“You’ve already found it,” Sam cried. “You needn’t go on! You’ve already found it!”
“Perhaps,” cried the marble man, “under the next stone. Or the one after that.”
Sam left him behind, still turning over boulders, still peering at the darkness beneath. “Phaed,” he said. More than any other legend, more than any tie with the past or the future, this one, this tie of the cells, this claim of the bone, this seeking hunger of the heart. “Phaed.”
“What freedom does my faith give me?” bellowed a huge, armored thing on multiple wheels, its torso rearing skyward over a tangle of blades.
“The freedom to hate!” cried Sam. “The freedom to kill what I hate.”
And what do I hate? he asked himself, knowing the answer, for Saturday Wilm had told him the answer.
I hate what I fear.
What do I fear?
“Phaed!” he called into the thunderous night. “Phaed.”
• On the height, the lengthening towers had reached the limit of their growth. The curious chemical smell had grown into a stench that drove the people from it, sneezing and choking. China Wilm, laboring in childbirth, identified the smell and the chemical that gave it off as the curious product of certain fungi. “Gyromitra,” she murmured, between pains. “False morels. That’s the class of fungus upon Mahome. We have related species in the mushroom house. They can only be eaten after we boil away the rocket fuel.”
“Rocket fuel?” Africa asked her, mockingly, thinking she was delirious, or joking.
“I’m serious,” cried China. “They secrete mono-methyl-hydrazine. The same stuff used in chemical probes. We boil it away when we process the fungus. This must be a similar species …” and she was panting again.
“Where’s the smell coming from,” Africa asked the children.
“The base of the towers,” said Saturday. “Inside the grills, there’s this strange twisty growth, all tubes and wrinkled, like brains.
“Get people away from here,” cried China. “That stuff is poison.”
The smell had already driven people away. They moved restlessly, gathering up their belongings and shifting about, like disturbed bees.
Clouds gathered overhead. It was not the rainy season. Clouds were not unheard of at this time, but they were rare. Still, the light of the stars was covered over, and the dull mutter of thunder began to roll across the highlands.
Young people who had been exploring came to Saturday, and she to her mother. “Over past the village, there are several mound-temples without any towers in the middle. There’s no bad smell there, either. The others say they’ve got tight roofs, and this looks like a longtime rain.
Africa glared at the lowering skies and agreed. The first hard drops of rain were already falling, hitting her face like ice. She and the Wilm brothers, trailed by the other evacuees, carried China through the Departed village, past the little ruined temples, and into a space where several mound complexes had ramified into doughnut-shaped structures with no towers. In these structures, the roofs ended at the central shaft and the central grills were tightly woven with leafy flaps, like shutters to let the air in or out. People moved hesitantly along the arches, found the space warm and welcoming, laid claim to sections of padded floor, then curled on the curving floors like fragile worms in a nutshell, safe, for the moment, from what was happening.
Everyone knew something was happening, though they did not know what. Dern Blass knew. Spiggy, sitting with his back against an arch, listening as the rain pounded on the false-thatch above him. Zilia, rocking a baby who was frightened of the echoes. Jamice, squatting on the pseudo-carpet, turning a Phansuri spirit rod between her fingers, as though in meditation. China, panting behind the screens Africa had rigged. Sal and Harribon, sitting side-by-side, holding hands. In each of their minds, as in every other settler, there had opened a vacancy, not so much a hole as a screen, like a white page, waiting for a message to be written upon it. The screen covered the place terror came from. Terror couldn’t get through it. The people knew this and were grateful for it. They were attentive to the vacancy. It was there that they would find the final words. Either the Gods would give them words to let them live, or the Gods would help them die. The Gods themselves did not know which. This thing had never been done before. The Gods didn’t know whether it would work, whether there was time. Whatever happened, the end would come into their minds upon that waiting blankness.
“I should be doing something,” fretted Harribon.
Sal looked at him, and he flushed. It was only habit, his saying that. There was nothing he or anyone else could do. Still, here and there among the circled masses, there were those who said it, men mostly. “I should be doing … something …”
Thunder came, an enormous shouting of sky and a cracking of split air. Saturday and Jep were at the entrance with a dozen others, seeing what they could see. Several of the great chimneys were within sight, several with lightning striking at their tops, again and again. Burning lines, like glowing fuses, ran down from the tops of the towers. Then there was fire and smoke and a roiling haze and a contained thunder.
“Come see,” cried Jep to Theor Close. “They’re going off like guns!” Guns he knew. Guns he had seen, in old dramas.
Theor came to see. Certainly something had been, was being propelled up the gigantic barrels and out into the sky. High above the edge of the escarpment, they could see the missiles exploding, making a spreading shadow across the night sky. Lightning appeared green behind the haze, vividly green, like new grass. Saturday ran to tell her mother.
“What’s happening,” panted China.
“The towers are going off like big guns,” Africa told her. “Shooting something up into the sky.”
“Using the MMH as a propellant,” China muttered. “What set it off?”
“Lightning,”
