The next day we came to the falls. The river poured over the escarpment, which was a steep, rocky cliff 200 meters high. We chose to climb close to the edge of the falls where winter floods had torn slabs of rock from the wall, affording an array of ledges and handholds. I said a brief prayer and started to climb. I planned to throw down a rope for the hules to climb. Angstrom would come last. Although he had lost weight steadily on Paschal, I thought I might have to use the hules to pull him up the cliff.
The rock was wet with spray and slippery with the green slime of algal life. I climbed for an hour, soaked, with my hair plastered to my head. I rested every few minutes by jamming my boots with their serrated soles onto some narrow ledge. Irritatingly, my laces became untied while I was climbing and no sooner had I retied one than the other came loose. When I looked down--which out of fear I did not do very often--I could see the four figures growing smaller far below, until they were tiny foreshortened dolls standing beside the churning whiteness at the bottom of the falls. The roar of the water drowned my shouted attempts to reassure them. My arms and shoulders, thighs and calves began to tremble until I scrambled over the top, dropped my pack to the ground and flopped down on the wet rocks like a landed fish.
When I got my breath I carefully knotted two lengths of rope together, tied one end to a tree that was firmly rooted between the flat rocks beside the river, and threw the other end over the edge. It was a black thing, snaking as it fell through the mist. Angstrom ran to it and I felt his tug. He handed the rope to one of the hules.
The hule climbed slowly, sensing the great danger. After 50 meters or so the hule's pack came loose. The pack swung by one strap. "Lord," I muttered. "Why didn't Angstrom check the knots?"
The pack swung away from the hule's shoulder, the second strap came loose and the pack fell away, tumbling through the spray down into the surging foam. Angstrom waved his arms at me as if to warn me.
The hule continued to climb. I watched his swinging movement, arm-over-arm, very ape-like, and when he was almost halfway up the cliff, just below the knot, I saw that the hule was M. Alain. As he reached for the knot, he fell.
At first I thought the rope had broken but then I realized that my elaborate knot had come undone. M. Alain fell away from the cliff with the loose rope twisting through the air around him like a black snake falling with him into the whiteness. He tumbled into the heart of the maelstrom at the bottom of the falls. I saw his head briefly bobbing in the surge and he was gone.
Angstrom and the other two hules waited for a long time, searching for M. Alain's body along the bank. In the late afternoon they all climbed up the falls, the hules following what was left of my scent on the wet rocks while Angstrom, who turned out to be an agile climber, urged them on from behind. It was evening when they reached the top and the sun was too low to light a fire. M. Jules kept looking down over the falls. Mlle. Marie crawled under a bush and curled up like a fetus.
"Maybe you should say a short requiem for him," said Angstrom.
"I can't do that for a hule. He had no soul."
"The other two might feel better if you did. Who's going to know? It's 50 light years from here to Rome."
But Canon Law applies wherever there are Catholics so I read some comforting words in a ceremonial way, a pseudo-service of no deeper significance.
We ate cold rations and settled down for a miserable night in the woods, shivering in our damp clothing.
I will always be grateful to Angstrom for saying nothing that night about my carelessness with the knot. I walked away from our camp to pray for forgiveness for my carelessness. Only those familiar with the confessional will understand the anguish this burden caused because I had no confessor.
I woke early and lay quietly in that stillness that comes at the end of the night. Here above the falls the forest canopy was lower and less dense and there were scattered grassy clearings. The raucous monkey birds were absent, but there were many new varieties of flying creatures, para-butterflies flapping their iridescent blue-green wings, warbling songs that were pleasing to my ears.
I dressed quietly but my laces would not stay tied. After the third attempt Angstrom, who was lying on his side watching me through half-closed eyes, said, "I think you're wasting your time. Above the falls we are closer to the AMF's source. We must have entered a region where mechanical friction is neutralized. Your lace relies on friction. Above the falls, knots are machines."
He was right. For days, M. Alain's truculent mind must have been more sensitive to the AMF. I was still responsible for his death, not through carelessness, but through blind stupidity, which was worse.
I set my boots aside. The friction buckles on our packs were useless and we could not tie the straps in place. The buttons on our torn clothes were also useless. We were forced to leave our packs behind, with all our supplies and food. I wrapped my books carefully, hoping to recover them on the return journey.
Our pace was slow because our soles were sensitive. A mile or two later, while we were climbing over some boulders, Angstrom's magnifying glass fell from his pocket and was smashed to pieces on a rock. The bottom seam of his pocket had unraveled.
"Sewing, weaving--they both rely on friction."
As we walked upstream all our seams were unraveling. The hules' coveralls hung in tatters and by lunchtime our clothing had literally fallen off our backs. Angstrom's white flesh wobbled on his body but the hules moved with a certain muscular grace I hadn't noticed before. Without the magnifying glass we could not light a fire that night and so we slept on beds of dry leaves that were still warm from the afternoon sun.
