“Light your torch,” Hresh said. “I want to see what’s on the far side.”
Cautiously they circled the interior of the building, staying close to the line of the outer wall. But the shimmering metal structure overhead seemed to be the only thing the building contained. At ground level there was nothing remarkable anywhere. The floor was bare brown dirt, dry and hard. When they came around to the entrance again Hresh, beckoning to Haniman, stepped outside, and they crossed the plaza to the next building in the circle. It was identical inside to the first, intricate metalwork within a dark hollow shell. So was the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Not until they reached the tenth building in the series did they come upon anything that was different.
This one had a rectangular slab of glossy black stone, the same kind of stone that had been used to pave the plaza outside, set flush with the ground in the center of its bare floor. It could have been some sort of altar; or perhaps it was the hatch covering a subterranean chamber.
You should search more deeply,the sapphire-eyes’ artificial had said.
Hresh scowled and shook his head. Surely the creature hadn’t meant anything so stupidly literal as to look underground.
He knelt and rubbed his hand over the rectangle of black stone. It was cool and very smooth, like some sort of dark glass, and it bore no inscriptions that Hresh could see, or even the traces of them. Stepping out into the middle of it, he looked up into the dizzying strutwork overhead. Here in the center of the tower the lowest struts were just beyond his reach.
“Come here and crouch down,” Hresh said. “I want to try something.”
Haniman obligingly went to his knees. Hresh scrambled to Haniman’s shoulders and told him to rise; and when Haniman stood erect Hresh gave the nearest metal strut a sharp two-fingered tap that set the whole building to ringing with brilliant echoing tones.
At once the black rectangular slab responded with a deep groaning sound and a kind of mechanical sigh; and then it began to move, gliding slowly downward.
“Hresh?”
“Steady,” Hresh said. “Here. Let me down.” He jumped from Haniman’s back and stood stiffly beside him, uneasily struggling to maintain his balance as the stone block went on unhurriedly descending, seeming to float, down and down and down through the darkness.
Finally it came to rest. Sudden amber light glowed about them. Hresh looked around. They were at the lowest level of a high-vaulted cavern that seemed to stretch away through the depths of the earth forever. Its roof was lost in the shadows far overhead. The air was stale and dry, with a sharp stabbing quality to it that reminded Hresh of the cold air in the first days after they had left the cocoon, although it was not cold in this place.
To the right and to the left along the cavern walls and rising as far as he could see was a great clutter of graven images, huge carvings half shrouded in darkness, climbing in tier upon tier. It was difficult at first to make out the shapes that were portrayed, but gradually Hresh began to discern that they were sapphire-eyes folk, mainly, carved from some green stone in high relief, their heavy jutting jaws and rounded bellies savagely exaggerated. The figures were grotesque, bizarre, with an aspect that was both comic and terrifying. Some were enormously fat, or had absurdly elongated limbs, or eyes as big across as a dozen saucers. Many of them had five or six smaller versions of themselves sprouting like boils from their bellies or shoulders. Their sinister daggerlike teeth were bared. Silent laughter seemed to boom from their gaping mouths.
But the statues that rose in uncountable numbers on both sides of them were not only those of sapphire-eyes. There was a whole world here — a cosmos, even — dense, congested, statue upon statue in crazy profusion, all manner of beings packed tightly together in crowded groups.
Here and there Hresh saw the carved figures of hjjk-men interspersed with the sapphire-eyes, and some dome-headed mechanicals not very different from the ones the tribe had found rusting in the lowlands just beyond the mountains of scarlet rock, and other creatures that looked like walking shrubs, with petals for faces and leafy branches for arms and legs.
“What are those?” Haniman asked.
“Vegetals, I think. A tribe of the Great World that perished in the Long Winter.”
“And those?” said Haniman. He pointed to a group of pale elongated beings that reminded Hresh very much of Ryyig Dream-Dreamer, that strange hairless creature who had dwelled in slumber in the cocoon for, so it was said, hundreds of thousands of years. These walked upright on two long thin legs and looked something like the people of the tribe, but they had no fur and no sensing-organs, and their attenuated bodies, even in stone, seemed flimsy and soft.
Hresh stared a long while at them.
“I don’t know what they’re supposed to be,” he said finally.
“They’re like the Dream-Dreamer, aren’t they?”
“I thought so too.”
“A whole race of Dream-Dreamers.”
Hresh pondered that. “Why not? Before the Long Winter, all sorts of beings may have lived on Earth.”
“So Dream-Dreamers were one of the Six Peoples of the Great World that the chronicles talk about?” Haniman began to count on his fingers. “Sapphire-eyes, sea-lords, hjjks, vegetals, humans — that’s five—”
“You left out mechanicals,” said Hresh.
“Right. That’s all six, then. So who were the Dream-Dreamers?”
“From some other star, maybe. There were all sorts of people here from other stars in those days.”
“What was somebody from another star doing living in our cocoon?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“There’s a lot you seem not to know, isn’t there?”
“You ask too many questions,” said Hresh irritably.
“Ah, but you are Hresh-of-the-answers.”
“Ask me this one another time, will you?” Hresh said.
He turned away, stepping down cautiously from the slab of stone that had borne them to this place and tentatively advancing a few paces up the floor of the cavern. As he moved forward the amber glow preceded him, illuminating his path. It seemed to radiate from invisible outlets that might have been set fifteen or twenty paces apart, activated by his proximity.
Though overwhelmingly intricate masses of statuary rose along the walls on both sides far into the distance, the cavern floor itself seemed bare. But as Hresh continued he began to make out a blocklike object, high and broad, sitting in his path far up in the dimness. When he was closer he saw it to be a complex and significant structure, perhaps a machine, set all about with knobs and levers fashioned from a shining tawny substance that looked almost like bone.
“What do you think?” Haniman asked.
Hresh chuckled. “Haniman-full-of-questions, they’ll call you!”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It could be. I don’t know. There’s nothing about any of this in anything I’ve read.” He raised his hands and let them hover above the nearest row of knobs, not daring to touch anything. He had a sudden clear sense of this thing as a master control unit to which all the metal webwork of the three dozen towers of the plaza was connected. Those spirals of struts and braces might serve to collect and funnel energy to it.
And if I touch the knobs? he wondered. Will all that energy go roaring through my body and destroy me?
To Haniman he said, “Stand back.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Conduct a test. It could be dangerous.”
“Shouldn’t you wait, and study it a little first?”
“This is how I will study it.”
“Hresh—”
“Stand back. Farther. Farther still.”
“This is craziness, Hresh. You’re talking nonsense and your eyes look wild. Get away from that thing!”
“I have to try it,” Hresh said.
He put his hands to the nearest knobs and squeezed them as tightly as he could.