Air sucked in. “Meth-maren,” She sighed, and the huge head lowered, sought taste.
Raen kissed Her, touched the scent-patches, waited for the vast jaws to close; and they did not.
“Meth-maren,” Mother said. “Kethiuy-queen.”
It was blue queen’s memory.
xii
The sun was unbearable. Jim felt the burn of it before he felt anything more, and struggled to shade his face from it. He was held, and had to think which way to turn; and that meant consciousness.
His hands met spines and hair and chitin. He focused at that, and shoved in horror at the stiffening limbs that lay over him, the intertwined corpses of a majat and an azi.
All about him were corpses, shimmering and running in the tears the sun brought to his eyes. He struggled to pull the visor which hung about his neck up to his eyes, to see—and found nothing living anywhere.
The house was ruined, gaping rubble; and bodies lay thickly over the garden, save in one vast track which led to the broken walls…bodies majat and human, naked and clothed. Insects flitted about him as they settled on the dead; he batted at them, fought with fingers stiffening with sunburn to fasten the sunsuit.
Rock moved, a shifting outside the wall. He gathered up a rifle, staggered in that direction, his senses wavering in and out of focus.
He climbed over the rubble, blinked, saw a shadow on the ground and whirled, whipped the rifle up, but the majat’s leap was faster. The gun went off, torn from his hands. Another was on him, pulling from the other side. Chelae gripped his arm, cutting flesh.
Red: he saw the badge and tried to pull from it; the badge of the second was green. It lowered its head, jaws wide, and the palps brushed his lips, his face.
And it drew back. “Jim,” it intoned.
He lived. The fact numbed him. He ceased to struggle, understanding nothing any longer.
“Meth-maren sendss,” red Warrior said.
“Let me go,” he asked then, his heart lurching a beat. “Let me go, Warrior; I’ll come with you.”
It released him. He clutched his injured arm and followed it, trailed by the green, down into the circle of the street, into the dark entry of the subway, into the deep places of the city, where no lights shone at all. At times he stumbled, blind, and his hands met bodies, yielding ones of majat-azi or the spiny hardness of majat. Chelae urged at him, hastening him, lifting him each time he fell.
Blue lights drifted toward him. At first he shrank from meeting them, not wanting delay, not wanting to be left: but he saw herbearing one of those lights, and he thrust his way free of the Warriors and ran, stumbling, toward her.
She met him, held him off at arm’s length to look at him. “You’re all right,” she said, a question in her impatient manner; but her voice trembled. There was Merry by her, and other faces that he knew.
She hugged him then, and he nearly wept for joy; but she did not know, he thought, the things that he must admit, the knowledge that he had stolen, the thing he had made of himself.
He tried to tell her. “I used all the tapes,” he said, “even the black ones. I didn’t know what else to do.” She touched his face and told him to be quiet, with a shift of her eyes toward Merry and the others.
“It’s ruined back there,” he said then. “Everything’s ruined. Where will we go now?”
“In, for a time. Till the cycle completes itself.” Her hand entwined with his: he felt the jewels rough and warm beneath his fingers. She gestured, walked with assurance the way from which she had come. Warriors walked about them; armed majat-azi followed. “It’s going to be a while before I think of outside, a long while, perhaps. Majat-time.”
“I’ve nineteen years,” he said, anticipating all of them, and well-content.
Her fingers tightened on his.
Soft singing filled the air, the peaceful sound of Workers, with the stirrings and movings of many bodies in the tunnels.
“Hive-song,” she said. “They’ve long lives. A turning of nature, a pulse of the cycle, to merge all colors, to divide again. This-sun,they say now. Home-hive.Against those cycles, my own life is nothing at all. Wait with me.”
There was a ship, he thought, recalling Pol. There were betas who might live, who might serve her. He objected to. these things one by one, and she shook her head, silent.
He asked no more.
xiii
Moth,the voices shouted, Moth, Moth!
Eggs,she thought back at them, and mocked them for what they were.
A different sound came through the speaker, the shrilling of majat voices, the crash of metal and wood.
From the vents came a curious paper-scent. Human voices had ceased long ago.
Moth poured the last of the wine, drank it.
And pushed the button.
BOOK TEN
i
The hatch opened, let in the flood of evening air, the gentle light of the setting sun.
“Stay put,”Tallen heard, “Sir, we’re picking up movement out there.”
“Wouldn’t do to run,” he said into the com unit. “Whatever happens—no response, hear me?”
“Be careful.”
Majat. He heard the ominous chirring, and walked forward, very slowly.
Newhope had stood here. Weeds had taken the ruins. At centre rose a hill, monstrous, where no hill had been. He had seen the pictures smuggled out, heard the reports and memorised them, along with family tales.
And in the long passage of years, in the fading of the Wars, thiswaited, where no Outsider dared trespass, until now.
We were wrong, the one side argued, ever to have relied on them.
But governments rose and fell and rose again, and rumours persisted…that life stirred in the forbidden Reach, that the wealth which had made the Alliance what it had been was there to be had, if any power could contrive to obtain it.
And the hives refused contact.
There were human folk on Istra, farmers, who lived out across the wide plains, who told wild tales and traded occasional jewels and rolls of majat-silk.
Tallen had met with them, these sullen, furtive men, suspicious of any ship that called; and there was warning here, for there were no few ships resting derelict in Istran fields.
Sixty years the contact had lapsed: collapse, chaos, war…worlds breaking from the Alliance in panic, warships forcing them in again, all for the scarcity of certain goods and the widespread rumours of majat breakout.
It was told in Tallen’s family that men and majat had coexisted here, had walked together in city streets, had co-operated one with the other.
It was told somewhere in Alliance files that this was so.
He heard the sound nearer now, and walked warily, stopped at last as a glittering creature rose out of the rocks and brush.
A trembling came on him, a loss of will. Natural,he thought, recalling the tales his grandfather had told, who claimed to have stood close to them. Humans react to them out of deep instinct. One has to overcome that.
They see differently:that too, from old Tallen, and from reports deep in the archives. He spread his hands wide from his sides, making clear to it that he had no weapons.
It came closer. He shut his eyes, for he quite lost big courage to look at it near at hand. He heard its loud breathing, felt the bristly touch of its forelimbs. A shadow fell on his closed eyes; something touched his mouth—he shuddered convulsively at that, and the touch and the shadow drew back.