“Yes. It is.”
“It is very beautiful. It is the temple of the gods.”
“No,” I said, “you are wrong. We are not gods. This is not a temple.”
He lowered his eyes to the gleaming surfaces underneath. “To me you are gods,” he said, “this is what I see. I see the thunder chariots and from them walk the gods with great power and strength. They come into our world and as the prophecies have held they come bearing gifts.”
“No,” I said, “we are not gods. There is no prophecy. There is no world.” I took off my outer clothing, allowing it to fall around me to the gleaming disinfected surfaces. Ezekiel remained in place. “Come,” I said, “come with me.”
“I am frightened.”
“There is nothing to frighten you.”
“But I am,” he said, “I am,” and he remained in place. I could see the thin shaking beginning around the upper surfaces of his body, then moving upward and down, his eyes rolling in his head, almost imperceptible but quite obvious to one as skilled in reactive psychology as I. After a while, however, the shaking modulated and he remained then unmoving as I stood patiently giving him no reason for increased fear. I waited for him to speak.
“I am less frightened,” he said.
“Good,” I said, keeping my voice gentle, “I am glad of that.”
Then I turned, extended a hand, gestured to show him that I wanted him to follow and then, moving down the slick pathways of the ramp, I moved toward its very center.
Downward we plunged, through layers of wires and tubing, past coils and condensers and into the secret, throbbing machinery of the ship itself, the low hum of the maintenance circuit giving it only a minimal lighting as we moved into the center. The ship was alive yet dead; to bring its engines and fluorescence to full power would have taken hours of the most sophisticated efforts aided, of course, by the opening of circuits from the Bureau . . . but Bureau had been stubborn, they would not allow us to debark so all of our efforts would have gone in vain. The ship was neither alive nor dead but in a ground in between where it could not function. At the bottom I looked up at the alien, unsteadily making his way by grasping the railings, and felt a surge of sympathy for him: if the ship was terrifying to me then how must it look to him, a simple primitive from a barbaric civilization? Terrifying, that was how it must be. In a sudden twitch of consciousness I could see it as he must, then: a strange tube hung with machinery, machinery dripping in coils and wires from the enclosure, the dank smell of machinery swirling up from the inmost and secret heart of the ship, and leading him into this darkness was the Thunder God of the chariot . . . oh, I could see it clearly, this sudden shift of consciousness, the placing of my consciousness into his so that we were for the moment identical, the two of us merged into a shell which became one being . . . one very discontented being of course.
But downward into the ship now, my purpose overwhelming the dislocation and so then I lost sight of Ezekiel’s consciousness being concerned fundamentally and as always with my own. We came through a series of ramps and stairs into the huge, bleak room at the pit of the ship lighted by only the thin glow of fluorescence, with the dark hum of the transistors the only sound in all of these spaces and it was there at last where I halted him, motioning him with a gesture to move back against one of the walls while I stood across from him.
He looked up cautiously, his simple, primitive’s face falling open into wonder as he saw the sheer, clear rising of the ship, the vaulting of spaces up hundreds of feet, the sheer dimensions of it overwhelming him as very much it should have and I felt once again the commander’s pride: I had been in control of all of this.
This mighty ship had been at my pleasure; I had slept in it, guided it, taken the responsibility for the landing. Whatever else had happened they could not take this away from me. Neither Stark nor Closter, not even Nina had guided the ship. I had.
“Do you see this?” I said to Ezekiel unnecessarily. Of course he saw it. Still, I felt that I had to establish a certain mood. “Do you?”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I see it. I . . .”
“This is the ship in which we came. It is not a chariot.”
He said nothing. If his face had had any intelligence it would have held cunning. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
“And this,” I said and paused, then went on with it because not to have done so would have been a negation of whatever had brought us here, “this is the place at the bottom of the ship where all the knowledge is held. Do you understand that?”
He nodded slowly, spread his palms in a gesture strangely reminiscent of that of one of the crew (I cannot remember which, they already are beginning to jumble in my mind) and held his position. “The place of knowledge?” he said.
“Here,” I said, “here are kept the secrets that would have been given your people when you were prepared to receive them. Here are the secrets which would give you great machines, the secrets of fire, the means by which you could control . . .”
“What are machines?” Ezekiel said, “I do not understand this.”
“But you would have,” I said, “you would have understood all of that, if the plans had gone ahead.” I paused, looked at him. “You may still have it now,” I said. “Do you want to know?”
“I want to go home. I want to go back to my people.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes, that is true, you want to go back to your people and so do I, back to mine, but this cannot be done. We have the same problem; we are both separated from our people, you and I, but that does not have to counsel absolute despair; if we are separated we can return, if we have been torn asunder, we can heal unto the breach and in the long run, good faith will run out. Here,” I said, shambling over to one of the lockers, pressing a recessed switch in the wall causing it to fall open, a switch which no one but I would have known about, knowledge of that switch being restricted to the commander himself, that is to say the man who bears the full responsibility for the well-being of the crew on the voyage as well as the security of its documents, “here,” I said again and took out of the locker an armful of documents, brandished them, then walked over and put them on the pit of his stomach forcing Ezekiel with a puzzled, terrified expression to bring his arms down, gather them in. “This is what you want,” I said, “and this is therefore what you will have. Eventually you would have gotten them anyway, but this is quicker, don’t you think? Besides it’s more convenient that way.” I reached into the locker, brushed aside more documents, my hands fluttering away in the darkness until they had set upon what I had wanted and then I took it; this I gave to Ezekiel, a duplicate of the very weapon bouncing and jouncing within my own clothing. “This too,” I said, dropping it into one of the crude pouches sewn on his clothing while he backed away from me, “this is what you really wanted, isn’t it? Well, you may have that too. A destruction machine, a killing machine and the only thing we ask in return is that you read up on the documents. It’s all there. Everything is there.”
