At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  “Upset?” She sounded mystified. “I’ve been waiting for you all week. If you hadn’t turned up in another couple of days, I would have had to continue on without you. The ship is due to sail at the end of the week, and—”

  “The ship?” he said. “What ship?” There was a lot to sort out here. “Wait a minute, Thalarne. This isn’t making sense. Can we back things up a little? Hamiruld came to me and told me that you had left town without saying a word to him about where you were going, and that he was instructed to simply inform me that our expedition was off.”

  “No. That isn’t true, Nortekku.”

  “What isn’t true? That he told me—”

  “No. That I left any such message for you.” Something close to panic flared in her eyes. “Oh, Nortekku, Nortekku, this is all so badly garbled! What I asked him to let you know was that there’s been a new discovery, something that has a much higher priority than anything you and I could have done at the cocoon site, and that I was leaving straightaway for Bornigrayal. You were supposed to take the next flight out.”

  He felt numb. “He said nothing whatever like that. Only that you had gone off somewhere, and the expedition was cancelled. And I thought—that perhaps, because of that imbecilic quarrel I had with you—”

  “The quarrel was over and done with.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “Hamiruld lied to you,” Thalarne said. She seemed to be trembling. “Deliberately and cold-bloodedly lied to you. I can hardly believe it.”

  By second sight Nortekku felt waves of sincerity radiating from her. To use second sight on another person without permission was improper in Dawinno, always had been, but the Yissouans had no such prohibition, and he and Thalarne had allowed themselves that communion almost from the beginning. He felt it now. There could be no doubt.

  He said, “I thought he had no feelings of jealousy about us. But that isn’t so, is it? I wanted to think so, but obviously that isn’t true. He deliberately withheld the key part of your message and distorted the rest of it, hoping to cause trouble between us. I see now that I’ve never really understood your relationship with Hamiruld.”

  She was silent a moment, frowning a little, as though debating how much she wanted to tell him. Then she said, “Hamiruld has no physical interest in women, Nortekku. He never has. I don’t know why: that’s just how he is. But he claims to love me, and I think he does. I’m a kind of trophy for him, perhaps: something to be proud of, a woman whom every man in Yissou seems to desire for one reason or another, most, I guess, for my looks, maybe some for my mind. Or both. And so he’s been willing to countenance my—affairs, provided I’ll go on living with him.”

  My affairs. Well, he thought, of course he hadn’t been the first. Of course not.

  “And you?” he said. “You’re perfectly willing to have that kind of marriage? Do you love him, Thalarne?”

  Something close to evasiveness crossed her features. “Love? How can I say? It was never an issue, before you came along. We were, well, happy. We got on well together. We enjoyed each other’s company. We went to the year’s social events as a couple. To the parties at court. To the opera—you saw what a problem it created when you wanted to take me. He didn’t get in the way of my research. If I felt like amusing myself with another man, he didn’t interfere.”

  “Up to a point, it would seem.”

  “Up to a point, yes. But clearly he was unhappy about the proposed cocoon expedition, or at least with your being a part of it, and even unhappier when I announced I was going to come out here. And so he suppressed my message to you, which I find tremendously distressing. He’s never done anything like that before. It’s a complete violation of the rules of our marriage.”

  Nortekku glanced away from her. All of this, this series of unwanted glimpses into the intimacies of their life together, was beginning to make him exceedingly uncomfortable.

  The less he knew of the rules of their marriage, the less he knew about their marriage at all, the better, he thought. He had taken care never to question her about any aspect of it. It had seemed unlikely to him that they coupled—indeed Hamiruld didn’t appear to be the sort of man who cared much about bodily passion—but Nortekku had not presumed to pry. Did they twine? He certainly had not wanted to know that. And now—having heard everything that had just poured out of her—

  We got on well together. We enjoyed each other’s company.

