“At the water’s edge,” Glimmung said. He sounded angry but at the same time contemptuous; the group’s conditions seemed to have enlarged his determination.
Joe said, “Good luck.”
The others flew, crawled, or walked out onto the wharf, now; as Glimmung had requested, they lined up at the water’s edge. Glimmung surveyed them one last time, then descended the wooden ladder into the water. At once he disappeared beneath the surface; only circles of water and bubbles marked the place where he had gone. Possibly forever, Joe thought. He—and we—may never come back up.
Standing close to Joe, Mali said, “I’m scared.”
“It won’t be long, now,” the plump woman with tangled baby-doll hair said.
“What’s your specialty?” Joe asked her.
“Slabbing rock.”
After that they waited in silence.
Fusion came to him as a monumental shock. And, he discovered, it came to the others the same way; the frightened babble of their composite voices washed over him—their voices and then the overpowering presence of Glimmung, his thoughts, his desires. And, Joe realized, his fears. Beneath the anger and contempt there was a core of anxiety that had not been evident before fusion. Now they all knew it . . . and Glimmung was aware of their knowledge; his thoughts altered as he deftly sought to evade their scrutiny.
“Glimmung is scared,” the matronly woman declared.
“Yes, very scared,” the timid little fellow piped.
“More,” the quasiarachnid said, “than we are.”
“Than some of us are,” the immense dragonfly answered.
“Where are we?” the red-faced heavyset man demanded. “I’m disoriented already.” Panic filled his voice.
Joe said, “Mali?”
“Yes.” She seemed very near him, close enough for him to touch. But he had no manual extremities; like a worm in a cadaver he found himself, as before, rigidly placed within the magnasoma that was Glimmung. Separate motion was impossible, for any of them. They existed as mentational entities only . . . a weird sensation that he found unpleasant.
And yet—once again deeply augmented. Multiplied by all the others and, more than anything else, by Glimmung. He was helpless and in addition he constituted a supranormal organism whose potentialities were beyond calculation. For Glimmung, too, there had been a radical enlargement; Joe listened carefully to Glimmung’s cerebral activity and marveled at the new acuity of it . . . acuity and power.
They dropped into the depths of the ocean.
“Where are we?” Harper Baldwin said nervously. “I can’t see properly; I’m too far in. Can you see, Fernwright?”
Through Glimmung’s eyes Joe saw the shape of Heldscalla grow before them. Glimmung moved rapidly, wasting no time; evidently he took the two-hour limit seriously. Reaching out, Glimmung sought to embrace the cathedral; he discharged, in a split second, his entire fund of energy in an attempt to hug the cathedral in a grip which could not be broken.
Suddenly Glimmung halted. Something rose from Heldscalla and confronted him, a dim figure. Glimmung’s micescurrying thoughts poured over Joe, drenching him. From the thoughts Joe understood why Glimmung had ceased to move; he knew what the dim figure was.
A Fog-Thing. From antiquity. Which still lived. And it stood between Glimmung and Heldscalla.
Physically, literally, the Fog-Thing blocked the way.
“Questobar,” Glimmung said. “You are dead.”
The Fog-Thing said, “And, like everything else on this planet which is dead I live here, now. In Mare Nostrum. Nothing on the planet completely dies.” The Fog-Thing raised its arm, then pointed directly at Glimmung. “If you raise Heldscalla from out of the depths to dry land, you will bring back to life the worship of Amalita and, indirectly, Borel. Are you prepared for that?”
“Yes,” Glimmung said.
“And with it ourselves? As we were before?”
Glimmung said, “Yes.”
“You no longer will be the dominant species on the planet.”
“Yes,” Glimmung said. “I know.” Through him rapid thoughts traveled, but they were thoughts of tension, not of fear.
“And you still intend to raise the cathedral? Knowing this?”
“It must be put on dry ground,” Glimmung said. “Back again where it belongs. Not down here in a world of decay.”
