She was a colossal tubular vessel of flesh, soft and pink, not remotely hjjk-like in any way, without eyes, without beak, without limbs, without features of any sort. But he felt himself to be in the presence of an extraordinary being, of such power and force that it was all he could do to keep himself from falling to his knees before Her.
And yet this was only a minor Queen, Hresh knew. This was just a subordinate of the great Queen of Queens.
The only sound in the chamber was that of his own breathing. He pressed his hands to his sides, digging them deep into his fur to stop them from trembling. Queen-attendants came up close against him, surrounding him on all sides, their hard shells and bristly limbs pressing tight. Their blades lightly pricked his flesh. If he made so much as the slightest unexpected move those blades would plunge deep.
A voice that was like the tolling of an awesome bell spoke in his mind.
“You have the contact focus with you?”
He understood somehow that the Queen meant the Barak Dayir.
“Yes.”
“Use it.”
He drew the Wonderstone from its pouch. It felt fiery in his hand. A profound chill of fear coursed through him, but it was met at once by a neutralizing warmth that seemed to come from the Queen.
He took a deep breath and entered into union with the stone.
At once there is a sound like a crack of thunder, or perhaps the world splitting apart on its hinges. His mind goes soaring across a vast abyss. As if he has dissolved, as if he is traveling on the wind. Impossible for him to comprehend where he is or what is happening; he has a sense only of an immensity containing an immensity, and, somewhere deep within it, a heart of fire burning with the power of ten thousand suns.
He is no longer aware of Nest-thinker’s presence, of the Queen-attendants, even of his own body. There is only that immensity surrounding him.
“What are you?” he asks.
“You know Me as the Queen of Queens.”
He understands. He is within the Queen, and not the minor one of the Nest he knows. All Nests are linked; all Queens are aspects of the one Queen. And that greatest of hjjks who lies in the realm of mysteries in the north has a Wonderstone too: holds it embedded within Her vast flesh, indeed, and it is that Wonderstone now that speaks to his. The union of the Wonderstones joins him to the Queen of Queens. He is engulfed in that gigantic mass of alien flesh.
Hresh remembers now his mentor Noum om Beng saying, so very long ago, “We had what you call a Barak Dayir also. But our Wonderstone was taken by the hjjks.” Yes, and swallowed by their Queen; and this was it, the other contact focus, the Wonderstone that the Bengs had had and lost, the twin to the ancient magical thing he holds clutched in his sensing-organ.
“Now you will see,” says the Queen.
The heavens split wide. The years roll away, back and back and back, and the Barak Dayir traces a narrow flaming line across the centuries into the distant past. The Queen wishes to show him the vastness of Her race’s heritage.
He sees the world buried in the ice of the Long Winter: he sees tongues of frost creeping down into lands that had never known cold, and green tenderness blackening under the onslaught. Creatures to which he could not give names searching desperately for refuge, and folk of his own kind fleeing pitifully hither and yon. The tall pale tailless creatures whom he knew as humans move among them, saying, Come, come, here is the cocoon, you will be saved.
And also he sees legions of hjjks, leaning unperturbed on their spears as the black wind whips swirling snowflakes past them.
Onward, then, back, back, into the time before the cold, into the glory of the Great World, even. Huge slow-bodied quick-witted crocodilian sapphire-eyes folk on the porticoes of their marble villas; sea-lords in their carriages, vegetals, mechanicals, all the strange and wondrous beings of that glorious era. Humans, again. And hjjks, always hjjks, myriads of them, perfectly organized, clear-minded and cold-eyed, living ever in accordance with the vast millennia-spanning scheme that was Egg-plan, moving among the other races, often spending years at a time in the Great World cities before returning to the Nest from which they came.
Will She take him backward even to the time before the Great World?
No. No, the voyage has reached its end. Hresh feels himself drawn forward again with dizzying speed, the images leaping past, everything in rapid motion, comet-tails in the sky, death-stars crashing down, the air turning black, the first snow-storms, the withered leaves, the world entombed in ice, the stoic patience of the doomed sapphire-eyes, the panicky flight of the desperate beasts, and the hjjks again, always the hjjks, moving calmly outward to take possession of the frozen world even as the other races abandoned it.
There was a great stillness in the royal chamber.
They were in the Nest again. A sense of the age-old grandeur and perfection of the hjjk world resonated like the swelling sounds of an immense symphony in Hresh’s soul.
The Queen said, “Now you see us as we are. Why, then, do you make yourselves our enemies?”
“I am not Your enemy.”
“Your people refuse to live in peace with us. Your people even now prepare to attack us.”
“What they do is wrong,” Hresh said. “I ask Your forgiveness for it. I ask You to tell me if there is any way for Your people and mine to live peacefully together.”
There was silence again, a very long one.
“I offered a treaty,” the Queen said.
“Is that the only way? To pen us up in the parts of the world that we already hold, and prevent us from going forth to explore the rest?”
“What value is it, this exploring? One piece of land is much like another. There are not so many of you that you need the entire world.”
“But to give up all hope of reaching outward into the unknown places—”
“Reaching outward! Reaching outward!” That huge pealing voice rang with royal contempt. “That is all you want, you little furry ones! Why not be content with what you have?”
“Is Egg-plan not a constant reaching-out?” Hresh asked boldly.
The Queen responded with a kind of enormous chuckle, as though answering a child so impudent that he was charming. “Egg-plan is the realization and fulfillment of that which has existed since before the beginning of time. It is not the creation of anything new, but only the final actualization of what has always been. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Hresh. “Yes, I think I do.”
“Your kind, boiling out of its hiding places when the time of cold ended, spreading like a disease over the land, multiplying your numbers unchecked, covering the Earth with cities of stone, fouling the land, darkening the air, staining the rivers as you turn them to your own use, pushing yourselves onward into places where you were never meant to be — you are the foe of Nest-truth. You are the enemy of Egg-plan. You are a wild force upon the orderly world. You are a plague, and must be contained. To eradicate you is impossible; but you must be contained. Do you understand Me, child of questions? Do you understand?”
“Yes. I understand, now.”
His sensing-organ tightened on the Barak Dayir. His entire body shivered with the force of the revelations sweeping through it.
He understood, beyond any doubt. And he knew that what he had come to see was more than the Queen had realized She was telling him.
The hjjks of the New Springtime were mere shadows of those who had lived during the time of the Great World. Those ancient hjjks had been venturers, voyagers, a race of bold merchants and explorers. They had journeyed the length and breadth of this and perhaps many other worlds as well in pursuit of their aims, lacing a bright red line of accomplishment through the rich fabric of the Great World.