"That's what the Latest believe. That's why the Integrator sent that honker to plant the egg-seed in me. The ability to do that, make the egg-seed, I mean, was within their powers long, long ago. They were just waiting for the right person to come along— me— and to do it. There's another burial chamber, miles from here, that gives instructions for doing that. It's in the characters of the alphabet used by the Makers, but with it are images that indicate how to do it."
Jack shook his head, and he said, "Too much, too much. I still think..."
"Think what?"
"Never mind. It doesn't bear thinking about."
He chewed on his upper lip before he spoke again.
"Why didn't the honkers lead us into the underground refuge as soon as we entered through the boulder-gate?"
"The Gaol were too close. Besides, it was evident to the honker spies that I was headed, being urged to head for, a destination north. They assumed that it was the pulsating vessel that had suddenly appeared. They tend not to interfere in certain situations. When we showed up near their underground entrance, the Integrator decided it was time to hide us."
She drew a deep breath.
"Also, when you and I appeared with Candy and Garth, they knew that the prophecy was being fulfilled. It was time to take us in no matter what the consequences might be for them."
"Anything else?"
"I almost forgot. The Integrator said he thought I was attracted to the boulder-gate on Earth because it led to this crater. The crater ring, he thinks, generates a weak field because it's rotating slowly. But the field was strong enough to attract me to it. I mean attract the Imago in me to it.
"The Makers theorized that the field or whatever should radiate from the Generator would attract the Imago. Like iron filings to a magnet."
"And... ?" Jack said.
"And what?"
"That pulsating ship Candy and the other androids manned: Why did it attract you more strongly than the crater ring? And who made the ship and the androids? Were they prepared millennia ago, too?"
"I don't know," she cried. "There's just too much to know, too many unanswered questions."
He embraced her and kissed her softly on the lips. "Take it easy. One thing at a time. You may feel as if you're about to crack up, fall apart. But you're really tough, Tappy, really strong. Just hang on."
He became aware that the shaman was silent. He looked toward him and saw him gesture for Tappy and him to follow him. He led them out of the muraled room and into another that also had wall paintings. Several yards into it, the shaman halted. He genuflected nine times before stepping ahead again. Then he halted again and genuflected seven times. When he went forward again, he made only three steps. The darkness shrank away from the lights of their torches. Not very far, though. The ceiling was so high that the lights did not touch them.
Now Jack saw, placed on the floor ahead of them, eleven twenty-foot-high globes made of some glittering crystalline material. When the shaman indicated that he and Tappy should come nearer to them, they got very close to the globes. Jack felt as awed and as seized with mystery as the archaeologists who had first entered King Tut's tomb. But this place was probably many thousands of years older than the tomb— older, indeed, than the very first Egyptian tombs or Stonehenge.
Each globe enclosed a body. Jack did not need to be told that each corpse was a Maker's.
They were six-limbed beings, quadrupeds with two arms. Centaurs, he thought, though not resembling much the half-man, half-horse of the Greek myths. Their lower part, the animal body, was shaggy with long red hair. The four legs were long but quite bearlike. The upright torso springing from the front of the quadrupedal form was covered with bright golden hair. Some of the corpses were female. The big, round, and thick-nippled breasts made that certain.
The heads were so flat above the eyes and so narrow from a side view that Jack deduced a similarity in this respect to the Gaol. Like them, the Makers' brains were in their bodies.
The eyes, like the beardless faces, were human, but they had epicanthic folds which would have made their faces Chinese-like if their lips had not been heavily everted like those of West African blacks. Their noses were very large and hawk-beaked.
The eyes, ranging in color from brown to blue, seemed to be magnets drawing eternity and infinity into them.
The Integrator brought eleven candles from his bag and placed them in their holders before the globes. After lighting them, he got down on his knees and began bowing and chanting while his right band weaved unseen symbols in the air. The acrid stench from the candies made Jack and Tappy cough. They walked away to the nearest wall and studied some of the murals there. Most of those showed the Makers in their daily life— or so it seemed to Jack. The vegetation and some of the animals depicted were not those of Earth or of the honkers' planet.
He was just getting started on his study of the series when the Integrator suddenly quit chanting. He quickly put the candles out, placed them in his bag, and gestured that the humans should follow him.
Chapter 14
They were in the cavern headquarters of the Integrator. Two hours ago, he had given Jack and Tappy glasses of a thick and dark purplish fluid to drink. It was a mixture of berry juice and an amount, very small, of the venom of the fly called "quickdeath." By increasing the quantity every day, they should be immune to the venom after twenty days. Meanwhile, they could expect to feel somewhat sick during this period.
"One bite will semiparalyze a person of our body mass," Tappy had told him. "Two bites in rapid succession will kill. The whole honker population has been immunized."
The drinking skull of the shaman came from an upper-class ratcage who had died from the quickdeath's bites.
"The Gaol ruling class seldom leave their ships when they're on this world— in this area, anyway— unless they're wearing heavy nets. They send out their humans and lower-class warriors to do the work. The shaman says we were lucky we didn't get bitten while we were wandering around in the crater."
After swallowing the sweet but foul-smelling fluid, Jack and Tappy resumed their study of the crater-ring model. Jack picked up the page he had been writing on, but he put it down when a sharp pain struck his stomach. A few seconds later, he had a severe headache.
Tappy, who looked as sick as he felt, said, "It'll go away in an hour. But we shouldn't eat anything until suppertime."
Jack's vision blurred. Where there had been one piece of paper there were now two, one overlapping the other by a few inches. Moreover, his hands and feet felt numb. Both abandoned the study to lie down in their cave bedroom. But, as the shaman had said, after sixty minutes, they had recovered enough to go back to the model and their notes.
So far, he and Tappy, aided by a honker who interpreted the notes written by generations of honkers, had plenty of clues, too many. But they had no idea what any of them meant. In that case, as Tappy remarked, how did they know the items were clues? Jack had replied that everything on the ring had to be significant. So far, though, he had found nothing meaningful in the images and symbols on the ring or in their locations on it or their relationships to each other.
Some of the images were of the Makers; some, of the ratcage-bodied Gaol.
There were also representations of the pulsating in-and-out vessel in which he and Tappy had taken refuge. Red wavy-shafted arrows lipped by flames radiated from the ship.
"Maybe those indicate the magnetism which the shaman thought might've drawn you to the ship," Jack said. "Like you were a migratory bird following the Earth's lines of force."
He shook his head. "I just don't know. Our only explanations for all this stuff are just theories. Not even that. Just hypotheses."