“Brannigan, Great Brannigan! Brannigan Galaxity!”
Discipline is what that one wants. What she needs. And Orimar could give it to her. He can feel it in himself. Hot. All simmering up, full of lusts. He would strike. He would hurt. He would reduce her to a quivering mass. Eventually he would dispose of her while she still screamed and begged for another chance, just one more chance. He would smile. He would shake his head. Too late.
… on the day the Great Question is answered …
The Great Question, the only question so far as Brannigan is concerned. The Question upon which it was founded, which it has translated and reframed and to which it has devotedly sought the answer. The Great Question, which has plagued humanity since it first came down from the primordial trees …
… passion fulfilled …
… down from the primordial trees …
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF MAN?
“Enough,” said Sepel794DZ. “We know him well enough. There is nothing there to help us. He was no technician, no engineer. He thought nothing about Elsewhere or the Core.”
The other dinks acquiesced. Brain dinks as a class were not deeply into feelings. They had understood only a little of what they had felt in Orimar Breaze. None of them knew why this particular memory had been kept for later reference. They withdrew from Orimar Breaze, all of them eager to find something they understood better.
On his bed, Boarmus shifted.
“Let us try this one,” said Sepel794DZ. “This one labeled Clore.”
The first sensation they encountered felt roadlike. The road was not, however, a surface of durable substance making up a continuous and more or less cohesive pathway, which is what even residents of City Fifteen usually meant when they thought “road.” In the Core, “road” was a less-concrete concept than that. Its parts emitted roadness though they were only remotely and occasionally contiguous. Its nature was of a resilient discreteness, an unwillingness to connect. Sepel and his colleagues were conscious of moving (seeming to move) from rubbery chunk to rubbery chunk, all of which were changing position relative to one another and bouncing apart if they happened actually to touch. There was little indication of distance and “direction” was a matter of arbitrary decision.
“What is this?” a dink asked.
“A dream,” said Sepel. “Clore is dreaming, and he has recorded his dream.”
“Why would he do this?”
“Perhaps he wishes to review his dreams in all their details, and he chooses this way of doing it. Persevere! Even a dream may tell us something useful.”
They persevered. They saw an eruption from the underlying stratum, an exudation of words in several languages, both archaic and current, indicating that they were approaching the lair/kingdom/residence of Great Lord Something. The words could be both seen and heard. They sprouted along the way like mushrooms, then deliquesced, running off in inky utterances among structures that stood here and there, more or less adjacent.
These might have been buildings or chimneys or mountains or trees. As the dream went forward, items became more certainly either thin or flat, finally becoming almost definable. They were proceeding through a dimensionless and arid wilderness that might have been painted by an untalented child of eight or nine on dirty paper with a limited number of colors: ochre, dun, bile-green, dung-brown—those left in the box when all the brighter and more favored colors had been used up.
The farther they went, the more solid things became. More words popped up indicating the approach of the Great God Something. The quality of the surrounding area changed, becoming less sketchy in character and more susceptible to perspective. They came upon definite growths, with perceivable thorns, and at last the dinks felt themselves mounting a ridge of rusty iron where they gazed down upon a fully realized landscape.
The valley echoed with muted howls, the thwack of slack drums and the clash of dissonant cymbals. A vaporous procession wound its way down the ridge beside them toward a vaguely circular chasm of black smoke. Across that chasm and to either side were other ridges, other processions, and through the sullen air came the dirgelike mourning of the mist-veiled marchers.
Within the chasm a stone mesa seemed to float upon the haze, a rock scarcely large enough to hold the hideously ramified bulk of the building upon it. Joining this isolated structure to the deeply creviced lands around it were bridges of black iron, spiderwebs of cable and strut leaping outward from the central plateau in flat trajectories to bury themselves at the ends of the squirming ridges. The building lay like a monstrous iron spider at the center of this web of ways, and like a spider it twitched its extended legs in great annexial spasms, seeming to shiver in constant motion, as mirages seem to shiver, an effect possibly caused by the haze of smoke that rose between the observers and the edifice itself.
Occasionally the chasm belched red fire that oppressively illuminated the narrow ledge between the building and the chasm, and there strode a monstrous six-legged being, insectlike, whose three great mouths grazed bloodily upon the processions attempting to cross the ledge to enter the great building.
And they were the creature upon the ledge, ravaging the marching hordes.
“Out,” murmured Sepel794DZ. “This isn’t helping us.” His colleagues did not argue. They withdrew from the recording.
“This tells us nothing,” murmured a dink. “People dream all kinds of things. Even we do. This was a nightmare. What good can we get from that?”
“The fact that he saved it,” murmured Sepel794DZ. “Only that.”
“Shall we try Thob?” asked another wearily.
They tried Thob and came upon a landscape; a shore, rocks, sky in flat primary colors: shore a line of brown, sea a plane of green, rock shapes of black, the sky a plane of blue. Was this what the Thob person saw? Or imagined? Was this her vision of life?
This passed, giving
