He expected anything: lightning cutting through the cavern like a bright sword, the crash of terrible thunder, the roar of the winds, the screaming of dead souls. Himself burned to a cinder in an instant. But all he felt was a faint warmth and a vague tingle. For an instant a startling, dizzying image flashed through his mind. It seemed to him that all the myriad statues on the walls had come to life, moving about, gesturing, talking, laughing. It was like being plunged into a turbulent stream, being swept down a wild whirlpool of life.
The sensation lasted only for a moment. But in that moment it seemed to Hresh that he himself was a citizen of the Great World. He was in the midst of all its wondrous surge and vigor. He saw himself striding down the throbbing streets of Vengiboneeza, moving through the turmoil and frenzy of a marketplace where members of the Six Peoples jostled one another by the thousands, sea-lords, vegetals, hjjks, sapphire-eyes, shoulder to shoulder. There was the sultry feel of warm moist air against his cheeks. Slender trees bent low under the weight of their thick, heavy, glossy blue-green leaves. Strange music tingled in his ears. The scent of a hundred unfamiliar spices astonished his nostrils. The sky was a tapestry of brilliant colors, azure, turquoise, ebony, crimson. It was all there. It was all real.
He was stunned by it, and humbled, and shamed.
All at once he understood what a true civilization was like: the immense bustling complexity of it, the myriad interactions, the exchange of ideas, the haggling in the marketplace, the schemes and plans, the conflicts, the ambitions, the sense of a great many people simultaneously moving in a host of individual directions. It was so very different from the only life he had known, the life of the cocoon, the life of the People, that he was stricken with profound awe.
We are really nothing, he thought. We are mere simple creatures who lived in hiding for century upon century, going through endless repetitious rounds of trivial activity, building nothing, changing nothing, creating nothing.
His eyes grew hot with tears. He felt small and lowly, a cipher from a tribe of ciphers deluded by their own pretentions. But then his chagrin gave way suddenly to defiance and pride and he thought: We were very few. We lived as we had to live. Our cocoon thrived and we kept our traditions alive. We did our best. We did our best. And when it was the Time of Coming Forth we emerged to take possession of the world that had been left to us; and when we have had a little time we will make it great again.
Then the vision slipped away and the astounding moment was over, and Hresh stood trembling, blinking, bewildered, still alive.
“What happened?” Haniman asked. “What did it do?”
Hresh made an angry gesture. “Let me be!”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes. Let me be.”
He felt dazed. The world of this dark musty cavern seemed only a hateful phantom, and that other world, so bright, so vivid, was the true world of his life. Or so it had seemed, until the cavern had sprung up about him once more and that other world had been swept away beyond his grasp. Just then he would have given everything to have it back.
He suspected that he had tasted only the merest slice of what this machine could give him. The Great World lived anew within it! Some ancient magic was kindled here, some force drawn downward through the three dozen towers and the enormous jumble of statuary, a force that had roared through his mind and carried him back across the bygone centuries to a lost world of miracles and marvels. And he could make that leap through the eons again. All it took was a touch.
He held his hands above the knobs a second time.
“No, don’t!” Haniman cried. “You’ll be killed!”
Hresh waved him away and seized the knobs.
But nothing happened this time. He might have been holding his own elbows, for all the effect he felt.
He reached around, touching this knob, that one, this one, that one. Nothing. Nothing.
Perhaps the machine had burned itself out in order to allow him that one miraculous glimpse.
Or perhaps, he thought, he was the one who had burned out. It might be that his mind was so numb from the inrush of that force that it could absorb no more.
He stepped back and studied the thing thoughtfully. Maybe it took time to build up its power again after having discharged it. He would wait, he decided, and try it once more a little later.
The sapphire-eyes artificials at the gate had not deceived him, then, when they had told him to search more deeply. They had meant it in the most literal way. Perhaps all the wonders that Vengiboneeza still contained were to be found in hidden caverns like this, beneath the great buildings.
Then Hresh remembered the other thing the sapphire-eyes had told him.
Search with that which can help you find what you seek.
That advice had made little sense at the time. Now, suddenly, it did. He caught his breath sharply as fear and excitement swept through him in equal measure.
The Barak Dayir, did they mean? The Wonderstone?
That magical talisman which the generations of chroniclers kept hidden in the casket that held the books? The instrument that Thaggoran himself had handled with such fear and reverence?
It was worth trying, Hresh thought.
Even if he died in the attempt, the attempt would be worthwhile; for there were great questions to be answered here, and if he had to risk everything in the hope of gaining everything, so be it.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here — if we can.”
“You aren’t going to fool around with it any more?”
“Not now,” said Hresh. “I need to do some research first. I think I know how to make this thing work, but I have to consult the chronicles before I try it.”
“What did you see just now?”
“The Great World,” said Hresh.
“You did?”
“For an instant. Only an instant.”
Haniman stared at him, jaws slackening with amazement.
“What was it like?”
Hresh shrugged. “Grander than you could ever imagine,” he said in a low, weary tone.
“Tell me. Tell me.”
“Another time.”
Haniman was silent. After a moment he said, “Well, what will you do now? What is it you need to know to make the machine work?”
“Never mind that,” Hresh said. “What we need to know just now is how to make that stone block rise and get us out of this place.”
In the heat of his eagerness to explore the cavern he had given that problem no consideration at all. Getting down here had been easy enough; but what were they supposed to do to get out again? He beckoned to Haniman and they jumped on the slab of black stone. But the slab remained where it was on the cavern floor.
Hresh slapped his hand against the stone. No response. He groped along its edges for some lever that might operate it, akin to the wheel that had opened the hatch of the tribal cocoon in the old days. Nothing.
“Maybe there’s some other way up,” Haniman suggested. “A staircase somewhere.”
“And maybe if we flap our arms hard enough, we’ll fly right out of here,” Hresh said sharply. He squinted into the dimness. A lever sticking out of the wall, perhaps — run to it, pull it, run back quickly to the stab—
No lever. What now? Pray to Yissou? Yissou himself might not know the way out of this place. Or care that two inquisitive boys had stranded themselves in it.
“We can’t just sit here all day,” said Haniman. “Let’s get off and see if we can find something that controls it. Or a different way out. How do you know there isn’t a staircase around here somewhere?”
Hresh shrugged. It cost nothing to look. They began to make their way along the cavern floor in the direction opposite from the one they had taken before, peering here and there at the base of the statuary groups in search of a control unit, a hidden doorway, a staircase, anything.
Suddenly there was a groaning sound, as of a heavy vibration in the ground beneath them. They halted and stared at each other in surprise and flight. A dry, dusty odor spread like a stain through the thick stale air.