Part 35 (1/2)
I felttowall Opposite the latticed heart of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked There for an instant we hung Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--
They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out from them the whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us
My skin flinched frorip, was motionless Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant They were like flexible strands of glass; their sh our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing
There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythled veins, beat through the latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had coh square of scarlet and yelloas liquid flaans beneath it seee red vapor
Holding us so the Keeper studied us
The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind But here was none of the vast, serene and ele from the Metal Emperor Powerful it ithout doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of igling Within the dishar for freedorew the swarlass, covering our faces,more and more difficult There was a coil of the
I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath I could not turn my head toward him, could not speak Was this then to be our end?
The strangling clutch relaxed, the e of anger through the crucifor that held us
Its sullen fires blazed I are of another light beating past us--beating down the Keeper's The hosts of tendrils drew back frorasp, whirled in the air and draay
Drake besideDisk--the Metal Emperor!
He it ho had plucked us fro I saw the Keeper's rily and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests
And out of the Disk, clothingof all huht, all human endeavor, an unthinkable, cosmic cal, drowning as in a fatho in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of preoccupation against the power pouring from it
A dozen feet away froard They were liiant replicas they seeed about by the aureate zodiac in which the nine ovals shone was a em fires; infinitely complex those patterns and infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes, the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature's own miraculous book of the soul of , petaled heart oven of living rainbows of cold flame
Silently we floated there while the Disk--LOOKED--at us
And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture of it all ca like e Cruciform shape, on the other side the radiant Disk, behind the two h above the wan circle of the shi+elds
There was a ringing about us--an elfin chi, sweet and crystalline
It caely was it their vocal synthesis, their voice Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire; swift in its wake uprose others
We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base The Keeper bent; angled Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the rods some unknown symphony of power
Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing curtains The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones the into the heavens like a noose
And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!
Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flaht flying down through the ring as though through a funnel top
Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones They did not glow as they had beneath the flood froreas too slowly for me to see; the shi+elds were s whirl up--smaller mouths of lesser cones hidden within the body of the Metal Monster, I knew, sucking down thisforth from the sun