I turned the light on the ceiling to show Nova the mural, but she wasn’t looking. Her own light was on a dark blotch in the sand.
“It’s your blood, isn’t it?”
I nodded. There were the marks of my feet and the disturbed sand where I had twice lain, once in fear and once in pain. “Look up,” I said.
She looked and her soft gasp echoed in the small room. “I had forgotten how strange and beautiful it was,” she said. She sat down on the sandpile and looked up. “We used to come here sometimes, when I was a child. I found this on our first visit. I was very small, and I got separated from the others. I lay here and . . .”
Her face grew solemn. “I think I slept and I had strange dreams. I woke when I heard them calling me, and I found my way out. I came here every time after that, down here, and . . .” Her eyes searched the faded mural. “I had forgotten . . . almost . . . it was always very disturbing, but . . . I always came.”
She laughed self-consciously and patted the sand. “Come, touch the sands of Mars,” she said.
Lying next to her I stared up at the galactic swirl of the unformed shapes. What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? Was this some sort of primitive Martian cave drawing, of no meaning to anyone but the alien artist, or to the pre-historic tribe he belonged to? Or was this some sort of mandala, or focusing image? Was it meaningless decoration, design without content, the painting of a madman locked away forever in a red stone dungeon?
My eyes wandered over the flaked, faded mural, trying to replace the missing parts, merging, blending, brightening . . . Was there some sort of galactic center to it all? Did the picture truly represent a spreading of intelligence as it seemed to do?
The silent arms turned without words. The galactic mural spun silently. Eons passed. Suns were born and grew old and shrank to black holes and waited for rebirth. Still the spiral moved, shaping and being shaped, expanding and changing.
Lifeforms proliferated, changed, died, moved on, changed. The galactic swirl turned in its majestic sweep, the amorphic arms with their tips of life, moving past . . . pulling me along . . . pulling Nova . . . we melted, blended, linked . . .
There was the slightest shift of awareness, a millimeter of reorientation, and the sudden awareness of a new reality. I knew then what the galactic mural’s true function was. It was a focusing device, a cosmic mandala—and beyond that the supreme creation of the ancient Martians. We linked through the mandala to their ultimate concept, a gigantic organic computer, self-perpetuating, self-aware, nearly eternal. Carried by a flood of shifting reality, we moved into full-phased contact with this incredible storehouse of information, this vast thinking machine, this still-living heart of the Martian civilization. I suddenly knew how primitive man’s toddler science of mnemonics really was. We were still in the “rhyme to remind” stage and they had created the mural as a focusing and teaching device before man on Earth had left the Bronze Age.
Buried in the sand drift in the old and seemingly meaningless room was a stone bench, a kindergarten chair-and-desk for Martian children. It was a classroom where young Martians had learned the first steps in controlling the racial computer. It had lain, long unused, until I had stumbled into it.
Now I looked, really looked, up through the stone, into the crystal structure above us and saw it for what it really was, not an ancient ruler’s whim, not the crowning achievement of a dynasty, but an organic crystal entity, a storehouse and machine, a function and a personality fused into a living work of art. Each microfleck of crystal was stressed-just-so and linked to another, a latticework of knowledge and function that had lasted across the millenia, a matrix of reality that moved out of time and space as it needed. And, like a tool that is decorated, it was also beautiful, and now, for the first time, I saw how beautiful. I merged into the mental web of the Star Palace and saw things that man had not yet dreamed possible. I saw the simple methods whereby man might control his own body. I saw the techniques of virtually instant regeneration of tissue, any kind of living tissue, man or Martian, animal or crystal. I saw the recording of a man, a microdot on the droplet of frozen gold that was the complete record of the Planet since Man had landed, and that man was me. I saw the severed leg, the bloody flesh, the pounding heart, the snap and sparkle of my brain as I used the techniques of the crystal computer to heal myself. I felt Nova join me, melding, flowing until we were like one. We saw how the mural had tugged at her, as a child, and laughed at how obvious it had all been. We “looked” with one set of perceptions, joined together, yet each an individual.
We saw the record of all the instruments that kept aware of the very fabric of space, and felt the computer read our simple minds and direct our joined focus to the anomaly we sought, the tiny disruption of that fabric several years before and several millions of miles sunward. We saw where creatures had passed through that momentary and artificial rupture, and where they had gone. We sensed, rather than saw, where Michael and Madelon had gone, and felt a flash of pity for the scientists who assumed that one of nature’s rules regarding electromagnetic radiation held true for physical objects. We saw the way open to the stars.
We perceived where the last of the Martians had gone into the fabric of space, taking themselves outward through space that was not space, outward to a destiny we couldn’t even guess, not even with the help of their great machine. They had gone beyond the use of it, leaving it behind like a discarded toy; or perhaps a marker on a path. Would man be able to follow? Would mankind’s huge ego allow it to accept a handout of knowledge, even a knowledge so vast? But our minds were already focusing elsewhere.
We tracked the trail from the machine that had momentarily opened a path through the stars to a certain spot—through the non-space that the Martian artifact focused for us—to the center of the lines of gravitic energy that the crystal computer pinpointed as the ball of dirt where Mike and Madelon had gone.
I willed us in that direction, almost unconsciously. There was a little push, an electron moving from this orbit to that, a reading from the probability factors.
We linked . . .
Linked . . . to Seventh Sphere and the Guide.
Firstar . . . Snowflake.
Cornerstone and Mindsword.
The Teacher . . .
linked to the ways they had planned, to knowledge . . . to understanding . . .
it can’t be that easy . . .
knowing how. . .
linking to self . . .
doing . . .
going . . .
the focusing . . .
direction . . . thrust . . .
wind and motion . . .
blurred space . . .
the doing . . .
a sun . . .
two moons . . .
a red-violet sea . . .
fresh new grass beneath our feet . . .
the seawind on our naked bodies, cool and brisk . . .
Brian!
“Brian! My god, where are we?”
“A place,” I said. I started down the grassy slope toward the rocks. “Come on, there are some people I’d like you to meet. Then perhaps we can go someplace else.”