He let his mind drift down toward them, and he entered into the blaze of their dazzling aura, and he sank into the shadowy cloak that covered their souls.
And he felt their inwardness, and knew their nature. And the knowledge of it struck him with such force that it thrust him down to the ground, huddling on his knees as though a mighty hand had pressed against his back.
Once more Hresh heard the mocking voice of the sapphire-eyes artificial, saying in a voice of thunder, You are not human. There no longer are humans here. What you are is monkeys, or the children of monkeys. The humans are gone from the earth.
Was it so? Yes. Yes, it was.
Thesewere the humans. These pale long-legged furless things, these Dream-Dreamers, these ghosts and phantoms floating through Vengiboneeza of old.
He touched their souls, and he knew the truth, and there was no way to hide from it.
He felt the ancientness of them. Their unending lifeline, falling backward, backward in time, across so many years that he had no name for a number that huge, millions of years, eternities. They had lived upon this world since the beginning of it, or so it seemed. He was crushed beneath the weight of that immense past of theirs, that staggering burden of their history. He looked into their souls and he beheld a vast procession of empires and realms that had risen and fallen and risen again, an endless immortal cycle of grandeur, kings and queens, warriors, poets, chroniclers, a host of accomplishments so great that they baffled his understanding. Surely they were gods. For, like gods, they were able to create and then to turn away from their creations; they could allow towering achievements beyond his comprehension to slip into oblivion, and then would create anew and turn away again, and again and again.
Surely these people, Hresh thought, must be the true masters of Vengiboneeza, rather than the sapphire-eyes whom we had thought were the rulers here.
But no. Not the masters, these humans. They did not need to be. To the sapphire-eyes fell the responsibilities of planning and government; to the mechanicals fell the burden of labor; to the hjjk-men and the sea-lords and the vegetals fell the various functions of commerce that sustained the life of the Great World. The humans, Hresh saw, simply were. An ancient race, declining now in numbers, they warmed themselves with glories out of an unimaginable antiquity. This world had once been theirs, theirs alone, and they showed by nothing more than the look of their eyes that they had not forgotten that ancient supremacy of theirs, nor did they begrudge having surrendered it, for it had been a willing surrender. Perhaps they had created the other five races long before. Certainly the others, even the sapphire-eyes, deferred to them without hesitation. Surely they were gods. Surely. Whenever he touched the mind of one of them it felt as he imagined it would feel to touch the mind of Dawinno or Friit.
After a while Hresh could no longer bear to be near them. He backed away from them as he would from a blazing fire, and moved onward, still searching, still finding.
There were still other races in the city, in even smaller numbers than the humans. They were strange creatures, of many startling sorts. Of some he could find no more than four or five representatives, of some a single one only. They looked like nothing that his studies of the chronicles had prepared him to encounter. Hresh saw beings with two heads and six legs and beings with no heads at all and a forest of arms. He saw beings with teeth like a thousand needles set round circular mouths that gaped in their stomachs. He saw beings that lived in sealed tanks and beings that floated like bubbles above the ground. He saw ponderous things moving with an earthshaking tread, and light, fluttering ones whose motions dazzled his eye. From them all came the unmistakable glint of intelligence, though it was not an earthly intelligence, and the emanations of their souls were puzzling and disturbing to him.
In time Hresh realized what these beings were. Star-creatures. Visitors from the worlds that circled the bright cold fires of the night. In the era of the Great World there must have been constant comings and goings of star-travelers among the worlds of heaven. From one of these strangers, maybe, had come the very Wonderstone that had granted him this vision.
And us? he thought. The People? Are we nowhere to be found in this mighty Vengiboneeza?
Nowhere. Not a trace. We are not here.
It was shattering. His people were altogether absent from the splendor and grandeur of the Great World.
He struggled to absorb and comprehend it. He told himself that this scene he saw was unfolding itself in the unimaginable past, long before the coming of the death-stars. Perhaps whole peoples are born just as individuals are, he thought: perhaps, on this age-old day that I have journeyed to, our kind is yet unborn. Our time is not yet come.
But that was small consolation. The deeper truth resonated and reverberated with terrible force in his soul.
You are not human. What you are is monkeys, or the children of monkeys.
The proof lay before him, and still he could not accept it. Not human? Not human? His mind whirled. He knew what it meant to be human, or believed that he did; and to be excluded from that great skein of existence that stretched backward into the depths of time was an agony beyond endurance. He felt cut adrift, severed from every root that bound him to the world. For a long while he hovered motionless in some sphere of air above ancient Vengiboneeza, numb, bewildered, lost.
Hresh had no idea how long he stood by the device in the underground vault, gripping the knobs and levers, while the Great World poured in torrents through his dazzled mind. But after a time he felt the vision beginning to fade. The shining towers turned misty, the streets blurred and melted and ran in streams before his eyes.
He gripped the levers more tightly. It was no use. His spirit was drifting upward now toward the stony reality of the cavern beneath the tower.
Then ancient Vengiboneeza was gone. But he was still under the spell of the Barak Dayir, and as he rose he saw once more the pattern of the ruined city in his mind as he had seen it upon his descent, those inter-locking circles, the blazing points of red light. Suddenly he understood what those red lights must be: the places where the life of the Great World still burned in the ruins. Wherever he saw those dots of hot light, there would he find caches of the treasure he sought.
Hresh had neither time nor strength to deal with that now. He felt dazed and weak. And yet a powerful exaltation lingered within his soul, mixed with great confusion, with self-doubt, with despair.
He looked around in disbelief at the huge hollow of the cavern: the dry earthen floor strewn with drifts of dust and cobwebs and bits of rubble, the dim lights, the half-seen statuary rising in insane profligacy along the walls. The Great World still seemed vivid and real to him, and this place only a shabby dream. But from moment to moment the balance was steadily shifting; the Great World slipped beyond his reach, the cavern became the only reality he had.
“Haniman!” he cried.
His voice came out cracked and ragged and thin, and half an octave too high.
Hresh tried again. “Haniman! Bring me up!”
There was no response from overhead. He stared up into the musty blackness, squinting, peering. He heard the sounds of chittering things moving about in the walls. But nothing from Haniman.
“Haniman!”
He bellowed it with all his strength. There was a sound as if of fine rain. Rain, down here? No, Hresh realized. Tiny pebbles, bits of sand and dirt, falling from the roof of the cavern. His voice alone had brought them down. Another such shout and he might bring the roof itself down upon him.
His nerves trembled like lute-strings. He wondered if Haniman had abandoned him in this tomb — simply walked off to leave him to rot and die. Or perhaps he had wandered away on some excursion of his own. Maybe it was just that Hresh was so far below the surface that Haniman was unable to hear his calls. Yissou! Hresh considered calling again. This place had endured the earthquakes of seven hundred thousand years; could it be tumbled by a single shout? “ Haniman!” he called once more. “ Haniman!” But once more his cries produced nothing but a further shower of fine particles from above.