The birds were ibises. They flew overhead, swooping low, welcoming him. Bar-Woten stared up, blinking in wonder.
After twenty years, he was home.
There was no immediate revelation of mystical completeness and beauty, only a child's voice informing him this was business for cerebral absorption and not religious inspiration. Generations after could look back upon the story (as Kiril would tell it; he saw himself surrounded by legions of children, stretching off on all sides) with awe if they wished, but for now it had to be explicated coldly and rationally.
No human mind had put the story together. Kiril detected a weariness in Hegira's voice, not physical or even spiritual, rather a fatigue that plagued the very medium through which it thought. The effect was that of falling dust and enclosing darkness, of a job approaching completion, with only a few thousand more years to go.
Kiril began to tremble. Pictures came to his mind rapidly, faster than he could consciously see them; sounds, smells, histories, overviews, impressions, even personalities of cultures and individuals.
He understood very little. Some of it was hideously alien to him. But he listened anyway.
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Twenty-five
I have built this world called Flight, have designed it and arranged for its construction, have populated it with beings of all kinds, and have started again the process of action and event, that these beings might exist and think as did living things long ago.
The time comes for all the beings on Hegira to know why they are called Second-born. You are no less than the First-born, but serve a different purpose. You are descendants and seed, and your life is the agony of an egg …
Kiril sat on the floor of the cramped cabin, high above his world, and squeezed his head to quell a headache. He stood and stretched his muscles, exhausted. Jury had been correct; he understood very little. He felt close to bursting, but his conscious awareness had not integrated all the visions and data he now contained; it would take years for him to do so, if he ever managed.
What is Hegira? he asked himself.
Hegira is a hollow shell made up of sections like latitudinal slices of an empty fruit rind. At its center is a singularity, an extremely compressed sphere of matter so dense that virtually nothing can escape from the well of its gravitation. This singularity, or black hole, or frozen star, or super-point mass, spins. When the inner surfaces of Hegira's sections pare off bits of themselves, and shoot these pieces around the singularity, they return with even greater energy, withdrawn from the spin. This process powers the world. Think of an enormous top that spins only on the inside.
He stared across the daylight surfaces of the two sections, and then into the blackness between, and with an inner eye saw these things happening, felt the world's pulse and progress, and its age.
The fire doves are other worlds like Hegira, some larger, many smaller, containing many different kinds of life-forms.
In a few thousand years, it would all stop; the singularities of all the worlds would be tapped out. The worlds would become cold and dead.
Before that time, he and all the pilgrims would have to tell the stories not contained on the Obelisks, to push their peoples into leaving Hegira and migrating outward.
"Oh, Lord," he moaned. Some of what he felt within was blasphemous. Some of the things he saw could sear the souls of those who were not prepared. His job would be hideously difficult.
All the worlds like Hegira together create a singularity with themselves inside, a larger, less dense and more diffuse mass, a kind of bubble with its own separate existence. This universe-in-itself floats through the destruction of the First-born's old universe, already dying or dead. A new universe is forming around this egg, and even now the egg begins to crack, its rents and distortions revealing the new universe. You have seen these as the nights with stars …
"They'll kill me if I preach these things," Kiril said. He thought of Mediweva and its citizens, of all they did not know, and cringed.
When these distortions occur, we take our bearings in the new universe, and decide what you will have to face. The new universe is not exactly like the old.
Bar-Woten had intuited as much, months past.
That succeeding universes differ was known long before the Unknown Span. To adapt to these conditions, you are not precisely like the First-born. The small differences these changes have made in the preparation of the worlds are reflected in the anomalies of animal and plant life. The Second-born are not precisely like the First-born. They are much smaller …
Kiril stood and passed through the door, frightened, almost panicked by what he felt within. But he did not return to the living quarters. The tower cabin vanished, and he found himself facing another long tunnel. He glanced back at the doorway, and was reminded of the spirit-blocking slabs in Golumbine. "Where am I?" he asked the ball clutched in his hand.
"If you walk to the end of this tunnel, you will cross the gulf between sections and come to the other Wall."
"Why do I have to go there? What will I find there?"
"That is where you'll find your double."
Kiril paused. "Why there? Why not here?"
The ball did not answer. That's the way it is, that's all, he answered for himself. "What if that isn't good enough? What if I don't cross?"
"Then you will remain here like Jury. You have come too far to stop now."
Kiril looked down the length of the tunnel. Every ten paces, a protruding black band marked the circumference, and a raised red pathway showed him where to walk. Red carpet. It seemed to stretch to infinity. Behind him, it stretched as far, interrupted only by the doorway.
"You explained all this to Jury, too."
"It is best not to hesitate," the child's voice warned.
"My woman is alive on the other side?"
"In a manner of speaking."
