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roaring softly among themselves. Riley was beginning to distinguish between roars, as if his newly acquired clarity of thought was able to make the kind of analyses that his pedia once had made for him and Asha had made without any such artificial aid. And he was aware of the smell of these creatures, like rotten meat and decaying vegetation, like Rory’s odor but worse. This Jurassic world, with all its fecund waste, stank.
    As they drew closer to the edge of this ancient city, Riley saw crude shelters, cottages or cabins, built of quarried stone and thatched with dried yellow vegetation. He knew now what had happened to the ruined structures of the old city. They had been scavenged for building materials for its fallen descendants. He felt a wave of despair. There would be little technological help from these decadent remains of a once great civilization.
    And then, as Rory led their way into one of the stone huts, Riley remembered the powered propulsion of Rory’s boat. Somehow that had survived.
    The interior of the hut was dark until Rory withdrew a small object from the pouch hanging from his belt and applied it to a hollowed stone whose contents sprang into flame and a flickering light. Strawlike vegetation was heaped in the corners of the hut. In the center was a low stone table without chairs or stools. Rory opened a nearby wooden chest and withdrew several kinds of the fruit that Riley had already sampled and placed them on the table. From another chest it withdrew a large piece of raw meat. Rory removed two stone flagons from under the table and filled them with a dark fluid from a pottery pitcher also stored under the table, sat on his haunches, and buried his teeth in the raw meat.
    Riley hesitated. The odor of the creatures was even stronger here—or his sensory apparatus had been improved along with everything else—and he felt his stomach rebel at the thought of eating, but he pushed the revulsion away as he reached for one of the flagons and sipped its contents. It was a kind of wine, and Riley was briefly encouraged by the thought that at least these creatures had mastered the art of wine-making and pottery creation as well as fire, although not, apparently, the art or desirability of cooking meat. Maybe he would be able to teach them skills that would begin their ascent back into the civilization that had created the city and the pyramid, though it would not, he realized, reach the stage he needed for a reunion with Asha during his life span, no matter how long extended by his passage through the Transcendental Machine.
    He was starting to sample the fruit when a loud clap of thunder exploded immediately over their heads followed by flashes of lightning and a downpour, like a gigantic bucket being emptied above them, that rattled the vegetation that roofed the structure and began to drip through in places and then in streams. Riley looked at Rory, who seemed oblivious, and continued to eat. It had consumed half the raw meat already and the rest seemed destined to follow immediately.
    The vegetation rattled and cracked above them, as if struck by heavy hailstones. Riley looked through the open doorway to the space outside. It was covered with balls of ice bouncing off the shattered paving stones and their pools of accumulating rainwater. Then, in the midst of the titanic storm, Riley heard a distant sound like a sonorous bell. Riley had never heard anything like it. It was sad, like a tolling for the dead, and compelling, like a summons to whatever place after death the hearer nourished in his hopes for eternity.
    Riley looked at Rory. The alien reptile had stopped eating. Ripples were moving across its body like shivers.
    Riley looked around the hut and, seeing nothing else, tore the top from one of the food chests. Holding it over his head, he stepped out into the storm, feeling and then hearing the hailstones hitting the wood and bruising his knuckles. The water poured down over him, and he