At Winter's End

8 One Enormous Thing at a Time

After the storm the weather in Vengiboneeza became warmer even than it had been before. Flowers of a dozen kinds burst into explosions of color on the hills above the city, trees grew so quickly you could almost see their boughs waving like arms, and the air was heavy and rich with scent. It was as if those three days of black skies and howling winds had been the final convulsive throes of the Long Winter, and now it was truly the New Springtime and would be forever more.

But Koshmar was troubled, and her distress was deepening from day to day.

There was a private place that she had found for herself in a ruined part of the city, a place that she called her chapel and kept so secret that not even Torlyri knew about it. It was the place where she went when she was uncertain and needed the special counsel of the gods or of her predecessors as chieftain — the equivalent for her of the black stone in the wall of the cocoon’s central chamber.

At first the chapel had been a diversion for her, a kind of amusement, that she visited at widely spaced intervals and forgot for weeks at a time. But now Koshmar found herself drawn to it almost every day, slipping away furtively in the early hours of the morning, or late at night, or even at midday sometimes instead of holding the regular judgment-sessions that were her custom as chieftain.

To reach her chapel Koshmar went eastward a little way toward the mountains, then north past a forbidding black tower that had broken to a jagged stump in some ancient earthquake, and down five flights of stupendous stairs which led to a saucer-shaped plaza of pink marble flagstones. At the far side of the plaza were five intact arches and six crumbled ones, each of which must have been the entryway to one of eleven rooms of some high ceremonial importance in the days of the Great World. Now they were empty, but all but two or three still were rich with gilded wall-carvings, strange and beautiful, of figures with bodies that seemed almost human and the faces of suns, of wraith-like animals with elongated limbs, of interwoven wreaths of unearthly long-stemmed plants. Pivoted stone doors gave admission to these chambers.

Koshmar had found out accidentally how to operate the doors, and she had chosen the midmost of the eleven rooms for her chapel. In it she had constructed a little altar and arranged objects of ritual importance or of sentimental value around it; and here she knelt in secret solitude, here she spoke with the gods — or, more usually, with Thekmur, who had been chieftain before her.

Kneeling now, she made an arrangement of dried flowers and set it afire. The fragrant smoke went up to Thekmur. Koshmar was wearing the ivory-hued mask of the former chieftain Sismoil, flat and glossy, with the merest of slits for her eyes.

“How much longer will it be,” she asked the dead chieftain, “before we discover why we are here? You dwell with the gods now, O Thekmur. Tell me what it is that the gods intend for us. And what they intend for me, O Thekmur.”

She could almost see the soul of Thekmur hovering in the air before her. Each time she came to the chapel Thekmur was a little more visible. A time would come, Koshmar hoped, when Thekmur’s apparition was as real and as solid for her as her own arm.

Thekmur had been a small, compact woman, very strong of body and of mind, with grayish fur and gray eyes that looked outward in a calm, unwavering way. She had loved many men and many women also, and had ruled the tribe with quiet competence until the coming of her death-day; and then she had gone through the cocoon’s hatch without a quiver. Koshmar sometimes thought that she herself was only a pale shadow of Thekmur, a poor substitute for the departed chieftain, though such dark moments came only rarely to her.

“The gods will not speak to me,” she told Thekmur. “I send the boy Hresh out and he finds nothing, and now he has found something and nothing so far has come of it. And there was a terrible storm, and during the storm the sky split and the lightning was frightful. What does all this mean? What is it that we are waiting for here? Answer me, O Thekmur. Answer me just this once.”

The smoke curled upward and the faint image of Thekmur swirled in the darkness. But Thekmur did not speak; or if she did, Koshmar was unable to hear her words.

Only gradually over the past months had Koshmar come to realize that she was sliding into gray despair, or something as close to despair as she was capable of feeling. Life had lost its forward thrust here in Vengiboneeza. Everything seemed to be standing still. And the happiness that she had felt in the first busy time of organizing the new life in the city had all melted away now.

In the cocoon you expected everything to stand still forever, unchanging, static. No one questioned that. You grew up, you did the things you were told to do, you kept the commandments of the gods, and you knew that in your proper time you would die and others would take your place; but you understood all the while that your life would be contained from first to last by the stone walls of the cocoon and that it would not be different in any fundamental way from the life of your grandparents or of your grandparents’ grandparents, back for thousands upon thousands of years. Your purpose was only to continue the life of the People, to be a link in the great chain of the eons that stretched from the epoch of the Great World to the hoped-for coming of the New Springtime. You did not expect to see the New Springtime yourself; you did not think that you would ever have a life outside the cocoon.

But now — whatever the occasional doubts that arose — the New Springtime had arrived. The world was unfolding like a flower. The tribe had gone forth into it. But the predestined first stage in the Going Forth was the sojourn in Vengiboneeza; and so far nothing had come of that sojourn except restlessness, uneasiness, dismay. Even their humanity itself had been brought into question, thanks to those lying, despicable sapphire-eyes artificials at the gate. And though Koshmar was certain that what the three strange guardians had tried to assert about their not being human was complete nonsense, she suspected that for some of the others the question still stood unresolved, a great anguished discord of the soul.

“How can I make things happen?” Koshmar asked the woman who had ruled before her. “My life is going by; I wish to embrace the world, now that it is ours; I feel impatient, Thekmur, I feel as trapped as though I were still in the cocoon!” Some part of her longed to leave this place and move on, though she knew not where; and yet she felt the powerful spell of Vengiboneeza and feared going from it, even while she yearned for new ventures far away.

Many of the tribesfolk, Koshmar knew, were quite content here. But they were people who would be content anywhere. Instead of the cramped and intense environment of the cocoon, they had an entire huge city to serve as their stage. They lived well — there was abundant food to be had from the gardens that they had planted here, and from the meat that the warriors brought back from the slopes of what Hresh had named Mount Springtime, where animals of all kinds abounded and the hunting was easy. For them it was a happy time. They twined, they sang, they played. They were mating and beginning to bring forth young. Already the numbers of the tribe were past seventy and more children would be arriving before long. They could look forward to rich and comfortable lives untroubled by the grim promise of the limitage.

