“I have never felt things like this before.”
“No doubt that’s true,” said Koshmar sharply.
“What shall I do, Koshmar?”
“Perform your services to the gods and to the people,” Koshmar said. “Take Hresh for his initiation. Make the daily offerings. Bring your goodness to those about you, as you always have.”
“And Lakkamai?”
“Do as you wish with Lakkamai.”
A third time Torlyri fell into silence. Koshmar allowed it to go on and on. Finally Torlyri said, “Do you want to twine with me now, Koshmar?”
“Another time,” Koshmar said. “In truth I’m very weary this evening, and I think it would not be a good twining.” She turned away. Bleakly she said, “I wish you joy, Torlyri. You understand that, don’t you? I wish you nothing but joy.”
Now Hresh began going into the ruins by himself, as if daring Koshmar to object; but she seemed not to care, or perhaps not even to notice. More often than not the Great World was his destination. The squat many-levered machine in the vault beneath the tower in the plaza of the thirty-six towers held an irresistible appeal.
By now he knew that the floating slab of stone that took him down to the lower-level vault would return automatically to the level above after a certain span of time; and so he no longer needed to bring Haniman or anyone else with him to operate the mechanism when he made his descents. Whatever risks there might be, he was willing to accept them for the sake of keeping others from sharing his journeys to the distant past. The Great World was his private treasure-trove, to mine as he pleased.
The procedure was the same every time. Activate the black stone stab; descend to the machine; grasp the Barak Dayir with his sensing-organ; seize the levers. And the Great World would spring to life, vivid and astonishing.
He never entered it at the same point twice. The physical structure of the city was different every time. It was as though all the long history of fabulous Vengiboneeza lay stored up in the machine, all its hundreds of thousands of years of growth and transformation, and it would randomly offer him any slice of the past that it wished, sometimes an early Vengiboneeza barely beginning its glittering expansion, sometimes a version of the city that surely must date from one of the final years, so close to the layout of the ruins was it.
There was no better evidence of how energetic and dynamic a place Vengiboneeza had been than the constant change Hresh observed in it. Only occasionally did he see any familiar landmarks — the waterfront boulevards, the thirty-six towers of the plaza, the tower that had become the temple of the People, the districts of villas on the mountainsides. Sometimes they were there, sometimes not. The squat potent Citadel was the only changeless and invulnerable place, whenever Hresh’s soul soared back across the gulf of the ages.
On one occasion he might vanish into a time when tall white palisades rose like spears along the streets of the lower part of town, and the city was full of sea-lords, parading up from the quay by the scores in their gleaming silver chariots. Another time, banners of some intangible force, a crackling tumult of colored lights, would be whirling overhead, and a vast procession of hjjk-folk would be winding down into the mountain, unimaginable millions of them filing one by one into the city, which absorbed them as though its capacity were infinite. Or there would be some convocation of humans in progress — he grudgingly conceded now that that was what they were, for he saw little alternative, though still he hoped desperately that he had misinterpreted the evidence he had found — seventy or eighty of the hairless thin-limbed ones sitting in a wide circle in a central plaza of the city just below the Citadel. They were exchanging silent thoughts from which he was utterly excluded, however hard he tried to penetrate their mysteries.
But mainly Vengiboneeza was a city of the sapphire-eyes. They dominated it. For every ten members of the other races that Hresh saw, there might be a hundred of the reptilians, or a thousand. He saw them wherever he looked, heavy-thighed, long-jawed, monstrous of form, brilliant of eye, radiating strength and wisdom and contentment.
It was easy enough for Hresh to enter into conversations with those he met in Vengiboneeza, even sea-lords, even humans. Everyone understood him and everyone was unfailingly courteous. But gradually he came to understand that these were not real conversations. They were polite illusions engendered by the machine that was his gateway to the past. He was not actually there in the Great World that had died seven hundred thousand years before under the onslaught of the death-stars, but was, rather, enmeshed in some projection, some facsimile, which had all the semblance of life and which drew him into itself as though he were an actual wayfarer in that huge city.
This became apparent because he went among its inhabitants full of questions, as usual. But somehow the answers that he received had no substance. They appeared to hold meaning, but it would slip away into nothingness even as it entered his mind, like the food one enjoys in the banquets of dreams. He could not learn anything by questioning those whom he encountered on the streets of lost Vengiboneeza. It was truly lost, and cut off from him by the terrible barrier of time.
Still, what he saw dazzled and enriched him, and filled him with awe for the splendor of what had been.
The sapphire-eyes seemed to appear and disappear in old Vengiboneeza as they pleased, winking in and out of being with astonishing ease. Pop and they were here, pop and they were gone again.
For travel outside the city they had another wondrous thing, sky-chariots like shimmering pink-and-gold bubbles that came floating down without a sound and released their passengers from hatches opening magically in their sides. Hresh saw hundreds of these bubbles overhead, moving silently and swiftly. They never collided, though they often seemed to come close. Within them sat sapphire-eyes, in positions of ease.
A third means of travel — if indeed travel was what it was — was available at enigmatic devices mounted on small platforms of sleek green stone. These were narrow vertical tubes of dark metal, about as tall as a full-grown man, widening at their upper ends into hooded open-faced spheres no larger than a man’s head. A strange fierce light, blue and red and green, played about the openings of these spheres as though emanating from some powerful apparatus within.
From time to time a sapphire-eyes, moving even more sedately and calmly than usual, would approach one of the platforms on which these tubes were stationed. Generally others of its kind would accompany it, walking close alongside, sometimes letting their little forearms rest against its heavy body. But always these companions would move away, allowing the departing sapphire-eyes to ascend the platform alone. It would draw near the sphere atop the tube until its great-jawed face was shining with the light that came from it; and then it would suddenly be drawn inside. Hresh could not see how that was accomplished, nor how there might be room for the immense bulk of a sapphire-eyes within that small glowing sphere. Never could he detect the moment when the transition was made, when the sapphire-eyes that stood peering into the sphere was swept from sight.
Whatever voyage the sapphire-eyes had undertaken was evidently a one-way journey: many went into the spheres atop the tubes, but Hresh never saw anyone emerge.
It appeared that none of these devices had survived into the modern-day Vengiboneeza. Hresh saw them only in his visions. In the real ruined Vengiboneeza he was unable even to find traces of the green stone platforms on which the tubes had been mounted.
After observing the rite of the hooded sphere many times, Hresh finally resolved to approach one of them himself. His dreaming spirit entered a deserted plaza on a moonless night. A tree stood nearby, its branches bowed down under the weight of enormous wedge-shaped brown nuts, each one bigger across than the span of his two hands. He made a heap of these, piling them high enough so that he could see into the sphere’s opening. It was a difficult business. The nuts, packed edge to edge, kept slipping and sliding beneath him, and he had to grip the hood of the sphere to keep from falling. Holding tight, he put his head close to the opening.