of intelligent life, there was no sign.
“Come,” I told Thrayna. “Let us seek out what primitive humans may remain on Earth.
“Splendid!” Thrayna agreed. “Let us discover who spoke. Was that a human?”
“I don’t know who or what it was,” I admitted “but human it was not. Not old-style human. They could not do thus.”
“They couldn’t do much,” Thrayna said. “It must have been awfully small, awfully closed, awfully dull to be a human.”
I tried to remember what it had been like “We did not find it so,” I said.
“How was it then?”
“It was as it is, I imagine,” I told her. “Let us find some people and see how it is with them, then you will know.”
I rose and headed straight as an arrow toward I-knew-not-what, hoping to intersect some vast city teeming with human commerce. I was loath to admit to Thrayna that I no longer recognized the landmarks of this globe that had been my home. Had it changed so much in the brief millennia. I wondered, or had I?
The city appeared, a speck on the horizon, and grew into its vastness as we approached. It was as empty, as devoid, as defunct, as all before it. But it was not ruined and rotten, as was the place we had left. The buildings were there: squat cubes and tall cylinders and lacy spires, with a spiderweb of roads and slidewalks and covered skyways. All intact, pristine, and ready for use. But whoever had used them was no longer there.
“No humans,” Thrayna observed, spinning about and showering a rainbow of fine sparks where she moved.
“No humans,” I agreed.
“Perhaps they have all become as we; perhaps they have left Earth and now inhabit the universe.”
“Perhaps.”
“Why is the city so fresh and clean if it is deserted?”
“It is tended by computers,” I told her. “Soulless machines that are all mind, that do the drudge work for the human race. The city will remain as it is for the next ten thousand years—or hundred thousand—waiting for the people to return.”
“What if the inhabitants have become as we, incorporeal beings of pure energy, drawing sustenance from the stars—immortal souls free to roam the universe?”
“If that is so, then I don’t think they will be coming back. Unless, as we, they wish to visit their childhood home.”
“And where was your childhood home?” Thrayna asked. “Where did you—who were born of Earth, of flesh and blood—metamorphose into beings such as I, who are at one with the stars?”
“Where?”
“Yes, Deradan, where on Earth? And how? How does an Earthman become a star-roamer?”
“I do not know the process except in the vaguest form,” I told her. “Others invented and perfected it. But I think I can find the location of the Box.”
“Let us find the Box,” she said. “What sort of box is it we seek?”
“It is what we called the building that housed the transformation. The Box.”
“Why?”
I tried to remember. Stars had been formed and planets had lost their atmosphere in the intervening years. But the memory was there. Memory is never lost to us, it just becomes progressively more difficult to retrieve, the longer it is dormant. “We called it the Box because it was a great, cubelike structure, isolated in one of the most inaccessible parts of the world.”
“Inaccessible?”
“To us, as we were then.”
“Where was it?”
“In the far south. By the southern pole.”
“Let us go. I would see the box from which you came.”
We lofted and flew south. The southern hemisphere was buried under a new ice age, which looked to be well advanced. In a few moments we were approaching the pole. The Box was still where it had been, clearly visible, resting on the surface of an ice-sheet that must have been miles thicker than when I had last visited.
“There it is!” Thrayna trilled an iridescent trill. She dove through the frigid atmosphere toward the great black cube, which seemed to float on the white ice-sheet.
We landed at the foot of the Box, by the great entrance on the east face. The door opened. “Welcome, Deradan,” a deep, hollow voice resonated in my mind.
“Hurrah! It is the Box itself that welcomes you,” Thrayna said. “Shall we go in?”
We entered.
Sudden throbbing pain. A white flash that died to red oblivion. My mind turned on itself, and I was no more. Slowly I came to myself again. The pain—long unfamiliar pain—was great and coursed through my body. My arms tingled (arms?). My legs burned (legs?). I was conscious of a strange and oppressive feeling that I seemed to recall from some long-past existence.
My consciousness rose and faded, then rose again. For a long time I slept (sleep?). When I came to, I was lying in a cocoon-like bed in the middle of a great marble hall. Except for the bed, and my body (body?), the hall was devoid of furnishings or tenants.
I rose stiffly from the confines of the bedwomb and examined myself. Two arms, two legs, one head, two ears, two eyes, not grossly misshapen; I looked thoroughly normal and human. I had, as far as I could tell, been thrust into a human form by some external agency of which I was not aware.
That there were beings with powers greater than my own, I had no reason to doubt. I had met many such as I who wandered the centuries. But, whatever their powers, their motives were usually not opaque. What was I doing here, and in this guise?
I turned to the cocoon that had enveloped me, and examined it with interest. It was the only visible clue to whatever lay behind my dilemma—except for the too, too solid flesh that enclosed my astral form like a prison of sinew, skin, and bone.
The bed was constructed of some fabric cushioned over a frame of shiny bronzelike metal. Tubes and wires bundled from the floor below and snaked into the bottom of the bed. There was some slight indication that probes and sensors and other devices were within the cushioned interior. Although the bed and frame and surroundings appeared to be in perfect condition, there was a patina of great age that covered the object and the great hall itself. I was perplexed. I wondered what Thrayna would make of this. I wondered what had become of my ethereal companion. Was I still within the Box, and Thrayna somewhere without?
“Greetings, Deradan.”
The voice was low, and soft, and seemed to come from all around. I looked all around It was confining, this human body; the vision limited by the scope of the eyes, the grasp limited by the reach of the arms. There was no one—nothing—in sight.
“Greetings, Voice,” I said. I found that I was trembling; an unfamiliar sensation. “What will you have with me?”
“Wait,”
