At Winter's End

6 The Art of Waiting

In wonder and in jubilation Koshmar and her people took up lodgings in the great city of the lost sapphire-eyes folk.

Shattered and crumbling though it was, Vengiboneeza still was a place of splendor beyond anyone’s imagining. Its location was superb, in a sheltered bowl bordered on the north and partly on the east by a golden-brown mountain wall, on the south and east by the dense jungle that the tribe had just left, and on the west by a dark lake, or perhaps a sea, so broad that it was impossible to look across it to the far side. Warm winds blew steadily out of the west, carrying moisture from the sea. Rain was frequent and the land was green and lush. This was winter, the season of short days, which seemed to be the rainy season, and it was a very wet season indeed. But the air was mild by day and only a few of the nights saw frost, and then merely in the hour just before dawn. When the days began getting longer there was a distinct quickening of growth and the weather grew even warmer. It was all very different from those early bleak months in the first days after leaving the cocoon, when they were crossing the sad and barren plains at the heart of the continent. Plainly the time of the Long Winter was over. No one doubted that now.

Vengiboneeza itself was everywhere, sprawling, vast, incomprehensible, a world unto itself, lying under an awesome silence. From the edge of the sea to the rim of the jungle to the forested foothills of the mountains the dead city spread in all directions, without apparent plan, without discernible order. In some districts the streets ran in grand open boulevards that afforded magnificent views of the mountains beyond, or the sea; in others, there were networks of tiny alleys that coiled one upon another in a sort of desperate cringing secrecy, or high walls that were set at odd angles to block ready access to the plazas beyond. There were great towers in many places, rising generally in serried rows of ten or twenty, but sometimes — and these were the biggest — the towers stood in grand isolation above a neighborhood of low squat buildings with green tiled domes.

Much of the city, especially in the seafront districts, was in ruins. Much was not.

The Long Winter had left fewer scars here than in the unsheltered plains to the east, but there were scars aplenty. The sea had risen more than once during the winter years and had swept devastatingly through the low-lying neighborhoods. There were ancient gray waterstains on high walls and swirling carpets of sandy rubble on third-story balconies. The scattered and crumbled bones of sea-creatures lay in drifts on the flat rooftops. It was clear also that sluggish rivers of ice must have come flowing down the sides of the mountain wall at some time to fold and crush the buildings on the higher slopes. And it looked as if the earth itself had heaved upward from its depths in many parts of the city, where the pavements were vertically displaced and buildings stood at precarious angles or lay fallen in shattered segments and shards of iridescent metal.

“The wonder of it is,” Torlyri said, “that any of it survives at all, after seven hundred thousand years.”

“It has been cared for,” said Koshmar. “It must have been.”

Indeed that seemed to be true. In many places signs were visible of repair and even of reconstruction on a large scale, as though the keepers of the city were expecting the sapphire-eyes folk to return at any moment and were striving to maintain the place in fit condition for them. But who were the keepers? No mechanicals were in evidence, no artificials of any kind: the place seemed deserted except for the three gigantic guardians who sat before the gate, and they never left their posts.

“Search the chronicles,” Koshmar commanded Hresh. “Tell me how this city has been preserved.”

Most diligently did he search. But though he discovered a great deal about the founding and glory of Vengiboneeza, there was no clue to any understanding of its survival. For all he could find out, the ghosts of the sapphire-eyes themselves might well have flitted invisibly through the streets, doing what had to be done.

At first the tribe did not venture to the more remote parts of the city. Koshmar led them inside just far enough so that they would feel safe from the creatures of the jungle, but not so far that they would become confused in the labyrinth of ruined streets. There was time to risk such things later; patience was essential now, in these early mysterious days. They had had the patience to live seven hundred thousand years in a single cocoon in a mountainside. Koshmar herself was not an extraordinarily patient woman; but she strived constantly to master the art that any wise chieftain must learn, which is the art of waiting.

She chose a district close by the southern gate that was not very badly ruined. Here a stupendous six-sided many-windowed tower of smooth purple stone dominated a sprawling neighborhood of the little green-domed buildings. These she assigned to the tribe in what she thought was a clever way. Each of the breeding couples was given a house of its own. The warriors were sent to live in a group, so they would jostle against each other and consume some of the restless energies that might otherwise lead to trouble. The older people were allowed to dwell in units of three or four, to look after one another, and all the children were placed together in a house adjoining that of the unmated worker-women. Koshmar and Torlyri took the building closest to the great tower for themselves. The tower would become the tribe’s temple, and later it could serve as a beacon to lead them back to their home district when they traveled through the city, since there was no region of Vengiboneeza, apparently, from which it could not be seen.

This was the happiest time that Koshmar had ever known. There was some problem to solve every day, some decree to issue, some decision to make.

In the cocoon she had often felt uneasy and uncertain. Her powerful urge toward leadership had mainly gone unfulfilled. Since girlhood she had been shaped toward the chieftainship, and she exercised her powers with strength and incisiveness. But she had been a leader with no leading to do. Things were too easy in the cocoon. She played her proper role in all the rites, she passed judgment when disputes or quarrels broke out, she acted as counselor to the weak and pacifier to the strong and the headstrong. That was what the life of the cocoon was like, and that was what the role of the leader was.

But she had seen her days going by without real purpose, and the end of them had been coming into view with her restlessness still aching within her. Though at thirty she was still as vigorous as a girl, she knew she had no way of avoiding the onrushing limit-age. The law was absolute. Only the chronicler might live beyond the thirty-fifth year. There was no exemption for chieftains. Koshmar had often considered how it would be for her a few years hence, when she must be thrust through the exit hatch, vigorous or not, to meet her death in the world outside.

That was all changed now. Now it was essential for them all to live as long as they could, and for those who were capable of bearing young to bring them forth with zeal.

Some of the tribesfolk did not understand that, at first. Anijang, who was the oldest, came to Koshmar not long after their arrival in Vengiboneeza and said, “It is my death-day this day. What shall I do, go out into the jungle alone?”

“Anijang, there are no more death-days!” Koshmar said, laughing.

“No death-days? But I am thirty-five. I have kept the count very carefully.” He displayed a tattered old strip of leather, marked with notches. “This is the day.”

“Are you not still strong and healthy?”

“Well—” He shrugged. Anijang’s shoulders were bent and his muzzle was beginning to turn gray; but he looked sound enough to Koshmar.

“There’s no reason for you to die until your natural time comes,” she said. “This isn’t the cocoon any more. There’s room for everyone now, for as long as he can live. Besides, you are needed. There’s work to do for all of us here, and in the times to come there’ll be even more. How can we spare you, Anijang?”

The baffled and forlorn look in the man’s eyes astonished her. Then Koshmar realized that he had long ago made his peace with death and was unable to welcome or even to comprehend this reprieve. For him, for this ordinary man, this plain slow-witted hardworking man, the thirty-five years was enough. He saw no reason to go on. Death to him was only an unending sleep, restful, pleasing.

