At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  But there was something paradoxical about that; for the Great World had been doomed, and its people had lived under the knowledge of that impending doom for a million years. How then could they have been happy?

  Still, he thought, a million years is a long time. For the people of the Great World there must have been much joy along the way to the inevitable end. Whereas our world has the precariousness of a newly born thing. Nothing is secure yet, nothing has real solidity, and we have no assurance that our fledgling civilization will last so much as a million hours, or even a million minutes.

  Somber thoughts. He tries to brush them aside.

  From the parapet’s edge he looked out over Dawinno. Night was beginning to descend. The last swirling purples and greens of sunset were fading in the west. The lights of the city were coming on. It was very grand, yes, as cities of the New Springtime went. But yet tonight everything about it seemed dreamlike and insubstantial. The buildings that he had long thought were so majestic appeared to him suddenly to be nothing more than hollow façades made of molded paper and held up by wooden struts. It was all only the mere pretense of a city, he thought dismally. They had improvised everything, making it look as they thought it should. But had they done it the right way? Had they done anything at all that was right?

  Stop this, he tells himself.

  He closed his eyes and almost at once he saw Vengiboneeza once again, Vengiboneeza as it had been when it was the living capital of the Great World. Those great shining towers of many colors, the swarming docks, the busy markets, the peoples of six vastly different races existing peacefully side by side, the shimmering vessels arriving from the far stars with their cargoes of strange beings and strange produce—the grandeur of it all, the richness, the complexity, the torrent of profound ideas, the poetry, the philosophy, the dreams and schemes, the immense vitality—

  For a moment its beauty delighted him, as it always had. But only for a moment; and then he was lost in gloom again.

  How small we are, Hresh thinks bitterly.

  What a pathetic imitation of the lost greatness we’ve created here! And we’re so proud of what we have done. But in truth we’ve done so little—only to copy, like the monkeys that we are. What we have copied is the appearance, not the substance. And we could lose it all, such as it is, in the twinkling of an eye.

  A dark night, this. The darkest of the dark. Moon and stars, yes, shining as they always had. But very dark within, eh, Hresh? You’ve thrown a cloak over your soul. Stumbling around in unyielding blackness, are you, Hresh?

  For a moment he thought of tossing the useless globes over the side of the parapet. But no. No. Dead as they were, they were still able to summon lost worlds to life in his mind. Talismans, they were. They would lead him out of this bleakness. He caresses their silken-smooth surfaces and the endless past opens to him. And at last he begins to extract himself a little way from this smothering weight of clamoring misery that has engulfed him. Some perspective returns. Today, yesterday, the day before the day before yesterday: what do they matter, against the vast sweep of time? He has a sense of millions of years of history behind him: not only the Great World but a world even older than that, lost empires, lost kings, lost creatures, a world that had had no People in it, nor even the hjjks and sapphire-eyes, but only humans. And there might have been a world even before that, though his mind swims to think of it. World upon world, each arising and thriving and declining and vanishing: it is the way of the gods, that nothing can be perfect and nothing will last forever. What had all his studies of the past taught him, if not that? And there is powerful consolation in that.

  He had been devouring the world all his life, hungrily gobbling its perplexing wonders. Hresh-full-of-questions: that was what they had called him when he was a boy. Cockily he had renamed himself Hresh-of-the-answers, once. He was that too. But the earlier name was truer. Every answer holds the next question, throbbing impatiently within it.

  His thoughts wander back to the day when he was eight years old, in the time before the Time of Going Forth, when he had bolted through the hatch of the cocoon to see what lay outside.

  Where was that boy now? Still here, a little worn and frayed. Hresh-full-of-questions. Dear Torlyri had grabbed him then, the gentle offering-woman, long since dead. It was almost fifty years ago, now. But for her, he too would have been long since dead, and long forgotten too, trapped outside when she closed the hatch after her morning prayers, and before nightfall eaten by rat-wolves, or carried off by hjjks, or simply perished of the chill of that forlorn era.

