Day after day he rode calmly onward, allowing his path to choose itself. Constantly he scanned the horizon, hoping to catch sight of roving parties of hjjks.

Where are you, children of the Queen? Here is Hresh-full-of-questions, come to talk with you!

But he saw no hjjks.

He was, he supposed, somewhere close by the lesser Nest where Nialli Apuilana had been taken by her captors years ago. But if there were hjjks hereabouts, they were keeping themselves out of sight; or else they were so sparse in these parts that he hadn’t passed near their encampment.

No matter. Eventually he’d find hjjks, or they would find him, in good and proper time. Meanwhile he was content to wander on, this way and that, across the broken land.

This cool windy region seemed fertile, in its way. There were great trees with thick black trunks and wide-spreading crowns of yellow leaves, each spaced far from the next as if it would tolerate no competition, choking off any of its own kind that tried to sprout within its zone of dominance. Sprawling shrubs with white woolly leaves clung to the ground like a dense coating of fur. Other plants, basket-shaped ones with tightly interwoven branches, rolled and tumbled freely as though they were beasts of the field.

But if there were plants that looked like animals here, so also did Hresh see animals that might well have been plants. A whole grove of snaky green creatures stood on their tails in holes in the ground. They might well have been rooted where they stood. He watched them rising up suddenly to snap some hapless bird or insect from the air and coiling back down again, and never once saw one come all the way out of its den. Then there were others that were no more than huge mouths with vestigial bodies, propped immobile against rocks and uttering booming seductive cries that brought their prey to them as if in trance. He remembered having encountered some such creatures when he was a boy, on the journey from the cocoon to Vengiboneeza. They had almost lured him then; but now he was invulnerable to their sinister music.

Hresh had told no one that he was leaving Dawinno. He had gone around to speak one last time with those he cared for most, Thu-Kimnibol, Boldirinthe, Staip, Chupitain Stuld, and, of course, Nialli Apuilana and Taniane. But he had told none of them, not even Taniane, that what he was actually doing was saying farewell.

That had been hard, hiding the truth that way. Especially from Taniane. He had suffered for it. But Hresh knew that they’d try to stop him from going, if they were aware of what he had in mind. So he had simply slipped out of the city in the mists of dawn. Now, with Dawinno far behind him, he felt no regrets at all. A long phase of his life had ended, a new phase was beginning.

If he regretted anything, it was that he had built the city so well. It seemed to him now that he had led the People down the wrong path, that it had been a mistake to build the City of Dawinno in the image of magnificent Vengiboneeza, to try to recreate the Great World here in the New Springtime. The gods had cleansed the Great World from the Earth because it had run its course. The Great World had developed as far as it could. It had reached a stand-still point. If the death-stars had not come to shatter it, its perfection would have given way imperceptibly to decay. For a civilization, unlike a machine, is a living thing, which must either grow or decay, and there is no third alternative.

He had wanted the People to attain the grandeur of the Great World, which had been hundreds of thousands of years in the making, in one sudden leap. But they hadn’t been ready for that. They were, after all, only a single generation away from the cocoon. Under the pressures of that leap they had passed from that primitive simplicity into their own corruption and decay, with scarcely a pause for ripening into real humanity.

This evil war, for example—

A crime against the gods, against the laws of the city, against the essence of civilization itself. But he knew that nothing he could do would stop it.

And so he understood that he had failed. In the time that remained to him he would do what he could to atone for that. But he refused to mourn the errors that he had made, or those that others were about to make; for he had done his best. That was the one great consolation. He had always done his best.

“I remember the day you were born,” Thu-Kimnibol said in wonderment. “Hresh and I stayed up all night together, the night before, and—”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t talk about what you remember. Don’t talk about when I was young.”

He laughed. “But am I just supposed to pretend, Nialli, that I’m not—”

“Yes. Pretend, if that’s what you have to do. Just don’t remind me that you were already grown up when I was born. All right? All right, Thu-Kimnibol?”

“But — Nialli—”

Then he laughed.

“Come here,” she said.

She pulled him close. He enveloped her in his arms. He was all over her, hands, lips, sensing-organ, touching, stroking, nibbling, murmuring her name. He was like a great river, sweeping over her, carrying her away. And she was letting herself be carried away. She had never expected anything like this. Nor had he, she guessed.

She wondered if she’d ever get used to the immensity of him. He was so huge, so powerful, so very different from Kundalimon. How strange that was, to be swallowed up in him this way. But also very pleasing. I think I can get used to it, given a little time. Yes, she thought, as she felt him trembling against her, and began to tremble herself. Yes, I definitely can get used to it.

The shape of the land was beginning to change. For the past few days he had had a ridge of low hills to his left and another to his right, with what seemed like an endless plain stretching between them. But now the two ridges were converging to form a narrow enclosed valley with no exit at its far end. Hresh halted beside a stream bordered with thick gray rushes to consider what he should do. It seemed pointless to proceed into that apparent cul-de-sac. Best to fall back, perhaps, and look for some way across the hills to the east.

“No,” came a voice that was not a voice, speaking words that were not words. “You will do better to go forward.”

“In truth, yes. It is the only way.” A second voice, addressing him in the silent speech of the mind.

Startled, Hresh looked around. After these days of unbroken solitude the voices had the impact of sudden thunder.

At first he saw nothing. But then he detected a flash of purple in the depths of the streamside rushes. The slender tapering snout of a caviandi, and then another, rose into view. Coming now from their hiding places, the lithe little fish-hunting creatures walked toward him unafraid, holding up their hands with delicate fingers outspread.

“I am She-Thikil,” said one.

“I am He-Kanto,” the other declared.

“Hresh is my name.”

“Yes. We know that.” She-Thikil made a soft small sound of friendship and put her hand into his. Her fingers were thin and hard, quick fish-catching fingers. He-Kanto took his other hand. And from them both came the invitation to communion of the sort that he had had in his own garden with the other pair, his captives, He-Lokim, She-Kanzi.

“Yes,” Hresh said.

Their souls came rushing toward his, and a surge of warmth and friendship leaped from them to him.

So kindness to one caviandi was kindness to all. When he had opened himself in communion to the two caviandis in his garden he had unknowingly enrolled himself in league with the entire caviandi race. These two had followed his wagon for days, secretly prodding the xlendi along the right path, the one that led to the Nest. Steering him away from places where perils lay hidden, guiding him toward grazing-grounds where beast and master could find fresh water and provender. His journey, Hresh realized, had been far less random than he had thought.