“I am not to go?” Anijang said.

“You must not go. Dawinno forbids it.”

“Dawinno? But he is the Destroyer.”

“He is the Balancer,” said Koshmar. “He takes and he gives. He has given you your life, Anijang, and you will hold it for many years to come.” She pulled him close, gripping his arms tightly. “Rejoice, man! Rejoice! You will live a long time! Go, find your twining-partner, celebrate this day!”

Anijang went shuffling away from her. He seemed not to understand; but he would accept.

Some of the others, Koshmar knew, would be confused in the same way. This matter had to be dealt with by a decree. She spoke a long while with Torlyri, devising what must be said. It was so difficult for them to work it out that they resorted to twining, which gave them the necessary depth of understanding. Then Koshmar called the tribe together to explain the new order of things.

It would be wrong, she told them, to believe that the gods had ever required early death of them. She reminded them of the teachings by which they had been reared. The gods had asked only that the People live within the cocoon in an orderly way until the Time of Going Forth arrived. Since the gods loved life, it had been important that new life occasionally enter the cocoon; but since the tribe could not easily expand the cocoon and their supplies of foodstuffs were limited, the gods had ordered them to maintain a balance of population. Thirty-five years was all that they could live, and then they must leave the cocoon to face their destiny, so that new life might enter. For every child, a death. No one, said Koshmar, had ever questioned the necessity and the wisdom of that.

But the gods in their mercy had brought them forth now into the world and the old strictures no longer applied. The world was huge; the tribe was small; food was easy to find. Now it was the desire of the gods that they be fruitful and multiply. Death would come when the gods willed it, but only then. This now was the season of life, of joy, of the growth of the tribe, said Koshmar.

“And how long will we live, then?” Minbain asked. “Will we live forever?”

“No,” said Koshmar, “not forever. Only for the natural time, however long that is.”

“Yes,” called Galihine, “and how long is that?”

“As long as the chroniclers have lived,” Koshmar said. “For they alone have lived their natural time.”

Still the faces were blank.

“How long is that ?” Galihine repeated.

Koshmar looked toward Hresh. “Tell me, boy: what was the name of the chronicler who kept the casket before Thaggoran?”

“Thrask,” Hresh said.

“Thrask, yes. I had forgotten, because I was so young when he died. Hardly any of you were born in Thrask’s time, but I tell you this, that he lived to be old and bent, and his fur was entirely white. And that is the natural time.”

“To be old and bent,” Konya said, shivering a little. “I’m not sure I like that.”

“For warriors,” young Haniman said with sudden impudence, “the natural time will be much shorter, Konya.”

The meeting dissolved in laughter. Koshmar could see that there was more uneasiness than she had anticipated: death for some was freedom, she realized, and not the brutal interruption of life that it seemed to her. They would learn. They would come to understand the new ways. And even if they struggled with these ideas, their children would not, and their children’s children would have trouble so much as believing that anything like a limit-age and a death-day had ever been imposed on the tribe.

But Koshmar saw that she could not only abolish death; she must encourage life. And so another of her new laws revoked the restrictions on childbearing. No longer, she decreed, would breeding be limited to just a few couples of the tribe, and they permitted to conceive only as often as was necessary to provide replacements for those who had reached the limit-age. From now on anyone above the age of twining might have children in any number. Not only might: should. The tribe was too small. That must change.

At once new couples began coming to her to ask for the coupling-rites. The first were Konya and Galihine, and then Staip and Boldirinthe. Then, most surprisingly, Harruel came with Minbain, who had brought forth Hresh by her mate Samnibolon. Samnibolon had died of a fever long ago. Did Minbain truly mean to breed again? Koshmar wondered if there had ever been a woman who had borne two children, two by different fathers. It was not the custom. But this was a new age, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. Had she not said that it was everyone’s obligation to breed who could? Then why not Minbain, since she was still of childbearing age? Why not any of us?

Why not you, Koshmar?a voice within her unexpectedly asked.

It was so odd an idea that she burst out laughing. I am a chieftain, she answered herself, trying to imagine herself lying in a bower with her belly grown huge and women clustered around to comfort her while a baby tried to force its way out of her body. For that matter, she could not even think of herself in a man’s embrace, his hands on her breasts, his hands pushing her legs apart. Or — how did they like to do it? The woman thrust down against the ground on her face, the man’s weight descending on her from behind — no, no, it was not for her, the chieftainship was enough of a burden for her—

And why not Torlyri?the same mischievous voice asked.

Koshmar caught her breath and clutched her side as though she had been kicked in the stomach. Warm good Torlyri, her Torlyri? Why, she was the mother of the whole tribe, was Torlyri. She had no need to bring forth babes of her own. How could the offering-woman take time for childrearing, anyway? She had so much else to do.

Still, the image would not go from her: Torlyri in the arms of some warrior whose face she could not see, Torlyri gasping and sighing, Torlyri’s sensing-organ thrashing about the way they did during coupling, Torlyri’s thighs opening—

No. No. No. No.

Why not Torlyri?the voice said again.

Koshmar clenched her fists.

These are new times, yes, she told herself. But Torlyri is mine.

Taniane said, “What did those sapphire-eyes things mean, when they said we were monkeys and not humans?”

“Nothing,” Hresh told her. “It was just a stupid lie. They were only trying to belittle us.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“Because we are alive,” said Hresh. “And they are things that never were, built by a race that is dead.”

Harruel said, “They called us monkeys. I know what monkeys are. I killed the two that attacked you in the jungle. I killed more when we were entering the city. I wish I had killed them all, the filthy dung-throwing beasts. What are these things, these monkeys, that are supposed to be our kin?”

“Animals,” Hresh said. “Just animals.”

“And we are just animals too?”

“We are human beings,” said Hresh.

He said such things as though there could be no question of their truth. But in fact he felt no certainty, only a dark morass of confusion.

To be human, he thought, was a grand and glorious thing. It was to be a link in an infinite chain of achievement descending from the world’s most ancient times. To be a monkey, or even the cousin of a monkey, was to be scarcely better than one of those foul-smelling chattering stupid things that swung by their sensing-organs — no, Hresh corrected himself, by their tails — from the trees of the jungle beyond the city’s edge.

Are we humans, then, Hresh asked himself, or are we monkeys?

In the chronicles, in the Book of the Way, it was written that at winter’s end the humans would come forth from their hiding places and journey to ruined Vengiboneeza, and obtain there the things they needed to gain power over all the world. So Hresh understood the text to say; and he understood the chronicles to mean the People, where the Book of the Way spoke of “humans.”

But was that so? The chronicles were not written in the simple words of everyday speech; they were composed of encapsulated thought-packets to which a reader had access by the powers of mind. There was much scope for misinterpretation in that. What leaped from the vellum page to his fingers and from his fingers to his mind, when he studied the Book of the Way, was a concept that seemed to mean the People, that is, those-for-whom-this-book-has-been-written. But it could just as readily mean humans-who-are-distinct-from-the-People. When Hresh examined the text more closely, he saw that the only unarguable reading was one which said that those-who-deem-themselves-to-be-humans would come to Vengiboneeza at winter’s end to claim the treasures of the city.

