They had awakened Tarhish Himself, and His Furnace would take them all.
“Brashieel. Brashieel!” The quiet voice intruded into his horror, and the old nest-killer touched his shoulder. “Brashieel, I must speak with you. It is important—to my Nest and to your own.”
“Why?” Brashieel moaned. “End me now, Hohrass. Show me that mercy.”
“No.” Hohrass knelt on his two legs to bring their eyes level. “I cannot do that, Brashieel. You must live. We must speak not as nest-killers, but as one Protector to another.”
“What is there to speak of?” Brashieel asked dully. “You will do as you must in the service of your Nest, and mine will end.”
“No, Brashieel. It need not be that way.”
“It must,” Brashieel groaned. “It is the Way. You are mightier than we, and the Aku’Ultan will end at last.”
“We do not wish to end the Aku’Ultan,” Hohrass said, and Brashieel stared at him in stark disbelief.
“That cannot be true,” he said flatly.
“Then pretend. Pretend for just a twelfth-segment that we do not wish your ending if our own Nest can live. If we prove we can destroy your greatest Great Visit yet tell your Nest Lord we do not wish to end the Aku’Ultan, will he leave our Nest in peace? Can there not be an end to the nest-killing?”
“I … do not think I can pretend that.”
“Try, Brashieel. Try hard.”
“I—” Brashieel’s head spun with the strangeness of the thought.
“I do not know if I can pretend that,” he said finally, “and it would not matter if I could. I have tried to think upon the things your Nynnhuursag has said to me, and almost I can understand them. But I am no longer a Protector, Hohrass. I have failed to end, which cannot be, yet it is. I have spoken with nest-killers, and that, too, cannot be. Because these things have been, I no longer know what I am, but I am no longer as others of the Nest. It does not matter what such as I pretend; what matters is what the Lord of the Nest knows, and he knows the Great Fear, the Purpose, and the Way. He will not stop what he is. If he could, he would not be the Nest Lord.”
“I am sorry, Brashieel,” Hohrass said, and Brashieel believed him. “I am sorry this has happened to you, yet perhaps you are wrong. If other Protectors join you as our prisoners, if you speak together and with us, if you learn that what I tell you is truth—that we do not wish to end the Aku’Ultan—would you be prepared to tell others of the Nest what you have learned?”
“We would never have the chance. We would be ended by the Nest, and rightly ended. We would be nest-killers to our own if we did your will.”
“Perhaps,” Hohrass said, “and perhaps not.” He sighed and rose. “Again, I am sorry—truly sorry—to torment you with such questions, yet I must. I ask you to think painful things, to consider that there may be truths beyond even the Great Fear, and I know these thoughts hurt you. But you must think them, Brashieel of the Aku’Ultan, for if you cannot—if, indeed, the Nest cannot leave us in peace—then we will have no choice. For untold higher twelves of years, your Protectors have ravaged our suns, killed our planets, slain our Nests. This cannot continue. Understand that we share that much of the Great Fear with the Protectors of the Nest of Aku’Ultan. We truly do not wish to end the Aku’Ultan, but there has been enough ending of others. We will not allow it to continue. It may take us great twelves of years, but we will stop it.”
Brashieel stared up at him, too sick with horror even to feel hate, and Hohrass’s mouth moved in one of his people’s incomprehensible expressions.
“We would have you and your people live, Brashieel. Not because we love you, for we have cause to hate you, and many of us do. Yes, and fear you. But we would not have your ending upon our hands, and that is why we hurt you with such thoughts. We must learn whether or not we can allow your Nest to live. Forgive us, if you can, but whether you can forgive or not, we have no choice.”
And with that, Hohrass left the nest place, and Brashieel was alone with the agony of his thoughts.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You think it’s really as grim as Brashieel seems to think?”
Colin looked up as Horus’s recorded message ended. Even for an Imperial hypercom, forty-odd light-years was a bit much for two-way conversations.
“I know not,” Jiltanith mused. Unlike his other guests, she was present in the flesh. Very present, he thought, hiding a smile as he remembered their reunion. Now she flipped a mental command into the holo unit and replayed the final portion of Horus’s interview with Brashieel.
“I know not,” she repeated. “Certes Brashieel believes it so, but look thou, my Colin, though he saith such things, yet hath he held converse with ‘Hursag and Father. Moreover, ’twould seem he hath understood what they have said unto him. His pain seemeth real enow, but ’tis understanding—of a sort, at the least—which wakes it.”
“You’re saying what he thinks and says are two different things?” Hector MacMahan spoke through his holo image from Sevrid’s command deck. He looked uncomfortable as a planetoid’s CO, for he still regarded himself as a ground-pounder. But, then, Sevrid was a ground-pounder’s dream, and she had the largest crew of any unit in the fleet, after Fabricator, for reasons which made sense to most. They made sense to Colin and Jiltanith, anyway, which was what mattered, and this conversation was very pertinent to them.
“Nay, Hector. Say rather that divergence hath begun ’twixt what he doth think and what he doth believe, but that he hath not seen it so.”
“You may be right, ’Tanni,” Ninhursag said slowly. Her image sat beside Hector’s as her body sat next to his. And, come to think of it, Colin thought, they seemed to be found together a lot these days.
“When Brashieel and I talked,” Ninhursag continued, choosing her words with care, “the impression I got of him was … well, innocence, if that’s not too silly-sounding. I don’t mean goody-goody innocence; maybe the word should really be naivete. He’s very, very bright, by human standards. Very quick and very well-educated, but only in his speciality. As for the rest, well, it’s more like an indoctrination than an education, as if someone cordoned off certain aspects of his worldview, labeled them ‘off-limits’ so firmly he’s not even curious about them. It’s just the way things are; the very possibility of questioning them, much less changing them, doesn’t exist.”
“Hm.” Cohanna rubbed an eyebrow and frowned. “You may have something, ’Hursag. I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it that way, but then I always was a mechanic at heart.” Jiltanith frowned a question, and Cohanna grinned. “Sorry. I mean I was always more interested in the physical life processes than the mental. A blind spot of my own. I tend to look for physical answers first and psychological ones second … or third. What I meant, though, is that ’Hursag’s right. If Brashieel were human—which, of course, he isn’t—I’d have to say he’d been programmed pretty carefully.”
“Programmed.” Jiltanith tasted the word thoughtfully. “Aye, mayhap ’twas the word I sought. Yet ’twould seem his programming hath its share o’ holes.”
“That’s the problem with programming,” Cohanna agreed. “It can only accommodate data known to the programmer. Hit its subject with something totally outside its parameters, and he does one of three things: cracks up entirely; rejects the reality and refuses to confront it; or—” she paused meaningfully “—grapples with it and, in the process, breaks the program.”