It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion latticings.Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a curve nor arching.
Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations--like--it came to me--immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.
Above towered the gigantic vertical beam.Toward its top I glimpsed a huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds stared down upon us from just beneath it--like eyes.And over all its height the striated octagons clustered.
I felt myself lifted, floated upward.Drake's hand shot out, clung to me as together we drifted up the living wall.
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 from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was motionless.Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant.They were like flexible strands of glass; their smooth tips questioned us, passing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing.
There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come.The huge, high square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange 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 elemental calm that Ruth had described as emanating from the Metal Emperor.Powerful it was, without doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones of revolt, something incomplete and struggling.Within the disharmonies I seemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battling against itself.
Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles winding about us like slender strands of glass, covering our faces, making breathing more and more difficult.There was a coil of them around my throat and tightening--tightening.
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 mass of the tentacles lessened.I was conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.
Its sullen fires blazed.I was aware of another light beating past us--beating down the Keeper's.The hosts of tendrils drew back from me.I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawn away.
Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk --the Metal Emperor!
He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper--and even as I swung I saw the Keeper's multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.
And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense tranquillity, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss.I struggled against it, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of preoccupation against the power pouring from it.
A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their regard.They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas they seemed to be.The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced in the lines of living gem 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 mathematical beauty.
The flashing, petaled heart was woven 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 came to me--two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one side the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of the bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.