One could deem oneself to be human, though, without truly being human.

The sapphire-eyes’ artificials, Hresh told himself, say that we are monkeys, or the descendants of monkeys. Koshmar angrily replies that we are human. Who is right? Does the Book of the Way mean that we will come to Vengiboneeza, or some mysterious they ?

Everything else in the Book of the Way appeared to be intended for the People. It was their book, written by them, for them. When the Book of the Way says “humans,” Hresh thought, it must surely be referring to us. But does the Book of the Way really say “humans” Hresh wondered? Or was that merely the reading that the People had given the word, because they had come over the centuries to regard themselves as human, when in fact they were not?

He was lost in confusion.

He asked himself: Does it matter, really, whether we are human or something else? We are what we are, and what we are is far from contemptible.

No. No.

Better than anyone else he knew what the monkey-beings of the jungle were like. He had looked them straight in the eyes, and had seen the beastliness there. He had been seized around the throat by a powerful furry tail and nearly done to death. He had heard their cackling gibberish. With all his soul he detested them; and with all his soul he prayed that the artificials had been lying, that there was not even the most distant of kinships between his people and the monkeys of the jungle.

He told himself fiercely that he and his people were human beings, just as Koshmar insisted. But he wished he could be as sure of that as she seemed to be. He wished he had some proof. Until then he must live in doubt and torment.

The People shared Vengiboneeza with other, smaller creatures, some of them very troublesome.

The monkeys of the jungle occasionally entered, dancing along the high ledges and cornices of the nearby buildings and tossing things at those below — pebbles, pellets of dung, little prickle-edged scarlet berries that burned like hot coals. Serpents with ruffled green mantles behind their heads were everywhere, coiling sleepily between rocks, but now and again uncoiling to hiss and strike. The girl Bonlai was bitten, and also the young warrior Bruikkos, and both were ill for many days, feverish and pain-racked, despite the medications and spells that Torlyri used on them.

Salaman, prowling between two slope-roofed three-sided alabaster buildings a hundred paces behind the main tower, came upon a slab in the ground with a metal ring set into it, and made the mistake of tugging on it. The slab lifted easily, and immediately a horde of gleaming iridescent blue-and-gold creatures no larger than a thumb came swarming up from the depths of the earth. Their eyes were huge and glittered like fiery red jewels, and their clacking little jaws were sharp as blades. Salaman endured a dozen bites, from each of which blood began to stream. He yelled in pain and Sachkor and Moarn came running, and the three of them were able to free him of his attackers, but by then the small beasts were everywhere. Their bodies were soft, though, and easily smashed by a blow from a broom of straw. An hour’s work by half a dozen of the tribe and all of them were dead. During the night unseen scavengers gathered the hundreds of pulpy little corpses from the plaza and by dawn none were to be seen.

Each day brought some new annoyance. There were stinging insects of many kinds, small and difficult and persistent. There were venomous little lizards that sang soft hissing sounds. There were birds with filmy tapering wings and pale, delicate blue bills that perched in high trees and bombarded anyone who passed beneath them with a shining sticky spittle that raised painful welts wherever it struck.

All in all, though, the city was not an unpleasant place to be. There were some who said that life here was almost as good as dwelling in the cocoon. And others declared that life in Vengiboneeza, for all its little annoyances and the strangeness of an existence beneath the terrifying open sky, was in truth to be preferred to the old days in the snug burrow in the heart of the mountain.

One day in the fifth week of their stay in Vengiboneeza, Koshmar called Hresh to her and said, “Tomorrow you and Konya will begin to explore the city.”

“Konya? Why Konya?”

“Did you expect to go out alone? We can’t risk losing you, Hresh.”

That was maddening. He had assumed that when Koshmar finally sent him out into Vengiboneeza he would be able to move at his own pace, thinking his own thoughts and poking his nose wherever he felt like poking it, without having to put up with some great hulking impatient warrior who had been given the job of protecting him. He argued, but it was useless. The sapphire-eyes folk, Koshmar said, might have filled the city full of deathtraps; or perhaps the outlying districts were occupied by the screeching monkeys, or some new kind of noxious insect or reptile with a poisonous bite. He was too valuable to the tribe. She would take no chances. One of the warriors would accompany him. Either that, she told him, or he could stay in the settlement and let the older and stronger men do the exploring without him.

Hresh was wise enough now to know when he could try to oppose Koshmar’s decisions and when it was best simply to abide by her wishes. He let the issue drop.

When morning came the day was warm and bright, with low-hanging mists quickly burning off. “Which way do you plan to go?” Konya asked, as they stood in the plaza before the great tower.

Hresh had no plan. But he peered in his most serious way to the right and to the left, as though deep in contemplation, and then pointed his forefinger straight ahead, toward a broad and awesome boulevard that seemed to lead to one of the grandest sectors of the city.

“That way,” he said.

In the beginning Konya walked ahead of him, stamping his foot against the pavement to see if it would hold their weight, peering into doorways and down alleys in search of hidden enemies, prodding with the butt of his spear against the sides of buildings to make certain that they would not topple as he and Hresh went past. But after a while, when it was obvious that no lurking beasts were waiting to spring, that the streets would not give way beneath them or buildings come tumbling down, Hresh began to sprint ahead, going wherever his curiosity took him, and Konya made no objection.

To Hresh it was like entering an enchanted world. He was dizzy with excitement and his eyes flickered so wildly from one thing to another that his head began to throb. He wanted to take in everything at once, in a single greedy gulp.

He saw buildings everywhere whose grandeur and massive forms took his breath away. The Great World seemed almost still to be alive. Any moment, he imagined, sapphire-eyes or vegetals or sea-lords might come sauntering out of that building of swooping parapets over there, or this one that rose in delicate filigreed arches that looked like frozen music, or that one of the yellow towers and wide-jutting wings.

“In here,” he called to Konya. “No, this one! No, this looks better yet! What do you think, Konya?”

“Whichever you want,” the warrior said stolidly. “They all look good to me.”

Hresh grinned. “We’re going to find all sorts of marvelous things. The chronicles say so. Everything’s been preserved, the miraculous machines that the Great World used. We’re going to find it all sitting right where the sapphire-eyes left it when the death-stars came.”

But very quickly Hresh found out that it was not like that at all.

Many of the buildings that appeared so amazingly well preserved on the outside were mere ruins within. Some were empty shells, containing nothing more than a trickle of ancient dust. Others had collapsed inside so that one floor lay piled upon another in chaos, and it would have taken an army of strong diggers to penetrate the mounds of debris. In others, seemingly intact facades and cabinets came apart at the lightest touch, dissolving into clouds of dark vapor when Hresh approached them.

“We should be going back now,” said Konya finally, as the purple shadows of afternoon began to gather.

