Valeddom
6: ixli

So we floated, my unconscious companions and I, away from Pezerjink on our little sky-platform, two thousand feet above the valley of Onuk. Whether the zitpoidl were awakening, whether they had spotted us, whether they could still recapture us, I had no idea, but I had done all I could. If this escape bid failed, then that was that. No point, then, in peering about to see. Besides, I wasn’t exactly keen to look straight down. Carefully I focused, not on the void below, but on the mountainous south-east boundary of the valley several miles ahead of us.
    You may be surprised that I was able to sit up and gaze around at all, rather than lie face down on the lannemilb, quaking with terror as I clutched the rim. You may be comparing my account with how you would feel in my place, up in the sky on an open disc just twelve feet across, without even a rail to hold on to. But actually, for a couple of reasons it wasn’t so bad.
I have already pointed out that the greater physical courage of my Mercurian body exercised a strengthening influence upon my timid Earthly mind. This is part of it, but it can’t be the whole story. After all, not even my Mercurian self could have been accustomed to flying around in the sky on the equivalent of a magic carpet, a situation just as outrageous to me, Ren Nydr, as it was to me, Hugh Dent. Admittedly the people of Ixli were used to balpars – as they called the lannemilbs – but they weren’t used to having them float at the lofty altitude of this Ancestor of all silicon cells.
    To tell you the truth (if you can believe it) the main reason why my fear of heights was controllable, was that there was a comforting aspect to our aerial glide, a reassurance which could only have spilled out from the Ancestor itself, as its mindless instinct enveloped me in a kind of aura, so that I shared in the sense that we were skimming over the invisible ghost-surface of Valeddom’s primordial ocean.
    For that’s as good a description as any other, of what we were doing. Otherwise I would not have experienced that sense of peace, as if I were on a raft on calm waters so clear as to be invisible – as invisible as the reality, namely, empty air.
    A hand stirred, and I saw Fnekt was waking up. The others, in the next few moments, also showed signs of emergence from their slumber. Evidently we were drifting out of range of the powerful zitpoidl minds.
    Hastily I said to Fnekt, “Don’t make any sudden moves. We’re very high up, but it’s all right.”
    He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, and grunted, “I see what you mean.” (I admired him then, more than I had ever done.) “You certainly got us out of there, somehow,” he added with a jerk of the head back in the direction of the giant cone of Pezerjink. “How did you do it? And what is this thing we’re on?”
    “Wait,” I said, “and I’ll tell you all.” Fnekt co-operated with me in reassuring the others one by one as they opened their eyes, so as to avoid any panicky flinching or jostling away from the edge of the lannemilb, which might have been disastrous. Each of us, once the initial dangerous moment was passed, conquered our fears, though not our amazement; Bryce’s expression was the most puzzled of all – I guessed he was wondering why he wasn’t more scared.
    Jackson, on the other hand, was complacent. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had always had an exceptional head for heights anyway. It would be typical of him.
    The women hardly spoke; they sat in the centre, their arms around one another, and on their faces a look of huge, patient relief.
    All were safely awake. So now I had to make my speech. I didn’t particularly enjoy narrating my triumph, for I wanted to forget the sadness of it; at the same time I was even more relieved at our escape than my companions were, for the greater responsibility was mine in that it was I whom Nzaterpli had summoned to Pezerjink, the others merely drawn in my wake.
    Eventually my tale drew to a close. I fell awkwardly silent, wondering how much I could expect them to believe, wondering whether what I could see in their expressions meant suspense, or actual doubt, but then – as I saw their faces relax – I realized that they had merely been waiting for me to finish. They believed every word.
    Little sister Haffnem piped up, “I’m sorry for Nzaterpli. But thank goodness you got us away from her.”
    “Yes, well,” I winced, “it was a close shave.”
    Opavedwa gave a shiver and spoke tightly: “The zitpoidl are perhaps not evil.... but they’re bad for us. You did well, Ren, to get out of that thing’s head.” She shuddered again. “Brrr...”
    “Yep, and you had all the worry,” Jackson commented. “All we had to endure was a few hours in the land of Nod.”
    “I am impressed, Ren,” said Fnekt, “most of all with the speed of your understanding. I suppose that I, too, might have realized that the lannemilb must be a balpar, and would therefore float; but for an ex-Dluku to make that leap of intuition was pretty good…”
    Bryce said slowly, “And this lannemilb, this Ancestor of all lannemilbs, that we’re on.... it feels safe.... and yet we’re flying so high....” He shook his head, struggling as usual to fit the facts to his scientific outlook. “I suppose,” he admitted, his voice cracking somewhat, “we’re tricked into thinking there’s no actual ‘height’ to be scared of, as we’re full of the sense that we’re actually at sea level!”
    “You got it, Semor,” I encouraged.
    “It’s a pity,” mused Jacko, “that Justine didn’t decide to climb out with you, when you smashed the window.”
    The stupidity of that remark took my breath away. Could he really be that dumb? I shot a quick glance at his face. No, he wasn’t trying some subtle joke; he really meant what he had just said. It was woefully clear that he really had taken my narrative to mean that Justine and I had been literally, physically imprisoned inside a zitpoidl’s hollow head like sweets rattling round in a tin.
    I said shortly, “Justine didn’t want to come out. She’s happy where she is.”
    “Let’s hope,” said Opavedwa in the wise tone people use to smooth things over, “that no other human being ever gets trapped in that kind of happiness. Remember that statue of the Defender, with its warning arm? The ancient Vutuans had the right idea: avoid Onuk.”
    Her words ended the discussion on the right note, covering up the enormity of Jackson’s blunder, which none of us wanted to mention – it was too embarrassing. Perhaps we all reached the same silent conclusion, that if such literal-mindedness was his defence against the weirdness of our adventure, then he had a right to be left undisturbed as he took that childish road. Anyhow, with one accord, we abandoned the whole subject – we left off talking about the realm of the zitpoidl, the trapped soul of Justine Lazenby, and our escape from Pezerjink.

                                                  *****

The crater and city of Vutu passed us some way to the west, receding from sight, and soon afterwards I heard a brief series of tiny popping sounds. I felt my Vutuan chest-band loosen. It had split up the back. I knew then that I could take it off and throw it away, and at the same time so did the others with theirs: we all laughed and cheered as we removed the bands and dropped the hated things over the side of our raft.
    Next, we gazed at the gradually approaching mountains to the south-east of us. Billions of years ago that range must have traced an ocean shoreline on the infant planet; now the long memory of the Ancestor of all silicon cells was heading us towards it.
    I had pinned all my hopes on the idea that when we bumped onto that “shore” we should be able to descend from the lannemilb and resume our journey on foot.
    “I want to know,” I said, “was my decision good, about where to aim? If we alight on those mountains, can we find a pass through them? And from there find our way home to Ixli? And we need to decide whether to try to take the Ancestor with us....” I stopped, for I saw that Fnekt was smiling.
He replied, “No need to worry about all that. There’s a pass, all right, and the Ancestor will bear us through it. All the way home.”
    “What? How can that be?”
    “You must realize, the ancient ocean had currents. We know something about them, enough for me to assure you that we shall get home without first having to touch ground.” He added, “Before all this happened I would never have believed it could be done, but given the reality of this Ancestor cell, I can tell you, we’re just about home and dry.”
    “Well,” I said, weakly.
    Opavedwa, now that true safety was within reach, became more the anxious mother than she had been when threats dominated on all sides. She reached out and drew us all closer to her, so that the six of us were huddled in a tight mass at the centre of the lannemilb.
    “Look, it’s true,” she breathed, and I looked and, yes, we were now aiming a bit south of our former course as the current veered in a slow curve, and the pass through the mountains was becoming visible as the peaks ahead of us shifted in the changing perspective.
    Bryce said, “But look here – why should this bring us precisely to your home city?”
    Fnekt had the answer ready:
    “Because Ixli’s location was originally chosen in the knowledge of these sky-currents. Millions of years ago our city was placed to take advantage of the opportunities of aerial commerce. We hardly go in for that any more, but what’s carrying us along now is the Ixli-Vutu current, and I think we’ll find it’s as usable as it ever was.”
    A sense of lightness affected us all during that long drifting journey. Family solidarity, the comradeship of friends, the comforting ride and the awesome view, and the expectation of a home at the end of it all, combined to produce a dreamy holiday atmosphere, in which we approached any topic in a happy-go-lucky manner. My Mercurian mother demonstrated her brilliant method of coming to terms with my Earth-mind. It was during this ride that I became aware that she thought of the Hugh identity as a kind of bonus to the Ren identity, as if she’d suddenly discovered she had two sons instead of one, though they both inhabited the same body. She said (I translate her idiom loosely), “It’s my dodge, and I’m sticking to it, ‘Renhugh’!”
    “Good for you, Opavedwa. And what about you, Haff?” asked Jackson/Tmaeu. “Two men for the price of one, huh?”
    “But why did we all transfer together, onto the same world?” demanded my old teacher with his permanent ache for logic. “That’s what I don’t get.”
    “Souls must be sticky,” said Fnekt.
    “Oh, great,” moaned Bryce. “Must title my PhD thesis, ‘Research into the stickiness of souls’.”
    “Don’t bother,” came the curt response from Jackson. “We all made the trip. That’s a fact. Science is luggage we can send for later.”
    Bryce shrugged, “Oh, well, perhaps I have a mother somewhere in Jempeldex who could be persuaded to take the same line.” He went quiet for a few minutes, except for some muttering shakes of the head. Then he was off again complaining as usual about the implausibility, the downright unbelievability, of various aspects of Valeddom. This happened on several occasions, and, like the good sport he was, he allowed us to gang up on him each time. One of these little conversations ended more seriously than the rest.
    “The sight of those zitpoidl,” Bryce said, “got me thinking about shape. The silicon giants, formed from a totally different kind of biology, nevertheless possess two arms and legs and a head just like we do – which makes me think there must be something about the humanoid shape that is basic to intelligent life.”
    “Well, it’s common, certainly, on many worlds; so our scientists tell us,” agreed Fnekt.
    “But what does it mean?” persisted Bryce. “How human is human? What about you people, and what about the Mercurian me? I thought at first we must be descended from some ancient space-faring race that left colonies on both planets, but that’s not so, is it? We’re not part of the same family tree at all, are we? I mean, if I went back to Earth as I am, as Semor Recrecd, I couldn’t interbreed with Earth people or have blood transfusions with them, could I?”
    “That is right,” said Fnekt. “That is something that is known. The word ‘human’, strictly speaking, does not refer to a species but to an approximate shape, size and type of mind.”
    “But how is it known?”
    “As to that – you’ll have to ask the Hish.”
    “The what?”
    “Fnekt,” reproved his wife, “I don’t think you should call our ruler the Hish. Not right at the start, anyway.”
    “The nickname is in common use....”
    “Not right at the start, dear, all right?” She then said to Bryce and me, “The Ixli-Melsh – to use our ruler’s formal title – will answer any of your questions, when we arrive; but perhaps we could fill you in a bit first, at least as regards the laws and customs of our city.”
    “Of course!” said Bryce eagerly, and a long question-and-answer session began.
    I did not take much of it in. I found that I knew some of it already – I wore, after all, a native Ixlian brain – though my knowledge was a mere residue, remote and small and smudgy as a picture seen through the wrong end of a poorly focused telescope. For example “Ixli-Melsh” did mean something to me, but nothing more than a hint of some tall shape vaguely akin to a planetarium projector.
    Bryce meanwhile plunged into the economics and geography of our destination, though because of the way he framed his questions – in a style more suitable for Earth studies – my Mercurian family had their work cut out trying to give him satisfying replies. I left them to it, and day-dreamed for much of the journey.
    So smooth was our glide over the non-existent sea, so constant our altitude as we curved with increased speed through the mountain range and then slowed down after emerging out the other side, that the ancient waters, which my intelligence told me were no longer present in reality, nevertheless seeped into my imagination until it hardly mattered that they were invisible to the eye; all ground below me was submerged, and I and my companions were cushioned, by the ghostly surface whose current carried us steadily homeward.

