CHAPTER XXI. PHANTASMAGORIA METALLIQUE.
Wearily I opened my eyes. Stiffly, painfully, I stirred. High aboveme was the tremendous circle of sky, ringed with the hosts of feedingshields. But the shields were now wanly gleaming and the sky was the skyof night.
Night? How long had I lain here? And where was Drake? I struggled torise.
"Steady, old man," his voice came from beside me. "Steady--and quiet.How are you feeling?"
"Badly battered," I groaned. "What happened?"
"We weren't used to the show," he said. "We got all fed up at the orgy.Too much magnetism--we had a sudden and violent attack of electricalindigestion. Sh-h--look ahead of you."
Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and proneat the base of one of the crater's walls. As my gaze swept away I notedwith a curious relief that the tiny eye-points were no longer sparklingwith their enigmatic life, that they were dulled and dim once more.
Before me, glimmering pallidly, bristled the mount of the Cones. Aroundits crystal base glittered immense egg-shaped diamond incandescences.They were both rayless and strangely--lightless; they threw no shadowsnor did their lambency lessen the dimness. Beside each of these curiousluminosities stood one of the sullen-fired, cruciform shapes--the Thingsthat now I knew for the opened cubes.
They were smaller than the Keeper, indeed less than half his height.They were ranged in an almost unbroken crescent around the visible arcof the immense pedestal--and now I saw that the lights were a few feetcloser to that pedestal than they. Egg-shaped as I have said, the widerend was undermost, resting in a broad cup upheld by a slender pediclesilvery-gray and metallic.
"They're building out the base," whispered Drake. "The Cones got so bigthey have to give them more room."
"Magnetism," I whispered in return. "Electricity--they drew down fromthe sun spot. And it was more than that--I saw the Cones grow under it.It fed them as it fed the Hordes--but the Cones grew. It was as thoughthe shields and the Cones turned pure energy into substance."
"And if we hadn't been pretty thoroughly magnetized to start with itwould have done for us," he said.
We watched the operation going on in front of us. The cross shapes hadbent, hinging above the transverse arms. They bowed in absolute unisonas at some signal. Down from the horizontal plane of each whipped thelong and writhing tentacles.
At the foot of every one I could now perceive a heap of some faintlyglistening material. The tendrils coiled among this, then drew upsomething that looked like a thick rod of crystal. The bent planesstraightened; simultaneously they thrust the crystalline bars toward theincandescences.
There came a curious, brittle hissing. The ends of the rods began todissolve into dazzling, diamond rain, atomically minute, that passingthrough the egg-shaped lights poured upon the periphery of the pedestal.Rapidly the bars melted. Heat there must be in these lights, terrificheat--yet the Keeper's workers seemed impervious to it.
As the ends of the bars radiated into the annealing mist I saw thetentacles creep closer and ever closer to the rayless flame throughwhich the mist flew. And at the last, as the ultimate atoms drovethrough, the holding tendrils were thrust almost within it; touched it,certainly.
A score of times they repeated this process while we watched. Unaware ofus they seemed, or--if aware, then indifferent. More rapid became theirmovements, the glassy ingots streaming through the floating brazierswith hardly a pause in their passing. Abruptly, as though switched, theincandescences lessened into candle-points; instantly, as at a signal,the crescent of crosses closed into a crescent of cubes.
Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowingof the cones--sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metalStonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fillwith a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone,so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.
They quivered; the slender pedicles cupping, the waned lights swayed;the lights lifted and soared, upright, to their backs.
Two by two with measured pace, solemnly the cubes glided off into theencircling darkness. As they swept away there streamed behind them otherscores not until then visible to us, joining pair by pair from hiddenarcs.
Into the secret shadows they flowed, two by two, each bearing over itthe slim shaft holding the serene flame.
Grotesquely were they like a column of monks marching with dimmedflambeau of their worship. Angled metal monks of some god of metal,carrying tapers of electric fire, withdrawing slowly from a Holy ofHolies whose metallically divine Occupant knew nothing of man--nor caredto know.
Grotesque--yes. But would that I had the power to crystallize in wordsthe underlying, alien terror every movement of the Metal Monsterwhen disintegrate, its every manifestation when combined, evoked; theincredulous, amazed lurking always close behind the threshold of themind; the never lifting, thin-shuddering shadow.
Smaller, dimmer waned the lights--they were gone.
We crouched, motionless. Nothing stirred; there was no sound. Withoutspeaking we arose; crept together over the smooth floor toward thecones.
