SUM.
She Who rides with me does not give sign of noticing that my songs have died in my throat. What humanness She showed is departing; Her face is cold and shut, Her voice bears a ring of metal. She hooks straight ahead. But She does speak to me for a little while yet:
“Do you understand what is going to happen? For the next half year I will be himiked with SUM, integral, anothier component of It. I suppose you will see Me, hut that will merely be My flesh. What speaks to you will be SUM.”
“I know.” The words must be forced forth. My coming this far is more triumph than any man in creation before me has won; and I am here to do battle for my Dancer-on-Moonglades; but nonetheless my heart shakes me, and is loud in my skull, and my sweat stink.s.
I manage, though, to add: “You will be a part of It, Lady of Ours. That gives inc hope.”
For an instant She turns to me, and lays Her hand across mine, and something makes Her again so young and uritaken that I almost forget the girl who died; and she whispers, “If you knew how I hope!”
The instant is gone, and I am alone among machines.
We must stop before the castle gate. The wall looms sheer above, so high and high that it seems to be toppling upon me against the westward march of the stars, so black and black that it does not only drink down every light, it radiates blindness. Challenge and response quiver on electronic bands I cannot sense. The outer-guardian parts of It have perceived a mortal aboard this craft. A missile launcher swings about to aim its three serpents at me. But the Dark Queen answers— She does not trouble to be peremptory—amid the castle opens its jaws for us.
We descend. Once, I think, we cross a river. I hear a rushing and hollow echoing and see droplets glitter where they are cast onto the viewports and outlined against dark. They vanish at once: liquid hydrogen, perhaps, to keep certain parts near absolute zero?
Much hater we stop and the canopy slides back. I rise with Her. We are in a room, or cavern, of which I can see nothing, for there is no light except a dull bluish phosphorescence which streams from every solid object, also from Her flesh and mine. But I judge the chamber is enormous, for a sound of great machines at work comes very remotely, as if heard through dream, while our own voices are swallowed up by distance. Air is pumped through, neither warm nor cold, totally without odor, a dead wind.
We descend to the floor. She stands before nie, hands crossed on breast, eyes half shut beneath the cowl and not looking at me nor away fromn me. “Do what you are told, Harper,” She says in a voice that has never an overtone, “precisely as you are told.” She turns and departs at an even pace. I watch Her go until I can no longer tell Her luminosity from the formless swirhings within my own eyeballs.
A claw plucks my tunic. I hook down and am surprised to see that time dwarf robot has been waiting for me this whole time. How long a time that was, I cannot tell.
Its squat form leads me in another directiomi. Weariness crawls upward through mime, my feet stumble, my lips tingle, lids are weighted and muscles have each their separate aches. Now and then I feel a jag of fear, but dully. When the robot indicates Lie down here, I am grateful.
The box fits nie well. I let various wires be attached to me, various needles be injected which lead into tubes. I pay little attemition to the machines which cluster amid murmur around me. The robot goes away. I sink into blessed darkness.
I wake renewed in body. A kind of shell seems to have grown between my forebrain and the old animal parts. Far away I can feel the horror and hear the screaming and thrashing of my instincts; but awareness is chill, calni, logical. I have also a feeling that I slept for weeks, mnonths, while leaves blew loose and snow fell on the upper world. But this may be wrong, and in no case does it matter. I am about to be judged by SUM.