He'd been floating in space, in a darkness in which distant stars and great gas sheets shone and there was the feeling, but not the direct effect, of unbelievable coldness. He'd been aware that he was not alone, though. He knew, without having seen them, that he was followed by uncountable souls, trillions upon trillions, perhaps far more. And then he was shooting toward a sun, and it became larger, and suddenly he saw that the flaming body was not a star but a vast collection of other souls, all flaming, yet burning not as in Hell but with an ecstasy that he'd never experienced and which the mystics had tried to describe but was indescribable.
Though shaken and afraid, he was also pulled fiercely by the ecstasy. Moreover, he could not allow his fear to overcome him, he who had boasted that he had never feared anything.
He closed his right eye and was again in space in the same "location." Again, he was hurtling through space, far swifter than light, toward the sun. Again, he felt the innumerable presences behind him. The star swam up, grew larger, became vast, and he saw that the flames were composed of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of souls.
Then he heard a soundless cry, one of unutterable ecstasy and welcome, and he plunged headfirst into the sun, the swarm, and he was nothing and yet everything. Then, he wasn't he any more. He was something which had no parts and was not a part but was one with the ecstasy, with the others who were not others.
He gave a great cry and opened his eye. There were Alice and Nur and Frigate and his companions staring at him from the doorway. Trembling, he went to them through the bubbles. He was not so upset, however, that he did not notice that the Sumerian was missing nor that Alice was weeping.
He ignored their questions, saying, "Where's Gilgamesh?"
"He died on the way up," Alice said.
"We left him sitting in the chair in a room," Nur said. "He must have had a brain concussion."
"I killed him!" Alice said, and she sobbed.
"I'm sorry for that," Burton said, "but it couldn't be helped. If he was innocent, he shouldn't have resisted. Perhaps he really was an agent."
He put his arms around Alice and said, "You did what you had to do. If you hadn't, he might've killed me."
"Yes, I know. I've killed before, but those people were strangers attacking us. I liked Gilgamesh, and now..."
Burton thought it was best to allow her to weep out her guilt and grief. He released her and turned to the others. Nur asked him what he had been doing in the room. He told them of the lens.
"You must've been standing there for at least an hour,"
Frigate said.
"Yes, I know, but the state seemed to last only a minute."
"What about the aftereffects?" Nur said.
Burton hesitated, then said, "Apart from being shaken up, I feel... I feel... a tremendous closeness to all of you! Oh, I've been fond of some of you, but... now... I love all of you!"
"That must've been a shock," Frigate murmured. Burton ignored him.
The Moor held up the multifaceted device and looked through it with his right eye closed.
"I see nothing. It has to be fitted next to the eye."
Burton said, "I thought that the lens was something which only the chief of the twelve, Thanabur, would wear. I presumed that it was some sort of ritual token or emblem of leadership, something traditional. I may've been wrong. Perhaps everybody took a turn wearing it during the Council meetings. It may be that the lens gave all of them a feeling such as I had, a closeness and love for everybody in the room."
"In which case, X was able to overcome that feeling," Tai-Peng said.
"What I don't understand," Burton said, "is why the lens put me into a trance yet didn't seem to affect Thanabur."
"Perhaps," Nur said, "the Councilors were used to it. After wearing it many times, they got only a mild effect from it."
Nur fitted the lens under his eyelids and shut his right eye. Immediately, his face took on an expression of ecstasy, though his body remained motionless. When two minutes had passed, Burton shook the Moor by the shoulder. Nur came out of his trance and began weeping. But when he'd recovered and had taken the lens out, he said, "It does induce a state similar to that which the saints have attempted to describe."
He handed the lens to Burton.
"But it's a false state brought about by an artificial thing. It's not the true state. That can only be attained by spiritual development."
Some of the others wanted to try. Burton said, "Later. We may have used up time we sorely need. We have to find X before he finds us."
48
THEY CAME TO AN ENORMOUS CLOSED DOOR ABOVE WHICH were more of the untranslatable characters. Burton halted the train of chairs and got out of his. A button on the wall seemed to be the only obvious means of opening the doors. He pressed, and the two sections slid away from each other into recesses. He looked into a wide hall ending in two more huge doors. Burton pressed the button by that.
They looked into a domed chamber which had to be half a mile across. The floor was earth on which grew a bright green short-bladed grass and, further on, trees. Brooks ran through it here and there, their sources cataracts forty or fifty feet high. Flowering bushes were many, and there were flat-topped rocks which had served as tables, if the plates and cups and cutlery on them meant anything.
The ceiling was a blue across which wisps of clouds moved, and a simulacrum of the sun was at its zenith.
They walked in and looked around. Human skeletons lay here and there, the nearest around a rock. There were also the bones of birds, deer, and some catlike and doglike and raccoon-like animals.
"They must've come here to get back to Nature," Frigate said. "A very reasonable facsimile thereof, anyway."
They had reasoned that X had transmitted a radio code which had activated the tiny black ball in the brains of the tower-dwellers and caused poison to be released in their bodies. But why had the animals died?
Starvation.
They left the chamber. Before they had traveled a mile, they came across another curiosity, the most puzzling and awe-inspiring of alclass="underline" A transparent outward-leaning wall on their left revealed a Brobdingnagian shaft. A bright shifting light flared from below. They got off the chairs to look down into the well. And they cried out with wonder.
Five hundred feet below them was a raging furnace of many differently colored shapes, all closely packed but seeming to pass through each other or to merge at times.
Burton shaded his eyes with a hand and stared into it. After a while he could occasionally distinguish the shapes of the things that whirled around and around and shot up and down and sideways.
He turned away, his eyes hurting.
"They're wathans. Just like those I saw above the heads of the twelve Councilors. The well must be of some material which enables us to see them."
Nur handed him a pair of dark glasses.
"Here. I found these in a box on a shelf near here."
Burton and the others put on the glasses and stared into the enormous well. Now he could see the things more clearly, the changing shifting colors in the always expanding-contracting shapes, the six-sided tentacles which shot out, flailed, waved, then shrank back into the body.
Burton, leaning out, his back pressed against the wall, looked up. The brightness showed him a ceiling of the gray metal about a hundred feet above him. He turned around and tried to see across to the other side of the well. He couldn't. He peered down into it. Far far below was a gray solid. Or was it his imagination, an illusion created by the metamorphosing horde, that made him now think that the solidity was pulsing?
He stepped back, removed the glasses, and rubbed his aching eyes.