But others were not fashioned of that placid stuff. Harruel, Koshmar saw, was seething with impatience and the hunger for change. Konya and a few of the younger men like Orbin seemed to be drifting toward Harruel and coming under his influence. Hresh, as he grew toward manhood, was more of an enigma to her than ever. And the girl Taniane was suddenly turning into a schemer, a whisperer, a hatcher of dreams. You could see the glint of ambition in her eyes. But ambition for what?

Even Torlyri seemed distant and strange. Torlyri and Koshmar twined rarely now, and when they did it was a strained, unrewarding thing. Koshmar knew that Torlyri wanted to mate; but she was keeping herself back from doing so, perhaps because she felt it would injure her relationship with Koshmar, perhaps because as offering-woman of the tribe she did not know how she could become mate and mother as well. Or perhaps she believed that there were no men in the tribe with whom she could mate as an equal, after having been their priestess so long. Whatever it was, it was causing trouble within Torlyri; and trouble within Torlyri was trouble for Koshmar.

“What can I do to make you speak?” she asked Thekmur. “Shall I make a special offering to one of the gods? Shall I go on a pilgrimage? Shall I bring Torlyri here, and twine with her, and approach you when we are twined?”

A small creature appeared through some opening in the wall, a slender blue animal with shining scaly skin, long fragile limbs, bright golden eyes. Seeing Koshmar, it paused, sniffing the air, balancing high up on its thin legs. It studied her intently. There was something calm and gentle about it, and its liquid gaze was steady and untroubled.

“Have you been sent?” Koshmar asked.

The animal continued to study her and to sniff.

“What creature are you? Hresh would know; or he would pretend to, and give you a name. But I can name you myself. You are the thekmur, eh? Do you like that name? Thekmur was a great chieftain. She was frightened of nothing, just like you.”

The thekmur seemed to smile in agreement.

“And she was one who withstood anything, just as you must,” Koshmar went on. “For you lived through the Long Winter, eh? You look frail but your kind must be tough. The sapphire-eyes died and the sea-lords died and all those other great peoples died too, but here you still are. Nothing frightens you. Nothing is too much for you. I will follow your example, little thekmur.”

The ground began to rock suddenly, a sidewise swinging motion that made the entire chapel sway. Another time, Koshmar might have made a dash for the safety of the open ground; but the thekmur held its place on the far side of the altar, and she held her place too, waiting without alarm for the earthquake to end. It was over in a moment or two. With great dignity the little creature strode from the room. Koshmar followed it outside. There had been little damage, only a few overhanging cornices of a ruined building thrown to the ground.

It is an omen, Koshmar said to herself. It speaks of the watchfulness of the gods, who have put their hands to the earth to remind me that they are there and that they are almighty, and that their plan is good and that in the fullness of time they will let their wishes be known.

The earthquake, following so soon upon the storm, left Hresh with no doubt that the time had come to return at last to the plaza of the thirty-six towers. These omens were too powerful, too urgent, to ignore. The gods were pressing upon him. It behooved him now to make use of the Wonderstone to gain the knowledge stored in that underground vault.

“Make yourself ready,” he said to Haniman. “This is the day. I mean to go down into the hidden vault again.”

Off they marched toward the district of Emakkis Boldirinthe. The morning was sunny and cloudless, with immense flocks of great-winged, long-necked purple birds, evidently bound on some vast migration, screeching far overhead. Haniman capered and whooped all the way, so eager was he to experience once again the mysteries of the vault.

They entered the tower of the black stone slab. At once Haniman ran toward the center and crouched down on the slab as he had done before, so that Hresh could mount him and strike the metal strut overhead that would cause the slab to descend. But Hresh waved him aside. He had brought a staff with him this time, so that there would be no need for him to clamber up on Haniman’s back to reach the strut.

“Wait here for me,” Hresh said. “I’ll go down alone.”

“But I want to see what’s down there too, Hresh!”

“I suppose you do. But I want to be certain of getting out of there. The last time, the slab came up again of its own accord. It may not do that again. Stay here until I call to you; then strike the metal with this staff, and bring me up.”

“But—”

“Do as I say,” said Hresh, and gave the strut a quick rap with his staff. The slab grumbled and groaned as it began to move. Quickly he tossed the staff to Haniman, who stood by looking sour and disgruntled while Hresh disappeared into the depths of the vault.

Amber light glowed. Hordes of somber glowering figures came into view along the walls, that frantic population of monstrous carvings. Hresh caught his breath in an involuntary reaction of amazement, and sharp, stale, strange air filled his lungs.

Ahead of him lay the device of the knobs and levers. He ran to it.

Quickly he drew the Barak Dayir from its pouch, and quickly he seized it with his sensing-organ. Immediately the strange music of the stone flooded his soul, distant chimes and a languorous roar punctuated by sharp stabs of brazen clangor.

He understood better now how to control the device. This time there were no storms. This time he did not soar toward the heavens, but instead extended the zone of his perceptions laterally in all directions, so that he spread out to encompass the entire city of Vengiboneeza. His tingling mind felt the structure of the city as a series of interlocking circles, hundreds of them both great and small, which he perceived as clearly as though they were no more than half a dozen straight lines scratched on the floor. Brilliant points of hot red light blazed at many places along the circles.

Hresh would investigate those points of light at another time. His task now was the machine of knobs and levers. Grasping the same knobs he had seized before — he could see the mark of his own hands’ heat on them from the last visit, a vivid throbbing yellow pulsation — he squeezed them with all his strength.

An irresistible force instantly took him and swept him up and carried him like a mote of dust into another realm.

The Great World erupted into glorious life all about him.

He was still in Vengiboneeza, but it was no longer Vengiboneeza of the ruins. Once more it was Vengiboneeza as it had been, the living city; but this time the vision was no fleeting one. It was vivid and tangible, with the unarguable density of the utterly real.