                                                 *****

I awoke from a doze and sat up. I felt cooler. The sky, and the panorama, looked dimmer. I remembered having heard that Ixli, which was about 400 miles southeast of Vutu, was close to the night side of Valeddom.
    My companions, silent and motionless, were staring ahead. Their intentness communicated itself to me. I strained forward likewise.
    What was that distant necklace of pale silver? It was a range of icy hills, strung along our dim grey forward horizon, and overhung by a low black curtain, the beginning of the sky of Darkside, pierced by a few bright stars.
    Closer, below and around us stretched a scrub-dotted, hummocky brown plain, with an interruption some miles off in the form of a single round patch of blues and greens towards which we swept along a curve of current.
    This special colourful area was a couple of miles across. In the midst of it stood a mile-wide hemisphere of brighter light, a volume of air that glowed of itself. My deep self knew that we were meant to enter that glow. We were going to land somewhere among the structures within it, which were becoming easy to see, arranged upon the cultivated ground.
    Most of the buildings were not too dissimilar to the mushroom-shaped Vutuan houses, but since their surroundings were vastly different from those of Vutu, the total effect was nothing like the crater city, and I was glad of that.
    But how were we going to land? This thing we rode – we could not steer it, nor alter its altitude or speed.
    Bryce asked, “Do we signal to them somehow?”
    Fnekt replied, “Relax! The scrublands around here are scattered with gleaners and hunters – watchful people. They must already have spotted us. The floaters must by now have been alerted.”
    Within minutes I saw how right he was. As if dozens of torches or lamps had been switched on in mid-air, a cloud of glittering specks became visible in the glow above Ixli. It did not take many more minutes before I guessed: balpars. Aerial platforms, the same kind as that on which we rode; not nearly as large as ours, and hovering at a lower level, but broadly similar.
    Our invisible travelling current brought us rapidly closer to that welcoming committee so that I soon made out the figures of the pilots manning the balpars. Closer still, and I saw lines that reached up from the ground to tether each platform. It all spoke of system, organization, expertise; we must be a special case but they knew just what to do, to haul us in.
    I liked the contrast between Vutu and Ixli. Balpars were something which the Vutuans hadn’t possessed at all. Perhaps (I speculated) people living so close to Onuk had developed a prejudice against the silicon cells, whereas here, hundreds of miles away, there was no hesitation in using them.
    “Hold tight,” said Fnekt. We had nothing to hold onto but each other, so we went back to huddling in the midst of the available space, as far from the edge as we could squeeze. And then I felt a slight “pop” as though we had burst through an invisible curtain of elastic gel, as we entered the bright zone over Ixli.
    It was a zone, not only of stronger light, but of richer air; with my next breath I took more oxygen into my lungs and detected a moss-like scent of moist plant growth.
    Mere seconds later our aerial platform shook heavily as a silver claw appeared on its rim; evidently, a kind of metal vice had whirred up to grip the edge of the Ancestor. Another whirr, another impact and clamp. Then it happened a third time and I could see the three clawlike attachments spaced equally round our sky-raft’s edge. Our forward motion ceased, and we began to descend.
    We naturally could not see what was pulling us – it had to be directly below – but on our way down, passing the platforms which hovered at various heights, we were hailed cheerily, informally, by their riders. Those close enough cried greetings by name (except of course to Bryce whom they had never seen). One of them shouted, “Where d’you get a raft that size, Fnekt?” But when they recognized me, they looked startled. I could guess only too well what they were thinking. Ren the Dluku has returned!
    Some riders weren’t on their balpars but were hanging with one foot in a kind of stirrup part way down the anchor-ropes; with one hand they held onto the rope and with the other they held something like the energy pistol of the Vutuans. Police, my Earth-mind thought. Despite the armament, they, too, seemed friendly. And why not? Except for Bryce the stranger from Jempeldex, and Tmaeu the Vutuan, we were Ixlians, returning home.
It was natural enough that they should have had doubts about me, since the last they had heard about me was that I had evolved backwards towards brutehood. After my exile into the wilderness, the people of Ixli couldn’t have expected to see me again. Well, recovery from the Dluku state was extremely rare, but it wasn’t unheard-of. So, now, every time one of them shot a curious look at me, I returned him a calm wave. One of them cried, “You are Ren Nydr, aren’t you?”
    I beamed at him. “Isn’t it grand that I’m back in the human fold?”
    In a few minutes, to my heartfelt relief, after our glorious, amazing ride on the Ancestor cell had brought us four hundred miles through the air over the Mercurian wilderness, we touched ground.
    I would never forget that ride, but I was glad it was over: enough was enough, and now my Ixlian blood was stirred by the greatest wonder of all, that of being home, though it was a home that my Earth-mind had never experienced.

                                                *****

The three grapple-clamps, that had been used to bring us down, had retracted into the ground, and we were able to step straight off our platform onto a clear space inside the city.
    I call it a city, though by now I had learned it had only about eleven hundred inhabitants. By Valeddomian standards that is a good-sized city.
With professional agility some of those whom I thought of as the “police” swarmed down the cables anchoring the balpars, and formed a kind of honour guard around us. Into this ring of personnel a heavily built Ixlian entered from ground level and greeted us. He carried his bulk impressively, like an ambassador greeting a foreign embassy. But his words to Fnekt were commonplace. “Glad to see you back home.”
    “Good to see you too, Iklant.”
    Iklant then turned to Bryce, and half-turned to me. “I am the repre-sentative and the emissary of the Ixli-Melsh,” he said in a more formal tone. “The Melsh would see you as soon as you are willing, so as to hear your story.”
    Bryce answered, “Fine by me. I am eager to meet your ruler.”
    Fnekt added, “I can speak for all of us: we are ready now, if the Melsh will grant us audience.”
    “Then follow me,” said Iklant. Walking beside Fnekt he added in a lower voice, “You have certainly arrived in style! Are you sure you’re not too tired to make a good go of this interview? The Melsh won’t insist on seeing you straightaway if....”
    “We would have been tired if we’d had to walk,” Fnekt said in high good-humour. “As it is....”
    Iklant shook his head in wonder. “As it is, you floated in on the grandfather of all balpars.”
    “Literally,” agreed Fnekt.
    I, meanwhile, eagerly stared around as we walked down one of the avenues of Ixli. For the time being I had had my fill of fantastic adventure and felt hungry for peace and security, but could I believe that these blessings were really on offer? It seemed I could! Not that I understood much of what I saw. The residue of Mercurian mind underlying my Earth-ego was just sufficient to blunt my amazement, softening the impressions that came at me thick and fast, so that I could experience them as a gentle rain rather than as a bewildering hail.
    The houses here, I now noticed, were, after all, different in some noticeable respects from the mushroom-design of the Vutuans’. Ixlian houses consist of cylinders topped not by hemispheres but by cones like old-style Chinese coolie hats. Lower down, prongs or rungs or little ledges protruded at various heights on the cylindrical part of each house, and some had balpars moored against them. Occasionally I glimpsed traffic: a steerable balpar with some kind of jet-motor attached, gliding through the air a few streets away, or using its jet to turn.
    The houses, and the more blockish public buildings, were all decorated, in a way that the Vutuan buildings had not been, by stylish bright graffiti: coloured scribbles which teased the eye by inviting you to look in vain for a complex pattern. I soon learned to blank that stuff out; it wasn’t much to my taste.
    Another, more pleasing, difference between Ixli and Vutu was that here each house was surrounded by a circular garden. Typically the entire property extended maybe fifty yards in diameter, with green lawns, not of grass but of some ground-cover plant with round leaves, and dotted by spiky yellow-and-brown shrubs. In some of the gardens I saw tables and chairs set out. Men and women sat and chatted, some stood up to wave at us as we passed, and others remained silently absorbed in moving their palms over the surfaces of tilted desks.
    The fact that I did not understand all of what I saw, and that not everybody greeted us, I took as a good sign, that I was being given a not-too-exciting welcome, an introduction which promised to be peaceful and gradual, so that I could take my own time to step into the great calm pool of ordinary life. Even the fact that I mildly disliked some aspects of what I saw, helped to make the whole thing seem normal: one does not expect to like everything in a place.
    My mood of contentment grew strong enough to survive the most peculiar sight which met my eyes on my way to the Melsh.
    It happened as we passed the arched entrance to a three-storey octagonal building, constructed of shiny black stone blocks. The structure was obviously not a dwelling. On Earth it could have been anything from a power plant to a library.
    A man was being taken into that building under guard. He was dressed in the same style as most Ixlians: loose shirt and trousers and a bright red cloak. By contrast, the four figures (two men, two women) escorting him all wore flowing white robes, obviously a special uniform of some sort. Bystanders made way for them.
    Well, so what, I might have said to myself; I had only just arrived and could hardly expect to understand every detail of Ixlian society. But there was one point that really jolted me.
    Blindfolding....
    If the man under guard had been blindfolded, I could easily have thought up stories to account for it, imagining, perhaps, that he was a foreigner being escorted into a sensitive area and being forced to wear the blindfold for reasons of national security.
    Only, it wasn’t he who was blindfolded. It was his escort of guards.
    I clamped a lid upon the scene. That is to say, I rejected it, and all the questions to do with it, even the simple question of how the guards could walk if they couldn’t see. I simply wasn’t having it. I had just come home and I was enjoying my stroll in the bright air and soon, after we’d reported to the Ixli-Melsh, I would be taken to my house. No more gaping mysteries right now, thank you. Slam. Click. Lock.
    Bryce asked Fnekt, “See that bunch in the white dresses. Who the heck are they?”
    Fnekt hesitated as if reluctant to speak.
    Jackson said, “Those guys are Oinameks. Haven’t we told you about them?”
    “Oinameks?” (The word must be closely derived from the Valeddomian oinamku, “immortal”. No wonder Bryce was intrigued.) “What are they, the boss class? Servants of the Machine? They have the look of rulers.”
    “Rulers! Not likely! The very idea would bore them crazy.” Jackson was obviously keen to show off his knowledge of his adopted culture. “And what do you mean, the Machine?”
    Bryce sounded a little embarrassed.
    “Well,” he said lamely, “in Jempeldex there’s a saying, or a legend, that Ixlians are ruled by a Machine Intelligence.... Of course, I, that is to say, my old Jempeldexan self, took it with a pinch of salt.... and my Earth self believes it even less....”
    “Good!” laughed Jackson. “As for the Oinameks, they’re the archivists of Ixli. Not associated with government at all.”
    “There’s a bit more to it than that....” began Fnekt.
    I interrupted them, pointing to another large structure that loomed some way beyond the one we were passing. “Look, is that the palace of the Ixli-Melsh?”
    Iklant, our guide, looked askance at me.
    “You could call it a palace, yes. But if we call it anything, we just call it the Centre.” He sidled closer. “Tell me, Ren, how much do you remember? Fnekt has told me the incredible news....”
    “That I changed from Dluku to Earth-mind? Yes, but,” I hedged, “I also, luckily, have some dregs of our knowledge still left in this brain. Enough to let me feel at home here. Completely – at home!”
    And that, I thought, had better be true.
    To make sure of it I must go all out to accept, accept, adapt, adapt! Become a native - or rather, encourage my already native Ren Nydr self. Play down my Hugh Dent self.
    Therefore I must go easy on my Earth memories and my Earth assumptions.  From now on I should simply pretend, as well as I could, that I was Ixlian. No, not pretend – actually be Ixlian.  That way I might take in, with ease, those sights which disagree with Earthly notions of what is sensible.
    That way, next time I saw blindfolded guards escorting an un-blindfolded person, I wouldn’t find it unsettling; I would simply shrug it off as being none of my business.

                                                 *****

Passers-by, who chanced to see us, tagged along out of curiosity, and other citizens, attracted by the rumours which flew ahead of us, also swelled our ranks, so that by the time we reached the abode of the Ixli-Melsh the procession numbered about fifty.
    The palace – or “Centre” – bulked from afar above the dwellings of Ixli. Perhaps sixty yards in diameter, it was a circular stone building, of lighter colour than the octagonal structure we had passed earlier. Its outer walls, twelve yards high, had many doors, but no windows at all that I could see. A round silhouette up above suggested that a dome rose from the middle of the roof, rather like the raised yolk of a fried egg, not extending as far as the edge.
    Our entrance was without ceremony. We simply opened a door and crowded in.
    Along an aisle I walked between Bryce and Fnekt, with the others behind me. The aisle traversed concentric rows of seats, inwards towards the towering Melsh.
    I was trying to rid my mind of Earth comparisons, but I couldn’t help thinking, inaccurately, of the London Planetarium. Instead of the projector, there was the Melsh; instead of the dome with stars, there were the walls and ceiling (including the domed part in the middle), all glowing with pearly light.
    Spaced along the rows of seats were stubby pillars shaped like obelisks or termite mounds, and as I passed close by one of them I glimpsed (on the side facing the Melsh) a small screen animated with a moving picture. Plant stems waving in the wind; shadows on hummocky terrain – surveillance, I guessed, of scenes on the plains outside Ixli. And I saw other, similar moving picture screens on other pillars. Plus some thinner pillars here and there which were topped with milky globes, like eyes on stalks.
    We had all fallen silent. The atmosphere was friendly, but solemn. We, the returned voyagers, drew up quietly in a line facing the Melsh.  Behind us the crowd settled to listen.
    Without turning round I heard more people coming in the way we came, and more were coming in by other doors…
    And now I’ve put it off long enough –
    Imagine two giant spindles, end to end, one on top of the other, standing vertically to about five times the height of a man.  The sight of it was nothing much; any picture of a chemical plant or physics lab or even the insides of an old glass-tube radio will furnish you with far weirder shapes.
    What haunted me was the voice.
    WELCOME, it boomed, not too loud but weightily, like a well-drilled chorus, reminding me of what all Ixlians knew – that the Melsh was, indeed, a blended store of the wisdom of Ixlians down the ages.
    An achievement accomplished by means which I could not even guess at: for a vast length of time the greatest men and women of the city had donated their best thoughts to a repository of brain-recordings from which eventually a composite Mind had emerged, far stronger and larger than the mind of any single human could ever be, and with a personality of its own.
Because it was composed of such highly respected ingredients, and because during its long lifetime it had earned the trust of the city’s inhabitants, the Melsh was loved as if it were a wise old grandfather.
    Bryce, however, did not understand any of this, for he was not an Ixlian. Probably the sight of the big spindle shape and the mighty voice emerging from it had stirred memories of those legends in which Ixlians were supposedly “ruled by a Machine”. That’s how he must see it, I reflected; understandably he looked scared.
    His negative attitude could not escape notice. The Melsh, with its eyes all over the place, and with its experience in reading human expressions, must be able to tell that there was one person present who did not trust it.
    Sure enough, after a short few minutes’ questioning of Fnekt and Opavedwa about our adventures, it turned its attention to Bryce.
    It greeted him bluntly – in English!
    SEMOR RECRECD, PERHAPS WE CAN HELP EACH OTHER, YOU AND I.
For a moment, Bryce and I were stunned to hear our own language spoken by this City-Intelligence on Mercury. Then we both remembered that we were by no means the first Earth-minds ever to reach this world.
    WELL, SEMOR, HAVE YOU A QUESTION FOR ME?
    The Melsh had shrewdly guessed at Bryce’s special yearning for answers. I didn’t suppose it could actually read thoughts, but it had some pieces of evidence: the short account given by Fnekt, the expression on Bryce’s face, perhaps the behaviour of previous Earth-minds.
    DON’T BE TONGUE-TIED. YOU ARE THE INTERESTING ONE. YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS NEW TO ME. AND YOU POSSESS THE ADULT EARTH-MIND.
    Bryce responded in blunt language – one plain speaker responding to another – as he seized the opportunity to disburden himself of the one great question that had haunted him ever since his arrival on Mercury.
    “If you, Ixli-Melsh, are the ultimate expert system, answer me this: why have the astronomers of my world got all the wrong ideas about Valeddom? What’s going on? We used to believe, rightly, that this planet, which we of Earth call Mercury, had a sun-synchronous rotation and a Twilight Belt, and then, when our science got better, we ‘disproved’ it all! How come? How is it possible to ‘disprove’ the truth?  And how did our astronomers fail to detect the atmosphere and the possibility of life here at all?  This is the riddle that’s been driving me crazy during almost every hour of my time on this world. I’m not kidding you, Ixli-Melsh: at this rate I’ll soon be reduced to saying either that it’s all a dream or that my life back on Earth was the dream, and that since I can’t believe in both at once, one or other of them must give way.”
    THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH INSTRUMENTS CANNOT TELL AT A DISTANCE. OUR OBSERVATORY REPORTS THAT THERE IS NO LIFE ON EARTH.
    “You mean – what do you mean, ‘no life on Earth’? What do your telescopes see?”
    WHEN THEY POINT AT EARTH, OUR TELESCOPES AND SPECTROSCOPES RECORD A DEAD WORLD. WE KNOW THAT IS WRONG, FOR WE HAVE MET MINDS LIKE YOURS WHICH COME FROM EARTH.  YET ALL OUR INSTRUMENTS SEE ON IT IS ROCK, SAND, DRY OCEAN BEDS, NO BREATHABLE ATMOSPHERE -
    “Since when?” interrupted Bryce hoarsely – and to say that my blood ran cold as I waited for the Melsh to answer, would be a poor description of the clammy terror which fingered me.
    If only it could be said that the Valeddomian instruments had always given the verdict “no life on Earth”, we could assume that there was something wrong with the gadgetry and we needn’t worry. But if they had once detected life, and now did so no longer; if in other words their message had recently changed – then, possibly, they were telling the truth, that something lethal had happened to our Earth since our departure from it.
    But no – hang on – I wasn’t thinking straight! The Melsh had admitted that there was a conflict between reality and the observatory’s results. So, all right, he was saying that Earth wasn’t dead although it looked dead from here.
    Just as, from Earth, Mercury seemed dead and yet was not.
    OUR INSTRUMENTS CEASED TO TELL THE TRUTH SOME HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO.
    “What could possibly cause scientific instruments to behave in that way?” demanded my teacher.
    I AM NOT SURE, said the Melsh. PERHAPS YOU CAN HELP ME FIND OUT.
    “Yeyyyy!  Thank you!” cried Bryce like a little boy bursting with excitement. At the dream of intellectual adventure come true, all his distrust was forgotten; delight flushed his doubts away - delight at being offered a chance to get at a mystery and push back the frontiers of his knowledge. A bit of puzzlement remained. “But,” he reflected, “I wonder what the heck can I do, that you can’t.”
    HAVE NO DOUBT, THERE IS MUCH THAT YOU CAN DO, THAT I CANNOT DO. BUT WE HAVE SAID ENOUGH FOR NOW. IKLANT WILL SHOW YOU TO YOUR QUARTERS, SEMOR, AND I WILL CALL FOR YOU AGAIN AS SOON AS YOU ARE RESTED. ALSO THE NYDR FAMILY WILL BE ANXIOUS TO GET HOME. MEANWHILE BE ASSURED, ALL OF YOU, THAT YOUR EXPLOITS WILL BE REMEMBERED.
    The Melsh knew how to pitch its tone for a kindly dismissal.
    Bryce was obviously the one of us whom it was really interested in. I could well understand that an adult Earth-mind and, what’s more, a teacher, was much more of a jackpot from the Melsh’s point of view than the rest of us could ever be, no matter how much I might have to say about the Vutuan Dayside trip, about Onuk and the zitpoidl, about the escape from Pezerjink or anything else.
    I was hardly at all miffed. In fact I was quite relieved at being let off without having to talk about (and thus re-live) that whirlwind of events.
For the moment, the golden contentment of everyday life was the big adventure, for me.

