(It seemed sinister till we saw it. It’s like an ornament. Why is it out here?) “Duun, what is this place?” Duun was silent. Thorn trembled, looking at it from the place on the bridge where Ivogi-tanun called them. It was foolish. Perhaps it was all the other shocks. But there seemed no other destination. Earth and Gatog spoke in some hieratic tongue past them, sharing secrets; and earth had drunk down Ganngein-“Gods,” the last transmission had been, or it had sounded like that. Then static from Nonnent too. “They’re behind the earth,” Duun said. They expected transmission to pick up again. But they never found it, though Deva asked Gatog. “We’ve lost it too,” Gatog said, one of the few uncoded transmissions they had gotten from this secretive place.
(Can silence be worth so much here, so far from earth?)
The lights shone against the stars, white and gold, a cluster here and removed from it, another.
“Five minutes to braking,” Ivogi said; and: “Go aft,” Duun said. Deva had no spare seats for six passengers. They had to brace themselves in a narrow place where Deva had provision for passengers during maneuvering: there was no viewport there, and nothing more than padding. Thorn went with them. Duun did not.
But Duun came for him after the hard burn. “We’re going to suit up to cross,” Duun said.
It was a cold place, Deva, gray and smelling of chilled metal and electrics and their own bodies and their own food. But Deva was a known place, and Thorn looked over it while he fastened up his suit. He did these things for himself and looked at Deva and thought of Sheon’s woods, and the hearthside. His mind leapt from one to the other. From that to the glittering lights.
(Duun, I’m afraid. I want the world again, Duun, I want to go home. I knew things there; but I go from one thing to the other, and you change, Duun, you go away from me, you talk with Weig, you talk with Ivogi, you talk a language I don’t understand and you’ve lost interest in me. You go farther away.)
(Don’t look at me like that. Don’t think about leaving me. I can read you, Duun, and it scares me.)
“Good-bye,” Ivogi said, and Deva’s hatch spat them out as impersonally as it had taken them in.
Thorn’s hand froze on the maneuvering gun in all that unforgiving dark. He drifted. His eyes jerked wildly from light to light to light-a great dish suspended, building-wide, or close to them; his eyes refused perspective. A web of metal stretching to insane thinness in the distance, dotted with brilliant lights. “Gatog,” Duun said, a voice gone strange with the speaker. “That’s the great ear, that dish. It listens. So does another, considerably across the solar system. Out in Dothog orbit.”
(What does it listen to?) But Thorn could not ask any question. His soul was numb, battered with too many answers. Duun dragged at him and turned him, and aimed him at another down with such a shift in perspective his sense of balance sent terror through him.
A great pit yawned, all lit in green: it went down a vast rotating shaft to a core; and his peripheral vision formed it as the hub of a vast wheel.
Yet another turn, and Weig and the others were there, their backs to them, their faces toward a great lighted scaffolding prisoning something from which the lights could not utterly remove the darkness-it looked older than the shining girders which embraced it: a cylinder of metal no longer bright.
“That’s a ship,” Duun said. “The ship.”
Thorn said nothing. He hung there, lost, held only by Duun’s hand. He had no more wish to be inside, wherever inside was, than to hang here forever in the blaze of these lights. (Is this the place? Is this what cost so much? Do I go beyond this place or is this the stopping-point for us? Duun, Duun, is this your Solution?)
Duun held him by the hand and dived down (or up) into the well, which was green as Sheon’s leaves. The walls spun and turned about them.