Masters of Everon

  "No, no, I'm all right," he reassured the maolot. "Just stiff. I ought to be able to walk that out of me."

  Mikey led off through a narrow gap in the rocks that closed the far end of the mountain cup. The gap led into a narrow track or trail on which it was not possible for the two of them to go side by side. The way they followed led across steep slopes, so that the rock on one side of them would fall sharply away and on the other, a near-vertical rock face would rise, so that they were half-climbing, half-walking most of the time. In addition to the angle of the slopes on which they traveled, their footing was often on small rock or gravel, which slid and rolled as weight was placed upon it, so that at almost any minute a failure of balance could have sent either of them into a steep slide or tumble down a long pitch, and possibly over a cliff to a certain death-fall.

  Between the weakness brought on by his fatigue and the uncertain footing, each step Jef made had to be considered individually before he took it. The effort seemed enormous. At any moment he would have believed that he had only another dozen steps left in him. And yet he went on, and on. Mikey was now in the lead, his four legs giving him a greater certainty of traction on the untrustworthy footing. As they went, the sun rose but the day did not warm greatly. The air was thin, and while there was blue sky to be seen, clouds were plentiful enough so that the brief periods of warmth when the sun shone would be cut short within minutes as a new vapor mass blocked its rays. A light, chill breeze blew steadily from the northwest.

  In spite of all this the exercise and the moments of sun warmth began finally to reach and soothe Jef's stiff muscles. The pain of traveling ceased to be active and important. It moved back into the general structure of things. He began to notice the country through which they traveled and see beyond the space of the immediate next footfall.

  For the first time he began to be aware of a difference that had come over him. It was a contradictory difference—at one moment he seemed to feel himself intensely within his body, and at the same time part way outside it. Now that his pain and the weariness had ceased to be important—they were still there, but it was easy to ignore them now—he was physically aware of the impacts upon his senses, to a degree he had never felt before in his life.

  The sunlight through the thin air, intermittent as it was, touched him with a warmth as precious as beaten gold. The chill breeze itself was as memorable as the taste of a strongly tannic, but unforgettable, wine. Altogether, the daylight showed him a world about him that possessed something like an added dimension. The solid bodies he looked at now appeared even more solid; he seemed to see more in rock and tree and mountain pinnacle or peak, than the eye could ordinarily discover. They seemed to reach off at one more right angle, giving a tesseractlike effect.

  The sounds, few as they were—the rattle of pebbles underfoot, the thin singing of the wind, the far-off cry of one of Everon's birdlike native flying creatures, the buzz of occasional insects— were not only richer than they had ever sounded to his ear, but laden with new meaning. It was meaning he could not yet interpret, but it was so much more than he had ever read before in any such sound, that the information of it felt as if it must bulk like the contents of a book, compared to the brief information printed on its spine and front cover.

  So it was, also, with the color around him. To a casual glance he was moving through a drab landscape of grey rock, in shades of dark to light. Only occasionally was there the blue or silver glint of water, the dark green of upland vegetation, or the grey to brown of the trunks of native Everon trees. A tiny insect with green wings, a birdlike shape as a spot of dusky red against the sky, the sky itself with its hard, high-altitude blue and the unvarying white puffs of the swiftly moving clouds—these were the full range of the dramatic colors around him. Yet he could not have responded more to all that he saw if he had walked in the heart of a rainbow.

  Each color that he found sang to him: rich and incredibly beautiful in its own right. Incredibly alive, as well. He recognized, for the first time in his life, the fact that no color was perceived as an invariant. Each one changed constantly, with each minute shift of light upon it, each change taking place in a fraction of a second, so that it was as if each color he looked at had a living, breathing existence of its own, in which it evolved—not merely in itself— but in him, who was resolving it from second to second into terms of human sight and memory.

  On a similar level his areas of exposed skin sent him living, pulsating richnesses of sensation in the areas of temperature, pressure, and texture. These, and the sound and color images, blended together into a symphony of physical experience, echoing off each other, so that in looking at the trunk of a tree he passed at a distance of ten meters, he could, without touching it, literally feel the texture of its outer skin, the waxy sharpness of its coniferlike needles. The pressure and coolness of the air on his lips brought him a taste that was, at the same time, physically nonexistent and incredibly real, like the silent but real melody that violin strings might send forth into another dimension as they waited in the ecstatic anticipation of being played by magnificently capable fingers. Even the weariness and discomfort of his body had a meaning and a quality beyond ordinary perception, so that even this seemed to carry the burden of a message beyond ordinary communication.

  But in the same moments that this great wealth of awareness was flooding him continuously, he was conscious of standing a little apart from himself. It was a sensation, like that of the richness of sensory input, that he had never experienced in his life before —and which even now he had difficulty believing could be possible. For it was a contradiction in terms. He had the benefit of detachment without being detached.

  The detachment was one that seemed to open to him a great increase in inner vision. It seemed that never before in his life had his mind had such an ability, space and freedom to really process what life had fed into it from the moment of his birth. Now it could do so. Now there was a timelessness to all things and a liberty to work with them. He had escaped from the narrow confines that were the logical front of his mind, where thoughts had to come as if through a narrow door, one at a time.