“But we haven’t found anything!”

“There’ll be other days,” Konya told him.

It was intensely embarrassing to return from the expedition empty-handed. Hresh could scarcely bear to look at Koshmar’s face as he made his report.

“Nothing?” Koshmar said.

“Nothing,” said Hresh, mumbling sheepishly. “Not yet.”

“Well, there’ll be other days,” said Koshmar.

He went out nearly every day, except when it rained. Usually it was Konya who went with him, sometimes Staip; never Harruel, for he was too huge, too overbearing, and Hresh told Koshmar bluntly that he would never be able to accomplish anything with Harruel breathing down his neck. Hresh would have preferred not to have Konya or Staip with him either, but Koshmar absolutely forbade that, and grudgingly he had to admit that she was right not to let him go off into the city alone. Hardly anyone else in the tribe knew how to read at all, let alone how to interpret the chronicles. If anything happened to him the People would be left helpless, cut adrift from all knowledge of the past and any hope of comprehending what the future might hold.

After a time, when some of Koshmar’s fears of the city’s dangers had subsided, he went out sometimes with Orbin as his companion. Orbin, though no older than Hresh, had always been bigger and sturdier, and now he was growing so fast that it looked as if he would be as big and strong as Harruel himself before many more years had gone by. Later still, Hresh took Haniman as his companion and bodyguard. To everyone’s surprise, Haniman too was growing tall and strong, and even in a way agile. He had become very unlike the Haniman Hresh had known in the cocoon, slow and pudgy and clumsy and, so it seemed, irritatingly stupid. The trek across the continent appeared to have transformed him, or, Hresh thought, perhaps there had been more to Haniman all along than he had been willing to see.

It made no difference who he went with, Konya or Staip, Orbin or Haniman, or where in the city he went, north or south, east or west. To his shame and consternation he could discover nothing of any imaginable value, only an occasional useless scrap of twisted metal or bit of dull glass.

“You look sad,” Taniane said. “It’s very disappointing, isn’t it?”

“There’s plenty out there. I’ll start finding things soon.”

“I know you will.” Taniane seemed very interested in his explorations. He wondered why. Perhaps he had underestimated her, too. She was taller than he was, now, growing up fast, and her mind seemed to be broadening, deepening, extending itself. There was an unusual expression about her eyes, a strange searching gleam that seemed to hint at hidden complexities. It was as if her coltish girlishness were only a mask for something more somber and strange. One day she asked him to teach her how to read, which surprised him greatly. He began to give her lessons. There was unexpected pleasure in going off with her to some quiet place and explaining the mysteries of the holy craft. But then a little while afterward Haniman expressed interest in learning how to read also, which spoiled everything. Hresh could hardly refuse him, but that was the end of his going off alone with Taniane, for there was no time to give each of them private instruction; and after a time he began to think that Haniman had asked Hresh to teach him to read for precisely that reason.

The great round of the seasons moved on. The mild rainy winter gave way to a drier, hotter time, and then a time of cooler east winds fore-tokening the return of winter. Resolutely Hresh went on searching the ruined city. Through one dark empty dusty shell of a building after another he prowled, finding nothing. He seethed with impatience. He wondered if he would ever find anything worthwhile at all.

It was beginning to seem as though Vengiboneeza was entirely useless.

What about the prophecy of the Book of the Way? Was it only a lie and a deception? Suppose he never discovered a thing in these ruins, as was beginning to seem likely? Did that mean, then, that the treasures of the city truly were reserved only for the real humans, whoever and wherever they might be? And that the People were in fact nothing more than glorified monkeys who had intruded where they did not belong?

Hresh fought bitterly against that dismal conclusion. But again and again it came swimming up from the depths of his mind to plague him.

He searched on and on, ranging farther and farther from the home settlement. Often now he went too far to return in a single day, and he begged and won permission to pitch camp overnight at some distant site of exploration. For those journeys he had to take two bodyguards, usually Orbin and Haniman, so that one might remain awake, sitting sentry through the dark hours. But they never encountered danger, though occasionally some wandering animal of the jungle browsed by, and once or twice a flock of monkeys went noisily through the upper stories of the buildings around them, swinging hand to hand in and out of empty windows and leaping wildly from one tower to another.

The size and complexity of the city still bewildered him, but after nearly a year Hresh knew it far better than any of the others. He was the only one for whom Vengiboneeza was something other than a wholly incomprehensible maze. He divided the city into zones, naming each sector for one of the Five Heavenly Ones, and subdividing each of the five into ten lesser zones that he named for members of the tribe. Then he drew a simple map which he carried with him at all times: a roughly sketched outline on an old strip of parchment.

Taniane saw it once, when he took it by accident from his sash. “What’s that?” she asked. “Are you learning how to draw pictures now?”

“It isn’t anything important.”

“Can I took?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I won’t make fun of it, I promise.”

“It’s — a sacred thing,” he said lamely. “Something only the chronicler can look at.”

He wondered why he had told her that. There was nothing sacred about the map. Indeed, not only was there no reason to conceal it from her, but he knew that he probably should make copies of it, so that the others could at least begin to gain some understanding of the city. But somehow he found himself reluctant. The map gave him power over the city, and power too over the rest of the tribe. The pleasure he took in his private knowledge of it was not, Hresh knew, particularly admirable. But it was real pleasure all the same and he prized it.

On a day in early winter when he felt oppressed to the depths of his soul by the disappointment and frustration of his fruitless search, Hresh returned to the main southern gate, where he had encountered the three gigantic artificials that the sapphire-eyes had left behind. They stood just where they had been, near the great pillars of green stone, silent, motionless, majestic.

He walked around them until he stood before them. He stared up at them without fear or awe this time.

“If you were anything more than machines,” he said, “you’d know that you’ve been wasting your time standing guard here all these thousands of years.”

The one on the left looked at him with something like amusement in its huge shining blue eyes.

“Is that the truth, little monkey?”

“You mustn’t call me that! I’m a human! A human!” Hresh pointed angrily at the center sapphire-eyes, the one who had finally granted Koshmar and her people permission to enter the city. “You admitted it yourself! ‘You are the humans now,’ you told us.”

“Yes. That is correct,” said the center sapphire-eyes. “You are the humans now.”

“Do you hear that?” Hresh said to the left-hand one.

“I do. And I agree: you are the humans now. For whatever that may be worth to you. But why do you say we have wasted our time, little monkey?”

Hresh fought back his annoyance.

“Because,” he said frostily, “you guard an empty city. Our books say that useful things are supposed to be stored here. But there’s nothing but ruined buildings, calamity, chaos, dust, trash.”

“Your books are correct,” said the center one.

“I’ve searched everywhere. There’s nothing. The buildings are empty. One good sneeze would bring half the place toppling down.”

“You should search more deeply,” said the left-hand sapphire-eyes.

“And search with that which can help you find what you seek,” said the right-hand one, speaking for the first time.

