How puny his own armies seem, against the colossal confident single force that is the hjjks! How ragged and confused, how crippled by division and vainglory! There’s no hope of prevailing in this struggle, Thu-Kimnibol sees. Egg-plan is in direct conflict with the ambitions of the People, and Egg-plan must triumph through sheer will and force of numbers. He might win a battle now and then, he might deal one band of hjjks or another a grievous blow, but always the underlying force of hjjk unity will remain, always the power of the Nest will bring forth horde after horde, until in the end the upstarts out of the cocoon must inevitably be defeated.
Must — inevitably—
— be—
— defeated—
Or perhaps have been already. Despair presses against him with crushing weight. All strength seems to be leaving his limbs, and he sees that that strength was only an illusion, that he had thought of himself as a giant but had always in reality been nothing more than a flea: a bold flea and foolish flea who has dared to challenge an immortal monarch.
He is floating downward toward the colossus that is the Queen like a cinder drifting on the air. In another moment he will land on the great surface of Her and be swallowed up. When he looks toward Hresh for help his brother seems more distant even than before, a mere speck far away, already caught beyond hope of escape in the Queen’s compelling force, already sinking irretrievably within the layers of Her flesh.
He is next. They both are doomed.
The Queen is like some great cosmic force, a deadly elemental thing that holds the power of ending his life with a single contemptuous flicker of Her will.
Does She mean to kill him, Thu-Kimnibol wonders, or merely to swallow him up? He considers the vastness of Her and the probable power of the Wonderstone hidden somewhere within the incalculable volumes of Her flesh; and he decides that probably She doesn’t intend to kill him, but that if She tries it he’ll send such a flare of defiant fury into Her, by way of Hresh with whom he lies entwined and the Wonderstone which Hresh possesses, that She will sizzle in unthinkable pain.
More likely, though, he decides, She means to absorb and neutralize, to transform him from Her foe into Her slave. That he will not allow either.
Her strength is immense. And yet — and yet—
He thinks suddenly that he can see Her limits. How She could be brought to a standstill, if not defeated altogether.
The perfection of the hjjk empire hums and whirrs and gleams about him, and the power of the Queen holds him fast, and nonetheless in the midst of all that oppressive force Thu-Kimnibol knows what Hresh meant when he said that he must try to comprehend the vulnerability of the hjjks.
Their very perfection is their weak spot. The greatness of the self-contained civilization that they have built and sustained for so many hundreds of thousands of years contains the seed of its own destruction. Hresh has seen that already; and now Hresh, wherever he may be, is helping him to see it. The hjjks are a supreme achievement of the gods, Thu-Kimnibol thinks; but they will not allow themselves to understand that the essence of the gods’ way is unceasing change. Time has brought change to everything else that ever lived; and it will come also to the hjjks, or they will perish.
They are too rigid. They can be broken. If they won’t bend to the law of the gods, Thu-Kimnibol tells himself, then ultimately they’ll suffer the fate of all that can’t or won’t bend. In time they will be struck by a force too strong for them to withstand; and they will shatter in an instant. Yes.
“Come, brother,” he calls. “We’ve stayed here long enough. I’ve learned what you wanted me to learn.”
“Thu-Kimnibol?” Hresh says dimly. “Is that you? Where are you, brother?”
“Here. Here. Take my hand.”
“I am for the Queen now, brother.”
“No. No, never. She can’t hold you. Come: here.”
Vast peals of laughter resound all about him. She thinks that She has them both. But Thu-Kimnibol is undismayed. His initial awe of the Queen had placed him at Her advantage; but that awe is gone now, overcome by anger and contempt, and there is no other way that She could hold him.
He understands that next to Her he is nothing more than a flea. But fleas can go about their business unseen by greater creatures. That’s the great advantage fleas have, Thu-Kimnibol thinks. The Queen can’t hold us if She can’t find us. And She’s so confident of Her own omnipotence that She isn’t even trying very hard.
He begins to slip away from Her, taking Hresh with him.
Ascending from Her lair is like climbing a mountain that reaches halfway to the roof of the sky. But any journey, no matter how great, is done a single step at a time. Thu-Kimnibol draws himself upward, and upward again, holding Hresh in his arms. The Queen does not appear to be restraining him. Perhaps She thinks he’ll fall back to Her of his own accord.
Upward. Upward. Streams of light come from behind him, but they grow indistinct as he continues. Now the blackness lies before him, deep and intense.
“Brother?” Thu-Kimnibol says. “Brother, we’re free. We’re safe now.”
He blinked and opened his eyes. Nialli Apuilana, standing above him, made a soft little cry of joy.
“At last you’re back!”
Thu-Kimnibol nodded. He looked over at Hresh. His eyes had opened slit-wide, but he seemed stunned and dazed. Reaching across, Thu-Kimnibol touched his brother’s arm. Hresh seemed very cool; his arm twitched faintly as Thu-Kimnibol’s fingers grazed it.
“Will he be all right?” Nialli Apuilana asked.
“He’s very tired. So am I. How long were we gone, Nialli?”
“Just short of a day and a half.” She was staring at him as though he had undergone some great metamorphosis. “I was beginning to think that you — that—”
“A day and a half,” he said, in a musing tone. “It felt like years. What’s been happening here?”
“Nothing. Not even Salaman. He marched around our camp without even stopping, and is heading on north without us.”
“A madman, he is. Well, let him go.”
“And you?” Nialli Apuilana was still staring. “What was it like? Did you see the Nest? Did you make contact with the Queen?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “I never understood the half of it. How awesome She is — how mighty the Nest is — how intricate their life is—”
“I tried to tell you all, that day at the Presidium. But no one would listen, not even you.”
“Especially not me, Nialli.” He smiled. “They’re a frightening enemy. They seem so much wiser than we are. So much more powerful. Superior beings in every way. I get the feeling that I almost want to bow down before them.”
“Yes.”
“At least before their Queen,” he said. A note of discouragement came into his voice. The triumph of his escape seemed far behind him now. “She’s almost like some sort of god. That ancient immense creature, reaching out everywhere, running everything. To resist Her seems, well, blasphemous.”
“Yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. “I know what you mean.”
He shook his head wearily. “We have to resist, though. There’s no way we can arrive at any kind of accommodation with them. If we don’t keep on fighting them, they’ll crush us. They’ll swallow us up. But if we go on with the war, if we should win it, won’t we be going against the will of the gods? The gods brought them through the Long Winter, after all. The gods may have intended them to inherit the world.” He looked at her in perplexity. “I’m speaking in contradictions. Does any of this make sense?”
“The gods brought us through the Long Winter also, Thu-Kimnibol. Maybe they realize that the hjjks were a mistake, that they were an experiment that failed. And so we’ve been brought on to finish them off and take their place.”
He looked at her, startled. “Do you think so? Could it be possible?”
“You call them superior beings. But you saw for yourself how limited they really are, how inflexible, how narrow. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? That was what Hresh wanted you to see: that they don’t really want to create anything, that they aren’t even capable of it. All they want to do is keep on multiplying and building new Nests. But there’s no purpose to it beyond that. They aren’t trying to learn. They aren’t trying to grow.” She laughed. “Can you imagine? I stood up in the Presidium and said we ought to think of them as humans. But they aren’t. I was wrong and you were all right, even Husathirn Mueri. Bugs is what they are. Horrible oversized bugs. Everything I believed about them is something that they put into my head themselves.”