There was a bright bland beach of yellow sand edging the dry interior of the undersea cave. Aloê lifted herself onto it and immediately found herself facing a solemn-faced denizen of the place. He sat, naked but clothed with an enormous sense of dignity, with his hand upon his chin. His silken hair, as white as snow, lay in loose curls across his scalp. His eyes were very strange: a white pupil, inside a white iris, inside a white cornea. The colorless eyes looked out of a colorless face—whiter even than Morlock’s fish-belly whiteness. His skin was almost translucent in its paleness, but apart from that he was extremely handsome, almost inhumanly handsome.
She was not feeling especially dignified herself, standing there dripping seawater (and, she abruptly realized, semen: she could feel a strand of it crawling jellylike down her thigh).
“I’m sorry if I am intruding,” she said in Kaenish. Her thought was that if Kaenish heresiarchs came this way to become gods, the locals might speak some Kaenish. Or, of course, the heresiarchs might learn a little of the local tongue—enough to get by.
Apparently that was the case, because the man just looked at her and said nothing. The inhuman dignity of his face never changed, even to acknowledge her presence. If he had not moved his head slightly to follow her movement, she wouldn’t have been sure he even saw her: his white-in-white-in-white eyes were hard to follow—empty of emotion, but seeming full of ageless wisdom.
They stood, golden eyes clashing against ivory, for a long moment. Then a kind of joyous barking and howling rose up in the cave beyond.
The ivory man’s face finally changed, expressing a transcendent wonder and joy. He said something like, “Ooof!” or maybe even, “Woof!” and tumbled over on the sand. He ran off on all fours, eagerly wailing in answer to the voices beyond, his sandy genitalia flopping in the air between his widespread legs.
“I seem to have misread the situation,” Aloê remarked to the empty beach, and followed the tracks of the beast she had mistaken for a person.
She walked up the beach into a kind of city. The buildings were built of bright translucent stone and the cave roof far above was gently, pleasingly luminous. Most of the inhabitants, pale people-like beasts like the one she had met on the beach, seemed to be in the street, yipping and howling with excitement. They were following a kind of domed vehicle or car, moving without an animal to draw it. Periodically the vehicle would pause and excrete, from several pipes in its side, a long gleaming chunk of wobbly red jelly. The people-beasts fell on them with great joy, pressing their faces into the gleaming red surface to gobble it up.
They were very polite, though. There was room for three or four people-beasts to eat at every rope of jelly, and they always shared. There was no fighting. Anyone who didn’t get a chance at the currently extruded jelly followed the vehicle, yapping and howling happily, as it moved on and excreted more jelly farther down the street. Aloê briefly wondered whether another vehicle came along later to spray down the streets, as in A Thousand Towers. But then she saw there was no need to clean up the leavings. There were no leavings. The people-beasts licked the very stones of the street clean of the jelly, and then carried on cleaning the jelly off each other with their tongues. The licking frequently became sexual, and many people-beasts were coupling in the streets still gleaming with their saliva.
Aloê was in no position to sneer, since she had recently been screwing in the street herself. But she did wonder whether sex always looked as absurd to an impartial observer as these wildly coupling beasts did to her.
Others, who were not having sex or had finished having sex, lay around in the street making grunts at each other that might have been conversation.
Only one figure, she saw as she carefully picked her way across the beast-crowded paving stones, stood apart from the others. He sat on a stone, wearing a short shirtlike robe, watching her approach with a lively interest in his warm gray eyes. Those eyes reminded her of Morlock, as did his dark unruly hair and long clever fingers. Otherwise he looked something like Naevros—without Naevros’ smiling catlike smugness.
“Welcome,” he said to her in Wardic. “Are you not terrified by the Keepers of the Wheel?”
“Is that who they are?”
“Once. Long ago.”
“What happened to them?”
“Some of them ascended to the Apotheosis Wheel and became gods or were destroyed. The rest, less ambitious, and more restful in their nature, gave themselves up to physical pleasure. Gods can’t know that, you know—to eat, to drink, to swim, to fuck—all these are alien to their nature. They are not sustained by matter and can take no pleasure in it.”
“Then why be a god?”
“Immortality. Many of those who come here feel their bodies failing. They fear death, and prefer to be gods. The Wheel kills most of those.”
“Oh? The Wheel is not reliable, then?”
