“The hjjks, yes,” said Hresh softly. “The Presidium.”

His spirit was still with Thu-Kimnibol and Naarinta. Taniane’s words seemed to him at first like mere empty sounds, tinny and meaningless. They seemed to be coming to him across a vast distance. Presidium? Hjjks? Yes. This scheme of the hjjks, she had said. What was that? The hjjks, the hjjks, the hjjks. He felt strangeness whispering at his mind, as it so often did when the thought of the hjjks came into it. The rustling of bristly claws. The clicking of great beaks.

She said, breaking in on him sharply, “Where have you gone, Hresh?”

“What?”

“You seem to be on the far side of the moon, all of a sudden.”

“Ah. You were saying—” He looked at her vaguely.

“I was speaking of the hjjks. Of the offer of a treaty. I need to know what you make of it, Hresh. Can we possibly abide by it? To let the hjjks isolate us in our own little province? To cut ourselves off from everything else in the world?”

“That is unthinkable, yes,” he said.

“So it is. But you seem to take it very calmly. It hardly seems to matter to you at all.”

“Must we talk about these things now? It’s a sad day, Taniane. I’ve just seen my brother’s beloved mate lowered into the fire.”

She seemed to stiffen. “By the Five, Hresh, we’ll see everyone we know lowered into that fire. And then someday our turns will come, and it won’t be as pretty as it is in that little sermon you always preach! But the dead are dead, and we’re still here, with plenty of trouble to cope with. This request for a peace treaty, Hresh: there’s nothing innocent or friendly about it. It has to be a maneuver in some larger game that we aren’t able at this time to comprehend. For us to sign it—”

“Please, Taniane.”

She ignored him. “ — would indeed be unthinkable, just as you say. Hresh, they want to take three-quarters of the world away from us under the guise of a treaty of friendship, and you won’t even raise your voice?”

He said, after a while, “You know I won’t ever give my support to a surrender to the hjjks. But before I take a public position there’s more I need to learn. The hjjks are complete mysteries to me. To everyone. Our ignorance affects our dealings with them. What are they, really? Nothing more than oversized ants? A vast swarm of soulless bugs? If that’s all that they are, how could they have been part of the Great World? There may be much more to them than we think. I want to know.”

“You always want to know! But how will you find out? You’ve spent your whole life studying everything that there ever was in this world and the worlds that went before it, and the best you can say after all that is that the hjjks are total mysteries to you!”

“Perhaps Nialli—”

“Nialli, yes. I’ve ordered her to speak with the envoy and bring me whatever she can discover. But will she? Will she, do you think? Who can say? She wears a mask, that girl. That girl is more mysterious than the hjjks themselves!”

“Nialli’s difficult, yes. But I think she’ll be of great help to us in this.”

“Perhaps so,” said Taniane. But there wasn’t much conviction in her voice.

The center of the city: the familiar confines of the House of Knowledge. A good place of refuge on a difficult day. Hresh found his assistants Chupitain Stuld and Plor Killivash there, huddling over some bits of rubble in one of the ground-floor offices. They seemed surprised to see him. “Will you be working today?” Plor Killivash asked. “We thought—”

“No, not working,” he said. “I simply want to be here. I’ll be upstairs. I won’t want to be disturbed.”

The House of Knowledge was a white slender spear of a tower, hardly a stone’s throw wide but many stories high — the tallest building in the city, in fact. Its narrow circular galleries, in which Hresh had stored the fruits of a lifetime of inquiry, coiled around and around, narrowing as they rose, like a great serpent coiled within the tower’s walls. At the summit of the whole structure was a parapet completely encircling the tip of the building to form a lofty balcony. From there Hresh could see virtually the whole of the great city that he had envisioned and laid out and brought into being.

A warm sultry wind was blowing. In his right hand he held a small silvery sphere that he had found long ago in the ruins of Vengiboneeza. With it, once, he had been able to conjure visions of the ancient magnificent epochs of the Great World. In his left lay a similar metal ball, golden bronze in color. It was the master control instrument that governed the Great World construction machines he had used to build Dawinno, in a place where nothing at all had existed but marshes and swamps and tropical forests.

Both these globes, the silver one and the golden bronze one, had long since burned out. They were of no value to him, or anyone, now. Within its translucent skin Hresh could see the master control’s core of shining quicksilver stained and blackened by corrosion.

As he hefted the two dead instruments thoughts of the Great World came into his mind. He was swept by powerful envy for the people of that vanished era. How stable their world had been, how tranquil, how serene! The various parts of that grand civilization had meshed like the gears of some instrument designed by the gods. Sapphire-eyes and humans, hjjks and sea-lords, vegetals and mechanicals, they all had lived together in harmony and unity, and discord was unknown. Surely it was the happiest time the world had ever known.

But there was something paradoxical about that; for the Great World had been doomed, and its people had lived under the knowledge of that impending doom for a million years. How then could they have been happy?

Still, he thought, a million years is a long time. For the people of the Great World there must have been much joy along the way to the inevitable end. Whereas our world has the precariousness of a newly born thing. Nothing is secure yet, nothing has real solidity, and we have no assurance that our fledgling civilization will last so much as a million hours, or even a million minutes.

Somber thoughts. He tries to brush them aside.

From the parapet’s edge he looked out over Dawinno. Night was beginning to descend. The last swirling purples and greens of sunset were fading in the west. The lights of the city were coming on. It was very grand, yes, as cities of the New Springtime went. But yet tonight everything about it seemed dreamlike and insubstantial. The buildings that he had long thought were so majestic appeared to him suddenly to be nothing more than hollow facades made of molded paper and held up by wooden struts. It was all only the mere pretense of a city, he thought dismally. They had improvised everything, making it look as they thought it should. But had they done it the right way? Had they done anything at all that was right?

Stop this, he tells himself.

He closed his eyes and almost at once he saw Vengiboneeza once again, Vengiboneeza as it had been when it was the living capital of the Great World. Those great shining towers of many colors, the swarming docks, the busy markets, the peoples of six vastly different races existing peacefully side by side, the shimmering vessels arriving from the far stars with their cargoes of strange beings and strange produce — the grandeur of it all, the richness, the complexity, the torrent of profound ideas, the poetry, the philosophy, the dreams and schemes, the immense vitality—

For a moment its beauty delighted him, as it always had. But only for a moment; and then he was lost in gloom again.

How small we are, Hresh thinks bitterly.

What a pathetic imitation of the lost greatness we’ve created here! And we’re so proud of what we have done. But in truth we’ve done so little — only to copy, like the monkeys that we are. What we have copied is the appearance, not the substance. And we could lose it all, such as it is, in the twinkling of an eye.