  Now, as if on a great plain, he saw moving together, milling about, all the things he had ever learned or come to understand. He looked down on that plain from some height, but with a telescopic vision that could see clearly the smallest detail of what was below. All that he knew was spread out before him like a horde of moving and mingled individuals; and, slowly, as he looked down, he began to sort, combine, and resolve the unstructured multitude into a gathering of coherent meaning. Gradually the information took form, acquiring the shapes of knowledges he had never imagined could exist, and offering a hope of answers beyond present conception. It was a hope that opened the available universe from something infinitesimal to something literally without limit, infinite and eternal in promise as well as in dimension.

  His life came together for him. Everon came together for him. In his imagination he could now easily envision the hailstorm he had watched from the Constable's porch. The cloudbursts that made the floods of which he had heard, that had washed away dams and bridges the humans on Everon had built. Now he found he had no trouble picturing the weather that had bred the storms that flattened crops, the eggs that had hatched into the insects that destroyed planted seeds and growing plants. In his mind's eye he found he could now see all of this—and he saw it in connection, integrated and related, while at the same time, physically, he drank in the sound, the sight, the touch of the mountain land through which he traveled, painfully and carefully, in the tracks of Mikey.

  He was still lost in the wonder of what was happening to him and what he was doing with his awareness of that happening, when they came at last to a closed-end canyon, surrounded except at its entrance by vertical, unclimbable walls several hundred feet in height. A small stream sprang from beneath a large boulder against the rock face at the far end of the canyon; and at the sight of it, Jef woke to the thirst in him.
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  Its awakening laid such a strong claim upon him that he hardly reacted to the fact that at the canyon's far end, up against the solid wall of great rocks barring progress, there were half a dozen mature maolots, sitting or lying as if waiting for him and Mikey.

  Jef stopped when he reached the stream, dropped flat at its edge and drank heavily. This water, like that in the lake, was icily cold; and it seemed to him, still caught up in the acuteness of his senses, to be the most beautiful drink he had ever tasted. Slaked, he sat up on his heels and looked around.

  The maolots at the end of the canyon stayed, waiting. Whether Mikey helped or not, he did not know, but with a little effort he found he could focus in on each of them from some observation point only a few meters or centimeters away. He did so now—and once again he found that they would not let him see their eyes. Those eyes, when his observation closed with them, were either closed or averted from his point of view.

  But Mikey was communicating with them.

  Jef could sense that the others were answering Mikey, but he could not understand them, even to the limited extent that he understood Mikey. Each one, he realized now, was subtly different in its communication. There was an individualism to each of them that did not interfere with Mikey's understanding, but baffled his human mind. He was like someone who has learned from one person to speak a non-native language with what he thinks is comfort and ease; only to find himself baffled by individual differences in other speakers of that tongue, when he tried to talk with them.

  Should they go on, now, Mikey was asking the others.

  The answer, Jef gathered, was affirmative. He got to his feet and joined Mikey. Together they went up the canyon toward the maolots. As he got to the great, waiting creatures who still kept their eyes hooded or averted from his gaze, Mikey led the way to the right of a four-meter-high boulder directly behind the sentinels.

  Following Mikey around the boulder, Jef discovered that the base of it stood away from the cliff behind it, and hid a triangular crack in the cliff, something like a natural tunnel leading through to daylight beyond. Along the floor of this tunnel ran the stream from which he had drunk earlier.

  The opening was a good two meters high and no more than ten meters in length.

  Mikey called Jef to follow. Jef, who had hesitated at the mouth of the tunnel, moved forward again. Entering into its shadow, he stepped into the flowing water and it closed icecold fingers around his ankles. Mikey was just ahead of him. He began to wade up the stream, feeling the current plucking lightly at the sodden, lower ends of his pants. Midway, the ceiling lowered and he had to duck his head. But a few steps farther it rose again and only a little distance farther he came out on to an open hillside, sloping down to a mass of weathered rock spires, which blocked his vision of what lay farther on and lower down. Go on, he felt Mikey urging him.

  He went ahead and Mikey came behind him. They started down the slope. Here, once more, there was loose rock underfoot, so that he had to concentrate on each step if he wanted to avoid turning an ankle or falling. Shortly he was in among the spires of weathered, grey-white rock. It was like being in a forest of stone. Here the loose rock was even deeper and more treacherous. Jef concentrated wholly on his footing, holding on to spires as he passed, feeling his way down. So occupied had he become that it was not until he paused to catch his breath, that he lifted his head and saw that a mist had moved in about him. He was surrounded by a soft, white dimness that made even the nearest of the rock spires into half-invisible, vaguely looming shapes, like enormously tall, fog-wreathed gravestones in some burial place.

  Holding on to the spire beside which he had paused, he turned to speak to Mikey—but Mikey was not to be seen.

  "Mikey!" he called.

  His voice died in the mist without an answer.