                                                 *****

Whereas in Vutu I had found that kind of contentment only for a brief few hours – those hours during which I had believed it might be possible to settle there – Ixli inspired me with a far greater and more long-lasting faith, that “here was home”.
    When my Mercurian parents brought me to their house, opened its front door, and were about to show me my room, I held up my hand to halt them and then I slipped past them, eager to show that I remembered, that I didn’t need to be told where my room was. I burst in and stood there, feasting my eyes on the sheer ordinariness of the little den in which I, Ren Nydr, had grown up.
    Simple furnishings framed of wood and metal – a bed and bedside table and lamp; a small clothes cupboard; a shelf of books; a modest stasis dump with 4D access to a few millions of years’ worth of heirlooms which would otherwise clutter the place to overflowing; a row of crystal cubes showing holographic images of family events; a young person’s first manual of Noleddern (what was Noleddern?); a small balpar, about a foot across, hovering in one corner; on the wall, a crossed pair of charge-tipped spears. The kind of stuff you’d be likely to find in any Ixlian teenager’s room.
    “Lunch in the garden,” announced Opavedwa.
    I helped carry dishes and cutlery to the garden table. We five sat down to eat, surrounded by lawn and ornamental shrubs, in the bright air. Opavedwa peered around. “I told Semor to join us, but maybe....” Just then we heard a cheerful hallooo and saw Bryce striding towards us across the green. Haffnem pulled out a chair for him and we all filled our plates from the dishes heaped with berries, crusty meats and the delicious coarse bread of Ixli.
    “Just been all over my house,” panted Bryce, “and can hardly believe the hospitality around here!” (A house close to ours had been allocated to him by the Melsh.) The six of us spun out the meal into a happy few hours, chatting about all sorts of glowing future prospects that were opening up in front of us.
    The next day my Mercurian father conducted Jacko and me to within sight of the school club, and waved us off. “Come back when you’ve had enough.”
Rather than a mere after-hours thing, the school club was the school. Instead of compulsory education (which, to a Valeddomian, would be as ridiculously unnecessary as compulsory eating or breathing), the Ixlians have voluntary associations where youngsters go to satisfy their thirst for learning. Oinamek guidance is available when needed; at any one time maybe five or six of the white-robed archivists are supervising the education clubs, which mostly run themselves. Trying in vain to picture the set-up in advance, I walked nervously up a path that led to a set of buildings made from milky corrugated glass.
    Jacko walked beside me. I suspected the only reason he was coming along was as a kindness to me. He didn’t need any more school; he had retained much more of Tmaeu memory than I had of Ren Nydr memory. But then, perhaps he liked school so much, he was glad of the excuse.... for everyone agreed that the clubs were lots of fun, though no one had got round to describing to me what went on in them.
    “In there,” said Jacko, pointing to one of the doors. “And I’ll bet you prefer it to Form 9c at Dallingdon Comprehensive.”
    “Let’s hope so,” I said with a wave as he turned to head for a different door.
    He looked back and saw me still standing there. “Well, go on in then. What are you waiting for?”
    “Er – just sorting myself out,” I said. “You go on in; don’t wait for me.”
He disappeared; and I hesitated.
    Wouldn’t it be just typical if....
    If what?
    If now was the time for a trail to be laid. Or a fuse to be lit.
    Was that the whisper of hudar, warning me of the shape of things?
    Or was the mere idea of “school” sinister enough on any world? Yes, yes, school must be different here. I believed this, for certain. Quite different. But still..... school.
    A couple of unfortunate ideas had just occurred to me.
    I had met danger aplenty on this world, but so far no really bad people. Villains – personal evil – seemed in short supply on Mercury.
    But then, I couldn’t remember having met any great evil on Earth either – before I went to school.
    It was indeed an unfortunate observation to make at this point, and no doubt unfair as well. Surely I should at least give Valeddom the benefit of the doubt? I placed my palm on the door and – hesitated again.
    That coach smash which knocked me from Earth to Valeddom: had it involved the rear coach too?
    I could hope not. I could hope that Pullen and Aldridge, who had got into the second coach, were still on that planet, not this.
    But even if some evil twerps had made the crossing between worlds, I surely needn’t worry about being bullied here. Physically, on this world I was no child; I possessed a more or less adult Valeddomian body; indeed, it was only the youth of my Earth-mind that had secured me permission to join the Ixlian school club.
    So what, though? Don’t kid yourself, Hugh Dent. Physical bullying was never the real problem at Dallingdon School. The problem was the hate and the contempt, the motiveless, mindless jeers, the gaping, drooling, senseless evil. If it’s also present here, then I’ll awaken it by going through that door, and from that moment on, I’ll have it on my trail. If.
    Only one way to find out.
    I went in and found the room surprisingly dim. I couldn’t see anybody. Rather than a classroom, the interior looked more like the war room of some defence command network. Tiny coloured pinpricks of light blinked on a huge wall-map; other maps lay slightly concave on shelves, or on tables, and lights blinked on them too. Many tall-backed armchairs were scattered around. At this moment I seemed to be the only person present.
    Suddenly my hands itched, literally itched to hold one of those maps. I seized one that was lying on the nearest table. Immediately on the large wall-map the image of a giant hand rocketed into view.  The image pointed a finger. I hastily dropped the smaller map, then reached for it again, unable to resist. The giant hand appeared again. This time – performing actions without knowing why – I traced something with my finger on the map I was holding. It was all happening too fast.
    After a few minutes of this, the whole process ran down and I came to myself, rubbing my eyes.
    One of the armchairs then swivelled around and I saw I wasn’t alone in the room after all. A girl was working here, or had been working until my interruption. In size and build she looked about my Earth age – fourteen. But a very serious, studious fourteen. Unreasonably, I imagined spectacles on her, though so far as I know spectacles are unknown on Mercury.
    “Are you all right?” she asked.
    Perhaps I was over-sensitive in response. “Don’t I look it?” I retorted.
    “You look a bit bleary.”
    I had no doubt that she knew who I was. Me, the ex-Dluku, the talk of the town. The Earth boy-mind in a man’s body.
    “Just a slight headache.”
    “The Yannd will be along in a minute,” she remarked, as if she expected me to know what that meant. And I sort of did.
    “What have I been doing?”
    She got up and came over and glanced at the map I was holding. “Distribution of the znouer stalk. This is the botany room, you know.”
    “Do I? Yes, I suppose I do.”
    An inner door opened. The girl glanced round and quietly went back to her table. The Yannd came in, a tall figure robed in white – the Oinamek in charge for the day. His face was bony, thin, austere, but he was courteous enough. “Some strain, Ren Nydr?” he asked, and, doctor-like, took hold of my head and moved it gently. “Rapid and continual eye movements,” he explained, “come in patterns which, like fingerprints, are unique to each individual. The educational facilities here are designed to respond to these ocular signatures – but if your Earth-mind has altered your pattern beyond a certain point of divergence, you will need a spell on the adapter. Follow me.”
    I obeyed, noticing, as I passed the alcoves and tables, that there were several other students in the chairs that faced away from where I had been sitting. I’d been quite wrong in my assumption that I was alone in the room. They had all been so quiet! And nobody looked up as I went.
    In another room, I was told to sit in front of a blank screen the size of a blackboard. I was told just to stare at it. And as my eyeballs jerked around, as eyeballs do, a corresponding scribble of light was traced on the screen.
    Then it was back to the botany room and the winking maps. This time the learning-bouts went on for longer, and without causing any headache. In fact the pleasure was intense. The most addictive computer game was nothing to this. Something about the flow of the lights, the order of their blinks, impelled me to build upon each pattern with patterns of my own. As the process became more and more interactive, pattern answering to pattern, I became aware that some skill was taking root in me and growing. I began to feel confident that before long I would possess an almost godlike knowledge of where to find various plants and fruits, and exactly how many I could take without damaging the environment.
    A lad got up out of his chair and hit a gong.
    Everybody else in the room got up, myself included.
    It was the break. We poured out of the room and into a lighter, wider part of the building. A canteen! Now things were getting more normal – Earth-style normal, or could it be universal? Students crowded round me, welcoming me by name and introducing themselves. Some of them tried out a few broken English phrases on me. When I saw some of them getting drinks from a machine, I almost wept with emotion, merely because some things were so much the same as on Earth.
    Jacko came over and remarked to me that the lad who had hit the gong was Chabrem Zonoy, and that he was the grandson of the chief Oinamek, Ebtet Zonoy. “But he hates any suggestion that he might be influenced to follow in grand-dad’s footsteps. Watch this,” he added, then sauntered over to Chabrem. “I admit it!” confessed said Jacko; “I’m envious at your promotion to gong-smiter.”
    Chabrem growled back, “I let myself be talked into it, and if that doesn’t show I’ll never be an Oinamek, I don’t know what does!”
    “How did your stats session go?” Jacko asked me, changing the subject.
    I almost jumped, in a comical double-take. Why, yes, what I had been doing was no more or less than statistics! The most boring subject I could think of, and yet I could hardly wait to get back to it!
    The girl who had first spoken to me, was the first to decide she’d had enough break. “Back to work,” she said, rising to return to the botany room.
    When she had gone, Jacko said to me, “That’s Fayn Tazzomban. Not the world’s greatest conversationalist.”
    “She’s a golk,” agreed Chabrem, meaning: she’s a good solid swot, seriously dull.
    “Well,” I said, “I think I’ll follow her example.”
    “In what sense?” grinned Jacko.
    “Both. Work, and golk.”
    I returned to the botany room where Fayn sat re-absorbed in her tasks. She nodded to me, in her pleasant unassuming way, as I passed her table. I went and sat down at my table and resumed the amazing work that felt so little like work.
    I ended that session possessed of more wholesome expectations than I had ever had before. No longer burdened with assumptions learned on Earth, where I had learned to relate “lout” to “school” as closely as “mosquito” to “swamp”, I now went home cleaned of resentment, able to forgive.
    That’s what a yob-free zone does for you.

