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  Cobwebs, of course, hang across the entrance. When he slaps at them to sweep them away, they pull free with a faint whispering chiming clang, like fine strands of metal rubbing one against another. He goes in, breathing mustiness. He enters a vestibule, narrow, dark, and deep, with clammy onyx walls. A high doorway confronts him. The door is of pink alabaster, warmly glowing, engraved with linear symbols that flow and bend and mingle in disturbing patterns of metamorphosis. He puts forth a finger and hesitantly touches the door; instantly it pivots inward, admitting hint to a courtyard that seems to occupy the entire central section of the building. A shaft of mote-flecked sunlight thrusts diagonally downward from an immense wound, invisible from outside, in the ceiling. The atmosphere in here is dank and coldly humid, like that of some vast subterranean cistern. His eyes slowly acclimate themselves to the dimness that prevails everywhere but at the place where that column of brightness strikes. He sees eroded statuary in careless corners, piled over with mud. Mud carpets the floor; by his third step inward he is ankle-deep in chilly ooze and thinking twice about continuing. There is an unpleasant acrid odor, as of a sea of walrus urine. He feels the closeness of animal life. He senses metabolizing mass. And, belatedly, he becomes aware of the quintet of gigantic creatures, motionless and awesome, on the courtyard’s farther side.

  They could almost be dinosaurs. Certainly they have the proper dimensions, and more. The two in the middle must be more than a hundred feet long; the two that flank them are nearly as huge, and the small one on the left end is larger than the largest elephant. What he can see of their skin is reptilian: shining, scaly, armored, dark. They sit in a curiously human posture, uncomfortable and incongruous, heads upright, arms dangling, spine bent to form a base, tails curled underneath, legs jutting out in front. The bodies that they arrange in this fashion are elongated saurian ones, with thick short limbs and long tapering tails. Folds of flesh descend in multiple wrinkles over their bellies and chests. The shapes of their heads vary: one has a tremendously protuberant snout, thrusting forward forty or fifty feet, and one is a spherical horned dome, and one is tiny, at the end of a serpentine neck, and one is neckless and immense, and one is toothy, like an Eater’s, but incredibly larger. All five creatures are embedded in thick black mud, which nearly covers one to the shoulders, barely soils another, and mires the rest to intermediate degrees. There seems no way for these monsters to have entered the ruined building through any of its openings; was it, then, erected around them, as a shrine? There they sit, side by side, infinitely patient, emitting stinks and inner rumbles, studying him with dim interest like a row of bored judges who have passed into the weariness that transcends all fatigues. They look familiar to him: Ninameen, once, in a moment of panic, flashed him a vision of them. Clay realizes that they are the Interceders, the ultimate hierarchs of mankind, to whose authority all seem to defer. He is frightened. Of all the varieties of humanity he has encountered, these mud-dwellers within the wrecked stone temple are the least comprehensible. They are at once imperial and loathsome. The silence remains unbroken, but he seems to hear the ringing of noiseless trumpets and the crack of trombones; next will come the mighty roar of the chorus. Shall he kneel? Shall he smear himself with mud in ritual abasement? He dares not go closer. Those five great heads move slowly to and fro, rubbing in the sticky mud, and he knows it would take no strenuous effort for one of them to lean forward a bit and snap him up. A tender morsel, bearing the archaic genes. How did this happen? How did you come forth from my loins? He trembles. He is devastated by fear. In his terror he regards his own skeleton as an alien intruder within his flesh. The Interceders snort and mumble. One of them, the long-snouted one, pushes up a furrow of muck with the curve of its chin and delivers a deep, slow roar that brings a slab of stone down into the courtyard. “My name is Clay,” he says timidly. Has he ever spoken to such implausibilities before? “I am of the human race. I was brought here by the time-flux long ago, and have had—many experiences—have—had—I was brought here—” He cannot remain standing. He crouches, squats, dips forward, knees in the cold slippery mud. The Interceders have taken no notice of him. “Will you—help—me? I have six friends who have chosen to die.” His rigid fingers slide into the mud. A stream of hot urine runs down his right thigh. His teeth chatter. The biggest of the Interceders lifts its head and swings it slowly from side to side above him; Clay looks up doubtfully, expecting to be seized. The head withdraws. A sluggish tail coils and loosens. “Go anywhere,” Clay murmurs. “Do anything. Die in their place, if necessary. To change their decision. How? What? If?” Can he reach the Interceders’ minds? He gropes toward them, but touches nothing; the Interceders have not deigned to open to him. Do they have minds? Are they in fact human, as human is now defined? His fear of them evaporates. “Nothing but stupid mountains of meat,” he says. “Buried alive, rotting neck-deep in mud. Ugly! Inflated! Empty!” The Interceders now bellow in unison; the ponderous walls of the building shake; another slab falls. He shrinks from them, throwing one hand across his forehead. They keep up their roaring. “No!” he tells them. “I didn’t mean—I only wanted to—please—my friends, my friends, my poor friends—” He can barely stand the thin, cutting smell of their rage, and he thinks the cries of the Interceders will bring the ruined museum to its final calamity. But he forces himself to remain. “I submit to your will,” he declares, and waits. They grow calm. They return to their earlier aloofness, ignoring him, rooting in the mud with tongues and teeth. He smiles uncertainly. He kneels again. He prostrates himself fully. “Why must the Skimmers die?” he asks. “To prevent. To persuade. To sacrifice on behalf of.” He hears the rolling of distant drums, a noble and inspiring sound—or is it thunder, or are the Interceders releasing monstrous farts? Without rising, he wriggles toward the door, feet first. What to do? What to do? He finds the answer in his mind, and, since it could not have been there a few minutes ago, the Interceders must have placed it there. He is to go to the Well of First Things; he is to yield; he is to accept everything. There is no other way. He rises and thanks the Interceders. They snarl and growl. Their dim eyes look elsewhere. He is dismissed. He stumbles out of the building, into a dismal dusk.

