They stared down at it, filled with knowledge and emotion.
After several hours silence, Asquiol spoke.
'What now?' he said.
'This is the gateway of which we learned on Thron and Ekiversh,' said Renark. 'I can do nothing now but descend into it in the hope of achieving our aim.' Now the human race seemed remote, a fantasy, unreal - and yet important. More important than it had ever been before.
He moved towards the very brink of the Hole and lowered himself into its pulsing embrace.
Asquiol paused for a moment behind him and then followed. They ceased to climb down, for they were now floating, going neither up nor down, nor in any definite direction, but yet floating - somewhere. The conservator had ceased to work - unless it still worked and, in some way, these laws applied more rigorously to it than any it had previously conserved.
Again they were on solid ground, on a small island in an ocean. They stepped forward and knew they were in the heart of a blazing sun; stepped back and were in the middle of a bleak mountain range. From the tops of the mountains an entity looked down and welcomed them.
They moved towards it and were suddenly in an artificial chamber which seemed, at first, to have dead, black walls. Then they realised they were looking out into a void - emptiness.
To their left a being appeared.
It seemed to be constantly fading and reappearing. like a badly-tuned laser set, Renark thought, desperately looking for something to cling to. He felt cut off entirely from anything he knew.
The being began to speak. It was not Terran he spoke. He conversed in a combination of sonic and thoughtwaves which struck responses in Renark's mind and body. He realised that these entities may have once been like himself, but had lost the power of direct speech when they gained the power to dwell on all levels of the multiverse.
He found he could communicate with the entity by modulating his own speech and thinking as far as possible in pictures.
'You wish (complicated geometric patterns) help…?'
'Yes (picture of universe contracting)…'
'You from (picture of a pregnant woman which changed quickly to a womb - an embryo, not quite human, appeared in it)…?'
Renark deliberated the meaning of this, but did not take long to realise what the entity was trying to say. Already he had half realised the significance.
Logic, based on the evidence he had seen and heard in the rest of the Shifter, was leading Renark towards an inescapable conclusion.
'Yes,' he said.
'You must wait.'
'For what?'
'Picture of a vast universe, multi-planed, turning about a central point. Until (picture of the Shifter moving through time, space and other dimensions towards the Hub).'
Renark realised what the picture meant. It could only mean one thing. He had only been shown it briefly, yet he understood clearly.
He had been shown the centre of the universe, the original place through which all the universal radii passed, from which all things had come. There were no alternate universes at the centre. When the Shifter passed through the centre - what…?
But what if the Shaarn succeeded in stopping the system's progress before it reached the Hub? He had to dismiss the idea. If the Shifter stopped too soon there would be no need for further speculation. No need for anything.
'What will happen there (misty picture of the multi-verse)?' he asked.
'Truth. You must wait here until (Hub with Shifter) then go (the binary star - the Shifter's star)…'
He had to wait in Limbo until the Shifter reached the Hub and then they must journey towards - no, into - the sun!
He transmitted a horrified picture of himself and Asquiol burning.
The being said: 'No,' and disappeared again.
When it reappeared, Renark said: 'Why?'
'You are expected.' The being faded, then vanished.
Since time did not exist here they couldn't tell how long they had waited. There were none of the usual bodily indications that time was passing.
Quite simply, they were in Limbo.
Every so often the being, or one like it, would reappear. Sometimes he would impart information regarding the Shifter's slow progress, sometimes he would just be there. Once a number of his kind appeared but vanished immediately.
Then, finally, the dweller appeared and a picture of the Shifter entering the area of the Multiversal Centre manifested itself in Renark's mind.
With relief and a bounding sense of anticipation, he prepared to experience - Truth.
Soon, whether he lived or died, remained sane or went insane, he would know. He and Asquiol would be the first of their race to know.
And this, they both realised, was all that mattered.
Then they went outwards.
They went towards the flaring, agonisingly brilliant suns.
They felt they had no physical form as they had known it, and yet could sense the stuff of their bodies clinging about them.
They poured their massless bodies into the fiery heat, the heart of the star, and eventually came to the Place of the Originators - not their natural habitat, but a compromise between Renark's and theirs.
They saw, without using their eyes, the Originators.
They could hear the Originators communicating, but there was no sound. All was colour, light and formlessness. Yet everything had a quality of bright existence, true reality.
'You are here,' said the Originators musingly, as one. 'We have been awaiting you and grown somewhat impatient. Your rate of development was not what we had hoped.'
On behalf of his race, in the knowledge of what the Originators meant, Renark said: 'I am sorry.'
'You were always a race to progress only when danger threatened.'
'Do we still exist?' Renark asked.
'Yes.'
'For how long?' Asquiol spoke for the first time.
The Originators did not answer his question directly. Instead, they said:
'You wish us to make changes. We expected this. That is why we speeded up the metamorphosis of your universe. You understand that although your universe is contracting, it will still exist as individual galaxies, suns and planets, matter of most kinds in different formations?'
'But the human race - what of that?'
'We should have let it die. Intelligent organic life cannot undergo the strains of the change. If you had not come to us, we should have let it die - regretfully. But our judgment was correct. We let you know of the coming catastrophe and you used all your resources of will and judgment to come here as we hoped you would.'
There was a pause, and then the Originators continued:
'Like all other races in the multiverse, yours is capable of existing on all levels. Not just one. But, because of these links you have with the rest of the levels, you would have perished, being not fully natural to just one level. None of the intelligent forms could survive such a catastrophe. We were responsible for placing them all in their present environment. Each plane of the multiverse serves as a separate seeding bed for a multitude of races, one of which may survive and succeed us. Your plane serves, in your terms, as a womb. You are our children - our hope. But if you fail to overcome the special limitations we set upon you, you, like us, shall die. But you shall die… still-born.'
'Then what is to become of us?'
'We made the changes in your universe in order to accelerate your rate of development, so that representatives of your race would find a way to us. To the greatest extent you have succeeded, but you must return rapidly and inform your race of their need to develop more rapidly, more dynamically. We shall afford you the means, this time, of evacuating your universe. But we are growing old, and you, of all the intelligent races in the multiverse, are needed to take our place. You cannot do that until you are ready. Either you succeed in achieving your birthright, or, like us, perish in chaos and agony.