“The worst is behind us,” Hanmer says in a calm, unaltered voice.
So it is. They still are deep in night, but Old’s bleak domain now reluctantly gives up its grip on him. Resurrection is gradual and prolonged. The throbbings and pantings and gaspings slowly cease; the symptoms of physical decay fade moment by moment. Clay’s body straightens. His eyesight clears. His skin becomes smooth. His teeth return, budding in his swelling gums. His manhood triumphantly rises. Yet not even its flagpole firmness can ease him of the memory of where he has been and what he has undergone; he still feels the claw of time on his shoulder, and forgets no detail of his descent into ghastly age. He walks with care and husbands his strength. He spends breath cautiously. He is obsessed with the fragility of his inner framework. He hears the scratch of bone on bone, the harsh rustle of dark blood pushing through thickened arteries. He has little confidence in his revival. Is the ordeal truly over, or is this restoration of strength only a dream within a dream? No. He is indeed given his youth again, though tempered by somber intimations of mortality. “Are there many such places in the world?” he asks, and Ninameen says, “There is only one Old. But there are other districts of discomfort.”
“Such as?”
“One is called Empty. One is called Slow. One is called Ice. One is called Fire. One is called Dark. One is called Heavy. Did you think all our world was a garden?”
“How did such places come into being?”
“In the old times,” Ninameen says, “they were established for the instruction of mankind.” She giggles shrilly. “They were very serious in those days.”
“But surely you have the power to remove these places now,” Clay suggests.
Ninameen giggles again. “We do, but we will not. We require them. We are very serious in these days, too.”
Ninameen’s body is firm and supple again. Her breasts are high; her thighs are taut. Once again she moves in a ready flowing stride. Her golden-green skin has regained its inward glow. So too with the other Skimmers, who have returned to buoyancy and vigor.
A light now appears in the sky.
It is not the rising sun. Unless he has wholly lost his grasp of direction, they have been walking westward this night; but the light lies before then. It is a cone of luminous green, rising from a point at the foot of the slope they now descend, and widening to fill much of the heavens; it is like a geyser of pale radiance spurting aloft. As the wind sweeps through it, it stirs swirls of a grayer color, whirlpools of light within light. Accompanying this outburst of brightness is a rushing, whispering sound, reminding Clay of the song of distant water. He also hears a sort of subterranean laughter, resonant, slippery. A few minutes of further descent and he has a clearer view of what is ahead. Where the hill blends with the valley a glassy coat covers the ground; the whole valley seems to be sealed in this layer of glass, which stretches off toward the horizon. In the center of this, from a circular fumarole, the towering shaft of green light issues. Behind that wavering, flickering luminosity he can dimly discern some massive shape, possibly a low broad mountain. There is no vegetation in sight. The aspect of everything is forbidding and unearthly. He turns to the Skimmers for an explanation, but their faces are so rigid with concentration, they walk now with such trancelike concern, that he dares not puncture their meditation with questions. In silence they proceed downward. Ultimately he feels the slick cool glass beneath his bare feet. As each Skimmer steps out on the glass, he pauses, turning to set down his frond along the border between glass and earth. Clay does the same. The roots scrabble eagerly toward the soil even before they touch. The frond establishes itself, and, in the light of the green upwelling cloud, its transparency takes on subtle newnesses.
Gliding over the polished floor, they move in a wary arc around the fumarole, skirting it to the south. He plainly sees the opening now, strangely small for so huge an effect, a circle no greater than the circumference of his outspread arms, surrounded by a raised rim a foot in height. And through this the green brightness bursts in pulsating blares, as though expelled rhythmically from some factory in the core of the world. Everything here seems artificial to him, the work of one of the species of the sons of man, probably ancient from the viewpoint of the Skimmers yet no doubt fashioned long after the things of his epoch had vanished.
Now they are in the green cloud itself.
