“That reason is that the Lords have inherited their weapons. What they haven’t inherited or taken from others, they cannot get. The race has lost its ancient wisdom and skill; it has become users, consumers, not creators. So, a Lord must use what he has. And if these weapons do not cover every contingency, if they leave holes in the armor, then they can be penetrated.
“There is another aspect to this. The Lords fight for their lives and fight to kill each other. But most have lived too long. They weary of everything. They want to die. Deep in the abyss of their minds, below the thousands of strata of the years of too much power and too little love, they want to die. And so, there are cracks in the walls.”
Luvah was astonished. “You do not really believe this wild theory, brother? I know I am not tired of living. I love life now as much as when I was a hundred. And the others, they fight to live as much as they ever did.”
Wolff shrugged and said, “It’s only a theory of mine. I have evolved it since I became Robert Wolff. I can see things that I could not see before and that none of you can see.”
He crawled to Vala and said, “Lend me your sword for a moment. I want to try an experiment.”
“Like cutting my head off?” she said.
“If I wanted to kill you, I have the beamer,” he replied. She took the short blade from its scabbard and handed it to him. He tapped the sharp edge gently on the glassy surface. When the first blow left the stuff unmarked, he struck harder.
Vala said, “What are you doing? You’ll ruin the edge.”
He pointed at the scratch left by the second blow. “Looks like a scratch made in ice. This stuff is far slipperier, more frictionless than ice, but in other respects it seems to resemble frozen water.”
He handed the weapon to her and drew his beamer. After putting it on half-power, he aimed it at a spot on the surface. The stuff grew red, then bubbled. Liquid flowed from it. He turned the beamer off and blew the liquid from the hole. The others crawled over to watch him.
“You’re a strange man,” Vala said. “Whoever would have thought of doing this?”
“Why is he doing it?” Palamabron said. “Is he crazy, cutting holes in the ground?”
Palamabron had recovered his haughtiness and his measured way of speaking.
Vala said, “No, he’s not crazy. He’s curious, that’s all. Have you forgotten what it is to be curious, Palamabron? Are you as dead as you look . . . and act? You were certainly lively enough a little while ago.”
Palamabron flushed, but he said nothing. He was watching the growth of tiny crystals on the walls of the hole and along the edges of the scratch.
“Self-regeneration,” Wolff said. “Now, I have read as much as possible on the old science of our ancestors, but I have never read or heard of anything like this. Urizen must have knowledge lost to others.”
“Perhaps,” Vala said, “he has gotten it from Red Orc. It is said that Orc knows more than all of the other Lords put together. He is the last of the old ones; it is said that he was born over a half a million years ago.”
“It is said. It is said,” Wolff mimicked. “The truth is that nobody has seen Red Ore for a hundred millennia. I think he is a dead man but his legend lives on. Enough of this. We have to find the next set of gates, though where those will lead us, I don’t know.”
He rose carefully and shuffled slowly a few steps forward. The surface of this world was not entirely barren vitreosity. There were widely spaced trees several hundred yards away and between them mushroom-shaped bushes. The trees had thin spiraling trunks that were striped with red and white, like barber poles. The trunks rose straight for twenty feet, then curved to left or right. Where the curve began, branches grew. These were shaped like horizontal 9’s and covered with a thin gray fuzz, the strands of which were about two feet long.