‘No furniture,’ the Brownie told him, quietly. ‘No material possessions. We have never needed them; we do not need them now. We have some food – caches of nuts and corn and grain and roots – stored against the winter, but that is all we have. You will, I hope, think none the less of us for this improvidence.’
Blake shook his head, half in answer, half in bewilderment.
Something stirred quietly in a darkened angle of the tree-house and Blake turned his head. A masked, furry face peered out at him, eyes shining in the darkness.
‘Our other friend,’ the Brownie said. ‘He does not seem to be afraid of you.’
‘I shall do nothing to harm him,’ said Blake, a little stiffly.
‘You are hungry?’ asked the Brownie. ‘We have…’
‘No, thanks,’ said Blake. ‘I ate this morning, with a compatriot of yours.’
The Brownie nodded, sagely. ‘He told me you were coming. That’s why I waited for you. He could not offer you a place to sleep; he has nothing but a burrow, quite too small for humans.’
The Brownie turned to go.
‘I don’t quite know,’ said Blake, ‘how I am to thank you.’
‘You have already thanked us,’ the Brownie said. ‘You have accepted us and accepted aid from us. And that is most important, I assure you, for ordinarily it is we who seek help from humans. To pay back a fraction of that help is very precious.’
Blake looked around to the raccoon. It was still watching him with its fire-bright eyes. When he looked back, the Brownie was gone.
Blake reached out and pulled his knapsack to him, rummaged in its contents. A thin and compact blanket, unlike anything he had ever seen, with a strange metallic lustre; a knife in a sheath; a folding axe; a small kit of cooking utensils; a lighter and a can of fluid; a folded map; a flashlight;
A map!
He picked it up and unfolded it, used the flashlight to light it, leaning close to make out the place names.
Willow Grove, a hundred miles or so away, the engineer had said. And there it was, the place that he was going. Finally, he thought, a destination in this world and situation where there had seemed to be no destinations. A place upon a map and a person, with an unremembered name, who had information that might be of interest to him.
He laid the blanket to one side and put the rest of the items back into the knapsack.
The raccoon, he saw, had crept a little closer, its curiosity apparently aroused by the things he had taken from the knapsack.
Blake moved over close to the wall, unfolded the blanket and pulled it over his body, tucked it in and lay down. The blanket seemed to cling to him, as if his body were a magnet, and for all its thinness there was warmth in it. The floor was soft and there were no lumps in it. Blake picked up a handful of the substance that composed it, and let it run slowly through his fingers. Tiny fragments of rotted wood, he saw, fragments that for years had fallen down from the tunnel of the hollowed trunk.
He closed his eyes and sleep crept in on him. His consciousness seemed to sink into a pit and there was something in the pit – two other selves that caught and held him and surrounded him so that he became one with them. Like a coming home, like a meeting with old friends not seen for much too long. There were no words and no words were needed. There was a welcome and an understanding and a seeming oneness and he was no longer Andrew Blake, and was not even human, but a being for which there was no name, and something that measured greater than either Andrew Blake or human.
But through the oneness and the comfort and the welcome an intruding thought stole out to nag him, He struggled and was let go and became himself again, an identity once more – not Andrew Blake, but changer.
-Quester, when we awake, it will be colder then. Could you take over for the night? You can travel faster and you can sense your way through the darkness and…
-I’ll take over. But there are your clothes and knapsack and you’ll be naked once again and…
-You can carry them. You have arms and hands, remember? You are all the time forgetting that you have your arms.
-All right! said Quester. All right! All right! All right!
-Willow Grove, said Changer.
-Yes, I know, said Quester. We read the map with you.
The sleep began closing in again, but something touched his arm and he let his eyes come open.
The raccoon, he saw, had crept across the space between them and now lay close against him.
He lifted a corner of the blanket and tucked it about the furry body and then he went to sleep.
25
Changer had said that it would be cooler, and it was cooler, but still too warm for running, too warm for making any time. But, as Quester reached the ridge-top, the wind knifing from the north had a welcome bite to it.
He stopped and stood there, on the flinty ground, exposed to the wind, for here, for some reason of geology, the trees did not intrude, but stopped short of the crest, a somewhat, unusual circumstance, since most of the hills were completely covered by the hardwood forest.
The skies were clear and there were stars this night, although it seemed to Quester not as many stars as could be seen from his native planet. And here, on this high piece of ground he thought, one could stand and snare pictures from the stars, although now he knew from Thinker that they were not pictures only, but the kaleidoscopic impressions of other races and other cultures and that they supplied the raw, bare-bones data from which the truth of the universe might someday be deduced.
He shivered, thinking of it – thinking of how his mind and senses could reach across the light years to harvest the fruits of other minds and senses. He shivered, but he knew even as he did that Thinker would not shiver, even had Thinker been so built, with muscle and with nerves, so that he could shiver. For there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could astonish Thinker; to him there was no mystic quality in the universe or life, but rather a mass of fact and data, of principle and method, which could be fed into his mind and be utilized by his faculty for logic.
But for me, thought Quester, for me it all is mystic. To me there is no need of reason, no compulsion reaching out for logic, no cold, no intensive drive to burrow to the heart of fact.
He stood on the flinty ridge, his tail drooping almost to the ground, his grizzled muzzle lifted to the sharp edge of the wind. For him it was enough, he thought, that the universe was filled with wonder and with beauty and he had never asked for more – and he knew now that it was his fervent hope that nothing ever would occur to blunt that wonder and the beauty.
Or had that process of blunting already taken place? Had he placed himself in a position (or been placed in a position) where he would find himself with a greater scope than ever to seek out new wonders and fresh mysteries, but with the wonder and the beauty watered down by the knowledge that he was providing material for Thinker to work out the logic?
He tried to test the thought, but as yet the mysticism and the wonder still were his. Here, on this windswept ridge, with the stars shining in the sky above, with the wind blowing through the wood below him, and the wood talking to the dark, with the strange, alien smells and the other-worldly vibrations that shivered in the air, there still was room for wonder that ran like a chill along his nerves.
The space between him and the next hilltop seemed clear of any threat. Far off to the left ribbons of moving lights marked the passing of the cars along the road that cut across the hills. In the valley were habitations, betrayed by beams of light and by the vibrations that came streaming out from them – vibrations, radiations (whatever one might call them) of human life itself and of that strange force the humans called electricity.
There were birds roosting in the trees and some sort of larger animal (although smaller than himself) sneaked through the underbrush to the right of him, mice huddled in their nests, a woodchuck in his den – and uncounted hordes of little burrowers and tiny scavengers moving in the soil and its mulch of rotting leaves. But these he screened out of his consciousness, for at the moment they were no concern of his.