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.”

“Don’t underrate them, Nialli,” Thu-Kimnibol said. “You may be going too far in the other direction now.” Hresh made a soft sighing sound. He turned and looked at him. But Hresh seemed asleep, breathing gently and calmly. Thu-Kimnibol turned back to Nialli Apuilana. “There’s one more thing, something the Queen told me that seemed even stranger than all the rest. Were you ever taught, when you lived among them, that the hjjks believe they were created by the humans?”

Now it was her turn to look startled. “No. No, never!”

“Can it be true, do you think?”

“Why not? The humans were almost like gods. The humans may have been the gods.”

“Then if the hjjks are their chosen people—”

“No,” she said. “The hjjks were a chosen people. Chosen to survive, to endure the Long Winter, to take over the world afterward. But they didn’t work out, somehow. So the gods created us. Or the humans did, one or the other. As replacements for them.” Her eyes were bright with a fervor he had rarely seen in them before. “Someday the humans are going to come back to Earth,” she said. “I’m certain of it. They’ll want to see what’s been happening here since they left. And they won’t want to find the whole place one gigantic Nest, Thu-Kimnibol. They put us in those cocoons for a purpose, and they’ll want to know whether that purpose has been fulfilled. So we have to keep on fighting, don’t you see? We have to hold our own against the Queen. Call them gods, call them humans, whatever they are, they’re the ones who made us. And they expect that of us.”

“This is the kind of country the bug-folk love,” Salaman muttered. “Dead country, with all its bones showing.” The king brought his xlendi to a halt and looked around at his three sons. Athimin and Biterulve were riding alongside him, and Chham just a short way behind.

“You think there’s a Nest out there, father?” Chham asked.

“I’m sure of it. I feel its weight pressing on my soul. Here, I feel it. And here. And here.” He touched his breast, and his sensing-organ, and his loins.

The territory ahead had a bleached, arid look. The soil was pale and sandy and the fierce blue sky glared with whipcrack intensity. The only sign of life was a malign-looking woody low dome of a plant that looked almost like a weatherbeaten skull, from which two thick strap-like gray leaves, tattered and shredded by the wind, extended across the desert floor to an enormous length. These plants grew far apart, each presiding over its little domain like a sullen immobile emperor. Otherwise there was nothing.