The air is electric. His pores tingle. A sour smell drills upward in his nostrils. His naked body sweats and steams. Silent and solemn, the Skimmers remain aloof, and he continues to respect their mood of withdrawal. The group is roughly parallel to the fumarole. As he comes past it, entering into the rear of the cone of greenness, he is able to see the massive shape to the west with greater clarity. It is no mountain. Rather it is some sort of monolith of flesh, a giant living Moloch, squat and enormous, huddled behind the greenness. The being sits in a colossal curving plate, metallic of texture and deep scarlet in color, which holds it above the level of the ground. Reflections from the green cloud slide along the sides of this cup, staining the scarlet with green, mingling with it in places to create a lustrous, overwhelming brown. Brown too is the color of the crouching being. Clay sees its leathery skin, thick and glossy and ridged like a reptile’s hide. The shape of the creature is froglike, but it is a frog of dreams alone, without eyes, without limbs: a tapering promontory, long-bodied, blunt-snouted, with a high vaulting back, fat sides, bulging belly, pedestal-like underparts. It sits motionless, like an idol. He cannot detect even a trace of breathing, yet he is convinced the thing is alive. There it rests in the glare of the green upsurge, giving the impression of being millennia old, vastly wise, a watcher, an absorber, a colossus encalmed. The tip of its snout rears at least five hundred feet in the air. Its gigantic hindquarters are lost in shadows. If it were to move, it would shake the planet. Baleful, monstrous, a living hill, it guards the glassy valley with frosty fervor. What is it? Whence came it? He consults his meager knowledge of the human species of these latter days, as garnered from Quoi the Breather: is this an Awaiter? An Interceder? A Destroyer? Some species not described to him? He cannot easily believe that this thing can be counted at all among the sons of men. Though humans in the fullness of time may have chosen to transform themselves into goats and squids and spheroids, he cannot believe that they would have sought to become mountains. This must be some synthetic monstrosity, or some visitant from another galaxy stranded on Earth, or some relict of a Skimmer’s troubled dream, accidentally left to linger in the world of reality.
Hanmer leads the way. They walk cautiously along the southern rim of the tremendous dish in which the being rests. Colors reverberate from it, smearing the bodies of the marchers with streaks of red and green and brown. When they have come nearly past it, the thing at last displays a sign of life: from it emerges a terrible rumbling moan, barely at the threshold of audibility, that causes the ground to quiver and fissures to spring up in the glassy floor. It is a smothered roar of such fierce anguish that Clay shatters with compassion. He has heard trapped animals make such outcries in the forest when caught by the leg in steel-jawed snares. Other than this grim sound, though, there is no hint of animation about the creature.
He questions Hanmer when they are safely beyond it.
“A god,” Hanmer tells him. “Left by a former age. Bereft of worshipers. An unhappy entity.”
“A god?” Clay repeats. “Do gods have such a shape?”
“This one does.”
“What were its worshipers shaped like, then?”
“The same,” Hanmer says, “only smaller. They lived eleven eras and sixteen eons ago. Before my time, I mean.”
“After mine.”
“It goes without saying. They created their god in their own image. Left it sitting in this plaza. Beautifully glassed over; handsome lighting effects. Those people knew how to build. Achieved rare longevity for their structures here; the world is so very changed, but this remains. However, they do not.”
“Human
?”
“So to speak.”
Clay looks back. He sees the geysers of green light; he sees the mighty rump of the abandoned god. The ground trembles as the deity cries out again. Tears burst in Clay’s eyes. A wild impulse seizes him: he makes the sign of the Cross as though he were standing before a holy altar. His gesture astonishes him, for he has never regarded himself as a Christian; but nevertheless the act of submission has been performed, and the outlines of his swift motions of the hand linger, glowing in the air before his eyes. Instants later the frog-mountain bellows again, even more terribly. Landslides begin; rocks fall in thundering avalanches; the glittering glassy crust over the valley is sundered in a hundred places as hidden fault lines yield. Over that monstrous basso boom comes, again, the high-pitched sobbing of Wrong, and laughter tumbles from the skies. Fear engulfs him. He cannot move. He sprays his toes with his own hot urine. He expects a momentary earthquake. Hands grasp his wrists: Ninameen, Ti, Bril. “Come,” they say, and, “Come,” and again, “Come,” and lift him away, as the first beams of morning roll in like the returning tide.
10
It is day. They are in a splendid gorge, camping on a protruding lip of black rock jutting out over the riverbed hundreds of feet below. The air here is mild and sweet. Birds circle in the flat blue sky. The heavy sun lies low on the horizon.
“We will do,” Hanmer announces, “the rite of the Lifting of the Sea.”
