Robert Silverberg - At Winter's End

Another cavern, lined on all sides by inscriptions in a writhing, bewildering script that made the eye ache to follow it, held shining glass cases that contained cubes of dark metal from which waves of shimmering light would burst at the sound of a voice. The cubes were small, no wider across than Hresh’s two hands side by side, but when he opened one of the cases and tried to draw a cube out it would not come. The metal of which the cube was made evidently was so dense that it was beyond his strength to lift.

A long noble gallery that had been partly destroyed by the incursion of an underground river still displayed, though it was badly encrusted by mineral deposits, a sort of large metal mirror rising on three sharp-pronged legs. Taniane approached it and let out a cry of amazement and dismay.

“What have you found?” Hresh called.

She pointed. “There’s my reflection, in the middle. But on this side — look, that’s me when I was a child. And on the right side, that bent and withered old woman — Hresh, is that supposed to be me when I’m old?”

As she spoke, a babbling tumult of sound came from the mirror, which after a moment she recognized, or thought she did, as her own voice distorted and amplified; but she was speaking some unknown tongue, perhaps that of the sapphire-eyes. In another moment the mirror went dull and the sound ceased, and the smell of burning rose to their nostrils. They shrugged and moved on.

Later that night, Hresh came upon a silver globe small enough to fit comfortably in one hand. When he touched a stud on its upper surface it came suddenly to life, emitting a keen piercing sound and steady pulses of cool green light. Boldly he put his eye to the tiny opening from which the light was coming, and a vivid scene out of the time of the Great World sprang to view.

He saw half a dozen sapphire-eyes standing on some bright platform of white stone in a sector of the city that he did not recognize. The sky looked strangely bleak and leaden, and angry spirals of agitated clouds moved through it as though some terrible storm were under way; yet the sapphire-eyes were turning calmly toward one another and ponderously bowing in a sort of tranquil ritual.

The device thus seemed to replicate on a much smaller scale the images of Great World life that the huge device of levers and knobs in the plaza of the thirty-six towers had been showing him. Hresh stowed the little globe in his sash, to be studied more carefully later.

The next night, working in a rubble-filled vault on the opposite side of the city entirely, where it sloped upward toward the foothills of the mountain, it was Taniane’s turn to make an extraordinary discovery, in a dank, mildewy cistern five levels down from the surface. She stumbled into it in the most literal way, tripping and sprawling against a stone block that went swinging to one side to reveal a secret chamber.

“Hresh!” she called. “Here! Quickly!”

The hidden room had blossomed into brilliant golden light the moment the door opened. In its center, mounted on a dais of jade, stood a metal tube with a round hooded opening at its top, from which flashes of dazzling color came in flickering bursts. She started toward it, but Hresh seized her sharply by the wrist and held her back.

“Wait,” he said. “This thing is dangerous.”

“You know what it is?”

“I’ve seen them in — in visions,” he told her. “I watched the sapphire-eyes using them.”

“For what?”

“To take their own lives.”

Taniane gasped as though he had struck her.

“To take their lives ? Why would they do that?”

“I can’t imagine. But I saw them doing it. That glowing opening at the top — it’s capable of absorbing anything that comes near it, no matter how big. There’s a blackness inside that’s some sort of gate to another place, or perhaps to no place at all. They would walk up to it and practically stick their noses inside it, and suddenly it would swoop them up, I don’t begin to know how, and they’d be gone. It’s an eerie thing, and very seductive. In my vision I walked up to it myself and it would have had me too, except I was only seeing it in a vision. But this is a real one.”

He released her wrist and walked slowly toward it.

“Hresh — no, don’t—”

He laughed. “I only want to test it.”

Picking up a small chunk of broken statuary, he hefted it a couple of times and tossed it underhand toward the glowing hood. It hovered an instant as if suspended in the air just outside the zone of flickering, hissing light; and then it disappeared. Hresh stood expectantly, waiting to hear the thump of the stone fragment falling to the floor. But the thump never came.

“It works! It still works!”

“Try it again.”

“Right.” He found another piece of stone, a slender one as long as his arm, and in a gingerly way he held it up to the mouth of the device. There was a tingling sensation in his hand and forearm, and abruptly he was holding nothing at all. He stared at his fingers.

He went closer.

What if I poke my hand inside it? he asked himself.

He hovered in place before the metal column, leaning forward on the balls of his feet, frowning, considering it. It was an astonishingly powerful temptation. The thing was insidious. He remembered those immense booming mouth-things, long ago on the great sandy plain, drawing him toward them with their inexorable drumming. This was like that. He could feel it pulling him inward. He was half willing to let it. More than half, perhaps. The thing might offer him … answers. It might offer him … peace. It might …

Taniane must have guessed what was passing through his mind, for she came up to him quickly and caught him by the shoulder, drawing him back.

“What were you thinking just then?” she asked.

Hresh shuddered. “Just being curious. Maybe too curious.”

“Let’s get out of here, Hresh. One of these days you’ll be much too curious for your own good.”

“Wait,” he said. “Let me check just one more thing.”

“It’s deadly, Hresh.”

“I know that. Wait. Wait.”

“Hresh—”

“I’ll be more careful this time.”

He shuffled forward in a half-crouch, averting his eyes from the zone of brightness at the summit of the column. Bending forward, he slipped his arm around the middle of the metal tube and, as he had somehow expected, lifted it easily from its platform of green stone. It was warm to the touch, and it was hollow; he could probably have crushed it with a light pressure of his arm. Without difficulty he carried it across the room and set it down against the wall. The flickering lights of the hood, which had gone out when he lifted the thing, immediately returned.

“What are you doing, Hresh?”

“It’s portable, do you see?” he said. “We can take it with us.”

“No! Let it be. Hresh, it frightens me.”

“It frightens me, too. But I want to know more about it.”

“You always want to know more about everything. This one will kill you. Leave it, Hresh.”

“Not this. It may be the only one of its kind that remains in all the world. Do you want the Bengs to get it?”

“If it would eat them the way it ate the stone you fed it, that might not be so bad an idea.”

“And if they didn’t let it harm them, and found some use for it?”

“It has no use except to destroy, Hresh. If you’re worried about the Bengs getting it, then drop a heavy rock on it and maybe it’ll smash. But let’s clear out of here.”

He gave her a long searching look.

“I promise you, Taniane, that I’ll take care with this thing. But I mean to bring it along.”

She sighed.

“Hresh,” she said, shaking her head in resignation. “Oh, Hresh! Oh, you!”