We did not speak again, any of us. The time for talk had passed and a higher authority from that moment took all initiative out of our hands. We looked up at the Face of Ea.
How can I tell you what it was like – now? You know how I saw it in the Record, when the images of this same scene recreated themselves in my mind and I looked up from this same spot, in a faraway age, into the towering Face. Even then I saw it as a Face far transcending the human, reflecting experiences unknown to my era and my world, complex beyond any possible human guessing.
When I looked up now and saw the vast cliffside rising above the gray nekronic plain, it was not as a Face I saw it. Not at first. It was too complex to be recognizable. It was shaped into equations so far beyond my comprehension that I could not read them in terms of a human likeness.
I suppose a Piltdown man, gazing from under his eye-ridges at the face of a Toynbee or an Einstein would realize only very remotely that this was the face of an evolved member of his own species. And there were greater gulfs than that between the Face and me.
You will have guessed already what likeness it was that I finally recognized. I should have guessed too. It was not very surprising, really. Belem had given me the clue. A city, he had told me, was simply a machine for human living, an extension of the Mechandroid organism. And this city, which was the Face. It looked down at us with a vast calm gaze, the same gaze that had brooded over our slumbers while time turned on its axis where we slept. The eyes that had once been quicksilver metal were very different now but I knew that gaze. The voice that had once run deeper and deeper with the volume of its power was a voice no longer, for it had passed beyond the need for a voice. The thing that had once been a Man-Machine had grown, developed, changed, synthesized with all of human living as the millennia went by.
Its functions had broadened to encompass every aspect of the civilizations through which it passed.
I understood very little of the complex symbiosis which had taken place, and I can convey only a very small part of what I understood. For mankind had changed too. Perhaps love and hate and fear survived but not in the forms we know. Perhaps human features were not so different as we imagined. Perhaps, through the streets and plazas of the city, which had begun as a Man-Machine and was now the cradle of the surviving race, men and women like ourselves really did move still.
I'm not sure. I walked the streets. But I am still not sure among what crowds I walked.
I've said the Face no longer needed a voice. This is why. In the old days I suppose the Man-Machine would have said, "Come," when it wanted us nearer. Now in effect it said, "Come" – and we came. But not on foot. Not under our own directions.
A whole segment of unnecessary, primitive activities was simply eliminated. There was no need for the clumsy human mechanisms to hear the summons, comprehend it, consider it, debate obeying, decide to comply, set muscles in motion and trudge across the plain.
Instead, the Face issued its voiceless command – and there was a sort of vortex in the red twilight air between the cliff-side and ourselves. Smoothly, gently, inexorably, we were drawn up along that spinning of the air, seeing the gray earth fall away beneath us and then slide backward with blurring swiftness. The Face grew startlingly larger, too large to see as a whole, large and near and very clear.
We lost sight of the tremendous serene brow, of the vast smooth chin, of the great downward slope of the nose, of the cheeks etched with experiences which no human and no machine could ever have known separately.
Walls of rock rushed at us, opened, sucked us in.
What did I see? I wish I could tell you. I can make useless sketches in the air with both hands, trying to show how the spiral streets sloped and how the blurred house-fronts slid past. But if I did you would picture ordinary house-fronts and a street that curved but was like any street you know. And these were too different to describe.
It may be that the street really did move with all its strange shapely houses. I have an idea that the whole interior of the city was actually in constant motion, as a machine might be, and that if motion ceased they would cease too, the city and the race of man.
But I can tell you this much. Ideas blew through that city like puffs of smoke through an industrial town. They brushed my mind and were gone, leaving only bewildering fragments in their wake. Sometimes they brushed two of us at once and we had incredible glimpses into one another's minds wherever the idea touched, evoking mutual memories, interlocking thoughts like rings that spread in water.
De Kalb had said, long ago, that these men were gods. He was right. They were far beyond any concept the men of my day had ever dreamed of for his gods. We walked through their city, were brushed by their thoughts, breathed the air of their streets, but we never saw them.
They were there. They were all around us. I am perfectly sure of that. I didn't see them. I didn't feel or hear them. But I knew they were there as surely as you know the chair in which you sit now has a back upon which you are leaning, though you won't see it unless you turn.
I had constantly the odd feeling that if I could turn I might come face to face with any man of the city I chose. But I was not capable of turning in the necessary direction, which would probably have been through a dimension we know nothing of.
I wish I could have seen them.
24. BATTLING THE NEKRON
The gusts of thought blew thicker and faster around us as we were drawn up the spiral. Our minds linked in impossible chords and discords as impossible ideas struck responses from us all.
Then the light failed us. Perhaps our sight failed us. I think we were drawn through a rather long space of solid wall, like a locked doorway which only this vortex could open for material things.
When we could see again we were in a bare and empty room. The shape of it was indescribable because of the extensions along which it reached. I was reminded a little of the corridor down which Belem had guided me toward the Subterrane of the middle future. Geometry, blindingly confused in patterns of inverted planes.
And then the room around us spoke directly, in the very air that pressed upon our minds. The Face of Ea spoke.
I had heard that voice before, if voice you could call it The Man-Machine who guarded our age-long slumbers had said, "Sleep – sleep," in this same voice, growing deeper, calmer, less human as the eons passed. Now it was the voice and the mind of the Man-Machine but immeasurably altered, incomprehensibly more complex.
"You have seen my first beginning," the Face of Ea said. "You and I have come together to this place at the end of our planet's life. I have watched over your sleep for a purpose. You are my weapons now.
"The nekron can never be destroyed. But with your help it can be excised out of normal space, normal time. For that I summoned you. For that I guided your journeying in time. Think and you will understand."
I believe the same knowledge flowed through the minds of my companions in the moment of timeless revelation that came to me. In a series of small, clear pictures I saw the manlike, killing creature that was the nekron, touching me as it swooped through oscillating time, becoming part human by the touch, running rampant through the worlds of humanity.
"Because of its release and its attacks," the voice of Ea said, "it is part human now. You have learned to fight it. To save yourselves and us you must finish the fight. The nekron cannot be touched – except by you. But we must somehow excise it out of the universe, not only in space but in time. We must cut back through time, so that we divide and alter the past as well as the present."