“I don’t understand. Tell me what you mean.”

The hissing sound of their laughter showered down about him.

“Little monkey!” said the left-hand one, almost affectionately. “Ah, impatient little monkey!”

“Tell me!”

But all he could get from them was the hissing of their laughter, and their indulgent, patronizing crocodile smiles.

Hresh was with Haniman, a month or two afterward, in the sector of the city that he called Emakkis Boldirinthe, when finally he made his first discovery of a working artifact out of the Great World.

Emakkis Boldirinthe was a northern district of extraordinary grace and beauty, midway between the sea and the foothills, where three dozen slender tapering towers of dark blue marble were arrayed in a circle around a broad plaza paved with shining black flagstones. The windows of the towers were intact in their triangular frames, yielding a dazzling pink glint as they reflected the light of late afternoon. Intricately carved metal doors twice the height of a man rested still on their massive hinges, seemingly ready to swing open at a touch. The buildings looked as if they had been abandoned only the day before yesterday. Staring at them in wonder, Hresh felt the weight of the inconceivable ages pressing down on him, a sense that all time was compressed into this single moment. A prickling sensation ran along the back of his neck, as though myriad invisible eyes were watching him.

“What do you think?” Haniman asked. “Do we try to go inside?”

They had been searching all day. A wet wind was blowing. Hresh felt weary and dispirited.

“I’ve already been in them,” he said, though it was untrue. Several times now he had seen these towers at a distance, and once had come this close to them; but in a perverse way their very intactness had discouraged him from trying to enter. Somehow there had seemed no point in it. They would be as empty as all the rest; and his disappointment would be all the more keen because they seemed so well preserved.

“You have? All of them? Every single one?”

“Do you doubt me?” Hresh said sourly.

“It’s just that there are so many — and there’s always the chance that one of them somewhere around the circle will have something, anything—”

“All right,” Hresh said. He lacked heart for sustaining the lie any longer. It was only his weariness, he thought, that made him not want to peer inside these buildings, he who had explored so many less promising places. Hresh who called himself Hresh-full-of-questions and Hresh-of-the-answers should not need to be urged by the likes of Haniman to undertake this exploration now. “We’ll give them a look. And then we’ll call it a day.”

Haniman shrugged.

“I’ll go first,” he said.

Without waiting for permission from Hresh he loped toward the nearest tower and stood for a moment in front of its great door. Then he flung his arms out as far as they would go, as though he were trying to embrace the building, and pressed himself against it, pushing hard. The door rose so swiftly that Haniman, with a shout of surprise, tumbled forward into the vestibule and vanished in the darkness within.

Hresh rushed after him. By a long shaft of light he saw Haniman sprawling face down just inside the door.

“Are you all right?” Hresh called.

He watched Haniman slowly pick himself up, dust himself off, stare upward. Hresh followed Haniman’s gaze and gasped. The building was hollow within, a great dark open space containing nothing but a spiraling arrangement of thin metal struts and tubes that began a few feet from the ground and ran in leaping zigzags from wall to wall, higher and higher, in a design so complex that it dizzied him to trace its pattern. At first he could track it only for a few stories, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that the crisscrossing structures went up and up and up, possibly to the very top of the tower. It was like a great web. Hresh wondered whether some enormous quivering spider waited for them in the remote upper reaches. But this was a web of metal, unquestionably metal, shining airy silvery stuff, cool and smooth to his hand.

“Should we climb it?” Haniman said.

Hresh shook his head. “Let’s try to see what sort of place this is meant to be, first.”

He reached up and tapped the strut nearest him. It rang with a rich musical tone, deep and astonishingly beautiful, that rose slowly and solemnly to the next layer of the web and the next, and the next, touching off reverberations at each level. Wondrous shimmering sounds echoed all about them, growing steadily in intensity as they penetrated the higher reaches of the tower, until they became a deafening roar that filled the entire interior of the building.

Hresh stared in wonder and in delight, and in fear, too, thinking that in another moment the tone would succeed in reaching the top and under the force of that tremendous climactic clamor the entire structure might come crashing down.

But all that happened was that the tone, after it had attained a breath-taking mind-filling peak of volume, rapidly began to grow fainter and more delicate again. In moments it faded away entirely, leaving them in startling silence.

“Light your torch,” Hresh said. “I want to see what’s on the far side.”

Cautiously they circled the interior of the building, staying close to the line of the outer wall. But the shimmering metal structure overhead seemed to be the only thing the building contained. At ground level there was nothing remarkable anywhere. The floor was bare brown dirt, dry and hard. When they came around to the entrance again Hresh, beckoning to Haniman, stepped outside, and they crossed the plaza to the next building in the circle. It was identical inside to the first, intricate metalwork within a dark hollow shell. So was the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Not until they reached the tenth building in the series did they come upon anything that was different.

This one had a rectangular slab of glossy black stone, the same kind of stone that had been used to pave the plaza outside, set flush with the ground in the center of its bare floor. It could have been some sort of altar; or perhaps it was the hatch covering a subterranean chamber.

You should search more deeply,the sapphire-eyes’ artificial had said.

Hresh scowled and shook his head. Surely the creature hadn’t meant anything so stupidly literal as to look underground.

He knelt and rubbed his hand over the rectangle of black stone. It was cool and very smooth, like some sort of dark glass, and it bore no inscriptions that Hresh could see, or even the traces of them. Stepping out into the middle of it, he looked up into the dizzying strutwork overhead. Here in the center of the tower the lowest struts were just beyond his reach.

“Come here and crouch down,” Hresh said. “I want to try something.”

Haniman obligingly went to his knees. Hresh scrambled to Haniman’s shoulders and told him to rise; and when Haniman stood erect Hresh gave the nearest metal strut a sharp two-fingered tap that set the whole building to ringing with brilliant echoing tones.

At once the black rectangular slab responded with a deep groaning sound and a kind of mechanical sigh; and then it began to move, gliding slowly downward.

“Hresh?”

“Steady,” Hresh said. “Here. Let me down.” He jumped from Haniman’s back and stood stiffly beside him, uneasily struggling to maintain his balance as the stone block went on unhurriedly descending, seeming to float, down and down and down through the darkness.

Finally it came to rest. Sudden amber light glowed about them. Hresh looked around. They were at the lowest level of a high-vaulted cavern that seemed to stretch away through the depths of the earth forever. Its roof was lost in the shadows far overhead. The air was stale and dry, with a sharp stabbing quality to it that reminded Hresh of the cold air in the first days after they had left the cocoon, although it was not cold in this place.

To the right and to the left along the cavern walls and rising as far as he could see was a great clutter of graven images, huge carvings half shrouded in darkness, climbing in tier upon tier. It was difficult at first to make out the shapes that were portrayed, but gradually Hresh began to discern that they were sapphire-eyes folk, mainly, carved from some green stone in high relief, their heavy jutting jaws and rounded bellies savagely exaggerated. The figures were grotesque, bizarre, with an aspect that was both comic and terrifying. Some were enormously fat, or had absurdly elongated limbs, or eyes as big across as a dozen saucers. Many of them had five or six smaller versions of themselves sprouting like boils from their bellies or shoulders. Their sinister daggerlike teeth were bared. Silent laughter seemed to boom from their gaping mouths.