  But Torlyri had caught him by the leg and yanked him back as he tried to scramble down the ledge into the open world. And when the chieftain Koshmar had sentenced him to death for his impiety, it was Torlyri who had successfully interceded on his behalf.

  Long ago, long long ago. In what seems to him now like some other life. Or some other world.

  But there was a continuity all the same. That unending desire to see, to do, to learn, had never left him. You always want to know, Taniane had said.

  He shrugged. And went inside, and set the two globes down on his desk. The darkness was threatening to invade him again.

  This was his private chamber. No one else was permitted to enter it. Here Hresh kept the Barak Dayir and the other instruments of divination handed down to him by his predecessors. His manuscripts, too: his essays on the past, thoughts on the meaning of life and the destiny of the People. He had told the story of the greatness and the downfall of the sapphire-eyes folk, as well as he understood it. He had written of the humans, who were even greater mysteries to him. He had speculated on the nature of the gods.

  He had never shown any of these writings to anyone. Sometimes he feared that they were nothing but a jumble of lofty-minded nonsense. Often he thought of burning them. Why not? Give these dead pages to the flames, as Thu-Kimnibol had given Naarinta to them a few hours before.

  “You will burn nothing,” said a voice out of the shadows. “You have no right to destroy knowledge.”

  In the darkest of the dark moments visions often came to him—Thaggoran, sometimes, long-dead old Thaggoran who had been chronicler before him, or sometimes the wise man Noum om Beng of the Helmet People, or even one of the gods. Hresh never doubted these visions. Figments they might be; but he knew they spoke only truth.

  To Thaggoran now he says, “But is it knowledge? What if I’ve assembled nothing but a compilation of lies here?”

  “You don’t know what it is to lie, boy. Errors, maybe: lies, never. Spare your books. Write other ones. Preserve the past for those who follow after.”

  “The past! What good is preserving the past? The past is only a burden!”

  “What are you saying, boy?”

  “There’s no point in looking back. The past is lost. The past is beyond preserving. The past slips away from us every hour of our lives, and good riddance to it. The future is what we need to think about.”

  “No,” Thaggoran says. “The past is the mirror in which we see that which is to come. You know that. You have always known that. What ails you today, boy?”

  “I’ve been at the Place of the Dead today. I’ve seen my brother’s mate become ashes and dust.”

  Thaggoran laughs. “Whole worlds have become ashes and dust. New Worlds come forth from them. Why should I have to remind you of such things? You were telling the others that only this day, at the Place of the Dead.”

  “Yes,” Hresh says, in sudden shame. “Yes, I was.”

  “Is it not the will of the gods that death should come from life, and life from death?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “But nothing. The gods decree, and we obey.”

  “The gods are mockers,” Hresh says.

  “Are they, do you think?” says Thaggoran coolly.

  “The gods gave the Great World happiness beyond all understanding, and then dropped the death-stars down on them. Wouldn’t you call that mockery? And then the gods brought us forth o
ut of the Long Winter to inherit the world, though we are nothing at all. Isn’t that mockery also?”

  “The gods never mock,” says Thaggoran. “The gods are beyond our understanding, but I tell you this: what they decree, they decree for reasons that are true and deep. They are mysterious in their ways, but they are never merely whimsical.”

  “Ah, but can I believe that?”

  “Ah,” says Thaggoran, “what else is there to believe?”

  Faith, yes. The last refuge of the desperate. Hresh is willing to accept that. He is almost pacified now. But even in matters of faith he still clings to logic. Not yet fully comfortable with what the old man is trying to get him to see, he says:

  “But tell me this, then—if we are to be masters of the world, as our ancient books promise us, then why have the gods left the hjjks here to stand against us? Suppose the hjjks cut us off before we’ve barely begun to grow. What becomes of the plan of the gods then, Thaggoran? Tell me that!”