                                                 *****

My daydreams, in the wake-periods that followed, were thronged with visions of an enjoyable life of fun and fulfilment, of personal discovery and peaceful, constructive citizenship; and the reality promised to match the daydreams.
    It was during this period of my life in Ixli that we three Earth-minds began regularly to call each other by our Valeddomian names even amongst ourselves, so that we were Ren, Tmaeu and Semor instead of Hugh, Jacko and Mr Bryce. This happened naturally as a result of a sociable wish to use the same names as our many new friends did.
    Gradually, Fayn Tazzomban became my closest friend, though we didn’t have much to say to each other (we were both too golk for that), and I could hardly regard her as my girlfriend in the romantic sense – the memory of Justine was too strong. To put it bluntly, Fayn was good for me because she was so boring. She was an anchor, answering to my need for someone dependable and unexciting. I was quite happy for her hidden depths to stay hidden.
    Mind you, she wasn’t the only serious student at the school club, by any means. All those youngsters, even the jokers among them, meant business. They were determined to grow up into knowledgeable adults. They had ambition, no doubt about that.
    I was the exception. I’d had enough adventure to last me a lifetime.
    Not surprisingly, while I merely enjoyed what the school dished out, it was Bryce who made the effort to understand it. He put in an application to attend the school club himself, but was told that the facilities only really worked properly on young minds. Since he couldn’t go himself, he eagerly listened to me.
    “I’m getting it now,” he said one ‘day’.
    “Getting what?” I asked, since he needed me to say something. We often depended on each other to listen to our haphazard thoughts.
    “This whole business of the Ixlian way of life! From what you tell me, I conclude that the ecology of Valeddom for at least a hundred miles all around Ixli is known to such a degree of detail, that the eleven hundred people of Ixli don’t even need the modest amount of intensive farming that the Vutuans undertook – for here it’s known just when and where and how much to gather, to live sustainably off the land. Do you see what this means? It’s something you could never have on Earth – a fabulously advanced science being used to support a hunter-gatherer economy!”
    When he put it like that I could see that it was remarkable but as for me, I viewed the economic structure of Ixli without astonishment, accepting it from the Ixlian point of view.
    “Something else nags at me more,” I said. “The Oinameks.”
    “What about them?”
    “Power,” I said. “I sense they have it.”
    “They certainly look impressive, striding around in their white robes, with their remote visages like something out of an MGM Biblical epic.” He reflected some more. “But they’re only archivists, aren’t they – or so we’re told. Would we be right to make something sinister out of them? Isn’t life interesting enough without that?”
    “One of the lads at school with me, called Chabrem Zonoy,” I said, “is the grandson of their leader. And what he says, is that the Oinameks are always looking out for recruits. In fact, he complains about it.”
    “Still, why shouldn’t they look out for new talent? That’s what organizations have to do, to carry on.”
    I shrugged. “When you put it that way....”
    He mused, “Better not be influenced too much by that kind of science fiction which needs dark doings and monstrous intelligences to make its plots work. I mean to say, forget the Oinameks for a moment; just consider the Melsh. A heap of brain-recordings, of all the city’s governments and elite intellects since time immemorial, now evolved into a single personality. Ripe candidate for a tyrannous super-being, wouldn’t you agree? And yet in reality it’s a kindly old thing.”
    From the depths of my Mercurian memories, came a whisper:
    Yes indeed, beings like the Melsh, or corporations like the Oinameks, are so old that they know how to bide their time. So as far as we brief mortals can tell, they are kindly old things.

                                                 *****

When he came for a meal at the Nydr household the next wake period, Bryce was full of excitement about his meetings with the Melsh. It appeared that while I had been having fun at the school club my former teacher had been undergoing very different, but equally rewarding, experiences in private conference with the City-Mind.
    The excuse for our get-together was to celebrate the fact that Bryce was no longer a foreigner here – his official naturalization had been completed. Therefore, although he (that’s to say, Semor Recrecd, his Mercurian self) was from Jempeldex, he was henceforth a registered citizen of Ixli. This acceptance had been a foregone conclusion, considering how chummy he was with the Melsh.
    We were sitting round our garden table, my mother, father, sister and brother-in-law, with Bryce and me, so that we six adventurers were gathered together just like old times. In the enveloping air-glow of Ixli the sensations of home life swathed me with such peace that I happily listened while Bryce burbled on, his excited words agitating me no more than the breezy rustling of the ornamental trees.
    “I really seem to have got it made, here!” he enthused. “I get to ask anything I like, and in return, all that the Melsh requires is for me to satisfy its curiosity about Earth. Never had an easier job in my life.
    “And then, would you believe,” he went on, “I get an offer from the Oinameks. Yes, they now want me to join them. Well, it’s nice to feel wanted, and in a way I was tempted.”
    Fnekt said, “I gather from your doubtful tone, that you didn’t accept.”
    “Right, I didn’t. You see, they warned me there’d be no backing out. Once you’re in you’re in. I suppose that’s because they have trade secrets, which suggests that archiving means something more here than it does on Earth.”
    Opavedwa, looking relieved, said, “I suppose it would have been quite a career. And I’m told it’s a terrific honour to be asked; they don’t just ask anybody to join them. But....”
    She and Bryce seemed both to be searching for words.
    “It has the.... the smell of immortality,” said he. “A slightly musty preservative smell, like joining some elite monastic organisation where you have to forget your personal limitations forever.... a great thing, but not for me. What do you think, Ren? Did I do right in turning the offer down?”
    “You certainly did,” I said. “As mother says, it was an honour to be asked. Be satisfied with that. Watch out, though - they might ask again. Those whom they choose, they don’t give up on, from what I’ve heard.”
    “Anyhow, I don’t need them; I’m friends with the Melsh. You know, I wonder if maybe the Melsh doesn’t like the Oinameks all that much. Perhaps the two forces see each other as rivals? But that can’t be right; the Melsh more or less runs the city, in a consultative sort of way, whereas the Oinameks aren’t interested – their minds are on higher things. Am I right?”
    Fnekt and Opavedwa looked at each other. “We’re used to things as they are; we don’t talk about them much. But don’t you stop talking,” he added kindly.
    Bryce laughed, “You are tactful – I’m afraid I do tend to go on.”
    “It’s because you’re so disgustingly happy, Semor,” remarked Jacko. “Isn’t there anything wrong with your life?”
    Bryce hesitated longer than usual.
    “I occasionally get a bit frantic,” he admitted, “when I suspect that the Melsh knows more than it’s letting on, about a danger facing Earth. I’m not always sure I’m on the right track about this. The Melsh and I can’t have anything like an equal relationship; its intellect is so much vaster than mine. It’s quite capable of deceiving me for my own good, and may have decided to spare me the awful truth.”
    Jacko asked, “Have you confronted it with this suspicion of yours?”
    Bryce grimaced and shook his head. “I’ve chickened out.”
    Rather bluntly, I asked: “You mean you think it may be right – that the truth is too awful to bear?” Then I was sorry I’d spoken. I should have let it be, rather than spoil the happy gathering. If Earth was in big trouble, what could we do about it? Besides, as Bryce no doubt would readily agree, Earth was always in a mess anyway. It was all just too big to worry about and the thing to do was to get on with one’s dinner. If only I hadn’t spoken.
    Bryce rescued the conversation. “Who knows how awful is awful?” he grinned. “I’ll tell you something: I gave the Melsh a shock when I talked to it about lawyers and the drafting of Acts of Parliament! When I said you had to be careful about drafting laws, in case people found loopholes in them, the Melsh was really puzzled! You’ll never guess what it said. ‘Why doesn’t every law simply include a clause to disallow all loopholes? Why can’t there be a law against unintended consequences?’ Then there’d be no escape, you see.”
    Jacko and I laughed heartily at that.
    Just before the gathering broke up, I made my own little announcement.
    “A school trip’s been organized. And guess what: I’m leading it.”

                                                 *****

A few miles east of Ixli, some hill country sprawls across the boundary between Yonnimay and the Darkside of Valeddom.
    With our packs of gear loaded onto a couple of floating balpars, which we took turns pulling after us on the ends of leashes, a dozen of us Ixlian youngsters set out towards a pass through those hills. We were following a track about a yard wide, made out of countless small scratches in the rock.  Like most trails on Valeddom, it wasn’t designed to make the going easier; it was a mere marker strip, and extremely faint.
    I found that it frequently rose above that level at which the balpars floated, so that across those humps they had to be dragged instead. I wished we could have hired a tmetl: those giant centipede/caterpillar-like creatures were ideal beasts of burden in rough country. The city possessed four of them, including Roppippolix, who had found its way home all right. But apparently we students did not rate one, at least not for this trip.
    One adult came with us: a tall Oinamek named Tuulth. He was careful to insist that he wasn’t leading, only supervising. “Ren is the leader,” he told the company. “It is his responsibility to read the signs.”
    Perhaps, I speculated, the authorities were feeling their way with me, as I was feeling my way with them. Could it be, I wondered, that there was some test ahead, in the course of which they might determine how useful my hudar ability was to the state? And yet, the school trip had been arranged not by the government but by the students themselves. I had been elected leader by my schoolmates apparently for no better reason than that my turn had come up. An ordinary reason for an ordinary trip. Thus my thoughts always circled back to the conclusion, that there was nothing to worry about.
    Tuulth, the Oinamek, walked with us yet seemed apart from us, with the aloofness of one who lives beyond the normal human lifespan; but I had been assured that they died of old age no later, on average, than the rest of us. The impression of immortality came from their calm, superior manner, centred so far from the ordinary run of things.
    Thirty-five, I had been told, was the total number of Oinameks in their guild or corporation. Their prestige was such, that no doubt they could take over Ixli quite easily if they wanted to, but apparently they could not be bothered. They sometimes developed an interest in certain individuals, but if they asked you to join, you were allowed to say “no”. That was the reassurance I needed: I could always say no.
    My attention swung back to the gritty path on which I trudged, and the dark sky ahead. Soon I was going to see starlight. I was suddenly hungry for starlight!  Invisible from most of Yonnimay, at the eastern edge of the Belt the stars can be seen, low in the sky. Beyond the next curve of hill.... the thought was exciting.
    Boots scrunched behind me and somebody nudged my elbow. It was Fayn Tazzomban. Her quiet voice said, “You’ll see the first notice any moment now. In fact, there it is.”
    Oops – I ought to have been looking out. “Thanks for telling me, Fayn,” I muttered.
    In a few minutes we had topped a low rise and reached an ancient post.  We walked around it, reading the words that circled its wide cylindrical head.
    The notice was in two parts. The lower half was ordinary Valeddomian, and it simply said,

                                          THE VALE OF KUZ

    We weren’t yet quite in Darkside but we could see that the true boundary must lie just beyond the shallow valley that lay before us. It was a mostly flat area, about a mile wide, out of which hillocks rose apart from each other like separate blisters on the lava skin of the world. The far side, the boundary itself, was not a continuous ridge but a broken, much-eroded line of more hillocks and rocky heaps of tilted, slabby boulders.
    The air was much dimmer here, this being the deepest twilight of Yonnimay.
    I peered at the upper half of the notice, and saw that it was just a chaotic scribble. Just like that decoration on the walls of buildings in Ixli.... which I now realized was not decoration. Nor was it graffiti. The “scribble” kept to its own area, with a regular margin. It was official, all right. I gazed at it in growing unease...
    “Ow!” I suddenly cried, and clutched my temples.
    After the dizzy pang I was sharply aware of sounds. I heard a murmuring among my companions, and decisive footsteps as the Oinamek came up to join me. I expected him to say something like, “Are you all right?” But no. What he said, in an eager tone, was:
    “Do we go on?”
    My vision cleared and I studied his face. Just for a moment I thought that I had surprised a gloating look on his impassive features. Was I trapped in some way? The seconds dragged and I couldn’t accuse him of putting any pressure on me to say either yes or no.
    He really was leaving the decision to me.
    “We go on,” I said.
    “Ah!” said several voices. My companions evidently approved of my decision. I caught several repetitions of a phrase I hadn’t heard before, compounded of words that made no sense. The hourless tapede. The hourless tapede.
    THE HOURLESS TAPEDE!
    I swung round. “Be quiet!” I commanded. “Don’t dare mention that name!”
    What name? I asked myself, listening to myself in wonder.
    I went on: “Once it was real, and prowled through this valley. Now it is gone and that is good; it should stay gone.”
    What in Heaven’s name was I talking about?
    Apparently I still hadn’t finished.
    “People shouldn’t put up notices like this,” I went on speechifying. “What’s the use of issuing warnings, if the evil wins a victory just by being mentioned? Long tradition has reason behind it; you can bet on that. Call it superstition if you like, but actually, the idea that it’s bad luck to name what you just named, is really common sense.”
    Then at last I shut up. I had “got it off my chest”, despite having no idea as to how it had got “onto my chest” in the first place.
    Young humanoids in any part of the universe are playfully interested in evil. Cor! The wicked hourless tapede prowled here! Let’s go and have a closer look!  I myself wasn’t immune from such boyish curiosity, despite my odd outburst against the notice. And my companions, boys and girls both, were quite eager to walk behind me through the Vale of Kuz. Well, that was all right, provided they obeyed me and did not speak the name that should not be spoken.
    But I noticed that none of them ventured to walk in front of me. I was definitely their leader, down that slope into Yonnimay’s last vale.
    Of course, the Oinamek was the exception. It was no surprise that he was independent of the taboo which lay over this area. He strode around, ranging sometimes ahead, sometimes to the side. Finally, I got so impatient, you might almost say I collared him. Quickening my pace, I veered and went alongside him and took him by the arm.
    “Tuulth,” I demanded, “what is going on here? What happened to me when I saw that notice, why didn’t it happen to the others, and why – ”
    He held up a hand.
    “Their turn may come.”
    “Turn at what? And why was it my turn first?”
    “You experienced the sharper headache because you are a precocious reader of Noleddern.” Once more I caught that flicker of gloating.
    “All right,” I sighed. No point in pretending that I don’t know.
    Noleddern is the ultimate language. It is picture-writing – hieroglyphics – taken to a point so advanced that it somehow cuts out the whole intermediate business of symbols; the sight of it doesn’t merely signify, it merges with, it is, the meaning. So the language can be read without being learned.
    It only works when you’ve reached a certain stage of development. Before then, it’s just scribble, but when you’re ready, ignorance is suddenly no longer possible – the scribble writhes into significance, you see it, you get the full message, instantaneously.
    Yet though it’s straightaway inside you, you don’t necessarily digest it quite so fast. That’s the scary part of it. You may not know at first exactly what it is that your mind has swallowed, you don’t know if it’s healthy or poisonous, but at the same time you do know that there’s no getting rid of it – you can’t unlearn it, you can’t sick it up – so you inescapably will know.
    You’ll also discover the unfortunate fact that education hasn’t prepared you. Guides to Noleddern merely tempt you, making you look forward to reaching reading age until suddenly it’s worked its way inside you and it’s too late.
    “You are naturally one of us,” prophesied Tuulth.
    “I don’t think so.” In my thoughts I put it more bluntly. Never.
    He didn’t argue; he drew away and went off walking on his own. I continued my role as leader. I was more alert than before, intending to spot the next notice before it was pointed out to me by Fayn Tazzomban. I was determined not to be taken by surprise again.