  33

  The little animals help him when morning dances down. In twos and threes they come to his side. “This way,” they tell him softly, and, “This way,” and again, “This way,” and he follows them, trustingly, blithely, happy to be out of the hands of apparitions for a while. His guides are simple beasts: birds, bats, lizards, toads, serpents, furry creatures of various sorts. None is of a species he can remember from the old days, but there are correspondences, each seems to fill an equivalent evolutionary notch: this might be a rabbit, this a badger, this an iguana, this a sparrow, this a tanager, this a chipmunk. But all changed and made wondrous. The toad has a crescent of many jeweled eyes; the bat has luminous wings that precede themselves with a delicate violet glow; the rabbit, though cuddly, carries a spiked tail, just in case. And they speak his language, or he theirs. “Follow us, follow us, follow us! This way! To the Well! To the Well!” He follows.

  A sweet journey, but a long one. He puts his back to the grim Interceders and walks till noon, through a land that grows ever more tender—pliable trees, frilly leaves, fuzzy flowers, balmy perfumes, pastel hues, the tinkle of airy music on the horizon. Unreal, a playland. Up and down gentle hills, soft as breasts. Wading through warm shallow ponds in which no monsters lurk. “This way! This way!” Even resting is lyrical: he sits under a vertical sun at the entrance to a grand valley that spreads for manicured leagues toward a probable river. When he chooses to continue, the animals sing him onward. In the valley the grass is close-knit and thick, each stem having a plastic firmness of texture; as he puts a foot down, the blades lean away from it, and hold their angle for ten minutes or more, so that he can trace his track across the meadow by looking back at the slowly closing gaps in the green carpet.

  The sun climbs. This is the warmest day yet, tho
ugh the heat is tempered by the softness of the air. “Swim here,” an amphibious twelve-legger tells him. “Climb this rock for the view,” insists a fragrant conical animal. “Don’t overlook these flowers,” says a purple mole, lifting a flat stone with its long nose to reveal a miniature garden of exquisite rosettes. Kindly beasts. A delight to travel with them. “Is it far to the Well?” he asks, halting for the night. “There is only one route,” a prickly salamander says, wriggling into a tiny cave.