Clay nods. Fatigue and terror have gone from him with the coming of the sun. He feels alert, receptive, open to new experiences. Sexual desire is surging within him once more; he wonders if he can persuade one of the Skimmers to couple with him. The entire group has been chaste, so far as he is aware, since the disappearance of Serifice. An intentional abstention? Or merely a rush of other things to do? Lolling by the edge of the ledge, loins turned toward the sun, he finds himself strongly aroused by the nearby breasts and thighs and buttocks. The Skimmers still seem like strange plastic mannequins to him, but the flow of passion that stiffens him is the authentic article; however they have managed it, these beings have contrived to present themselves to him as human. Would he have responded like that to any of the other species? Drive his rigid shaft into a spheroid’s jellied harbor? Clasp himself to a goat-woman’s foul udders? Get himself off in a frog-girl’s rump?
Hanmer says, “Will you share this ritual with us, friend?”
“If I can.”
“You can and will. We ask only patience and restraint.”
He promises. Ninameen, Angelon, and Ti, who are in the female form this morning, sprawl face-down on the ledge and with delicate ease bend their bodies into hoops, heads against toes, knees flexed outward in a manner impossible for Clay’s species, buttocks upturned in a frank offering of the sexual parts. “We must join ourselves in this,” Hanmer remarks, and as he steps toward Ninameen, his member slides from its place of concealment; he slips it into Ninameen’s exposed slit as coolly as if he were plugging in an appliance, and grasps her by the haunches to steady her in her contorted posture. Bril just as calmly enters the body of Angelon. Hanmer flicks his hand toward Clay in genial impatience. “Yes, I see,” Clay says, and, seizing Ti’s plump rear, glides the tip of his wand to its goal. She makes a soft sound. He leans forward, lacking the suppleness of the two Skimmer males but having an advantage of dimension over them, and presses himself into her to the hilt. The six of them form an odd group on this lofty ledge, a tableau of acrobatic eroticism, held motionless, like statues of impassioned sprites. Seeing that Bril and Hanmer are not making the plunging motions of intercourse, but merely stand behind their partners, united and frozen, he does the same. He waits. Where is the signal? When begins the rite?
Imperceptibly it commences. The five Skimmers emit an oblique humming sound, so faint that less of it is within the universe than without it; their song is scarcely a molecule in breadth when Clay becomes aware of it and hardly spans a photon’s depth from edge to edge, but steadily the sound insinuates itself into the world of phenomena, taking on form and color and mass as it invades his continuum, thickening in timbre, rising in pitch, so that ultimately it is a thunderous column of tone suspended above the gorge, a hammer of gray-black sound that rises and falls in devastating impact, and the crescendo continues, the song gains every moment in dimension, growing more rounded, now, more sleek, developing subtle highlights that flash and sizzle in its center, and Clay, fearing that the weight of it will destroy him if he does not defend himself, timidly lends himself to it, finding an unoccupied rung of pitch within the now tremendous mass and claiming it. As he joins the song he looks uncertainly at his companions, afraid that they may feel he is marring their effort, but they smile their encouragement, Hanmer, Bril, even the contorted females twisting their heads backward to nod warmly at him. He takes comfort from this and lets his output swell to match their volume. The cavities of his skull resonate as the mighty droning sound blasts through him. He becomes one with them. He understands their unity, a thing even more intense than that which links the Breathers in their various pools. Now that he has entered the circuit he no longer is afraid of taking a false step. When Ti begins a series of interior spasms, adopting a complex and exquisite rhythm, he realizes intuitively that this is not his cue to move. He remains in stasis, allowing her to gyrate around the axis that he is providing for her. The physical sensations are acute, but he sustains himself with a patience he had not known he had; and when it seems to him that he can no longer refrain from motion, that he must plough her or die, it is simple for him to shunt his excitement’s excess to Hanmer and Bril, who dispose of it for him. He waits. Ti moves. A machine has been created on this ledge: he is one of its six parts. Now he is past the point of immediate stimulation; his entire body throbs and glows, but he is glassily calm. The sexual energies have spread through him. His penis has totally absorbed him and there is no longer a Clay, but simply this one rod, this erect member plugged into the circuit. Then even an awareness of sexuality disappears. He is a pattern of black lines and white blobs. He is a jaggedness on a graph. He is force without mass. He is mass without dimension. He is acceleration without velocity. He is power. He is potential. He is response. He is creation.
It is the time of the Lifting of the Sea.
