The warlike boy Samnibolon, who had become this warlike man Thu-Kimniboclass="underline" they were the utter opposite of the gentle Kundalimon, that shy and strange bearer of the Queen’s love and the Queen’s peace. Nialli Apuilana had loved Kundalimon beyond any doubt. In some way she still did. And yet — and yet — when she looked at this fierce Thu-Kimnibol she found herself swept by irresistible love and desire. It had come over her for the first time at the drill-field, to her astonishment and joy. It had come over her a hundred times since. Here beneath the terrible walls of Salaman’s city it seemed stronger than ever. She had known him since she was a child; and yet she realized now she had not actually known him at all, not until these past few weeks had brought them so strangely together.
All his life, she thought, he has waited for a chance to fight again; and now he will. And suddenly she realized that what she loved him for was that strength, that oneness of character, that had defined him since his earliest boyhood, when this city’s wall had been nothing more than a palisade of wood.
Her love for Kundalimon glowed imperishably within her: she was certain of that. And yet this other man, Kundalimon’s opposite in all things, now filled her soul so thoroughly that there seemed no room for anyone else.
Hresh had never touched such perfection before. He had not ever imagined it was possible. Truly the Nest functioned as smoothly as any machine.
He knew this was only a minor hjjk outpost, certainly not the great Nest of Nests; and yet it was so huge and complex that even after many days within it he had no clear idea of its plan. Its tunnels, warm and sweet-smelling and dimly lit by some pink glow that emanated from the walls, radiated in bewildering patterns, running this way and that, crossing and recrossing. Yet all those who traversed these corridors moved swiftly and unhesitatingly in obvious clear knowledge of the route.
The hjjks had fabricated their huge subterranean city in the simplest way, digging the tunnels with their bare claws — Hresh had watched them at work, for they never ceased expanding the Nest — and lining the walls with a pulp made of soft wood, which they chewed themselves and spat out into great soggy mounds that could be scooped up and pressed into place. Wooden beams served to prop the tunnel roof at regular intervals. He had expected something more complex from them. This was not very different except in size from the sort of nests the ants and termites of the forest built for themselves.
And, like those small insects of the forest floor, they had evolved an elaborate system of castes and professions. The biggest ones — females, they were, though apparently not fertile — were the Militaries. They were ordinarily the only ones who ventured into the world beyond the Nest. It was Militaries who had brought Hresh here.
A parallel caste of sterile males, the Workers, had charge of constructing and expanding the Nest, and of maintaining the intricate systems of ventilation and heating that kept it livable. They were thick-bodied and short, with little of the eerie grace that the slender Militaries displayed.
Then there were the reproductive cadres, the Egg-makers and Life-kindlers: smaller, stockier even than the Workers, with short limbs and blunt, rounded heads. When they were mature, they were taken before the Queen, who brought them to full fertility by penetrating them in some way and flooding them with a substance She herself secreted: this was known as Queen-touch. Life-kindlers and Egg-makers mated, then, and brought forth eggs that hatched into small pale larvae. A caste known as Nourishment-givers reared and nurtured these in outlying caverns. It was they who determined which caste the new hjjks would belong to, in accordance with the orders of the Queen, and shaped them for it by the manner of food they provided. The number of each caste’s members never changed: as the life of each hjjk Military or Worker or Egg-maker or Life-kindler neared its appointed end, its replacement was already being reared in the caverns of the Nourishment-givers.
Hresh learned all these things from the members of a different caste yet, one with which he felt a great personal kinship of spirit: the Nest-thinkers, the philosophers and teachers of the insect-folk.
Whether these were male or female, he couldn’t tell. They were as tall as Militaries, which argued that they were female, but they had the blocky frame of Workers, barely narrowing at all at the places where one segment of their bodies gave way to the next, as though they might be male. In any event they were unconcerned with sexual matters. They sat all day in dark sealed chambers, to which the young came for instruction. Hresh went to them too, and listened solemnly as they explained the workings of the Nest to him. He was never sure if he ever spoke twice with the same Nest-thinker. They seemed indistinguishable. After a while he fell into the habit of regarding them all as one, a single individual — Nest-thinker.
Nest-thinker it was who opened the mysteries of the Nest to him, Nest-thinker who showed him how every aspect of the life of the Nest was coordinated perfectly with every other aspect, Nest-thinker who instructed him in Nest-truth, who taught him the intricacies of Egg-plan and Queen-love, who offered him the comfort of Nest-bond.
It was Nest-thinker, ultimately, who brought him before the Queen.
That was the deepest mystery of alclass="underline" the city’s giant immobile monarch, hidden in a chamber sunken far beneath the other levels, guarded by the elite caste of Queen-attendants — warriors of immense size and indomitable valor who encircled Her place of repose in an impenetrable legion.
“The Queen can never die,” Nest-thinker told Hresh. “She was born when the world was young and will live to its final age.” Was he supposed to take that literally? Surely the Queen’s life-span was great. Perhaps She lived so long that to the others She seemed immortal. But immortal?
Hresh had no idea how long he had been in the Nest before they took him to the Queen. Time had little meaning here: his days often passed in a dreamy haze of contemplation. He had slipped into a strange peaceful otherness. The storms of the outer world, the turmoil and bustle of the City of Dawinno, seemed to him now like phantasms out of some other life. But ultimately a day arrived when Nest-thinker said to him, “You are for the Queen today. Follow me.”
Together they descended a narrow, spiraling ramp, its earthen floor worn to a high polish by the passage of generations of feet. Hresh wondered if any of those feet had been feet like his. He doubted it. Very likely only the hard bristly claws of hjjks had traveled this way before today.
Down and down and downward still they went. The shaft was like an auger boring its way backward through the depths of time. Crisp unknown odors floated up toward him. A pulsing black glow was the only illumination.
The deeper they went, the faster they moved. The long-legged Nest-thinker set an unrelenting pace. Hresh came close to growing dizzy as the shaft wound on and on. But some unknown force steadied his souclass="underline" perhaps from Nest-thinker, perhaps from the Queen Herself.
Then at last they reached the holy of holies.
It was a long oval chamber with a high, rounded ceiling. Instead of roof-beams there was a vaulting of hexagonal plates overhead, fitted one against the other in a way that looked invulnerable even to the mightiest tremor of the Earth. At one end of the chamber — the end where Nest-thinker and Hresh had entered — was a platform where the Queen-attendants stood packed close together, their weapons pointing outward. The Queen filled all the rest of the room, end to end, wall to wall.