That wasn't as definite as he would have wished. He hesitated. But unlike Jury, he had to act for at least two others: for Barthel, who was dead, and for Bar-Woten, wherever he was. And he had to finish his quest to find Elena, though he could hardly remember what she had looked like. Nevertheless, she was a steady, painful memory, and any chance to be rid of that pain, of all his past obligations, was more than welcome.
Still, perversely, he hesitated. He asked the ball more questions: why, on Hegira, a woman could only bear two children before becoming infertile; how long the Second-born had lived on Hegira; why all Second-born children were able to read Obelisk script from birth, but did not necessarily understand the languages; what part animals played on Hegira; and so on.
The ball answered in its weary child's voice whenever the answer could be briefly given. Kiril still found things confusing. These matters of universes and singularities were clearly beyond him, though no doubt they would be discussed on the Obelisks.
Now that he had some of the answers he had been looking for, he could not completely accept them. All of the life and humanity and history he was familiar with had to be more than a single egg shot with thousands of others into a dead eternity, a diaspora of silkseed worlds.
Kiril took a deep breath and began walking down the tunnel. "All right," he said. "I'll take it on faith, for now." Under his breath, he added, "But if this is all a fantastic lie … "
The journey took only a few moments. After several dozen steps, his vision blurred. He rubbed his eyes and saw another doorway blocking the tunnel a few steps ahead. Following the red path, he stepped through.
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Twenty-six
Jury lay on the floor before him, asleep. Kiril nearly fell over him. The Pallastan sat up quickly. "Careful, there!" he said. He stood and brushed himself down fastidiously.
"I thought you weren't going to cross," Kiril said, staring in wonder at what lay around them.
"You shamed me into it," Jury said, glancing at him sidewise. "I got sick of sponging off that table back there. Besides, I asked the ball if my woman w
as alive. It said there was no way she could be killed, in her present condition. It might take me a while to find her, however. In an English-speaker's museum, maybe, or a circus sideshow … "
The chamber they stood in was so broad its far edge seemed lost, yet the ceiling was low enough to seem oppressive, only a few centimeters above their heads. The wall of the chamber nearest them, behind the doorway, was divided into coffin-sized partitions, all covered by transparent doors, all apparently empty.
The air was cold and antiseptic-smelling. A thin, rubbery covering on the floor deadened their footsteps.
Kiril removed the ball from his pocket. "What do we do now?" he asked.
"Locate the booth that has a light in it," it answered. "As there are two of you, there will be two booths near each other."
"I don't see any," Jury said, turning around.
"Follow the perimeter until you do."
They set out around the chamber. As they walked, Jury's face wrinkled, as if he was both anxious and reluctant to talk. Finally, his anxiety won out. "You learned everything?" he asked, walking backwards ahead of Kiril.
"I suppose so."
"Did you understand it?"
Kiril shook his head.
"We could talk about it. Compare things. This might take a while. Maybe we could tell whether they've lied to us or not."
That didn't seem a bad idea. They talked.
The First-born worked and loved and suffered to achieve what they achieved, and they did well. The Obelisks tell their story to the end of their existence as physical beings …
Your form-ancestors lived on old Earth until they could send ships far out to the planets around their star, called the sun. They populated the planets where possible and sent more advanced ships out to other stars. At first the journeys were slow, but their knowledge increased rapidly, and old laws bowed to new refinements. Ships soon traveled very fast, shooting through the distances between stars in days and weeks and months instead of lifetimes.
"I don't understand what stars are," Jury said, shaking his head. Kiril explained as well as he was able.
There were many other intelligent species besides your form-ancestors. Sometimes they met, and at first the meetings were confused, often destructive, yet always educational. Two thousand years of interaction made your form-ancestors part of a very accomplished interstellar civilization, with the cooperation of thousands of non-human intelligences, many of them the form-ancestors of other beings on Hegira and its companion worlds. This civilization filled the whirlpool of three hundred billion stars that the First-born called their galaxy.
In these times, your form-ancestors changed themselves by adapting biologically and mechanically to live in places where they would otherwise die. Some grew used to deep space, far from the attractions of planets. Still others, to live in the peculiar places where ships went to travel faster than beams of light, adapted themselves to new sets of spaces and times.
"God help us all," Jury exclaimed. "Nothing could make me understand that." Kiril, however, could clearly see these forms in his head. They were terrifying and beautiful, almost angelic.
Wars and disputes broke out between the different varieties of humanity, and between humans and other beings, and between other beings and different forms of their own kind. It was a cruel, restless age, full of change and growth and pain.
In time, some species found it desirable to mingle their patterns with each other. The results were clumsy at first, and progress difficult, but soon there were as many crossbred beings as there were individuals of distinct species. It was not a sexual communion in the usual sense; rather, it was an exchange of strengths and a repression of weaknesses. All benefited. Your form-ancestors disappeared as a distinct species.
