Taniane saw it once, when he took it by accident from his sash. “What’s that?” she asked. “Are you learning how to draw pictures now?”
“It isn’t anything important.”
“Can I took?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I won’t make fun of it, I promise.”
“It’s — a sacred thing,” he said lamely. “Something only the chronicler can look at.”
He wondered why he had told her that. There was nothing sacred about the map. Indeed, not only was there no reason to conceal it from her, but he knew that he probably should make copies of it, so that the others could at least begin to gain some understanding of the city. But somehow he found himself reluctant. The map gave him power over the city, and power too over the rest of the tribe. The pleasure he took in his private knowledge of it was not, Hresh knew, particularly admirable. But it was real pleasure all the same and he prized it.
On a day in early winter when he felt oppressed to the depths of his soul by the disappointment and frustration of his fruitless search, Hresh returned to the main southern gate, where he had encountered the three gigantic artificials that the sapphire-eyes had left behind. They stood just where they had been, near the great pillars of green stone, silent, motionless, majestic.
He walked around them until he stood before them. He stared up at them without fear or awe this time.
“If you were anything more than machines,” he said, “you’d know that you’ve been wasting your time standing guard here all these thousands of years.”
The one on the left looked at him with something like amusement in its huge shining blue eyes.
“Is that the truth, little monkey?”
“You mustn’t call me that! I’m a human! A human!” Hresh pointed angrily at the center sapphire-eyes, the one who had finally granted Koshmar and her people permission to enter the city. “You admitted it yourself! ‘You are the humans now,’ you told us.”
“Yes. That is correct,” said the center sapphire-eyes. “You are the humans now.”
“Do you hear that?” Hresh said to the left-hand one.
“I do. And I agree: you are the humans now. For whatever that may be worth to you. But why do you say we have wasted our time, little monkey?”
Hresh fought back his annoyance.
“Because,” he said frostily, “you guard an empty city. Our books say that useful things are supposed to be stored here. But there’s nothing but ruined buildings, calamity, chaos, dust, trash.”
“Your books are correct,” said the center one.
“I’ve searched everywhere. There’s nothing. The buildings are empty. One good sneeze would bring half the place toppling down.”
“You should search more deeply,” said the left-hand sapphire-eyes.
“And search with that which can help you find what you seek,” said the right-hand one, speaking for the first time.
“I don’t understand. Tell me what you mean.”
The hissing sound of their laughter showered down about him.
“Little monkey!” said the left-hand one, almost affectionately. “Ah, impatient little monkey!”
“Tell me!”
But all he could get from them was the hissing of their laughter, and their indulgent, patronizing crocodile smiles.
Hresh was with Haniman, a month or two afterward, in the sector of the city that he called Emakkis Boldirinthe, when finally he made his first discovery of a working artifact out of the Great World.
Emakkis Boldirinthe was a northern district of extraordinary grace and beauty, midway between the sea and the foothills, where three dozen slender tapering towers of dark blue marble were arrayed in a circle around a broad plaza paved with shining black flagstones. The windows of the towers were intact in their triangular frames, yielding a dazzling pink glint as they reflected the light of late afternoon. Intricately carved metal doors twice the height of a man rested still on their massive hinges, seemingly ready to swing open at a touch. The buildings looked as if they had been abandoned only the day before yesterday. Staring at them in wonder, Hresh felt the weight of the inconceivable ages pressing down on him, a sense that all time was compressed into this single moment. A prickling sensation ran along the back of his neck, as though myriad invisible eyes were watching him.
“What do you think?” Haniman asked. “Do we try to go inside?”
They had been searching all day. A wet wind was blowing. Hresh felt weary and dispirited.
“I’ve already been in them,” he said, though it was untrue. Several times now he had seen these towers at a distance, and once had come this close to them; but in a perverse way their very intactness had discouraged him from trying to enter. Somehow there had seemed no point in it. They would be as empty as all the rest; and his disappointment would be all the more keen because they seemed so well preserved.
“You have? All of them? Every single one?”
“Do you doubt me?” Hresh said sourly.
“It’s just that there are so many — and there’s always the chance that one of them somewhere around the circle will have something, anything—”
“All right,” Hresh said. He lacked heart for sustaining the lie any longer. It was only his weariness, he thought, that made him not want to peer inside these buildings, he who had explored so many less promising places. Hresh who called himself Hresh-full-of-questions and Hresh-of-the-answers should not need to be urged by the likes of Haniman to undertake this exploration now. “We’ll give them a look. And then we’ll call it a day.”
Haniman shrugged.
“I’ll go first,” he said.
Without waiting for permission from Hresh he loped toward the nearest tower and stood for a moment in front of its great door. Then he flung his arms out as far as they would go, as though he were trying to embrace the building, and pressed himself against it, pushing hard. The door rose so swiftly that Haniman, with a shout of surprise, tumbled forward into the vestibule and vanished in the darkness within.
Hresh rushed after him. By a long shaft of light he saw Haniman sprawling face down just inside the door.
“Are you all right?” Hresh called.
He watched Haniman slowly pick himself up, dust himself off, stare upward. Hresh followed Haniman’s gaze and gasped. The building was hollow within, a great dark open space containing nothing but a spiraling arrangement of thin metal struts and tubes that began a few feet from the ground and ran in leaping zigzags from wall to wall, higher and higher, in a design so complex that it dizzied him to trace its pattern. At first he could track it only for a few stories, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that the crisscrossing structures went up and up and up, possibly to the very top of the tower. It was like a great web. Hresh wondered whether some enormous quivering spider waited for them in the remote upper reaches. But this was a web of metal, unquestionably metal, shining airy silvery stuff, cool and smooth to his hand.
“Should we climb it?” Haniman said.
Hresh shook his head. “Let’s try to see what sort of place this is meant to be, first.”
He reached up and tapped the strut nearest him. It rang with a rich musical tone, deep and astonishingly beautiful, that rose slowly and solemnly to the next layer of the web and the next, and the next, touching off reverberations at each level. Wondrous shimmering sounds echoed all about them, growing steadily in intensity as they penetrated the higher reaches of the tower, until they became a deafening roar that filled the entire interior of the building.
Hresh stared in wonder and in delight, and in fear, too, thinking that in another moment the tone would succeed in reaching the top and under the force of that tremendous climactic clamor the entire structure might come crashing down.
But all that happened was that the tone, after it had attained a breath-taking mind-filling peak of volume, rapidly began to grow fainter and more delicate again. In moments it faded away entirely, leaving them in startling silence.