“It is perfectly reliable. It never lets someone be a god who is unworthy of godhood, and it assigns each aspirant a godhood worthy of his nature—or her nature.”
“Who’s to judge all that?”
“The Wheel.”
“Do all gods come from the Wheel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Torlan and Zahkaar come from the Wheel?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
“You may know them as the Masked Powers—the Two Powers—as Fate and Chaos?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
She almost asked about God Creator, Sustainer and Avenger, but thought better of it. It wasn’t relevant to her current business, and she had no reason to believe this fellow anyway. The fact that she felt she could trust him she discounted: it was another reason to suspect him, really.
The stranger smiled with Naevros’ lips. “You are wise,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Too wise to consign yourself to the Wheel. Consider the considerable loss, and the dubious gain. If you want power, you can rule here with me, or even over me, if you prefer. You could raise these sad beasts back to the level of people by your example and teaching. And I could give you pleasure. Somehow I know we would be right for each other.”
She looked at him coldly. “Yes, you seem especially designed to please me. Of course, you must tailor yourself to the wishes of every aspirant. What do you really look like?”
“You would not wish to see it.”
“But I do wish to see it.”
The stranger gave a very Morlockian shrug and vanished. In its place was a bulbous, vaguely manlike thing formed from a transparent jelly. It looked like the food jelly, except it was colorless and glowed slightly. There was a hollow foggy place in the middle of its head, and from that a voice came forth—no longer much like Morlock’s or Naevros’. “This is as much of my true self as can be seen with your eyes.”
“Then there is more of you.”
“Much more, in the talic realm. I pervade the island.”
“Do many people take you up on your offer of sex and power?”
“Some.”
“What happens to them?”
“They join with these.” The gleaming arm with no hand gestured carelessly at the people-beasts.
“Then you are the true Keeper of the Wheel.”
“The truth is as I told you. But the Keepers made me so that they might give themselves over to pleasure, and become what you have seen, or ascend to the Wheel and become gods, in which case they left this place to meet their destiny.”
“Then you are the true Keeper of the Wheel.”
It bowed its gleaming, fog-holed head. “It is not part of my instructions to argue with you.”
“Why do you answer my questions? Are you bored here?”
It paused before answering. “I answer your questions, because I am instructed to do so: to ward off those who can be tempted from godhood, and lead those who cannot be tempted to the Wheel. I perceive that you will go there now.”
“In a moment. I am curious. Why do you obey these things who are no longer people? Why not leave this place?”
It paused again and said, “I am this place. I cannot leave it. And there is another thing.”
“Yes?”
“I abide by my instructions in addressing all who come in their own language. The problem here is in your language. I do not see that it has the ability to refer to such as me. It constrains me to refer to myself as a self. But in truth, I am not a being who carries out instructions. I am, in fact, merely the instructions of the Keepers, woven into the weft of a talic structure.”
“You don’t choose. You don’t think.”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“All right, then. Take me to the Wheel.”
The jelly-thing stood and walked straight through the crowd of beast-people as if they weren’t there. They made way for it without fear, without even seeming to notice it or Aloê.
“Do you keep them alive?” Aloê asked. “Do you run the food-cars, or whatever they are?”
“Yes, and provide fresh water, and healing, and all that they need.”
“Why?”
“I am instructed to do so. Also, their tal is necessary to the maintenance of this place.”
“This place. That’s you.”
“Yes.”
“So you do it for yourself.”
“I might, if I were a self.”
“Maybe you are and you don’t know it. Maybe selfhood can grow from the circumstances you find yourself in.”
“Or maybe I am not a self, and you do not know it. I was instructed to act as a self, to deceive those who could be deceived.”
“What if you yourself were deceived? That would prove there was someone there inside you, a self who could be tricked.”
“My instructions tell me to avoid such paradoxes. We are here.”
The jelly-thing stood still and gestured at a pit in the icelike stone of the street. There was a stair descending in a long spiral down the hole into darkness.
“Descend to ascend,” it said. “Good-bye.”
Aloê thought for a moment. It might be she had learned as much as she could, that there was no point in descending. She had no thought of actually ascending the Apotheosis Wheel, but it might be dangerous even to be near it.
Still! There was knowledge here about how gods were made. Perhaps there was some way to use that knowledge to ward off angry gods, or even unmake them. Perhaps Torlan and Zahkaar had come from this god-factory; perhaps not. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the knowledge, and she wouldn’t get it here contemplating her navel.
