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He knows by now they have no use for words as he understands words, just as “He-Lokim” and “She-Kanzi” are not names as he understands names. They live outside the need of such things, just as they and all their kind live outside the need for the building of cities, or the fabrication of objects, or any other such “civilized” thing. The otherness of them is the central fact of their nature: their strangeness, their non-Peopleness.
Their souls flood into his, and he into theirs, and suddenly there comes to him a vision within the vision he is having. He sees a second Great World upon the Earth, different from the first but no less glorious, a world not of six races but of dozens, of hundreds, of People and caviandis and stinchitoles and thekmurs, of sisichils and stanimanders and catagraks, of all the creatures that lived — united, locked in perpetual understanding sharing in everything, a world deeper and richer in its fullness than even the old Great World had been, a world that embraced everything that lived upon the Earth—
A sudden discordant voice within him asks:
Even the hjjks?
And he answers at once, without pausing to think:
Yes. Even the hjjks. Of course, the hjjks.
But then, considering it, he asks himself if the hjjks would in fact join any such new confederation of races. They had, after all, been part of the earlier one. And the Transformer has had all the hundreds of centuries since the time of the Great World to alter and elevate them. It might be that they have moved so far beyond the other races of the Earth now that they are incapable of joining them as equals in anything.
Was that so? Hresh wonders. Have they become gods? Is She a god, the great Queen of the hjjks?
In that instant, but only for an instant, his dreaming mind flashes northward into the bleakness of the cold lands, where the horizon is lit by a brilliant incandescent glow. And he beholds there the vast secret Queen, lying motionless in Her hidden chamber while She directs the destinies of all the millions of insect-folk, and, for all Hresh can tell, of the rest of the world as well. He feels the force and power of that immense mind, and of that great living machine, the Nest over which She rules. He observes the meshing of the parts, the weaving of gleaming pistons, the spinning of the web of life.
Then it is gone and he hovers again in the indeterminate void; but the tolling echo of that immensity lingers in him.
A god? Ruling over a race of gods?
No, he thinks. Not gods.
The Five Heavenly Ones, they are gods: Dawinno, Emakkis, Mueri, Friit, Yissou — the Transformer and Destroyer, the Provider, the Comforter, the Healer, the Protector.
And Nakhaba of the Bengs: he is a god. The Interceder, he who stands between the People and the humans, and speaks with them on our behalf. So old Noum om Beng had taught him, when he was a boy in Vengiboneeza.
And therefore it must be so, Hresh tells himself, that the humans also are gods, for we know that they are higher even than Nakhaba, and older than the Great World.
Perhaps they are the ones who brought the other five races of the Great World into being, the hjjks and the sea-lords, the mechanicals and vegetals, the sapphire eyes. Could it be? That they had grown weary of living alone on the Earth, the humans, and had created the others to join with them in a new great civilization, which would flourish for many years, and then perish as all civilizations perished?
Where are they, then, if they are gods?
Dead, like the sapphire-eyes and the vegetals and the mechanicals and the sea-lords?
No, Hresh thinks. For how can gods die? They have simply withdrawn from the world. Perhaps their own Creator has summoned them elsewhere, and they are building a new Earth for Him far away.
Or else they are still with us, nearby but invisible, biding their time, keeping themselves aloof while they await the working-out of their great plan, whatever that may be. And the hjjks, awesome though they are, are simply an aspect of that plan, not the designers and custodians of it.
Perhaps. Perhaps.
And if there is to be a new Great World, the hjjks must be part of it. We must turn to them as fellow humans, as Nialli Apuilana once had said. But now instead we are about to go to war with them. What sense does that make? What sense, what sense, what sense?
He can’t say. Nor can he sustain himself aloft any longer. His soul comes spiraling downward through the darkness, crashing toward the ground. As he falls from the skies Hresh looks toward the city that rises to meet him, and catches one final glimpse of his brother Thu-Kimnibol, proudly parading before his troops on the stadium grounds. Then he passes through some zone of incomprehensible strangeness; and when he is conscious again, he finds himself at his own desk, dazed, stunned.
His mind is in a whirl. Things are as they always have been for him. Too many questions, not enough answers.
The voice of Chupitain Stuld cut through his confusion. “Sir? Sir, I’ve brought the Tangok Seip artifacts. Sir? Sir, are you all right?”
“I — it — that is—”
She came rushing into the room and hovered before him, eyes wide with anxiety. Hresh scrambled to pull himself together. Fragments of dream circled and spun in the bedlam of his soul.
“Sir?”
He summoned all the serenity he could muster.
“A moment of reverie, is all — deep in thought—”
“You looked so strange, sir!”
“Nothing’s wrong. A moment of reverie, Chupitain Stuld. The wandering mind, very far away.”
“I could come back another time, if you—”
“No. No. Stay.” He pointed to the box she was holding. “You have them in there? Let me see. Inexcusable, that I’ve let them wait this long. Plor Killivash’s already studied them, you say?”
For some reason that produced a flurry of turmoil in her. He wondered why.
She began to lay the objects out on his desk.
There were seven of them, more or less spherical, each one small enough to be held with one hand. By their elegance of design and richness of texture Hresh knew them at once to be Great World work, each of them fashioned of the imperishable colored metals characteristic of the extraordinary craftsmen of that vanished era. The vaults of Vengiboneeza had yielded hundreds of devices like these. Some of them no one had ever learned how to operate; a few had produced one single startling effect and then had never functioned again; still others he had managed to master and use effectively for years.
Things like these were unearthed only rarely, now. This new cache was a remarkable find. It was a measure of the turmoil in his own soul that he’d left them to his assistants for so long, without bothering to examine them himself.
He looked at the seven objects but didn’t touch any of them. He knew the dangers of picking such things up without knowing which of the various protrusions on them would activate them.
“Does anybody have any idea what they do?”
“This one — it dissolves matter. If I touched this knob on the side, a beam of light would come out and dissolve everything between here and the wall. This one casts a cloak of darkness over things, a kind of veil that’s impossible to see through, so you could walk through the city and no one would notice you. And this one, it cuts like a knife, and its beam is so powerful we couldn’t measure the depths of the hole it cut.” Chupitain Stuld gave him a wary look, as if unsure that he was paying attention. She picked up another of the things. “Now, this one, sir—”
“Wait a moment,” said Hresh. “I see only seven instruments here.”
She looked troubled again. “Seven. That’s right, sir.”
“Where are the others?”
“The — others?”
“I seem to recall being told that there were eleven of these things, the day they were brought in. A couple of months ago, it was — during the rainy time, I remember — eleven Great World artifacts, that’s what you said, I’m sure of it, or perhaps it was Io Sangrais who told me—”