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.
"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 Integ
rator 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."
The drinkin skull of the shaman came from an upper-class ratcage who had died from the quickdeath's bites.
"The Gaol ruling class seldom leave their ships when they're on this world-in this area, anyway-unless they're wearing heavy nets. They send out their humans and lower-class warriors to do the work. The shaman says we were lucky we didn't get bitten while we were wandering around in the crater. , After swallowing the sweet but foul-smelling fluid, Jack and Tappy resumed their study of the crater-ring model. Jack picked up the page he had been writing on, but he put it down when a sharp pain struck his stomach. A few seconds later, he had a severe headache.
Tappy, who looked as sick as he felt, said, "It'll go away in an hour. But we shouldn't eat anything until suppertime."
Jack's vision blurred. Where there had been one piece of paper there were now two, one overlapping the other by a few inches.
Moreover, his hands and feet felt numb. Both abandoned the study to lie down in their cave bedroom. But, as the shaman had said, after sixty minutes, they had recovered enough to go back to the model and their notes.
So far, he and Tappy, aided by a honker who interpreted the notes written by generations of honkers, had plenty of clues, too many. But they had no idea what any of them meant. In that case, as Tappy remarked, how did they know the items were clues? Jack had replied that everything on the ring had to be significant. So far, though, he had found nothing meaningful in the images and symbols on the ring or in their locations on it or their relationships to each other.
Some of the images were of the Makers; some, of the ratcagebodied Gaol.
There were also representations of the pulsating in-and-out yessel in which he and Tappy had taken refuge. Red wavy-shafted arrows tipped by flames radiated from the ship.
"Maybe those indicate the magnetism which the shaman thought might've drawn you to the ship," Jack said. "Like you were a migratory bird following the Earth's lines of force."
He shook his head. "I just don't know. Our only explanations for all this stuff are just theories. Not even that. Just hypotheses."
"The crater's magnetism drew me through the boulder-gate," she said. "That means that it somehow, uh, leaked through the gate even though this planet must be many, many light-years from Earth."
"But you wouldn't have felt the attraction if you hadn't come near the boulder. That means-might mean, anyway-that your foster parents sent us there because they knew about the boulder."
"I suppose so," she said. "But if they knew about it, why didn't they take me there themselves?"
"They must've had a good reason."
"Why didn't they wait until I was mature enough for the Imago to develop fully?"
"Because," he said, "they knew the Gaol were getting close to finding out that you were on Earth. They had to get you away before the Gaol went any further in their investigation. They had to chance your finding your way to the boulder. Who knows what your foster parents did after I drove you away? Maybe they went through another gate to another world. I don't know."
He was wondering, though, if her foster parents had been agents of the persons who might be working to fulfill the prophecy.
"Those people could be organized as a cell system. Each cell knew very little about the others. The inferior agents worked in solitude and ignorance except when they received orders from a higher agent. On the other hand, the foster parents might be in the highest echelon.
A few seconds later, a tall rangy honker ran into the cave. He stopped before the Integrator. Though winded, he delivered a long series of honks. The shaman rose from the moss pile on which he had been sitting and began honking at Tappy. His eyes were wide, and he was gesticulating wildly. His excitement infected the beasts on him. The snake re
ared up and hissed. The dormouse growing from his navel yipped and squeaked and waved its paws.
The hairy thing on his genitals split bilaterally, closed, split, and closed. It quivered violently. The hip tentacles thrashed around.
Tappy became pale. Her voice unsteady, she said, "A Gaol ship has landed in the crater. It's either the one that captured us or one just like it."
"The best defense is offense."
That was a clichd. But, like most clichds, it was often valid.
Jack, Tappy, the Imaget, the Integrator, Candy, and sixty honkers were deep under the ground. The large chamber they occupied had been excavated by the Makers. One wall was composed of an immense piece of nickel-iron, a fragment of the meteorite which had formed the crater long ago. Many times during the thrde-day underground journey to this place, the group had encountered large relics of the fiery falling star. The Integrator said that the Gaol's orbital geosurvey ships must have detected these and the cavern complex centuries or more ago. If they had ever gone down into the subterranean system, it had been so long ago that the honkers had no record of it.
Now, however, they knew, or thought they knew, that the Imago and its host were somewhere in the crater. Instead of trying to keep one step ahead of the Gaol, Jack had decided to attack.
After a conference, the Integrator had agreed that that was the best policy.
The war party was now directly beneath the Gaol ship that had landed several days ago. Sixty feet of earth and meteorite fragments were between the vessel and the chamber housing the Latest and the others.
A report about the Gaol had just been brought by a spy who had climbed down a series of ladders glued to the inside of a ventilator pipe. Its entrance was inside a hollowed-out tree. According to the spy, the Gaol had set up a camp inside the circle formed by the landing-support system beneath the ship. It was composed, so far, of humans and cyborg Gaol. But the cyborgs had gone back into the ship for the night.
"You can be sure," the Integrator said, "that a walking ratcage is in command. This is too important to leave to mere humans and cyborgs."
THE CATERPILLARS QUESTION Page 23