He had flown for many days into the growing cold. The sun was gone and the wind was rising as he searched the ground below him for a place to pass the night. It must be sheltered, not so much from the elements (though this too was important) as from the marauding bands of ground wasps that lived in these northern regions. There was still far to go and much danger ahead. He had no strength for useless battles.
At last as all light faded he came upon a towering pillar of stone in the midst of a vast wasteland, split at the top as if cloven by a giant axe. Reaching its heights, he descended slowly into its broad embrasure. Detecting some deeper shadow in the blackness of the eastern wall, he flew toward a narrow fissure in the rock. Landing silently on the lip of it, he tested the air for vibrations. All was still. He moved inside and huddled close together. He was empty and cold and weary to the point of exhaustion. He remained in quiet thought for many hours.
When he had taken the quest, he knew only that he must somehow continue the labors of Shannon's life—-find some way to avenge the death of it. He had wandered alone for a period of days, remembering, until one morning, at the rising dust of a fiery dawn, he had felt the North calling to him. He felt it still, though less strongly, and he deemed that this was right. What he hoped to find there he could not say. He only knew that he must find it.
The most difficult aspect of his journey thus far had not been the long flight on short provisions. To the mai such things meant nothing. They lived to work and serve the greater need, that was all. No, it was more the feelings and emotions that the long pilgrimage evoked in him, seeming almost to rise from the vast loneliness of his world. For though the man's spirit had died or moved on, his sensations and experience had not. They lived on within Simin, and sometimes puzzled or even frightened him. He understood, and knew this was necessary; but the knowledge did not make it easier.
WHAT A TORTURED RACE THEY MUST BE, he thought. SO TORN BETWEEN DESIRE
AND FEAR. THEY ARE GIVEN NO ROLE, NO CLEAR PLACE. THEY MUST FIND IT,
AS WE MUST FIND MOISTURE IN AN ARID LAND.
It was this fear of frustration and fruitless searching that he felt most deeply, because it had for so long been a part of his own existence. Through all his twenty months he had sought after some intangible, some elusive quality of being, with no more guide than a restless and smoldering hunger inside him. TO NOT KNOW, really not know who he was or where he was going.
This, he decided, must be the doom of humanity: to be born a burning question of itself, a paradox of beauty and destruction, love and loss. To take personally and introspectively the irresolvable conflict of life and desire over stillness and the void. Again, he felt it so deeply. That the struggle could also be beautiful he knew. But still, such a hard and lonely fate…..
When dawn came he crawled out of the niche and looked about him. The great crack was shadowed and still. He felt the presence of many creatures, but they were not yet near him. The rockface offered little resistance as he climbed, and soon he stood atop a hooked spire that sprang from the pillar's crumbling eastern shoulder, high above the plain. Two long lines of wingless wasps were mounting towards him. The first of their number touched the spire. He took one last taste of the dawn, then flew out beyond their reach.
He flew staunchly and steadily northward, now that he had some plan. For the clarity of first-sun had told him what he must do. Stopping to rest along the top of a shallow ridge, he ate part of a darkening bush-bulb, nearly as large as himself. Its taste was bitter, but it gave him strength. Then he set out again.
His mind had determined to search the farthest North. Shannon's memory told him what he might find there: great frozen wastes of ice and earth, underground hollows left from times when the water had been greater. Sometimes as he pondered these, at the edge of thought he would feel a sound, a sensation: deep throbbings in empty places beneath the ground, a golden light that drew him onward. But then it would vanish and leave him, wondering. He must find its source, if it were real.