Eight Keys to Eden Part 25

Perhaps the reactions of Tom, that taking away the concept of a balanced equation destroyed all certainty, and therefore was not to be countenanced, was a reflection of his own reaction, willing though he might be to consider something else.

In his wanderings about the island, picking fruits and nuts, stems and leaves, catching fish when he hungered, drinking the clear water of the stream when he thirsted, yet so enrapt that he was unaware he was taking care of his body's needs, Cal built up whole structures of alien philosophies on the nature of the universe, and saw them topple of their own weight.

Until, at last, he realized the basic flaw in all his reasoning. He was too well-grounded in the essence of physical science, and all physical science was built on the balanced equation. Even in trying to consider the unbalanced equation, he had been attempting to determine the exact nature of the unbalance, and to supply it as an X factor on the other side of the equation to restore balance.

To restore balance was to maintain the status quo of physical reality.

To turn the key in the lock, to open the door, he must change the physical reality to balance the equation, rather than supply the X factor to keep reality unchanged.

But how to do it still eluded him.

At times, as if seeing partial diagrams, he seemed very close to a solution. At times it seemed the printed card of an electronic wiring was necessary only because the human mind could not visualize the whole without that aid, that music did not come through because in incomplete visualization some little part was left dangling, unconnected. And the long history of non-science belief in the magic properties of cabalistic signs and designs rose up to taunt him, to goad him with the possibility that perhaps man had once come close to the answer of how to control physical properties without the use of tools; that the development of a physical science had taken man down a sidetrack instead of farther along the direct route toward his goal.

Or that man had once been shown, and never understood, or forgot. Yet kept alive the memory that physical shifts could be changed if he could only draw the right design.

Through his wanderings, one fact gradually intruded upon his mind. It seemed the farther inland he roamed, the closer he came to grasping the problem; the nearer the seash.o.r.e, the more it eluded him.

One morning he looked up at the glittering heights of Crystal Palace Mountain, and suddenly he resolved to climb it. Perhaps the winds of the mountain being stronger, the fuzziness of his thought would be blown away? Perhaps the arrangement of the crystalline structures, the arches and spires, might catch his brain waves, modulate them, transform them, strengthen them, feed them back, himself a part of the design instead of outside it?

In the framework of physical science a nonsense notion. But what harm to try?

He sought out Tom and Jed, the two who would miss him, the two who would care.

"There ain't no water up there, far as I know," Jed said. "And you can't carry none, now. Me and a party scouted the mountain once. It's mighty purty, but useless. The quartz ain't valuable enough to cover its shipping costs back to Earth. The ground is too rocky to farm. Not much in the way of food growing there. So we never went back."

"The scientists surveyed it when the planet was first discovered," Cal said. "One of the first places they went because it was so outstanding.

But they found nothing interesting and useful either. Still, I think I'll go."

"Well," Jed said with a shrug. "You can't get lost. If you should lose your bearings, just walk downhill and you'll come to food and water.

Follow the sh.o.r.e line until you get back, either direction. And, I reckon, the way things go now, you ain't goin' to hurt yourself. We won't worry about you none. We're all gettin' along all right, so you needn't worry about us either."

"You want me to come with you, Cal?" Tom asked.

"No," Cal answered, "I think better if I'm alone."

He left them then, went past some colonists who were picking berries and eating them, and on up the valley that ran between two ridges.

It was only a few miles to the foothills, a gradual rise of the valley floor, a gradual shallowing and narrowing of the stream, a gradual drawing in of the spokelike ridges until the valley at last became a ravine. The morning air was clear and still, the scent of flowers and ripening fruit was sweet.

Before he left the ravine to begin his climb he ate some of the fruit, and washed the lingering sweet taste from his mouth with a long, cool drink of water from one of the many springs that fed the stream.

He looked up at the mountain above him, and his eye picked out the most likely approach to its summit. It was not a high mountain, not in terms of those tremendous, tortured skin folds of other planets. Hardly more than a high hill in terms of those. Nor, as far as he could see, would the climb be difficult or hazardous.

The fanciful thought of Mount Olympus on Earth came into his mind, although this one was not so inaccessible, so parched and barren. The G.o.ds of Greece would have found this a pleasanter place, although they might not have lived so long in the minds of man, since the mountain was more easily climbed, and therefore man would have been the more easily convinced after repeated explorations that no G.o.ds lived there after all.

Would the Greeks, as with the later religions, have placed the site of heaven farther and farther away, retreating reluctantly, as man explored the earlier site and found no heaven there? Retreat after retreat until at last the whole idea was patently ridiculous?

Dead are the G.o.ds, forever dead, and yet--to what may man now turn in rapture? In ecstasy? In communion? What, in all physical science, filled the deep human need of these expressions?

