The New Springtime

by Robert Silverberg

  I turned in the book at the end of July, and with it I sent my outline for the proposed third volume of the trilogy, The Summer of Homecoming, which I had worked out while awaiting my editor’s response to the first draft of The Queen of Springtime.

  And then real trouble began.

  My first hint of it came when Brian Thomsen told me that Warner did not like the title of The Queen of Springtime and wanted to change it to The New Springtime, which I had reserved for the designation of the trilogy as a whole. The reason he gave had to do with marketing hype: “queen,” he said, was too “soft,” too “feminine” a word for a sturdy masculine epic like this. No matter that my novel was built around a major female character who would emerge from it with the same title that I had given the book itself, or that a second queen, the great matriarch of the insectoid hjjk-folk, also figured significantly in the story. The publisher felt that the book would sell better with the revised title. I didn’t feel that fighting over the point was worthwhile; if they had cogent sales reasons for making that relatively minor title change, I would go along with it. (I did, however, let my original title stand for the British edition.)

  What I didn’t then know, though, was that the Warner people were being disingenuous with me. The reason for discarding my title had plenty to do with marketing, yes, but was in no way connected with the “softness” or “femininity” of a title with “queen” in it. Some months later I discovered that just about the time I turned my book in, Warner had agreed to publish a novel called The Summer Queen, by Joan Vinge, which in fact would appear in the season just after my own book. So plainly the notion that a science-fiction book with “queen” in its title presented marketing problems was a specious one. The Vinge book was the long-awaited sequel to her Hugo-winning novel The Snow Queen of a decade earlier, and The Summer Queen was a perfectly appropriate title for her new book, just as Queen of Springtime was for mine. And therefore it had been decided that her title would stay and mine had to go.

  Had Warner simply told me that the Vinge book was going to be coming up right after mine and that they could hardly bring out two novels called The Queen of Springtime and The Summer Queen, by different authors, in two successive publishing seasons, I would have accepted the decision without hesitation. I knew that Vinge’s earlier book had done extremely well for them, running up sales figures higher than any book of mine had ever produced, and it had won a Hugo besides. Though technically I had the claim of priority to my title, they plainly saw better commercial prospects for the Vinge book, and it was reasonable that they would prefer to let her title stand as is and change mine. I would not have put up any argument against that if the situation had been straightforwardly explained to me. But it annoyed me to realize that I had been needlessly lied to, when the truth would have been sufficient to win my cooperation.

  And then—further evidence that my once-happy relationship with Warner had grown cool to the point of extinction—I was told that my proposal for The Summer of Homecoming was ill conceived, “grand, but without focus. There are a lot of events but no cohesion or development.” Brian Thomsen told me that he disliked the idea of leaping a couple of centuries, as I intended, for the third book. He wanted one that was set only a generation or two after The New Springtime and, essentially, presented me with his own idea of what I should write for the concluding volume.

  Perhaps the third book he wanted me to write would have been a good one. We will never know. But the third book that I wanted to write had been in my mind virtually from the outset of the project, and I didn’t take kindly to the request for a new outline. My agent and I attempted to get them to allow me to tell the story I wanted to tell, but with little success. And when other signals came from Warner that the company had lost enthusiasm for the project and had ceased to feel the need to give me much support, I simply withdrew the proposal entirely and turned to another publisher, with whom I signed a multi-book contract that would keep me busy for the next five years. Obviously The Summer of Homecoming could not be included in that new enterprise. No publisher would want to take over a trilogy in its final volume when the two earlier books belong to another house.

  And so I went on to other tasks, and now it is certain that I will never write that third volume. Too much time has gone by. Perhaps I still might find the stamina here in my seventies to write books of the length that I managed in my late forties and early fifties, but in any case I think it would be too difficult, some two decades after the first book of the pair was written, to feel my way back into that far-future world, to master all its complexities one more time, to return to that intricately conceived far-future era and make it seem as though I had been away only a short while. No doubt I could mimic the spirit in which I wrote the first two books, but mimicry is not the same thing as creation, and I suspect that writing that book would be nothing more than drudgery for me and a doubtful pleasure for my readers. So I will not attempt it.