The city glistened with the hot sheen of its vitality, and he was everywhere in it, floating down all the streets at once, an unseen observer in the central marketplace, on the marble quays by lakeside, in the villas on the green slopes of the hill district.

I am there, he thought. I am truly there. I have been drawn down through the abyss and whirlpool of time like a dust mote through a straw, and thrust into the heart of the Great World.

He wondered if it would ever be possible for him to return to his own world.

He realized that he didn’t care.

Wherever he looked he saw throngs of the sapphire-eyes folk. They moved calmly, confidently, strolling arm in arm. And why shouldn’t they be confident and calm? They were masters of the world. Hresh looked upon them with awe. What great terrifying beasts they were, with their enormous jaws and their myriad gleaming teeth and their rough green scales and their bulging sapphire-blue eyes! How they swaggered about the streets on their powerful fleshy hind legs, propped up by those huge thick tails! And yet they could not truly be thought of as beasts, however fearsome they looked. The light of keen intelligence burned in the strange eyes. The long heads rose in startling domes, and Hresh felt the power of the large brains ticking within them.

A cold sluggish fluid that was like blood, but not blood at all, bathed those great brains. But the minds of the sapphire-eyes folk were neither sluggish nor cold. Hresh felt the thunder of those minds pounding against him from all sides. Merchants, poets, philosophers, sages, masters of the sciences and the wisdoms: they all were hard at work, recording, analyzing, comprehending, at every moment of the day and the night. He saw even more clearly than he had before what work it was to create and sustain a great civilization like this: how much thought was necessary, how much information must be gathered and stored and disseminated, how intricate the webwork of planning and execution. The People, with their little cocoon, their pitiful books of chronicles, their trifling oral traditions and sanctified customs, seemed more insignificant than ever to him as he contemplated the sapphire-eyes. Even when they sat basking in the stone-walled pools of pink radiance that they loved so much, they busied themselves in study, thought, passionate dispute. Had there ever been another race like this? How had it come to pass that such miraculous folk had sprung from the same stock as the lowly mindless lizards and serpents?

And why, he wondered, had they allowed themselves to die of the Long Winter, when surely they had had the power to fend off the disaster that was coming upon their world?

And he saw that the other five of the Six Peoples were represented in this lost ancient Vengiboneeza also.

Here were hjjk-folk, chilly and aloof, keeping close together in files of fifty or a hundred, like ants. Hresh sensed the dry rustle of their bleak thoughts, the click-clatter of their hard, brittle souls. It was easy to detest them. There was no singleness to them, no individuality. Each was part of the larger entity that was the group of hjjk-folk, and each group was part of the race of hjjk-folk as a totality.

From them radiated the stern conviction of their own enduring superiority. We will be here after you are gone, the hjjk-folk announced with every movement of their arrogant antennae. And it was clear that they would regard the instant disappearance of all members of the other races as a considerable boon. Yet no one begrudged the presence here of these inimical insect-people. Hresh saw them actively mingling, acquiring, trading.

Here too were the vegetals, the delicate flower-folk, gathering in little groups on sunny porches. The petals of their faces were yellow or red or blue, and in the center of each was a single golden eye. Their central stems were sturdy, their limbs much less so, pliant and soft. They spoke in mild whispering tones, with much rustling of leaves and elegant gesturing of branches. There was a soft poetry in their movements and sounds.

By what miracle had it happened, Hresh wondered, that plants had learned to speak and walk about? He was able to look within the souls of these vegetals and see the knotty fibers and sinews of true brains, little hard clumps nestling in the protected place where their head-petals joined their central stems. In his trek across the plains he had not encountered plants that had minds; but of course these vegetals that he saw were ancient creatures. Their kind had been swept away by the bitter storms of the Long Winter, and perhaps nothing like them had been capable of surviving into the era of the People.

The mechanicals were much in evidence. Hresh saw them hard at work in every district of the city, those massive dome-headed, jointed-legged metal beings. They were constructing, repairing, cleansing, demolishing. So they were the servants of the sapphire-eyes; and yet they had clear, strong minds and a sharp awareness of their own existence. Machines they might be, but to Hresh they were more comprehensible than the hjjk-folk. Each was an individual, with a distinct identity and no little pride in that identity.

A scarcer group were the sea-lords, but this, Hresh realized, must be owing to the difficulties they experienced in getting about on land. They were sleek brown tight-furred beings, tapered in a graceful way, with robust frames and flipperlike limbs. Plainly they were creatures of the water, though they breathed the air of Vengiboneeza with no sign of discomfort. Each was installed in a cunning chariot on silver treads, which was operated by deft manipulations of the sea-lord’s flipper tips. Sea-lords were to be found mainly in the districts near the waterfront, sensibly enough, in taverns and shops and restaurants. Their took was a bold and haughty one, as if each regarded himself as a prince among princes. Perhaps it was so.

On and on he drifted, and the Great World glittered about him in the fullness of its brightness. What had existed only as the blurred memory of a memory in the oldest pages of the chronicles was alive for him. For him there was no time outside the time of his vision. This was the world as it had been before the disaster; this was the world at the summit of its highest civilization, when miracles were everyday things.

He had become a citizen of that world. Moving through the streets of ancient Vengiboneeza, he paused now to bow to some sapphire-eyes lord, paused to exchange pleasantries with a group of blushing twittering vegetals, paused to let a sea-lord in a magnificent gleaming chariot go past him. He knew himself to be at the hub of the universe. All epochs of every star converged here. There had never been anything like it in the universe before. It was his great and unique privilege to be seeing it. He wanted to roam every street, to inspect every building, to see and comprehend everything: to live in two worlds from now on, to retain, if he could, his citizenship in this doomed land of the long-gone past.

If this is a dream, he thought, it is the finest dream that anyone ever had.

