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.

But the Great World was long gone.

What were these hjjks who had survived? Still a great race, yes. But a fallen one, which had lost all of its technical skills and all of its outward thrust. They had become a profoundly conservative people, clinging to the fragments of their ancient glory and permitting nothing new to emerge.

What was it they most wanted, after all? Nothing more than to dig holes in the ground and live in the dark, performing eternal repetitive cycles of birth and reproduction and death, and once in a while sending their overflow population forth to dig a new hole somewhere else and start the cycle going there. They believed that the world could only be sustained by proper maintenance of the unvarying patterns of life. And they would do anything to assure the continued stability of those patterns.

This is great folly, Hresh thought.

The hjjks fear change because they’ve lived through so great a fall, and they dread some further descent. But change comes anyway. It was precisely because the Great World had done so well at insulating itself from change, Hresh told himself, that the gods had sent the death-stars upon them. The Great World had attained a kind of perfection, and perfection is something the gods cannot abide.

What the hjjks who had survived the catastrophe of the Long Winter still refused to comprehend was that Dawinno would inevitably have his way with them, whether they liked it or not. The Transformer always did. No living thing was exempt from change, no matter how deep in the earth it tried to hide, no matter how desperately it clung to its rituals of life. One had to respect the hjjks for what they had made out of the shards and splinters of their former existence. It was rigid, and therefore doomed, but in its own way it was awesomely perfect.

Building a different kind of static society wasn’t the answer. And for the first time in a long while Hresh saw hope for his own erratic, turbulent, unpredictable folk. Perhaps the world will be ours after all, he thought. Simply because we are so uncertain in our ways.

He had no idea how much time had passed. An hour, a day, perhaps a year. He knew that he had been lost in the strangest of dreams. There was absolute silence in the royal chamber. The Queen-attendants stood still as statues beside him.

Once more Hresh heard the tolling of the Queen’s great voice in his mind:

“Is there anything else you wish to know, child of questions?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I thank You for sharing Your wisdom with me, great Queen.”

With quick fierce strokes of his spearpoint Salaman sketched a map in the dark, moist earth.

“This is the City of Yissou” — a tight circle, unbroken and unbreakable — “and this is where we are now, three days’ march to the northeast. Here is where the land begins to rise, the long wooded ridge that leads to Vengiboneeza. You remember, Thu-Kimnibol, we rode out that way together once.”

Thu-Kimnibol, peering intently at the sketch, grunted his assent.

“This,” said Salaman, drawing a triangle to the right of what he had already inscribed in the ground, “is Vengiboneeza, utterly infested with hjjks. Here” — he poked the ground viciously, some distance beyond the triangle — “is a lesser Nest, where the hjjks dwell who slaughtered our Acknowledgers. Here, here, and here” — three more angry jabs — “are other small Nests. Then there’s a great open nothingness, unless we’re greatly mistaken. And here” — he strode five paces upward, and gouged a ragged crater there — “is the thing we seek, the Nest of Nests itself.”