adding a further twist to endoskeletal ones? Did the alleged perversion of predatory intelligence consist of a general tendency to violence and rapaciousness, or was it something more complex and less obvious? Might it, perhaps, be the domestication of other species to relieve the necessity of hunting?
He had, of course, no way to think all this save for subvocalization, but Lumen prudently refrained from comment on the suspicion that he might be in accord with Aristocles on at least some matters concerning the nature of humankind.
Thomas found himself pushed into close proximity with Raleigh. “How are you feeling, Walter?” he asked.
“Numb and tired,” Raleigh confessed, “but fit for travel, I thank you for what you did, by the way, even if I owe my life to the monsters that healed me.”
“It was a brave act, Captain Digges,” Field added, doubtless aware of the contrasting nature of his own reaction.
“I wish now that I’d been permitted to wear my sword,” de Vere put in, while there was still time for one last remark. “Useless as it might be against the kind of natural armor so many of these creatures have, I’d feel a sight more comfortable.”
Thomas was nudged forward then, as if to lead his crew on a journey far longer than the one they had already undertaken. He allowed himself to be shuffled to the designated spot, and looked up into the bowels of the machine towering above him—but he had no opportunity to study its internal anatomy in any detail.
He felt suddenly nauseous, as if he were being turned inside out. Then, without any perceptible interval at all, he felt giddy, as if he were being righted again. He wished that the two effects could have cancelled one another out, but in fact their combination seemed to redouble them both. He staggered away from his mark, blinking his eyes against sudden tears, and had to be caught by strong insectile “hands” before he fell. He was still collecting himself when Francis Drake was able to put out a hand to help steady his friend.
Thomas accepted the support, but was eager to look around. He had half-expected to find himself on a surface as bleak and bare as the moon’s, but this was a very different kind of world. What surrounded him was not so much a forest—although it certainly bore some resemblance to one—but an infinite confusion of mast-like structures. It was as if a vast fleet of galleons had been gathered together, so tightly packed that there was no space left between their decks and gunwales, and their rigging extended into a single coherent network stretching from vessel to vessel and horizon to horizon...save that the “decks” were so far below him that he could not be sure that they actually constituted a single surface, that the “masts” were very unequal in height, and that the “rigging” was rigid and metallic....
The most remarkable thing of all, Thomas thought, as he steadied his runaway imagination, was that the “sailors” manning the mast-like structures and their rigging-like connections bore hardly any resemblance to insects, or even crabs. They seemed to be made of metal, and many had wheels as well as—or instead of—legs and tentacular arms. In spite of the awesome variety of the members of the True Civilization, he had not seen one equipped by nature with anything resembling a wheel, so he concluded that the world of masts was populated almost exclusively by machines.
Lumen had told him that, he recalled, belatedly. Lumen had also told him that the stars were more densely aggregated in the center of the sidereal system—but the ethereal had not warned him that the sky would be on fire. When he looked up, Thomas could not tell whether it was night or day on the world to which they had come, and took leave to wonder whether such terms might even be meaningful here. The sky was awash with colored light; full of stars as it was, they seemed to him more like stars reflected in a turbid sea than stars viewed directly through the lens of the Earth’s atmosphere. He had looked at the Milky Way through the lens of a refracting telescope as good as any the finest lens-grinders in Europe could contrive, but all he had seen was a greater profusion of tiny, pale and seemingly-feeble stars. These stars seemed different, and the etheric ocean in which they swam seemed very different too.
“It’s the various effects of matter being smeared and transmuted as it falls into the Pit,” Lumen said. “Stars being pulled apart and transformed. You might be able to imagine it best as a kind of alchemy.”
“Paracelsus might,” Thomas murmured, almost audibly, “or even Master Dee—but not me.” He had to turn away then to help John Field, whose legs had given way under him, due to the psychological effects of the one-dimensional journey. Drake was similarly busy with de Vere, although Aristocles and his fellow moths were already trying to hurry everyone off the platform on which they all stood, herding them towards a double door set in a wall. Raleigh had the right to be the most distressed of them all, but the young man had made every effort to collect himself, and it was he who led the way at the urging of their captors.
The humans huddled together as they moved, almost as if they had begun to imitate the representatives of True Civilization—but the real reason was that no one dared step any closer to the platform edge than was absolutely necessary. Had anyone stumbled over it, they would have had a very long fall, and their parachutes were safely stowed away on the Queen Jane.
The stem supporting the platform was hollow, and it was there that a door opened, to reveal a circular chamber some nine or ten feet in diameter. There was room enough for all the humans inside, and for one insectile companion. Aristocles took the extra space, unseconded now by any of his own or any kindred kind.
As the cylinder began to descend towards the distant surface, it occurred to Thomas that it would probably be easy enough for the five humans to overpower their guardian and strike out on their own into the strange world of laboring machines—but no one made the slightest hostile gesture.
“Can you ask Aristocles what is at stake here, Lumen?” Thomas asked his passenger silently. “Are we really about to be put on trial, representing our species in a court of monsters?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Lumen countered. “When the time comes, if you will let me speak on your behalf, I promise that I shall do my best to protect you, and see you safely back to your own world.”
Thomas tried to suppress his doubts regarding his invader, or at least to make them less transparent, but he was out of his depth. He was fairly certain that he had more enemies than he knew, and he could not be sure that he had any friends at all, save for his crew—and even then, the only ones of whom he was completely sure were Drake and Raleigh. Even if Lumen were perfectly sincere, the ethereal had no more authority here than Thomas had, and no matter what his “best” might consist of, it might be utterly impotent to protect them from harm or win them a passage home. If Lumen were not sincere, and was not the friend to humankind as which it posed....
“That way lies madness, Thomas,” said the passenger in his mind. “You can trust me, and you should...if only because the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.”
“Why are you interested in this matter?” Thomas wanted to know. “And why were you ready and waiting when Master Dee’s etherlock failed?”
“I have devoted seven hundred years to the close study of your species,” the ethereal told him, startling him yet again with the casual revelation of its antiquity. “I followed the course of Dr. Dee’s experiments with great interest—you were, after all, outward bound for my world—the moon was only a contingent objective.”
It seemed a frank enough answer—and yet, it seemed to Thomas that it was subtly evasive, and that the evasion in question might be as ominous as any, in its implication that the millions of millions of millions of other citizens of the unimaginably broad universe might be no more inclined to anything humans would recognize as justice than they were to anything humans would recognize as generosity.
The descending chamber came to a stop with a sudden jerk, making all six of its passengers stagger sideways.
“We have arrived, it seems,” Drake murmured, covering his unsteadiness with irony.
De Vere had just enough time to say: “No, I don’t think...,” when the sliding doors that had sealed the chamber burst inwards, brutally