That they were telepathic had naturally been one of the first of all of the hypotheses—and now, contrary to all of Martels’ prior inclinations, he was prepared to believe that this was in fact the most tenable explanation. He did not like it any the better for its having been forced upon him.
Qvant did not speak again. The triple-minded creature that was Tlam forged steadily southward, without need of further urging from Martels, and under his own guidance, as before,
as to how to handle the minutiae of the journey. Martels, withdrawn, continued to speculate.
Of course one would have to begin by throwing out all the 20th century observations on telepathy as resting solely upon testimony; every time a Rhine or a Soal took it into the laboratory, it evaporated into the clouds of these investigators’ willingness to call unfavorable results by some other name. Direct contact with it, here, now, seemed to indicate that it was in fact subject to the inverse-square law, or, in other words, that it diminished with distance; and if birds— even the bird-brained birds of Martels’ own time—had always been able to use it, then it had probably started as nothing more than a sort of riding light by which like minds and like intentions could be detected.
Such an ability would naturally be selected out in sentient creatures, since from the evolutionary point of view, intelligence would serve the same functions far better. That would leave behind only the maddening vestiges—a sort of vermiform appendix of the mind—which had so persistently disappointed the most sincere occultists from Newton onward. Maybe mob psychology was another such vestige; if so, that was definitely anti-survival and would be selected out even faster. Even for the Birds of this century, it did not have much future—but Martels was going to have to deal with them in the present.
Another question: How was Qvant tied to Tiam and Martels? Was he inside Tiam’s skull, as Martels now seemed to be? Or was he still back in the museum inside the assaulted braincase, with only a tenuous spiritual tentacle stretched out to connect him to the tribesman, perhaps through Martels’ own intermediation? By Martels’ hypothesis, that ought to be impossible, but the men of Rebirth III might quite easily have bred telepathy back into the human line, as his own time had recreated the aurochs, and as Qvant’s people had made Qvant
the bearer of hypnotic and projective powers. Qvant had mentioned something called general juganity, “at which the Birds are instinctively expert.” What were the laws underlying a phenomenon of this kind? Qvant doubtless knew them, but they were impossible to deduce from scratch, at least by anyone who had been so complete a skeptic as Martels until he had been plunged into this era, minus some twenty centuries of intermediate thought on the subject.
Whatever those laws were, they seemed to confuse the Birds. As the more and more neglected body of the triplyinhabited man plunged on through the thorns, vines, and fronds of the midsummer century, the Birds gathered about it, pecking, darting, quarrelling, and slashing, yet never making the fatal final attack that Martels—and, clearly, Tiam— expected at any moment. He felt like a steer being driven down the slaughtering chute, unable to understand what was going on, certain only that creatures whom he had regarded heretofore as not much more than minor nuisances had suddenly and mysteriously turned malevolent.
Qvant did not help, nor even surface, but a faint and complacent hum, like a maintenance turnover, somewhere near TIam’s cerebellum or even farther down into the brain-stem near the rhinencephalon warned Martels that he was still there, in whatever mode. That was helpful, in a way, in that he did not interfere with Martels’ imposed Drang nach Sueden; yet at the same time, Martels was sure that the furies of tentative rage with which the Birds now surrounded them like a storm of feathers had something to do with Qvants immanence. After all, had not Qvant himself said that he was a symbol of everything the Birds most hated and feared? Martels was sure by now that a single man occupied only by his own mind would have been shredded to bits out of hand long before he had seen the first, ravenlike creature; the triple being was being spared in part because the Birds sensed
something peculiar about it which they both hated and needed to know—but could not tell by direct telepathy anything more than that.
Thus it was that he came at long last to the Tower on Human Legs.
He did not know the overall size of the museum in which he had awakened into this world, but some sort of leakage between Qvant’s mind and his told him that the Tower was considerably bigger. It had been erected in a natural clearing so large as to be almost a meadow, and filled most of it with its base, all of it with its shadow.
The three columns which held it aloft were, of course, its most striking feature. Originally they had been very ancient trees, each of which might have been made the core of a respectable medieval tower in itself, with a spiral staircase carved last of all out of the wood, like several such Martels had seen in Paris. They formed instead the points of a nearly equilateral triangle, with portions of their thick roots above the ground. Perhaps it had been these roots which had originally suggested the conceit of shaping the pillars in the form of human feet and legs, toes outward, around which the Tower proper was .draped like an exaggeratedly long tubular skirt. Or perhaps the Birds had originally only girdled the trees to stop their growth, and in flensing away the bark had accidentally uncovered a pre-existing resemblance, which was heightened by the ivory whiteness of the wood underneath. The work itself had evidently been done with something like a drawknife, for Martels could see the flatness of the long strokes it produced—a technique which had been cunningly used to accentuate the flatness of the human shin.