  But the outline of The Summer of Homecoming survives…

  Here, follows, as published in the 2005 Bison Books edition of The Queen of Springtime, Robert Silverberg’s outline of The Summer of Homecoming. In the next section, is the only part of this proposed third volume that ever got written by Robert Silverberg: A Piece of the Great World first published as a short story in the collection “One Million A.D.” edited by Gardner Dozois in December 2005.

  Outline of “The Summer of Homecoming”

  The New Springtime, Volume III

  Thalarne, a vigorous, strong-willed woman of the city of Yissou, is an archaeologist. Nortekku of Dawinno, an architect who comes from a powerful Dawinnan merchant family, is a brusque, somber, and embittered man escaping from an arranged marriage that he detests. These are the protagonists of The Summer Homecoming, the final book in the series that began with At Winter’s End and The New Springtime. Their complex and stormy love affair, played out over a worldwide canvas, holds the front of the stage in the new book, and leads to climactic revelations about the role of the vanished human beings who have created the strangely altered far-future Earth of this trilogy.

  It is about 150 years after the events described in volume 2 of the trilogy, perhaps 200. By this time, those members of the People who led the Coming Forth from the cocoon—Koshmar, Torlyri, Harruel, Hresh, Taniane, Salaman—have become virtual mythical figures, each surrounded by an accretion of apocryphal fables. The Long Winter itself, which swept away the Great World society that had been Earth’s highest achievement, seems like little more than a dream now. The world’s climate has fully recovered from the falling of the death-stars, and is in a benign temperate-to-tropical stage over much of the Earth: the New Springtime has given way to perpetual worldwide summer.

  Among the People we have been following so far, centering on the cities of Dawinno and Yissou, this has happened:

  It has been a time of great technological progress. The People have moved from the basically medieval technology of volume 2 to something approximating the twentieth-century level. New cities have been founded; the equivalents of automobiles, helicopters, telephones, and airliners now exist.

  A hereditary aristocracy, as foreshadowed in volume 2, has now appeared: the aristocrats are the descendants of those who played leading roles in the Coming Forth and in the early migrations of the New Springtime. But the aristocracy is already decadent and something of a joke. Most political and economic power resides with the emergent bourgeoisie. This is particularly true in Dawinno, the great southern capital. Yissou, in the north, is somewhat more backward, still in many respects a feudal state.

  The City of Dawinno, founded by Hresh, has achieved dominance all along the coast of the continent, absorbing its neighbors to the north just as the early Romans spread out from their one city to engulf the entire Italian peninsula. It is a vast and prosperous metropolis now, ruled by an oligarchy of the highborn (many of them descendants of Nialli and Thu-Kimnibol, known as the House of Hresh) in consultation with a Presidium of powerfu
l bankers and merchants.

  Salaman’s city of Yissou, in the far north, is ostensibly the secondary capital, somewhat as Florence of the Medici was in medieval Italy in relation to Papal Rome, but in fact Yissou is completely subordinate. Descendants of King Salaman still maintain a sort of harsh aristocracy in Yissou, subject to annoying interference from Dawinno, and some of them, practicing a variant on the second-sight technique that amounts to telepathy, are a constant threat to reestablish their city’s independence. (In Yissou the old taboos on use of second sight to enter the minds of other People have long since broken down, and the free use of quasi-telepathy there makes the people of Yissou disconcerting to people of other cities.) Prince Vuldimin, a vigorous Salaman-like member of the royal family of Yissou, is struggling to bring about a modernization of his city as a way of reestablishing its greatness, but he has found opposition from his own reactionary cousins, one of whom is the city’s king, Falid. (All character names are to be regarded as provisional at this point.)