The Fog-Thing stepped aside. “I will not stop you,” it said. Joy filled Glimmung; he rushed forward to seize Heldscalla, and with him they all plunged, too. All of them reached with Glimmung. All of them grasped the cathedral together. And, as they did so, Glimmung began to change. He devolved, rushing backward into time, becoming once more what he had long since ceased to be. He became powerful, wild, and wise. And then, as he lifted the cathedral, he changed again.
Glimmung became an enormous female creature.
Now the devolution reached the cathedral; it changed, too. In Glimmung’s arms it became an encased fetus, a small, sleeping child-creature wrapped tightly in the cocoon whose strands enveloped it. Without effort, Glimmung raised it to the surface; all of them cried out in delight as, in a glimmering instant, the cathedral broke through into the cold lateafternoon sun.
Why the change? Joe wondered.
Glimmung answered. Because, she thought back to Joe, at one time we were bisexual. This part of me has been suppressed throughout the years. Until I obtained it again I could not make the cathedral my child. As it has to be.
Under the weight of the child-creature the dry ground sagged and failed; Joe felt the ground sink away under the majestic weight. But Glimmung did not seem alarmed; gradually, she released the cathedral, unwilling to let it go, to let it once again be separate from her. I am it, she thought, and it is part of me.
A clap of thunder sounded and rain began to fall. Quietly, heavily, the rain soaked into everything; water gushed from the cathedral and wound a tortuous route back to Mare Nostrum. Now, by degrees, the cathedral regained its customary form. The child-creature gave way to concrete and rock and basalt, to flying buttresses and a soaring Gothic arch. Once again the red-stained glass, derived from gold, shone in the erratic light of a rain-clouded sunfall.
It is done, Glimmung thought. Now I can rest. The great fisherman of the night has received its victory. Everything has been set in order once again.
Let us go, Joe thought. That ever yet remains.
“Yes!” others of them dinned. “Release us!”
Glimmung hesitated; Joe felt her conflicting thoughts ebb back and forth. No, she thought. Because of you I have great authority; if I release you I will sink again, dwindle into smallness.
You must, Joe thought. That was our compact.
True, Glimmung thought. But you have so much to gain as portions of me. We can function for a thousand years, and none of us will be alone.
“A vote,” Mali Yojez said.
Yes, Glimmung thought. A vote among you, to see who wishes to remain within me and who chooses to separate into an individual entity.
I’ll stay, Nurb K’ohl Daq thought.
So will I, the quasiarachnid thought.
The vote continued; Joe listened to them, some of them electing to remain, some of them electing to break free. I want to be released, he said, when his time came to vote. At this Glimmung shuddered with dismay. Joe Fernwright, Glimmung thought. You are the best of them; won’t you remain?
No, Joe thought.
He walked a shadowy shore with dark shapes looming, a dense and permanent swamp somewhere in the wilds of Plowman’s Planet. How long had he been here? He did not know. Sometime before, he had been within Glimmung, and now he trudged painfully, the sharp sand lancing his feet as he struggled on.
Am I alone? he wondered. Halting, he peered into the twilight, trying to make out another life-form in his proximity.
The multilegged gastropod wriggled toward him. “I left with you,” the gastropod said.
“Anyone else?” Joe asked.
The gastropod said, “In the final vote only the two of us. All the others remained. I consider it incredible, but it is so—they remained.”
“Including Mali Yojez?”
“Yes,” the gastropod said.
So that was that. He felt the weight of centuries on him; the task of raising the cathedral and now the loss of Mali were too much. “Do you know where we are?” he asked the gastropod. “I can’t walk much farther.”
“Neither can I,” the gastropod said. “But there is a light to the north; I have drawn a paralactic fix on it and we are peregrinating in that direction. In another hour we should reach it, if I have computed our velocity correctly.”
“I can’t see the light,” Joe said.
“My vision is superior to yours. You will see it in another twenty minutes. It winks almost out; it is very fragile. Probably a spiddle colony, I would guess.”
“Spiddles,” Joe said. “Are we going to live the rest of our life with spiddles? Is that how we wind up after leaving all the others and Glimmung?”
The gastropod said, “From there we can go by hovercar to the Olympia Hotel, where our possessions can be found. And then we can return to our own planets. We did a good job; we did what we came here for. We should rejoice.”