Pink ribbons leap outward from the ledge, vaulting across the land to the great green globe of water. He follows. He becomes a river of pure sensation rushing in lightning zigzags down the continental slope. Here is the sea, a sleepy giant crushing its bed. Clay embraces it. He senses it all: the heaviness, the greenness, the saltiness, the turbulence, the calm, the warmth, the chill. Here are waves lashing a transparent beach. Here are secret valleys and slime-festooned peaks. Here is blackness. Here is brilliance. Here is light, dancing down to the sparkling polyps. Here are the creatures of eternal night, trawling for nightmares. Here are some fugitive children of mankind, altered, hidden, raging in the depths. Here are the cords that bind the planet. Here are the seams of the soul. Here is a winged thing flapping through a realm of shimmering sand. Black spines twitching on a green-encrusted rock. Random claws clasping quivering fleshy tubes. Mouths. Teeth. Surging masses of troubled water. Fragile tawny cells tossed on tides. Silent slippery currents eroding drowned gulfs and bays. The plankton ballet. The symphony of the whales. The weight. The weight. The weight. The sea stirs, questioning the intruders. But it is proper. The rite is necessary. Those who have come from the sea must return to their source. Arms plunge into the ocean’s rocky bed. Hands seize the levers of control. Bodies go taut. Ah, yes, yes, yes! The sea rises! Easily, proudly, confidently, they lift it, tugging it in one coherent fishy mass until it erupts from its age-old place. They hold it high overhead. A salty rain begins to fall. Stray weeds and urchins tumble loose, but everything is caught and restored to its rightful position. The liquid sun bathes the bubbling mucky bottom. The roots of the planet’s skin lie exposed. The sea’s voice has joined their song, overlaying it with thick blurred tones and tender
booming crashes. Burbling trumpets sing sweetly. The Skimmers rejoice. The power of the sons of man is made manifest. The circle of the seasons is closed. On the surface of the levitated sea-sphere, prickly protrusions rise and swiftly sink as gravity’s shifting spikes perturb its harmony. Now the sphere descends, while those who have lifted it gather ecstatically at the mathematical center of the hemisphere, taking it lightly on their shoulders, tucking in the stray strands of kelp and the occasional unruly eels. Is this the moment for the blaze of completion? No. No. Not yet. The sea subsides. The distant murmur of its echoing flesh grows more faint. It returns to its bed. Easily, easily, easily, all its contents undisturbed, the vast swimming things still nosing in the dark, the drowned cities of antiquity once more concealed, the tracks of lost explorers hidden, the vessels of the millennia blanketed with familiar silt. The demands of the rite have been met. Those who lifted are free now to resume individual identities and pursue individual ecstasies. He slides out of the linkage. He hears the soft rumbling of the relieved ocean as it spreads its rim over the world’s coasts. He comes out of his stasis, ready now for the fulfillment that he postponed for the sake of the event.
His body still is joined to Ti’s. She moves; he moves; the passionate friction begins. Together they have slipped to the floor of the ledge. His legs part; his back arches; her weight descends on him. He feels her cool lips against his. Ti’s hands clasp his breasts and stroke his hardened, fevered nipples. Ti thrusts into him, sliding again and again into the lubricated cleft, probing deep, knocking at the gate of his womb; he has never been invaded like this before, and the penetration is strange and terrifying, although he finds pleasure in it. Gasping, he caresses Ti’s strong, muscular back, her taut waist, her flat buttocks. He draws up his knees so that the union can be even more intense. The stone is cold against his back. A curious sense of dislocation troubles him even in the midst of his frenzies. His hips buck; his pelvis heaves. Waves of ecstasy radiate from his loins, shivering into his thighs, his belly, his chest, his skull. He explodes with sensation. But it is not over. Can Ti continue? Yes: goading him toward the next explosion. Ti’s body pushes down fiercely against him. He feels Ti’s chest against his breasts, he feels the hard shaft of her drilling into him with steady friction. Another explosion. Yes. Yes. Enough! He is lost; he is baffled; he is dazed. He locks his thighs around Ti’s hips and cries out for the final frenzy. Ti rams deeper than ever, battering at his kidneys, his ovaries, his intestines, all the hidden machinery of his inner flesh, and then comes the flood of fluid gushing from Ti’s member, the cascade spurting from her and striking him with sudden surprising power, and he submits and surrenders and allows the full climactic fury to overwhelm him. It has ended. Ti subsides. After a while, Ti rolls off him. Frowning, he lies as before, belly-up, knees flexed, legs spread, and tries to comprehend the reasons for the feelings of disorientation that have obsessed him since the finish of the Lifting of the Sea. Slowly he comes to realize the nature of the situation. He has assumed the female form.