believe. A dialect word only comprehensible to someone who has a varied and broad background of liberal, humanistic information at his disposal. Other persons would walk right by.