“Good-bye,” she said to her guide, and took the long spiralling stair downward.
The stones darkened as she descended, from the crystalline clear of the street paving to ebony black at the stair’s end.
At the bottom of the stair was an empty room. Opposite the stair was an arch, and through the arch was the Apotheosis Wheel.
It was in use.
As she stepped through the archway she was struck by a wave of sound and heat and stench and something else—a nonphysical shuddering like flame rippling through her: talic distortions, strong enough to echo in her flesh.
The sensations were strong enough to knock her down, but she struggled to her feet again and strove to keep order in her mind and body so that she could observe what was happening.
The Wheel was enormous, almost filling the great graystone chamber that contained it. It was golden, with many spokes, bright and, it seemed, hot. In the center, where the axis was, lay a bound form that screamed and screamed as the Wheel spun. The heat of the Wheel seemed to be cooking or burning the figure like a webwork griddle cooking a sausage. The figure was hard to see clearly, shrinking to mouselike smallness, billowing out under its own smoke like a storm cloud of indefinite shape.
Here was the former heresiarch, aspirant god, who had killed his oarsmen as a first sacrifice to himself. Was the Wheel killing him or making him into a god? Maybe the processes included each other, or at least overlapped.
She walked around the Wheel, fascinated in all its blurry details. There was a long basketlike object along the wall in the back of the chamber. She was tempted to investigate it, but didn’t want to interrupt the process of the Wheel—or be drawn into it, either. She might be able to ask the newborn god after it descended from the Wheel, if it ever did, and if it wasn’t so hungry for worship that she didn’t have to fight it to retain her selfhood.
The Wheel began to slow. She turned from the basket thing to look at the wheel. The being at the center was still indefinite, cloudlike, but somehow still within the blinding golden motion of the Wheel. She thought about arming herself, but decided not to: she would have a better chance at friendly contact without her staff in her hand, she thought.
There was a sniffling sound behind her.
She turned back to the basket thing.
It had raised up from its wickerwork body a tympanum of wet gleaming flesh. A mouthlike opening appeared in the tympanum as she watched and drew air through it: that was the sniffing sound.
The tympanum was facing her—looking at her, it seemed, or at least sniffing at her.
She reached over her shoulder for her staff.
The basket-thing unfolded arms and legs and leapt to its feet.
She got in one strike on the creature’s outstretched right arm. But its left arm struck her on the side of the head and she fell to the ground. As she lost consciousness, she saw the basket-thing’s chest open up like a mouth. Inside it was a body-shaped cavity. Darkness swept over her before she saw more.
Morlock was gathering bones on the beach in the red light of evening. He didn’t think there was enough undamaged wood to make a two-person boat, and so his thinking had turned along different lines. In his mind he had sketched out a design for a boat with a small hull, and bony rails or skis on which the craft would ride, skimming along the surface of the water like a skipped stone. (Swimming Morlock avoided whenever he could, but he had skipped many a stone in his time.)
Of course, the speed of the craft would have to be very high for the skis to work, but Morlock had some ideas about that.
At the moment he was chiefly seeking shoulder blades from the bleached bones on the sacrificial beach. Many of these had moldered away over the ages, but some were still in usable condition, and Morlock had a fair pile of them before him when his world was completely overturned.
A beast made of wickerwork vaulted like a porpoise from the sea in front of him. At the top of its arc, it unfolded wings from beneath it and began to fly away.
As it went, he saw through the basket-surface that it held a prisoner within: Aloê, her dark face slack in unconsciousness, but her arms bound by wickery bonds. Her hand still held the glass staff he had made for her.
The wicker-beast flew eastward, straight into the red eye of the setting sun.
Fear, and the rage born of fear, threatened to toppled Morlock’s mind: for a time his rage was redder than the sun. He clenched his shaking hands, unclenched them, clenched them again.
He fought the rage like an enemy, threw it from him like a slug or a parasite trying to drain his blood.
There was no time for this. He must go after her. Either she was alive, in which case he could help her, or she was dead, in which case he would have his vengeance. In either case, he must go after her.
The shaking in his hands receded. He went back to his task. And, bone by grim bone, the boat began to take shape as the sun set and the stars wheeled above.