It had become a common occurrence to witness one inhabitant of the garden or another utter a stream of half-coherent prattle after communing with the statue. But they tended to be abstractions of quasi-spiritual gibberish.
"Quit yanking my chain, Abner," Constance objected. "We both stepped out of that elevator no more than a minute ago."
"No, ma'am." The blunt-featured young man shook his head soberly. He was looking at her with a somewhat awed expression, his baby-blue eyes still glistening with tears. Sitting cross-legged, he looked strangely small against the backdrop of stars. His broad shoulders were rounded as he gripped the slab-like object he had brought along rather protectively to his chest. "I ain't calling you a liar, mind. You must have fallen into a trance, I reckon, like that time when you got to communing with the statue."
Constance was gripped by a sudden fear. Some time ago—she couldn't exactly remember how long—when she had first experimented with joining the group that had been communing with the statue-like obelisk in what they called the grove, the resulting monologue had reportedly been intimate enough to make Abner Wade blush, and to make her punch him for mentioning it. "What did I say?" She asked.
"I don't know how to describe it," Abner admitted, "except as maybe a lamentation. You started off listing what sounded like cities and other places, describing towers and forests, palaces and oceans, things I don't even know the words for. You named what I think were cities—funny names, with lots of short syllables. You were talking about riches. Different kinds of food and drink, cloth, precious metals and stones, and about ships that carried them. But I don't think you meant ocean ships, I think you meant star ships. You talked about how things looked under the light of different suns."
Constance put a hand over her mouth and took a step toward Abner before lowering herself to the glassy floor in a crouch. It had become a common occurrence to witness one inhabitant of the garden or another utter a stream of half-coherent prattle after communing with the statue. But they tended to be abstractions of quasi-spiritual gibberish. What Abner was describing sounded more concrete.
"What else?" She asked. "What made it sound like a lamentation?"
"Well, after all the cities and ships and things, you got to talking about some kind of a queen or a goddess. Like an overseer. You were describing how she knew everything and saw everything, and held everything together. Everything worked because of her. There was peace and happiness. And then, you said, she went away. Disappeared. And it all fell apart, I guess. You started describing wars, cities in ruins, folks falling into barbarism. Like kind of a dark age, I reckon."
"A dark age," Constance repeated thoughtfully. She craned her neck to look up at the center of the transparent ceiling.
"What you were describing was so sad," Abner whispered. "And you sounded so sad saying it. So much loss—wasted potential. Countless centuries of progress come to nothing. It was heartbreaking listening to you."
"What you're describing sounds like some things I've heard hints of in the grove," Constance explained. "Remember when I told y'all that this tower was left over from a grand civilization?"
Abner nodded soberly. "Until now, I thought that maybe you'd made that up."