“What do you make of it, friend?” Tedesco asked over his shoulder as they tramped the crumbling streets, stepped around piles of curious debris and skirted gaping holes in the pavement that gave entrance to secret, vaulted cellars out of which swept cool, briskly moving currents of air. All the while they were flanked by the shiplike structure; it was immense.
“Nothing,” Jask said curtly.
“You've seen its like?”
“Never.”
“Then it would seem to me that such a sight would give rise to all manner of doubts — concerning your religion, that is.”
“It is not a spaceship,” Jask said.
“Oh?”
“It is something else altogether, something that was once quite common and ordinary.”
“Such as?”
“A monument, perhaps.”
Tedesco laughed aloud but said nothing more. He was aware that he had scored a point and that if he continued on this tact, he would only force Jask into a rambling and boring exposition of the tenets of his faith, of Pure beliefs. He had said that they would discuss the history of the Earth — both his version and the Pure, theological explanation — later, and he had meant that. Right at the moment, however, they must concentrate on clearing these ruins, which could easily be circled by Pure soldiers and sealed off. They must gain the forest and, shortly after that, the sanctity of the Chen Valley Blight.
At last they passed the tail section of the abandoned spacecraft — if, indeed, spacecraft it was — the soaring, rust-spotted, sixty-foot-diameter cylinders that might have been six mighty engines glinting like blue jewels in the slanting rays of the giant sun. Now Jask was more at ease, relieved of the threatening sight of the ship, no longer constantly confronted with the wonder of it — the deeply heretical wonder of it. Still, he found a great deal to catch his eye, engage his mind and make him feel, ultimately, as if he were displaced, lost, alone and unhappy.
Approximately twenty meters above the shattered street, the broken sections of the second-level roadway swept in what were clearly once-graceful arcs from one peak of ruin to another, sometimes breaking off in midair, thick beams dangling precariously but held well enough to have lasted out the bitter centuries. Here and there the roads crossed pylons or struck through the center of buildings, twisting out the other side and curving away in another direction. Beneath the roadways, twisted, charred, vine-eaten machines, which may have once been the vehicles that traveled the skyway, lay quiet and dreaming, dulled and pitted and useless.
They passed through a courtyard ringed by the smashed and rotting walls of stone and plastic buildings and found, miraculously, a pocket of cleanliness and perfection in the midst of the post-holocaust city. Here, pillars of glass, rising fifty meters into the sky, each easily ten meters in diameter and as clear as fine crystal, ringed a dark glass floor, upon which had been traced curious designs in crimson frost.
“What's this?” Jask inquired as their feet squeaked on the slick floor.
“I don't really know,” Tedesco said.
“Then how is it so undamaged, while the remainder of the city died so long ago?”
“I haven't the answer to that, either,” the bruin said, stepping up the pace.
Jask genuinely desired answers to these questions, for the strange place had intrigued him more than a little — yet he was perversely pleased that Tedesco lacked this knowledge.
They passed beyond the glimmering glass columns, stepped off the shining floor and walked on through more mundane scenery, through crushed blocks of stone, jagged sheets of glass, twisted steel beams, the yellowed bones of men, the bones of other less identifiable creatures, past machines of all shapes and sizes, past a row of six pyramidal buildings where the doors were ten meters high and twice that wide and opened on unknowable chambers or devices, past statues of men who had presumably once been famous, past statues of creatures who were in no way similar to man and who were even too unhuman to be classified as tainted creatures, quasi-men, statues that could only be of beasts. But who, Jask wondered, would erect a monument to a nonintelligent creature? They passed more of these, some broken, some in perfect order, passed a great glass bell with what appeared to be thousands of names etched into its sweeping surface, passed an amphitheater with one seat and a multitude of stages. Shortly they came upon the most unexpected sight of alclass="underline" three man-sized maintenance robots busily removing the debris from a wall that had recently collapsed for half its length.
They stopped.
They watched, perplexed.
All three robots were in bad repair, tarnished, stained, creaking, with tortured limbs and gap-edged joints, each as tall as two men but somehow diminished by their ruined facades, just as an old man, though keeping his full height and stature, oftentimes seems tiny and frail and useless. One of these three machines had a broken tread. It bumped around on its two good strips while the damaged band flapped loudly in its wake. Another had only one good digited extensor arm with which to gather the trash, letting the other three limbs slap wildly about, jerking this way and that without purpose like the afflicted arms of a cerebral palsy victim. The last machine was blind, ramming heedlessly into obstacles, slapping its scoop hands into empty air when it wished to gather rubble, succeeding at making any achievement at all only because it relied on its audio receptors to take its clues from its two companions. Yet the three of them toiled industriously, scraping up the slag into their bulbous middles, where they had considerable storage facilities, trundling the stuff away to licensed garbage dumps.
“Why do they bother to clean up this one thing?” Jask asked, fascinated by the noisy trio. “Why worry over a single pile of stones in the midst of disaster?”
“Who can say?” Tedesco asked, shifting the weight of the rucksack on his broad back. He wiped sweat out of his eyes and sighed deeply. “They're still clanking around, guided by the orders of men long dead, as alien to this demolished city as we are. Who can say what they mean or what they expect?”
“If these machines survive,” Jask said, “perhaps others survive, in better condition — perhaps enough of them to risk dissecting a few to see how they're constructed.”
“Perhaps,” Tedesco said. “But we haven't the time to linger and find out. Come along, we must get moving again.”
The robots kept at their work.
One limped.
One slapped at the air.
One stumbled blindly.
Wearily Jask hefted his gray cloth sack full of supplies, slung it over his back as the bruin had taught him to do, and followed in the dusty steps of the quasi-man, now and again turning to look back at the rattling, banging, merry crew of workers until they were no longer visible and the sounds of their mindless labor had been swallowed up by warm air, sunshine and the sound of their own footsteps.
As they walked through the last of the antediluvian metropolis, the thrusting green heads of trees now visible as the forest neared, Jask wondered, for the first time, how strange and unacceptable the Wildlands must be. If here, so close to the white cliff and the fortress, lay ten thousand unfathomable mysteries, what even more inexplicable and awful things lay in the Chen Valley Blight and beyond? Here, according to the theology he had been taught, Nature at least maintained some grasp on the land, held out however minimally against the Ruiner. What madness had been perpetrated in lands where Lady Nature had no control at all, in the wild places?