The ash Yggdrasil great evil suffers,
Far more than men do know;
The hart bites its top, its trunk is rotting,
And Nidhogg gnaws beneath.
_Elder Edda._
In ghostly, shivering streamers of green and blue, like northern
lights, the closing hues of the fourth Hoderson symchromy, called "the
Yggdrasil," shuddered down toward visual silence. Once more the ancient
myth, antedating even the Dawn Civilization, had been told--of the tree
of life with its roots in heaven and hell and the land of the frost
giants, and serpents gnawing at those roots and the gods fighting to
preserve it. Transmuted into significant color by Hoderson's genius,
interpreted by the world's greatest color instrumentalists, the
primeval legend of cosmic dread and rottenness and mystery, of wheels
within cosmic wheels, had once more enthralled its beholders.
In the grip of an unearthly excitement, Thorn crouched forward, one
hand jammed against the grassy earth beyond his outspread cloak. The
lean wrist shook. It burst upon him, as never before, how the Yggdrasil
legend paralleled the hypothesis which Clawly and he were going to
present later this night to the World Executive Committee.
More roots of reality than one, all right, and worse than serpents
gnawing, if that hypothesis were true.
And no gods to oppose them--only two fumbling, overmatched men.
Thorn stole a glance at the audience scattered across the hillside. The
upturned faces of utopia's sane, healthy citizenry seemed bloodless and
cruel and infinitely alien. Like masks. Thorn shuddered.
A dark, stooped figure slipped between him and Clawly. In the last
dying upflare of the symchromy--the last wan lightning stroke as
the storm called life departed from the universe--Thorn made out a
majestic, ancient face shadowed by a black hood. Its age put him in
mind of a fancy he had once heard someone advance, presumably in
jest--that a few men of the Dawn Civilization's twentieth century had
somehow secretly survived into the present. The stranger and Clawly
seemed to be conversing in earnest, low-pitched whispers.
Thorn's inward excitement reached a peak. It was as if his mind had
become a thin, taut membrane, against which, from the farthest reaches
of infinity, beat unknown pulses. He seemed to sense the presence of
stars beyond the stars, time-streams beyond time.
The symchromy closed. There began a long moment of complete blackness.
Then--
Thorn sensed what could only be described as something from a region
beyond the stars beyond the stars, from an existence beyond the
time-streams beyond time. A blind but purposeful fumbling that for a
moment closed on him and made him its agent.
No longer his to control, his hand stole sideways, touched some soft
fabric, brushed along it with infinite delicacy, slipped beneath a
layer of similar fabric, closed lightly on a round, hard, smooth
something about as big as a hen's egg. Then his hand came swiftly back
and thrust the something into his pocket.
Gentle groundlight flooded the hillside, though hardly touching the
black false-sky above. The audience burst into applause. Cloaks
were waved, making the hillside a crazy sea of color. Thorn blinked
stupidly. Like a flimsy but brightly-painted screen switched abruptly
into place, the scene around him cut off his vision of many-layered
infinities. And the groping power that a moment before had commanded
his movements, now vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving him
with the realization that he had just committed an utterly unmotivated,
irrational theft.
He looked around. The old man in black was already striding toward the
amphitheater's rim, threading his way between applauding groups. Thorn
half-withdrew from his pocket the object he had stolen. It was about
two inches in diameter and of a bafflingly gray texture, neither a gem,
nor a metal, nor a stone, nor an egg, though faintly suggestive of all
four.
It would be easy to run after the man, to say, "You dropped this." But
he didn't.
The applause became patchy, erratic, surged up again as members of the
orchestra began to emerge from the pit. There was a lot of confused
activity in that direction. Shouts and laughter.
A familiar sardonic voice remarked, "Quite a gaudy show they put on.
Though perhaps a bit too close for comfort to our business of the
evening."
Thorn became aware that Clawly was studying him speculatively. He
asked, "Who was that you were talking to?"
Clawly hesitated a moment. "A psychologist I consulted some months
back when I had insomnia. You remember."
Thorn nodded vaguely, stood sunk in thought. Clawly prodded him out of
it with, "It's late. There are quite a few arrangements to check, and
we haven't much time."
Together they started up the hillside.
* * * * *
Especially as a pair, they presented a striking appearance--they
were such a study in similarities and contrasts. Certainly they both
seemed spiritually akin to some wilder and more troubled age than
safe, satisfied, wholesome utopia. Clawly was a small man, but dapper
and almost dancingly lithe, with gleamingly alert, subtle features.
He might have been some Borgia or Medici from that dark, glittering,
twisted core of the Dawn Civilization, when by modern standards
mankind was more than half insane. He looked like a small, red-haired,
devil-may-care satan, harnessed for good purposes.
Thorn, on the other hand, seemed like a somewhat disheveled and
reckless saint, lured by evil. His tall, gaunt frame increased the
illusion. He, too, would have fitted into that history-twisted black
dawn, perhaps as a Savonarola or da Vinci.
In that age they might have been the bitterest and most vindictive of
enemies, but it was obvious that in this they were the most unshakably
loyal of friends.
One also sensed that more than friendship linked them. Some secret,
shared purpose that demanded the utmost of their abilities and put
upon their shoulders crushing responsibilities.
They looked tired. Clawly's features were too nervously mobile, Thorn's
eyes too darkly circled, even allowing for the shadows cast by the
groundlight, which waned as the false-sky faded, became ragged, showed
the stars.
They reached the amphitheater's grassy rim, walked along a row of
neatly piled flying togs with distinctive luminescent monograms,
spotted their own. Already members of the audience were launching like
bats into the summary darkness, filling it with the faint gusty hum
of subtronic power, that basic force underlying electric, magnetic,
and gravitational phenomena, that titan, potentially earth-destroying
power, chained for human use.
As he climbed into his flying togs, Thorn kept looking around.
False-sky and groundlight had both dissolved, opening a view to the
far horizon, although a little weather, kept electronically at bay for
the symchromy, was beginning to drift in--thin streamers of cloud. He
felt as never before a poignancy in the beauty of utopia, because he
knew as never before how near it might be to disaster, how closely it
was pressed upon by alien infinities. There was something spectral
about the grandeur of the lonely, softly-glowing skylons, lofty and
distant as mountains, thrusting up from the dark rolling countryside.
Those vertical, one-building cities of his people, focuses of communal
activity, gleaming pegs sparsely studding the whole earth--the Mauve Z
peering over the next hill, seeming to top it but actually miles away;
beyond it the Gray Twins, linked by a fantastically delicate aerial
bridge; off to the left the pearly finger of the Opal Cross; last,
farther left, thirty miles away but jutting boldly above the curve of
the earth, the mountainous Blue Lorraine--all these majestic skylons
seemed to Thorn like the last pinnacles of some fairy city engulfed
by a rising black tide. And the streams of flying men and women, with
their softly winking identification lights, no more than fireflies
doomed to drown.
His fingers adjusted the last fastening of his togs, paused there.
Clawly only said, "Well?" but there was in that one word the sense of a
leave-taking from all this beauty and comfort and safety--an ultimate
embarkation.
They pulled down their visors. From their feelings, it might have been
Mars toward which they launched themselves--a sullen ember halfway up
the sky, even now being tentatively probed by the First Interplanetary
Expedition. But their actual destination was the Opal Cross.