But the statues that rose in uncountable numbers on both sides of them were not only those of sapphire-eyes. There was a whole world here — a cosmos, even — dense, congested, statue upon statue in crazy profusion, all manner of beings packed tightly together in crowded groups.

Here and there Hresh saw the carved figures of hjjk-men interspersed with the sapphire-eyes, and some dome-headed mechanicals not very different from the ones the tribe had found rusting in the lowlands just beyond the mountains of scarlet rock, and other creatures that looked like walking shrubs, with petals for faces and leafy branches for arms and legs.

“What are those?” Haniman asked.

“Vegetals, I think. A tribe of the Great World that perished in the Long Winter.”

“And those?” said Haniman. He pointed to a group of pale elongated beings that reminded Hresh very much of Ryyig Dream-Dreamer, that strange hairless creature who had dwelled in slumber in the cocoon for, so it was said, hundreds of thousands of years. These walked upright on two long thin legs and looked something like the people of the tribe, but they had no fur and no sensing-organs, and their attenuated bodies, even in stone, seemed flimsy and soft.

Hresh stared a long while at them.

“I don’t know what they’re supposed to be,” he said finally.

“They’re like the Dream-Dreamer, aren’t they?”

“I thought so too.”

“A whole race of Dream-Dreamers.”

Hresh pondered that. “Why not? Before the Long Winter, all sorts of beings may have lived on Earth.”

“So Dream-Dreamers were one of the Six Peoples of the Great World that the chronicles talk about?” Haniman began to count on his fingers. “Sapphire-eyes, sea-lords, hjjks, vegetals, humans — that’s five—”

“You left out mechanicals,” said Hresh.

“Right. That’s all six, then. So who were the Dream-Dreamers?”

“From some other star, maybe. There were all sorts of people here from other stars in those days.”

“What was somebody from another star doing living in our cocoon?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“There’s a lot you seem not to know, isn’t there?”

“You ask too many questions,” said Hresh irritably.

“Ah, but you are Hresh-of-the-answers.”

“Ask me this one another time, will you?” Hresh said.

He turned away, stepping down cautiously from the slab of stone that had borne them to this place and tentatively advancing a few paces up the floor of the cavern. As he moved forward the amber glow preceded him, illuminating his path. It seemed to radiate from invisible outlets that might have been set fifteen or twenty paces apart, activated by his proximity.

Though overwhelmingly intricate masses of statuary rose along the walls on both sides far into the distance, the cavern floor itself seemed bare. But as Hresh continued he began to make out a blocklike object, high and broad, sitting in his path far up in the dimness. When he was closer he saw it to be a complex and significant structure, perhaps a machine, set all about with knobs and levers fashioned from a shining tawny substance that looked almost like bone.

“What do you think?” Haniman asked.

Hresh chuckled. “Haniman-full-of-questions, they’ll call you!”

“Is it dangerous?”

“It could be. I don’t know. There’s nothing about any of this in anything I’ve read.” He raised his hands and let them hover above the nearest row of knobs, not daring to touch anything. He had a sudden clear sense of this thing as a master control unit to which all the metal webwork of the three dozen towers of the plaza was connected. Those spirals of struts and braces might serve to collect and funnel energy to it.

And if I touch the knobs? he wondered. Will all that energy go roaring through my body and destroy me?

To Haniman he said, “Stand back.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Conduct a test. It could be dangerous.”

“Shouldn’t you wait, and study it a little first?”

“This is how I will study it.”

“Hresh—”

“Stand back. Farther. Farther still.”

“This is craziness, Hresh. You’re talking nonsense and your eyes look wild. Get away from that thing!”

“I have to try it,” Hresh said.

He put his hands to the nearest knobs and squeezed them as tightly as he could.

He expected anything: lightning cutting through the cavern like a bright sword, the crash of terrible thunder, the roar of the winds, the screaming of dead souls. Himself burned to a cinder in an instant. But all he felt was a faint warmth and a vague tingle. For an instant a startling, dizzying image flashed through his mind. It seemed to him that all the myriad statues on the walls had come to life, moving about, gesturing, talking, laughing. It was like being plunged into a turbulent stream, being swept down a wild whirlpool of life.

The sensation lasted only for a moment. But in that moment it seemed to Hresh that he himself was a citizen of the Great World. He was in the midst of all its wondrous surge and vigor. He saw himself striding down the throbbing streets of Vengiboneeza, moving through the turmoil and frenzy of a marketplace where members of the Six Peoples jostled one another by the thousands, sea-lords, vegetals, hjjks, sapphire-eyes, shoulder to shoulder. There was the sultry feel of warm moist air against his cheeks. Slender trees bent low under the weight of their thick, heavy, glossy blue-green leaves. Strange music tingled in his ears. The scent of a hundred unfamiliar spices astonished his nostrils. The sky was a tapestry of brilliant colors, azure, turquoise, ebony, crimson. It was all there. It was all real.

He was stunned by it, and humbled, and shamed.

All at once he understood what a true civilization was like: the immense bustling complexity of it, the myriad interactions, the exchange of ideas, the haggling in the marketplace, the schemes and plans, the conflicts, the ambitions, the sense of a great many people simultaneously moving in a host of individual directions. It was so very different from the only life he had known, the life of the cocoon, the life of the People, that he was stricken with profound awe.

We are really nothing, he thought. We are mere simple creatures who lived in hiding for century upon century, going through endless repetitious rounds of trivial activity, building nothing, changing nothing, creating nothing.

His eyes grew hot with tears. He felt small and lowly, a cipher from a tribe of ciphers deluded by their own pretentions. But then his chagrin gave way suddenly to defiance and pride and he thought: We were very few. We lived as we had to live. Our cocoon thrived and we kept our traditions alive. We did our best. We did our best. And when it was the Time of Coming Forth we emerged to take possession of the world that had been left to us; and when we have had a little time we will make it great again.

Then the vision slipped away and the astounding moment was over, and Hresh stood trembling, blinking, bewildered, still alive.

“What happened?” Haniman asked. “What did it do?”

Hresh made an angry gesture. “Let me be!”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes. Let me be.”

He felt dazed. The world of this dark musty cavern seemed only a hateful phantom, and that other world, so bright, so vivid, was the true world of his life. Or so it had seemed, until the cavern had sprung up about him once more and that other world had been swept away beyond his grasp. Just then he would have given everything to have it back.

He suspected that he had tasted only the merest slice of what this machine could give him. The Great World lived anew within it! Some ancient magic was kindled here, some force drawn downward through the three dozen towers and the enormous jumble of statuary, a force that had roared through his mind and carried him back across the bygone centuries to a lost world of miracles and marvels. And he could make that leap through the eons again. All it took was a touch.

