It was growing dark. There was no moon. But far away was a golden glimmer of light on the horizon. Weston turned toward it. He didn’t know, in the darkness, how close the giant was. But he could still make speed, for there were no obstacles and the moss was resilient and level. The golden shining brightened as they neared it. But Weston was exhausted. His mind went around in circles. After a time he began to talk to Serena again.
“You’re not human. You lost that a million years ago. Absolute perfection—yes, your race achieved that, at the cost of humanity. Now you don’t need machines. A long while ago you learned to harness natural dynamics, the force of growing things. And eventually the technique of mastering that power was born in you. You have it, don’t you, Serena? I’ve seen you use it.
“So you didn’t need reason. You got yourself a paradise and tailored your very minds to fit. So the answer was stagnation—mindlessness—tropism. Serena, don’t you see the race wasn’t ready yet for perfection? It still had a job to do. I don’t know what. But it must have had. Idleness in paradise must have seemed horrible to your race, or they wouldn’t have had to sacrifice intelligence to endure it.”
He glanced again at her calm, half-visible profile. No response stirred there.
“You’ve got to understand. Somebody understood once, a long time ago. The Knowledge told me that. A great scientist. I suppose psychological biogenetics would have been his field. He saw that the race was accepting paradise before it had earned it, and so—well, he knew the race was doomed, but he hoped that the search might go on.
“He set them a job to do. He gave them the job of creating life. That’s your tropism—that’s your taxis. Your own race is lost and damned, Serena, but you’re trying, by instinct now, to create a new race, a race that will carry on where your forefathers lost the way. With natural dynamics, and those life-fires you kindle, trying for a thousand years to create a greater race than your own—driven by the impulse born in you, Serena.
“Ants or bees. Alien. I can’t understand you or your race or your world. I have only—intelligence!
“But that’s the answer, Serena. I can’t let you commit suicide. You’d go back to the fires and walk right into them, like a moth. The tropism would make you do that. Serena, Serena!”
He had been walking in a dream. And suddenly he saw that the Light rose directly before them.
It was a tall flower of cool pale flame, swaying a little. The shower of gold that came to Danae—it was like that. There were ruins embedded in the moss, as though once a temple had risen around the Light. Perhaps it had once been worshipped. It was tall as a man, and it glimmered, and seemed to wait.
Weston was ineffably tired. But he knew that a last struggle still lay before him. Or, rather, behind him, for heavy footsteps came out of the dark, and the resilient ground quivered a little, and out of the blackness strode the newest life-form the last men had created.
Weston pushed Serena behind him. He stood there, waiting, watching the reflections of the Light glimmer on the magnificent pallid body of the giant as he marched forward.
And—marched past!
Ignoring Weston and Serena, the giant moved forward toward the light!
Weston stood gaping. The monster never glanced aside. He was trying to touch the light with big, uncertain hands that seemed to strike an invisible barrier between him and the flame. He kept on trying futilely—ignoring Weston.
Serena slipped free and went calmly away in the dark, following her homing instinct toward the faraway fires. Weston was dizzy with fatigue. He went after her, watching the giant across his shoulder. The Titan was staring at the light, hypnotized, trying in vain to touch it with his hands.
He did not follow.
Weston never remembered much about the trip back. He must have slept on his feet, stumbling toward the moss, holding Serena’s wrist as she led the way toward the fires that waited for her. They went slowly; her patience was fathomless and somehow terrible.
Late in the morning they reached the blue buildings again. The men looked up from their work briefly, and then bent again over the figure they were moulding. “Almost ready now,” Serena murmured. “No time was lost, after all. Soon—soon, perhaps!”
Then nightmare. Weston had to exert constant effort simply to keep his fingers locked around her wrist. He was looking for the time-gate. But his eyes kept closing and sleep washed up exactly like a tide rising, so that twice he snapped awake in time to see Serena walking toward the fires. He caught her scarcely in time.
Perhaps the gateway had moved with the time-flow. Perhaps he had simply forgotten its exact location. He searched and searched, in a dull, grinding interval of aching exhaustion, all through that terrible noontide of a race that would soon move on into its night, searching for its own destruction.
A dreamy sort of horror grew slowly upon him. The men seemed to be working so fast. Their blind tropism, their ancient, inbred instinct drove them. Weston stumbled on around the little pool, dragging Serena—
Then he was in the Versailles garden, by the pool, again, and a plane was droning overhead, and he still gripped Serena’s wrist. He had brought her back through time, from noon to morning.
And that was his damnation—and hers.
South of Suva a coral island stands in the empty seas. Once there were natives there, Kanaka boys, but not now. There is a walled garden, and a deserted house; already pandanus grows wild, and the lichen and the
