The airwagon was a very large elongated metal box with wings, a thing of gigantic size. There must have been two or three dozen other passengers on board, perhaps even more. Nortekku was unable to understand how anything this massive could ever be capable of rising into the air. It was only about thirty years since the first experimental flying wagons had made the first tiny uncertain hops between one village and another, and already they were able to traverse the entire continent, which was impressive progress indeed; but for Nortekku transcontinental travel by air was simply something that one might read about, one more of the many technological miracles of modern times, not anything that had any real relevance to one’s own life.
Would he survive the voyage, he asked himself? Did it matter?
He had no assurance that he would be able find Thalarne at all when he got there, or if he did, that she would welcome his having pursued her across all this great distance. It might well be that this whole enterprise would prove destructive to the very thing he hoped to accomplish. Maybe, he thought, she had gone off like this to sort out her feelings about him, and his going after her would serve only to convince her that he was still an adolescent in some ways, an interesting choice for a brief fling but too troublesome to remain involved with for very long.
From beneath him rose a terrifying rumble. From each side of the airwagon came a low throbbing sound that rapidly expanded into a deafening roar.
Without even pausing to consider the incongruity of what he was doing Nortekku, who had never had a moment of religious feeling in his life, murmured a quick spontaneous prayer to all the ancient tribal gods. He called upon Yissou the Protector to look after him, and then asked Mueri the Comforter to ease his journey, and then, for good measure, begged the surveillance of Friit the Healer and Emakkis the Provider as well, and even Dawinno himself, the deity of destruction and transformation.
The airwagon began to move forward. And suddenly, astonishingly, unbelievably, it was aloft.
Nortekku had no clear sense of the point at which the wagon made the transition from ground to sky. But there could be no doubt that it had made the transition, for he was looking down at treetops and the metal-roofed sheds of Yissou Sky Harbor, and then, as the wagon banked and wheeled eastward, he saw Yissou City far below, a clenched fist of a place, an ugly huddled maze of tangled streets held in a constricting grasp by the formidable medieval wall that encircled them, with a chaotic sprawl of latterday suburbs spreading outward from it. From this height it was possible clearly to make out the perfectly circular outline of the city: the first settlers had built the place inside the rim of one of the giant craters that had been formed when the death-stars struck the Earth.
Yissou diminished quickly and was lost to sight somewhere behind them.
In its jarring, lurching way the airwagon sped on through the sky. Red sparks streamed by the windows like frantic scarlet insects. The steady metallic screaming of the engines, disconcerting at first, came to seem familiar and almost welcome. Below, all was a green wilderness, with great blankets of snow on the highest elevations. From time to time Nortekku saw a great circular scar, a brown-walled cicatrice in the midst of the greenness: one of the innumerable pockmarks left on the face of the Earth by the falling death-stars.
As he looked down he was struck by an inrushing awareness of the vastness of the world, and of its antiquity, and of the succession of races that had come and gone upon this planet. Down below there was nothing at all, now, but trees and stones. But once all that wilderness had been inhabited, he knew, by the myriad denizens of the long-lost Great World civilization, the unthinkably rich and glorious era of the Six Peoples whom he had studied in school long ago and then again lately in the first flush of his affair with Thalarne: the Hjjks, the Sea-Lords, the Vegetals, the reptilian race known as the Sapphire-Eyes people, the Mechanicals, and the most enigmatic ones of all, the Dream-Dreamers, who might perhaps have been the last vestiges of the humans who once had ruled this world in a previous epoch.
For some unknowable length of time—half a million years, a million?—the huge cities of the Great World, full of quivering vitality, astounding in their opulence and size, their myriad windows sparkling in the sun, had covered the landscape below. They had come, they had flourished, they had disappeared, he thought. And it will be the same with us, as it was for others who had lived before them. More strongly than ever before he understood that we are all just visitors here. Though our time of stay may last for millions of years, we are merely temporary residents all the same.
As Nortekku passed high above that landscape he sought with second sight to pry open the eons and thrust his mind into that ancient world, and the worlds that had lived before it, but without success. Nothing remained of it now except some vague traceries of foundation lines and a few ruined structures. Now and again he thought he could make out the spidery outlines of one of those lost ancient cities below, but perhaps that was only an illusion. Those cities were long gone, right down to their roots. The death-stars had come, dropping in swarms from the sky to stir up dark clouds of debris that blotted out the sun and brought on a winter seven hundred thousand years long, and all the Great World peoples had perished, all but the Hjjks, who manifestly could survive anything, even the end of the world.
There were half a dozen Hjjks aboard this very wagon. Nortekku saw their bristling antennae rising from seats not very far in front of his. He wondered what they were thinking and feeling as they looked down toward the uninhabited plains where their ancestors had dwelled in the Great World's time of majesty. Nostalgia for that vanished epoch? Pride at its accomplishments? Grief over its destruction? Nothing at all, perhaps. Who could say what sort of emotions a Hjjk might have? They kept their feelings to themselves, if they had any.
But his own feelings were in turmoil again. Contemplating the antiquity of the world had stirred fresh yearnings for Thalarne in him. He wanted to sweep into his arms all those millions of lost years whose faint traces he imagined he could see down there, all that richness of a vanished world, as though to embrace the whole of Earth’s past, because by embracing that incomprehensible past he was embracing Thalarne, whose goal it was to comprehend it. And for him Thalarne was the future.
Bornigrayal would tell the tale.
He was surprised at how swiftly the day grew darker as they continued eastward. It was winter, of course, and days were short; but the airwagon had taken off in the morning, and already the sky had the dull cast of afternoon, though they had been aloft only a couple of hours. Such a foreshortening of the day perplexed him for a time. But then Nortekku realized that the sun, rising out of the east, was in motion just as they were, already past him and rushing off beyond the cities of the west into the Western Ocean even as they went roaring on in the opposite direction toward the gathering night. The hour must be later the farther east one went; in some places out there, night had already fallen. In Bornigrayal, Thalarne might even now be sitting down to her evening meal, while for him it was not much past midday. Strange, he thought, that it should be early afternoon here, and night already there. He had never considered such matters before.
A meal was served; and then the wagon began to descend. Landing at Bornigrayal so soon? Fine. He had already had more than enough of this trip. But no, no, not Bornigrayaclass="underline" it was a place called Kundalimon, they told him, a town he had never heard of, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Three passengers disembarked; seven new passengers came on board, five People and two Hjjks. The airwagon, he realized, must not have the capacity to fly all the way across the continent in a single burst, and, in any case, the inhabitants of places like Kundalimon must sometimes need to travel also. Within fifteen minutes the wagon was aloft again.