The Tower proper had been fastened around the trees as a series of drums of equal size, whose sides were crazy quilts of animal hides beautifully stitched together with the finest of leather cords. The hides themselves appeared at first to
have been chosen at random, but seen from a distance they flowed upward from the meadow in long twisting lines which gathered together toward the top of the structure like a stylized candle flame. Its point, however, was not visible from where Martels stood; more than likely, the total effect could be seen to best advantage from the air.
Even the main body was not easy to see amidst the clouds of Birds which constantly surrounded it, however; nor was Martels given any chance to study it in detail. He was chivvied under the immense tripod to its exact center, where there proved to be a slender central pole around which jutted a spiral of ascending pegs. Undignffied, needlelike thrusts into Tlam’s rump indicated that he was to climb these.
The pegs had not been cut or spaced for men, and since it got steadily gloomier as he climbed, for a while his attention was totally centered on keeping himself from falling. Eventually, he ran out of breath, and had to sit down upon the next peg which looked to be thick enough to bear his weight, with assists from feet and hands on the two adjacent. Breathing heavily, he clung to the pole and pegs and looked aloft.
Above him there first seemed to be a barrel-shaped universe extending into infinity and pricked along its sides with the most intense of little stars, growing confusingly brighter with distance. Strange nebular masses occasionally occluded them, and there was a good deal of twinkling. Bars of light crisscrossed it, some of them being shed by the brighter stars, others looking more solid, and set at different angles, as though this universe had a visible metrical frame. The twittering, fluttering, and squawking of the Birds outside was here muted into a composite thrilling, an audible music of the spheres, which was shaken occasionally by some broader shudder or larger pinions.
After a while, his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he began to see what was really to be seen. It was not
much less remarkable than his first impression, and the two tended to change places abruptly, like an optical illusion. The stars were meeting-places of the corners of hides; the shafts were sometimes true sunbeams, as direct and intense as laser light; and more seldom were the radial ribs of the drums. These rib
s, plus the increasingly larger pegs of the ridgepole he was clinging to, provided an ascending series of perches upon which sat great dusky raptorlike figures in apparent somnolence except for an occasional shifting of claws or flutter of wing or drooping tail. Here and there, eyes like half-moons tilted and looked down upon him, filming and closing, then opening again. There was a whole heirarchy of Birds inside this tower—and Martels was in no doubt at all as to who was at the top. This universe was theirs, every mote and beam.
His honor-guard was gone now, and except for the half-moons, nobody seemed to be paying close attention to him. He looked down. The dun disc of the floor under the tower looked like the far end of a tunnel in this artificial perspective but the unique experience of having fallen down the barrel of a telescope gave him reason to believe that it was a drop he could survive; particularly if he began by swinging down around the pegs again, monkeylike. And once he hit the earth, he could probably scuttle flat along the meadow floor back into the jungle faster than the Birds could realize that he might. It seemed highly unlikely that any man had been drawn this far into the Lobachevskian universe of the Birds, or at least not for decades, and besides, they were probably not equipped to appreciate how rapidly a man can revert to his quadruped ancestors when driven by the need. Their own ancestors were bipedal dinosaurs even farther in the past.
But he would have to be quick. More and more half-moons were regarding him now, and he felt an obsessive pressure radiating out from the center of his mind, as though those
eyes were demanding his identity. Hitching forward until most of his weight was on his feet, he shifted and prepared for the long swinging drop through the black, feathery continuum..
In midswing the vertical twinlding tunnel and the disc of dirt below it blacked out entirely, and for the second time Martels found himself in the midst of a mortal struggle with Qvant. The battle was wordless, which gave Qvant enough of an advantage to leave Martels no attention left over for his immediate environment. The riptides of demanding hatred surged through a featureless, locationless chaos in which the only real things were the combatants. They went at it over kalpas of eternity, eternities of seconds, neither knowing which was hammer and which was anvil, against no backdrop but a distant scream which might have been Tlam’s.
They were still fighting when the tribesman’s body hit the ground.
9
A deep, racking ache awoke Martels out of a sleep which he would infinitely have preferred to have been endless. He groaned and stretched tentatively. He had hit the bottom of the telescope, evidently; but why was it made of drumhide rather than fused quartz? But radio telescopes do not have quartz mirrors, either; why shouldn’t there be drumhide instead? Whatever the reason, he could sense it flexing tautly as he moved, giving off a deep ronronner, like a cheetah purring in French. Far echoes answered it, as if from below.
There was light on his eyelids, but he did not open them yet, listening instead inside his own psyche for an unknown enemy. Qvant? The name brought everything back and he was instantly tense.
At the moment, there seemed to be no trace of the Autarch. A faint edge of alertness suggested that 11am was also awake, and perhaps had been awake for some time. Well, that figured; the first persona to awaken from the shock of a long fall would be the tribesman, and Qvant, who had not been in a body for some centuries, would be the last. That was a point to remember: Against Qvant, physical pain was an ally.
