At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  Troubled by the possibility that everything they believe about their own past may be mere myth—was there ever a Long Winter? Did the People really once live in cocoons underground?—was the Great World truly as magnificent as the legends would have it?—these sophisticates among the People have become formidable archaeologists. All the evidence of the Chronicles, they argue, must be challenged, reviewed, subjected to modern scientific examination, and either confirmed or dismissed. And therefore a group from Dawinno, accompanied by a couple of archaeologists from Yissou such as Thalarne, actually sets out to search for the original cocoon of the Koshmar tribe, thought to be somewhere along the western bank of the great river that splits the continent from north to south. This quest, and its outcome, will be one of the major enterprises of the novel.

  In the east, in Thisthissima, another archaeological-minded group begins excavating the Great World ruins that lie beneath their own city, much as Hresh did when the People lived in Vengiboneeza. But Hresh was looking for Great World devices that could be put to practical use; these modern diggers, like those of Renaissance Rome, have historical and esthetic goals in mind. They begin uncovering great works of art and other startling artifacts of the Great World. An agent of Thalarne’s mate Hamiruld is on hand to obtain some of these artifacts for his antiquarian-minded master, thereby linking these events with the main ones of the book.

  A further manifestation of the new interest in the past surfaces in the distant city of Bornigrayal, which sends an expedition to the eastern continent that discovers the surviving Sea-Lord colony. This has happened just prior to the events of the novel, and causes a great stir in the Seven Cities. The details of this event come to us as shown through the eyes of the Dawinnan Ambassador to Bornigrayal, the suave and subtle Samnibolon, a princely member of the House of Hresh, who is connected by marriage to the family of Silina.

  While the educated folk are engaging in all this antiquarian investigation, the lower classes are undergoing a different sort of psychological crisis. They have no doubt that the Long Winter was real, or that Hresh was a Messiah-figure who led the People to their present glories. But now apocalyptic cults have arisen among them that predict the coming of new death-stars and the return of the Long Winter. These ideas are based on certain cryptic and ambiguous writings of Hresh that have been lately discovered in the House of Knowledge. Wiser heads argue that the Hresh texts are corrupt and unclear. Nevertheless, a great many of the People are convinced that the doom of their civilization is approaching, and that the original mythical human savior-figures—Lord Fanigole, Balilirion, Lady Theel—will soon return to Earth as harbingers of the new ice age and lead the People back into cocoons. Occasional rumors circulate to the effect that the humans have already returned and will soon make themselves known, but these are invariably dismissed by the educated people as hoaxes perpetrated by the priesthood of the apocalyptic cult or as mere wishful thinking.

  The story that unfolds against the background of this interest in the past focuses primarily on the adventures of Nortekku and Thalarne, but also depicts:

  The efforts of Vuldimin of Yissou to restore his city’s independence under the House of Salaman.

  The economic rivalries among the Seven Cities, particularly involving Thisthissima, Bornigrayal, and Dawinno, which threaten to erupt into actual warfare.

  The expedition from Dawinno to the southern continent that stumbles upon the equally unexpected People cities in the tropics, and the impact that this discovery makes in Dawinno, as shown through the eyes of Khardakhor.

  The cultural renaissance in Thisthissima, involving the unearthing of a vast horde of Great World treasures, which is witnessed by Til-Menimat, a princely Dawinnan art collector who can trace his ancestry to Torlyri. (And whose secret shame is that his great-great-great-grandmother was the sister of the treacherous and tragic Husathirn Mueri.) This search for ancient works of art takes on new significance when one of the diggers uncovers an archive of historical records, similar to the device that Hresh found in Vengiboneeza that (for a short while) gave him visions of the Great World. By obtaining access to this device, Til-Menimat learns that there may be some substance to the popular legend that the humans intend to return to Earth. He witnesses scenes of the departure of the humans from the world at the time of the onset of the Long Winter, and interprets them in a startling way, leaping to the conclusion that the humans desired the Long Winter as an evolutionary tool, and saw to it that the dominant sapphire-eyes race of Great World days would take no action to halt the falling of the comets that would destroy the world’s civilization.

  This material ultimately falls into Khardakhor’s hands. It is sought also by the slippery Hamiruld, and by Vuldimin, who hopes somehow to turn it to his political advantage.

  The central story line follows Nortekku and Thalarne on their journey eastward to the heart of the continent. Hamiruld is aware that they desire each other, and he is determined to thwart them. Nevertheless they do manage to become lovers. Under Thalarne’s second-sight ministrations, Nortekku softens and begins to emerge from the somberness and sourness of spirit that has darkened so much of his life in recent years.

  The expedition succeeds in discovering the cocoon. (They identify it by the black stone on the wall of the central chamber, put there by the predecessors of Koshmar long ago, and by the maze of abandoned passages below, as described in the chronicles.) The expedition discovers, also, that a shipload of humans has arrived from space! Nortekku and Thalarne, seeking a secluded place for a rendezvous, are the first to encounter the humans, but they are seen also by Hamiruld, and soon the news is everywhere. Panic spreads through the cities as the belief in imminent return of the Long Winter is apparently confirmed by the return of the humans.

