"Ring? The model shows three rings. How do they know there are three?"
"You'll know when we see a burial chamber of the people who made the rings. The honkers call them the Makers. We'll see the chamber soon. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The honkers call the rings the Generator.
"Generator of what?"
"The murals in the burial cave imply that the rings are a generator of some sort."
"And what happened to the Makers?"
"The honkers believe that the Makers built the Generator as a weapon against the Gaol, a last-ditch stand. But the Gaol killed all of them before it could be used. The Gaol had no idea what the ring was for. They consider it to be a great curiosity but not worth intensive investigation. To them, it's some kind of religious artifact."
"All those millennia, and the honkers don't have the slightest idea what its purpose is or how to operate it?"
Despite his strong pleadings, she refused to say more about it.
The Integrator was absent during the following "day." Jack asked Tappy if she knew where he was.
"He's gone ahead to the burial chamber we're to visit. He didn't say much about what he'd be doing there except that he had to repaint some of the murals. They're so ancient they need retouching now and then. I suppose he's going to prepare the chamber ritually for our visit."
The day after that, they were awakened early-or he thought it was early since there was no sun to go by-and were given breakfast. Immediately afterward, Candy accompanying them, they started their journey through the tunnels and the caves.
Three lesser shamans led the way. These lacked the implanted animals, but the genitals of each were covered with the mossy oyster-thing, and each had a pale snake-thing coiled around his or her neck.
Throughout the journey, Tappy was silent. Jack asked her what was depressing her. She only replied that she had much to think about and was trying to work her way through them. Would he please not be worried about her? She would be all right soon.
After three meals, the party came to a halt. The Integrator was waiting for them in a tunnel. The luciferous pods growing on the vines on the wall showed two large packs, a large canteen, a chamber pot, and a collapsible wooden ladder on the floor. The Integrator had camped here, Jack thought. But why at this place?
It looked like every other tunnel the party had traversed except that one section of the wall was bare of the vegetation.
But the honkers, including the lesser shamans, were obviously awed. All halted when they were thirty feet from the Integrator, bowed, and honked softly.
Tappy had spoken about the chambers during their trip. Nobody but the chief shaman entered them except for some highly placed shamans who repainted the murals when they needed it.
The Integrator, honking a "chant" over and over, danced around the tunnel in a tight circle. Then he went to the bare section and pushed on it. It swung out at one side and in at the other. It was a door of stone on pivots in its center. Musty air rushed out.
Jack looked into the darkness within. The shaman, after so...more incomprehensible "chanting" and dancing, lit a pine torch.
The flame wavered slightly, showing that the tunnel had some ventilation. The shaman posed in the doorway, facing toward Tappy. He honked at her, genuflected three times, turned, and walked into the darkness.
Tappy said, "You and Candy are allowed, too, Jack."
Candy just behind him, he followed the girl and the shaman for about twenty feet. The tunnel began curving here. After two hundred paces, counted by Jack, the tunnel straightened out.
Immediately, a large arched doorway was ahead of them. The shaman walked through it, his torch lighting up the immense chamber. He set that in a wall sconce, then lit two more torches he had carried in a bag on his back. He handed one to Tappy and one to Jack.
There were several fascinating objects seen dimly in the shadows deeper within the chamber. But a mural near him caused him to stop and study it by the light of his torch. It looked as if it had been painted yesterday. In fact, he could smell the paint.
He said, "I can't believe it."
Above him was a painting depicting, among other things, a group of four people. No. Change that to three people and one weird being who looked as if it were half machine. The human beings were a young female, a somewhat older male, and a woman. But a section of clockwork and wires was exposed in a hole in the woman's chest. That meant what? That she was not really a human being. She was an android.
And, though the half-machine did not look much like Garth, it portrayed a cyborg fitted with wheels.
To one side was another painting. It was clearly the space-time vessel in which he and Tappy had taken refuge and found the androids in it. Squiggly lines around it represented, he supposed, the pulsations emanating from the vessel.
All the images had been freshly repainted.
Jack's heart was clenching as if it were a hand desperately squeezing down on ectoplasm. Though he did not want to look again at the young female in the painting, he forced himself to do so.
She did not have Tappy's features. But she had that sweet expression Tappy so often had and that wondering look. Like the faces of Alice in Wonderland and of Dorothy in Oz. The artist had also managed to give a sense of both vulnerability and invulnerability. Jack had never seen anything to match the contradictory impressions in any work by an Earth artist, and he thought he had seen all the works of the great ones and the near-greats.
She wore a blue robe of some sort. It was not a nightgown, but it could easily have been used for that purpose.
A circular section in her breast and stomach areas was white.
Representations of rays emanating from the central brightness shot through her body and several feet bey,")nd her. Was that symbolic of the Imago?
He looked more closely. On her left breast was a vague tentacled shape through which the fabric of the robe could be seen.
The Imaget?
The hairs on the back of his neck seemed to be standing up, and cold raced over his skin.
The young male did not have his face, and his clothes were not those of any Terrestrial. But he held a painter's brush in one hand.
The four certainly seemed to represent prophecies or predictions of the coming of Tappy, Jack, Candy, and Garth. Impossible-yet, there they were, and the young human female shone with the Imago within her, and she bore the lmaget on her breast.
He stepped back, lifted the torch higher, and saw the image above the group. It was of tongues of fire shooting above the heads of the four persons. Above these were images of the craterwall rings and their figures and symbols.
From its interior sprang more tongues of fire. And in their midst were upper-class Gaol, the ratcages. Some of them were burning.
How would the rings be powered? The outer one had been rotating slowly for many thousands of years. Some kind of machinery had to be turning it, the other rings, too, he supposed. Nothing in the painting indicated what that could be. Was there a vast engine deep under the crater floor? What did it use for fuel? A shaft plunging to the hot core of the planet? A shaft which conducted the heat to the machine, where the heat was converted to electricity?
Or had the Makers possessed means of which Terrestrials had no inkling
By now the Integrator was bobbing up and down and whirling with an agility and endurance amazing for such an old person. He was also honking loudly.
Jack moved close to Tappy and spoke softly. "This couldn't be just coincidence."
He felt numb, but deep within him was a fiercely hot ball of excitement. "My God! Predictions can't be valid. No one can look into the future and see what's coming. Not about what individuals'll be doing, anyway. Especially if they won't exist for thousands of years. If true prophecies or predictions could be made, we'd just be machines rolling along tracks that were laid in the beginning of time. There'd be no free will.