Very little of what he saw bore much resemblance to the ruined Vengiboneeza he had come to know. Perhaps half a dozen of these great buildings, he thought, had survived into his own time. The rest were entirely different, as was the pattern of the streets. He knew that this place was Vengiboneeza, for the arrangement of the city between the mountains and the water was the same; but the city must have been built and rebuilt many times over during its long span of existence. He had a powerful sense of it as a living, changing thing, as a gigantic creature that breathed and moved.

More than ever, now, Hresh perceived the complexity of the Great World, and felt dismayed and disheartened by the task that he knew the People would face in attempting to achieve so lofty an ambition as to equal the achievements of that lost civilization. But once again he told himself that even the Great World had not been built in an afternoon. The labor of millions, across thousands of years, had created it. Given enough time, the People could do just as well.

He ventured onward, hovering like a wraith, peering here, peering there, trying to take it all in before this vision, like the last, was snatched from him.

And after a time he realized that there was one thing he had not seen here.

My own kind, Hresh thought. Where are we?

He counted carefully. Of the Six Peoples of whom the chronicles spoke, those who had shared this vanished world in peace, Hresh had seen five thus far: sapphire-eyes, hjjks, vegetals, mechanicals, sea-lords. Humans were the sixth people. He had seen none at all. Dazzled by the richness and strangeness of it all, he had not become aware of the absence of that one race until now.

He searched the city to its boundaries; and there were no humans to be found. Through one broad plaza after another, up this grand boulevard and that, into the wineshops of the harbor and the white marble villas of the foothills he sought them, hoping for a glimpse of dark thick fur, of bright alert eyes, of sensing-organs proudly erect. Nothing. Not one. It was as if humanity was wholly unknown in this antique Vengiboneeza of the high great era.

But during this quest Hresh came from time to time upon creatures of another kind familiar to him: curious frail beings sparsely distributed in the great city, scattered by twos and threes through Vengiboneeza like precious gems on a sandy shore. They were tall and slender, and walked upright as the People did. Their skulls were high-vaulted; their lips were thin; their skins were pale and bare of fur; their eyes glowed with a mysterious violet hue. And from them came an emanation of great antiquity and power, rooted in a sense of self so firm that it was overwhelming, it was crushing in its complacent force.

Hresh had seen these people before, carved on the walls of the subterranean vault where he had commenced this journey across time. He had seen one in the cocoon itself: that enigmatic sleeping creature who had dwelled so long among the People without ever entering into the life of the tribe. They were the Dream-Dreamer folk. Haniman, all innocence, had asked if they were one of the Six Peoples when he saw them amid the statuary of the vault, and Hresh had said no, no, they must be folk from some other star. But now he was not so sure. Now a dread suspicion of the truth began to hatch and grow within his soul.

He saw them moving through the city in silence, aloof mysterious creatures, like kings, like gods. They seemed almost to float a little way above the pavement. Then he came to a building that he recognized, the dark flat heavy-walled structure that he had called the Citadel, windowless, stark, looming in somber majesty on a great hill and looking just as it did in his own time. There he found dozens of the creatures going to and fro, as if this was their special hostelry, or perhaps their palace. They paid him no notice. He watched them approach the building one by one and touch their long fingers to its sides, and pass through as though the walls were mere insubstantial mist; and when they emerged it was the same way.

He let his mind drift down toward them, and he entered into the blaze of their dazzling aura, and he sank into the shadowy cloak that covered their souls.

And he felt their inwardness, and knew their nature. And the knowledge of it struck him with such force that it thrust him down to the ground, huddling on his knees as though a mighty hand had pressed against his back.

Once more Hresh heard the mocking voice of the sapphire-eyes artificial, saying in a voice of thunder, You are not human. There no longer are humans here. What you are is monkeys, or the children of monkeys. The humans are gone from the earth.

Was it so? Yes. Yes, it was.

Thesewere the humans. These pale long-legged furless things, these Dream-Dreamers, these ghosts and phantoms floating through Vengiboneeza of old.

He touched their souls, and he knew the truth, and there was no way to hide from it.

He felt the ancientness of them. Their unending lifeline, falling backward, backward in time, across so many years that he had no name for a number that huge, millions of years, eternities. They had lived upon this world since the beginning of it, or so it seemed. He was crushed beneath the weight of that immense past of theirs, that staggering burden of their history. He looked into their souls and he beheld a vast procession of empires and realms that had risen and fallen and risen again, an endless immortal cycle of grandeur, kings and queens, warriors, poets, chroniclers, a host of accomplishments so great that they baffled his understanding. Surely they were gods. For, like gods, they were able to create and then to turn away from their creations; they could allow towering achievements beyond his comprehension to slip into oblivion, and then would create anew and turn away again, and again and again.

Surely these people, Hresh thought, must be the true masters of Vengiboneeza, rather than the sapphire-eyes whom we had thought were the rulers here.

But no. Not the masters, these humans. They did not need to be. To the sapphire-eyes fell the responsibilities of planning and government; to the mechanicals fell the burden of labor; to the hjjk-men and the sea-lords and the vegetals fell the various functions of commerce that sustained the life of the Great World. The humans, Hresh saw, simply were. An ancient race, declining now in numbers, they warmed themselves with glories out of an unimaginable antiquity. This world had once been theirs, theirs alone, and they showed by nothing more than the look of their eyes that they had not forgotten that ancient supremacy of theirs, nor did they begrudge having surrendered it, for it had been a willing surrender. Perhaps they had created the other five races long before. Certainly the others, even the sapphire-eyes, deferred to them without hesitation. Surely they were gods. Surely. Whenever he touched the mind of one of them it felt as he imagined it would feel to touch the mind of Dawinno or Friit.

After a while Hresh could no longer bear to be near them. He backed away from them as he would from a blazing fire, and moved onward, still searching, still finding.