                                                     *****

As we advanced we progressed towards the dark and the uncomfortable cold. Except for the deepening dimness, the landscape in the Vale of Kuz reminded me of the approaches to Vutu, with the rocks of lunar grey, though here the plains were dustier. I strained my eyes and discerned, in addition to the track which we were following, lengths of older track looping around, which I guessed had been pulled gradually out of shape through eons of crustal slither.
    The increasing dark and cold, the barrenness and the icy starlight glimpsed ahead, all contributed to a sense of walking towards death. However, I don’t think I would have felt at all spooked if it had not been for that notice written in Noleddern. I was therefore the victim of suggestion, and this could have been something to get angry about, but I wasn’t sure enough about my position in Ixlian society to give way to anger or indignation; so, instead, I felt annoyance and confusion, together with a fear of disgracing myself.  I hung on to the thought that I was here to lead, not to grumble.
    Midway through the Vale I called a halt so that we could unload our protective clothing from the balpars and put it on.
    Our heavy, insulated garments kept us warmer but made further progress more tiring. Slower than before, we plodded through the dimness towards a region just south of one of the boundary hillocks. Here we reached the next stop, the so-called Ruins of Raimk. These consisted of huge tumbled blocks of lava, some bigger than the sarsens of Stonehenge, but not definitely artificial. Perhaps some primeval impact or eruption had arranged them to look like the remains of a fortress.
    An official notice, designed like the previous one, marked the approach. I averted my eyes from it. I wasn’t going to be conned again. The others could look if they wished; I’d had all the Noleddern I could take.
    After a few minutes spent examining the “ruins” I led my companions round the curve of the very last hill of Yonnimay, so that we could gaze upon and maybe actually step into Darkside itself.
    We would not have the energy for much exploration, since the insulated suits we wore made the going quite tough; a serious expedition would require motorised transport. For us, to venture even a few hundred yards on foot into the frozen, starlit hemisphere of Mercury, would be a big enough exploit. Not much further to go….
    A scattering of jaggedly split boulders lay strewn around a final pillar. Its notice displayed the simple words:

                                      THE CAPIAN PLAIN

    Over this phrase was the usual scribble of Noleddern. I fully intended to defocus my eyes from it, walk forward past it and ignore it, setting an example to the others, of how not to be disturbed by the ultimate language.
    And yet I did look.
    And I was all right, because this last message was different.
    It told me something which I could absorb without a headache. Here were no sinister hints; here the message fitted in humanely with what stretched out before me.
    Though it is a hopeless task to translate Noleddern properly into English, here’s my attempt to convey the gist of that notice:

                                   Time is a merciful blanket
                                         that smothers evil

    Behind me, the others were dropping back, hesitating to follow. We were all hushed, but I was less subdued than they. Strange that I, the outsider, should feel suddenly the tremendous comfort and hope which lurked here – and which they did not share! But then, how could they know? No way could they know that I had just recognized the Capian Plain from the picture in the children’s encyclopaedia in my house in England!
    Here was that picture become reality. Here was the dark cracked plain under the purple-black sky, with pointy rocks framing the scene to right and left. Here, made real, was the tingling solitude whose beauty keeps you company forever. Here was the silence that speaks, when you can almost hear the tick of Time’s clock, the confident voice of the eventless years that flow past in their millions, saying, we have no need of happenings, our deadness is more alive than any flesh.
    So I went forward. Without looking back, I crossed the invisible boundary between Yonnimay and Darkside, trustfully aware, as I did so, that I really had entered the scene from that beloved old book; that I trod the picture ground. With the soft thud of my boots on the Capian Plain I experienced that rarest and most glorious ecstasy, when an early childhood wonder turns out fact, radiating the assurance that one’s deepest longings are based on truth.
    I knew it would be silly to stay long, that my energy would soon give out, what with the drastic drop in temperature that occurs around the Darkside boundary. My spirit, besides, was close to being crushed by weighty delight, and, sensing that I had gambled well, I felt a strong urge to retire and hoard my psychic winnings, before my luck ran out and the game took a different turn. So after maybe two hundred yards I turned around and trudged back.  A few of my companions had advanced a little way; they turned back too, when they saw that I had.
    I re-crossed the boundary, going past the notice again, and as I did so, another aspect of its meaning occurred to me.
    It had already become obvious, that the arrangement of the three notices was meant to give a lesson.
    The first, announcing the Vale of Kuz, warns that the hourless tapede has prowled there. Reading this Noleddern inscription, the traveller is alerted to a lingering sense of past evil, an evil so great as to haunt the vale with a psychic smell of despair that has lasted for millions of years.
    I hadn’t read the second notice, but I didn’t think I needed to, in order to get the general idea. The punch line of the sequence was the Noleddern inscription on the third notice.
    That one invites you to picture Time as a lid, clamped down upon the horror of the past. “Time is a merciful blanket that smothers evil.” All bad things eventually die, and their effect is wiped out, buried under a protective coating, Time. Just as, on this walk, my depression in the Vale of Kuz had been wiped out by my elation on the Capian Plain.
    A neat lesson in hope.
    You couldn’t ask for a better one, except –
    To my way of thinking, the trouble was, that to think of Time as a lid, was to invite another, less welcome thought, namely –
    Lids can be removed.
    I must have been getting tired. My thoughts flopped around. Evil in the past. Records of the past. Archives. Leave well alone. But hang on, why should I think just then about the archives of Ixli?  I wasn’t in any danger, myself.  No chance I would go meddling in old records! I wasn’t that way inclined at all. Especially if the stuff was written in Noleddern! No Siree – as Jacko might say – after my recent headache, my curiosity had its limits! I would happily leave that whole business to the professionals, the Oinameks. Besides, if I did meddle, so what? Records were just records, weren’t they? The map is not the territory. A record of an evil is not the evil itself.
    Fayn Tazzomban fell into step beside me. “I’ll be glad to sit down with a mug of lim when this is over,” she remarked, looking worn out.
    I gazed at her affectionately, marvelling at her commonplace mind. “Look there,” I said, pushing her shoulder to turn her round to gaze at the blackness low in the Darkside sky. “See that bright planet. Is it Nuzhryven? Or Urom?”
    (Nuzhryven is Venus. Urom is Earth.)
    “Nuzhryven, I think,” she said. “Too bright to be Urom.” She turned her head forward again and looked down and stamped once or twice. “These boots of mine,” she went on, “are getting caked with dust. I’ll have to scrub them when I get back.” And that was that. End of conversation. Well, thought I, if I ever did get trapped in a haunted library with a nameless terror from the archives, I’d do well to have Fayn with me. No self-respecting horror would risk a clash of atmosphere with Fayn, bless her.

                                               *****

None of us talked much as we tramped the weary homeward miles, towards the beckoning city light. Eventually we touched that hemisphere boundary and experienced the slight elastic “pop” as we entered the zone of richer, brighter air. Before us stood the first buildings of the outskirts of Ixli.
    The group began to scatter as most of us headed for our separate homes. Fayn and I headed for the school club, accompanied by three others who were too restless and excited to relax just yet. While they chattered about the trip, I peered around in silence, nagged by an impression that the streets seemed different somehow. A minor detail had altered. That much I knew. But which detail? At first I got nowhere as I tried to figure out what had changed, and I had gone almost cross-eyed with the effort, when it came to me with sudden force that it was I who had changed.
    I could read.
    Those squiggly scribbles running in rows along the buildings, which I had assumed to be mere decorative graffiti when I first came to Ixli, and which I now knew to be inscriptions in Noleddern, were sticking little needles of meaning into my mind as I walked past, whispering tales from the buildings’ history, so that, as my unwary glance travelled along the lines of scribble, my sight began to film over with mental movies, ghost images of the structures being erected amid the bustle of a long-vanished age. I wrenched my gaze away; I wasn’t ready for all this just yet. The vision faded and I saw normally.
    My life is certainly going to be different from now on, thought I, mopping my brow. And why precisely did it have to happen now? Well, for that matter, why does one learn anything at one time rather than another? Because a time comes when one is ready. Especially if one has been made ready. Yes, the Oinameks knew what they were doing. The “school trip” to the Capian Plain might have been organized by the students but I strongly suspected that the Oinameks had long ago foreseen the likely outcome of that kind of trip.
    “Fayn,” I said, “let me join you in a mug of lim.”
    We went to the common room of the school club. To my relief, the others did not follow us there.
    Fayn sipped her herbal brew and waited for me to have my say. I found that I was desperately dependent on her support. In fact, though she didn’t know it, emotionally I was clinging to her. Not because she understood me or my problems; on the contrary, it was because she was so far away from understanding, that she encouraged me to believe that I, likewise, might escape the need to understand.
    “This Noleddern stuff,” I began, “it looks like there’s probably too much of it around for me to resist.”
    She nodded, sipped, said: “It’s a stage you reach.”
    “I suppose one way out,” I went on, “is for me to lose my Earth mind completely, and return to being just plain Ren Nydr of Ixli, Valeddom, forgetting that I was ever Hugh Dent of England, Earth. Then I’d be used to it. I wouldn’t question it. I’d live a quiet life. Unless....” I looked at her. “Hmm, the trouble is,” I rambled on, “I might then become a Dluku again, if, as I begin to suspect, Noleddern is the reason why some people become Dlukus. Those who can’t take it.”
    She said nothing except, “Go on.”
    “The weaker-minded,” I said, “who are too sensitive to stand the pressure of all the visions hitting them from one inscription after another every time they walk along the streets.... oh, flummk, what shall I do?”
    Fayn swallowed another sip and said placidly, “You’ve got to be yourself.”
    I almost groaned aloud at that useless bit of advice. Be myself! And what the flipping heck was myself? Of all the trite remarks....
    Clinging to this girl was worse than wimpish – it was useless.
    Better to consult an Earth-mind.
    Jacko I discounted. He was staunch but (to put it bluntly) he was too thick. That left Mr Bryce. Yes, he was the one to talk to. I put down my mug of lim and stood up. “I think I’ll see if Semor is in,” I said.
    Fayn merely nodded.
    I still stood there, irresolutely. “Tell me,” I asked her, “did you read Noleddern for the first time on this trip?”
    “Quite a bit more clearly than before.”
    “So – it wasn’t a thing that came at you all at once.”
    She shook her head. “It came all at once, but the digestion will take time. So it wasn’t as exciting as all that.”
    “It must take different people in different ways,” I said dryly, turning to go. At the door I stopped and looked back at her. She had got up too and was rinsing the mugs we had just drunk out of. Suddenly I understood Fayn. What was excellent about her, was precisely that lengthy digestion. Noleddern entered her in a flash but it might take all her life for her to absorb and react, and some things she would never get round to understanding. Sensible girl. Not useless. Not really boring. Just.... er.... solid.
    My voice trembling, I said: “Fayn, can I ask you another favour? Could you come with me to see Bryce? I may want a second opinion....” What I really meant was, I wanted her dullness, her kindness, as a shield against whatever awaited me.
    She didn’t answer. She simply finished what she was doing and walked in my direction.
    “Is that all right?” I said.
    “Of course. Let’s go.”
    I could have hugged her then, but I didn’t – I was so impressed at the ordinariness she spread like a coat of matt paint over everything around her, that some of it splashed onto me too, so that I began to tell myself: we’re just sorting a little matter out, something that just needs arranging.
    On the way to Bryce’s house, the belief grew stronger, that there was really nothing to worry about. The shock of Noleddern was wearing off.  Surely, I told myself, you can’t be damaged by reading! You don’t even have to do it if you don’t want to! And sure enough, as I passed the inscriptions in the streets I found it easier to ignore them.
    We came to Bryce’s house. Doors in Ixli aren’t locked, but there is a buzzer for courtesy’s sake. I pressed the button; it rang; no answer. “He’s out,” I said. “So what do I do now?” I wondered aloud.
    “Go ask the Hish,” shrugged Fayn.
    It always surprised me, the lack of outward respect with which Ixlians referred to their ruler the Melsh, the colossal City Mind. They weren’t in awe of it at all. It really was like a kindly old uncle to them. But then it was, after all, composed of the mind-stuff of Ixlians like themselves.
    Yet though its raw material was composed of human memories and knowledge, the Melsh had fused it all into a larger being, a great and impressive personality which I could never bring myself to call by the affectionate nickname “the Hish”.
    “Good idea,” I said. I didn’t bother to ask whether Fayn had meant, go ask the Hish the questions you were going to ask Semor, or whether she had meant, go ask the Hish where Semor is. For, either way, the Melsh was the next stop, for the simple reason that Bryce was probably there anyway. It was his favourite haunt.
    “Come on then,” said Fayn, taking my hand matter-of-factly, feeding me such a surge of wholesome happiness that I had no longer any intention of barging in on any conference between Bryce and the Melsh; I wouldn’t have the cheek, and besides, I was ceasing to believe that I had anything much to worry about; I was now going along just for the walk.
    The great planetarium-style central building in which the Melsh was housed loomed before us, so majestic that my instincts made me look around for royal guards, though by this time I knew the set-up was nothing like that. Fayn simply pulled me in and we found ourselves alone with the spindle shape towering in the middle.
    Bryce wasn’t there. So my guess had been wrong.
    Fayn gave me a friendly push. “Just ask....”
    I tried to find my voice. But I was too slow. The Melsh spoke first.
It spoke in English – the modern English it had learned from a sprinkling of Earth-minds in the past century or two.
    SEMOR TELLS ME, it boomed, YOU HAVE BEEN A WHOLE DAY ON VALEDDOM.
    A Mercurian day – same length of time as a Mercurian year – 88 Earth days. Yes, that sounded about right. I could believe that.
    YOUR BLOOD IS RESTLESS, it went on. A “NEW MORNING” FEELING INVADES YOU. LIKE SEMOR, YOU WISH TO TRY A DIFFERENT PATH. YOU HAVE A ZEST FOR EXPERIMENTATION.
    “Pardon me, but I do not. I just want – ”
    YOUR BODY-CLOCK IS ABOUT TO SOUND AN ALARM. I SEE YOU LOOK CONFUSED. SEMOR TELLS ME, I SOUND LIKE THE ORACLE. I LIKE SEMOR. I WISH HE HAD NOT GONE AWAY.
    “Gone! Where?”
    HE HAS DISAPPEARED INTO THE ARCHIVES.
    “Couldn’t you have stopped him?” I choked.
    NOTHING COULD HAVE STOPPED HIM, NOW THAT THE OINAMEKS HAVE INVITED HIM TO JOIN THEIR LIBRARY STAFF. EARTH HISTORIES DEAL IN THOUSANDS OF YEARS, VALEDDOMIAN HISTORIES IN MILLIONS. NO EARTH SCHOLAR EVER GETS A CHANCE LIKE THIS.
    I heard footsteps. A third figure had ambled into the presence of the Melsh. It was my father, Fnekt.
    “Ren, I’m glad to find you. You heard about Semor, I suppose? Yes, well. I’m not happy about it. I tried to dissuade him.”
    “What got into him?” I demanded.
    “As you know, he wouldn’t go so far as to become an Oinamek. But joining their auxiliary staff – with full right of access to explore the archives – that was another matter. He jumped at that. You should have heard him.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Imagine Mercury in the days when it still rotated as it circled the cloudy newborn Sun; imagine the days when Mercury had seas, hot seas but nevertheless real seas, and continents and a different life from now; and then think that records actually survive from those days, from before there was any multi-celled life on Earth!”
    Yes, he must have been excited, all right.
    “And you,” I probed, “are unhappy at his decision.”
    “We all know,” Fnekt hedged, “that the Oinameks are admirable....”
    “Oh, awfully. Frightfully,” I snapped.
    He looked me up and down. “Tell me, have you got Noleddern yet?”
    I grimaced, nodded.
    “Then,” he sighed, “you can imagine the Archives, wall to wall with that stuff. Imagine it hurling the weight of history onto the reader. Certain exceptional people can bear it. Oinameks can. Semor perhaps can. He’ll just have to find out....”
    I shook my head. “No such thing as mere ‘finding out’ in this business.”
    WHAT DO YOU MEAN? The Melsh was still speaking in English despite the presence of Fnekt.
    “You can get trapped by the discoveries you make!” I shouted up.
    HOW?
    “How? What do you mean, ‘how’?” (I was telling the Melsh off!) “It’s obvious! Sunlight glances off your binoculars so that you reveal yourself to a sniper!”
    EARTHLY ANALOGIES – I LIKE THEM!
    “So Mr Bryce has got to be rescued,” I ploughed on, still in English. “Before he....”
    BEFORE HE MAKES THE DISCOVERY FROM WHICH THERE IS NO RETURN.
    “The hourless tapede?” I murmured.
    YES.