For ages, all the species had been blown about by a wind they had hardly been aware of. They looked back and saw that on their home worlds they had been both muscle and seed, like the pods in a poppy plant. Their intelligence and technology had resulted in a building of muscular tensions, which had exploded to carry them far out into space. Their individual spirits, they learned, had been subservient to a higher force, which they had always thought was more primal—the propagation of living forms.
They discovered a genetic similarity between species, rooted in the nature of matter and energy itself, and they discovered that to reach higher stages of development, most species would have to combine.
It soon became apparent that non-living matter played much the same part in the life-history of the galaxy that calcium in bones and dead hair and skin play in individual biological beings. The inorganic world is actually shaped by the organic for its own needs.
Natural extensions of living things into other spaces and times behaved according to laws as strict as any for the conscious world of the First-born. So-called ghosts, demons and other influences were extensions of their living counterparts and served definite purposes, either as repositories of racial memory or protection from destructive forces—much as your dead outer skin works to keep you from harm. This interaction of states of life and death gave a new clue as to how the First-born must adapt and change. Just as the migration of life from galaxy to galaxy began, the Space Age, which lasted a mere four thousand Earth years, became subservient to another far longer, longer age, the Age of Dissolution.
Description now is far more difficult. Some form-ancestors were shaped much like yourself, even then, thinking in much the same way. There are backwaters in any development, especially when the development is rapid. But other species and superspecies were advancing to the point where language using words cannot describe them.
Suffice it to say that organic and inorganic merged throughout thousands of galaxies. For a time, those left in the backwaters thought they lived in a largely dead universe, with only stars and rocky worlds left to explore. They could not see what was actually around them; it would have been easier for a bacterium in a man's gut to understand the man.
Metaphysics became as fluid a tool as physics. Realities were altered and tailored. The Age of Dissolution blended into a new period, the Unknown Span.
To assign lengths of time to the Unknown Span is not appropriate. It would be better to assign energy levels and degrees of equations describing basic entropic functions, which had not, and could not, be altered. The Unknown Span soon approached the death of the super-organism that the universe had always been, and that only now was self-aware. Soon, life would have to spread itself to the universe that would arise from the death of the old.
All things are nested together, and between all things there must be commerce and exchange. In that Unknown Span, Hegira and all its companion worlds were created. Hegira is itself aware and alive.
Jury squatted to rest. The booths were still empty and dark, and they had been walking for five hours. "I am so stupid," he moaned. "What good am I as a pilgrim?"
Kiril didn't answer. The question had occurred to him, as well.
In another hour, when they were about to give up and try to find the doorway again, they found the pair of booths, both filled with an opaque, milky glow. They peered in and saw nothing, but before they could ask the balls another question, sparks and rainbows whittled away at the milkiness within the booths. They then appeared to contain two young men.
One resembled the young scrittori who had fallen and killed himself on Obelisk Tara, in Mediweva, it seemed so long ago: Elena's double. The other was familiar to Jury.
Abruptly, the figures in the booths faded and vanished. Kiril felt a sudden snapping-to within him, an almost nauseating integration that told him more than words their quest was at an end.
"Wait!" Kiril shouted, pounding on the glass. Jury stood limply nearby and tittered, holding two fingers over his mouth like a clown. He broke into raucous laughter.
"Now you can return home," the balls said in unison.
"But we have to take them back with us," Kiril protested hoarsely.
"No need. Both are dead. There can be no
returning for them now. All you have to do is return with what you saw here. In fact," and the voices seemed to be speaking through smiles, "your women are already free of their affliction."
"We have to go back now," Jury said matter-of-factly. "My woman will be half out of her mind if she wakes up and finds everything in shambles. I have to be with her. If she hasn't awakened … buried alive someplace." His face paled.
"She is alive," the ball reassured him.
"How do we get back?" Kiril asked.
"Find the gate. Enter."
Whether it was the same gate or not, they never knew. They said their farewells rapidly, eager to be done with each other, to try to get back to reality and away from this knowledge-filled madness. They entered the door a few seconds apart and never saw each other again.
Kiril awoke from a sound night's sleep on a hillside in a country he barely recognized, clothed but unshod, and minus his ball and pack. A local sheriff arrested him for vagrancy a day later as he walked along a narrow dirt cart road, and he was taken to a deputato.
It took him three weeks in custody to prove he was who he claimed to be. A visiting church cleric from his village, dough-cheeked and acne-scarred, another student of the Franciscans, was brought in to identify him, and the deputato released Kiril into the hands of his former order. The cleric lent him an ass and together, poor and humble yet somehow happy, they trekked across four hundred kilometers of Mediweva, resting at village inns of varying repute. Nothing seemed to have changed much. The knowledge of the English-speakers had yet to come this far south.
Obelisk Tara was their guide and beacon. After two weeks of travel, interrupted by visits to the church of local districts—the cleric's business—they came to the village where Kiril had been raised. Here they parted company. Kiril shook the hooded man's travel-roughened hand. "Go with God," he told him.