Simin stood before the flat porous surface of a section of a wall of
stone. The pale light which illuminated it was the same as ever,
perhaps a little brighter, or his eyes had dulled in growing used to
it. But through the worn blankness of his mind (though a fair measure
of his physical strength had returned, yet having no will to drive it)
he felt a spark of emotion, almost human, that held him there with a
hollow aching in the center of his chest. He stood before a fading
portrait, a mark left on the uncaring stone.
At his feet lay the scattered and broken armor, all that remained, of
another who had tried. This melancholy work, drawn in the creature's
own browning blood and severed foreclaw, had been its death-act of
remembrance, its struggle still to forge some meaning from the
emptiness of its failure. It had not been mai---he knew from the
broken shell and the drawing---and this more than anything else,
thundered shame at his growing feelings of surrender and despair. He
remained silent, head down, wrapped in rage. At length he looked up to
study the creature's last act of flesh.
It was the image, subtly changed, of a winged chivit, roaming insects
living to the south of the mai. The outlines of its frame, like the
edges of a fisherman's net, were opened at the center of the body and
joined shut at the limbs and single arching wing. Its left foreleg and
right hind (it had only four digits in all) extended from the main in
almost Egyptian caricature, drawn with a trembling hand. The effect of
the whole was that of a shriveled and shrunken Phoenix, macabrely
adorning the tomb of some lost pharaoh. Subtly changed, like
himself..... But the thing that held him---one strange detail. A
smoky blur emanated outward from the body, like Spirit growing out of
flesh. A fearful banshee image, or dying vision of the Life After?
The long journey.
Aura.
Breaking away at last he continued downward, seeking the source of the
light, finding passages as best he could. He tried to read what signs
there were, the faint flux of incandescence, feeling called but never
sure, taking what nourishment he could, for three days more. Always
the strange tingling of flesh against his armor increased, as did
internal body heat. And ever as he went he came across more of the
striped-brown creatures, male centipedes, some running it seemed, from
what he could not guess, all fearing him, all bearing the marks of
battle. Yet none were ever wounded to the point of near-death, and all
appeared strong of their kind. It was a puzzle he could not dissect.
Their fear held his confidence, but drawing steadily downward, he felt
a growing reluctance to trespass the source of their being. It seemed
to contradict all fairness that the way which led to meaning, if it
did, lay through a world of savage (of this he was also quite sure),
sniveling insects, who had in no way raised themselves above the
animal. They were mindless and ugly, and his distaste for them would
not be abated. Fatigue, too, was becoming unbearable, as the invisible
force that beat back on him, assaulting both mind and body, continued
to grow with the light which was its sister sun.
On the fourth day, though time meant little in that place, passing only
in the world outside, he discovered the reason for his revulsion. The
dull, scraping sounds of armor against stone, of multitudes locked in
battle, had caught first at the edge of hearing, seeming unreal, then
steadied, held, and increased as he went on. Till coming to the
fissure-like opening of yet another vast cavern, he looked down on a
sight that twisted his spirit like rope and squeezed hard at the knots.
Some twenty meters below him, as it were through a glassless window,
he saw and understood at last the riddle of these pathetic creatures.
Newly hatched---the broken, swollen webs of multiple cocoons lay many
layers deep all around them---they were locked into countless battling
pairs. Each separate fight was to the death, the victor sometimes
stopping to eat a part of the vanquished, gaining strength, then moved
on to grapple with others who had yet survived. By such attrition
their numbers had already been reduced from thousands to hundreds, to
what end he could not imagine.
Then he saw the females. Huge and bloated, they sat complacently on
raised vantage points at the margins of the battlefield, awaiting the
final conquerors. These victors he knew, from the signs he had already
seen, would mate with them and then be cast out, possibly eaten, left
to die as they would, the reason for their brief, wretched lives
extinguished.
He watched them in dull horror, growing to intense pity and disgust.
For he knew that what he sought lay beyond them, and that its power,
for good or ill, had nothing to do with them, and no influence
whatever, either to elevate or corrupt. They were only here, and
through some flaw of intelligence, or heart, or having no choice, they
lived and died in a meaningless haste of reproduction.
