He knew there was danger in this. He might be drawn in and swept away — where? To another world? To the home of the gods? Or he might be destroyed altogether, for he had begun to suspect that the sapphire-eyes used these devices to end their lives, when their death-day finally had come. But the temptation to look within one was irresistible. And he told himself that this was only a vision. How could he be harmed by a device that had no real existence, that had ceased to exist at least seven hundred thousand years before he was born?
But if you are not really here, a voice within him said, then how is it you were able to pull those nuts from the tree and pile them up like this?
Hresh brushed the question aside and looked within.
There was a strange thing at the heart of the hooded sphere: a zone of utter darkness, so black that it gave off a kind of light beyond light. He stared at it, dazzled, and knew that he was looking not merely into another world but into some other universe, something outside the domain of the gods entirely. Though the black zone was very small — he supposed that he could enclose it in the palm of one hand — there was a great power to it. They have captured little pieces of that other universe, he imagined, and installed them in these round metal containers; and when they wish to leave the realm of the gods they approach one of the containers and the blackness scoops them up and carries them off.
He waited calmly for it to carry him off. The spell of the thing held him completely. Let it take him where it would.
But it took him nowhere. He stared at it until his eyes hurt; and then two figures appeared out of the shadows, a sapphire-eyes and a vegetal, and beckoned to him.
“Come away from there,” the vegetal said, in its whispering, rustling way. “There’s danger there, little one.”
“Danger? Where? I can put my head right in it, and nothing happens.”
“Come away, all the same.”
“I will, if you’ll explain to me what this is.”
The vegetal folded its petals; the sapphire-eyes laughed its hissing laugh. Then they explained the device to him, both of them speaking at once, and he understood perfectly what they said, at least so long as they were speaking. What they told him left him rapt with wonder; but it was like everything else he heard while visiting the Great World, no more nourishing than dream-food, and such meaning as it might have had in the first moment of its telling slipped away from him at once, hard as he struggled to hold to it.
He stepped down from the platform, and they led him away toward a place of lights and singing. The only thing he could remember afterward was something he had concluded for himself, and not anything they had told him. Which was that these were the devices that the people of the Great World employed to end their lives, when they knew that the time had come for them to die.
Why would they want to die? he asked himself. And had no answer.
Then he thought: they knew the death-stars were coming. And yet they stayed here, and let them come.
Why would they have done that?
And had no answer for that, either.
There was a place in the city of Hresh’s visions where the whole world stood portrayed against the sky. A flat metal disk of a bright silvery metal was mounted at an angle in the outer wall of a low ten-sided building; and when he touched a knob beside it a shaft of piercing brightness came down out of somewhere and struck it, and a huge globe of the world sprang into brilliant life before him. He knew at once that this was the world, because he had seen pictures of it in the chronicles. Those pictures were flat, and this was round, but he knew it was the world because that was how the chronicles said the world really was. Hresh had never imagined there would be so much of it. He could walk completely around the globe that represented it, and there were places on every side. He saw four great landmasses, separated by vast seas. Vast sprawling cities were shown, laced with highways like rivers of light, and lakes and rivers, and mountains and plains. Even though this was only an image in the air, Hresh could feel the surging power of the mighty seas and the immense weight of the mountains, and when he looked at the representations of the cities he had the illusion that he saw tiny figures moving about on tiny streets.
One of the landmasses was gigantic, filling nearly an entire face of the world. When he went around to the globe’s other side he saw two more, one above the other, and the fourth was at the bottom of the world, an icy place from which came a perceptible chill.
“Where is Vengiboneeza?” Hresh asked, and a dazzling green light appeared near the left-hand side of the uppermost landmass on the side of the globe that had two.
“And Thisthissima?” he asked. “Mikkimord? Tham?”
As fast as he could name other cities of the Great World, they sprang into light, and the globe turned to display them. Then his little store of names was exhausted, and he ordered the globe to show him every city all at once. It obeyed instantly; and so many blazing points of light sprang out on the globe, and it turned so rapidly, that he shrank back, blinded for the moment, covering his eyes in terror. When he dared to look again the globe was gone.
He never tried to summon it a second time. But the image of that round world with its immense seas and its colossal landmasses speckled everywhere with the blinding light of a myriad cities would remain with him forever. And he understood how great the Great World in fact had been.
Something else that showed him the immensity of what had been lost was a structure that he guessed to be the Tree of Life, of which Thaggoran had sometimes spoken.
It was not really a tree at all, but more of a tunnel, or set of tunnels, for it lay horizontally upon the ground for many hundreds of paces in an open parklike space. Its floor was below ground level, and it was roofed over with arches of some absolutely clear material, so that it did not appear to have a roof at all. A great central gallery was at its core, from which smaller passageways branched, and even smaller ones from those.
At the tip of each branch was a round chamber; and in each of those chambers a little family of animals lived, each in what must have been its natural surroundings, for some chambers were dry and desertlike, others were lush with moist foliage. It was possible to walk through the Tree of Life past branch after branch without disturbing the creatures in it in any way.
Hresh had seen no animals like these when the tribe was crossing the plains. But they resembled some that he had seen depicted in the Book of the Beasts in the chronicles. So these must be the creatures that had dwelled in the world before the coming of the death-stars: the lost animals, the vanished denizens of the former world.
There were huge slow ambling black-and-red ones with horns like trumpets that opened into wide bells at the tips, and there were delicate long-legged ones with pale yellow fur and round, startled eyes as big across as Hresh’s hand, and there were fierce little low squat ones that seemed to be all snout and teeth and claws. There was something tawny with black stripes that waded in a marsh, standing high above it on four scrawny legs, and swooped down with its long neck and long toothy beak to snatch hapless green creatures from the mud.
There were round drumlike animals that made jovial booming sounds with their distended blue bellies. There were snakelike things with triple heads. There were shy huge-eared little beasts that were covered with green moss and thickets of small flat leaves, so that Hresh could not tell whether they were animals or plants.