In this manner, naked, we wandered for days through this idyllic landscape, always staying close to the river. We ate fruits from the trees and I could see the fat was shrinking on Angstrom's flaccid body. At first I felt a certain shame about our nakedness. After all, I was a celibate priest. But as time passed I became comfortable with our situation.
At one time we walked for several days through grassy glades filled with wildflowers. Sometimes the stream (for that was what the river had become) widened and we would bathe our brown bodies in a warm pool. On other days the rain would wash the sweat and the dirt from our skins.
M. Jules and Mlle. Marie would wander off for hours and when they returned there was a certain glow about them. You might think they were sneaking off, but that is not the case. They just wandered off as if, like animals, they could do exactly as they pleased. Of course, now that we had no packs, there was no work for them to do. We were still their masters but we had no commands to give them. They spent more and more time by themselves. I suppose when they wanted to come back to us they could track us by our scent.
Angstrom and I, naked, with our hair uncombed and beards long, looked much like the hules. We wandered together through the dappled woods, eating when we were hungry, and resting when we were tired. We walked quietly, each with our own thoughts. Like the hules, we no longer had any tasks.
Above the falls our thought was clearer. "You are looking for a single truth that lies behind the dichotomy of careful reason and dogmatic faith," said Angstrom. "I am looking for a single truth that lies behind the dichotomy of quantum mechanics. The single truths we seek might be the same truth."
He was right. As soon as he spoke, the idea seemed quite obvious. "Alien tech blends physics and metaphysics, spirit and matter," I said. "Behind the apparent dual nature of matter, behind the apparent dual nature of thought, there is a single fundamental truth. Alien tech is built on that truth. That truth is the secret the aliens hid here on Paschal and why they set their beacon to mark the hiding place."
The river had become much narrower. Inexplicably, the hules began to make fewer forays into the woods. One afternoon we came to the source of the river. A spring flowed from the base of a large rock into a pool. The water was quite clear and there was nothing at the bottom but a jumble of stones.
I knelt at the edge and dipped my hands into the water. Ripples spread across its still surface. I cupped my hands and lifted them. The water ran between my fingers and splashed and tinkled back into the pool.
The hules were watching carefully, waiting to see what we would do.
"You drink first," said Angstrom.
Once again I dipped my cupped hands into the pool and this time I lifted the water to my lips. The water was cold and refreshing.
I felt unchanged, at first.
Angstrom was looking at me, taut with curiosity.
"Drink," I said. "See for yourself."
He knelt beside me, bowed his head to the surface of the water and lapped at the water like an animal. When he straightened up he did not wipe the water from his lips and chin and it fell to the ground in shining droplets.
"Yes," he said, slowly. "I see."
Like me, he did not say what it was he saw. But I think he saw logics that were not human, ways of reasoning that were surprising and completely alien, hinting at larger truths than we had known before.
We sat in the shade of a small copse close to the pool.
"The temple is a library," I said.
We sat in silence for several minutes, inspecting the contents of our minds. Do not think we had experienced a transformation. Nothing was that simple. The best I can do is to tell you that we had been granted the potential for transforming ourselves, but the complete task assigned to us would require great effort and take many years.
The idea of transformation captivates me. I have come to realize that a man who truly transforms himself acquires the mysterious ability to help others transform themselves. Would you agree? I think any student of religion must.
We did know some new things that suddenly seemed quite obvious. "We can turn off the AMF any time we want," said Angstrom.
"I know."
Like all alien tech, the trigger was intent. To turn it off, all we had to do was not to want to turn it off. I thought about this for a moment and rose to my feet, picked up a dead tree limb lying on the ground, put one end under a rock and levered the boulder from its resting place. Dozens of dull black insects scuttled away in the sudden sunlight, leaving behind hundreds of glistening eggs. I examined the stick. There was no frost on the branch, no brittle cracking of the gnarled wood, and my hands were still warm. I looked back at Angstrom and saw, behind him, the hules kneeling side by side and drinking from the pool, lapping noisily.
They raised their heads and looked back at us. The water was running from their snouts and their faces were impassive. They turned back to the water and drank again. M. Jules stood up and stared at us boldly, curiously. Mlle. Marie dipped her finger in the pool, walked to me and stood before me, her hand held before me, finger pointing down. A shining droplet hung from the end of her finger.
"Kneel down. Open your mouth," said Angstrom, hoarsely.
I opened my mouth. She held her wet fingertip over my waiting tongue. A single drop fell into my mouth. I swallowed.
The hules turned away and walked into the darkening woods. In a moment they had vanished between the trees.
