What most astonished me was that he had wings, long, slender, beautiful, golden, translucent wings, folded against his back.
He was not strapped down.
He seemed to be completely unconscious.
I bent my ears to the air tubes in his abdomen and I could hear the slight whispers of respiration.
'I had to design this equipment myself,' said Misk, and for that reason it is inexcusably primitive, but there was no possibility to apply for standard instrumentation in this case.'
I didn't understand.
'No,' said Misk, 'and observe I had to make my own mnemonic disks, devising a transducer to read the scent-tapes, which fortunately are easily available, and record their signals on blank receptor-plating, from there to be transformed into impulses for generating and regulating the appropriate neural alignments.'
'I don't understand,' I said.
'Of course,' said Misk, 'for you are a human.'
I looked at the long, golden wings of the creature.'Is it a mutation?' I asked.
'Of course not,' said Misk.
'Then what is it?' I asked.
'A male,' said Misk.He paused for a long time and the antennae regarded the inert figure on the stone table.'It is the first male born in the Nest in eight thousand years.'
'Aren't you a male?' I asked.
'No,' said Misk, 'nor are the others.'
'Then you are a female,' I said.
'No,' said Misk, 'in the Nest only the Mother is female.'
'But surely,' I said, 'there must be other females.'
'Occasionally,' said Misk, 'an egg occurred which was female but these were ordered destroyed by Sarm.I myself know of no female egg in the Nest, and I know of only one which has occurred in the last six thousand years.'
'How long,' I asked, 'does a Priest-King live?'
'Long ago,' said Misk, 'Priest-Kings discovered the secrets of cell replacement without pattern deterioration, and accordingly, unless we meet with injury or accident, we will live until we are found by the Golden Beetle.'
'How old are you?' I asked.
'I myself was hatched,' said Misk, 'before we brought our world into your solar system.'He looked down at me.'That was more than two million years ago,' he said.
'Then,' I said, 'the Nest will never die.'
'It is dying now,' said Misk.'One by one we succumb to the Pleasures of the Golden Beetle.We grow old and there is little left for us.At one time we were rich and filled with life and in that time our great patterns were formed and in another time our arts flourished and then for a very long time our only passion was scientific curiosity, but now even that lessens, even that lessens.'
'Why do you not slay the Golden Beetles?' I asked.
'It would be wrong,' said Misk.
'But they kill you,' I said.
'It is well for us to die,' said Misk, 'for otherwise the Nest would be eternal and the Nest must not be eternal for how could we love it if it were so?'
I could not follow all of what Misk was saying, and I found it hard to take my eyes from the inert figure of the young male Priest-King which lay on the stone table.
'There must be a new Nest,' said Misk.'And there must be a new Mother, and there must be the new First Born.I myself am willing to die but the race of Priest-Kings must not die.'
'Would Sarm have this male killed if he knew he were here?' I asked.
'Yes,' said Misk.
'Why?' I asked.
'He does not wish to pass,' said Misk simply.
I puzzled on the machine in the room, the wiring that seemed to feed into the young Priest-King's body at eight points.
'What are you doing to him?' I asked.
'I am teaching him,' said Misk.
'I don't understand,' I said.
'What you know - even a creature such as yourself -' said Misk, 'depends on the charges and microstates of your neural tissue, and, customarily, you obtain these charges and microstates in the process of registering and assimilating sensory stimuli from your environment, as for example when you directly experience something, or perhaps as when you are given information by others or you peruse a scent-tape.This device you see then is merely a contrivance for producing these charges and microstates without the necessity for the time-consuming external stimulation.'
My torch lifted, I regarded with awe the inert body of the young Priest-King on the stone table.
I watched the tiny flashes of light, the rapid, efficient placement of disks and their almost immediate withdrawal.
The instrumentation and the paneling of the room seemed to loom about me.
I considered the impulses that must be transmitted by those eight wires into the body of the creature that lay before us.
'Then you are literally altering his brain,' I whispered.
'He is a Priest-King,' said Misk, 'and has eight brains, modifications of the ganglionic net, whereas a creature such as yourself, limited by vertebrae, is likely to develop only one brain.'
'It is very strange to me,' I said.
'Of course,' said Misk, 'for the lower orders instruct their young differently, accomplishing only an infinitesimal fraction of this in a lifetime of study.'
'Who decides what he learns?' I asked.
'Customarily,' said Misk, 'the mnemonic plates are standardised by the Keepers of the Tradition, chief of whom is Sarm.'Misk straightened and his antennae curled a bit.
'As you might suppose I could not obtain a set of
standardised plates and so I have inscribed my own, using my
own judgement.'
'I don't like the idea of altering its brain,' I said.
'Brains,' said Misk.
'I don't like it,' I said.
'Do not be foolish,' said Misk.His antennae curled.'All
creatures who instruct their young alter their brains.How
else could learning take place?This device is merely a
comparatively considerate, swift and efficient means to an
end that is universally regarded as desirable by rational
creatures.'
'I am uneasy,' I said.
'I see,' said Misk, 'you fear he is becoming a kind of
machine.'
'Yes,' I said.
'You must remember,' said Misk, 'that he is a Priest-King and
thus a rational creature and that we could not turn him into
a machine without neutralising certain critical and
perceptive areas, without which he would no longer be a
Priest-King.'
'But he would be a self-governing machine,' I said.
'We are all such machines,' said Misk, 'with fewer or a
greater number of random elements.'His antennae touched me.
'We do what we must,' he said, 'ane the ultimate control is
never in the mnemonic disk.'
'I do not know if these things are true,' I said.
'Nor do I,' said Misk.'It is a difficult and obscure
matter.'
'And what do you do in the meantime?' I asked.
'Once,' said Misk, 'we rejoiced and lived, but now though we
remain young in body we are old in mind, and one wonders more
often, from time to time, on the Pleasures of the Golden
Beetle.'
'Do Priest-Kings believe in life after death?' I asked.
'Of course,' said Misk, 'for after one dies the Nest
continues.'
'No,' I said, 'I mean individual life.'
'Consciousness,' said Misk, 'seems to be a function of the
ganglionic net.'
'I see,' I said.'And yet you say you are willing to, as you
said, pass.'
'Of course,' said Misk.'I have lived.Now there must be
others.'
I looked again at the young Priest-King lying on the stone
table.
'Will he remember learning these things?' I asked.
'No,' said Misk, 'for his external sensors are now being
bypassed, but he will understand that he has learned things
in this fashion for a mnemonic disk has been inscribed to
that effect.'