Meg moved close to Cushing. He put his hand upon her arm and found that she was shivering. “Laddie buck,” she said, “I feel the coldness once again, the great uncaring. Like the time we found the rock on the first night out.”
“It’ll be all right,” he said, “if we can make our way through the Trees. The rocks seem to want us to move in toward the Trees.”
“But the wardens said the Trees would not let us through.”
“The wardens,” he said, “are acting out an old tradition that may not have any meaning now or may never have had a meaning, something that they clung to through the centuries because it was the one reality they had, the one thing in which they could believe. It gave them a sense of continuity, a belonging to the ancient past. It was something that set them apart as special people and made them important.”
“And yet,” said Meg, “when the bear stampeded the horses, they left us and went streaking after them, and they’ve not been back.”
“I think it was Elayne,” said Cushing. “Did you see their faces when they looked at her? They were terrified. The bear, running off the horses, took them off a psychological hook and gave them an excuse to get out of there.”
“Maybe, too,” said Meg, “it was being without horses. To the people of the plains, a horse is an important thing. They’re crippled without horses. Horses are a part of them. So important that they had to run after them, no matter what.”
The Trees loomed before them, a solid wall of greenery, with the greenery extending down to the very ground. They had the look of a gigantic hedge. There was an ordinary look about them, like any other tree, but Cushing found himself unable to identify them. They were hardwoods, but they were neither oak nor maple, elm nor hickory. They were not exactly like any other tree. Their leaves, stirring in the breeze, danced and talked the language of all trees, although, listening to them, Cushing gained the impression they were saying something, that if his ears had been sharp enough and attuned to the talk that they were making, he could understand the words.
Shivering Snake, positioned in a halo just above Rollo’s head, was spinning so fast that in one’s imagination one could hear it whistle with its speed. The Followers had come in closer, smudged shadows that dogged their heels, as if they might be staying close to seek protection.
Ezra had halted not more than ten feet from the green hedge of the Trees and had gone into his formal stance, standing rigidly, with his arms folded across his chest, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. Slightly behind him and to one side, Elayne had flopped down to the ground, feet tucked beneath her, hands folded in her lap, and bowed, with the ragged elkskin pulled up to cover her.
Now there was a new sound, a faint clicking that seemed to come from back of them, and when Cushing turned to see what it might be, he saw it was the rocks. They had joined in a semicircular formation, extending from the forefront of the Trees on one hand, around an arc to the forefront of the Trees on the other hand, spaced equidistantly from one another, no more than a foot or so apart, forming an almost solid line of rocks, hemming in the travelers, holding them in place. The clicking, he saw, resulted when the rocks, each one standing in its place, but each one rocking slightly, first to one side, then the other, struck against the neighbors next in line.
“It’s horrible,” said Meg. “That coldness—it is freezing me.”
The tableau held. Ezra stood rigid; Elayne sat unmoving; Andy switched a nervous tail. The Followers came in closer, now actually among them, blobs of shadows that seemed to merge with the others huddled there. Shivering Snake outdid itself in its frantic spinning.
Rollo said, softly, “We are not alone. Look back of us.”
Cushing and Meg twisted around to look. Half a mile away, five horsemen sat their mounts, graven against the skyline.
“The wardens,” said Meg. “What are they doing here?”
As she spoke, the wardens raised a wail, a lonesome, forsaken lament, a thin keening in which was written an ultimate despair.
“My God, laddie boy,” said Meg, “will there never be an end to it?”
And, saying that, she deliberately strode forward until she stood beside Ezra, raising her arms in a supplicating pose.
“In the name of all that’s merciful,” she cried, “let us in! Please, do let us in!”
The Trees seemed to come alive. They stirred, their branches rustling and moving to one side to form a doorway so the travelers could come in.
They walked into a place where lay a templed hush, a place from which the rest of the world seemed forever sealed. Here was no low-hanging greenery but a dark and empty vastness that rose up above them, a vastness supported by enormous tree boles that went up and up into the dimness, like clean churchly pillars that soared into the upper reaches of a sainted edifice. Beneath their feet was the carpetlike duff of a forest floor—the cast-off debris that had fallen through the centuries and lain undisturbed. Behind them the opening closed, the outer greenery falling into place.
They halted, standing in the silence that they discovered was really not a silence. From far above came the soughing of trees put in motion by the wind, but, strangely, the soughing did no more than emphasize the basic hush that held here in the dimness.
Well, we made it, Cushing thought to say, but the deep hush and the dimness strangled him and no words came out. Here was not a place where one engaged in idle conversation. Here was something that he had not bargained for, that he had never dreamed. He’d set out on a forthright quest for a Place of Going to the Stars, and even in those times when he could bring himself to think that he had a chance of finding it, he had thought of it as being a quite ordinary installation from which men had launched their great ships into space. But the Trees and the living rocks, even the wardens, had about them a touch of fantasy that did not square with the place he had sought to find. And if this butte was, in all reality, the Place of Going to the Stars, what the hell had happened?