He must past through them. He waited as long as his patience would
hold, away from the window, not watching. When he looked in again many
hours later, the number of fighting pairs had been reduced to perhaps
sixteen. He crawled in through the high opening, moved carefully down
the back-leaning arc of wall and onto a level with the combatants, all
unnoticed. A narrow wrinkle in the chamber, nearly flat at the base,
ran like a sunken path before him, dividing the battle in half. Having
no choice, he began to walk the shallow gauntlet, moving stiffly,
always ready for a fight.
First one pair and then another released their grip as they saw him,
confused. Some, already on the verge of death, lay writhing and
legless, fighting still. The four queens, each from its raised
pedestal, looked on in disbelief: their sacred ritual had been
disturbed. Simin moved steadily forward, staring down and backing off
each male as he passed. He was nearly halfway through.
Finally one of the females raised up her forward body, and began moving
it back and forth like an impatient cobra. The male closest to her
---it seemed to Simin the largest he had seen---broke away and came
forward, moving toward the dry canal where the intruder stood waiting.
Unlike the others it showed no outward fear. It advanced without
hesitation, or thought, or much of anything except the blind mating
aggression of its kind. It stopped only once, looking back at the
female from the lip of the sunken path, then came forward with only one
impulse in its mind. Kill him.
Simin had only a short time to plan his fight. As the creature drew
nearer he opened his wings instinctively and strafed the air with his
foreclaws. His wings! In all the time since finding the abyss he had
forgotten them, first from the weak amnesia of near-death, then from
simple disuse. With no more time to marvel he moved in a quick
half-circle to avoid the lumbering bulk, then flitted up behind it onto
the slanting edge of the rift. These short bursts of flight he
repeated several times (the thought that he could fly to safety and
forget this fight never occurred to him), searching for a weakness.
Though filled with a sullen rage, he knew there could be no mistakes.
Rising higher, he hovered briefly above his baffled foe, then swept
down onto its back, and in three quick motions of jaws and foreclaw,
tore off its head and left it to die.
Still full of bitter and unused anger he landed again on the plain
closest to the female, clawing the rock as if clinging to a rope, as
his blurring wings drummed threateningly. Then letting go he flew
directly over her, and left the sorry massacre behind.
With this action his patience expired. Landing as the far side of the
chamber grew shallow, he walked on through a curving length of tunnel
for some miles, until confronted by a three-directional branching of
the passageway. He followed the right-hand way first, and for a short
time made good progress. But then it doubled back on him and finally
ended, died, into a narrowing of stone through which he could not pass.
Furious, he worked his way back to the starting point, taking this
time the central shaft, leading downward. The result was the same,
though it took him much longer to realize. Returning again to the
meeting of ways was now difficult, since in his haste he had been
forced to take and re-take several turns in a compact but puzzling
labyrinth, that he found in the end took him nowhere.
Coming again after many hours to the branching of paths, he tried to
rest both mind and body, conceding the inevitable. His anger here was
useless. It had only robbed him of strength and precious time, and he
was no closer to a resolution of his bitter quest than he had ever
been. And also, a peculiar yellow fear, such as he had seldom
experienced in his life, was beginning to grow in him. At first he
blamed himself, raging. But walking through the twisted tunnels of the
labyrinth he had realized, suddenly, that it was not his fear alone.
His body was still not right, if wrong in a way that was hard to
define, and there could be but one explanation for it. The mist, the
growing light, was affecting his altered physiology. He searched
within himself, bewildered, till Shannon's memory put a name to it.
RADIATION. A force that should not affect an insect, but which worked
on those parts of his body that were yet human.
He rested for a time, but his rest was brief. The feelings of unease
continued to grow in him; they would not be contained. The source of
what he sought---he could now feel a faint throbbing in the stone
around him---was a danger in itself, repulsing, even as it called to
him. He must find it quickly, then be gone. For he knew that his time
in those depths was limited. He gathered what courage and presence of
mind he could, then pushed on, entering the left-hand passage.