                                                 *****

“Please, can you do something?”
    I AM IMMOBILE. I CANNOT GO IN THERE.
    “You’re the government!” I moaned, shrunken in spirit, unable to stop myself from saying things which I knew were of no use.
    NOT IN AN EXECUTIVE SENSE. I RULE THROUGH INFLUENCE AND PRESTIGE.
    “Oh, go ahead and influence me, then,” I said in disgust.
    ONE MAN WITH HUDAR MAY SUCCEED, WHERE AN ARMY MIGHT FAIL.
    Beaten, dulled, weakly sarcastic, I said: “Yes, yes, I can just about manage to get your drift, thank you. So tell me what you can, about what Bryce was after. I don’t suppose he merely intended to browse.”
    HE WANTED THE KNOWLEDGE WHICH I KEPT BACK FROM HIM. HE WAS WORRIED ABOUT EARTH.
    “Can’t I be worried about Earth, too? I used to live there.”
    BUT I CAN SAFELY TELL YOU THINGS THAT WOULD HAVE BLOWN HIS MIND.
    I gulped, “Um....” Not even sarcasm was left to me. The verbal fight had quite drained out of me.
    YOU UNDERSTAND, I MUST USE VIOLENT METAPHOR.
    “Er....”
    A WORLD CAN GET DRAGGED OFF COURSE.
    “Oh.” My tongue felt thick in my mouth.
    IT SLIPS AND SLIDES FURTHER AND FURTHER FROM THE CENTRAL REALITY, FLOUNDERING IN A PROBABILITY SMEAR, LIKE PREY IN A MUD-PATCH WHILE THE PREDATOR CLOSES IN.
    I did not ask what he meant – for I feared to know. Instead, I feebly demanded, “How do we know this?”
    THE FIRST SIGN OF ATTACK IS FOR THE WORLD TO APPEAR DEAD FROM OUTSIDE. THEN – IF THE ATTACK PROCEEDS – THE DEADNESS CREEPS INWARDS TOWARDS THE PLANETARY SURFACE ITSELF. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT WORLDS ARE STILL ALIVE. HAVE YOUR PEOPLE VISITED ANY?
    “Only our Moon.”
    AND?
    “It really is dead.”
    THAT IS BAD. WHAT ABOUT ZDAKASH?
    (Zdakash is Mars.)
    “It seems to be dead – though we haven’t travelled there yet to make sure.”
    ALL WORLDS, IF THEY ARE FULLY REAL, HARBOUR LIFE. PERHAPS, IN THIS RESPECT, YOUR PLANET AND MINE ARE THE LAST SURVIVORS. EARTH MAY BE NEXT ON THE LIST TO BE ROBBED OF ITS REALITY – STRIPPED OF ITS LIFE.
    It wasn’t just what the Melsh was saying, that caused me to start backing away, it was the tone of utter conviction with which it spoke, and what’s more, something else that I couldn’t bear, it seemed to waken inside me a belated understanding of certain Noleddern inscriptions which, during the course of the past few hours, I had seen, read and absorbed unawares. This kind of delayed-reaction awakening, this digestion, can be triggered awfully fast, which is why I hesitate to recommend the study of Noleddern, and why the craven side of me wished, at that moment, that I had never come home to Ixli. But I knew that there was no way I could decently back out of the rescue mission.
    I turned and hurried from the presence of the Melsh, in my haste to get the ordeal over and done with.
    As I loped away I heard Fnekt’s voice arguing with the Melsh. Good old Fnekt! My Mercurian father was trying to help, trying to organize something. But I could not imagine him being any use, and the Melsh, by the sound of its booming reply, shared this view: THEY WOULD NEVER ADMIT YOU TO THE ARCHIVES, FNEKT NYDR – YOU NEVER DIGESTED A SINGLE WORD OF NOLEDDERN. Fnekt’s vain protests were still audible as I went out through the hall door.
    I emerged into the street and began a jog-trot towards the Archives building.
    At first I did not hear the pattering behind me, over and above the sound of my own deep breaths. Then, becoming aware, I stopped, turned.
    “Fayn,” I said, moved by her loyalty, “as always, I’m glad of your company, but I’m not sure I want you mixed up in this....”
    And I wasn’t just saying this to be noble. For selfish reasons, I wanted her preserved, untouched by it all. That was her usefulness in my life. But how could I explain to her, that I needed her to be my Foreign Legion, the thing I could run off to join, To Forget?
    However, as soon as she opened her mouth it became clear that she was quite safely ignorant of the seriousness of the situation.
    “Just thought I’d tell you,” she said, “I’ve heard you get given a medical, before they let you go deep into the Library.
    “A medical! Well, that’s very reassuring,” I replied. “Uh, thanks for telling me, Fayn,” I added, toning down the irony, for after all the dear lass did perceive that I was still a new boy around here and needed looking after. I added kindly, “You run along and I’ll see you later.”
    “Let me know, as soon as you can, how you got on.” As though I was going for a job interview or something. Amid all the stressful wonders of Valeddom I found her dullness absolutely irresistible. There were no mysteries about Fayn (except the mystery of why she liked me).
    “Will do,” I agreed.
    “I would come in with you, you know,” she dithered, “only my Noleddern isn’t yet good enough. They wouldn’t pass me.”
    And of course your English is non-existent; my conversation with the Melsh has gone over your head. Just as well.
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    She turned away and I was alone in the bright Ixlian air.
    Well, I thought, that’s the girl for me. A girl whose Noleddern isn’t good enough. I can’t think of a better recommendation.
    What a pity it was, that at this particular moment I couldn’t simply go and join her in a life which was one long holiday from the facts. Wouldn’t it be great, I wistfully thought, to be at one with the pedestrians and loiterers who made this street scene look so normal; leave Bryce to his fate, assume everything was above-board, and content myself with a stroll among the lawns – what a good, sound, positive attitude, if only I could have believed it so.
    Next stop the Oinamek stronghold.
    The Great Library of Ixli.
    That bulky, octagonal structure built of heavy black stone blocks, had impressed me on my first arrival in the city before I knew what it was. All in all, it looked to be a finer headquarters than the central palace of the Melsh.  The blocks were mortared and edged with a mild brown substance that looked like varnish; the three storeys of tall, elegant windows lent grace to the massive solidity of the walls, which seemed to lean back ever so slightly, like the sides of the Parthenon; every aspect seemed perfectly proportioned despite a certain grim sturdiness. As I walked up the steps to the pillared entrance, I admired the exterior at the same time as I feared the power that lay within.
    I remembered the peculiar spectacle I had encountered upon my arrival in the city: blindfold guards escorting a sighted prisoner.... I looked to left and right. No sign now of anything odd.
    I pushed my way in through the swing door, and my boots sank into the rich carpet of the lobby. The respectable hush took over. After all, whatever else this was, it was a place to honour knowledge.
    The lobby was a small library in itself, with alcoves, small side-rooms, stacks and tables and a scattering of readers. Beyond it stood a ticket-barrier structure manned by two officials.
    These men were not white-robed Oinameks; rather, they were ordinary-looking Ixlians – except in one respect. They were blindfolded.
    Approaching the checkpoint, I saw that the men weren’t really wearing blindfolds but strips of what looked like translucent plastic around their heads, covering their eyes but, presumably, not blanking out all of their vision.
    One of them turned his head towards me with a courteous smile.
    “How may I help you?”
    “I’m looking for my friend Semor Recrecd,” I said. “He’s somewhere in the Library.”
    “We know him. He’s currently below ground.”
    “Below....?”
    “In the Archives.”
    “I realize that. Can I go and look?”
    “By all means, Ren Nydr. First, please step through here for the medical test.”
    The other man ushered me into a side-room where a third official sat me in a chair and went through the motions of carrying out a few pulse measurements and scans. I needed all this to happen fast, so fast that my terrible doubts had no time to multiply, and mercifully this need was met.
    “Not much to that,” said the doctor type. “A mere formality, in your case.” I emerged and was shown back to the first official.
    To my astonishment, he was now standing beside what looked like a motorised wheelchair/buggy contraption, which must have been produced from one of the other side-rooms, and he gestured at me to get onto it.
    “This,” he said, “is your drell.”
    “Gosh,” I said (in Valeddomian, Bannam!) “That’ll get me around,” I added naively.
    “It will get you around, yes. The controls are simple.” He showed me how to work the levers for stop-start and steering.
    Amazed at the level of service which the Library provided for its users, I was also glad of the conveyance, since I was still a bit more physically tired than usual – although because of my Mercurian physique I was quite rapidly recovering from the exhausting hike to the Capian Plain.
    “And this,” the man handed me a mauve metal plate, about the size of a normal book-page, “is your Interruption Card.”
    I held the thing and looked at it blankly.
    The man explained, “You may have to interpose it between your friend and what he is reading.”
    “I think I understand,” I scowled. “Just tapping him on the shoulder wouldn’t work. Not if he’s deep into Noleddern.”
    “It might do worse than merely fail to work; it might well damage his brain. But the Card should be safe enough to use. It has been designed with neural....”
    “I’ll take your word for it,” I cut in.
    “I’m sure you do. However, if the Card does not work, your options are limited.” He frowned.
    As a rule I’m not that good at guessing people’s thoughts from their expressions but in that instant I could read his mind perfectly. The management takes no responsibility....
    “Here,” he brightened up, handing me a larger, engraved metal sheet about A4 size, which winked with pretty lighted arrows, “is a plan of the Library and the Archives. If you need assistance in locating your friend, press this button on the corner,” he showed me on the plan. “Don’t be shy of asking. We’re here to help, and if necessary we will provide you with a personal guide.”
    “Thanks. I’ll see how I get by on my own.”
    I drove my drell through the main barrier, and it snapped shut behind me.

