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 assessments 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 glass, 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 space 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 ...
... the internal structure of crystals....