  Hoarsely he said, “We’ve taken ourselves completely off the track with this discussion of how Hamiruld handled that message of yours. The important thing is that I still don’t know why it is that you went to Bornigrayal, or wanted me to come here. A new discovery, you said—a higher priority than excavating the cocoon site—”

  “Yes.” She looked relieved to be changing the subject also. “Do you know where the Inland Sea is, Nortekku?”

  “Approximately, yes.”

  From the uncertainty of his tone she must have realized how approximate that knowledge was. Nortekku knew that there were other continents in the world, of course, somewhere on the far side of the Eastern Ocean, and that two of them were separated by a great land-rimmed sea that was almost a third ocean in itself. But that was all. One never thought much about the other side of the world. The Five Cities of this coast were remote enough; the continents of the other hemisphere were beyond consideration.

  She sketched a quick map for him. “Our continent, here. Yissou, Dawinno.” A line down the middle for the Hallimalla River. Five dots along the eastern seaboard for the Five Cities. Then emptiness—the Eastern Ocean—and then, far off at the left end of the sheet, two amorphous land masses, one above the other, with another emptiness, this one long and oval, between them. “The Inland Sea,” Thalarne said, tapping the sheet. “And here, on its southern coast, where the weather is very warm, a little colony of Sea-Lords has been living ever since the Long Winter began.”

  She said it quite calmly, as though telling him that she had learned of some interesting new inscription that had been discovered there, or some unusual Great World artifact. But for him it was like an earthquake. Sea-Lords? Still living somewhere, a little colony of them on the far side of the Eastern Ocean? There were no Sea-Lords anywhere, he thought. The Sea-Lords were gone, every last one of them, like all the rest of the Great World except the Hjjks.

  Nortekku’s recent historical studies had told him very little about the Sea-Lords. One of the Six Peoples of the Great World, yes, a race of intelligent amphibious mammals, sea-going merchant princes who had held sway over the extensive maritime commerce that had flourished in Great World times. That was all he knew of them, other than that they were all supposed to have perished when the darkness and cold of the Long Winter fell upon the Earth. The books that Hresh and other historians had written about that era had dealt mainly with the reptilian Sapphire-Eyes, the dominant race of their time, and provided some knowledge of their servants the Mechanicals, and of the floral Vegetals, and, in abundance, of the Hjjks, whose subterranean hives had sheltered them without difficulty throughout the interminable icy years. But of the Sea-Lords virtually nothing was known. They were the most mysterious of the Great World races, other than the totally baffling Dream-Dreamers.

  “You mean to say they’re still there? Living as they always did?”

  “Still there, yes. Living as they always did, no. From what I’ve been told, I suspect that they’re pitiful impaired creatures, decadent, degenerate, whatever word you want to use—half-crazy, most of them. Bestial. Sad. They’ve retrogressed, gone some distance backward toward the animals they once were.”

  That saddened him. Attuned to ancient history as he had lately become, he had often longed for some miracle that would restore at least a part of the Great World to life, in all its wonder, for him to see and experience. Still, the fact that they had survived at all—

  “They’re definitely Sea-Lords, though? Not just some contemporary species of marine mammal?”

  “Oh, yes. D
efinitely Sea-Lords. They speak what is thought to be a Great World language, or at least a debased version of it. The Hjjks who were in the discovery party claim to be able to communicate with them. Legends of the Great World have survived among them. They know what they once were, it seems.”

  “This stands everything that we know about the end of the Great World on its head, doesn’t it?” Nortekku said.

  “Much of it, anyway. We thought that the oceans everywhere had grown so cold that it became impossible for the Sea-Lords to survive. Apparently not so. And if there’s a band of them still alive on the coast of that southern continent, who can say what still survives farther south? A bunch of Sapphire-Eyes, maybe? Vegetals? It’s only two hundred years since we came out of the cocoons, Nortekku. We think we’ve achieved a lot, with our cities and our universities and our air-wagons and all of that. But the truth is we’ve only just begun, really, to explore the world around us. Off in Dawinno and Yissou, it seems to us that cities of the Eastern Coast like Bornigrayal and Thisthissima are worlds unto themselves, far off beyond our ken. Actually we should look upon them as being next door to us, though. There’s a whole huge continent south of us that we know just about nothing about—”

  “South?”