                                                 *****

Ahead was an enormous glowing wall-plan of the Library and Archives (a larger and more detailed edition of the one I held in my hand), and beyond it I could see the beginning of the maze of corridors and ramps which it depicted, all heavily carpeted and softly lit by yellow ceiling-bulbs and alcove-lamps. The bookshelves reached from knee height to eight or nine feet up the walls, and the books were mostly very large, like exaggeratedly massive church bibles or cartoon depictions of magicians’ books of spells. If even as little as ten per cent of it all was written in Noleddern, I could imagine Bryce and I being swallowed forever in this vast recording of the thoughts, researches, dreams, experiences and wisdom of Ixlians over millions of years.
    Gliding through room after room and at times down intervening ramps, I descended in a gradual spiral, deeper into the seemingly limitless kingdom of ultimate knowledge.
    The doorways had no doors, they were mere openings, wide enough for two drells to glide through side by side. You could describe each level of the Archives either as a web of corridors, each corridor sectioned by bulkheads into octagonal areas, or as a grid of octagonal rooms laid end to end and open to each other.
    Either way you looked at it, it seemed limitless. And never monotonous, because of the way each section was arranged. Though (apart from doorways) the four “square” walls of each octagon were lined with books or bound volumes of documents, the other four “bevelled” or “corner” walls were something different altogether. These were what I call the “walls of temptation”. Adorned with large notices written in Noleddern, they announced themes that could be further pursued if the reader cared to browse. It was as difficult for me to ignore them, as for a tourist in London to ignore the Tower, or the bright lights of Piccadilly. To give you one example, a notice that caught my eye invited me to explore Arnep, a temporary moon of Valeddom in the remote past. In one twinkling second those Noleddern statements delivered a parcel of tantalising information into my brain, which plunged me into a vision of Arnep. Briefly and vividly I saw the little world, a half-molten blob about a hundred and fifty miles across, tumbling through space. And with the vision came a hint that Arnep actually contained some kind of life. What happened to that form of life, and to the moon itself, I shall never know, for I resisted the temptation to swerve and enter that particular room.
    I found the strength to keep on course and to avoid being overwhelmed by the sensory bombardment, because something inside me came to my aid: hudar.
    To counter the vast promises of Noleddern, hudar could build pictures too.
    Almost I heard a roar and felt the blast of rockets as hudar whispered: “so you’re tempted to explore; very well, go ahead, explore, but do it properly, do it in such a way as to achieve your purpose. Consider the space probes launched by NASA, flung around the Solar System on sling-shot trajectories to multiple destinations, only just avoiding collisions as they swing close round one planetary target before shooting off to the next one. Then think about you, here, in the lair of Noleddern, needing to read but in danger of reading too much, constantly subject to the risk that you may crash into some truth that will finish you. Like the space probes, you must swing past, you must graze, you must use but not succumb to the gravitational forces which the fat tomes can bring to bear on you as you come within range, as you seek to learn just enough to follow Bryce’s trail.”
    In this way, hudar kept me on the job.
    Other drells purred past me, some driven by Oinameks, some by lay users of the Archives, but I felt no impulse to stop anyone, to ask for help. I acted as if I were alone.  For better or worse, life on Mercury had instilled in me the conviction that it was essential for me to face and overcome challenges on my own; I might dodge and parry, but could not share, the perils that waved around me like the fronds and barbs of an undersea forest.
    This sense, that it wasn’t any use calling for aid, got stronger as my spiralling descent widened and deepened so far that I realized I must be travelling in a warren of tunnels that extended well beyond the bounds of the city of Ixli. The suspicion grew on me that the Archives had grown beyond the control of the Oinameks themselves. I began to imagine that back of it all there must be a greater power, perhaps a giant intelligent maintenance machine. I had no evidence of this; I saw no robotic excavators busily enlarging the network; yet I could not believe that a corporation consisting of a mere thirty-five people could be responsible for something the size of this. Certainly a hidden source of energy was being tapped to keep the lights on and the air in circulation. But it was no use trying to think about it. No real comparison was possible with any Earth library, since Valeddomian civilization stretched back millions of years....
    And where was I headed as I glided from tunnel to tunnel in this underground labyrinth? The map I’d been given was of limited use. The “walls of temptation” were more promising: they cross-referenced with each other, and time and again I read and obeyed and went on past before realizing consciously what I had done. It was the only way to get on: anything more deliberate and less speedy would have pulled me off course, causing me to “crash”. And after a while I realized that the big decision had made itself. It was obvious where to find Mr Bryce.
    A district of the Archives was devoted to Earth.
    Specifically, to what had been learned about that planet from previous contacts with Earth-minds in Valeddomian bodies. This district must be relatively new: the civilization of my world was in its infancy compared to that of Mercury, and Earth-studies a newfangled science. Still, the rooms I was headed for would be older and richer than any terrestrial library.
    And they ought to deal not only with Earth but with aspects of Mercurian history that were relevant to Earth’s doom.
    That must have been the magnet for Bryce.

                                                  *****

I found him at last, seated alone at a table with his back to me, his head bowed over a huge open book which must have felt as heavy as a suitcase when he lugged it down from the shelf.
    Don’t make him jump.
    Keeping my eyes on him, I sidled to the chair opposite his. I sat. He didn’t move his head the slightest bit. Only his eyeballs were jerking like mad.
I spoke: “Sir, you’ve been here a long while. How about a spot of lunch?”
Never have I seen, never will I see, another such look on a man’s face. Whatever he was reading about, it wasn’t good news. He turned a page. Another. Another. He handled the heavy sheets feebly, fumbling as if he were reading bits at random.
    Risking a glance I saw, as I expected, that the pages were covered with Noleddern script; hastily averting my gaze from there, I looked again into Bryce’s countenance of woe.
    At this point I had better explain that Noleddern is not arranged into sentences. The sentence as we know it is unknown in the ultimate language, where every word is a statement in itself, and the vocabulary is so cosmically huge that it contains as many possible words as there are possible sentences in English. So far I have called it “scribble”, but, actually, it’s knots of scribble connected with wavy lines. The knots are the words; the lines are something like punctuation, something like prefixes and suffixes and other inflections, and something like footnotes and cross-references, but all forming a web of connections much more subtle and advanced than anything we Earthlings know. So when you read it your eyes don’t just travel in orderly fashion from left to right and down the page; they jerk around as though you were a parachutist who has bailed out in the midst of a firework display. Continuously, violently, Bryce’s eyes darted up and down and around the double-page spread. With a sudden heave he flipped backward through several pages…. “Sir,” I said, “tell me….” but he simply went on staring at the script.
    Since he was deaf to my voice –
    Time to try the Interruption Card.
    Gingerly, I slid it between Bryce’s face and the book.
    And the card had no effect; he ignored it. Wherever he had gone, he had gone too far. Well, the Oinameks had warned me, hadn’t they? They’d said that it might not work....
    They had also warned me that I should give up rather than try to shake him out of it. In this situation I should be patient and wait for him to come out of his own accord. Wait for eye-strain to get the better of him, maybe.
But that would be no good either! Instinctively I knew that by the time he did get out, the old Bryce would be no more. He would have become an Oinamek. It might be a good life, but he would no longer be himself; so, what I must do, I must do to save his identity; in effect, save his life.
    To call him back, to get him to hear me, I must go where he had gone.
    How?
    How in the world could one lost mind follow another? I sat back and saw, reluctantly, as I contemplated the question, that it carried within itself its own answer. How can minds follow other minds? How can a bus crash cause not only me but also Bryce, Jacko and Justine Lazenby to migrate mentally to the same alien planet? Why do things happen in groups? Why are souls sticky? Why do they hover and haunt? Why don’t you straightaway depart at death for some infinitely remote realm, why aren’t you wrenched completely away, why do you stick around in the gradual drifting dirge: When thou from hence away art past, / To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last.... From Whinny-muir when thou may’st pass / To Brig o’Dread thou com’st at last....
    Sorrowfully I stood up. Hudar was turning my questions into statements, showing me the score, and I had no further excuse to hesitate. I brought my chair round to Bryce’s side of the table, sat beside him and took a last glance around the room. It seemed, during those final moments, quite like an ordinary library. The homely tables were scuffed; some volumes lay about untidily; just to my side there was a worn pencil left by a previous researcher; but I knew better than to trust the appearance of scholarly security. The double-page spread which gaped in front of me was about to pull me down into its pit of awareness with no guarantee against flooding.
    I brought myself to focus on the script.
    Threads of signification began to lift and spiral at me, reaching for my head; I felt a viscous tug and the walls and shelves around me vanished and I was plunged into a basin – tub – pool – lake – sea – ocean of meaning.

                                                  *****

I hovered like a seagull above the waves - but not Earth’s. Below a steamy white sky, all around me, stretched Valeddom’s primal ocean, the Milb.
    Everything that I looked at, I understood. No sooner did I stare at the bloated, fuzzy red sun that stained the watery horizon, than I knew when I was. That huge sun was new-born. It did not dazzle at all. It was so gentle on the eye, partly because the early Solar System was still dimmed by its cocoon of dust, partly because the thermonuclear solar fires would take millions of years to build up their full blaze. In these relatively mild conditions, liquid water could exist on daytime Mercury, though only just. It was close to boiling point, and I wondered if life had yet appeared here.
    I seemed to wait for hours, and during those hours, the sun traversed the zinc-white heaven like a red balloon; Mercury in this remote past age was still rotating, and rotating quite fast. Night followed day. Day followed night. Morning broke, and I turned to see the sun spurting its flaming glow above the other horizon.
    A flotilla of dark disc-shapes approached from that direction. They were the living ships, the lannemilb. Gigantic single cells of silicon life. They swam past me and disappeared in the west.
    The scene flickered – perhaps I had turned a page – and the picture changed. I immediately knew that millions of years had passed.
    The sun was brighter, though still red. Now some saw-shaped rocks poked above the water. I saw a swarm of lannemilb, a larger group than before; quite an armada. Its members no longer swam on the surface of the ocean but drifted through the air, forever at the same height, keeping to the former sea level. Later I saw other fleets, locked to other altitudes, each confined to the level at which it had swum at birth. Information came to me, that this was something to do with the planet’s “biotic field”, which was not continuous but layered, like the energy states of an atom.
    More scenes flickered by as I hovered through the early history of Valeddom. Nothing yet about Earth.
    Lower and lower sank the ocean as the ages passed. More islands appeared, which swelled and merged into continents as the waters evaporated. My viewpoint darted all over the little world from point to chosen point, as the author of the pages I was reading – or rather, living – made me watch creatures evolve. So I saw multi-cellular life, some silicon-based, some carbon-based, establish itself at various locations on the planet, spreading, meeting, reacting, conflicting. Because natural history wasn’t the author’s main interest, some of these scenes were rather blurred, but they were essential background to what followed.
    Cities reared up, both the cone-shaped cities of the giant zitpoidl – just a very few of these – and the sprawling settlements, more familiar in style, of a race that looked approximately human. Changes flickered rapidly before my eyes as I speeded through time towards the point that the author wished to examine.
    The cities looked big to me, for I had got used to the small populations of Mercury, but they were still small by modern Earth standards, containing tens of thousands or (at most) hundreds of thousands, rather than millions. I witnessed wars that were hardly at all destructive compared with ours; aerial armadas clashing and just a few wrecked planes tumbling down out of the sky. These conflicts were all between human societies. Somewhat to my surprise I never witnessed any clash between humanity and the zitpoidl. I suppose their natures differed so profoundly that silicon and carbon life found nothing to compete or quarrel about. They even lived on different time-scales, a fact which I had experienced myself.
    Most of mankind’s aggressive energy was taken up with the fight against the harshness of Nature. Even at its best, Mercury was only marginally habitable; a beautiful, cruel world. (This author, as I have indicated, wasn’t much into natural history or ecology for their own sakes; otherwise I might have got a different viewpoint.) Civilizations had to cope with the environmental changes as the planet’s rotation slowed. Extremes of heat and cold grew worse as the days and nights lengthened, and eventually the peoples were forced to admit that civilization had no choice but to retreat to the poles. For once, an effort was made to communicate with the zitpoidl. A challenging project, surely; but I didn’t catch much of it, as this was one of the blurred parts of the history, the author contenting himself with the conclusion that, with great difficulty, an agreement was reached between the two species: humanity would take the South Pole, while the zitpoidl took the North.
    Probably, humans could have taken both north and south – there would have been room for all. But if that had happened, the two halves of human civilization would have lost touch with one another for millions of years, and the people were wise enough to fear the results of such divergence. So the entire membership of humanity went south together, dug in, built a partially subterranean polar city, and for a long while was confined in this very small area.
    Finally the planetary rotation ceased altogether and the world became locked into its present orientation with a permanent Dayside and Nightside. I watched sun-glare broil the Bay of Cholvg, while final darkness fell over the Capian Plain. Now at last, along the new Twilight Belt in between, life could creep back.
    Surprisingly, the two intelligent species – zitpoidl at the North Pole, humanity at the South – were the slowest to re-colonize along that habitable strip. Perhaps they had both got so used, in their different ways, to a polar existence, that they were contented with the way things were. (I wondered about those polar cities; wondered if they still existed at the present time. I later found out that they do.)
    So at first it was left to other life, the so-called blind forces of evolution, to occupy the Twilight Belt from both ends, advancing mile by mile, century by century, along both half-circles, converging gradually on the equator. It became a much-travelled path (along which my consciousness swept along many times with the speed of a glider), as various species of plant and animal, not as numerous as those of a richer world such as Earth, but dramatically divergent in the methods they found to cope with the harsh environment, spread themselves in wave after gradual wave of new forms, moulded continually by accidental pressures and the twists of fortune.