“I don’t understand,” he said once again. Failure of understanding seemed to be our only common ground . . . but that in itself can be sufficient, of course. “I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“In those papers is everything you need to know,” I said, motioning to the documents which slipped and poured from his hands like little animals as he staggered to hold onto them, and had to bend to pick up stray wisps, “Machinery. Fire.Controlled fire. Munitions. The wheel. Gunpowder. Steam. Light. The internal combustion engine if you’re sophisticated enough to follow through the diagrams. Geometry. Euclidean and non-Euclidean. The three laws of thermodynamics. Nuclear fisson. Controlled mutation.Uncontrolled mutation. It’s all there, you’re holding it!”
He shook his head. “I am frightened. I don’t want it.”
“Well,” I said, “well yes, maybe you don’t want it, that’s a very good point and I appreciate your having made it but you see, whether you want it or not makes very little difference to us. We traveled light years to put it into your hands, all under our benevolent control of course, and I’m afraid that your wishes and opinions have very little to do with the situation at this time. You’re going to have to take it just as we did, you see.”
“I don’t . . .”
“But,” I said with awful patience, “but look here now,” crouching so that I could confront the thing at his own height, “wedidn’t want it either, did we? We would have been just as well without it, all of us, we just inherited it. We didn’t have any choice in the matter; they gave it to us and we just had to do what we could with it but don’t you think given a choice we would have passed it up?”
He backed away from me. Documents jiggled in his arms but he held them in tight embrace, a powerful, equivocal point of balance. I knew that he would not drop them. He could not let them go. “Come,” I said, “let me take you out of here. Go back to your people. Take them back to your shamans; teach them the language and they’ll find some very interesting material here. You won’t regret it.”
“I won’t regret it. I do not understand . . .”
“Of course,” I said, “of course you don’t understand. What the hell does that have to do with it? The entire human condition comes from the failure of understanding, do you think that you’re the first to have that?” and so on and so forth. “It makes no difference, makes no difference,” I shouted as I ascended the ramp, the two of us coming out of the bowels of the ship, moving toward that snout now as if we were rising through levels of prehistoric mire (I have a rather metaphoric turn of mind sometimes) toward some recapitulation of all history, spinning through the grave of the ship then and up its spout toward the high rising cone, the two of us scuttling on the ramps and I did not know then who preceded who in that climb: sometimes he was ahead of me, I thought, and at other times he might have been behind; entering into his consciousness again with that shift of perception, I knew that he could see it the same way. Was I follower or leader? Was I apparition leading him out or doppleganger pursuing him, probing and limiting his flight? Ezekiel did not know, I did not know either, and so through steel and glass, the alien grunting and scrambling behind, we continued.
We continued through the ship for a thousand years; through ice and fire we ascended. Gleaming little daggers of light, cast from broken places in the fuselage where the weapon had struck through, were lighting our way and it was in that millenium as if we were not two but one, one great, shambling beast split into halves, groaning, screaming, grunting for the light as we trembled upward. He was I, I he and through ten centuries we exchanged not only shouts and footsteps, we exchanged the very ethos itself in the vault of the great beast scrambling and through it all with some calm, cold piercing part of the brain that cast the great strobe of light forward, I told myself to have patience, patience, you will emerge from this, this is only as long as you want to make it and knowing this . . . knowing that I could at any time call it to an end, make both Ezekiel and ship disappear, was what enabled me to bear it for ten centuries. To have within my hands the means of reversal was, then, to bear what was inflicted upon us and I did not faint nor did I crumple under these burdens but instead only continued, upward on the ramp, holding hard on the poles that gripped our hands like ropes until finally we came into the place of the vault where we had entered and only then did the halves of us spilt, fission then like mitosis, the beast splitting to parts that were named Ezekiel and Folsom and there we stood, separate once again, looking at one another. In his hands he gripped what I had given him.
“Go,” I said.
He looked at me. There was no need for him to say anything; we had been one person, now two only in the flesh; the need for disputation had vanished. He nodded once, solemnly and it was as if I was nodding to myself after I had killed Stark, that single, slow nod of approval in the darkness. Done it and done it good, you, I had murmured and had been speaking to myself, now too it had happened again except that this self was an extension. “Go,” I said again, “go back to your people. Teach them. Teach them what we know so that they may become us.”
“Yes,” he said, that was all, justyes and then he turned. I hit the locks, I hit the pressure latches and slowly the skin of the ship broke open in pores of light, the inversion of sky pressing upon it and then he was gone, two steps and a leap. In that bound, falling clear of the ship I saw him framed as if in a still life, the features poised, rigid, as delicately formed as if they had been cast and when he had fallen out of the network of sight, he diminished below consciousness as well . . . and as he went away, as I turned to seal up the hatches again, thought of Ezekiel had already deserted me. I did not need to think of him anymore; he would do as he must just as I would, soldered together we had been fissioned apart, but these parts would always know of the gestalt. At least that is the way that it seemed. Perhaps I was suppressing my very deep and genuine emotions at a great loss.
But the ship was sealed, Ezekiel was gone and I turned then in the emptiness to perform the few, small tasks that were left me before, necessarily, all of my responsibilities would end. And not a moment too soon.