Ezra was on his knees and his lips were moving, but the words he spoke, if he was speaking words, were mumbled.
“Ezra,” Cushing asked sharply, “what is going on?”
Elayne was not sitting with her grandfather, as had been her habit, but was standing over him. Now she turned to Cushing. “Leave him alone,” she said coldly. “Leave him alone, you fool.”
Meg plucked at Cushing’s sleeve. “The Holy of Holies?” she asked.
“What in the name of God are you talking about?”
“This place. It is the Holy of Holies. Can’t you feel it?”
He shook his head. To him there seemed nothing holy about it. Frightening, yes. Forsaken, yes. A place to get away from as soon as one was able. A place of quiet that suddenly seemed to hold a strange unquietness. But nothing that was holy.
You are right, the Trees said to him. There is nothing holy here. This is the place of truth. Here we find the truth; here we extract the truth. This is the place of questioning, of examination. This is where we look into the soul.
For an instant he seemed to see (in his imagination?) a grim and terrible figure dressed in black, with a black cowl that came down about a bony face that was merciless. The figure and the face struck terror into him. His legs were watery and bending; his body drooped and his brain became a blob of shaking jelly. His life, all his life, everything that he had ever been or seen or done, spilled out of him, and although it was out of him, he could feel sticky fingers with unclean fingernails plucking at it busily, sorting it out, probing it, examining it, judging it and then balling it all together in a scrawny, bony fist and stuffing it back into him again.
He stumbled forward on jerky legs that still seemed watery, and only by the greatest effort kept himself from falling. Meg was beside him, holding him and helping him, and in that moment his heart went out to her—this marvelous old hag who had trod uncomplainingly all the weary miles that had led them to this place.
“Straight ahead, laddie boy,” she said. “The way is open now. Just a
little farther.”
Through bleary eyes he saw ahead of him an opening, a funnel with light at its other end, not just a little way, as she had said, but some distance off. He staggered on, with Meg close beside him, and although he did not look back to see—fearful that, looking back, he would lose the way—he knew that the others were coming on behind him.
Time stretched out, or seemed to stretch out, and then the tunnel’s mouth was just ahead of him. With a final effort he lurched through it and saw ahead of him a rising slope of ground that went up and never seemed to stop, ground covered with the beautiful tawniness of sun-dried grass, broken by rocky ledges thrusting from the slope, dotted by clumps of bushes and here and there a tree.
Behind him Rollo said, “We made it, boss. We are finally here. We are on Thunder Butte.”
18
A short distance up the slope, they found a pool of water in a rock basin fed by a stream that barely trickled down a deep gully, with misshapen, wind-tortured cedars forming a half-hearted windbreak to the west. Here they built a meager fire of dead branches broken off the cedar trees, and broiled steaks cut off a haunch of venison that was on the point of becoming high.
They were up the slope far enough that they could see over the ring of the Trees to the plains beyond. There, just over the tip of the Trees, could be seen the toylike figures of the wardens. Their horses were bunched off to one side and the five wardens stood in line, facing toward the butte. At times they would fling their arms up in unison, and at other times, when the wind died down momentarily, those around the fire could hear their shrill keening.
Meg studied them through the glasses. “It’s some sort of lament,” she said. “Rigid posturing, then a little dance step or two, then they throw up their arms and howl.”
Ezra nodded gravely. “They are devoted but misguided men,” he said.
Cushing growled at him. “How the hell do you know? You are right, of course, but tell me how you know. I don’t mind telling you that I have a belly full of your posturing, which is as bad as anything the wardens may be doing.”
“You do me wrong,” said Ezra. “I was the one who got us through the Trees. I spoke to them and they opened a way for us; then I spoke to them again and they let us out.”
“That’s your version,” said Cushing. “Mine is that Meg got us in, then got us out again. All you did was mumble.”
“Laddie boy,” said Meg, “let’s not quarrel among ourselves. It doesn’t really matter who got us through the Trees. The important thing is they did let us through.”
Elayne looked at Cushing and for once her eyes had no blankness in them. They were cold with hatred. “You have never liked us,” she said. “You have patronized us, made fun of us. I’m sorry that we joined you.”
“Now, now, my pet,” said Ezra, “we all are under tension, but the tension now is gone, or should be. I’ll admit that I may have been over-clowning to a small degree, although I swear to you that my belief in my own ability has not faded; that I believe, as always, that I can talk with plants. I did talk with the Trees; I swear I talked with them and they talked to me. In a different way from the way any plant has ever talked with me before. A sharper conversation, not all of which I understood, a great part of which I did not understand. They talked of concepts that I have never heard before, and though I knew they were new and important, I could grasp but the very edges of them. They looked deep inside of me and let me look, for a little distance, into them. It was as if they were examining me—not my body but my soul—and offered me a chance to do the same with them. But I did not know how to go about it; even with them trying to show me, I did not know the way to go about it.”
