"Box," said Thorinn in a whisper, "why are all the children asleep?"
"If the children were awake, they would know they are being brought into the cavern from another place."
"Well, and why not?"
"Then they would know there is another place when they grow up, and they might try to leave the cavern."
"But why not real men instead of engines? Or why not engines instead of children? It doesn't make any sense."
"There must be real children or it would make no sense to have engines which look like men. But there cannot be real men because they would remember another place. The children are too young to remember. When they are grown they will take the engines' place and will think men have always lived here."
Thorinn tried half-heartedly to puzzle this out, but his attention was distracted: the chamber was emptying rapidly. The last stacks were being taken down, and behind them he could see the rear wall of the chamber, but there was no sign of a tunnel opening yet. He waited with increasing impatience while the few remaining stacks were dismantled, denying to himself what he saw: the rear wall was unbroken.
"Thorinn, there is a danger to you unless you leave this place quickly." He turned and saw the last few wingmen crowding out through the opening. He followed them; they did something to the lid and it slowly descended, closing the chamber.
"Box," he said, "where is the tunnel?"
"There is no tunnel, Thorinn."
He had known it, he supposed, all the time.
While he was asleep they had all gone into the underground chamber to hide, and had set the bird to watch him. He would have lived out his life here, and then the bird would have told them he was dead (or rather, it would have stopped telling them he was alive), and they would have come out, just as they were doing now, to resume their existence—as if he had never been.
11
How Thorinn tried to fly without success, and built a bladder instead.
The fields around the city were full of wingmen, and so were the byres, orchards, sheds, and the towers themselves. Wingmen and women were everywhere, setting things to rights, cleaning, repairing, weeding, gardening. The towers were aswarm with them; the sound of their wings, many times multiplied, made a susurrant whispering. Thorinn put his head into a few of the rooms on the lowest level and found joiners joining, tailors sewing, weavers weaving. None of them acknowledged his existence by so much as a glance or gesture.
He climbed the well to the upper rooms, buffeted by the wind of wings that missed him by finger-spans, and searched until he found some of the children asleep in hammocks of woven cord. Their small faces were serene. "When will they wake up?" he asked the box.
"When all the signs that they come from another place are gone."
"But they did come from another place—they'll remember that, won't they?"
"The other place is just like this place."
"How do you know all that?"
"I don't know it, Thorinn, but it must be so, or all this would be senseless." The wingmen toiled by day and night; they never slept, and even when the sky was so overcast that Thorinn could not see his hand before his face, they seemed to need no artificial light. When Thorinn approached them out of curiosity, aiming his light-box at their faces, they turned as if half asleep, blinked at his light, then went back to their labors.
Thorinn had made himself a shelter in the grove near the town, disliking the idea of sleeping under the wingmen's roof, although he well knew that they could find him anywhere if they meant him harm. On the third morning, when he poked his nose into the pantries for something to eat, he heard the piping of tiny voices above: the children were awake.
He found them here and there, some at their lessons, some in a nursery, some following the wingmen and women about at their daily tasks. Unlike the wingmen, the children stared at Thorinn with frank curiosity. One of them tugged at a woman's garments and said something; the woman answered curtly and drew the child away.
"What were they saying, box?"
"I think the child was saying, 'Who is that person?' and the engine was saying, 'Never mind.' There is danger for you, Thorinn, if the engines believe you might harm the children."
"I, harm the children?" said Thorinn indignantly. Indeed, there was something about them that drew him: they were like the young of rabbits or mice, innocent, tender, and beautiful. Now that he saw them beside the wingmen and women, he could well believe that the adults were engines, and he wondered that he had not seen it before. The big wingmen had dull faces; they were like the bark-creatures animated by Snorri in the tale; the children were bright-eyed, full of life.
Now that the children were awake, the adults no longer worked day and night; they slept, or appeared to sleep, hanging head downward from the perches in their apartments. Cooks were busy in the kitchens where, instead of fireplaces or ovens, they had great heaps of rotted vegetable matter secured in wooden presses; and the heat from these, as Thorinn felt for himself by putting his hand near them, was sufficient to cook their food.
The children were of different sizes, the smallest so young that they were just beginning to learn to fly, the biggest perhaps four summers older. They followed Thorinn about, in spite of the attempts of the wingmen to prevent it, and two or three turned up so often that Thorinn learned to watch for their faces. The box spoke to them whenever there was opportunity, and after a few days it could tell Thorinn what they said.
"Where do you come from?" was their persistent question. Thorinn told the box to answer that he came from the sky, but this did not satisfy them. Once when he was prowling along the wall of the cavern west of the city, followed as usual by two children whom he called Sven and Ilge (their own names were unpronounceable), the children stopped him and pointed to a cleft in the rock, no wider than two fingers' breadth. "Here is where you come from," they told him.
"What, from that little hole?"
"It is too small now, but you were smaller before."
"I don't know what you mean. When was I smaller?"
"When you came out of the rock." Sven thrust his fingers into the cleft and pulled them out again, drawing his small hands apart as if to indicate something that emerged and grew. After a few more questions and replies it became clear that he thought Thorinn had really come out of the stone itself. "Like sap dripping from a tree?"
The child's face was merry. "Yes, just like that.
Naturally you do not remember; you had just come into the Egg."
"No, that was not what happened."
"Then," said Ilge, "how did you get into the Egg?" Thorinn hesitated, thinking of the cataract which could be seen in the distance from where they stood, but some obscure instinct made him lie. "From another crack," he said. He walked on, with the children fluttering about him. "But not a crack like that," he said. "A big one, a tunnel, like this." He held his arms out. The box seemed to be having trouble; it spoke, Sven answered, it spoke again. Ilge looked puzzled. She repeated Thorinn's gesture: "Like this? A crack? Where is there such a crack in the Egg?"
"Well, it is hidden."
Sven sniggered. "It must be well hidden."
"Someday I may show you."
"And in such a crack, there could be three Thorinns and not one."
"Oh, yes, and not three but hundreds."