  There was no answer. Thaggoran was gone, if indeed he had ever been there.

  Hresh slipped into his worn familiar chair, and put his hands to the smooth wood of his desk. The vision had not carried him quite as far as he had needed to go, but it had done its work nevertheless. Somehow his mood had shifted. The past, the future: both of them darkness, all darkness, he thought. And under cover of darkness despair finds a good place to hide. But then he asked himself: Is it all truly so bad? What else can the future be, but unknowable, a darkness? And the past: we cast our little lights backward into it and illuminate it, after a fashion, and what we learn guides us onward into the other great unknown. Our knowledge is our comfort and our shield.

  Yet I know so little, Hresh thought. I need to know so much more.

  You always want to know, Taniane had said.

  Yes. Yes. Yes, I do.

  Even now. Although I am so tired. Even now.

  “We’ve looked up your name in the records at the House of Knowledge,” Nialli Apuilana told Kundalimon. “You were born here, all right. In Year 30. That makes you seventeen, now. I was born in 31. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” he said, smiling. Perhaps he did, a little.

  “Your mother was Marsalforn and your father was Ramla.”

  “Marsalforn. Ramla.”

  “You were taken by the hjjks in 35. It’s in the city records. Captured by a raiding party outside the walls, just like me. Marsalforn disappeared while searching for you in the hills. Her body was never found. Your father left the city soon afterward and no one knows where he is now.”

  “Marsalforn,” he said again. “Ramla.” The rest of what she had said seemed lost on him.

  “Do you follow what I’m telling you? Those are the names of your mother and father.”

  “Mother. Father.” Blankly. Her words didn’t seem to hold meaning for him at all.

  “Do you know what I want to do with you?” she said in a low urgent voice, with her face close to his. “I want to talk about life in the Nest. I want you to make it come alive for me again. The smell of it, the colors, the sounds. The things that Nest-thinker says. Whether you ever went marching with the Militaries, or had to stay behind with the Egg-makers. Whether they let you go near the Queen. I want to hear all about it. Everything.”

  “Marsalforn,” he said again. “Mother. Father. Ramla. Marsalforn is Ramla. Mother is Father.”

  “You aren’t really getting much of what I’m saying, are you? Are you, Kundalimon?”

  He smiled, the warmest smile she had seen from him yet. It was like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. But he shook his head.

  She had to try something else. This was too slow.

  Her heart began to pound.

  “What we ought to do is twine,” Nialli Apuilana said, suddenly audacious.

  Did he know what she meant? No. He made no response, simply maintained the same fixed smile.

  “Twine. I want to twine with you, Kundalimon. You don’t know what that is, either, do you? Twine. It’s something that People do with their sensing-organs. Do you even know what a sensing-organ is? This thing here, hanging down behind you like a tail. It is a tail, I suppose. But much more than that. It’s full of perceptors that run up into your spine and connect right to your brain.”

  He was still smiling, smiling, obviously comprehending nothing.

  She persisted. “One of the things we use the sensing-organ for is to make contact with other people. Deep, intense, intimate contact, mind to mind. We aren’t even allowed to try it until we’re thirteen, and then the offering-woman shows us how, and after that we can go looking for twining-partners.”

  He looked at her blankly. Shook his head.

  She took his hand. “Any two people can be twining-partners—a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, anyone. It’s not like coupling or mating, you see. It’s a union of souls. You twine with anyone whose soul you want to share.”

  “Twine,” he said, and smiled even harder.

  “Twine, yes. I’ve done it only once. On my twining-day—when I was thirteen, you know—with Boldirinthe the offering-woman. Since then, never. Nobody here interests me that way. But if I could twine with you, Kundalimon—”

  “Twine?”

  “We’d make contact such as we’ve never known in our lives. We could share Nest-truths and we wouldn’t need even to try to speak each other’s languages, because there’s a language of twining that goes beyond any mere words.” She looked around to see if the door was latched. Yes. A kind of fever was on her now. Her fur was damp, her breasts were rising and falling swiftly. Her own scent was rank and musky in her nostrils, an animal reek.

