Erwal pushed her way out of the snow. Her knees and hips ached. All around her, people were emerging from their snow cocoons. She rubbed a little snow into her face, then took a mouthful of the crumbling stuff and let it melt on her tongue.
For once it was a clear, still day. The snow lay in great mounds to the horizon, and the desolate landscape was punctuated only by the defiant remnants of cow-trees — and, on the northern horizon, by a building. Erwal squinted, straining to see in the dim daylight. It was a large, plain box, just as Teal had described.
The Eight Rooms.
Her party began to make for the artifact. The children ran whooping, the adults hurrying after. Erwal thought of cautioning them to be careful; but she stopped herself, almost amused. What precautions were there to take? Either the Eight Rooms would save their lives… or they would have to turn back, try to reach the village before the worst of the winter set in, and wait, exhausted, for the cold to kill them.
Either way there wasn’t much point in being careful. Stiffly, Erwal made her way through the snow to the Eight Rooms.
The children were soon clambering in and out of an open doorway. Erwal paused some distance from the structure and studied it carefully. She recalled Teal describing his shock at seeing how the building floated, unsupported, a foot in the air; and, bending down, she saw a strip of snowy land beneath the Rooms. She frowned, puzzling at her own un-startled reaction. What was the great wonder? Every child heard stories of how powerful the ancients had been, of how they had built the very world humans lived in; why should a box floating in the air be such a surprise?
She sighed. Perhaps she simply wasn’t very imaginative. Briskly she approached the Rooms, paused only briefly at the doorway, then stepped up and over the foot-high sill—
— and nearly fainted as she entered warm, still air. She felt blood rush to her face, and, seeking support, she reached out to a wall — and pulled her fingers back, shocked. The material of the wall was warm and soft, like flesh. Arke joined her, running a callused palm over the wall. “Isn’t it remarkable? Perhaps this whole building is a living creature.”
“Yes.” Feeling stronger she turned and surveyed the Room. There were hatchlike doors in all four walls, and in the floor and ceiling; through each door she could see people in other Rooms running fingertips over the walls, their expressions slack. “It’s very strange…”
…Wait a moment. Rooms beyond each door? But this one Room was big enough to fill up the cube she had seen from outside, so that beyond the doors should be only snow or sky…
And yet there were Rooms where there was no space for them.
Vaguely she remembered Teal’s impatient descriptions of how the Rooms were folded over each other, and briefly she struggled to understand. Then she sighed, deciding to put the mystery of the folded-up place out of her mind. If it didn’t bother the children, why should it bother her?
Arke went on, “Erwal, we’ve done well, even if we go no further than this. We are warm and dry, and we still have the mummy-cow for food. We could stay here, bring the mummy-cow inside, allow the children to grow…”
“But that’s not why we came here,” she said, suddenly impatient. “Teal went further.” She looked up, recalling how Teal had described climbing up through the roof hatch. “Come on,” she told Arke. “Help me up.”
Arke allowed her to climb onto his shoulders; soon others, already in the upper Room, were pulling her up through the hatch/door.
The upper Room was just like the first, with light from nowhere filling the air. A few adults stood here, looking lost. Silently she climbed to her feet. She tried to picture Teal as he had taken these steps. Straight ahead from the hatch in the floor, he had said, and push at the door…
Beyond the door was the Eighth Room. It was shaped like the rest but its walls were clear, as if made of ice.
Beyond the walls was a black sky sprinkled with tiny lights.
There was a body on the crystal floor.
Arke stood beside Erwal. “Are they ‘stars’?”
Shuddering, she said: “That’s the word Teal gave us.”
“And that—” He pointed straight ahead; beyond the farthest wall an object like a large, black seed pod floated in emptiness. “Do you think that’s the ‘ship’?”
Erwal tried to speak but her throat was dry.
She forced herself to look down.
The body was little more than bones swathed in rags of clothing. In one clawlike hand it clutched an elaborate knife. Erwal bent, took the knife; the skeletal fingers fell to pieces, clattering against the warm material of the floor. “This was Allel’s knife,” she told Arke. “Teal’s grandmother. Teal treasured this knife.”
Arke held her elbow. “It’s a miracle he made it this far, you know. And the second time he came he didn’t have a mummy-cow.”
“He died alone. And so close to his goal.”
“But he didn’t die in vain. He brought us here.”
Erwal, trembling, walked to the wall nearest the ship. “Now all we have to do is work out how to get out of here.”
The others watched her, their faces pale with awe.
It is not true to say that Paul waited beside the Eighth Room after the brief appearance of the first human. Rather, he assigned a subcomponent of his personality to monitor events within the Room, while he turned the rest of his multiplexed attention elsewhere. And it could not be said that Paul’s patience was tested by the subsequent delay. After all he was largely independent of the constraints of time and space; and the galaxies were available for his study.
And yet…
And yet, when humans reappeared in the Eighth Room, it seemed to Paul that he had waited a very, very long time.
The humans stared at the star-strewn Universe and retreated in alarm. Paul was fascinated by their angular movements, their obviously limited viewpoints. How unimaginably constraining to have one’s awareness bound into a box on a stalk of bone!
But as Paul continued to observe, memories of his own brief corporeal sojourn on the Sugar Lump stirred, oddly sharp. Godlike, uncertain of his own reaction, he watched men, women and children talk, touch each other, laugh.
He noticed the ragged, filthy clothes, the protruding ribs, the ice-damaged skin. He pondered the meaning of these things.
Eventually a gray-haired woman entered the Room. Her behavior seemed different; she walked slowly to the crystal wall and stared out steadily at the stars.
Paul focused his attention so that it was as if he were gazing into her eyes.
The face was fine-boned, the skin drawn tight over the bones, and age had brought webs of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. The skin was scarred, the lips cracked and bleeding. This was a tired face. But the head was held erect, the eyes locked on a Universe which must be utterly baffling.
And behind those eyes a quantum grain of consciousness lay like an unripened seed, shaped by millions of years.
The woman left the Room; Paul, oddly shaken, reflected.
Over the next few days the humans investigated their crystal box. They touched the walls, staring through them with blank incomprehension. They were clearly aware of the spacecraft which lay waiting just beyond the Room’s walls: they pointed, knelt so they could see under it, and occasionally one of them would paw at the walls; but there was no pattern to their searches, no system; they deployed no tools beyond fingertips and tongues. But they showed no frustration. They were like children in an adult world; they simply did not expect to be able to make things work.
At length there was a flurry of activity at the brightly-lit doorway. The humans were goading some sort of animal into the Room: here came a barrel-like head, a broad, solid body covered by shaggy fur. The humans punched the beast’s flanks, tugged at the hair above its trembling eyes; the creature, obviously terrified, was almost immovable. But at last it stood in the center of the Room, surrounded by sweating, triumphant humans. It looked to left, right, and finally down at its feet. Paul imagined its terror as it found itself standing on apparent emptiness light years deep. The great head rotated like a piece of machinery and the beast scurried backward through the door, bowling some of the humans over. The people ran after it, shouting and waving their arms.