Brother Red’s voice was agitated. “He must be stopped, yes! If what you tell us about the seeresses is correct, if he isn’t stopped, all intelligent life will end! That’s your Great Enigma. Stop the Woput then in order to preserve life now. But we can’t go back to the time he arrived. The device doesn’t work like that.”
“How does it work?” demanded Sahir.
One of the other brothers answered. “The device is cyclical. This may be a design limitation, or it may be that time itself is cyclical. We have argued both ways. From the top, the device does look like a wheel, but actually it’s more helical than it is wheel-like. One cannot go back to just anytime. One cannot go back along time at all, one can only cross one turn.”
“How long is one turn?” I asked.
“Three thousand years.”
“Let’s see if I understand this,” said Izzy. “If I were to go back, or as you say, cross one turn, I would arrive three thousand years ago, more or less, and thirty years after your colleague had arrived.”
“Not more or less. Exactly three thousand years. And he arrived about three thousand thirty years before now. And we don’t know what he’s done, that is, nothing has changed, here, so we believe he hasn’t done anything yet. That doesn’t mean he won’t.”
Izzy nodded. “And one or more of you intend to go back—”
“No!” said one of the Weelians sharply. “No. Not we. We are too few to risk any of us! Some of you. There are lots of you.”
Soaz snarled, “It all sounds very sacrificial, Brothers. There may be lots of us, but there is only one of me. Also, the world is large. I’ve traveled over parts of it. How on earth would we, any of us, find this colleague of yours?”
“The control is still set as he left it. It couldn’t have been changed without the key. It is still set for the same location he set it for. Whoever goes will go to that same place.”
“Which place your colleague no doubt left some thirty years ago,” said Soaz. “It sounds unlikely of success, gentlemen.”
Izzy had been sitting silent with a very thoughtful expression. Now he said urgently, “Have you been talking a lot about this? Out here near the woods, for example? Did you discuss this business of the Woput killing trees and rivers and what not?”
Brother Red replied. “I suppose. We’ve had thirty years to discuss it, worry over it, try to figure out what to do. Why?”
“The trees have heard you. They’re in revolt. They’re frightened, and they don’t know what they’re frightened of. We ran into whole forests of them, upset and rebellious. They said they’d learned about the conspiracy from the place the gervatch flower blooms. That’s here.”
“Trees! The trees said!”
“The trees said,” I confirmed in a loud voice. “I heard them. Izzy gave one of them a mouth, and they told us.”
“Nassif,” Izzy said sadly. “That might not have been a smart thing to tell them.”
It seemed for a moment he was right. They were very quiet, all the hoods turned in our direction. “Sorcery?” asked Brother Red. “You can do sorcery?”
“Only a little,” said Izzy, waving it away. The way his gesture told it, he did a few card tricks and perhaps a little amateur juggling.
This started another colloquy, nonetheless, much muttering and gesturing, while our group sat looking on, completely at sea.
“It shouldn’t make any difference,” said Brother Red, turning back to us. “At the end of the last cycle, there was lots of technology. I doubt sorcery will help you, but if it does, fine.”
“Help us?” asked Sahir. “Why do you keep insisting it has to do with us?”
“You’re here. You’ve brought the key. Two different prophecies have sent you all here, so it’s evident the seeress knew you would come here. If you don’t do this thing, we all die, so it’s logical to assume you will do this thing. Someone has to. It’s either that or sit back and wait for the end.”
We argued. Soaz threatened. We said we would take our guards and go, and the Weelians told us our guards, all those who could walk, had been sent back during our conference. They were already far past recall, on their way back to the emperor.
The countess interrupted. “Is it possible your traitor might have had an accomplice? Could that possibly have been the emperor’s nephew, Fasahd?”
“We don’t know what arrangements or alliances he made. We do know Woput was no Korèsan. It’s possible that he spread lies among the Farsakians in order to undermine the Korèsans, and it’s possible those lies have lived on, as lies tend to do. He could not, however, have made an ally of Fasahd, for Fasahd had not been born when Woput left.”
After a pause, Brother Red went on to say, “We know what books the Woput was reading before he left. Perhaps, if you were to read them, you would understand what he was up to. We can get those books from our library—”
“So you have one, too,” snarled Soaz.
“Only our own. Since this place is secure, we have stored all our books and documents here, all those we have had from earliest times. It is not as large as the emperor’s library, nor so well equipped as the one Prince Izakar describes, but it probably has documents in it that exist nowhere else.”
And that is where it stopped for the nonce. Izzy and Soaz and the countess spent the remainder of the day in the library. Sahir went in to chivvy them from time to time, but he had no stomach for helping them. I went in and out as well, sometimes listening to them mumble at one another. It was less amusing than helping Dzilobommo prepare food for us all or playing in the fountain with the onchiki. I told Lucy Low about everything, of course. I had meant it when I said we had entirely too many secrets.
Brother Red came upon the two of us where we were enjoying ourselves in the garden, though really it was only a paved terrace set about a fountain with some pots of flowers here and there against the walls.
