'They were insects long ago. They need no vehicles, but slip like a swarm of locusts down the faults and cleavage zones of space (which they conceive of as an extensive empty wasteland littered with the stony rubbish of planets and echoing with their own dry stridulations). Their motives are unclear: instinct – or something resembling it – compels them to search the continuum endlessly for some solution they cannot even define to themselves. Now, that cold passion is in ruins, and they are trying to live on the Earth. They were never meant to come down here and build a city. It is their tragedy as much as ours.

'This was how the great aviator put it to us. Out of confusion he had offered to lead them to the Earth. (Who can blame him? – woken from apparent death on the far side of the Moon, he had found himself neither insect nor human nor anything he had once been! They were all he had to cling to.) Out of a greater confusion they had followed him. Now – totem or deity or mere interpreter – he was encysted at the heart of their new city, passing his immobile hours in the blue mosaic flicker of his half insectile dreams, involuntary amplifier of the swarm's Umwelt.

“'Already it is too late for human consciousness ever to fully repossess the World; the new dream pours out like mist to envelope and mutate it.” Yet the swarm had been contaminated in its turn: “Where once it boasted the horny membranes of the locust, the mantis or the wasp, now it imagines flesh, skin, hair. It regards itself with horror. It is losing the struggle to maintain its inner vision, its hermetic certainty in the face of the void.'

'In the grip of this perceptual stalemate the very substance of the planet had begun to fade, stretch and tear, like an old net curtain at a window in the Boulevard Auss-man. If it continued, the conflict between Man and Insect would become nothing more than a jumble of meaningless shadowy events pivoting round a decaying point in space and time. In areas of major confrontation, matter, in its attempts to accommodate both “realities”, was already distorting, drifting into new forms and miscegenations. New ranges of mountains had appeared in the north; coastlines had taken on new forms, plastic, curious, undependable, draped with a new vegetation which had come up out of the sea along the flight-paths of the insects and now assumed a grey, etiolated, mucoid transparency; vast hallucinatory displays filled the skies at night, great shifting modular curtains like the view from a mosaic eye. All this had been added to the minor symptoms already observed, the Sign of the Locust, the rains of lights. In addition, the conflict of two dreams had woken older dreams: the factories of the Afternoon rebuilt themselves fragmentarily in the Great Wastes, producing clouds of corrosive vapour; strangely-dressed figures speaking ancient languages were posturing in the streets of Lendalfoot and Duirinish.

“'The World,” whispered Benedict Paucemanly, “is desperately trying to remember itself… blork… nomadacris septemfasciata!. .. what a lovely bit of meat…

Embers settled in the hearth. The doors of the throne-room rattled suddenly, their brass motifs of coelacanths and mermen shifting uneasily in the bluish gloom, and were still. It was the wind, perhaps; or perhaps something had fallen against them. From the passage outside was heard briefly an indistinct groaning; a dull clamour far off; silence. Something was happening out there, but those within were captivated by the wavering pentadic spectre of the old airman, his voice faint and his flesh tortured by the mask which, he explained, was now his sole means of perceiving the 'real', the human world. Methvet Nian said nothing, but only watched in horror and compassion the nodding of that wounded, debased head; and gently shook her own, while Cellur the birdmaker tugged his robe tighter round his thin chest and shivered. His head ached with the cold, and with the effort of following that faded cloacal whisper. He had recognized in the spectre's antics a certain self-consciousness. There was an archness in its winks and gross nods; the narcissism of the confessional informed its breakings of wind.

'What must we do, then?'he asked, a little impatiently.

Paucemanly gave a loud belch. His image swam, retreated, and was replaced by something quite new: great dragonflies, jewelled and crippled, dragged themselves across the shivering panes while behind them the landscape heaved and humped itself into shapes nascent and organic. 'They mutate and die in the new vapours of Earth: but their breeding cells are full.'Wingless and melting, the insects were swallowed by the curious hills about them. These in turn folded back to reveal a face, brown and bony-looking like the stripped and varnished skull of a horse into which had been inserted two half-pomegranates for eyes. It stared into the throne-room. 'Oops,'it said. 'Green, brown, testing. Hello?'Paucemanly reappeared in a glutinous yellow fog, looking puzzled. 'Whatever emerges from them,'he went on, 'will wrest the world to its own purposes… testing…

Septemfasciata .…'A high fluting sound came out of the windows. One of them shattered. Glass fell into the room. Nothing was revealed except a dusty hole which later proved to contain only some gold filaments and a few small bones. (Cellur, though, winced away as if he expected some alien limb to reach out of it.)

In the remaining panes a tarry smoke obscured intermittently the greenish image of the airman. A clump of fat sinister fingers – his own – appeared, feeling their way over his face as if trying to remember it from some previous encounter. They rested thoughtfully on the mask; then with a quick, predatory motion clutched it by the straps and tugged it oW Vomit sprayed from the defaced features beneath. Paucemanly vanished instantly.

'Is the world ending, then?'asked Cellur.

'I want only death,'came the answer, a distant whisper clogged with self-pity and guilt. 'A hundred years in the Moon! Only death.'

In the windows appeared a series of faded pictures of ordinary insects, the dry husks ofwasps crushed underfoot in an attic long ago, and hawkmoths like flower-pressings in an old book. A wind stirred them. They darkened one by one until there was nothing left at all. Cellur stood for a long time in the gloom, thinking of nothing. He could not make himself say anything to the Queen.

The dwarf came in with his axe in one hand and a bundle of thin shiny steel rods in the other. He was out of breath and there was blood in his hair. He drank his lukewarm chamomile with a grimace. When he noticed the dark windows and broken glass he nodded grimly. 'They had the signal to pass the gates half an hour ago,'he said. 'We're done for in here.'

He dropped the steel rods on the floor and, with a packet of tools he took from under his jerkin, set about assembling them. It was quick work. Soon he had in front of him a half-human skeleton ten or eleven feet tall – his famous 'mechanical wife', grubbed up long ago from some frigid desert in the far North. It was quiet in the room as he coupled its metal bones. Nevertheless he paused every so often to tilt his head on one side and listen; and at one point said casually: 'Someone will have to bolt the doors. I can't reach them, and the lads out there won't last much longer.'(Cellur did not answer. Little motes of blue light like luminous beetles had begun to spill from the shattered window. They fell faster and faster, like rain. They filled the room with a queer glow which lit the white cheek of Methvet Nian as she sat staring silently at nothing.)

A distant shout filtered through from the beleagured outer corridors. The whole palace seemed to shudder. The dwarf scratched his head. After a long life his understanding of such situations was preternatural. Steel scraped on steel, on stone, as he hurriedly spread the mechanical wife on the floor so that its legs stuck straight out and its arms were set close to its sides. He did something to it until it hummed and sent up motes of its own. Then he lowered himself down so that he lay limb for limb on its cold bones. A harness fastened his upper body into its flaring ribcage; its jawless skull he hinged forward to fit over his head like a helmet. 'It is my cold companion, that I thought I would never embrace again,'he murmured. Certain levers enabled him to control it, but for the moment he lay still in the curious blue light, performing some act of memory. Ozone, and a low buzzing, filled the air. The skeleton snapped its fingers inadroitly. It shivered and stretched, and of its own accord made grasping motions; but when he moved the levers at last, it failed to respond.