As we crossed I saw that the pave, like the walls, was built of thebodies of the Metal People; and, like the walls, they were dormant,filmed eyes oblivious to our passing. Closer we crept--were only a scantscore of rods from that colossal mechanism. I noted that the crystalfoundation was set low; was not more than four feet above the floor.The sturdy, dwarfed pilasters supporting it thrust up in crowded copses,merging through distance into apparent solidity.
Now, too, I realized, as I had not when looking down from above, howstupendous the structure rising from the crystal foundation was.
I began to wonder how so thin a support could bear the mount bristlingabove it--then remembered what it was that at first had flown from them,shrinking them, and at last had fed and swelled them.
Light! Weightless magnetic ions; swarms of electric ions; the mistybreath of the infinite energy breathing upon, condensing upon, them.Could it be that the Cones for all their apparent mass had little,if any, weight? Like ringed Saturn, thousands of times Earth's bulk,flaunting itself in the Heavens--yet if transported to our world solight that rings and all it would float like a bubble upon our oceans.The Cones towered above me--close, so close.
The Cones were weightless. How I knew I cannot say--but now, almosttouching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yettenuous, dense and unsubstantial.
Again the thought came to me--they were force made visible; energy madeconcentrate into matter.
We skirted, seeking for the tablet over which the Keeper had hovered;the mechanism which, under his tentacles, had shifted the circlingshields, thrust the spear of green fire into the side of the woundedsun. Hesitantly I touched the crystal base; the edge was warm, butwhether this warmth came from the dazzling rain which we had justwatched build it outward or whether it was a property inherent with thesubstance itself I do not know.
Certainly there was no mark upon it to show where the molten mists hadfallen. It was diamond hard and smooth. The nearest cones were but ascant nine feet from its rim.
Suddenly we saw the tablet; stood beside it. The shape of a great T,glimmering with a faint and limpid violet phosphorescence, it might havebeen, in shape and size, the palely shining shadow of the Keeper. It wasa foot above the floor, and had apparently no connection with the cones.
It was made of thousands of close-packed tiny octagonal rods the tops ofsome of which were cupped, of others pointed; none was more than halfan inch in width. There was about it a suggestion of wedded crystaland metal--as about its burden was the suggestion of mated energy andmatter.
The rods were movable; they formed a keyboard unimaginably complex;a keyboard whose infinite combinations were like a Fourth Dimensionalchess game. I saw that only the swarms of tentacles that were theKeeper's hands and these only could be masters of its incredibleintricacies. No Disk--not even the Emperor, no Star shape could play onit, draw
out its chords of power.
But why? Why had it been so made that sullen flaming Cross alone couldrelease its hidden meanings, made articulate its interwoven octaves?And how were its messages conveyed? Up to its bases pressed the dormantcubes--that under it they lay as well I did not doubt.
There was no visible copula of the tablet with cones; no antennaebetween it and the circled shields. Could it be that the impulsesreleased by the Keeper's coilings passed through the Metal People ofthe pave on the upthrust Metal People of the crater rim who held theshields?
That WAS unthinkable--unthinkable because if so this mechanism wassuperfluous.
The swift response to the communal will that we had observed showed thatthe Metal Monster needed nothing of this kind for transmission of thethought of any of its units.
There was some gap here--a gap that the grouped consciousness could notbridge without other means. Clearly that was true--else why the tablet,why the Keeper's travail?
Was each of these tiny rods a mechanism akin, in a fashion, to thesending keys of the wireless; were they transmitters of subtle energyin which was enfolded command? Spellers-out of a super-Morse carryingto each responsive cell of the Metal Monster the bidding of those higherunits which were to It as the brain cells are to us? That, advancedas the knowledge it implied might be, was closer to the heart of thepossible.
I bent, determined, despite the well-nigh unconquerable shrinking Ifelt, to touch the tablet's rods.
A flickering shadow fell upon me; a flock of pulsating ochreous andscarlet shadows--
The Keeper glowed above us!
In a life that has had its share of dangers, its need for quickdecisions, I recognize that few indeed of my reactions to peril havebeen more than purely instinctive; no more consciously courageousnor intellectually dissociate from the activating stimulus than theshrinking of the burned hand from the brand, the will-to-live dictatedrush of the cornered animal upon the thing menacing it.
One such higher functioning was when I followed Larry O'Keefe and Lakla,the Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a placealmost as strange as this *; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, Istudied the angrily flaming Shape.
* See "The Moon Pool" and "The Conquest of the Moon Pool."
Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o'-my-Thumbs to the Giant; hadit been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to itsknees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that wasthe Keeper's foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline--yet beneathit was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable,microscopic crystals.
Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen gloweddull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close tothe bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard inwidth. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of theunderlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be--similarto the great ovals within the Emperor's golden zone.