  Yissou, in this time of crisis, attempts to take advantage of the disturbance to rid itself of domination by Dawinno; and as the Yissou uprising begins, Vuldimin stages an uprising within the uprising, intending to seize power for himself from King Falid. In this he has the backing of the powerful and wealthy Khardakhor of Dawinno, who is quite willing to aid Vuldimin against his own city’s interests so long as his own will prosper. In the east, a determined war party in Bornigrayal moves to overthrow the hegemony of Thisthissima. The entire civilization of the People is quickly plunged into chaos.

  Nortekku, the discoverer of the returned humans, believes that it is the humans who are at fault and determines to drive them from Earth. (This is in fact a displaced version of his rebellion against his father: this dark and troubled man is unable to submit to authority figures.) The embittered Hamiruld, who now has lost Thalarne to Nortekku, takes a pro-human stance, not merely to be contrary but also in the hope of bringing about Nortekku’s downfall.

  The various threads come together in the final third of the novel. Vuldimin seizes power in Yissou, expelling all Dawinnans. Khardakhor, whose role in the Yissou uprising becomes known, is branded a traitor in his own city, and flees to the southern continent, which he plans to use as a springboard for an eventual invasion of Dawinno. Nortekku, returning to Dawinno with Thalarne, attempts to assemble an army to march against the humans and force them to leave the planet.

  Til-Menimat, the princely Dawinnan art collector who has gained access to Great World devices, offers his aid to Nortekku, giving him the key information that the humans had deliberately brought about the downfall of the Great World. Together they intend to use this information in stirring up popular hatred of the humans—which means they must regain Til-Menimat’s collection of Great World artifacts, which had fallen into Khardakhor’s hands but which Khardakhor has left behind in his flight to the south. Hamiruld also wants these artifacts, both for his private delight and because he knows they could be used against the humans. Ultimately there is a convergence on the place where the artifacts are hidden. Hamiruld is killed and Nortekku emerges with the ancient treasures.

  In the climactic events of the book Nortekku, somewhat in the manner of the ancient hero
Thu-Kimnibol, leads an army against the place where the humans have quietly sequestered themselves. Thalarne is with him, although she has come to have increasing doubts about the wisdom of Nortekku’s campaign.

  There is indeed a battle—but it is a battle of phantoms, in which the humans send simulacra of various Great World races out to meet Nortekku’s troops. Sapphire-eyes legions come from one side, sea-lords from another, and from the center march millions of hjjks. It is all imaginary; but the Dawinnan army flees, and Nortekku, seeing his scheme crumble, undergoes a sudden and savage emotional breakdown. Thalarne supports and guides him through it, until, with her telepathic aid, he emerges purged and sobered, no longer obsessed with rebellion against authority.

  Calmly now, the newly purified and matured Nortekku undertakes a solitary pilgrimage to the sanctuary where the humans have taken up residence, and the following things are revealed:

  The humans are a vastly superior, incredibly evolved species, qualitatively different from any of the other Great World species and from the People who succeeded them. During the fourteen million years that separates the time of this trilogy from our own era, the human race had gone through enormous physical and mental changes, at various times becoming barely recognizable in our terms as human at all. Their current form—tall attenuated humanoid—is a voluntary choice, a sentimental willed return to what they conceive as the ancestral appearance of the human race after a period of flamboyant genetic deviation.

  All the races of the Great World (sapphire-eyes, sea-lords, vegetals, hjjks, mechanicals) were created by human manipulation. The human population of Earth had long ago dwindled to just a few thousands, by choice, and these superbeings had experimented with developing widely different life-forms to replace themselves on Earth.

  The Great World was designed so well that it grew static and began to decline—something that the humans had anticipated, but which they had hoped would not occur. (There were limits even to their power to shape and control events.)

  The humans had known for several million years that the comet cloud would return eventually and jeopardize life on Earth, but they took it for granted that the Great World peoples would have a way of defending themselves against the collision of the comets with Earth. Once it became apparent that the Great World was a failure, though, the humans and all the other races agreed that it was best to make no effort at defense but simply to allow the Long Winter to wipe out the Great World in favor of a fresh start. (The insectoid hjjks did not share this passive acquiescence in the oncoming doom, and quietly planned to inherit the world themselves after the cataclysm.)

  To make ready for the fresh start, the humans selected a primate race, the People, that had evolved from something like gibbons to a level of consciousness roughly equivalent to that of Neolithic Homo sapiens, and established them in cocoons to protect them against the climate change. A few humans volunteered to remain on Earth during the Long Winter to guide the People through the transition to cocoon life; the rest took up residence in another solar system.