  He decides that he is traveling southeast, though he has forgotten which continent this is or where he may be in relation to the place of his awakening. On the fourth day the landscape begins to lose its coy, sugary tone. The sweetness bleeds from it rapidly, and the character of the route undergoes a complete change in a single hour. The yellow toadstools, the grinning squirrels, the tall pink caterpillars, the trees with golden gumdrops, are seen no more: he enters into a vast and stark savanna patrolled by immense herds of big game.

  To the limits of his vision sprawl flat fields of knee-high coppery grass on which bulky beasts graze. In the foreground are stocky quadrupeds, like short-faced horses, whose hides are dappled with shifting patterns of red and gold; they look like ten thousand sunsets at large in the plain. Pausing in their munching, they give him cold eyes. He discovers that his little guides have faded from sight. “I seek the Well of First Things,” he explains, and the red-and-gold munchers snort and toss their hooves and glare toward the horizon. So he goes on. In a glade of spiky gray trees he finds a troop of long-necked browsers at least forty feet high. They fill the ecological niche of giraffes, he realizes, but these fellows must have been brought forth in one of evolution’s moments of indigestion, for they are as graceless as a giraffe is noble: absurdly, they have only three legs, arranged in an isosceles way as props for a sack of a body out of which, in the center, erupts the endless neck. The legs are rigid and angular, with three sets of equidistant knees between gaskin and fetlock, but the neck is serpentinely flexible, and the contrast between the knobbiness below and the ropiness above is an unnatural vulgarity of design. The heads of these animals are little more than gigantic mouths, topped with dim uneasy eyes. Diligently they rip greasy leaves from the towering trees on which they feed, and as they pass on, new leaves spring forth with indecent swiftness. The animals take no heed of Clay. In a fit of abstract curiosity he tries to panic them with shouts, merely to see how a three-legged beast would manage to run, but the titans continue with their meal. “Run!” Clay yells. “Run!” One of the biggest lifts its head, peers at him a moment, and—unmistakably—laughs. Clay decides to continue. He passes a squat tank-shaped thing like a double rhinoceros, with an armored hide; he sees, in the pocket of the grassland beyond a gentle rise, a herd of tens of thousands of broad-nosed animals that might be pigs with antelopes’ legs; he wonders where the lions are, and finds them at the far side of the herd, three slim, tawny carnivores with harsh wedge-shaped heads, fierce forearms, and powerful kangaroo-like hind legs. They lie growling and bloody-mouthed in a heap of gnawed ribs. A mother and two cubs: they lift their heads and show Clay bright eyes like red stars, with odd twitching antennae just above them, but they show no desire to attack him. He circles warily wide. Keeping the afternoon’s light on his shoulders, he plods diligently through a succession of fauna, and, dulled by the surfeit of strangeness, he hardly tries to analyze what he sees, but calls this great pile of meat an elephant, and those frisky blurs gazelles, and this streaking bolt of toothiness a cheetah, and that comic perambulation of lumps a warthog, though conscience tells him the parallels are inexact. When darkness comes, he camps at the foot of a dwarf mountain, a ship-sized pile of rock perhaps eighty feet high that rises precipitously from the plain, and sits impatiently through the night, trying to outstare the glistening eyes that peer at him.

