Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

Rollo said, softly, "We are not alone. Look back of us."

Cushing and Meg twisted around to look. Half a mile away, five horsemen sat their mounts, graven against the skyline.

"The wardens," said Meg. "What are they doing here?"

As she spoke, the wardens raised a wail, a lonesome, forsaken lament, a thin keening in which was written an ultimate despair.

"My God, laddie boy," said Meg, "will there never be an end to it?"

And, saying that, she deliberately strode forward until she stood beside Ezra, raising her arms in a supplicating pose.

"In the name of all that's merciful," she cried, "let us in! Please, do let us in!"

The Trees seemed to come alive. They stirred, their branches rustling and moving to one side to form a doorway so the travelers could come in.

They walked into a place where lay a templed hush, a place from which the rest of the world seemed forever sealed. Here was no low-hanging greenery but a dark and empty vastness that rose up above them, a vastness supported by enormous tree boles that went up and up into the dimness, like clean churchly pillars that soared into the upper reaches of a sainted edifice. Beneath their feet was the carpet like duff of a forest floor—the cast-off debris that had fallen through the centuries and lain undisturbed. Behind them the opening closed, the outer greenery falling into place.

They halted, standing in the silence that they discovered was really not a silence. From far above came the soughing of trees put in motion by the wind, but, strangely, the soughing did no more than emphasize the basic hush that held here in the dimness.

Well, we made it, Cushing thought to say, but the deep hush and the dimness strangled him and no words came out. Here was not a place where one engaged in idle conversation. Here was something that he had not bargained for, that he had never dreamed. He'd set out on a forthright quest for a Place of Going to the Stars, and even in those times when he could bring himself to think that he had a chance of finding it, he had thought of it as being a quite ordinary installation from which men had launched their great ships into space. But the Trees and the living rocks, even the wardens, had about them a touch of fantasy that did not square with the place he had sought to find. And if this butte was, in all reality, the Place of Going to the Stars, what the hell had happened?

Ezra was on his knees and his lips were moving, but the words he spoke, if he was speaking words, were mumbled.

"Ezra," Cushing asked sharply, "what is going on?"

Elayne was not sitting with her grandfather, as had been her habit, but was standing over him. Now she turned to Cushing. "Leave him alone," she said coldly. "Leave him alone, you fool."

Meg plucked at Cushing's sleeve. "The Holy of Holies?" she asked.

"What in the name of God are you talking about?"

"This place. It is the Holy of Holies. Can't you feel it?"

He shook his head. To him there seemed nothing holy about it. Frightening, yes. Forsaken, yes. A place to get away from as soon as one was able. A place of quiet that suddenly seemed to hold a strange unquietness. But nothing that was holy.

You are right, the Trees said to him. There is nothing holy here. This is the place of truth. Here we find the truth; here we extract the truth. This is the place of questioning, of examination. This is where we look into the soul.

For an instant he seemed to see (in his imagination?) a grim and terrible figure dressed in black, with a black cowl that came down about a bony face that was merciless. The figure and the face struck terror into him. His legs were watery and bending; his body drooped and his brain became a blob of shaking jelly. His life, all his life, everything that he had ever been or seen or done, spilled out of him, and although it was out of him, he could feel sticky fingers with unclean fingernails plucking at it busily, sorting it out, probing it, examining it, judging it and then balling it all together in a scrawny, bony fist and stuffing it back into him again.

He stumbled forward on jerky legs that still seemed watery, and only by the greatest effort kept himself from falling. Meg was beside him, holding him and helping him, and in that moment his heart went out to her—this marvelous old hag who had trod uncomplainingly all the weary miles that had led them to this place.

"Straight ahead, laddie boy," she said. "The way is open now. Just a little farther."

Through bleary eyes he saw ahead of him an opening, a tunnel with light at its other end, not just a little way, as she had said, but some distance off. He staggered on, with Meg close beside him, and although he did not look back to see-fearful that, looking back, he would lose the way—he knew that the others were coming on behind him.

Time stretched out, or seemed to stretch out, and then the tunnel's mouth was just ahead of him. With a final effort he lurched through it and saw ahead of him a rising slope of ground that went up and never seemed to stop, ground covered with the beautiful tawniness of sun-dried grass, broken by rocky ledges thrusting from the slope, dotted by clumps of bushes and here and there a tree.

Behind him Rollo said, "We made it, boss. We are finally here. We are on Thunder Butte."

A short distance up the slope, they found a pool of water in a rock basin fed by a stream that barely trickled down a deep gully, with misshapen, wind-tortured cedars forming a halfhearted windbreak to the west. Here they built a meager fire of dead branches broken off the cedar trees, and broiled steaks cut off a haunch of venison that was on the point of becoming high.

They were up the slope far enough that they could see over the ring of the Trees to the plains beyond. There, just over the tip of the Trees, could be seen the toy like figures of the wardens. Their horses were bunched off to one side and the five wardens stood in line, facing toward the butte. At times they would fling their arms up in unison, and at other times, when the wind died down momentarily, those around the fire could hear their shrill keening.

Meg studied them through the glasses. "it's some sort of

lament," she said. "Rigid posturing, then a little dance step or two, then they throw up their arms and howl."

Ezra nodded gravely. "They are devoted but misguided men," he said.

Cushing growled at him. "How the hell do you know? You are right, of course, but tell me how you know. I don't mind telling you that I have a belly full of your posturing, which is as bad as anything the wardens may be doing."

"You do me wrong," said Ezra. "I was the one who got us through the Trees. I spoke to them and they opened a way for us; then I spoke to them again and they let us out."

"That's your version," said Cushing. "Mine is that Meg got us in, then got us out again. All you did was mumble."

"Laddie boy," said Meg, "let's not quarrel among ourselves It doesn't really matter who got us through the Trees. The important thing is they did let us through."

Elayne looked at Cushing and for once her eyes had no blankness in them. They were cold with hatred. "You have never liked us," she said. "You have patronized us, made fun of us. I'm sorry that we joined you.

"Now, now, my pet," said Ezra, "we all are under tension, but the tension now is gone, or should be. I'll admit that I may have been over-clowning to a small degree, although I swear to you that my belief in my own ability has not faded; that I believe, as always, that I can talk with plants. I did talk with the Trees; I swear I talked with them and they talked to me. In a different way from the way any plant has ever talked with me before. A sharper conversation, not all of which I understood, a great part of which I did not understand. They talked of concepts that I have never heard before, and though I knew they were new and important, I could grasp but the very edges of them. They looked deep inside of me and let me look, for a little distance, into them. It was as if they were examining me—not my body but my soul—and offered me a chance to do the same with them. But I did not know how to go about it; even with them trying to show me, I did not know the way to go about it."