There were still other races in the city, in even smaller numbers than the humans. They were strange creatures, of many startling sorts. Of some he could find no more than four or five representatives, of some a single one only. They looked like nothing that his studies of the chronicles had prepared him to encounter. Hresh saw beings with two heads and six legs and beings with no heads at all and a forest of arms. He saw beings with teeth like a thousand needles set round circular mouths that gaped in their stomachs. He saw beings that lived in sealed tanks and beings that floated like bubbles above the ground. He saw ponderous things moving with an earthshaking tread, and light, fluttering ones whose motions dazzled his eye. From them all came the unmistakable glint of intelligence, though it was not an earthly intelligence, and the emanations of their souls were puzzling and disturbing to him.

In time Hresh realized what these beings were. Star-creatures. Visitors from the worlds that circled the bright cold fires of the night. In the era of the Great World there must have been constant comings and goings of star-travelers among the worlds of heaven. From one of these strangers, maybe, had come the very Wonderstone that had granted him this vision.

And us? he thought. The People? Are we nowhere to be found in this mighty Vengiboneeza?

Nowhere. Not a trace. We are not here.

It was shattering. His people were altogether absent from the splendor and grandeur of the Great World.

He struggled to absorb and comprehend it. He told himself that this scene he saw was unfolding itself in the unimaginable past, long before the coming of the death-stars. Perhaps whole peoples are born just as individuals are, he thought: perhaps, on this age-old day that I have journeyed to, our kind is yet unborn. Our time is not yet come.

But that was small consolation. The deeper truth resonated and reverberated with terrible force in his soul.

You are not human. What you are is monkeys, or the children of monkeys.

The proof lay before him, and still he could not accept it. Not human? Not human? His mind whirled. He knew what it meant to be human, or believed that he did; and to be excluded from that great skein of existence that stretched backward into the depths of time was an agony beyond endurance. He felt cut adrift, severed from every root that bound him to the world. For a long while he hovered motionless in some sphere of air above ancient Vengiboneeza, numb, bewildered, lost.

Hresh had no idea how long he stood by the device in the underground vault, gripping the knobs and levers, while the Great World poured in torrents through his dazzled mind. But after a time he felt the vision beginning to fade. The shining towers turned misty, the streets blurred and melted and ran in streams before his eyes.

He gripped the levers more tightly. It was no use. His spirit was drifting upward now toward the stony reality of the cavern beneath the tower.

Then ancient Vengiboneeza was gone. But he was still under the spell of the Barak Dayir, and as he rose he saw once more the pattern of the ruined city in his mind as he had seen it upon his descent, those inter-locking circles, the blazing points of red light. Suddenly he understood what those red lights must be: the places where the life of the Great World still burned in the ruins. Wherever he saw those dots of hot light, there would he find caches of the treasure he sought.

Hresh had neither time nor strength to deal with that now. He felt dazed and weak. And yet a powerful exaltation lingered within his soul, mixed with great confusion, with self-doubt, with despair.

He looked around in disbelief at the huge hollow of the cavern: the dry earthen floor strewn with drifts of dust and cobwebs and bits of rubble, the dim lights, the half-seen statuary rising in insane profligacy along the walls. The Great World still seemed vivid and real to him, and this place only a shabby dream. But from moment to moment the balance was steadily shifting; the Great World slipped beyond his reach, the cavern became the only reality he had.

“Haniman!” he cried.

His voice came out cracked and ragged and thin, and half an octave too high.

Hresh tried again. “Haniman! Bring me up!”

There was no response from overhead. He stared up into the musty blackness, squinting, peering. He heard the sounds of chittering things moving about in the walls. But nothing from Haniman.

“Haniman!”

He bellowed it with all his strength. There was a sound as if of fine rain. Rain, down here? No, Hresh realized. Tiny pebbles, bits of sand and dirt, falling from the roof of the cavern. His voice alone had brought them down. Another such shout and he might bring the roof itself down upon him.

His nerves trembled like lute-strings. He wondered if Haniman had abandoned him in this tomb — simply walked off to leave him to rot and die. Or perhaps he had wandered away on some excursion of his own. Maybe it was just that Hresh was so far below the surface that Haniman was unable to hear his calls. Yissou! Hresh considered calling again. This place had endured the earthquakes of seven hundred thousand years; could it be tumbled by a single shout? “ Haniman!” he called once more. “ Haniman!” But once more his cries produced nothing but a further shower of fine particles from above.

What should he do? Starve? No. Climb? How?

He thought of using his second sight to catch Haniman’s attention. That was a forbidden thing, to turn one’s second sight upon a fellow member of the tribe, and thus to violate the sanctuary of his mind. But was he supposed to rot here in the darkness rather than go against custom?

Gathering his strength, Hresh sent forth his second sight.

Upward through the darkness went the tendrils of his perception. Someone was up there, yes. He felt life, he felt warmth. Haniman. Asleep! Dawinno take him, he had fallen asleep!

Hresh gave him a jab with his mind. There was a stirring overhead. Haniman murmured and grumbled. Hresh had a sense of Haniman turning in his sleep, perhaps brushing at his face as if trying to brush away a bothersome dream. He jabbed again, harder. Haniman! You imbecile, wake up! And harder yet. Haniman was awake now. Yes, sitting up, eyes open. Hresh saw the upper floor through Haniman’s eyes. That was a weird sensation, being in someone else’s mind. Hresh knew that he should withdraw. But he remained, lingering another moment, out of sheer curiosity. Feeling Haniman’s mind all around his like a second pelt. Touching Haniman’s little yearnings and hungers and angers. Discovering something of what it had been like to grow up fat and slow in a tribe of thin agile folk. Hresh felt an unexpected flood of compassion. This was almost like a twining; and in some ways it was more intense, more intimate. His annoyance with Haniman remained; but now it was like being annoyed at one’s own self, an irritation tinged with amusement and forgiveness.

Then Haniman’s mind shook itself angrily, tossing Hresh aside, and hastily Hresh withdrew, shivering at the impact of the breaking of the contact.

“Hresh? Was that you?”

Haniman’s voice floated downward, faint, vague, shrouded in echo.

“Yes! Bring me up, will you?”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I’ve been calling for ten minutes. Were you asleep?”

“Asleep?” came the voice from far above. But Hresh could not be sure whether it was Haniman repeating his word, or his own voice returning to him from the vault of the cavern.