My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feetfrom tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, notdull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the centerof the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrousreflection of the Emperor's pulsing multicolored rose had each of thepetals of the latter been clipped and squared.
It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilionlatticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angrycrimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never acurve nor arching.
Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettesfilled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations--like--it came tome--immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.
Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed ahuge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamondsstared down upon us from just beneath it--like eyes. And over all itsheight the striated octagons clustered.
I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to meas together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heartof the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instantwe hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--
They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out from them thewhiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.
My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, wasmotionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. Theywere like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questionedus, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over ourclothing.
There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing ofvermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through thelatticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, highsquare of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organsbeneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.
Holding us so the Keeper studied us.
The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. Buthere was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth haddescribed as emanating from the Metal Emperor. Powerful it was, withoutdoubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones ofrevolt, something incomplete and struggling. Within the disharmonies Iseemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battlingagainst itself.
Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles winding about us like slenderstrands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more andmore difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat andtightening--tightening.
I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my headtoward him, could not speak. Was this then to be our end?
The strangling clutch relaxed, the mass of the tentacles lessened. I wasconscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.
Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating pastus--beating down the Keeper's. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me.I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawnaway.
Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk--the Metal Emperor!
He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper--and even as I swung I sawthe Keeper's multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrilyand then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.
And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immensetranquillity, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, anunthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed tobe sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss. I struggled againstit, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier ofpreoccupation against the power pouring from it.
A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us theirregard. They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas theyseemed to be. The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiacin which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols tracedin the lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns andinfinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which Iseemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes,the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beautythat are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature's own miraculous book ofthe soul of mathematical beauty.
The flashing, petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.
Silently we floated there while the Disk--LOOKED--at us.
And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird pictureof it all came to me--two men swinging like motes in mid air, on oneside the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the otherside the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of thebristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.
There was a ringing about us--an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline.It came from the cones--and strangely was it their vocal synthesis,their voice. Into the vast circ
le of sky pierced a lance of green fire;swift in its wake uprose others.
We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base. The Keeper bent;angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over thetablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon therods some unknown symphony of power.
Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowingcurtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the conesswung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves--nopillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like anoose.
And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!
Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled; lost theircolors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as thoughthrough a funnel top.
Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones. They did not glowas they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it wastoo slowly for me to see; the shields were motionless. Now here, nowthere, I saw the other rings whirl up--smaller mouths of lesser coneshidden within the body of the Metal Monster, I knew, sucking down thismagnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun.
Then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the valley of the bluepoppies, the ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations--as thoughthe force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had beencaught.
Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman,anomalous Things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrustrods.
But if we forgot, we were not forgotten!
The Emperor slipped nearer; seemed to contemplate us--quizzically,AMUSED; as a man would look down upon some curious and interestinginsect, a puppy, a kitten. I sensed this amusement in the Disk's regardeven as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquillity; as we had sensedthe playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, thecuriosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley.
I felt a push--a push that was filled with a colossal, GLITTERINGplayfulness.
Under it I went spinning away for yards--Drake twirling close behind me.The force, whatever it was, swept out from the Emperor, but in it wasno slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of thesinister.
Rather it was as though one would blow away a feather; urge gently somelittle lesser thing away.
The Disk watched our whirlings--with a sparkling, jeweled LAUGHTER inits pulsing radiance.
Again came the push--farther yet we spun. Suddenly before us, across thepave, shone out a twinkling trail--the wakened eyes of the cubes thatformed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow.
Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the Emperor turn--hisimmense, oval, metallic back now black against the radiance of thecones.
Up from the narrow gleaming path--a path opened I knew by somecommand--lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands; the sentient currents ofmagnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the Metal Hordes. Theyheld us, thrust us along, passed us forward. Faster and faster we moved,speeding on the wake of the long-vanished metal monks.
I turned my head--the cones were already far away. Over the tablet oflimpid violet phosphorescence still hovered the planes of the Keeper;and still was the oval of the Emperor black against the radiance.
But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone--wasfading out close behind us as we swept onward.
Faster and faster grew our pace. The cylindrical wall loomed close. Ahigh oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Beforeus stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing uponus, had forced us completely out into the hall.
Unlike that passage, its floor lifted steeply--a smooth and shiningslide up which no man could climb. A shaft, indeed, which thrust upwardstraight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whoseend or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way throughthe City--through the Metal Monster--closed only by the inability ofthe eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance becameimpenetrable.
For an instant we hovered upon its threshold. But the impulse, thecommand, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here. Into it andup it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface;lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by theforce that pressed out from the sides.
Up and up we went--scores of feet--hundreds--