                                                *****

The author, I began to feel sure, would be coming to his punch-line soon. But what about Earth?
    Up to this point I had been, you might say, comfortably amazed. What had happened to me when I found myself living the pages of Noleddern script was, of course, fantastic, stupendous, awesome; yet I understood that I was merely experiencing the transfer of images and ideas more efficiently than when one reads ordinary language. We have the phrase, “losing yourself in a book”, and such sayings as “oh, look at him, he’s miles away, he’s always got his nose in a book”. Noleddern merely takes it further.
    In other words, up to this point I had been contentedly watching a kind of mental movie.
    To be sure, it had our movies beat hollow. The pictures were fused with the commentary – the author’s thought-input – in a manner I can’t describe, except to say that it was so clear, bracing, nifty and fun, that you’d never get anyone wanting to miss school, or, for that matter, failing their exams, if such an educational tool were available on Earth, though I’d hate to think of the uses that a government propaganda department might make of it.
    Anyhow – call it a mental movie, where you can enjoy being “scared” from the safety of your seat.
    But, after a while, fun gave way to doubt.
    A note of insincerity crept into the commentaries. It was a kind of fluttering coyness, as the author, or director of this written ‘movie’, began to ‘beat about the bush’, dodging and veering, his thoughts blurring not due to impatience but because he was getting leery of his chosen subject.
    “Something”. “It”. Infuriating screen of fuzzy thoughts. Less willing to get to the point the closer he approached it, the author decelerated, pulling my awareness more and more slowly northwards along the path of developing life in ancient Yonnimay.
    Why did it happen here? the writer’s tone was asking, and then, without explaining what was meant by the question, grabbed at an answer: because this world has both silicon and carbon life, and because therefore at one point the two kinds came together, with the result that something came into existence, that should never have been.
    That evasive and reluctant “something!”  Yet though he lacked courage and honesty, the author could not repress his skill. Using the whole power of Noleddern as the climax neared, he made it all seem so real that I no longer seemed to be a disembodied observer. I still knew perfectly well that I wasn’t really there, that I was in fact reading in the Archives of Ixli, yet I began to see (though not to feel) my legs striding and my arms swinging. I was given to understand, now that the introduction was almost over, and we had to zoom in on the main point, that I must be allowed a better idea of scale, and so my advance had slowed to walking speed.
    Actually the deceleration, which was supposed to suit me, really suited the author. Noleddern, despite being so brilliant, is no guarantee against waffle; it simply ensures that when you do get waffle, it’s brilliant. The author was doing a splendid job of communicating his own hesitancy and cowardice.  I was left in no doubt of his determination to find some excuse, to explain away in advance the horror that lay ahead.
    The fact that the realism of my experience did not go so far as to give me a sense of touch, ought to have been reassuring. Though I could see my legs move, I couldn’t actually feel the path I was treading. All well and good, you might reasonably think.  Shouldn’t this lack have nicely reminded me that I had not actually been transported into that scene for real?
    Lack of physical sensation certainly did make the experience dreamlike, but then, you’re nowhere more vulnerable than in a dream.
    Especially is this true in the kind of dream where your floating self is pulled helplessly along towards what waits for you.  I tried to keep my cool by saying to myself, it’s all in the mind. Louder I repeated it, to shout down the mocking reply, if it’s all in the mind, then you’ve had it, mate.
    I saw a figure walking ahead of me, shuffling along like an old man, or like a younger man who is having to plod against a strong wind. Gradually I gained on this figure. As I overtook him he turned his head. It was Bryce.
He said, “Looks like we’re getting down to it. The business. The payoff.”
    Then he turned his head back. He hadn’t greeted me, or showed any pleasure or surprise in seeing me, nor did I to him. Nothing mattered but the issue ahead.
    “As you say, it looks like it,” I agreed. “The nitty-gritty,” I added, in the hope that a banal, stupid phrase might break the spell.
    The path ahead began to descend steeply, and we paused at this rim.  We saw down into a wide, flat-bottomed valley.  All of a sudden I recognized the lie of the land. It was the Vale of Kuz, millions of years previous to the reality I had hiked through a few hours earlier. Geological change is even slower on Mercury than on Earth, and the place was broadly recognizable.
    Some surface features, though, were different in this earlier version. A wide, shallow river, choked with stones, meandered through the Vale. Multiform spiky shrubs, dark green, brown and black, were sprinkled thinly over the central flatness and the adjacent slopes. Meanwhile to our right a grey fog appeared, rolling leftwards across the field of view. It eventually blotted out about half the valley before it began to thin.
    At one location inside the fog an object glowed, a patch of fiery red.
Little by little as the fog dissipated, the redness flamed more distinctly into the shape of a mouth.
    “Dragon”, I thought, but now it was I who was not being honest.  When the veil of fog had melted entirely, so that what had been hidden inside it stood clear, I knew how much I would have preferred a dragon.
    The thing’s distance was hard to determine; it depended on how our vision zoomed, with a dream’s unsteady range.  Anyhow the distance didn’t really matter. Merely through the fact of its existence, the creature threatened our sanity.
    I thought at first that it had no eyes; then I saw the blank, white orbs blink open. Its mouth slavered red flame, it moved like a tiger on the prowl - but I am no more honest than the author of the scene; I am as reluctant as he to say the only important thing about the hourless tapede.
    No accidental, false comparison like the “face” you can see on the full moon, can explain away what is truly expressed, in the sag of its mouth and its drool of fire. Damn this Noleddern script which does not allow you to look away from evil made flesh.
    Bryce was even worse affected than I was. I could see him twitching.
    It’s all in the mind, it’s all in the mind, I chanted, while the tapede took some forward steps with a peculiar jerkiness like a model monster in an early horror movie.  For some unfair reason, the cranky stop-motion made it seem more real. I continued my threadbare insistence, It’s all in the mind! When it gets to us it will just pass through us! And we’ll just pass through it! Because it’s only a mental image! And even the image is not that big! Not as big as a dinosaur! Hippo-sized, maybe…
    No use. You might as well try to blank out fear in the presence of a ghost by telling yourself that it doesn’t weigh anything. The uncanny is what it is. And if it’s coming closer with an air of purpose –
    There’s a good Valeddomian word: Bufubu. Translation: “Never mind the theory, I want to get out of here.”
    Bryce turned to me and I saw his lips move and I heard words. But lips and words weren’t quite synchronised; as can happen on live TV-by-satellite they were smeared by a slight signal gap between speech and image as he said: “And yet – and yet – it’s only a beast.”
    Hearing this smudged wisdom, my nerves stretched even tighter. Was it right to hope?  Was my old teacher onto something?  
    Bryce ploughed on, “An animal can’t make moral choices. And an animal is what it was; the book clearly says so without leaving room for doubt!  The ancient thing – remember we’re seeing far back in time – was a deadly predator, no doubt; but without intelligence it can’t have been bad.”
    “Anyway, who cares?” I broke out in a fury of impatience. “I’ve achieved what I came here to do – I’ve found where you are – so now all we have to do is....”
    What, exactly?
    Just shake ourselves out of it, that was what! We were after all simply reading a perishing book, for goodness’ sake! All we had to do, therefore, was to get up out of our chairs and retrace our steps out of the Library and –
But what was the use of mentioning the Library, a part of me wondered, since I could not see, nor feel, any Library around me, or any chair under me; instead, I stood in the Vale of Kuz, millions of years ago, and the hourless tapede was padding towards me, mouth agape, drubbling, and though that word doesn’t exist in English, I must use it, adapting it from the Valeddomian drubbalaon, “promising to smell”.
    My judgement of distance had become more precise as I got used to the flexible zoom facility of Noleddern. I could tell that the beast was now about forty yards away.
    Forty yards and closing. Now, this whole thing is getting stupid. How many times do I have to repeat, that I’m only reading, for the love of Heaven.
    Thirty-five yards and closing.
    Well then, go on, why don’t you announce to Bryce that we’re turning our heads from this book?
    Yeah, just say it.  Say: look up, wake up, clear off!
    Thirty yards and closing.
    Puffs of dust burst up from the ground as the beast’s pads thudded.  Momentarily it closed its mouth and, zooming, I was treated to the sight of its crocodile grin. It had the universe on its side, a traitor universe, an enveloping nightmare that will crush your reason, unwise reader who is now more than a reader. Your arguments will be ignored like the squeaks of a rat in the coils of a boa constrictor.  Twenty-five yards and closing.
    All right then, never mind the arguments; what about action? What was stopping me from making a move? Could it conceivably be.... (Twenty yards and closing.) ....that I was afraid to put it to the proof? Afraid to find that when I tried to turn away, I was locked here by.... (Fifteen yards and closing.) .... the very last question of all? Could I honestly say that I had never seen the thing before?
    Could I honestly claim that it wasn’t a mask?
    Bufubu, bufubu, theory be damned, the evil past is pushing to lift the trap door of Time, and when it has poked its head up into the present, here on Valeddom, you will recognize having met it on Earth. You saw it in Pullen’s gormless sneer, “Especially for Dent. Especially for Dent.” And what are you going to do about it, Dent? Spend your last seconds pretending you don’t know the score?
    IT’S NOT ALL IN THE MIND, said I with my entire will, honesty seizing power at last in the stronghold of my heart.
    Ten yards and closing. The tapede’s eyes bulged fully open, with their infinite promise, infinite guarantee that the shriek I was about to utter, once begun, would have no end.
    So for me, time was up, with none left to lose.
    It must have happened, as I sat in the room in the great library, in the so-called reality of the present physical world, that I seized the pencil which was lying on the table, and started frantically to scribble comments of my own – in Noleddern – in the margin of the text I was reading.
    Changes to the script.
    With the result, in that actual scene in which my mental vision was absorbed, that a new object flashed into visible existence, an object caused by the newly interfering writer, me.
    A rescue ladder, its top in the clouds, its base lowered to the ground in front of us, had to be some kind of hudar-inspired symbol, but who cared, so long as the rungs could bear our weight?
    Bryce, swaying and mumbling like a drunk, was about to collapse.  I caught him as he toppled and, thanks to my Mercurian physique, I was able to throw him over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift.  I grasped the ladder and stepped onto the first rung.
    Five yards and closing. I feared the tapede might accelerate, try to leap.  However it just kept steadily on, didn’t increase its speed at all. That, of course, was lucky for us, yet I hated the way it seemed not to mind what I did, even as I put my trust in the ladder.
    The touch of that ladder told me its substance was composed of steps of reasoning. Huff, puff, heave onto the next rung. Limited reasoning. Phew. Third rung now. Reasonable to admit limits of reason. Up another rung. Good/evil not just good/bad intention. Next rung. Time to admit the lurk beneath. Next rung. Don’t Explain, Cottleston Pie, Why does a Chicken, I Don’t know Why, huff puff, next rung, I don’t need to know why it is, to know that it is. Upward heave; yet another rung...
    Oh but now the ladder began to shake, prompting me sadly to look down, and there was the monster resting its pads on one of the lower rungs.  The hourless tapede gaped up at me with its hell-pit mouth. Surely it wasn’t built to climb! No, but it might be able to use its strength and bulk to tear the ladder down. Just then it gave it a worse shake and drubbled and I almost lost my grip.
    With enormous difficulty I heaved my own weight and Bryce’s up yet another rung, and prayed that in so doing, what I might really accomplish would be to shake myself awake from what I was determined to miscall “this evil dream”.
    As to that, some definite signs of progress did become visible. The Vale of Kuz became slightly less substantial.  It began to shimmer so that I hoped at any moment to see the solidity of the library room break through.
    Unfortunately I wasn’t yet out of the fix because, instead of being replaced by the welcome sight of physical reality, the scene welshed on the deal, it contracted around me to form the walls of a pit, and the worst of it was, I had no questions to ask, could not pretend, could not assume a puzzled tone and demand, “What’s going on? Why is there this huge walled pit in the library floor?” Metaphor revenged by metaphor: ladder of reason turns into the pitfall of reading unsuitable literature, and here am I, in the pit.  I laughed with a rattling in my exhausted throat.  One more heave had better do the business.  The ladder, now in the pit, still had to be climbed.  I managed to pull us up till the library floor was level with my forehead. With safety in sight, I braced myself. Now – please, muscles! But nothing happened. I simply did not have enough energy left to save us.
    I could not help looking down and I saw, in a dream-vision of many viewpoints that the hourless tapede, its hind pads resting on the distant pit-floor, was reaching towards us, impossibly elongating itself, now exhibiting stripes like a wasp, which were being produced by extra segments of itself. It was not bound by any rules of the game.
    The most inconvenient thing happened next. Bryce awoke. Head down, he announced:
    “We’re going about this the wrong way. We should go back down and face the thing. Can’t allow an irrational hallucination like that to scare us away. Otherwise, don’t you see, it will have won.”
    There was a lot more in this vein of folly.  I ignored the chatter.  I was trying to shift him round so that he could do his share of grasping the side of the pit and haul us out. He refused to co-operate. On and on he gabbed during those eternal last few seconds.  He seemed to think he could reason it all out as though the hourless tapede could be persuaded to stop its silly habit of existing. At any moment I expected to find the monster’s retractile claws embedded in my legs and back, as a preliminary to being dragged into its mouth, because all the while it was elongating itself further, nullifying my vein-bulging attempts to emerge from the pit.
    The ladder swayed and shook as I wasted the oxygen in my lungs in a shouting match with Bryce, trying to make him see that it was he who was going about things the wrong way.
    Then I heard a different voice, which spoke just one word, in an American accent.
    “Nuts!”
    An extra pair of arms joined their efforts to mine. Bryce was lifted from my shoulder. I heard a thud and a special scream which, if you ever hear it, you will recognize as the sort you utter when you’re torn away from absorption in a text of Noleddern. Wow, thought I, Jacko’s methods are certainly direct. He may have killed Bryce, but there’s no other way, if you’re afraid to touch the book in order to close it. My turn next! Twist my neck, most likely.
    But when the wrench came, I did not scream. For as it turned out, I still had one remaining bolt hole.
    I experienced a swish and an electric zzzzzinggggg and next thing I knew I was propped up in bed amid bandages and needles and tubes, and I opened my eyes into the astonished face of a nurse.

>>  Eeyoo