He summoned now all his underground instincts, honed by the long
delvings of his life among the mai. In those days, a constant stream
unbroken by sleep, he had endlessly searched out tunnels untraveled or
long forgotten, returning ever and again to those that went deepest,
learning the mazes, delving deeper still. Though what he sought there
he could not have said.
The left-hand way was subtle, as he passed onward through the narrow
stone, with many turnings and side passages. He held mostly to the
main shaft, learning its direction, following it on its slow, steady
course downward. Many times it narrowed, till he was ready to despair.
But always through perseverance and careful backtracking, he was able
to find a way through.
The narrowing and tight touching of the walls began to frighten him.
By this, more than any other token, he knew that the growing fear
inside him was not solely his own. Far back in the journey he had
realized that
in taking the quest he must know, in part, what it was to be human.
Perhaps the spirit of Shannon still lived more strongly than he knew.
And perhaps there were others as well. Often he had thought with human
voice, human words, till now it was impossible to separate the two. He
had known, and been, emotions that were not his own.....
But THIS fear. Sometimes from the deeps of his mind he could hear a
howling as of many tormented voices, rising out of him like a driven,
heart-frozen wind.
He stopped. He himself was afraid, and he did not know why. He must
master it and go on. He must master it and go on. Go on.....
Resistance was thick around him, his body's weakness, till he felt that
in standing still he walked against a current of water.
He hardened, and went forward. The passage began to open again,
growing wider. Several more of the branching ways, through a mesh of
stone, and a straight, subtly rising tunnel lay before him. Far off in
the distance he heard, unmistakably, a steady throbbing, echoing like a
fall of water---the deep, rapid pulsing of a heart. He pushed on,
harder, though the pulsing of yellow light grew stronger, pushing back
on him, darkening to gold, an airless wind urging him back.
The passage seemed endless, and still it went on, with no
indication..... Ahead of him, the tunnel opened out, almost beyond
the edge of sight. He continued. Farther. He had reached it: the
horn's spout. Over the lip, and in.....
*
The beginnings of the chamber greeted him like an opened book, lying on
its bindings, leaning downward. The rock of that flattened wedge,
angling slowly away from him, was ribbed and strangely
symmetrical---smooth porous gray, but bathed in a strong golden light,
inexplicably tinged dark crimson where it met a rise of stone. He was
only vaguely aware that beyond this antechamber the ceiling warped high
and huge, above a valley that dwarfed even the place of his birth. For
here, as nowhere else beneath the surface of his world there were
shadows, lengthening toward him to either side of the shallow, widening
staircase. And for all the desperate haste of his journey, Simin could
not yet go forward. He stood looking down at the two pillared
sentinels in awe, the vast spherical expanse beyond. He little thought
that he himself, standing before the rim of the long tunnel he had just
traversed, his upper body and underside wreathed in red, formed an
equally stunning and unlikely visage of life against the Void.
Assimilation.
Two stone sentinels stood in perfect symmetry, like Roman statues, atop
the angling walls that rose to either side of the stairway's end. The
sunken plain lay beyond. Whether these silent watchers had been carved
by Nature or intelligence it was impossible to say: perhaps meant to
connote angry, reptilian merman rising out of the stone, perhaps
roughly shaped bodies whose accidental carving held no meaning at all.
Here all boundary between the spiritual and the meaningless faded.
They stood silent, faces outward, guarding the plain below. He
descended slowly until he stood between them, on the ripple of stone
looking down.
The plain lay before him like a massive wrinkled dish, bone-white and
barren. He breathed deeply several times, not knowing why. His
objective was a clear as the tolling of a bell.
A broad crater rested in the center of all, sinking out of sight, and
from it came the deep tremor of sound, the slow throbbing of light that
pervaded the underground vastness with its certain and unnerving
presence. Everywhere the edges of floor and ceiling glowed red, as if
from heat, and the brightness of yellow gold folded over and through
him like a liquid current of sun and air, warming. Simin had not the
heart to remain there long; he must descend now, or turn back in
defeat. This place was the very nexus of his unspoken fears.
