Dream thief

9

… WHAT PLACE Is THIS? " Spence stood on a sort of sky way overlooking a spreading underground metropolis undulating in graceful asymmetry-hives, hollows, arches, pinnacles, and spikes-stretching out as far as the eye could see under a great glimmering golden dome.

"Tso. It is the largest of the underground cities built in the Third Epoch. On Ovs there have been four epochs: Vjarta, Kryn, Ovsen, and Soa. In your words the Water Epoch, Dust Epoch, Stone Epoch, and Star Epoch."

The underground city held an eerie beauty for Spence, though seeing it now reminded him of nothing so much as bones, as if he were gazing into the fabled Elephant Graveyard.

In the last few days-Spence called them days – Kyr had guided him through the ancient city and had instructed him in the culture of the vanished race. Each new bit of information struck him with the force of a mind explosion. Each new fact was a revelation. Spence had learned a great deal; enough to know that to learn the rest would take a lifetime-ah, but what a lifetime!

He turned to his tall friend. That had been one of the first things he had learned; the docile, peace-loving, kindly beings were friends, not enemies of man. Brothers under the sun.

He gazed at the form of the being beside him and felt a sadness for him. "Why did you stay behind? Why didn't you go with your people?"

Kyr fixed him with an indecipherable look. "I am a Guardian. it is my life to preserve the memory of our kind in the solar system, so that any who come-as you have come-will know and remember.

"I was chosen among others to guard the secrets of our past, lest anyone come after us and use our discoveries unwisely. You see, there was much we could not take with us and to destroy it would have been unthinkable. The Guardians were chosen to keep watch over all that was. Now I only am left." Sadness accompanied this last admission; Spence felt it and turned the conversation.

"When did your people leave? How long ago?"

Kyr pondered this for a moment. "Several lifetimes," he replied at last. "Three or four thousand of your years, maybe more. I cannot be sure until I have visited the-" He paused and chirped a word that sounded to Spence like krassil and then continued. "That I must do soon. I must make certain no one has entered there."

"Then let's go. I'd like to see it." Spence, feeling remarkably fit thanks to Kyr's healing care, was eager to see all he could of Martian wonders.

The krassil turned out to be part museum and part time capsule. It was a huge, cone-shaped hive in the center of a cluster of smaller hives, and it had been sealed long ages past against this very day.

Kyr walked several times around the enormous structure while Spence sat on one of the mushroom-shaped objects which abounded throughout Tso. After his tour Kyr stepped aside and tilted back his head, loosing a long, whining note that split the air like a knife.

Spence clamped his hands over his ears and watched.

Kyr waited for a few moments and then repeated the procedure, this time in a slightly lower register.

The vibration of the Martian's voice shook the very ground beneath their feet. Spence realized then how powerful the beings were. He watched as a sizable crack opened in the smooth, shelllike surface of the hive. Kyr went to the crack and began pulling away chunks of material which concealed a door.

He stood before the door and in his whistling tongue chirped a few words to it. The door magically slid aside.

A voice-imprinted lock, thought Spence. Such things were in experimental use on Gotham now. The Martians then were not as far advanced technologically as he had first thought.

Spence entertained this notion for a few seconds before remembering that he was seeing the state of their science four thousand years ago. Technology on Mars had frozen the day they left.

He chided himself for the vanity that lay behind his mistaken observation and for presuming to compare two such different civilizations. Then Kyr reemerged from the krassil, and beckoned to him to follow.

Spence entered through the oblong doorway and stepped into the interior of the krassil, crammed to the ceiling with singular objects, all looking as if they had been placed there only moments before and their owners would return to take them up again at any time.

There were things impossible to describe-many of them looked like they had been grown according to some freakish horticultural method rather than manufactured. Most of the Martian artifacts he saw possessed this natural, rather organic quality.

This had caused Spence to do some wild theorizing on the origins of the Martian civilization. Man had belonged to the mammalian order on Earth, but it did not necessarily follow that that should be the regular course of things at all. The Martians might very well be part of the botanical branch of the Martian life tree, or the reptilian-he was not sure which they resembled the more. Maybe they came from some otherworldly synthesis of both.

While Kyr busied himself with what appeared to be an inventory of sorts, Spence wandered among the strange assemblage of objects-objects at once bizarre and eerily fascinating, whose uses could only be supposed by the most astounding leaps of imaginative fancy. His curious eyes devoured all he looked upon greedily, like a man whose sight has just been restored after a long period of blindness.

He came after some time to a further part of the krassil where an arched opening led into a small alcove. Inside, set on a rough base of stone, stood a large graceful object which immediately captured his attention. It looked like delicate, interwoven, semitransparent wings. He stepped into the alcove and the sculpture-if that is what it was-instantly lit with a rosy light and began to slowly move.