  The next day he leaves the savanna behind. The terrain becomes more apocalyptic. This is a zone of thermal disturbances; geysers spout, warm springs bubble, and much of the ground is scalded into moist brown bareness. He examines chalky terraces, like clustered bathtubs, that hold algae-corrupted sheets of water, red and green and blue and mixtures thereof. He pauses to watch black steam spout hundreds of feet from a purse-shaped fumarole. He crosses a dead plateau of glassy sediments, zig-zagging to avoid the vents that release foul rotting gases. Here, again, he acquires small guides: “Is this the path to the Well of First Things?” he asks an owlish thing hooked to a limb of a withered tree, and it tells him to keep going. A many-legged rosy slitherer conducts him graciously through an intricate array of thermal pools that gurgle and heave and moan and seem about to deluge him with boiling fluids. The sky here is gray-blue with smoke even at midday. The air has a chemical reek. His skin is quickly covered with dark exhalations; when he runs his fingernails across his chest, he leaves tracks. “Can I bathe here?” he asks a friendly hopping thing, pointing with his toes at a pond from which no vapors rise. “Not wise,” the hopper says. “Not wise, not wise, not wise!” and the pond instantly flushes a dangerous scarlet as if acid has come flooding into it from a trapdoor in its belly. He remains coated.

  A shelf of blunt rock closes in this place of geysers at its farther end, stretching off to north and south. Scaling it calls for some skill, for it rises almost vertically and there are many loose boulders, but he manages to clamber up, preferring that to the endless-looking detour around its sides. He is relieved to see that the slope is much more gentle on the cliff’s other face. As he descends, he looks outward into the zone ahead, and beholds a sight so extraordinary that he knows he has reached his destination. By a deep light, as though from a filtered sun, he views a completely naked flatland: not a bush, not a tree, not a rock, only a level span of land running from the extreme left to the extreme right, and curving away from him over the belly of the world. The soil, so Martianly barren, is brick-red. Straight ahead, at least several days’ march into the plain, there is a column of light that bursts from the ground and rises with perfect straightness, like a great marble pillar, losing its upper end in the lofty atmosphere. This column must be half a mile in width, Clay guesses. It has the sheen of polished stone, yet he is certain that it is no material substance but rather an upwelling of sheer energy. Motion is evident within its depths; huge sectors of it swirl, clash, tangle, blend. Colors shift randomly, now red predominating, now blue, now green, now brown. Some areas of the column appear more dense in texture than others. Sparks often detach themselves and flutter off to perish. Above, the uncertain summit of the column blends with the clouds, darkening and staining them. He can hear a hissing, crackling sound, as of an electric discharge. That single mighty rod of brilliance in the midst of this forlorn plain overwhelms him. It is a scepter of power; it is a focus of change and creation; it is an axis of might on which the entire planet could spin. He narrows his eyes to screen some of the splendor. “The Well of First Things?” he asks. But he has no guide, and must answer himself, with “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes” again. This is the place. He stumbles forward. He yields. He accepts everything. He will give himself to the Well.

  34

  He stands on the Well’s lip. A broad calcified rim, bone-white, porcelain-smooth; a few yards in front of him the column of light surges upward from an abyss beyond measure. This close, he is surprised not to feel more of an effect. There is warmth, and a certain electrical dryness in the air, and maybe the snap of ozone; but for all that rushing force blasting out of the ground he expects prodigies of sensation, and does not get them. The column seems intangible, like the beam of a colossal searchlight. He takes another step toward it. He is moving slowly, but not out of fear or hesitation, for his path now is resolved; before he goes in, he wants to understand as much as is possible. The rim slopes away from him, heading down. He is still on the flat part, but as he shuffles forward, his big toes touch the beginning of the curve. Nothing more than a trifling shift in his weight will send him toppling in. He is willing. I am the sacrifice. I am the scapegoat.
I am the tool of redemption. He will go. He begins to lean. He spreads his arms wide; he opens his hands, palms toward the light. The skin of the column seems silvery, mirror-bright: he sees his own approaching face, eyes dark and dark-ringed, lips tightly pressed. The tip of his nose touches the column. He sinks through it; he falls; he is weightless; he is ecstatic. His descent ceases within moments. Like a speck of cinder caught in an updraft, he is whirled toward the top of the column, drifting freely, tossed about, soaring beyond all control. His physical body is dissolving. What remains is a mere net of electrical pulses. He no longer knows whether he is rising or falling. He is within the column, passing from zones of great density to zones of lightness, changing levels at the whim of the force that holds him, and he knows only that he spins and swirls and shuttles in the blazing effluent of the Well of First Things.