  He might be beginning to comprehend.

  Gingerly she lifted her sensing-organ and brought it forward, and let it slide lightly across his.

  For an instant there was contact. It was like a shock of lightning. She felt his soul with astonishing clarity: a smooth pale parchment, on which strange inscriptions had been written in a dark, bold, alien hand. There was great sweetness in it, and tenderness, and also strangeness. The dark cloistered mystery of the Nest was everywhere in it. He was open to her, entirely vulnerable, and there would be no difficulty about completing the twining and linking their spirits in the keenest of intimacies. Relief, joy, even something that might have been love, flooded her soul.

  But then, after that first stunning moment, he whipped his sensing-organ back out of her reach, breaking the contact with jarring suddenness. Uttering a hoarse ragged sound, midway between a growl and a hjjk’s chittering insect-noise, he beat frantically at her for a moment using both his arms at once, the way a hjjk would. His eyes flared wildly with fright. Then he hopped backward and crouched in a defensive stance in the corner, pressed tight up against the walls of the room, panting in terror. His face was a frozen mask of fear and shock, nostrils wide, lips drawn back rigidly, both rows of teeth bared.

  Nialli Apuilana looked at him wide-eyed, horror-stricken at what she had done.

  “Kundalimon?”

  “No! Away! No!”

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I only—”

  “No. No!”

  He began to tremble. He muttered incomprehensibly in hjjk. Nialli Apuilana held out her arms to him, but he turned away from her, huddling close to the wall. In shame and anguish she fled from him.

  “Are you making any progress?” Taniane asked.

  Nialli Apuilana gave her a quick uneasy look. “A little. Not as much as I’d like.”

  “Can he speak our language yet?”

  “He’s learning.”

  “And the hjjk words? Are they coming back to you?”

  “We don’t use the hjjk words,” Nialli Apuilana said in a low, husky tone. “He’s trying to put the Nest behind him. He wants to be flesh again.”

  “Flesh,” Taniane said. Her daughter’s strange choice of words sent a chill through her. “You mean, to be part of the People?”

  “That’s what I mean, yes.
”

  Taniane peered close. As always she wished she could see behind the mask that hid her daughter’s soul from her. For the millionth time she wondered what had happened to Nialli Apuilana during the months she had spent below the surface of the earth in the dark mysterious labyrinth of the Nest.

  She said, “What about the treaty?”

  “Not a word. Not yet. We don’t understand each other well enough to talk about anything but the simplest things.”

  “The Presidium will be meeting next week.”

  “I’m going as fast as I can, mother. As fast as he’ll let me. I’ve tried to go more quickly, but there are—problems.”

  “What sort of problems?”

  “Problems,” Nialli Apuilana repeated, looking away. “Oh, mother, let me be! Do you think this is easy?”

  For three days she couldn’t bring herself to see him. A guardsman had been sent with his food in her place. Then she went, bringing a tray of edible seeds and the small reddish insects known as rubies, which she had gathered that morning in the torrid drylands on the northeastern slope of the hills. These she offered timidly, without a word. He took the tray from her just as wordlessly, and fell upon the rubies as if he had not eaten in weeks, sweeping the little ruddy carcasses into his mouth with broad avid motions of his hand.

  He looked up afterward and smiled. But he kept a wary distance from her throughout that day’s visit.

  So the damage wasn’t irreparable. Still, the breach would be some time in healing. She knew that her attempt at twining with him had been too hasty, too bold. Perhaps his sensing-organ itself was something he barely understood. Perhaps the fleeting touch of intimacy he had shared with her had been too powerful a sensation for him, raised as he had been among a species that had emotions of quite a different kind; perhaps it had begun to undermine his already uncertain sense of which race he belonged to.