Ulysses continued to glide like a phantom over the face of the moon and then he went as invisibly and gently as a breeze into a tree that contained a laboratory. And here he saw humans and non-humans watching an experiment. There was an immobile figure inside a plastic transparent cubicle. It was the object of many-coloured fluctuating rays directed from a device like a laser gun. The gun poured out its energies, which penetrated the walls of the cubicle and splashed over the still figure.
He recognised the statue. It was himself.
Apparently, the scientists were trying to restore the natural motion of his atoms.
He knew what success they would have.
But what was he doing on the moon? Had he been loaned to the scientists there for some reason he would never know? If so, he had been shipped back to Earth, though this may not have occurred until thousands of years later.
As abruptly as he had left, he was back on Earth. Not only space had been traversed. Much time had also passed.
The Earth was desolated. Fiery winds wrapped it. The polar caps had melted, and earthquakes, exploding volcanoes, and crumbling coastal masses had changed the face of what land was left.
There was no explanation for what had happened or for what had caused the global holocaust. Possibly, the huge luminous teardrops that tore through the smoke covering the seared earth were the cause. But there was no one to explain. The smoke passed away and the air became clear again except for great dust storms. Little clots of sentients and the animals that had gone underground with them came out. They sowed seeds, and they cultivated little pieces of ground. Some little trees that had been saved underground were planted.
The teardrops appeared again and hovered over the colonies for a while. None took any action, except one. This loosed energy bolts that burned out the little tree containing the forty survivors ofhomo sapiens.
The other sentients, the cat-men, dog-men, leopard-men, bear-men, elephant-men, were not harmed. Apparently, whoever was operating the teardrops — unless these were themselves living entities — wanted to exterminate onlyhomo sapiens.
The bat-men were a modified form ofhomo sapiens, and these too had been killed off.
But when the teardrops left, the bat-men came out of hiding.
Neshgai slaves and the Vroomaw were not human. They had descended from mutated monkeys. This explained why they were not bothered by the teardrops.
He continued to drift across the face of the Earth. Time slipped by, or he slipped by time. Each great land mass now had only one tree. The trees had evolved and those on a landmass met and merged and became one. Each grew and grew. The sentients, one by one, went to live on its surface. The time would come when The Tree would spread across the continent. Only the coastal regions would be free, because salt water inhibited its growth. But The Tree could evolve to overcome this inhibition and would. And then each continental Tree would merge into the other surrendering its individuality through some vegetable mechanism that Ulysses did not understand. It would have one brain, one identity, one body.
And it would be the master of the planet. Forever and forever. Amen.
Unless the Neshgai and the stone god could defeat it.
He seemed to step backward out of the disk — a reluctant Alice, he thought.
Afterward, talking to the high priest, he formulated his own theory about the Book of Tiznak. Kuushmurzh had a theological explanation for the strange things that occurred to the readers of the Book. Nesh dictated its contents according to what he thought each reader should find in the Book. But the high priest admitted that his explanation could be wrong. It was not dogma.
Ulysses thought that whoever had made the disk had put into it a recording of the past. This recording probably was not made when the events it depicted occurred. The peculiarity of the Book — one of them — was that it contained what Ulysses could only describe as "resonant points." That is, the individual demands of each Reader brought out in the Book that which interested the Reader. It was the same as picking out a book on a certain historical subject in a library. The Book, working through mental means, detected what the Reader wanted to know and then furnished the information in its fashion.
"That may well be true," the high priest said. He looked with dark blue eyes from under the triple-horned hat at Ulysses. "Your explanation may well fit the facts and yet not conflict at all with the official explanation that Nesh dictated the contents. After all, whoever made the disk did so because Nesh required him to do so."
Ulysses bowed. There was no sense in arguing against this.
"Do you now understand that The Tree is a sentient entity and is our enemy?" Kuushmurzh said.
"The Book told me that this is so."
The high priest smiled and said, "But you do not necessarily believe the Book?"
Ulysses though it best not to answer. He could have said that much of the Book's contents were true, but that the disk was made by sentients, and any creature of flesh and blood could make mistakes or be in error. But the high priest would only reply that the disk could not be wrong, since Nesh had dictated its contents, and Nesh, the only god, could make neither mistake nor error.
When he returned to the airfield, he had changed his attitude toward Thebi. She was no longer the potential mother of his children. He doubted very much that she or any slave or Vroomaw could conceive by him. Though she looked like a slightly altered form ofhomo sapiens, she probably had a different chromosomal makeup. She would be barren as long as he was her only mate. Enough time had gone by that she had proved that.
Of course, it was possible that she was sterile no matter who her mate was. But Lusha had been with him long enough to conceive, too. Again, it was possible that she, too, was sterile. Or that both women, unknown to him, were secretly using methods of birth control. This did not seem likely, since he had never heard of such among any peoples he had encountered. Fertility was as revered now as in the first Palaeolithic age of Earth.
During the months that followed his first visit to the temple of Nesh, he found some time to make other visits. Though he was not allowed to read the Book of Tiznak again, he could explore the underground city, or museum, as he thought of it. He found many things the purpose of which he figured out, though many were useless because he did not know how to power them. He did find a device which had not evolved so far from those he knew in his time as to be unrecognisable. He took tissue slides of his skin and of a number of slave women and put them in the matcher. The tissues of the slave women turned scarlet when placed next to his. He could not breed with them.
That was that. He pushed aside the device with a feeling of disappointment. Yet, somewhere in him, was a tickling of elation.
He put the faint good feeling aside. It had to go. If he let it build up into something strong, he would then have to suffer guilt.
But why should he? he told himself. He could not help it that he could not be the father of a new breed of humanity. Nor was it vital that Earth know mankind again. Mankind had almost destroyed the Earth. The flying teardrops had made a point of exterminatinghomo sapiens but had left the other sapient beings alone. Not that they were any less evil potentially. But they had not done anything evil to Earth as of then, and so they had been spared.
Why should he generate his pernicious and destructive breed again?
No reason at all. But he did feel guilty because he was unable to.
He also felt guilty because he preferred Awina to Thebi or any of Thebi's kind.