  During the period of volume 2, the People had founded five other cities in the eastern part of the continent—first Thisthissima, a ruined city of the Great World that some tribes of the People had rebuilt and occupied, and then Gharb, Ghajnsielem, Cignoi, and Bornigrayal. These, with Dawinno and Yissou, constituted the Seven Cities of the post-Winter world. In Hresh’s time there was virtually no way for the People we have been following to enter into contact with the eastern cities, because of the great distance and the primitive means of transportation and communication then available. But now there is regular travel and commerce among all seven of the cities. There are also strong trade rivalries, and the possibility of actual war between the cities of the east (held in a loose confederation under the hegemony of Thisthissima) and those of the west has begun to emerge.

  The hjjks, who were such a menace to the People in volume 2, have fallen into decadence and disarray since Nialli Apuilana’s time. The old system of dominance by a central Queen operating out of a central Nest has been shattered by a civil war; the Queen of Queens has been put to death by her own Militaries, in a punitive action characteristic of the alien hjjk psychology, following the rebellion of the lesser Queens. Now each Nest is independent and the People’s old sense of the hjjks as an implacable monolithic entity has been replaced by an awareness of their weaknesses. In this present period of hjjk weakness, the former boundary between hjjk and People territorial zones that was established by treaty has also broken down: there is commerce now between various hjjk Nests and the cities of the People, and hjjks are commonly seen on the streets of the Seven Cities. Tensions remain between the two species, but the hostility that existed in Nialli’s time now seems as antiquated as the struggles of the Guelphs and Ghibbelines do to us.

  Within the past generation, the People have begun exploration of other continents, and this has produced some surprises. Across the Eastern Ocean, on the continent that once was Europe, a colony of decadent Sea-Lords has turned up, living in the vast inland sea that occupies roughly the position of the Mediterranean. These dolphin-like survivors of the Great World had waited out the Long Winter along the shores of North Africa, but evolution has not been kind to them and the few that remain are mysterious, tormented, half-mad people, lost in visions of their ancient grandeur. Unable to take their own lives but still driven by an age-old compulsion to survive despite everything, these tragic aquatic mammals hope that their discoverers—an exploring party from the East Coast city of Bornigrayal—will mercifully put them to death. But the Bornigrayal folk have no such intentions. They regard the Sea-Lords as fascinating novelties, and bring three or four of them back to the main continent to display, rather as Elizabethan explorers brought a few American Indians to London.

  Explorers from Dawinno, meanwhile, have penetrated the steaming tropical wilderness of the continent that lies south of their own city—South America, essentially, though it has moved far to the west and north of its twentieth-century position in the intervening fourteen million years. To their amazement, the Dawinnan explorers discover that some tribes of the People had never gone into cocoons during the Long Winter, but had retreated to the tropics and had managed to survive the time of the death-stars unprotected. These people of the southern continent have built major cities, cities that are much older than Dawinno or Yissou and have passed through many cultural upheavals, entering now into a passive post-industrial phase in which their citizens live as virtual squatters in the shadow of their own past achievements.

  This discovery astounds the Dawinnans. They had thought that they were pioneers building a new civilization in the reborn world, but now it seems that others very much like them had already built a post-Long Winter empire of the People in this southern continent, an empire that had gone through the full cycle of its history, from greatness to decay, while our People were still in the cocoon. As we will see, the existence of this lost southern empire will cause surprise to others besides the People.

  The book opens with Nortekku embroiled in conflict with his father, the wealthy and highly connected merchant Gratan-Antho. Gratan-Antho has arranged a marriage for the moody and turbulent Nortekku with the vapid but highborn Silina, who can trace her ancestry to the early Beng chieftains. To Gratan-Antho, the mating would provide his family with the touch of aristocracy that is the only thing he thinks it lacks. To Nortekku, though, it is an intolerable intrusion on his freedom of choice. He has never been involved with any one woman very long, and he has no wish to take a mate.