  “South, yes. Going on and on, right on down to the Pole, maybe. There have been some voyages to it from Cignoi, but the Cignese haven’t been saying anything about whatever they may have found there. And in the east, across this ocean here, there are two continents far larger than this one, with cities of the People on them—we know the names of two or three—with which Bornigrayal has regular commerce, though they haven’t been talking much about that either. Beyond those two—”

  “Even more continents?” Nortekku said. This was dizzying.

  “Who knows? Nobody’s ever been there. But it’s a round planet, Nortekku. You keep going east, sooner or later you reach the Western Ocean’s far side, and if we could sail across it we’d be back at our own coast again. I find it hard to believe that there’s nothing but empty ocean west of us.”

  “The Sea-Lords,” he said. “Come back to the Sea-Lords. You told me, when I first came in, that there’s a ship due to sail from here at the end of the week, and you’re planning to be on it. To go and look for that colony of Sea-Lords, is that it? And you want me to accompany you?”

  “Of course,” Thalarne said.

  It was too much, flooding in all in a single moment like this. His head was swimming. One day he had simply been trying to repair a spat with his lover, and the next, practically, he found himself aboard an airwagon heading for the other side of the continent, and then—new continents—living Sea-Lords—a voyage to the eastern hemisphere, to the shores of the Inland Sea—

  She sat him down and poured wine for him, and she told him a little about the arrangements she had made for the new expedition and her hopes of what they would find out there across the ocean, and her fears, too, and of a good deal else, while he listened spellbound, though only partly convinced that any of this was really happening. Perhaps, Nortekku thought, he was still back in Yissou, lost in some fever-dream. Perhaps he had never even left Dawinno.

  But the whiplash sound of an icy wind against the window reminded him that he really was in wintry Bornigrayal, and that the dark, emerald-eyed woman beside him actually was Thalarne, whom he had not lost after all, and that he and she were talking quite seriously about taking passage aboard some ocean-going vessel and crossing the sea in quest of survivors of a race that had thought to be extinct for seven hundred thousand years. He moved closer to her. By imperceptible stages they found themselves embracing, and then, after only a moment of shared uncertainty—shall we couple first? Or twine?—they made their choice and slid to the floor and were hard at it, coupling for the first time in—what, two weeks? Three? She arched her back against his chest, pressing herself close, and awaited him. How good it was to reunite with her now! First the coupling, the simpler communion, the basic one, the old primitive thing that all creatures enjoyed. And then later, he hoped, they would twine. But for now he lost himself in her rich scent, in the warmth of her. He clasped her tight, and cupped her breasts in his hands, and from her came a gasp of joy as he thrust himself into her.

  And afterward, when they had coupled, and rested, perhaps even dozed a little while, their sensing-organs came into contact, idly, nudging playfully, at first, and then touching in what was not a playful way at all, and they entered twining mode, made ready for the true union of souls, the joining that only the People could do, the linking of their perceptors in the deepest, most intense, most intimate contact that was possible between one person and another. The essence that was Thalarne came flooding into him, and all that was Nortekku into her. He felt her love—no question of it—and her excitement at everything that was opening before them now, the new quest and their own companionship in the weeks to come.

  They slept, then. They rose and put together a sort of a meal. They coupled a second time. No twining, this time—one did not twine often; it was too intense—and then they slept again, and when Nortekku woke just after dawn there was a light carpeting of shining snow over the grounds outside the building. Nortekku had never seen snow at such close range before. Snow was wholly unknown in and around Dawinno, certainly, where it was summer all year round, and even up by chillier Yissou it was a once-in-a-decade event, so they said. Since the end of the Long Winter the world had grown warmer year by year, and, having spent his whole life in the benign climate of the Western Coast, Nortekku had come to assume that all the world now enjoyed similar temperate weather. Not true, it seemed. Here on the other side of the continent things were different. They were not as distant yet in Bornigrayal from the days of the Long Winter as were those who lived on the other coast.