He descended into the Valley, and almost at once the wailing of
human voices erupted in his ears, rising and falling in a discordant
terror of mutilated passions, scales without notes or boundaries. He
moved on, oblivious, physically incapable of dealing with this fear.
His weakness cried out strange horrors; his strength was confused.
He continued, not knowing what else to do. The surface of that plain
was cracked and uneven---warm, and unbearably long. The cacophony of
human fears climbed and fell back, rising now as if engulfed in flame,
then chilled, despairing.
HUMAN FEAR. At last he understood. He felt the presence of other
minds so strongly that he wondered if Shannon were truly dead, and not
merely the emissary of human suffering and grief. For this, surely,
was an unearthly place of His world. The high ceiling, the infinite,
trackless waste. The heat. Words raced through his beleaguered body,
slowing, till with a dread he would not have thought possible..... The
voice of a weary, tortured old man, his spirit broken in the end---a
Jew, his lungs filled with poison---formed physically, undeniable, in
his ears.
"Inferno."
He stopped, as if a razor had cloven him in two. It was there before
him, all around. He could not go forward, or back. He was dying.
Yes, dying in that place, where the river of his dreams, fallen to a
trickle, had at last died into unconquerable sand. He stood frozen in
terror. To breathe was a pointless misery. There was
nothing---alone---in that hollow place but death.
He knew not where he got the strength, or desperation. He lifted the
first of his walking legs, moved it forward. It touched the ground, a
little farther ahead. He moved the next, and then the next. He
staggered forward, feeling a will such as he had never known hardening
out of his weakness and despair. He was terrified, in pain. Burning
with fever. But he moved.
With this action the resistance seemed to falter, the wailing of human
passions to subside. But only for a moment. They redoubled their
assault---the current against him was physical---but broke against his
stubborn movement like a wall of water against stone. He continued.
The sand of many hours flowed past him.
He was nearing the crater, now certain he would die. If only by his
death he could achieve for Shannon, and for the other..... He forced a
foreclaw to shackle the edge of the crater, looking down. Determined.
The dry heat of that place was unbearable; and still distance defied
him. A silver-white core, cruel mockery of the Carrier stone, glowed
at the center of the broken-rock pit. From within came the voices, the
fever, the Heat. Yet this was his only quest. He must. . .TOUCH
it..... Must.
He could not walk; his legs would no longer carry him. With a weak
spasm of his hind and a pathetic flutter of wings, he pushed himself
over the edge and slid, rolled across stones, folding his wings just in
time, to tumble down a steep slope then land, legs folded beneath him
gripping hot stones, perhaps a hundred yards from all his desire.
He welcomed now its death, if only he could move. If only he could go
that distance farther, against the barrage. Of distance. But he was
afraid. Afraid to die. To die! At last he had met the greatest human
fear: the wakened animal, knowing it would live no more.
Oh, it was too much. He steeled the fire in his heart and went on, but
would have screamed if he could. Fifty yards. Forty. It was too
much. Too much. The stones beneath him rasped and hissed, speaking
Death's name. Downward, into the final hole of death, the murderer of
all his passions. It was too much. What kind of God would ask.....
Too much.
His death reached out. He touched the stone.
*
He touched the stone. Slowly the feverish weakness left him, as if a
violent storm fading at the last. The human flesh, the human trial,
had left him. There was only Simin, and he was one.
The Stone, which had appeared to burn white-hot, was cool, and he
experienced a sense of tranquility such as he had never known. He had
done it. The spirit of Shannon was at peace.
His mind was calm, his own. He remained, outstretched foreclaws
touching this new life, where death had been certain. His inner being
was like the quiet surface of a pool. A tiny pebble fell into it, and
as the ripples smoothed outward and the settled stone touched bottom,
he understood.
"It is a strange truth that the path to beauty and meaning often lies
through fear and ugliness." After a time another part of his being
added this. "God may exist; at times I feel him. Yet we must walk
dark paths alone, and endure."
He remained there in silent thought for some time, until at length he
turned and made his way back toward the tunnels, knowing now with
certainty what he must do. His mind possessed new powers, because it
was one with the Unnamable. His armor was many times stronger.
He knew what he must do.