“Oh, you are a strange and motley group to do what must be done,” said Brother Red in his slightly nasal, slightly whining voice.
“We may be motley,” I said indignantly, “but of us all, you and your ilk are the strangest.”
“True.” He seated himself on the curbing of the fountain and started to dip his fingers in the water, becoming aware, suddenly, of his gloves.
“You don’t always wear those,” I said.
He shook his head.
I pushed a little farther. “There are not any females here.”
Having said which I waited, wanting him to make some comment, but he did not.
“Why?” I demanded.
“All our daughters and ladyfolk are far from here,” he murmured. “A lifetime’s journey, almost. I have not seen my love for ten long years.”
“And why is that?”
He shuddered. I did not know if he was laughing or crying. “We are so few,” he said at last. “We are inbred. We have known it for a long time. Our children are few, and often they do not live. They are born with hereditary diseases and conditions…. Our ancestors have much to answer for.”
“Why? What did they do?”
He put a fingertip in the water, stirring it. “Long ago, they used machines and drugs to keep the unhealthy and unfit ones of us alive. In that past time it was believed that all persons must have children. It was a right deemed so precious that it was forced upon even those who did not value it or should not have had it. If one of our people became pregnant, our people used all their knowledge to assure the young would be born, no matter how sick or disabled. Then, if the young lived, they injected them and dosed them and radiated them and transfused and transplanted them, to keep them alive, and then, when they were grown, they used all their skills in assisting them to have children of their own.”
Lucy Low asked, “How did your people survive the plague?”
“We did not know about the plague until Izzy told us,” said Brother Red. “We had no idea how our cycle ended. Our legends tell us our ancestors were part of the tribal government, and we were iso
lated in a protected place underground, a place with vast stores of food and water, a place of technology and laboratories and manufacture by machines. We lived in that place for a century before we emerged. By the time we did, our genetic weaknesses had permeated all our tribe and there were no other peoples to breed with. Only degenerate…” He fell silent, shaking his head.
“So sad,” said Lucy Low.
“A tragedy,” he agreed. “We carry that heritage. Our children still die, two out of every three.”
“Would you not do better breeding more frequently than every ten long years?” I asked, amazed.
He shrugged. “Our wise ones tell us we must breed more widely, not more frequently. Each female must have children by as many males as possible. Each male must impregnate as many different females as possible. If a child is born who is unhealthy, that child must not breed at all. I have fathered fifteen children there, where my dear love dwells, and she has had seven children, but only one of them is mine.”
“How many lived? Of yours?”
“Better than average. Of the fifteen, four are living and two are considered healthy. The others came feebly from the womb, struggled a time, then passed away, like flowers. Some of my colleagues can father no living children, no matter who the mother is.”
“So, when you have done fathering, you come here?”
“To avoid conflict among us, between our fatherings, we come here or to one of our other places, near the western sea, or far to the south, past Isfoin, to the jungles, where is another such place. And we dream of blessed Chamony of the Fountains, for there our hearts lie.”
“You love her still?” asked Lucy Low.
He sighed dramatically. “I love, yes. We have always loved. And such a life as ours keeps love as pure as the dew upon the gervatch petal. We never have a chance to grow weary of one another.”
I heard him with distress, for his heart was on his tongue. “But if it helps your people to survive…”
“Three chances out of ten we will survive. Our survival is only perhaps. And I think of what your friend said. What was it? ‘While there are many of my people, there is only one of me.’ So with us. While there are perhaps a thousand of our people, there is only one Beloved Maryam, there is only one me.”
Lucy Low said, “But if we go back in time…perhaps we will change things.”
He laughed, a jeering sound. “That was the Woput’s failing! Wanting to change things! How would you know you did not change them for the worse? The best we can ask is that you stop the Woput! That you prevent his interference! We don’t expect you to do anything for us because we don’t know what you could do.”
“You believe stopping him is a righteous thing for us to do?”
“Yes,” he said, leaning wearily upon the curbing. “And who could argue against righteousness. I only wish righteousness could make us feel less lonely.”
“One’s own extinction is a lonely business,” said another of the Weelians, Brother Green, who came walking across the pavement, his hand outstretched. “But worse is to cause the extinction of another people. Our respected leader says that he who causes another’s extinction will dwell forever in hell, an unforgiven executioner, to the end of time.”
“So he says,” murmured Brother Red, staring at the wall of the terrace and beyond it, away north. I wondered where Chamony of the Fountains was. I wondered if, when his Maryam was too old for childbearing, Brother Red might be permitted to come home to her once more. I did not ask, and they did not speak of it further.
I could go on and on about the next two days. There were a great many attacks (all verbal, of course) and retreats. There were bargaining sessions. There were threats and shouts and murmurings in corners and, I should suppose from my own example, not a few tears. None of us had set out on this journey with any sense of personal commitment to fixing things. Well, Izakar, perhaps, though nothing he said convinced me of his dedication. We had all fallen into the journey, or gone along, or been sent, and when all the complaints and words were done, none of us were eager. We were merely resigned to going forward. Or backward, as fate would have it.
