"Past, present, a nd future would be fixed. We wouldn't be responsible for anything we did, good or bad. No, I just can't swallow that."
Tappy looked as if she had just seen some horrible monster coming out of a wall.
She said, "I can't believe it either, Jack. The Integrator told me about this, but he made me promise not to tell you about it. It was all I could do to keep silent. But I think I couldn't really believe what he said. I thought we should see this before we got high hopes, too high, and then fell off the wall like Humpty Dumpty."
Jack tried to dispel the numbness but failed. When he spoke, it was as if he were under water.
"Maybe someone-who, I don't know -is trying to make this prophecy, this prophetic mural, come true. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy. That'd be the only rational explanation. But who could be doing this if that is the case?"
"I'm really confused," Tappy said.
"Me, too."
She smiled, though it was obviously difficult for her to do. She said, "What difference does it make if we are programmed? Does it really matter if Fate or Someone has determined our lives? Or if we screw it all up by ourselves? We think we have free will.
Even if it's a delusion, we wouldn't believe it. Not if we had solid proof. We'd deny it. So why worry about it, rant and rail and curse the gods? We can only act as if we truly were the masters of our destinies."
Jack could only grunt. But she was right. And her attitude and her manner of speaking showed that she had matured far beyond her years. Perhaps the false experiences had had some effect after all.
"I suppose," he said, "that the brightness within the girl and the rays shining from it symbolize the Imago?"
"That's what the Latest believe. That's why the Integrator sent that honker to plant the egg-seed in me. The ability to do that, make the egg-seed, I mean, was within their powers long, long ago. They were just waiting for the right person to come alongme-and to do it. There's another burial chamber, miles from here, that gives instructions for doing that. It's in the characters of the alphabet used by the Makers, but with it are images that indicate how to do it."
Jack shook his head, and he said, "Too much, too much. I still think . .
"Think what?"
"Never mind. It doesn't bear thinking about."
He chewed on his upper lip before he spoke again.
"Why didn't the honkers lead us into the underground refuge as soon as we entered through the boulder-gate?"
"The Gaol were too close. Besides, it was evident to the honker spies that I was headed, being urged to head for, a destination north. They assumed that it was the pulsating vessel that had suddenly appeared. They tend not to interfere in certain situations. When we showed up near their underground entrance, the Integrator decided it was time to hide us."
She drew a deep breath.
"Also, when you and I appeared with Candy and Garth, they knew that the prophecy was being fulfilled. It was time to take us in no matter what the consequences might be for them."
"Anything else?"
"I almost forgot. The Integrator said he thought I was attracted to the boulder-gate on Earth because it led to this crater. The crater ring, he thinks, generates a weak field because it's rotating slowly.
But the field was strong enough to attract me to it. I mean attract the Imago in me to it.
"The Makers theorized that the field or whatever should radiate from the Generator would attract the Imago. L'ke 'ron filings to a magnet."
"And ... ?" Jack said.
"And what?"
"That pulsating ship Candy and the other androids manned: Why did it attract you more strongly than the crater ring? And who made the ship and the androids? Were they prepared millennia ago, too?"
"I don't know," she cried. "There's just too much to know, too many unanswered questions."
He embraced her and kissed her softly on the lips. "Take it easy. One thing at a time. You may feel as if you're about to crack up, fall apart. But you're really tough.. Tappy, really strong.
Just hang on."
He became aware that the shaman was silent. He looked toward him and saw him esture for Tappy and him to follow him. He led them out of the muraled room and into another that also had wall paintings. Several yards into it, the shaman halted. He genuflected nine times before stepping ahead again. Then he halted again and genuflected seven times. When he went forward again, he made only three steps. The darkness shrank away from the lights of their torches. Not very far, though. The ceiling was so high that the lights did not touch them.
Now Jack saw, placed on the floor ahead of them, eleven twenty-foot-high globes made of some glittering crystalline material. When the shaman indicated that he and Tappy should come nearer to them, they got very close to the globes. Jack felt as awed and as seized with mystery as the archaeologists who had first entered King Tut's tomb. But this place was probably many thousands of years older than the torn"lder, indeed, than the very first Egyptian tombs or Stonehenge.
Each globe enclosed a body. Jack did not need to be told that each corpse was a Maker's.
They were six-limbed beings, quadrupeds with two arms. Centaurs, he thought, though not resembling much the half-man, half-horse of the Greek myths. Their lower part, the animal body, was shaggy with long red hair. The four legs were long but quite bearlike. The upright torso springing from the front of the quadrupedal form was covered with bright golden hair. Some of the corpses were female. The big, round, and thick-nippled breasts made that certain.
The heads were so flat above the eyes and so narrow from a side view that Jack deduced a similarity in this respect to the Gaol.
Like them, the Makers' brains were in their bodies.
The eyes, like the beardless faces, were human, but they had epicanthic folds which would have made their faces Chinese-like if the' lips had not been heavily evened like those of West Africaln blacks. Their noses were very large and hawk-beaked.
The eyes, ranging in- color from brown to blue, seemed to be magnets drawing eternity and infinity into them.
The Integrator brought eleven candles from his bag and placed them in their holders before the globes. After lighting them, he got down on his knees and began bowing and chanting while his right hand weaved unseen symbols in the air. The acrid stench from 'the candles made Jack and Tappy cough. They walked away to the nearest wall and studied some of the murals there. Most of those showed the Makers in their daily life-or so it seemed to Jack. The vegetation and some of the animals depicted were not those of Earth or of the honkers' planet.
He was just getting started on his study of the series when the Integrator suddenly quit chanting. He quickly put the candles out, placed them in his bag, and gestured that the humans should follow him.
THEY were in the cavern headquarters of the Integrator. Two hours ago, he had given Jack and Tappy glasses of a thick and dark purplish fluid to drink. It was a mixture of berry Julce and an amount, very small, of the venom of the fly called "quickdeath."
By increasing the quantity every day, they should be immune to the venom after twenty days. Meanwhile, they could expect to feel somewhat sick during this period.
"One bite will semiparalyze a person of our body mass," Tappy had told him. "Two bites in rapid succession will kill. The whole honker population has been immunized."