In a moment the slab emitted its familiar groaning, sighing sound. Hastily Hresh scrambled aboard it, and it began to rise. He lay still, feeling the ache of fatigue in all his limbs.

He emerged into the upper level. Haniman stood beside the slab, arms folded, regarding him sourly.

“I don’t care if you are the chronicler,” he said. “You touch me like that again and I’ll push you into the sea.”

“I had to get your attention somehow. I was calling and you weren’t answering.”

“You weren’t calling loudly enough, maybe.”

“Enough to knock rocks loose from the cavern roof.”

Haniman shrugged. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

“You were asleep.”

“Was I? How could I have been? You weren’t down there more than two minutes.”

Hresh stared in amazement. “Are you serious?”

“Two minutes! No more than that! You went down below, I laid myself down to rest, and maybe I closed my eyes for a moment, and next thing I knew there you were, grubbing around inside my mind in that filthy way, and—” Haniman halted abruptly. He walked toward Hresh and peered at him closely. “Yissou! What happened to you down there?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look a hundred years old. Your eyes are strange. Your whole face — it’s all different. As if you’ve been hollowed out inside.”

“I had a vision,” Hresh said. He touched his face, wondering if it had been transformed as Haniman said, wondering if he looked as old as old Thaggoran now. But his face felt the same as ever. Whatever transformation he had undergone must have been within.

“What did you see?”

Hresh hesitated. “Things,” he said. “Strange things. Disturbing things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Never mind,” said Hresh. “Let’s get out of this place.”

A great weariness gripped him on the journey back to the settlement. He had to pause often to rest, and once he became sick and knelt behind a broken column, gagging and retching for an almost interminable spell. He felt old and feeble all the rest of the way, lagging behind as Haniman went bounding ahead, and then feeling abashed as Haniman found it necessary to come back and look for him. Only as they reached the settlement itself did his youthful vitality assert itself and his strength begin to return. He moved more quickly, he paused less frequently, though Haniman still turned again and again to beckon impatiently.

Hresh knew he would be a long time pondering what he had learned in the vault of the plaza of thirty-six towers. The jeering hissing laughter of that sapphire-eyes artificial by the south gate swelled in his soul until it seemed to fill the world.

Little monkey, little monkey, little monkey.

It was impossible now for him to clear his spirit of that bitter mockery. And yet he had found the key to lost Vengiboneeza as well. A great triumph, a shattering defeat, each wrapped in the other: it bewildered him. He resolved to keep his own counsel until he came to some deeper comprehension of these matters. But the treasures of Vengiboneeza lay open to him now. He had to tell Koshmar at least that much.

Just outside the chieftain’s house he came upon Torlyri.

“Where’s Koshmar?”

The offering-woman pointed toward the house. “Inside.”

“I’ve got things to tell her! Marvelous things!”

“She’s busy now,” Torlyri said. “You’ll have to wait a little while.”

“Wait? Wait?” It was like a bucket of cold water in the face. “What do you mean, wait? I saw the Great World, Torlyri! I saw it alive, as it had been! And I know now where everything we came to Vengiboneeza to find is hidden!” In his sudden enthusiasm his fatigue and confusion fell away. “Listen, go to her, will you? Tell her to drop whatever she’s doing and let me in. All right? Will you? What’s she so busy doing, anyway?”

“She has a stranger with her,” said Torlyri.

Hresh stared, not comprehending at first.

“A stranger?”

“A scout from a strange tribe, so it seems.”

Hresh’s hand went, as it so often did, to Thaggoran’s amulet at his throat. A stranger!

He gaped. “What? Who?”

“A spy, in fact. Harruel and Konya caught him snooping around on Mount Springtime a little while ago.” Torlyri smiled and put her hands over his. “Oh, Hresh, I know you’re bubbling over with things to tell her. But can you wait? Can you wait just a little while? This is important too. It’s an actual man from another tribe, Hresh. That’s an enormous thing. She can’t deal with more than one enormous thing at a time. Nobody can. Do you understand that, Hresh?”

Koshmar stood straight and tall in front of the dark rat-wolf skin that hung as a trophy on the wall of her room. Her wide shoulders were drawn tightly back, her face was set in determination. Harruel was at her left, Konya at her right, both of them armed and ready to protect her; but she knew that spears were useless in this situation. What was unfolding now was a challenge that intelligence alone could deal with. It was something that she had anticipated since the Time of Coming Forth; but now that it had finally arrived she was far from sure of the best way to proceed.

Now, if ever, she needed old Thaggoran. Another tribe! It was only to be expected; and yet it was almost beyond belief. Throughout all their history her people had thought of themselves as the only people in the world, and in essence that had been so. And now — now—

She stared across the room at the spy.

He was a formidable sight. There was an overwhelming strangeness about him. His face was a lean one, sharp cheekbones cutting away to a long narrow chin. His eyes, set very far apart, were a color that Koshmar had never seen, a startling bright red, like the sun at sunset. His fur was golden, and long and rank, not at all like the fur of anyone of the tribe. Though slender and graceful, he had a remarkable look of strength and resilience, like some fine cable that could never be broken. His legs were almost as long as Harruel’s, although he was far less massive. And there was a curious helmet on his head that made him actually seem taller even than Harruel.

The helmet was a nightmarish thing. It was a high cone of a thick black leathery material, with a visor that went down almost to the stranger’s forehead in front and a ridged plate running the length of his neck to the rear. Mounted in back at the helmet’s summit was a circle of golden metal and five long metal rays jutting upward like five spears. In front, over the stranger’s forehead, the sinister image of a huge golden insect was affixed, its four wings outspread, its gigantic eyes of red stone burning with a ferocious gleam.

At first glance the man looked like some sort of upright monster with a hideously frightful head; only when you looked again did you see that the helmet was a thing of artifice, mere headgear, strapped below his neck with a thick brown cord.

