“Let’s go inside the hotel,” Joe said, “and have a drink.” Together, they passed through the revolving door, into the Olympia Hotel, with its wooden floors, carved hardwood decorations, polished brass doorknobs and railings, and thick red carpet. And its antique elevator, which Joe had already caught sight of. Nonautomatic, he discovered. The elevator required an attendant.
In his hotel room, with its dresser, splotched mirror, iron bed, and canvas windowshade elegance, Joe Fernwright sat on an overstuffed, faded chair and studied The Book.
Not long ago he had been preoccupied with The Game. And now—The Book. But this consisted of something quite different, and the more he read of The Book the more he realized it. Gradually, as he nosed among its pages, he began to assemble, in his mind, the totality of the English text; he had begun to put the separate bits in superimposition over one another.
“I’m going to take a bath,” Mali said. She had already opened her suitcase and had laid most of her clothes out on the bed in her room. “Isn’t it strange, Joe Fernwright?” she called. “That we have to keep two rooms. Like a century ago.”
“Yes,” he said.
She entered the room, wearing only her tight pants; bare from the waist up, he saw. Small-breasted but dense and tall, with fine muscle tone. The body of a dancer, he said to himself, or—a Cro-Magnon female, a hunter, an astute, supple person accustomed to long, lean, even fruitless marches. There was not a gram of useless flesh on her, as he had already discovered in the locked lounge of the ship. He had clutched it then; now he saw it. However, he thought morbidly, Kate had—actually still has—as good a figure. That made him depressed. He returned to reading The Book.
“Would you have wanted to go to sleep with me,” Mali said, “if I were a cyclops?” She pointed to a spot above her nose. “One eye there. Polyphemus; the cyclops in The Odyssey. They put his one eye out with a burning stick, I think.”
Joe said, “Listen to this.” He read aloud from The Book. ‘The current, dominant species on the planet consists of what is called a Glimmung. This shadowy, enormous entity is not native to the planet; it migrated here several centuries ago, taking over from the weak species left over when the once-ruling master species, the so-called Fog-Things of antiquity, vanished.’ “ Joe waved her to come and look. “’Glimmung’s power, however, is sharply curtailed by a mysterious book in which, it is alleged, everything which has been, is, and will be is recorded.’ “ He snapped the book shut. “It’s talking about itself.”
Coming over to his chair, Mali bent to read the text. “Let me see what else it says,” she said.
“That’s all. The English part ended there.”
Taking The Book from him, Mali began to glance through it. She had begun to frown; her face was tense and stern. “Well here you are, Joe,” she said at last. “As I told. You’re in here by name.”
He took The Book from her and read rapidly.
Joseph Fernwright learns that Glimmung considers the Kalends and their Book his antagonist, and is said to be plotting to undermine the Kalends once and for all. How he will do this, though, is not known. Here the rumors begin to differ.
“Let me turn the pages,” Mali said; she examined the subsequent pages and then, her face darkening, paused. “In my language,” she said. For a long, long time she studied the passage, and as she read and reread it, her expression became more intense, shadowed by her own intense urgency into starkness. “It says,” she said at last, “that Glimmung’s Undertaking is the raising of the cathedral Heldscalla to dry land once more. And that he will fail.”
“Is there more?” Joe said. He had a feeling there was; her face showed it.
Mali said, “It says that most of those recruited to help Glimmung will be destroyed. When the Undertaking fails.” She corrected herself. “Toojic. Damaged or made to unexist. Maimed; that’s it. They will be permanently altered, beyond immediate repair.”
“Do you think Glimmung knows about these passages?” Joe said. “That he’ll fail and we’ll be—“
“Of course he knows. It’s there in the text, in that section you read. ‘Glimmung considers the Kalends and their book his antagonist and plots to undermine them.’ And, ‘He’s raising Heldscalla to undermine them.’
“It didn’t say that,” Joe said. “It reads, ‘How he will do this, though, is not known; here the rumors begin to differ.’”
“But obviously it’s the raising of Heldscalla.” She paced about the room in agitation, her hands clasped tightly together. “You said it yourself. ‘The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla.’ All you have to do is put the two passages together. I told you it was all there, our future, Heldscalla’s, Glimmung’s. And ours is to unexist, to die.” She halted, stared at him frantically. “That’s the way the Fog-Things perished. They challenged the Book of the Kalends. As the spiddles can tell you; the spiddles are still chattering about it.”
Joe said, “We had better tell the rest of the people here at the hotel about it.”
A knock sounded on the door; it opened, and Harper Baldwin peered apologetically into the room. “I’m sorry to bother the two of you,” he rumbled, “but we’ve been reading this book.” He held up his copy of the Book of the Kalends. “There’s stuff in it about all of us. I’m having the hotel management notify all its guests to meet in the main conference room in half an hour.”
“We’ll be there,” Joe said, and, beside him, Mali Yojez nodded, her partially disclosed body rigid with concern.
8
Half an hour later all of them, a hotelful of sentient organisms of forty kinds, filled the main conference room. Joe, looking about at the enormous variety of life-forms, saw, among them, several which he had eaten, back on Earth. Most of the forms he did not recognize. Glimmung had in fact gone to many star-systems to get the talent he wanted. More than Joe had realized.
“I think,” Joe said quietly to Mali, “that we ought to prepare ourselves for a full manifestation of Glimmung. He’ll probably show up here as he really is.”
Mali grated, “He weighs forty thousand tons. If he manifested himself here as he really is he’d collapse the building; he’d fall through the floor and down to the basement.”
“Then in some other form. Such as that of a bird.”
On the stage, at the microphone, Harper Baldwin rapped for silence. “Come on, folks,” he said, and, in all that vast variety of tongues needed, his words were translated into each earphone.
“You mean such as a chicken?” Mali said.
Joe said, “That’s not a bird; a chicken is fowl, barnyard fowl. I mean like a soaring great long-winged albatross.”
“Glimmung isn’t above lowly things,” Mali said. “Once he manifested himself to me—“ She broke off. “Never mind.”
“What this meeting is about, folks,” Harper Baldwin continued, “has to do with a book they have here that we’ve run across; now, those of you who’ve been on this planet longer probably know about it. If so, you’ve already formed your own—“
A multilegged gastropod rose up and spoke into its microphone. “Of course we are familiar with The Book. The spiddles sell it at the spaceport.”
Mali said into her own mike, “Our edition, being later than yours, may contain material you haven’t read.”
“We buy a new edition each day,” the gastropod said.
“Then you know it says that—the raising of Heldscalla will fail,” Joe said. “And that we’ll be killed.”
“It does not precisely say that,” the gastropod answered. “It says that those he employs will suffer, will receive some sort of blow which will permanently change them.”
An immense dragonfly took the floor by the simple expedient of flying up to Harper Baldwin’s entrenchment and landing on his shoulder. Challenging the gastropod it said, “There is no doubt, however, that the Book of the Kalends predicts the failure of the attempt to raise Heldscalla.”
The gastropod yielded the floor to a reddish jelly supported by a metal frame that held it upright; hence it could join in the discussion. As it spoke it flushed darkly, obviously very shy. “The burden of the text seems to state that the raising of the cathedral will fail. ‘Seems to state,’ I put it to you. I am a linguist, brought here by Mr. Glimmung for that reason; under the water in the cathedral there are countless documents. The key sentence, ‘The Undertaking will fail,’ appears one hundred and twenty-three times in The Book. I have read each of the translations and I submit that the text most properly means, ‘There will be failure after the Undertaking,’ that it will lead to failure, rather than it will fail.”