“This is the last time we will meet, Father”
“Yes. I know.”
“You have taught me many things. But all of them indirect, all of them the things that lie behind things. Perhaps the meanings of them will burst into life in my head as I grow older, as I reflect on all you have said here. But today I pray we may speak more directly of the great matters that perplex me.”
“We have spoken very directly all the time, boy.”
“It does not seem that way to me, Father.”
In times gone past such a flat contradiction would have brought him a stinging slap. Hresh waited for one now. He would even have welcomed one. But Noum om Beng remained still. After a lengthy silence he said, as though speaking from a distant mountain, “Then tell me, Hresh: what are these things that perplex you?”
Hresh could not recall another time when Noum om Beng had called him by his name.
Out of the myriad questions that came boiling up out of his mind he sought to choose one, the most important one, before the offer should be withdrawn. But it was impossible to choose. Then Hresh saw on the screen of his mind a gray featureless sea that spread to the horizon and beyond it into the stars, a sea that covered all the universe, a sea that gleamed with a pearly light of its own amid utter darkness. There was a sudden bright spark of flame upon the bosom of the waters.
He stared at Noum om Beng.
“Tell me who created us, Father!”
“Why, the Creator did.”
“Nakhaba, do you mean?”
Noum om Beng laughed, that strange parched rasping laugh that Hresh had heard only two or three times before. “Nakhaba? No, Nakhaba is not the Creator, any more than you or I. Nakhaba is the Interceder. Have I not made that clear?”
Hresh shook his head. Interceder? What did he mean?
“Nakhaba is the highest god we know,” said Noum om Beng. “But he is not the highest god of all. The highest god, the Creator-god, is unknown, and must always be. Only the gods may know that god.”
“Ah. Ah,” Hresh said. “And Nakhaba? Who is he, then?”
“Nakhaba is the god who stands between our people and the humans, and speaks with them on our behalf when we have failed to meet the demands of our destiny.”
Hresh felt himself lost in realms beyond realms.
Despair, disbelief, confusion threatened to overwhelm him.
“A god who stands between us and the humans? Then the humans are higher than the gods?”
“Higher than our gods, boy. Higher than Nakhaba, higher than the Five. But not higher than the Creator, who made them as well as us and all else. Do you see the hierarchy?” Noum om Beng drew vast structures in the air with the tip of a finger. The Creator here, at the highest place, the great Sixth of whom Hresh had once speculated; and here the humans, some distance below; and here Nakhaba; and here the Five; and here, lower than all the others though higher than the wild beasts, at least, were the common folk of the world, the cocoon-folk, the furry-folk.
Hresh stared. He had asked for revelation, and Noum om Beng had given him revelation unstinting. But he could not absorb it; he could not digest it.
Seeking some familiar corner, he said, “So you accept the Five? They are gods for you as well as for us?”
“Of course they are. We give them other names, but we accept them, for how could we not? There must be a god who protects, and a god who provides, and a god who destroys. And a god who heals, and a god who comforts. And also a god who intercedes.”
“A god who intercedes, yes. I suppose.”
“That is the one god you came to forget, your people. The one who stands above the other five and reaches higher yet, and speaks on our behalf with them. ”
“Are the humans gods too, then?”
“No. No, I do not think so,” said Noum om Beng. “But who is to say? Only Nakhaba has ever seen a human.”
“I think I have,” said Hresh.
Noum om Beng chuckled in his rasping way. “Madness, boy.”
“No. In our cocoon, during the days of the Long Winter, there was one who always slept, who lay by himself in a cradle in the central chamber. Ryyig Dream-Dreamer is what we called him. He was very long and very pale and pink, without any fur, and his head rose high above his forehead, and his eyes were purple, with a strange glow. It was said that he had always lived with us, that he had come into the cocoon on the first day of the Long Winter, in the time when the death-stars began to fall, and that he would sleep until the day the winter ended; and then he would sit up and open his eyes and prophesy that we must go forth into the world. After that he would die. So it was said, long ago, and written in the books of our chronicles. And all this actually came to pass, Father. I saw him. I was there on the day he awoke.”
Noum om Beng was staring at him with a strange fixity of vision, his whole face rigid, his red eyes gleaming. The old Helmet Man’s harsh breathing seemed to grow louder and louder, until it sounded like the panting of some approaching beast.
Hresh said, “I think the Dream-Dreamer was a human. That he was sent to live with us, to watch over us, through all the Long Winter. And that when the winter ended his work was done, and he was summoned by his people.”
“Yes,” Noum om Beng said. He was quivering like a bowstring drawn overtaut. “So it must have been, and why did I not see it? Boy, shall I tell you something? There was a Dream-Dreamer in our cocoon too. We had no idea what sort of creature he was, but we had one just as you did. Long ago, before I was born, if you can imagine a time so long ago. And we had what you call a Barak Dayir also. There are tales of such things in our chronicles. But our Dream-Dreamer awoke early, while ice still held the world. He led us forth and he perished, and our Wonderstone was taken by the hjjks. Nakhaba has guided us well and we have achieved greatness despite our loss, with greater things yet to come: for all the world will be Beng, boy, that much I see clearly. Yet our task has been much heavier because we have not had a Barak Dayir in these later years. Whereas your people — you, boy — having possession of that magical thing—”
Noum om Beng’s voice trailed away. He stared at the floor.
“Yes? Yes? What is the destiny of my people?”
“Who knows?” the old Helmet Man said, sounding suddenly very weary. “Not I. Not even Nakhaba, perhaps. Who can read the book of destiny? I see our own: yours is unclear to me.” He shook his head. “I never thought that our Dream-Dreamer might have been a human, yet now I see that your guess has much strength, that your guess has virtue. That must be what he was.”
“I know that he was, Father.”
“How can you know that?”
“By a vision I had, using a machine I found in Vengiboneeza, that showed me the Great World. It showed me sapphire-eyes and vegetals and all the other races. And it showed me humans, too, walking these very streets; and they looked just like our Dream-Dreamer Ryyig.”
“If that is so, then I understand many things that were unclear to me before,” Noum om Beng said.
That astounded Hresh, that he should be the one to make things known to Noum om Beng, and not the other way around. But still he was baffled. He sat in silence, trembling.
Noum om Beng said, “Guard your stone, boy. Swallow it, if you are endangered. It is an essential thing. We have had to struggle twice as hard for our greatness, or more, because we have been careless of ours.”
“And what is the Barak Dayir, then? I had heard it was a thing made in the stars.”
“No. It is a human-thing,” Noum om Beng said. “That is all I can tell you. Something older even than the Great World. A device that the humans made, so I realize now, and gave to our kind, to use in many ways. But what those ways are, I have never known, and you have only begun to learn.”