Konya and Harruel had stumbled upon him while hunting together in the foothills of the mountains. He was camped in a cave not far above the last line of ruined villas, and from the looks of things he had been there some time, perhaps as long as a week, for the bones of animals that had been recently butchered and roasted were scattered all around the place. When they found him — sitting quietly, wearing his helmet, staring out over the city — he sprang up immediately and ran past them into the high forest. They followed, but it was no easy chase. “He runs like one of those animals with red horns on their noses,” Harruel said.

“Like a dancerhorn, yes,” Konya put in.

Several times they lost him amid the tangles of the wilderness, but always the glint of the golden rays of his helmet revealed him in the distance. In the end they had trapped him in a pocket canyon that had no exit; and, though he was armed with a beautifully made spear and seemed capable of using it, he offered no resistance, but abruptly surrendered without a struggle and without saying a word.

Nor had he spoken yet. He met Koshmar’s gaze evenly, fearlessly, and kept his silence as she attempted to question him.

“My name is Koshmar,” she began. “I am the chieftain here. Tell me your name and who your chieftain is.”

When that produced nothing but a calm stare, she ordered him by the names of the gods to speak. She invoked Dawinno, Friit, Emakkis, and Mueri without success. It seemed to her that the name of Yissou drew some response from him, a quick quirking of the lips; but still he said nothing.

“Speak, curse you!” Harruel growled, angrily stepping forward. “Who are you? What do you want here?” He shook his spear in the stranger’s face. “Speak or we’ll flay you alive!”

“No,” Koshmar said sharply. “That is not how I mean to deal with him.” She pulled Harruel back beside her and told the stranger in a soft voice, “You will not be harmed here, I promise you that much. I ask you again to tell us your name and the name of your people, and then we will give you food and drink, and welcome you among us.”

But the stranger seemed as indifferent to Koshmar’s diplomacy as he was to Harruel’s bluster. He continued to stare at Koshmar as though she were uttering mere nonsense.

She tapped her breast three times. “Koshmar,” she said, in a loud, clear tone. Pointing at the two warriors, she said, “Harruel. Konya. Koshmar, Harruel, Konya.” She pointed now at the helmeted stranger and gave him a questioning look. “Thus we entrust you with our names. Now you will tell us yours.”

The Helmet Man remained silent.

“We can go on like this all day,” said Harruel in disgust. “Give him to me, Koshmar, and I promise you I’ll have him talking in five minutes!”

“No.”

“We need to find out why he’s here, Koshmar. Suppose he’s the lead man for an army of his kind that’s waiting out there, planning to kill us and take Vengiboneeza for themselves!”

“Thank you,” said Koshmar acidly. “It was a thought that had not occurred to me.”

“Well, what if he is? It’s almost certain that he means trouble for us. We’ve got to know. And if he won’t tell us anything, we’ll have to kill him.”

“Do you think so, Harruel?”

“Now that he’s been down here and seen everything, and he knows how few we are, we can’t just let him go back to his people and give them his report.”

Koshmar nodded. That had been clear to her all along, though only a brute like Harruel, she thought, would say such a thing to the stranger’s face. Well, perhaps they would have to kill him. The idea held little appeal for her, but she would do it without hesitation if the safety of the tribe was at stake.

A thousand conflicting thoughts collided in her mind. Strangers! Another tribe! A rival chieftain!

That meant enemies, conflict, war, death, might it not? Or would they be friendly? Conflict was not inevitable, whatever Harruel believed. Suppose they settled here — Vengiboneeza was big enough for a second tribe, certainly — and entered into some kind of amiable relationship with her people. But what would that be like, she wondered — friends who are not of our kind? The two terms were close to being contradictory: friends and not of our kind. Different beliefs, strange gods, unfamiliar customs? How could there be other gods? Yissou, Dawinno, Emakkis, Friit, Mueri: those were the gods. If these people had different gods, what sense was there in the world?

And would there be matings between people of the two tribes? Where would the children live — with the mother’s tribe, or with the father’s? Would one tribe grow large at the expense of the other?

Koshmar closed her eyes a moment, and drew breath deep down into her lungs. She found herself wishing that this were only a dream.

Where this man came from, there must be many more just like him, an army of strangers camped on the far side of the mountain wall. Everywhere in the world right now, very likely, other tribes were making the Coming Forth as the new warmth flooded the air. She had lived all her life in a world of sixty folk. It was almost impossible for her to grasp the truth that there could be six thousand in the world, or sixty thousand, even — all those names, all those souls, all those unfamiliar selves, each clamoring for some place in the sun. But that might well be the case.

There was a knocking at the door.

She heard the voice of Torlyri, saying, “Hresh has returned, Koshmar.”

“Bring him in,” she said.

Hresh looked odd: worn and dusty, tired, suddenly much older than his years. His eyes were in shadows. He seemed almost ill. But at the sight of the stranger in the helmet the old Hresh glow returned to his face. Koshmar could almost hear the questions beginning to pop and click in his mind.

Quickly she told him of the capture and of the interrogation thus far. “We can get nothing out of him. He pretends not to understand what we say.”

“Pretends? What if he actually doesn’t understand you?”

“You mean, that he’s stupid, like a beast?”

“I mean that he may speak some other language.”

Koshmar stared at him, baffled. “Another language? I don’t know what that means, ‘another language.’”

“It means — well — another language, ” Hresh said lamely. His hands groped in the air as though they were searching. “We have our language, our set of sounds that convey ideas. Imagine that his people use a different set of sounds, all right? Where we say ‘meat,’ his people may say ‘flookh,’ or maybe ‘splig.’”

“But ‘flookh’ and ‘splig’ are sounds without meaning,” Koshmar objected. “What sense is there in—”

“They have no meaning to us,” said Hresh. “But they might to other people. Not those sounds particularly. I just made them up as examples, you understand. But they could have some word of their own for ‘meat,’ and one for ‘sky,’ and one for ‘spear,’ and so on. Different words from ours for everything.”

“This is madness,” Koshmar said irritably. “What do you mean, a word for meat? Meat is meat. Not flookh, not splig, but meat. Sky is sky. I thought you might be of help, Hresh, but all you do now is mystify me.”

