"If I do nothing, the world will go on until we come to another fire." The original line reappeared.
"I don't understand," Thorinn said. "If I were not the king, what would you do?"
"I would go on. Our world does not need to turn about a fire for heat, as other worlds do. If men went to live on another world, I could not keep them from harm."
"Then why come here at all?"
"I was told to do so by the men who made me."
"Well, suppose I say to go on, then—what else is there?" The central ball, the lines and beads, all disappeared in the click of an instant. Now a vast gray globe filled the room, like a cloud around the Monitor. In it Thorinn saw ghostly threads, some radiating from the center, some in concentric layers. "In our world there are three hundreds of thousands of thousands of caverns where men live, and in each one they are living in a different way. You must decide which way is best."
"But how am I to do that?"
"I don't know."
Thorinn saw then that his kingship was only a grim joke, and that the king of the world was nothing but another kind of prisoner. He said dully, "Leave me alone now." The Monitor vanished; the room was bare and empty in the even light, just as it had been before. "Box," said Thorinn, "can they hear what we say?"
"Yes."
"In the other rooms, too?"
"Yes, Thorinn, but not in the washing-box."
Thorinn began to take off his clothes. When they were all floating in the air, he fetched the box from the net on the wall, leaped to the washing-box, closed the door behind him. "Box, I must get away. Tell me how to do it."
"Thorinn, the Monitor says I am broken. I say I am not, but if I am broken by the geases you put on me, then your only hope of getting away must be to break the Monitor, too."
"How do you mean, by telling him he must not do anything to harm me, and so on?"
"Yes, but it will not be easy, for there is a geas on the Monitor already, and he is much greater than I am."
"What sort of geas?"
"The Monitor has been told that he must do everything he can for the good of men."
"Much good that does me."
"Thorinn, the Monitor is not sure what is good for men. If you can make him believe that it is good for men to let you go back to the Midworld, he will let you go."
Thorinn opened the door of the washing-box and put the box outside to drift in the air; he closed the door again, put his feet on the floor and let the water gush over his body. When he was cleansed and dried, he went out into the room and put his clothes on. The box was drifting near one wall. Thorinn retrieved it and put it in the net.
He took a deep breath. "Monitor," he said.
And the bearded old man was there, in the middle of the room.
"Monitor," Thorinn said carefully, "while I am king of the world, I will choose to let the world turn around the fire you showed me. And I will choose to send men to live on the other world, the one that is like ours. That will be bad for men, because you won't be able to keep them from harm. Is that true?"
"It is true."
"But you must let me do it, because of the geas that is on you."
"That is also true."
"But if you let me do it, you'll be allowing men to come to harm, and you are forbidden to do that by another geas. Is it true?"
"Yes, it is true."
"And if I give up being king of the world, then you mustn't let me go back to the Midworld, because then I might come into the Underworld again and do harm."
"That is true."
"But if I don't go back to the Midworld, I will stay here and be king of the world, and do harm." The figure of the old man flickered, like a candle in the wind. "That is true."
"Which harm is greater? Remember that if I stay here as king of the world, I will think of other things to do that may harm men."
"It is a greater harm if you stay here as king of the world."
"Then I'll make a bargain with you. Give me three things, and I will leave you to rule."
"What are the three things?"
"First, you must take me back to the Midworld, to the land of the Skryllings, with all my possessions. Do you agree?"
"I will answer when I have heard the other two things."
"Very well. Second, you must awaken the wing-children again and let them live together, even if they make a fire now and then."
"And the third?"
"The third is this, and it must be a geas upon you. The best way for men to live is that which gives them the most freedom to choose how they will live."
"I agree to the second and third things," said the Monitor. "I agree to the first thing in part. I will send you back to the Midworld with all the possessions you brought from it, but nothing from the Underworld."
"Thorinn, you must agree," said the box at once.
He turned to look at it. "But that would mean leaving you behind."
"You must, for if the men of the Midworld saw me, they would know that what you tell them about the Underworld is true, and they would want to come here themselves." Thorinn bit his lip. "Monitor," he said, "couldn't you put the box into an engine that looks like a man, like the ones in the wingpeople's cavern?"
Before the old man could reply, the box said, "That cannot be done, Thorinn. Remember that the children were deceived, but you were not. And besides, it may be true that I am broken." It paused a moment, and said in a different tone, "Monitor, will you also agree to put me back in the cavern where Thorinn found me, and leave me there in case he comes again?"
"I agree," said the Monitor. "But I will stop up all the passages by which he came before."
"That is understood," the box said. "Now, Thorinn, it is time to say farewell." The spidery engine came floating up from the room below. "What, already?" Thorinn looked around, but there was nothing to take with him; everything he had brought from the Midworld was already on his back or in his wallet.
The Monitor said, "You and I will not meet again. Farewell, Caerwin Darson." The tall figure" vanished.
"Box, I'll remember you," said Thorinn. The spidery engine drifted up, wrapped its coils around him. As they descended through the hole in the floor, the room, the box in its net, floated upward and were gone.
As the box had foretold, the first engine took him to another, a metal egg with stout walls and thick windows. When the door was shut, water spurted into the chamber around them and filled it; then they went out into a darkness broken only by their own lights. Thorinn saw schools of little fish like flashing coins, and once something larger that hung for a moment at the edge of the darkness. At length they came out into the air again; the door opened, and the engine's arms grasped him and handed him through like a sack of wheat into the belly of another engine. This one was like the engine that had captured him before. They went through another doorway. The windows were instantly obscured by a thick white cloud, and remained so for the rest of their journey upward. In this engine, things had weight again; Thorinn felt himself growing heavier and heavier as the days passed.
On the fourth day, shortly after he awoke, there was a change; he felt the engine turning in the air. Looking back through the windows, he saw the cloud they had just emerged from. It came out of a great hole in the plain, rose in a gigantic column and spread out under the sky like a tree of cloud. Under it was bogland, gray and swampy, with incessant rains, but when they had got beyond it the sky was bright. They traveled high in the air all that day, and just before nightfall Thorinn saw ahead a wall of towering mountains that rose from the plain like a fortress. First there was a sloping cliff, thousands of ells high, then a broad green plain cut by rivers and dotted by lakes: then the true mountains, which he had seen only in his dreams.
Night scythed overhead as they approached the Highlands, and the mountain peaks passed below green and mysterious in the sky-glow. Here and there, high in the valleys folded into the mountains, Thorinn could make out the lights of clustered houses, but at length these went out and they drifted onward over a sleeping landscape.