He held his hands above the knobs a second time.

“No, don’t!” Haniman cried. “You’ll be killed!”

Hresh waved him away and seized the knobs.

But nothing happened this time. He might have been holding his own elbows, for all the effect he felt.

He reached around, touching this knob, that one, this one, that one. Nothing. Nothing.

Perhaps the machine had burned itself out in order to allow him that one miraculous glimpse.

Or perhaps, he thought, he was the one who had burned out. It might be that his mind was so numb from the inrush of that force that it could absorb no more.

He stepped back and studied the thing thoughtfully. Maybe it took time to build up its power again after having discharged it. He would wait, he decided, and try it once more a little later.

The sapphire-eyes artificials at the gate had not deceived him, then, when they had told him to search more deeply. They had meant it in the most literal way. Perhaps all the wonders that Vengiboneeza still contained were to be found in hidden caverns like this, beneath the great buildings.

Then Hresh remembered the other thing the sapphire-eyes had told him.

Search with that which can help you find what you seek.

That advice had made little sense at the time. Now, suddenly, it did. He caught his breath sharply as fear and excitement swept through him in equal measure.

The Barak Dayir, did they mean? The Wonderstone?

That magical talisman which the generations of chroniclers kept hidden in the casket that held the books? The instrument that Thaggoran himself had handled with such fear and reverence?

It was worth trying, Hresh thought.

Even if he died in the attempt, the attempt would be worthwhile; for there were great questions to be answered here, and if he had to risk everything in the hope of gaining everything, so be it.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here — if we can.”

“You aren’t going to fool around with it any more?”

“Not now,” said Hresh. “I need to do some research first. I think I know how to make this thing work, but I have to consult the chronicles before I try it.”

“What did you see just now?”

“The Great World,” said Hresh.

“You did?”

“For an instant. Only an instant.”

Haniman stared at him, jaws slackening with amazement.

“What was it like?”

Hresh shrugged. “Grander than you could ever imagine,” he said in a low, weary tone.

“Tell me. Tell me.”

“Another time.”

Haniman was silent. After a moment he said, “Well, what will you do now? What is it you need to know to make the machine work?”

“Never mind that,” Hresh said. “What we need to know just now is how to make that stone block rise and get us out of this place.”

In the heat of his eagerness to explore the cavern he had given that problem no consideration at all. Getting down here had been easy enough; but what were they supposed to do to get out again? He beckoned to Haniman and they jumped on the slab of black stone. But the slab remained where it was on the cavern floor.

Hresh slapped his hand against the stone. No response. He groped along its edges for some lever that might operate it, akin to the wheel that had opened the hatch of the tribal cocoon in the old days. Nothing.

“Maybe there’s some other way up,” Haniman suggested. “A staircase somewhere.”

“And maybe if we flap our arms hard enough, we’ll fly right out of here,” Hresh said sharply. He squinted into the dimness. A lever sticking out of the wall, perhaps — run to it, pull it, run back quickly to the stab—

No lever. What now? Pray to Yissou? Yissou himself might not know the way out of this place. Or care that two inquisitive boys had stranded themselves in it.

“We can’t just sit here all day,” said Haniman. “Let’s get off and see if we can find something that controls it. Or a different way out. How do you know there isn’t a staircase around here somewhere?”

Hresh shrugged. It cost nothing to look. They began to make their way along the cavern floor in the direction opposite from the one they had taken before, peering here and there at the base of the statuary groups in search of a control unit, a hidden doorway, a staircase, anything.

Suddenly there was a groaning sound, as of a heavy vibration in the ground beneath them. They halted and stared at each other in surprise and flight. A dry, dusty odor spread like a stain through the thick stale air.

“Ice-eaters?” Haniman said. “Coming up underneath us, the way they did under the cocoon?”

“Ice-eaters here?” said Hresh. “No, that can’t be. I thought they lived only in mountains. But the ground is shaking, all right. And—”

Then came a sighing sound of a sort that he had heard before, and another deep groan; and Hresh realized what was happening. There were no ice-eaters here. The sounds they heard were those of the unseen machinery that had carried them into these depths.

“The stone!” he yelled. “It’s taking off all by itself!”

Indeed it had begun slowly to rise. Desperately he rushed for it. It was already as high as his knees when he caught it by the edge and pulled himself up. Looking around for Haniman, he saw him lumbering and thundering along in a strange sluggish way, as though running through water. It was the Haniman of old returned, the fat clumsy boy out of whom this Haniman had grown; that fat Haniman might be gone, but evidently even this new improved version was still a slow runner. Hresh leaned over the edge of the slab, furiously gesticulating at him.

“Hurry! It’s going up!”

“I’m — trying—” Haniman grunted, head down, arms flailing.

But the slab was nearly as high as Haniman’s shoulders when he reached it, an eternity later. Hresh reached down to catch him by the wrists. He felt a terrible hot wrenching pain, as though his arms were being yanked out at the sockets; and he thought for a moment that Haniman’s weight would pull him forward and off the slab. Somehow he anchored himself on the smooth glossy stone and heaved. In one terrible burst of exertion Hresh hauled Haniman up until he was able to hook his chin over the edge of the slab, and after that it was easier. The slab rose into the dome of blackness above them. They lay sprawled side by side, both of them gasping, shaking, exhausted. Hresh had never felt such pain as he was feeling all along his arms now, pulsating fiery tremors that went on and on and on; and he suspected that was going to get worse before it healed.

The slab glided up and up. When he dared, Hresh looked over the edge and saw only empty darkness below; the amber light must have gone off once they were in midair. Above was darkness also. But before long they were back in the tower of the metal webwork, and the slab was fixed once more on the tower’s bare dirt floor.

They rose from it in silence. In silence they made their way back to the tribe. Night had come, heavy, starless, mysterious. Hresh could not recall ever feeling so weary in his life, not even during the worst days of the long march. But in his mind there blazed the brilliant images he had seen, in just that single moment, of the Great World alive. He knew he would return to the cavern under the tower soon. Not at once, no, however much he wanted to do that, for there were certain preparations he knew he must make first. But soon.

And this time he would bring the Barak Dayir.

Taniane, studying Hresh and Haniman in the days that followed, sensed that something extraordinary must have happened on their last trip to the heart of the city. They had come back with eyes glowing and faces strange with amazement. Hresh had gone straight to Koshmar, simply brushing aside anyone who tried to speak with him before he found her, as if brimming with urgent things to report. But when Taniane asked him that evening what he had seen, he glared as if she were one of the hjjk-folk and said, almost angrily, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

It seemed to her that she had been trying to get Hresh to tell her things all her life, but he had always kept her at arm’s distance. That was, she knew, not strictly true. In the days of the cocoon they had played together often and he had told her many things, fanciful things, his visions of the world outside the cocoon, his dreams of life in the ancient times, his versions of the tales that the old chronicler Thaggoran related to him. And all too often she had not been able to understand what Hresh was talking about, or had simply not been interested. Why should she have? She was only a child then. That was what all of them had been then, she, Orbin, Haniman, Hresh. But Hresh had always been the strange one, far beyond them all, Hresh-full-of-questions.

