Now he was approaching the chambers of Noum om Beng once more, and he felt a band of uneasiness across the chest, a squirming in his stomach. These visits were becoming increasingly tense for him.

It had not been that way at the beginning, many months before. Noum om Beng had seemed just a strange-looking shriveled old man then, frail and remote and alien. To Hresh he had been nothing but a repository of new knowledge, a kind of casket of chronicles waiting to be opened and read. But now that they were able to speak one another’s language and Hresh was coming to have some truer understanding of Noum om Beng’s nature, he saw the depth and power of the man, and the chilly austerity of him, and he could not help a feeling of dismay at the thought of baring his mind to him. Not since Thaggoran had been alive had Hresh known anyone remotely like Noum om Beng; and Thaggoran had been too familiar a figure, and Hresh had been too young, for there to have been anything frightening about their conversations. It was different with Noum om Beng. He opened incomprehensible worlds to Hresh, and that was terrifying.

“You look troubled today,” Noum om Beng said, as Hresh entered his chambers on this dry, hot midsummer day. The offhand statement was almost as unexpected as one of the blows Noum om Beng dispensed so freely. Rarely did Noum om Beng show much awareness of Hresh’s state of mind, nor interest in it.

Taking his seat before the old man’s stone bench, Hresh said, “Koshmar has asked me once again to teach the Beng language to our people, Father.”

“Teach it, then! Why have you hesitated so long?”

Hresh felt his face growing warm. “The knowledge is my special possession. I feel jealous of it, Father.”

Noum om Beng laughed. It was a laugh much like a cough.

“Do you think you can keep it all to yourself? Teach it, boy, teach it! The day will come when all the world speaks in the Beng way: prepare your people, let them be ready for that.”

Hresh moistened his lips. “Do you mean to say that all the world will be Beng, Father?”

“All that is not hjjk.”

Hresh thought of Harruel, building his little kingdom in the wilderness, and wondered how he would fit into such a scheme of things. Or Koshmar, for that matter. But he said none of this to Noum om Beng.

“Then you believe that when the gods destroyed the Great World, it was to clear a way for the supremacy of the Bengs?”

“Who knows,” said Noum om Beng, “the purposes of the gods? The gods are harsh. All striving is repaid in the end with a hail of death-stars. So it has happened again and again, and so it will happen yet again in times to come. We can never comprehend the reasons for this; all we can do is strive ever onward, struggling in the face of everything, to survive and then to grow and then to conquer. In the end we perish. To comprehend this is unimportant. To survive and grow and conquer is all there is.”

Never before had Noum om Beng made so explicit a statement of his philosophy. Hresh, taking it in as though it had been a rain of blows, sat trembling, struggling to come to terms with what he had just heard.

“Will the death-stars come again to destroy us?” he asked finally.

“Not for a very long time. We are safe from them now, and for so much time to come that it is impossible to comprehend it. But they will come, when you and I have been long forgotten. It is the way of the gods, to send the death-stars to the world time after time. It has been that way since the beginning.”

“Am I to understand from what you say that the death-stars that destroyed the Great World were not the first that came to the world?”

“That is so. Millions of years go by between each visit of the death-star swarms. This I know, boy. This knowledge comes to me from the ancient ones. The death-stars fell upon the Great World, and they fell upon the world that existed before the Great World ever was. And upon the world before that.”

Hresh stared and could not say a word.

Noum om Beng said, “We know nothing of those older worlds. The past is always lost and forgotten, no matter how hard we strive to save it. It survives only in shadows and dreams and faint images. But the Great World people knew how to read those images, and so did the humans before them.”

“The humans — before them—”

“Of course. The humans were old when the Great World was born. But the death-stars are older still. There were no humans when the death-stars fell, the time before the last time; or if the humans did exist, they were only little simple creatures such as we are now, with everything still ahead for them, and they lived through that time of death-stars just as we have lived through this one.”

Hresh could not even blink as Noum om Beng uttered these words, which fell upon him like the final strokes of the ax that cuts through the mightiest of trees.

“Once very long ago the humans had their time of greatness and ruled the world,” Noum om Beng went on, “and I think that they remembered the death-stars that had fallen when they were young, or else they rediscovered the memory of them, I cannot tell you which. And the time of greatness of the humans, long though it was, ran its whole course in the time between the swarms. The humans’ greatness came and went in that time. And then the Great World arose and flourished, and it was upon the Great World that the most recent death-stars fell. Now the world is ours and we will build something great in it, as the humans did and the Great World peoples did after them; and one day, millions of years from now, the death-stars will come again. This is truth. This is the way of the world, as it has been since the beginning.”

Hresh sat quietly, struggling with the horror of what he had just heard, trembling under the weight of the unimaginable past, which rose above him like one tower piled upon another all the way to the stars.

After a very long time he said, “If that is so, Father, then it makes no difference, does it, what we do? We may grow and flourish and build something greater than the Great World; and when the wheel turns ‘round again, whatever we have built will be destroyed as the Great World was. Nor should we think that when the destruction comes it is coming for punishment’s sake, to destroy a wicked civilization. Whether we are good or evil, whether we keep the ways of the gods or spurn them, the death-stars will come all the same. They come and come and come, when the appointed time arrives, and they fall upon the wicked and the virtuous alike, on the lazy and the industrious alike, on the cruel and the gentle alike. We might just as well not build at all, for whatever we build will be destroyed. That is the world the gods have devised for us. It seems terribly harsh to us; but the gods are beyond our comprehension. Is this what you say, Father?”

“This is what I know to be true.”

“No,” Hresh said. “It is too cruel a belief. It says that there is a flaw in the universe, that things are fundamentally wrong at the heart.”

Noum om Beng sat quietly, nodding. Something almost like a smile passed across his wizened face.

“We die, do we not?” he asked.

“At the end of our days, yes.”

“Is it as punishment?”

“It is because we have come to our end. The wicked sometimes live long, the good die young: so death is not punishment, except that we are all punished the same way.”

“Precisely, boy. There is no sense to it; so how can we hope to understand it? The gods have decreed death for us, each of us as a single mortal being. They decreed death also for the Great World; they have decreed death also for the world of hjjk-folk who rule now, and for the Beng world that will follow after. If you call this a flaw in the universe you are wrong. It is the way of the universe. The universe is perfect; it is we who are flawed. The gods know what they are doing. We never will. But that does not mean that there can be an end to our striving.”