Hresh felt his face growing warm. “The knowledge is my special possession. I feel jealous of it, Father.”
Noum om Beng laughed. It was a laugh much like a cough.
“Do you think you can keep it all to yourself? Teach it, boy, teach it! The day will come when all the world speaks in the Beng way: prepare your people, let them be ready for that.”
Hresh moistened his lips. “Do you mean to say that all the world will be Beng, Father?”
“All that is not hjjk.”
Hresh thought of Harruel, building his little kingdom in the wilderness, and wondered how he would fit into such a scheme of things. Or Koshmar, for that matter. But he said none of this to Noum om Beng.
“Then you believe that when the gods destroyed the Great World, it was to clear a way for the supremacy of the Bengs?”
“Who knows,” said Noum om Beng, “the purposes of the gods? The gods are harsh. All striving is repaid in the end with a hail of death-stars. So it has happened again and again, and so it will happen yet again in times to come. We can never comprehend the reasons for this; all we can do is strive ever onward, struggling in the face of everything, to survive and then to grow and then to conquer. In the end we perish. To comprehend this is unimportant. To survive and grow and conquer is all there is.”
Never before had Noum om Beng made so explicit a statement of his philosophy. Hresh, taking it in as though it had been a rain of blows, sat trembling, struggling to come to terms with what he had just heard.
“Will the death-stars come again to destroy us?” he asked finally.
“Not for a very long time. We are safe from them now, and for so much time to come that it is impossible to comprehend it. But they will come, when you and I have been long forgotten. It is the way of the gods, to send the death-stars to the world time after time. It has been that way since the beginning.”
“Am I to understand from what you say that the death-stars that destroyed the Great World were not the first that came to the world?”
“That is so. Millions of years go by between each visit of the death-star swarms. This I know, boy. This knowledge comes to me from the ancient ones. The death-stars fell upon the Great World, and they fell upon the world that existed before the Great World ever was. And upon the world before that.”
Hresh stared and could not say a word.
Noum om Beng said, “We know nothing of those older worlds. The past is always lost and forgotten, no matter how hard we strive to save it. It survives only in shadows and dreams and faint images. But the Great World people knew how to read those images, and so did the humans before them.”
“The humans — before them—”
“Of course. The humans were old when the Great World was born. But the death-stars are older still. There were no humans when the death-stars fell, the time before the last time; or if the humans did exist, they were only little simple creatures such as we are now, with everything still ahead for them, and they lived through that time of death-stars just as we have lived through this one.”
Hresh could not even blink as Noum om Beng uttered these words, which fell upon him like the final strokes of the ax that cuts through the mightiest of trees.
“Once very long ago the humans had their time of greatness and ruled the world,” Noum om Beng went on, “and I think that they remembered the death-stars that had fallen when they were young, or else they rediscovered the memory of them, I cannot tell you which. And the time of greatness of the humans, long though it was, ran its whole course in the time between the swarms. The humans’ greatness came and went in that time. And then the Great World arose and flourished, and it was upon the Great World that the most recent death-stars fell. Now the world is ours and we will build something great in it, as the humans did and the Great World peoples did after them; and one day, millions of years from now, the death-stars will come again. This is truth. This is the way of the world, as it has been since the beginning.”
Hresh sat quietly, struggling with the horror of what he had just heard, trembling under the weight of the unimaginable past, which rose above him like one tower piled upon another all the way to the stars.
After a very long time he said, “If that is so, Father, then it makes no difference, does it, what we do? We may grow and flourish and build something greater than the Great World; and when the wheel turns ‘round again, whatever we have built will be destroyed as the Great World was. Nor should we think that when the destruction comes it is coming for punishment’s sake, to destroy a wicked civilization. Whether we are good or evil, whether we keep the ways of the gods or spurn them, the death-stars will come all the same. They come and come and come, when the appointed time arrives, and they fall upon the wicked and the virtuous alike, on the lazy and the industrious alike, on the cruel and the gentle alike. We might just as well not build at all, for whatever we build will be destroyed. That is the world the gods have devised for us. It seems terribly harsh to us; but the gods are beyond our comprehension. Is this what you say, Father?”
“This is what I know to be true.”
“No,” Hresh said. “It is too cruel a belief. It says that there is a flaw in the universe, that things are fundamentally wrong at the heart.”
Noum om Beng sat quietly, nodding. Something almost like a smile passed across his wizened face.
“We die, do we not?” he asked.
“At the end of our days, yes.”
“Is it as punishment?”
“It is because we have come to our end. The wicked sometimes live long, the good die young: so death is not punishment, except that we are all punished the same way.”
“Precisely, boy. There is no sense to it; so how can we hope to understand it? The gods have decreed death for us, each of us as a single mortal being. They decreed death also for the Great World; they have decreed death also for the world of hjjk-folk who rule now, and for the Beng world that will follow after. If you call this a flaw in the universe you are wrong. It is the way of the universe. The universe is perfect; it is we who are flawed. The gods know what they are doing. We never will. But that does not mean that there can be an end to our striving.”
Hresh shook his head. “If there’s no point to anything, if death comes for each of us and death-stars come for our civilizations, then we might as well live like beasts. But we don’t. We do keep striving. We plan, we dream, we build.” Caught up in his own fervor, he cried, “I mean to know why. I will devote my life to finding out why.”
He realized that he was speaking very loudly. He realized too that it was some time since he had remembered to call Noum om Beng “Father,” as the old Helmet Man insisted. Yet he had not been struck. Truly this was an unusual day.
Noum om Beng stood up, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding to his full great height, and filling the room in his fragile way like some papery-bodied water-strider that had taken on another form. From far above he looked down at Hresh, and it was impossible to fathom the thoughts that were crossing his face, though Hresh knew they must be powerful ones.
At last Noum om Beng said, “Yes. Devote your life to finding out why. And then come to me, and tell me your answer. If I am still alive, I will very much want to know.” Noum om Beng laughed. “When I was your age I was troubled by the same question, and I too sought the answer. You see that I failed. Perhaps it will be otherwise for you. Perhaps, boy. Perhaps.”
13
Twinings
What had been the crater of the death-star — for they were certain by this time that that was what the circular basin must be — had now become the capital city of Harruel’s kingdom. The territory of one was identical to the territory of the other, and the rim of the crater was the boundary of both. Harruel had named his kingdom Yissou, and the city City of Yissou.