  After angrily telling his father that he will never marry, despite a threat of disinheritance, Nortekku pays a ceremonial call on Silina’s family to explain his reluctance to undertake the mating. There he meets the crafty and powerful Prince Vuldimin of Yissou, whose efforts to restore his city’s independence under the House of Salaman form a subplot of the book. Vuldimin has come to Dawinno seeking an architect for a palace that he plans in the countryside outside Yissou, and Silina’s family has promised to introduce him to Nortekku.

  The meeting begins badly, since Nortekku has come to break off the betrothal and the resulting fuss tends to overshadow Vuldimin’s purpose in meeting him. But Vuldimin—a shrewd older man—manages to calm things down and invites Nortekku to visit him at his present Yissou estate, ostensibly to talk about the construction project, but in fact for the sake of getting him away from Dawinno before he lands himself in deeper trouble with his family or Silina’s. Nortekku, seeing the wisdom of that, goes back to Yissou with the prince, eluding process-servers from Silina’s family, who are suing for breach of contract (they, though highborn, are impoverished and eager for the mating) and from his own father’s retinue, who have orders to bring him back and force him to honor the contract.

  In Yissou, Nortekku encounters Khardakhor, a vigorous and intellectually adventurous member of a great Dawinnan merchant family, unrelated to any of the ancient heroes, that has long been in direct competition with Nortekku’s ancestors. Khardakhor, worldly and civilized, is a powerful figure in modern Dawinno. He is charmed by the headstrong Nortekku, who seems so different from his crabbed and churlish father, and tells him of the expedition he is sponsoring to the newly discovered southern continent. Khardakhor is seeking new sources of raw materials for his factories. Hoping to score a satisfying coup against his rival Gratan-Antho, Khardakhor invites Nortekku to join the expedition.

  It is a tempting offer. The rebellious Nortekku would savor the pleasure of defying his father in an entirely new way by joining forces with Khardakhor. And plainly he needs to get away from Dawinno for a long time. Vuldimin encourages him to go, saying that he can always wait another year or two to start work on his new palace. But just as Nortekku is on the verge of accepting the invitation, a complicating factor emerges.

  This is Nortekku’s meeting, at the court of Yissou, with the beautiful and fascinating archaeologist Thalarne, who is about to depart on an expedition of her own—a joint Dawinno-Yissou expedition to the midwest to search for the a
ncestral cocoon in which the great heroes had taken refuge during the Long Winter. Nortekku has no particular interest in ancient history. But he develops an immediate and powerful interest in Thalarne.

  The difficulty here is that Thalarne is the mate of Vuldimin’s cousin Hamiruld, a prince of the family of Salaman. The sly and effete Hamiruld has no particular interest in Thalarne, and she feels no love for him; but, however estranged they are, they are mated. And Hamiruld will be accompanying Thalarne on the expedition. Despite this obstacle, Nortekku resolves to go along. An architect, he tells Thalarne, will be valuable to the project. She—attracted to him at once—agrees. And so it is arranged. When the expedition departs shortly to seek the site of the cocoon, Nortekku will be part of it.

  Two strong psychological currents run through the civilization of the People at this time:

  Among the educated classes, there is a pervasive feeling that the popular historical myths somehow distort the reality of the past. They assume that the figures of Koshmar, Hresh, Taniane, etc., about whom they are taught in school, and who play prominent roles in the new art-form, historical drama, that lately has blossomed in their society, are greatly inflated and distorted. (One of the most popular plays deals with the life of Nialli Apuilana, her captivity and resurgence and her defeat of the hjjk Queen. Another tells of the love story of Torlyri and Trei Husathirn; another, of the boyhood of Hresh, of Hresh’s visit to the Nest of Nests. These plays are the equivalents of the dramas of Aeschylus or Sophocles in ancient Athens—not only entertainment but also communal rites of purgation and communion with the past.)

  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.