Martels heaved himself up on one elbow and looked about. He seemed now to be in the topmost drum of the tower, one which was smaller than all the others and hence had been
invisible from the ground. It had no central pole, only the radial ribs and circular members of the drum itself. Furthermore, it was open upon three sides, by panels which had simply been left off the drum entirely. The high chamber was uncomfortably cold, which made him realize that from having had no sensations at all in the brain-case he had gone to being uncomfortably hot all the time up to now. Didn’t this damn century have anything but extremes?
He raised himself creakily to a sitting position and looked upward. By now he had realized that this direction, which nobody pays much attention to in normal life, was what counted in the country of the Birds. It could of course have been deduced, but getting into the habit was something else; like an Englishman who knows that Americans drive on the wrong side of the road, yet does not connect it with looking left instead of right when he steps off a curb.
Sure enough. At the topmost reaches of this cylindrical hat there was another perch, surrounded by cruel, thorny, occasionally shifting claws; then a long, greasy, feathery breast of blue-tinged black; and at last, sagging, narrow, reptilian shoulders and a long narrow beak topped by very narrow eyes. The thing looked like a gigantic vulture, but there were rings upon its eight scaly fingers, the nails of each central claw had been filed to a razor edge, and over its breastbone was embedded a gleaming metallic seal enameled with something very like the Taoist sign of Yang and Yin, the oldest symbol in history. The monster did not seem to be asleep; on the other hand, it did not seem to be watching him. It was just, terrifically and potently, there.
After Martels reached the nearest opening in the drum, Martels could see why. The drop from there to the setback was only about twenty feet, but the setback too had a drumhead floor which he would plunge right through; and from
there, it was perhaps more than a thousand feet down through the cylindrical universe to the meadow.
The view from here over the forest would have been beautiful, had he been in any position to appreciate it, but it was contaminated by more Birds of all sizes at all possible distances, wheeling and wheeling. Clearly, as a captive he was something special.
Restlessly, he crossed to the next window. These openings seemed to be placed alternately to the legs on the ground. Essentially, the view had not changed here; he moved on to the last.
Still the same. No, not quite. The light was different. And more than that: There did not seem to be any horizon on this side; it was masked by what seemed to be almost a wall of mist, rising almost a third of the way to the zenith.
A stab of pure excitement shot through him, despite his best attempts to keep it from 11am and from the problematical presence of Qvant. His astronomical training, his now lengthening experience with Tiam of jungle orientation, and even a vague memory of Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym combined like so many puzzle pieces.
He was looking due south over the Drake Passage toward the Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica . . . or what had been those other lands and seas in his time.
His mind reeling with unfocused desire, he clung to the edge of the ribs and sat down, suddenly aware in addition that his borrowed body was weak with hunger and accident, sticky and reeking with its passage through a thousand jungle saps and resins, aching with effort and parched with thirst. Above him, the enormous vulturelike creature brooded, semisomnolent but obviously alert enough. There lay the Promised Land; but as far as Martels was concerned, the curtain of rising mist which marked the beginning of the icecap might
as well be the layer of ice-crystals which delimited the atmosphere of Mars.
Had great gull-like Birds flown toward him out of the mist crying Tekeli-li, he could not have been more sure . . . or more helpless.
Behind the knowledge arose a faint current of mockery. Qvant was awake.
One of the wheeling Birds was approaching the tower; now that he noticed it, he realized that he had been subconsciously watching its approach for some minutes. Suddenly it was coming at him like a cannonball. He pulled away from the open panel, his back against the hides.
There was a thrashing of pinions above him as his guard moved to a higher perch. Another rush of feathers and disturbed air, and its place was taken by a scarlet and gold effigy nearly as tall as he was. It wore no insignia whatsoever, but none were needed; its plumage, its bearing, its very shape—a combination which suggested both the eagle and the owl,
without closely resembling either—told him that this was the King.
The great Bird sat silently regarding him for several minutes, its eyes occasionally filming. At last the hooked beak parted, and a deep, harsh voice said:
“Who are your’
Martels wondered if the King had any suspicion of how difficult that apparently routine question would be to answer. Under the circumstances, he felt that it would be best to let 11am do the talldng, provided that Qvant did not interfere. But Qvant showed no present disposition to intervene.
“I am nothing, Lord King. Once I was a man of the tribe of Hawkburrow, but I have been cast out as one demonridden.”
“We see what you are,” the King said. “It is the nature of your inner self we seek to understand. You are three in
one, like this the footstool of our world. The tribesman is beneath our notice; he is but a son of Man. Who are these others?”
Martels had a flash of inspiration. He said in his own voice: “I, Lord King, am the tribesman’s ancestor, far removed.”
The King blinked, once. “We hear you, Father,” he said surprisingly. “Yet we sense that though what you say is the truth, it is not the whole truth. We feel indistinctly in you the one human being in all our world who most threatens our coming triumph. For this alone we should kill you, and we shall—but what is this third spirit which we would so loose upon that world?”
Blish,James - Midsummer Century Page 6