“Free us!” Nurb K’ohl Daq begged. “This is unfair!”
“You’re destroying us!”
“We’re being sacrificed for your ends!”
“How can we help you if we’re destroyed?”
Glimmung said, “You are not destroyed. You are engulfed.”
“That’s being destroyed,” Joe said.
“No,” Glimmung boomed, “it is not.” He began to lumber away from the remains of the wharf, the scattered bits of wood which he had not absorbed. Down, Glimmung thought, and the thought impressed itself in Joe’s brain—as well as in the other brains around him. Down to the bottom. The time has come; Heldscalla must be raised.
Now, Glimmung thought. What sank down centuries ago will be spewed up, once more, to the surface. Amalita and Borel, he thought. You will be free and on the shore; it will all be as it was before, worlds without end.
Depth. The water became dull. Forms darted or crept by, a multitude of them, no two alike. The snowflakes of the sea, he thought. A winter of vegetable life which crawls over and hangs onto. Let go.
Before him Heldscalla lay. Its pale turrets, its Gothic arch, its flying buttresses, its red-stained glass made from gold—he saw all of it from a dozen eyes. It was intact, except for the engineering divisions, from another time, when he had planned to raise it externally. Now, he thought, I will enter you; I will become a part of you and then I will rise. You will go up with me, and we shall die on the shore. But you will be saved.
He made out the jagged ruins of the Black Cathedral. Broken into bits, he thought. Destroyed where I left you; rotten and unusable debris which serves no purpose and which no longer can block me, weak as I am. Because of all of you, he thought, I can function again. Can you hear me? He spoke distinctly. “Say if you can hear me.”
“Yes we can.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.” The answering voices rattled on and on; he counted them and they were all there, all alive and functioning as subforms of himself. “All right,” he said, and triumph filled him as he dove directly at Heldscalla.
“Will we survive this?” Joe Fernwright asked. He felt fear. You will, Glimmung thought. But not me. Raising his perimeters he extended himself so that his front end served as wide an area as possible. Now you are me, he thought, and I am you, Heldscalla. It has happened, despite The Book.
He held within him the sunken cathedral.
Now, he thought. He listened; he had ceased moving. Mr. Baldwin, he thought, and Miss Yojez, Mr. Daq, Miss Fleg, Miss Reiss—can you hear me?
“Yes.” Begrudging but genuine responses; he felt their presence, their agitation, as they held out against his pull. Come together, he told them. To survive we must go up, and to go up requires you to act. There is no other way. There never was.
“How can we act?” the voices asked.
Combine with me, Glimmung said. Add your skills, your capacities, your strengths . . . add everything to my mind. Mr. Baldwin; you move matter at a distance. Help me. Help them. Miss Yojez; you understand the art of removing objects from coral encrustation. Do that, now; unbind the coral reaches. Mr. Fernwright; you must knit the ceramic surfaces of the cathedral together . . . they are clay and you are the potter. Mr. Daq; you are a hydraulic engineer. No, Daq replied; I am a graphic archaeologist; I deal in recovered art objects. I can identify them, catalog them, and estimate their cultural value. Yes, Glimmung thought; it is Mr. Lunç who is the hydraulic engineer. I forgot. The similarity of names.
We will make our first run now! Glimmung told them, told the parts of himself who possessed separate identities. Probably we will sink back down. But we will try again. As long as we live? Mali Yojez asked. Yes, he thought. We will try as long as we are alive. Until the last of us is dead. But that’s not fair, Harper Baldwin thought. Glimmung thought, You offered me everything you had; you yearned to help me when I lay dying. Now you are doing it. Be glad; rejoice. He grasped the uncut floor of the cathedral with his many somatic extensions. Before, he thought, when the Black Glimmung and the Black Cathedral were down here, I could not take the risk of lifting with my own girth. Now I can.
The lift failed. The cathedral remained rooted to the coral. Held fast by its mass, its weight, and bonds. He gasped, spent by the faulty effort. Everywhere within himself he ached, and all the separate voices cried out in panic and despair. And pain.
It doesn’t wish to come, Joe Fernwright thought.
Is that so? Glimmung asked. How did you know that?
I found it out, Joe thought. When I came down here. I read it on the pot; remember?
Yes, Glimmung thought. I remember. He felt weary terror, the overwhelming submission which involved everything which came down here. Even himself. Once again, he thought. And then he thought, Faust always fails. But, he thought, I’m not Faust. You are, a multitude of voices came, a desperate din of defeat and refusal.
Let us go upward, Glimmung said. We are going. He felt the base of the cathedral resist. Perhaps you are right, he thought. I know I am, the voice came. It has happened before; it will happen again; it will always happen. But I can raise Heldscalla, Glimmung said to himself and to them. We can, all of us.
Using them, making them his arms, he lifted; he tugged the body of the cathedral to him and forced it to rise, against its own desires. Feeling it resist he felt bitterness and dismay. I did not know this, he thought. Perhaps this knowledge will kill me; perhaps this is what The Book meant. Perhaps, he thought, I should leave it down here; perhaps it is better the way it is.
It won’t lift.
He tried again. No. It will not lift; I say it will not. At any time. For anyone. Under any combination of circumstances.
It will rise, Joe Fernwright said, when you are recovered from your injury, the damage done to you by the Black Cathedral.
“What?” he said, listening. Other voices joined Joe’s. When you are stronger. Wait until then.
I must make myself stronger, he realized. Time must pass, authentic time over which I have no control. How can they know this when I do not? He listened, but heard no voices; they had quieted into silence as soon as he ceased striving. So be it, he decided. I will rise to the surface alone, and some day, not long from now, I will try again.
And once again, he decided, I will absorb you. All of you. Once more you will be parts of me as you are now. All right, the voices squeaked. But let us go; prove to us you can release us. I shall, he told them. And let himself rise to the surface.
Cold night air plucked at him and he saw feeble, distant stars.
On a wild shoreline, with nocturnal water birds striding about, he deposited the strident voices, he disgorged all of them, those whom he had incorporated, and then he lunged out again into the water—an aquatic world which was now safe: he could stay here forever and not be endangered by any hostile force. Thank you, Joe Fernwright, he thought, but now no answer came; internally he was again alone. So he spoke the words aloud, and, as he spoke, felt lonely. For a time he had been inhabited. But . . . it would come again, the warm, interior babble.
He examined his wounds, made himself comfortable in a half-submerged position, and waited.
Shivering, his feet in sandy mud, Joe Fernwright listened and heard Glimmung’s voice. “Thank you, Joe Fernwright.” He continued to listen, but there was no more.
He could see Glimmung, as the big creature lay a few hundred yards from shore. He would have killed us, Joe thought. And himself, too. In trying to bring up the cathedral. Thank god he listened.
“That was too close,” Joe said to the other creatures near him, deployed here and there along the sandy beach. And especially to Mali Yojez, who huddled close to him, trying to get warm. “Much too close,” he said, half to himself. He shut his eyes. Anyhow he let us go, he reflected. And now it’s just a question of walking until we come to a house or a road. Unless he tries to get us back.
But that did not seem likely. Not, anyhow, for some time. “Are you going to stay on Plowman’s Planet?” Mali asked him. “You know what it means; he’ll reabsorb all of us who stay here.”
Joe said, “I’m staying.”