“Space is an illusion,” said Elayne, speaking in a precise textbook voice, as if she were speaking not to them, nor indeed to anyone, but was merely reciting something that she knew or had newly learned, speaking as if it were a litany. “Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any wonder, no longer any doubt; for the simplicity of it all lies before us—the simplicity…the simplicity…the simplicity…”
Her voice ran down on the single word and she lapsed into silence. She sat staring out beyond the campfire circle, her hands folded in her lap, her face again assuming the look of horrifying emptiness and terrible innocence.
The rest of them sat silent, stricken, and from somewhere a chill came off the slope of ground above them and held them motionless with an uncomprehending dread.
Cushing shook himself, asked in a strained voice, “What was that all about?”
Ezra made a motion of resignation. “I don’t know. She has never done a thing like that before.”
“Poor child,” said Meg.
Ezra spoke angrily. “I’ve told you before, I tell you now: never pity her; rather, it is she who should pity us.”
Meg said, “No pity was intended.”
“There are more wardens out there,” said Rollo. “A new band of them just showed up. Six or seven, this time. And from far to the east there seems to be others coming in. A great dust cloud, but I can see no more.”
“It was a shame about the wardens,” said Meg. “We messed them up after all their years of watching. All those generations and no one had ever got through.”
“Perhaps there has never been anyone before who wanted to,” said Rollo.
“That may be true,” said Meg. “No one who wanted to get through as badly as we wanted to. No one with a purpose.”
“If it hadn’t been for the bear,” said Rollo, “we might not have made it, either. The bear provided a distraction. And they lost their horses. They were naked and defenseless without the horses.”
“The bear shook them up,” said Ezra. “No man in his right mind goes against a bear with nothing but a spear.”
“I’m not a man,” said Rollo, reasonably, “and I was not alone. Cushing put some arrows in the beast and even Andy came in on the kill.”
“My arrows did nothing,” said Cushing. “They only irritated him.”
He rose from where he was sitting and went up the slope, climbing until the campfire was no more than a small red eye glowing in the dusk. He found a small rock-ledge that cropped out from the slope, and sat upon it. The dusk was deepening into night. The Trees were a hump of blackness and out beyond them what must have been the campfires of the wardens flickered on and off, sometimes visible, sometimes not.
Sitting on the ledge, Cushing felt an uneasy peace. After miles of river valley and of high dry plains, they had finally reached the place where they were going. The goal had been reached and the daily expectation of reaching it had vanished and there seemed to be little to fill the void that was left by the lapsing of the expectations. He wondered about that, a bit confused. When one reached a goal, there should be, if nothing else, at least self-congratulation.
Below him, something grated on a stone, and when he looked in that direction, he made out the dull gleam of something moving. Watching, he saw that it was Rollo.
The robot came up the last few paces and without a word sat down on the ledge beside Cushing. They sat for a moment in silence; then Cushing said, “Back there, a while ago, you called me boss. You should not have done that. I’m not any boss.”
“It just slipped out,” said Rollo. “You ran a good safari—is that the right word? I heard someone use it once. And you got us here.”
“I’ve been sitting here and thinking about getting here,” said Cushing. “Worrying a little about it.”
“You shouldn’t be doing any worrying,” said Rollo. “This is the Place of Going to the Stars.”
“That’s what I’m worrying about. I’m not so sure it is. It’s something, but I’m fairly sure it’s not the
Place of Stars. Look, to go to the stars, to send ships into space, you need launching pads. This is not the kind of place to build launching pads. Up on top of the butte, perhaps, if there is any level ground up there, you might build launching pads. But why on top of a butte? The height of the land would be no advantage. The job of getting materials up to the launching site…It would be ridiculous to put pads up there when out on the plains you have thousands of acres of level ground.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Rollo. “I don’t know about such things.”
“I do,” said Cushing. “Back at the university, I read about the moon shots and the Mars shots and all the other shots. There were a number of articles and books that told how it was done, and it was not done from atop a hill.”
“The Trees,” said Rollo. “Someone put the Trees around the butte—all around the butte—to protect whatever may be here. Maybe before the Time of Trouble, the people got up in arms against going to the stars.”
“That might have been so,” said Cushing. “Protection might have been needed in the last few hundred years or so before the world blew up, but they could have put the Trees around level ground just as well.”
“Place of Going to the Stars or not,” said Rollo, “there is something here, something protected by the Trees.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. But it was the Place of Stars I wanted.”
“The thing that bothers me is why they passed us through. The Trees, I mean. They could have kept us out. The rocks were out there waiting. All the Trees would have had to do was give the word, and the rocks would have moved in and flattened us.”