The trouble was that the Weelians were convincing and the books were convincing. They told us things that only Izzy had known about before, that three thousand years before there had been more tribes than there were today, each with its own nation or location, its own culture, language, cuisine, many of them with individual styles of dress or a specific religion. They told us that these peoples began to mix, just as we did in our own time, and that some persons could not bear this! This one would have only his own country and would kill to maintain it; that one would have only his own language and would kill for that; the next one would have only his own religion and would kill for that; the final one would have no other flag! So, the books said, some tribe invoked its god and loosed a plague that destroyed almost everyone, including themselves.
According to Izzy, none of the gods of that time had survived, except for Korè.
“It was Korè’s people who fought for all the beings of nature during a time when nature itself was threatened with extinction. If this Woput wishes to change things, he will try to eliminate Korè,” Izzy told us.
“Did you find Korè in these books?” asked the countess.
“One of the books he was reading just before he left describes the rites of Korè,” he said. “What is written is incomplete, but I can see how it might have tantalized him. Perhaps, in his madness, he extrapolated from these incomplete references…”
None of which was decisive. In the end, we knew only what we had been told at the beginning: this Woput, this low-life, had gone back to change things so that other tribes would die but not his own. In the end, after we had talked it to death, we agreed that someone had to go after him and put a stop to his…whatever.
“What does he look like?” demanded the countess. “How shall we recognize him?”
Much embarrassment among the Weelians. “He did not go bodily,” they said. “He chose to take the body of someone living at that time, in order not to seem strange or out of place. That is why we still have the control, and now the key. Had he gone bodily, he could have taken them with him, as you will take them with you, so you can return. If he had had them, he could have returned, but he left them here, with his dead body, when he went.”
This started the whole discussion over again, with a new set of information. I grew weary. The countess grew weary. We called an end to it and went to supper, where we told everyone about everything, much to the amazement of the onchiki and even of Dzilobommo, who evinced surprise by leaning back and staring at the ceiling without grummeling for a very long time. Soaz and Prince Sahir continued arguing in one corner, the countess seemed to be having a similar discussion with Blanche in another corner, the Weelians drifted about, making apocryphal noises. I told everyone I was going to bed, and this broke up the gathering.
I thought three thousand years was a very long time, but Izzy said it wasn’t. He sat on the foot of my bed and whispered to me about time, and space and other worlds that revolved, perhaps, around the stars, and how it was all billions of years old. He told me about the Gyptians, whose culture had lasted for thousands of years but who had, in time, passed away, and of the Maya, who had built a great empire but had passed away, and the Gricks and the Perishans and the Rohmans and the Shinees, all passed away, then our peoples, too, all but the remnants of the Mercans and the Frynch and the Chermans and all who still lived in our tribes of the current age.
“The library says all those tribes used to fight among themselves. The emperor doesn’t want civilization to fall apart again. He’s trying so hard to prevent it,” whispered Izzy, there in the dormitory, with the three wounded guards snoring in one corner and the umminhi muttering behind the wall. The onchiki were piled on the bed next to me, sleeping quietly, like children.
“Do you think it can be prevented?” I asked. “Is it what we were meant for?”
He th
rew up his hands. “I don’t want to just sit here, waiting for the end.”
“I will go with you, Prince Izakar,” I said.
“And I,” said Lucy Low, opening one eye from the bottom of the pile. “And Burrow and Mince will go, too.”
“We all will,” said the countess wearily from a distant bed. “If you young ones will please let us get some sleep. Three thousand years may not be forever, as you say, but it is a very long journey, and we should be well rested when we begin.”
There were still fifteen of us when we were ready to depart. Three of the Weelians took us down into the place beneath the tower where their ancestors had found the thing. We saw the place for the first time, a circular platform made of something much like gray stone, only all of one piece, seamless, with great metal spokes running out from it into the mountain itself. This part did look rather like a wheel. Inside the circle was a great coil, like a gigantic worm or an enormous rope that wound down and down and down again into the very center of the earth. So we observed for ourselves when we walked out onto a kind of crane that extended over the middle. It was like looking down into a well, or into the coils of some unimaginably great black-speckled serpent. The Weelians lowered a light, and we could see that obdurate, terrible substance going around and around and around, forever. It had not been built, they told us, for even in the centuries since they had come here, it had grown, slowly turning its way into the world, like a great screw. They did not know if it was living or perhaps half living, or something else entirely.
Only the topmost coil was visible, and it was surrounded by a haze of violet light which, we were told, was impermeable. At the very end of the coil, however, was a thinning in the haze, an almost clear space, and the end of the coil itself had a gelatinous, almost transparent look.
“It isn’t set yet,” said Brother Red, commenting upon the gelatinous appearance of it. “Recent history takes a while to set. People really don’t know what just happened. They only figure it out later.”