  Though People mythology held that the so-called Dream-Dreamers were humans who had spent the whole seven hundred thousand years of the Long Winter in a somnolent state in the cocoons, in fact the human lifespan, though long, was nothing nearly as great. The Dream-Dreamers were humans who had returned from space from time to time during the Long Winter to check on the well-being of the People, and who had entered states of suspended animation to prolong their stay on Earth. In most cases something had misfired with these Dream-Dreamers and they had remained in suspension, or simply had died. (The humans, though of great abilities, were nevertheless not gods, and some of their schemes did go astray. They were unaware, for example, that some of the People had lived through the Long Winter outside the cocoons in the tropics and were pursuing plans of their own long before the Coming Forth of the chosen ones.)

  Now that the humans have come back, what do they want? Where will they live? Will they dominate the People? The psychological impact of their return is overwhelming: it disrupts the established institutions of the People just as the unexpected return of the Messiah would confuse and disrupt things on Earth today. There are those among the People who for the highest of motives support Nortekku’s original call for killing all the humans so that life can return to normal.

  But gradually, out of the chaos, the real intent of the humans’ return becomes apparent. Diversity, conflict, even periods of chaos, are necessary for evolutionary development—the constant seeking toward growth that Hresh, in the first book, has defined as the human ideal. Perfection, or any close approximation of perfection, brings stagnation and inevitable decay. (“Once you stop being born, you begin to die.”) The humans had experienced that themselves—and dealt with it by the constant transformation of their culture, even to the point of abandoning the Earth—and then had gone through it all over again as the miraculous Great World that they constructed to be their own replacement began to subside into a static failure.

  The conflicted, brawling new civilization that the People have built, with its rivalries, its class differences, its constant shifts of power, is in fact the humans’ best hope to keep alive the spark of dynamic unfolding that is the hallmark of intelligent life. The cycle is beginning again: once more there is a species on Earth that will grow, change, make mistakes, expand its reach, eventually even reach out into the stars, as the humans had done before them. The conflict between the People and the hjjks was beneficial in stimulating the People’s development; the hjjks thus served their purpose in the great plan and have regressed. The unanticipated existence of non-cocoon People in the southern cities will also cause welcome conflict, further challenge and response. The People are not likely to lack for the sort of stimuli that build civilizations.

  There is, therefore, no neat conclusion to the epic. The nature of a dynamic civilization is that there never can be. Though the trilogy reaches its end with the revelation of the Darwinian purpose behind the humans’ willingness to let the Great World perish, the People do not subside immediately into a flawlessly coordinated world civilization. Yissou will continue to wrestle with the heritage of difficulties left by Salaman’s original concept of absolute monarchy, Dawinno will have to deal with the bickerings of its various powerful factions, the eastern cities will face their own conflicts—and so on.

  Where we do close with resolution and integration is in our last view of Nortekku—fully adult at last, freed of resentments and hotheaded urges—mated to Thalarne, reconciled with his father, and at work on a vast architectural project, a new city that will spring up on the site of the original cocoon of the Koshmar People of long ago.

  Having seen to their own satisfaction that the People are on the right path, the humans now will clear out again, leaving the furry folk to their own sometimes troubled paths. Returning to their home in the stars, they will be heard from no more—it will be up to the People of some distant future generation to come forth into space and seek them out, if they can, on the world to which they have once again retreated.

  A PIECE OF THE GREAT WORLD

  The expedition to the ancestral cocoon would be setting out very soon now. Nortekku was still deep in the task of preparing for it, studying up on the accounts of the events of two centuries before. For weeks he had been poring over the accounts of the emergence of the People from the cocoons when the Long Winter had finally ended—out into that strange, empty world, where the debris flung up by the death-stars still hovered in the upper levels of the atmosphere and a rippling mesh of color streamed in the sky, rainbow nets of amethyst, copper, topaz, crimson, radiant green. He had read too of the famous trek across the continent to the ruins of ancient Vengiboneeza, and of the founding of the first cities of the New Springtime. By then he had become so caught up in the story that he kept pushing his research backward and ever backward across the ages, digging hungrily, compulsively.

  There was so much to absorb. He wondered if he would ever master it all. The ye
ars fluttered before him, going in reverse. He moved step by step from the tale of the Time of Going Forth back to the era of the cocoons itself, the 700,000 years of life underground during the Long Winter that had preceded the Going Forth, and from there to the dire onslaught of the death-stars that had brought on the deep snows and black winds of the Long Winter. Then he went farther back yet, to the glorious civilization known as the Great World that the winter of the death-stars had destroyed, when all was in motion and great caravels circled the globe laden with merchandise of fabulous richness and splendor, and onward even into what little was known of that shadowy era, millions of years before the Great World had existed, when the vanished human race had dominated the world.

  Nortekku had never cared much about all that before—he was an architect by profession, looking toward the future, not the past. But Thalarne, who was an archaeologist, did, and he cared very much about Thalarne, with whom he was about to go off on an expedition of the highest archaeological significance. So for her sake he went tunneling deep into these historical matters that he had not thought about since his schoolboy days.