The climb of the first slope, up to the crest of the ridge he intended to follow, was quickly done. He turned there and looked behind him, at the valley of the colonists below, and far down where the valley merged into the sea, and far on out at the hazy purple line of another island.

As he started to turn back again, to resume his climb, his eye caught a flash of something moving in the ravine below him, sunlight on brown, bare skin.

He waited until he caught another glimpse through the trees. As he had suspected it was Louie, still trying to keep him always in sight.

His first impulse was to call out, to wait for Louie, ask him to join in the climb. He discarded the impulse. His need was to get away from all others. And sympathetic and compa.s.sionate though he might be, the confusion in Louie's mind seemed to intrude upon his own. Nor had his earlier attempts to comfort Louie met success.

Let Louie follow if he willed. Perhaps the clean air would clear his mind as well. He feared no physical harm, even if Louie's tortured mind intended it. There were no tools to strike at him from a distance. Even a boulder pushed from a height above him would not strike, for that would be the physical use of a tool to gain an end. He feared no bodily attack from ambush, for his own strength and knowledge were dependable.

He began his climb again, followed the crest of the ridge where it swept upward to b.u.t.tress the side of the mountain. The going was not difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear s.p.a.ces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his bare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot them. He felt no physical discomfort, neither from tiredness nor thirst, nor from the branches sc.r.a.ping his bare skin, nor anything to drag his mind into trivialities.

Nor tortured theories such as had plagued him in trying to reason out the new concepts of a proportionate, variable reality.

Instead, there was a sense of well being, antic.i.p.ated completeness, a merging of the often quite separated areas of thought, intuition, and appreciation.

Although at no great height, now the trees no longer grew so tall that they obscured his vision of the heights above. As he climbed they were replaced by shrubs shoulder high, then waist high, then merely low, creeping growths which his feet avoided without mental direction.

A curve of the ridge brought him to the first outcroppings of crystallized quartz. On them he saw no signs of scar left by the geologist's hammer, no imperfections where nodes may have been broken away. They were complete, singularly unweathered.

There was no path, nor hint of one, nor sign that either scientist or colonist had ever pa.s.sed this way.

The ridge swung back into line, and still he climbed, effortlessly and without consciousness of pa.s.sing time. Time and s.p.a.ce and matter seemed to have receded far into the background of consciousness. Man's star-strewn civilization was no more than a dream. It was as if he, alone and complete, occupied the whole of the universe, encompa.s.sed it as he was encompa.s.sed by it.

Yet not alone! Their presence, which seemed so evanescent on the valley floor, was closer now, more clearly sensed. Almost as if, at any instant, the veil of blindness would disperse and They would stand revealed.

Now up the final slope of the mountain he threaded his way through higher outcroppings of a more perfectly formed quartz, with deeper amethystine hue scintillating in the Ceti sun's light, diffracted not only in the purples but into greens and reds and blues.

As he came around the base of one of these, there towering above he caught his first full view of the greater spires, pinnacles, b.u.t.tresses, and arches of the mountain's crest.

It was the crystal palace.

The climb had been steep, steeper than it had appeared from below, yet his breathing was not labored, his mouth was not dry from thirst, nor were his muscles protesting the effort. He did not need to stop and rest, to gather his energy for the last steep a.s.sault upon the peak.

Far below him he saw Louie toiling up a slope, then dropping with every appearance of exhaustion when he came to each level place. Still he would rest no more than a minute, and always his head was turned to keep sight of Cal above him. He would push himself to his knees, then to his feet; and slowly, step by step, begin his climb again.

As if from far away, Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of the self-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guilt of imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moral sense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. For in the ordered universe, where everything fitted into the whole, what could be either good or bad, right or wrong, except as a reflection of man's inadequacies in his imaginings? Rightness and good, wrongness and evil, these could not possibly be other than a.s.sessments of furtherance or threat to the ascendancy of me-and-mine at the center of things, and had no meaning beyond that context.

He turned from watching Louie, pitying him, and made the last sharp climb with no more effort than the whole had been. Now he drew near to the towering structures of the crest, now he was beside them. Now he walked beneath and through an arch which seemed almost a gothic entrance.

And stood transfixed in ecstasy.

Magnificent the dreams of man that took form in steel and stone and gla.s.s, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, the sublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures where light from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled the air with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him.

Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating spires made blended sounds the ear could barely endure in rapture.

As once, in childhood, he had stood in a grove of giant trees that laced their limbs in gothic splendor above him, now again he stood, lost in time and s.p.a.ce and being, lost in vision and in music which neither had nor needed form nor beginning nor end.

And knew it was a simple tool; Their concession to the mind of man, to bridge the gap between Their minds and his.

Without wondering more, he sank down upon the mossy turf of the floor and lay supine to gaze upward, to follow line to blended line until they seemed mirrored into infinity.

The darting lights above him whirled, spiraled up, then down, clockwise, then counterclockwise, reminding him ... reminding him ...