Spence watched as other colors gradually came into play along the sculpture's transparent surface: yellow, blue, and green. These tones began to melt into each other in complex patterns as they swirled over the sculpture's elegant form until the form itself and the color became one. The hues mingled and blended, forming more subtle shades, now flashing boldly, now subdued.

He was riveted to his place, drinking in the astonishing beauty of the art piece. He could not take his eyes from it. The thing held him with a hypnotic power as it spun and resolved itself into endlessly intricate patterns of light and color, each more graceful and lovely than the last. He felt a welling up inside him of emotion, a yearning so strong that it resembled a hungering Pain-a pain that bordered on bliss.

It was a feeling he recognized as belonging to the apprehension of beauty, but one he had rarely, if ever, felt. Presumably others were so moved when they looked upon a classic work of art or listened to a beloved symphony. He had seldom had such experiences; the feeling was foreign to him and perhaps therefore more powerful and bewildering.

He could not look away. The light sculpture reached out to him, binding him fast with threads of wonder. He felt nearly faint with rapture.

This, thought Spence, was what the poets felt, the love that burns its victims in flames of ecstasy. Oh, to be so consumed-it was past enduring, yet he longed to endure still more.

That he could be so affected by the sight of any created object he would have denied. But that obstinacy melted away in the certainty that he was experiencing a work of consummate beauty.

Tears formed in his eyes and his heart swelled nearly to bursting as the dry rivers of his soul began to flow with streams of joy. The passions he felt unlocked within him could not be contained. He wanted to leap, to dance, to weep and shout and exhaust himself in singing. Shudders of pleasure coursed through him; he heard a strange music ringing in his ears and realized that it was his own voice giving free vent to his pleasure in spontaneous song.

The sculpture, as if sensing his joyous outpouring, moved more swiftly in response. The brilliant shades spun and changed, weaving themselves together and parting in intricacies beyond reckoning.

It seemed to live, growing larger and more luminous, throwing off flashes of light and filling his tear-filled eyes with shapes too wonderful to behold.

At last he could take no more. He closed his eyes, but still felt the shifting colors of light playing over him. A voice nearby said, "This is Soa Lokiri. "

Spence turned to see Kyr standing beside him. He had not been aware of the Martian's presence.

"It is beautiful." He returned his gaze to the shimmering display. At length he said, "What is Soa Lokiri?"

"It means Starmaker. It is an artwork in homage to Dal Elna, made by the hand of one of our most revered artists, Bharat."

"Starmaker." Spence repeated the name, nodding to himself. "It is aptly titled. But who is Dal Elna?"

Kyr tilted his head sideways, looking at Spence closely. "Dal Elna, the All-Being."

"All-Being? You mean God?"

Kyr's head began weaving from side to side. "That word does not communicate to me."

A pang of guilt squirmed inside Spence. Possibly the word held no meaning for Kyr because it held no particular meaning for him. Whatever means Kyr had used to, as he said, assimilate Spence's language, he had only received Spence's vocabulary and only the meanings Spence himself attached to the various words at his command. God, for Spence, was an empty word. It did not communicate.

"The word God, I think, is what men call the All-Being."

Kyr merely looked at him.

"I have never been so moved by anything in my life. Bharat is a most extraordinary artist. Are there more of his works here?"

"No. This was, as many considered, his greatest. It alone survived the Burning."

"That's tragic. I would like to have seen more." He looked back at the sculpture. He now imagined he could see the hot points of stars forming in starfields, worlds bursting into creation, and more. There was a pattern to it-a greater pattern than could be taken in all at once. "I feel as if I were always on the verge of apprehending it, and yet… not at all," Spence said.

"That is the greatness of the work. Bharat has mirrored Dal Elna's mystery and given visual expression to the greatest single truth of our philosophers: Rhi sill dal kedu kree. It means: In the many there is One."

Spence repeated the words with a slow shaking of his head. "You'll have to explain that to me. I don't get it at all."

"Many hundreds of lifetimes ago our philosophers reduced their theories to this one axiom. It cannot be expressed more simply. But I will think about it and find a way to explain it to you."

They left the alcove and the kinetic sculpture silently. Spence went on tiptoes like a priest leaving the holy of holies. He was conscious of a sharp longing, almost a loneliness, as if he had left the presence of the Deity himself. He felt cut off.

He turned to view the sculpture a last time, but the alcove was dark and the slender object still. He wondered if he had imagined the patterns and color. The ache in his heart told him that he had encountered a masterpiece, and that, as an onlooker at a miracle, he, too, had been inwardly changed.