  Since Thalarne was still asleep, he went downstairs and walked in the snow for a time. Scooped some up in his hand: it burned like flame against his bare skin. He shivered and wrapped his arms about himself. This must have been what the Long Winter was like, he thought, something like this snowy morning, though on a much greater scale. Snowdrifts many times higher than a man’s head; vast expanses of blinding whiteness, stretching off as far as anyone could see; black icy winds, relentless, remorseless, raking the land like scythes. No leaf in sight, no blade of grass. How awful!

  He cast his mind back across the ages, tried once again, as he had so many times before, to imagine the Long Winter’s onset: the death-stars plummeting from the sky—the legend had it that they came every twenty-six million years, clusters of jagged stones falling out of the heavens, crashing down to engender such clouds of dust and smoke that the sky turned black and there was darkness on the face of the Earth and its inhabitants were cut off from the warmth of the sun for century after century. Whole races had died out in that terrible winter and those that survived did so by creeping off into safe hiding places until the agony of the planet was over. And when it was over the Great World was gone and the inheritors of the planet were the simpler folk who called themselves the People.

  The Great World peoples could have saved themselves, so said the Book of Hresh that that great wise man had set down toward the end of his life, in the first generation after the Time of Going Forth. Their wisdom would have been equal to that task. But they had calmly chosen to die instead, all but the Hjjks, who, like insects of every sort, seemed to intend to endure until the end of time. According to Hresh, though, the others had convinced themselves that it was the great design of divine Dawinno to replace old races by new ones from time to time in the course of the world’s history: the ancient humans had given way to the peoples of the Great World, and now it was the turn of the Great World peoples to vanish in favor of the furry folk of the cocoons, whose turn it would be, so Hresh supposed, to yield the stage eventually themselves someday. Dawinno was the deity of transformations, was he not? He destroyed and then he created, all in the service of eternal change and renewal.

  So the Sapphire-Eyes and the
Vegetals, who were not in any way fitted to withstand cold, had done nothing to protect themselves against it, and the Mechanicals, those intelligent machines, saw that they would have no purpose once the others had died, and let themselves be overtaken by the snowfall in open country, where their rusted remains could still be found all these many years later, and the Dream-Dreamer race disappeared somewhere also, except for those few who settled among the People in the cocoons, and those did not outlast the Long Winter. And, though scientists knew that the oceans themselves had not completely frozen over during the Long Winter, it was believed that the Sea-Lords, too, had found the new climate too much for them.

  Evidently not, if Thalarne’s tale of that degenerate band on the southern shore of the Inland Sea had any substance to it. To some small extent they had defied Dawinno’s great plan of extinction, just as the Hjjks had done. What, Nortekku wondered, would old Hresh have made of that?

  He had had enough of walking through the snow. He went back inside and found that Thalarne had awakened.

  “Did you enjoy it, the snow?” she asked.

  He rubbed his tingling hands together. “An interesting experience, I suppose. But a little of it goes a long way.”

  “You’ll find it much warmer where we’re going. More like your own city.”

  “Good,” he said. “Excellent.”

  While they breakfasted she told him more of the details of the venture on which they were about to embark.

  The sea voyage would take two weeks, possibly three. That was staggering in itself: cooped up for such a long time in what he envisioned as some sort of wooden container, tossing on the turbulent breast of an ocean so great in size that his imagination was unable to encompass it. He was restless by nature. It would be difficult, he knew, to get through the days and nights of such a long voyage without growing a little fretful, maybe more than a little. But he did not share his anxiety about that with her.