but I did grasp the torch in my teeth with one end lit and, hand over hand, lower myself down the knotted rope.
One side of my face began to sweat.I closed my right eye.
A circle of eerie, blue, descending light flickered on the walls of the passage down which I lowered myself.The walls a few feet below the level of Misk's compartment became damp. The temperature fell several degrees.I could see the discolourations of slime molds, probably white, but seeming blue in the light, on the walls.I sensed a film of moisture forming on the plastic of my tunic.Here and there a trickle of water traced its dark pattern downward to the floor where it crept along the wall and, continuing its journey, disappeared into one crevice or another.
When I arrived at the bottom of the rope, some forty feet below, I held the torch over my head and found myself in a bare, simple chamber.
Looking up I saw Misk, disdaining the rope, bend himself backwards through the aperture in the ceiling and, step by dainty step, walk across the ceiling upside down and then back himself nimbly down the side of the wall.
In a moment he stood beside me.
'You must never speak of what I am going to show you,' said Misk.
I said nothing.
Misk hesitated.
'Let there be Nest Trust between us,' I said.
'But you are not of the Nest,' said Misk.
'Nonetheless,' I said, 'let there be Nest Trust between us.'
'Very well,' said Misk, and he bent forward, extending his antennae towards me.
I wondered for a moment what was to be done but then it seemed I sensed what he wanted.I thrust the torch I carried into a crevice in the wall and, standing before Misk, I raised my arms over my head, extending them towards him.
With extreme gentleness, almost tenderness, the Priest-King touched the palms of my hands with his antennae.
'Let there be Nest Trust between us.'
It was the nearest I could come to locking antennae.
Briskly Misk straightened up.
'Somewhere here,' he said, 'but unscented and toward the floor, where a Priest-King would not be likely to find it, is a small knob which will look much like a pebble.Find this knob and twist it.'
It was but a moment's work to locate the knob of which he spoke though I gathered from what he said that it might have been well concealed from the typical sensory awareness of a Priest-King.
I turned the knob and a portion of the wall swung back.
'Enter,' said Misk, and I did so.
Scarcely were we inside when Misk touched a button I could not see several feet over my head and the door swung smoothly closed.
The only light in the chamber was from my bluish torch.
I gazed about myself with wonder.
The room was apparently large, for portions of it were lost in the shadows from the torch.What I could see suggested paneling and instrumentation, banks of scent-needles and guages, numerous tiered decks of wiring and copper plating.
There were on one side of the room, racks of scent-tapes, some of which were spinning slowly, unwinding their tapesthrough slowly rotating translucent, glowing spheres.These spheres in turn were connected by slender, woven cables of wire to a large, heavy boxlike assembly, made of steel and rather squarish, which was set on wheels.In front of this assembly, one by one, thin metal disks would snap into place, a light would flash as some energy transaction occurred, and then the disk would snap aside, immediately to be replaced by another.Eight wires led from this box into the body of a Priest-King which lay on its back, inert, in the centre of the room on a moss-softened stone table.
I held the torch high and looked at the Priest-King, who was rather small for a Priest-King, being only about twelve feet long.
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.