He must think I am a fool, Taniane thought bleakly. That I am empty, that I am simple.

But she was no longer a child. She was rapidly rising toward womanhood now. When she ran her hands over her body she could feel the buds of her breasts sprouting. Her fur was deepening in tone, a rich glossy dark brown with undertones of red, and it was growing thick and silken. She was becoming tall, almost as tall as such full-grown women as Sinistine and Boldirinthe. Certainly she was taller than Hresh, whose growth was coming on him more slowly.

It was the time when Taniane was beginning to think of finding her mate.

She wanted Hresh. She always had. Even when they were children in the cocoon, bouncing from wall to wall in the wild games they played, the kick-wrestling and the arm-standing and the cavern-soaring, she had dreamed of being grown up, dreamed of becoming a breeding-woman, dreamed of lying in the dark breeding-chambers of the cocoon with Hresh. Even though he was so small, even though he was so strange, there was a force about him, an energy, an excitement, that had caused Taniane to desire him although she had not yet known what desire meant.

Now she was older, and she still desired him. But he seemed still to treat her casually, with little show of interest. He was wholly absorbed with being the chronicler. He lived in a realm apart.

And chroniclers never took mates, anyway. Even if Hresh loved her the way she loved him, what chance was there that they would ever form a couple? No, she would probably have to mate with someone else, when her time came.

Orbin? He was big and strong, and gentle within his strength. But he was slow-minded and stolid. She would be bored with him quickly. Besides, he was unmistakably interested in little Bonlai, though Bonlai was two or three years younger than they were. Bonlai was the sort of easygoing, sturdy girl that someone like Orbin would prefer. And calm patient Orbin would be quite willing, Taniane guessed, to wait for Bonlai to grow up.

That left Haniman, then: the only other young man of their group. It struck her as odd, the idea of mating with Haniman. He had been such a woeful thing when they were younger, so slow, so fat, always tagging along behind the others. In the cocoon days she could not imagine that anyone would want to mate with Haniman, or twine with him, or do anything much else with him. But there was something likable about him, or at least unthreatening, that had drawn her to him for companionship. Now he was greatly changed. He was still a little slow and awkward, always fumbling things and dropping them, but he was strong now, and all that soft childish flesh was gone from him. There was nothing fascinating about him, as there was about Hresh. But he was acceptable, she supposed. And he might well be the only choice she had.

I will mate with Haniman, she told herself, trying the thought out to see how she liked it. Taniane and Haniman, Haniman and Taniane: why, the names had similar sounds! They went well together. Taniane and Haniman. Haniman and Taniane.

And yet — yet—

She couldn’t quite bring herself to it. To mate with Haniman, merely because he was the only one — Haniman the slow, Haniman the outsider, always the last one to be chosen in any game — no matter that he was different now, he would always be the same Haniman to her, a boy she liked to have as a friend, but not as her mate, no, no—

Maybe someday soon they’d meet some other tribe of people, as Hresh was always speculating. And she would find a mate in that new tribe, since she couldn’t have Hresh himself.

Or maybe she wouldn’t mate at all. There was always that possibility. Torlyri had never mated. Koshmar had never mated. A person didn’t have to mate. Koshmar was a magnificent leader, Taniane thought, though she seemed sometimes a driven person, narrow-souled, hard. There was no room in Koshmar’s life for a mate: the closest she could come to it was what she did with Torlyri, which was twining, not mating. But she was the chieftain. The chieftain did not mate, by custom. Or perhaps by law. And in Koshmar’s case by preference as well.

It was sad to think of never having a mate at all. Though if that was the price of being chieftain, perhaps it wasn’t too much to pay.

“Does the chieftain really never take a mate?” Taniane asked Torlyri.

“Maybe long ago,” Torlyri said. “You could ask Hresh about it. But certainly no chieftain I’ve ever heard of has had one.”

“Is it the law, or just the custom?”

Torlyri smiled. “There’s very little difference. But why do you ask? Do you think Koshmar ought to take a mate?”

“Koshmar?” Taniane burst into laughter. The thought of Koshmar with a mate was absurd. “No, of course not!”

“Well, you asked.”

“I was just speaking generally. Now that so many of our customs have changed, I wondered if that would too. Almost everyone is mating now, not just the breeders. Maybe a time will come when the chieftain mates also.”

“Very likely it will,” said Torlyri. “But not, I think, Koshmar.”

“Would that trouble you, if Koshmar mated?”

“We are twining-partners. That wouldn’t change, if she were to mate. Or if I were. The twining bond remains strong always, regardless. But Koshmar is not at all the sort to give herself to a man.”

“No. Not at all.” Taniane paused a moment. “Are you, Torlyri?”

Torlyri smiled. “I confess that I’ve been asking myself the same thing lately.”

“The offering-woman is another one who by custom never has mated, am I right? Like the chieftain, like the chronicler. But everything’s changing so fast. The offering-woman might take a mate too now. And even the chronicler.”

Torlyri’s eyes sparkled with gentle amusement. “Even the chronicler, yes. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Taniane looked away. “I was speaking in general terms.”

“Forgive me. I thought you might have some special reason.”

“No. No! Do you think I’d have Hresh even if he asked me? That weird boy, who pokes his nose in dusty places all day long, and never says a word to anyone any more—”

“Hresh is unusual, yes. But so are you, Taniane.”

“Am I?” she said, startled. “How?”

“You are, that’s all. There’s more to you than I think most people suspect.”

“Do you think so? Do you?” She considered the idea. Unusual? Me? Taniane preened herself. She knew it was childish and foolish to react with such obvious pleasure; but no one had ever praised her before, and to hear such things from Torlyri — from Torlyri —

Impulsively she embraced the older woman. They held each other tightly a moment. Then Taniane let go and backed away.

“Oh, Torlyri, I do hope you find the mate you want, if that’s what you’ve decided to do.”

“Wait, now!” cried Torlyri, laughing. “When did I say I had decided to do anything? Only that I was beginning to ask myself if such a thing was proper for me. That’s all.”

“You should mate,” said Taniane. “Everyone should. The chieftain should — the next chieftain, the one after Koshmar. The chronicler should. In this New Springtime no one should be alone. Don’t you think so, Torlyri? Everything is changing! Everything must change!”

“Yes,” Torlyri said. “Everything is changing.”

Afterward Taniane wondered if she had been too open, too naive. Things said to Torlyri might well go straight back to Koshmar; and Taniane found that thought troubling.

She shrugged and put her hands to her body. She slipped them over her smooth strong flanks and up over the firm little new breasts nestling in her lustrous auburn fur. Her growing body ached. A horde of unanswered questions bubbled in her mind. Time would answer them all, she thought. She needed now to study the art of waiting.