The city itself was walled and looked more like an illustration of Baghdad in a copy ofThe Arabian Nights than anything else. The cavalcade drove through gates which were shut after them and wound through streets toward the centre of the city. Here they got out and were marched into a huge building and upstairs into a huge room where the doors were locked on them. However, they found food waiting for them and, after eating, went to sleep on the bunkbeds.
Awina climbed into the bunk above him, but he awoke in the middle of the night to find her clinging to him. She was shaking and sobbing softly. He was startled, but he controlled himself and asked her, in a low voice, what she was doing here.
'I had a terrible dream,' she said. 'It was so frightening it woke me up. And I was afraid to go back to sleep. Or even to be alone in bed. So I came down here to get strength and courage from you. Did I do wrong, my Lord?'
He rubbed her between the ears and then stroked and fondled the kitten-fur-smooth ears.
'No,' he said. He had gotten used to having the felines touch him so that they might draw from him some of his god-like qualities. It was a harmless superstition and it did benefit them psychologically.
He looked around. The bulbs, set in clusters in containers on the wall, were not as bright as when they had come into the room. They gave enough light so that he could see the others near him clearly, however. They were all sleeping. Nobody seemed aware that Awina was in his bed. Not that anybody would have objected. He knew by now that he had the power to do anything with them that he wished, and they would not object. He was their god, even if he was, after all, a small god.
'What was the dream?' he said, continuing to stroke her. Now he ran his fingers along her jaw and then up and over her round wet nose.
She shivered and then said, 'I dreamed that I was sleeping in this very place. And then two of the grey-skins came in and lifted me out of my bed and carried me out of this place. They took me down many halls and down many dark staircases and into a deep chamber beneath this city. There they chained me to the wall and then began to hurt me terribly. They rammed their tusks into me and tried to pull my legs off with their trunks and, finally, they unchained me and threw me on the floor and started to crush me with their great feet.
'At that moment, the door to the room opened, and I saw you in the next room. You were standing there with your arm around a human female. She was kissing you and you saw me and laughed at me when I begged you to help me. And then the door clanged shut and the Neshgai began to step on me again, and one said, 'The Lord takes a human mate tonight!'
'And I said, 'Then let me die.' But I did not really want to die. Not away from you, my Lord.'
Ulysses considered her dream. He had had enough of his own dreams concerning her to know what his unconscious was trying to tell him, although he was also consciously aware of what his feelings were. An interpretation of her dream was difficult, though. If he used the Freudian dictum that dreams represented wishes, then she wished him to have a human female as a mate. And she also wished to punish herself. But punish herself for what? She would not be guilty about any desire for him. The Wufea culture did have plenty of things about which their people could feel guilty, as did all cultures, human or nonhuman, but this was not one of them.
The trouble was that the Freudian dictum had never been proved to be true and, second, the subconscious of people descended from cats (if they were from cats) might differ from those of people descended from apes.
Whatever the interpretation of her dream, it was evident that she was worried about human females. Yet he had never given her any reason to consider him anything other than a god. Or to consider herself as any more than a good assistant to a god, even if the god was fond of her.
'Are you all right now?' he said. 'Do you think you could get back to sleep?'
She nodded.
'Then you had better get back up into your bed.'
She was silent for a moment. Her body had stiffened under his hand. She said quietly, 'Very well, my Lord. I did not mean to offend you.'
'You did not offend me,' he said. He thought he should not add anything. He might weaken and ask her to stay with him. He needed some comforting of his own.
She climbed out of his bed and went up the ladder into her own. He lay for what seemed a long while, while the tired and anxious Wufea, Wagarondit and Alkunquib snored, stirred or muttered around him. What would tomorrow bring? Today, rather, since it surely would be dawn soon.
He felt as if he were swinging in the cradle of time. Time. No one understood it, no one could explain it. Time was more mysterious than God. God could be understood, God was thought of as being like a man. But Time was not at all understood, its essence and origin not even lightly touched as it went by.
He was swinging in the cradle of time. He was the ten-million-year-old baby. Maybe the ten-billion — year-old baby. Ten million years. No other living creature had endured such a passage of time whatever time was, and yet ten million or ten billion years were nothing in time. Nothing. He had endured — not lived — ten million years, and he must die soon. And if he did — when he did — he might as well have never lived. He would be no more than some miscarriage that had occurred in some subhuman two million years before he was born. Just as much and no more, and what good was life for him? Or for anybody?
He tried to shunt this train of thought off into oblivion. He was alive, and this sort of philosophising was useless, even if inevitable for a sentient. Even the less intelligent of human beings must surely think of the futility of individual life and of the incomprehensibility of time at least once in his/her life. But to dwell on such thoughts was neurotic. Life was its own answer, question and answer wrapped up in one skin.
If only he could sleep. he awoke with the opening of the great doors and the thumping of the huge feet of entering Neshgai. And then he ate breakfast and took a shower (his people abstaining) and used his knife to scrape off his few whiskers. He only had to shave about every third day and this task took only a minute. He did not know if his Indian genes were responsible for this hairlessness or if there were also other factors.
He shed his clothes, which were too dirty and torn to wear, and gave them to Awina to wash and repair. He stuck his knife into the pocket on the side of the kilt a slave gave him, put on new sandals, and followed Gooshgoozh out of the room. The others were not invited; the big doors closed in their faces.
The interior of the enormous four-story building was as ornately carved and as brightly painted as the exterior. There were many human slaves in the wide and lofty corridors but very few soldiers. Most of the guards were twelve-foot high Neshgai with leather helmets wrapped in brilliant scarlet turbans and holding spears that looked like young pine trees and shields on which were painted X's inside broken circles. They came to attention when Gooshgoozh neared them and ground the butts of the spears with a resounding noise into the marble floors.
Gooshgoozh led Ulysses down many halls and up two flights of winding marble stairs with exquisitely carved handrails and then down more corridors which opened onto vast rooms with massive bejewelled furniture and painted bejewelled statuary. He saw a great number of Neshgai females. These were between eight and nine feet tall and totally lacked the little tusks. They wore kilts and long jewelled earrings and, occasionally, a ring or ornament inserted into the skin on the side of their proboscises. Their breasts were below their chests and were, like those of all the sentient females he had seen, fully developed whether the female was nursing or not. They emanated a powerful and pleasing perfume, and the young ones painted their faces.
At last they paused before a door of some rich red colour and dense grain. It bore a number of figures and symbols in alto-relief. The guards before it saluted Gooshgoozh. One opened the doors, and Ulysses was led into a cavernous room which had many shelves with books and a few chairs in front of a gigantic desk and chair. A Neshgai, wearing rimless glasses and a conical tall cap of paper painted with a number of symbols, sat behind the desk.
This was Shegnif, the Grand Vizier.
A moment later, Ghlikh was ushered into the room by an officer. He was grinning, and part of this pleasure undoubtedly originated in relief at the unbinding of his wings. Part of his pleasure also came from anticipation of humiliation, and worse, for Ulysses.
Shegnif asked Ulysses some questions in a voice deep even for the thunderous-throated Neshgai. Ulysses answered them without hesitation and truthfully. They were mainly requests for his name, where he came from, were there others like him, and so on. But when he said that he came from another time, perhaps ten million years ago, and that a lightning stroke had 'depetrified' him, and that he had come here through The Tree itself, Shegnif seemed to be struck with a lightning bolt himself. Ghlikh did not like this reaction; he lost his grin and began to shift
