“Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”
Laurel rolled her eyes. “No, you won’t. Come on.”
Asach worried briefly that the hoods were about to go back on; that they’d spend the day teetering on precipices, blind. But not so: it was trail craft that concerned Laurel, not visibility. “Stay off the dirt. Stay off the sand. See there? Stay on the rock.” She pointed to an option off the obvious path; it required hopping across polished boulders, as if fording a stream. A light came on in Asach’s head.
“Is that what we’ve been doing all along? Avoiding seeing the trail? Avoiding making a trail?
Again, Laurel rolled her eyes. “What else?”
I don’t know, thought Asach. Initiation rites. Secret orders. Dark mystery. And so on.
Laurel trudged upward. “We share His gaze. We don’t hide it. But we’re not stupid. If they found this place, what do you think TCM would do?”
“I’m surprised they haven’t already.”
Laurel stopped and turned around. Her eyes were piercing aquamarine. They seemed to focus the dreary light. “A few have tried.”
She turned, and continued on.
Eventually, the path became—a path, worn into dark granite. Asach did some mental calculations. The Himmists had been on New Utah less than a century. Either there were a lot more of them than anyone thought, which was unlikely, or the path predated them by a very long time.
“Who made this?”
Laurel’s answer was matter-of-fact, as if Asach had asked the time. “The Angels.” She did not look back.
The path wore deeper into the rock, and widened. The route became more boulder-strewn. They were old, and weathered, and lichen-encrusted. Lichen-like encrusted. Who knew what grew here of its own. Then suddenly they stepped through the veil of fog into the open sun. Asach was momentarily dazzled. Before them lay a barren, until the path rounded up over a lip and disappeared. Behind them lay a carpet of cloud, sparkling in the sunshine.
Finally they reached the rim. Asach gasped as their heads cleared the rise. They looked out over the edge of a tabletop; the truncated remains of an ancient cone. It dipped gently away from the eye, like a concave lens seen edge-on. Windswept, bare, it seemed paved with diamonds. As they climbed up over the edge and stood to full height, the reason became clear. The ground was littered with foamy shards, brilliant white in the morning sun. Asach picked one up in a hand heated by the climb, and saw the ghost of blue iridescence. It was opal meerschaum.
“His tears,” smiled Laurel. “It makes me happy to be so near.”
As they walked on, the scattered chunks consolidated; some streaked edgewise in exposed veins, crystallized in an ancient volcanic layer-cake. Their boots crunched in the gravel. Then, behind them, floated the eerie thread of the Hymn as the others joined them on the plateau. It came from all directions, as other parties also cleared the edge, converging toward the unseen center, obscured by the slope of the land. Asach looked up at the aquamarine sky, clear as Laurel’s eyes. The day was crisp, clean; the sun warm. They walked on awhile. As the voices of one group joined the next, the singing became less a roundelay, but kept that exquisite polyphonic harmony. Then, as they approached a dip, Laurel held up a hand and turned, shouting back, “We stop here.”
Asach looked about, confused as others crowded past and pushed forward, singing in full voice. Joining hands; turning to look one another full in the eyes, then turning to do the same to each neighbor; they waved Asach to join in; belting out the final stanzas:
Arise! And leave no stone unturned!
Arise! And plow each field!
Arise! Believe! That all who yearn
Will see His Face revealed!
We fled in fear His awful Gaze
But with His Earthly Eye
He sees, He knows, He sends His Grace
Across all starry skies.
So shoulder all your burdens!
For when your time is done
Revealed at last! His angels
Will make all Churches one!
And as they ringed the rim and the final words echoed below, all looked down, and gasped again as one: even those who had been there before. Centered within a mile-wide bowl stretched a polished dome of white: a stratum of perfect opal meerschaum, nearly half a mile across, its overlying layers worn away by wind and time. It bulged upward slightly, perhaps due to pressures within the mountain core. At its center intruded—an old lava tube?—that radiated with crystalline depths in the sun, like a ruby set in gold. Or more likely, thought Asach, like a garnet set in mica, but why spoil the magic of it all?
Whatever the structure was that twinkled in the heart of the dead volcano, the effect was unmistakable: it did indeed, for all the world, look like an enormous red eye, complete with mica-speckled iris and a dark pupil staring up from deep within the mountain.
Unthinking, Asach stepped forward.
“No! No further! You could be consumed by His Gaze!” Laurel pointed to something at her feet.
Exasperated—it was, after all, only rocks—Asach followed the line of Laurel’s finger. There was something carved there, in the stone. Peering, it was difficult to make out. Fist-sized, old, scuffed, weathered, it looked like—eyes, maybe, over a lopsided mouth, but highly stylized.
“Watch for the Angels,” Laurel instructed. “Do not pass His Angels. Wait here. I must bring others.”
So, it seemed there was to be more to the show. Asach sank down cross-legged next to the carving, and settled in for the duration. Another round-trip would take a fair stretch of time. Doodling aimlessly with one finger on the rock, picking away stray bits of mossy, lichenish gunk, Asach studied the amazing panorama. The crystalline structure was hauntingly flawless. It drew the eye into its depths, like staring into infinity. Like staring into space—the eyes played tricks, and it even seemed to twinkle from time to time. On careful study, the mica seemed to be under, or behind, or—well, Asach really couldn’t decide, but anyway somehow layered with the gemstone, as if looking through it to the reflecting rock.
The wind blew steadily across the rim, and eventually Asach worked out why the meerschaum seemed so polished: in a sense, it was. The prevailing wind passed over the lip at a nock, sending it into a swirl through the bowl. The heavier particles had long since piled up in the lee corner; only the lightest dust was blown across, sweeping and polishing the stone smooth before it. The rim was far from solid: Asach could see nooks and caves riddling the face. Some whistled spookily as the dust devils blew past, or in.
As the sun passed overhead, then sank, high cirrus played tricks with the light. A rosy glow suffused the dome, feathering like wisps of smoke. Abandoning the particle-picking effort, Asach stood and peered again, eyes squinted. Translucent light was dancing across the stone in milky swirls. Asach looked around in vain for a source; peered again. But the light was clearly coming from within the dome itself: swirling, pooling, blue and green for an instant, then winking out. Agitated, Asach looked to the others. They were smiling; clapping, waving: “He wakes!” they called. “Here come the Seers, now!”
As Laurel topped the crest, another singing band in tow, dusk fell with that sudden plummet of the sun felt only in the mountains. The pilgrims now stood hand-to-hand in an enormous semicircle around the rim, their Seers spaced behind them. The colors showed up stronger in the gloam, and the dome itself glowed brighter: now milky; now cloudy; now clear.
“Now!” screamed Laurel, “Now! Avert Your Gaze! He Wakes!”
In that instant, Asach became intently aware of standing on the top of a volcano. Of the implications of a magma surge close enough, and hot enough, to excite that much meerschaum beyond playing at iridescent halos, and into emitting clear, incandescent, light. Of themselves, Asach’s eyelids clamped shut; of itself, Asach’s head snapped down. But like looking at the sun, mere eyelids were not enough to block the dazzle of brilliant green that bathed the dome, or the long green line that shot from the crater’s core straight up into the sky.