  Jef stood, holding to the cold rock of the spire. Mikey had been right behind him. There had been no sound, no indication that anything had happened to him. Jef opened his mouth to call once more, then closed it. Instead, he put all his strength into a non-physical reaching-out; and then stood, trying to feel for Mikey with the new sensitivity that had been growing in him since he landed on Everon.

  After a moment he thought he did indeed feel Mikey—but at some distance off. He made another effort to bridge the gap between them by empathic rapport.

  Faintly he sensed a response from Mikey, a feeling of sorrow and regret that he could not be with Jef at this time. It was not clear, but Jef got the impression that Mikey was telling him to go forward alone.

  With that understanding, a new calmness filled him. He became certain that his going on alone from this point was inevitable, had been inevitable from the moment of his landing. Everything he had done from that moment, from the first sight of Everon that had arrested him at the head of the landing stairs, had directed him to this place and time in which he would have to go forward alone to whatever had been waiting for him from the beginning.

  The realization brought a feeling of peace to him. He breathed deeply of the damp air, taking it into his lower lungs. He let go of the rock he was holding and went on down the slope.

  As he went, the mist thickened; and he was not surprised that it did. The mist was as much a creature of this moment as the hailstorm had been that he had watched from the Constable's porch, and that other mist that had obscured the moonlight just before the maolots' attack on the wisent drive. Very soon he could see no more than the next spire closest to him. Then he could see nothing at all but whiteness. He continued to grope his way forward, feeling the slope still angling downward under his feet, until finally he began to realize that either he had come out from among the spires, or he was in some open area where they now stood back a distance from him. He had not touched one for minutes, and still the slope led down.

  But even as he realized this, the slope began to lessen. It became more gradual by degrees as if it was leveling out into a plain. The loose rock underfoot grew less, until now, more often than not, his bootsoles fell upon bare rock. At last a time came when he was walking on unrubbled surface that seemed perfectly level.

  A burst of feeling from Mikey stopped him. He was there— wherever he was supposed to have come to.

  He stood. For a moment there was nothing, only the mist around him. Then it started to lift and thin. It rolled back from him like sky-high curtains being drawn back, gradually revealing a vast amphitheater of rock surrounding him. He stood in a wide, circular depression in the mountains. The floor of that depression was flat, clean of loose rock and open. All around the sloping sides surrounding that central floor, however, rose the rock spires, but here they were broken off short, like a rubble of massive, flat-topped columns broken and shaped by the frosts of unbelievable winters.

  As far as his eye could see, the rocks had tenants. One to each rock, the great adult maolots lay—as the last of the mist cleared— under an ice-blue sky, looking down at him. And he did not need to ask the name of this place to which he had come at last.

  Chapter Eighteen

  the valley of thrones.

  In no way could it have been accidental that a young maolot cub had been found abandoned here, in this place where, he could now feel, as he felt his own breathing, nothing had been abandoned or mislaid for thousands of Everon years. This was no area of accident or chance. As the mist rolled back and he felt the pressure of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of mature maolot empathies, he knew this beyond any need for further proof.

  There was no way to tell how many of the great beasts surrounded him. He could, either with Mikey's help or on his own, move in his mind's eye to a close-in point of view with any one of them, but he had no means to count them one by one or take an overview that would show all of them to him at once. But in fact it did not matter how many were physically present; for any not present could look at him through the point of view of any of those that were actually there. Still each one turned a massive head away, or closed eyes when he looked closely. But this, too,
did not matter. In effect the Valley of Thrones held the presence of all the adult maolots of Everon—and this piece of knowledge, too, rode to him on the wave of the assembled empathies he felt as certainly as if it had been a physical pressure against him.

  They were all here; and they were here because of him—to judge him.

  He had never felt so tiny, so insignificant, in all the years of his life. He did not physically shrink from the watching multitude; but inside him his courage faltered; and he looked around helplessly and almost desperately for Mikey.

  There was a movement among the bases of the columns to his left, and Mikey came from among them, his eyes still as closed as that of any of his elders, though he had now grown so that size alone no longer distinguished him from the others. He crossed the open floor of the natural amphitheater to Jef.

  "Mikey—" said Jef gratefully, when the maolot stopped in front of him. He reached out to touch Mikey's neck, but his hand dropped. The name of Mikey sat awkwardly now on this old friend of his, who had grown out of the diminutive address and role of playfellow-pet. Mikey was an equal, and more, now. He reached Jef and turned to sit down beside him, facing the surrounding watchers.

  Jef felt Mikey being questioned on some matter by those who lay on the columns. He responded, rejecting whatever had been asked, and stayed where he was.

  "What do they want, Mikey?" Jef asked.

  Mikey indicated that he should be patient and wait. There were things yet to happen.

  "What?" asked Jef.

  Mikey directed his attention to the columns at the very edge of the open space a little to his left. Looking, he caught sight of figures emerging from between the rock uprights and beginning to cross the space toward him. Some of the figures seemed to be aware of what they were doing. Others moved as if dazed or under some silent order that gave them no choice. They were both human and animal; but with one exception all of the animal ones were Earth variforms.