“These ideas are very strange to me too,” the boy said. He seemed to be extraordinarily weary, and struggling to express his thoughts. His hands groped the air, as if searching. “I have never known any language but ours, or even thought that there might be another. The notion leaped into my mind, out of nowhere, just as I looked upon this stranger. But think, Koshmar: what if the hjjk-men have a language of their own, and each kind of beast has its own also, and every tribe that lived through the long winter too! We were alone so long, cut off from others for hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe at first everyone spoke one language, but over so long a time, hundreds of thousands of years—”

“Perhaps so,” said Koshmar uneasily. “But in that case, how will we communicate with this man? For we have to communicate with him somehow. We have to find out if he’s friend or enemy.”

“We could try doing it by second sight,” Hresh said after a moment.

Koshmar stared at him, shocked. “Second sight is not used among people.”

“In extreme cases it can be,” said Hresh, looking uncomfortable. “We’ve got the tribe’s safety to think about here. Shouldn’t we use whatever abilities we have to find out what we need to know?”

“But it’s such a violation of—”

Koshmar halted, shaking her head. She looked toward Torlyri, standing by the door.

“What do you say? Is it proper to attempt such a thing?”

“It seems strange. But I see no harm in it,” the offering-woman said, a little doubtfully, after a moment’s consideration. “He is not of our tribe. Our customs need not apply. No sin will attach to us on this account.”

“The gods gave us second sight to help us where language and vision fail,” said Hresh to Koshmar. “How could they object if we used it in a situation like this?”

Koshmar stood silent, examining the matter. The stranger, impassive as ever, gave no sign that he had comprehended anything of this. Maybe he really does speak an entirely different language, Koshmar thought. The idea made her head hurt. It seemed as strange to her as the idea that someone could be a man today and a woman tomorrow, or that rain would fall upward from the ground, or that the blessing of Yissou might be withdrawn from her in the twinkling of an eye and someone else named chieftain in her place. None of those things was possible. But this is a time of many strange things, Koshmar thought. Perhaps it was true, what Hresh said: that here was one who spoke with other words, if indeed he spoke at all.

After a time she turned to Hresh and said brusquely, “Very well. You’re the expert on language here. Use your second sight on him, and find out who he is and what he seeks here.”

Hresh stepped forward and confronted the stranger in the helmet.

He had never felt so tired in his life. What a day this was! And not finished yet. They were all watching him. He was far from sure he could muster second sight again, so tired was he.

The Helmet Man looked down at him from his great height in a cool, distant way, as though Hresh were nothing more than some bothersome little beast of the jungle. His eerie red eyes were disturbingly intense. Hresh imagined that he could see anger in them, and contempt, and an abiding sense of self-worth. But no fear. Not a trace of fear anywhere. There was something heroic about this helmeted stranger.

Hresh gathered his strength and sent forth his second sight.

He expected to meet some sort of opposition: an attempt to block his thrust, or to turn it aside, if that was possible. But with the same cool indifference as ever the stranger awaited Hresh’s approach; and Hresh’s consciousness sank easily and deeply into that of the Helmet Man.

The contact lasted no more than a fraction of a second.

In that instant Hresh had a sense of the great power of this man’s soul, of his strength of character and depth of purpose. He saw also, for the briefest flicker of a moment, a vision of a horde of others much like this one, a band of warriors gathered on some heavily wooded hill, all of them clad in bizarre and fanciful helmets like his, but each of an individual design. Then the contact broke and everything went dark. Hresh felt his limbs turning to water. He staggered, tumbled backward, pivoted somehow at the last moment, and landed on his belly in a sprawling heap at Harruel’s feet. That was the last he knew for some time.

When he awakened he was in Torlyri’s arms on the far side of the room. She held him close, crooning to him, reassuring him. Gradually he brought his eyes into focus and saw Koshmar holding the stranger’s helmet in both her hands, regarding it quizzically. The stranger was limp on the floor and Harruel and Konya, gripping him by the ankles, were dragging him out of the room as unceremoniously as if he were a sack of grain.

“Don’t try to stand up yet,” Torlyri murmured. “Get your balance first, catch your breath.”

“What happened? Where are they taking him?”

“He’s dead,” Torlyri said.

“Fell right down the moment you touched his mind,” said Koshmar from across the room. “So did you. We thought you were both gone. But you were just knocked out. He was dead before be hit the floor. It was to avoid being questioned, do you see? He had some way of killing himself with his mind alone.” She slammed the helmet down angrily on the ledge of her trophy shelf. “We will never know anything about him now,” she said. “We will never know a thing!”

Hresh nodded somberly.

The thought came to him that this was somehow his fault, that he should have anticipated some defensive maneuver of this sort from the stranger, that he should never have allowed himself to talk Koshmar into using second sight in this interrogation.

Perhaps it would have been a better idea to use the Wonderstone instead, he told himself.

But how was he to have known? Thaggoran might have known; but he, as he continued to discover, was not Thaggoran. I am still so young, Hresh thought ruefully. Well, time would cure that. A great sadness spread through him. He might have learned new and remarkable things from this man of another tribe. Instead he had merely helped to send him from the world.

Best not to think of it.

He went to Koshmar’s side, where she stood glowering above the helmet, running her hand repeatedly along its golden rays in a stunned, angry way. After a moment she glanced at him. Her eyes were dull and sullen.

“I need to tell you something,” Hresh said. “I’ve just come back from the heart of the city. Haniman and I. We went down into a vault beneath a building, where there is a machine of the sapphire-eyes, Koshmar. A machine that still works.”

Koshmar looked at him more closely. The light of her spirit returned to her eyes.

“It’s a machine that was meant to show pictures of the Great World,” Hresh told her. “More than pictures. It was meant to show the Great World itself. I put my hands on it, Koshmar, and I used the Barak Dayir on it.”

“And could you see anything?” she asked.

“Yes! Wonderful things!”