At his feet lay the scattered and broken armor, all that remained, of another who had tried. This melancholy work, drawn in the creature's own browning blood and severed foreclaw, had been its death-act of remembrance, its struggle still to forge some meaning from the emptiness of its failure. It had not been mai—-he knew from the broken shell and the drawing—-and this more than anything else, thundered shame at his growing feelings of surrender and despair. He remained silent, head down, wrapped in rage. At length he looked up to study the creature's last act of flesh.
It was the image, subtly changed, of a winged chivit, roaming insects living to the south of the mai. The outlines of its frame, like the edges of a fisherman's net, were opened at the center of the body and joined shut at the limbs and single arching wing. Its left foreleg and right hind (it had only four digits in all) extended from the main in almost Egyptian caricature, drawn with a trembling hand. The effect of the whole was that of a shriveled and shrunken Phoenix, macabrely adorning the tomb of some lost pharaoh. Subtly changed, like himself….. But the thing that held him—-one strange detail. A smoky blur emanated outward from the body, like Spirit growing out of flesh. A fearful banshee image, or dying vision of the Life After? The long journey.
Aura.
Breaking away at last he continued downward, seeking the source of the light, finding passages as best he could. He tried to read what signs there were, the faint flux of incandescence, feeling called but never sure, taking what nourishment he could, for three days more. Always the strange tingling of flesh against his armor increased, as did internal body heat. And ever as he went he came across more of the striped-brown creatures, male centipedes, some running it seemed, from what he could not guess, all fearing him, all bearing the marks of battle. Yet none were ever wounded to the point of near-death, and all appeared strong of their kind. It was a puzzle he could not dissect. Their fear held his confidence, but drawing steadily downward, he felt a growing reluctance to trespass the source of their being. It seemed to contradict all fairness that the way which led to meaning, if it did, lay through a world of savage (of this he was also quite sure), sniveling insects, who had in no way raised themselves above the animal. They were mindless and ugly, and his distaste for them would not be abated. Fatigue, too, was becoming unbearable, as the invisible force that beat back on him, assaulting both mind and body, continued to grow with the light which was its sister sun.
On the fourth day, though time meant little in that place, passing only in the world outside, he discovered the reason for his revulsion. The dull, scraping sounds of armor against stone, of multitudes locked in battle, had caught first at the edge of hearing, seeming unreal, then steadied, held, and increased as he went on. Till coming to the fissure-like opening of yet another vast cavern, he looked down on a sight that twisted his spirit like rope and squeezed hard at the knots. Some twenty meters below him, as it were through a glassless window, he saw and understood at last the riddle of these pathetic creatures.
Newly hatched—-the broken, swollen webs of multiple cocoons lay many layers deep all around them—-they were locked into countless battling pairs. Each separate fight was to the death, the victor sometimes stopping to eat a part of the vanquished, gaining strength, then moved on to grapple with others who had yet survived. By such attrition their numbers had already been reduced from thousands to hundreds, to what end he could not imagine.
Then he saw the females. Huge and bloated, they sat complacently on raised vantage points at the margins of the battlefield, awaiting the final conquerors. These victors he knew, from the signs he had already seen, would mate with them and then be cast out, possibly eaten, left to die as they would, the reason for their brief, wretched lives extinguished.
He watched them in dull horror, growing to intense pity and disgust. For he knew that what he sought lay beyond them, and that its power, for good or ill, had nothing to do with them, and no influence whatever, either to elevate or corrupt. They were only here, and through some flaw of intelligence, or heart, or having no choice, they lived and died in a meaningless haste of reproduction.
He must past through them. He waited as long as his patience would hold, away from the window, not watching. When he looked in again many hours later, the number of fighting pairs had been reduced to perhaps sixteen. He crawled in through the high opening, moved carefully down the back-leaning arc of wall and onto a level with the combatants, all unnoticed. A narrow wrinkle in the chamber, nearly flat at the base, ran like a sunken path before him, dividing the battle in half. Having no choice, he began to walk the shallow gauntlet, moving stiffly, always ready for a fight.
First one pair and then another released their grip as they saw him, confused. Some, already on the verge of death, lay writhing and legless, fighting still. The four queens, each from its raised pedestal, looked on in disbelief: their sacred ritual had been disturbed. Simin moved steadily forward, staring down and backing off each male as he passed. He was nearly halfway through.