At Winter's End

by Robert Silverberg

  Thu-Kimnibol laughed. “If it’s a trick, it’s one that Salaman has played on himself. The wall’s real enough, Nialli. For twice as many years as you’ve been alive, or something close to that, he’s poured all the resources of his city into constructing that thing. While we’ve built bridges and towers and roads and parks, Salaman’s built a wall. A wall of walls, one to stand throughout the ages. When this place is as old as Vengiboneeza, and twice as dead, that wall will still be there.”

  “Is he crazy, do you think?”

  “Very likely. But shrewd and strong, for all his craziness. It’s a mistake ever to underestimate him. There’s no one in this world as strong and determined as Salaman. Or as mad.”

  “A crazy ally. That makes me uneasy.”

  “Better a crazy ally than a crazy enemy,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

  He turned and signaled to those in the wagons just behind him. They had halted when he had. Now they began to move forward again, up the sloping tableland toward the high ground where that incredible wall lay athwart the sky. Nialli Apuilana could see small figures atop the wall, warriors whose spears stood out like black bristles against the darkening air. For a moment she imagined that they were hjjks, somehow in possession of the city. The strangeness of this place inspired fantasy. She found herself thinking also that the wall, colossal as it was, was merely poised and lightly balanced on its great base, that it would take only a breeze to send it falling forward upon her, that already it had begun slowly to topple in her direction as the wagon rolled onward. Nialli Apuilana smiled. This is foolishness, she thought. But anything seemed possible in the City of Yissou. That black wall was like a thing of dreams, and not cheerful dreams.

  Thu-Kimnibol said, “It was only a wooden palisade when I was a boy here. Not even a very sturdy one, at that. When the hjjks came, they’d have swarmed over it in a moment, if we hadn’t found a way of turning them back. Gods! How we fought, that day!”

  He fell into silence. He seemed to lose himself in it.

  Nialli Apuilana leaned against his comforting bulk and tried to imagine how it had been, that day when the hjjks came to Yissou. She saw the boy Samnibolon, who would call himself Thu-Kimnibol afterward, holding his weapons like a man, striking at the hordes of hjjks in the bloody dusk as the shadows lengthened. Yes, she could see him easily, a boy of heroic size, as now he was a man of heroic size. Fighting unrelentingly against the invaders who threatened his father’s young city. And something in her quivered with excitement at the thought of him hot with battle.

  The warlike boy Samnibolon, who had become this warlike man Thu-Kimnibol: they were the utter opposite of the gentle Kundalimon, that shy and strange bearer of the Queen’s love and the Queen’s peace. Nialli Apuilana had loved Kundalimon beyond any doubt. In some way she still did. And yet—and yet—when she looked at this fierce Thu-Kimnibol she found herself swept by irresistible love and desire. It had come over her for the first time at the drill-field, to her astonishment and joy. It had come over her a hundred times since. Here beneath the terrible walls of Salaman’s city it seemed stronger than ever. She had known him since she was a child; and yet she realized now she had not actually known him at all, not until these past few weeks had brought them so strangely together.

  All his life, she thought, he has waited for a chance to fight again; and now he will. And suddenly she realized that what she loved him for was that strength, that oneness of character, that had defined him since his earliest boyhood, when this city’s wall had been nothing more than a palisade of wood.

  Her love for Kundalimon glowed imperishably within her: she was certain of that. And yet this other man, Kundalimon’s opposite in all things, now filled her soul so thoroughly that there seemed no room for anyone else.

  Hresh had never touched such perfection before. He had not ever imagined it was possible. Truly the Nest functioned as smoothly as any machine.

  He knew this was only a minor hjjk outpost, certainly not the great Nest of Nests; and yet it was so huge and complex that even after many days within it he had no clear idea of its plan. Its tunnels, warm and sweet-smelling and dimly lit by some pink glow that emanated from the walls, radiated in bewildering patterns, running this way and that, crossing and recrossing. Yet all those who traversed these corridors moved swiftly and unhesitatingly in obvious clear knowledge of the route.

  The hjjks had fabricated their huge subterranean city in the simplest way, digging the tunnels with their bare claws—Hresh had watched them at work, for they never ceased expanding the Nest—and lining the walls with a pulp made of soft wood, which they chewed themselves and spat out into great soggy mounds that could be scooped up and pressed into place. Wooden beams served to prop the tunnel roof at regular intervals. He had expected something more complex from them. This was not very different except in size from the sort of nests the ants and termites of the forest built for themselves.

  And, like those small insects of the forest floor, they had evolved an elaborate system of castes and professions. The biggest ones—females, they were, though apparently not fertile—were the Militaries. They were ordinarily the only ones who ventured into the world beyond the Nest. It was Militaries who had brought Hresh here.

  A parallel caste of sterile males, the Workers, had charge of constructing and expanding the Nest, and of maintaining the intricate systems of ventilation and heating that kept it livable. They were thick-bodied and short, with little of the eerie grace that the slender Militaries displayed.

  Then there were the reproductive cadres, the Egg-makers and Life-kindlers: smaller, stockier even than the Workers, with short limbs and blunt, rounded heads. When they were mature, they were taken before the Queen, who brought them to full fertility by penetrating them in some way and flooding them with a substance she herself secreted: this was known as Queen-touch. Life-kindlers and Egg-makers mated, then, and brought forth eggs that hatched into small pale larvae. A caste known as Nourishment-givers reared and nurtured these in outlying caverns. It was they who determined which caste the new hjjks would belong to, in accordance with the orders of the Queen, and shaped them for it by the manner of food they provided. The number of each caste’s members never changed: as the life of each hjjk Military or Worker or Egg-maker or Life-kindler neared its appointed end, its replacement was already being reared in the caverns of the Nourishment-givers.

  Hresh learned all these things from the members of a different caste yet, one with which he felt a great personal kinship of spirit: the Nest-thinkers, the philosophers and teachers of the insect-folk.

  Whether these were male or female, he couldn’t tell. They were as tall as Militaries, which argued that they were female, but they had the blocky frame of Workers, barely narrowing at all at the places where one segment of their bodies gave way to the next, as though they might be male. In any event they were unconcerned with sexual matters. They sat all day in dark sealed chambers, to which the young came for instruction. Hresh went to them too, and listened solemnly as they explained the workings of the Nest to him. He was never sure if he ever spoke twice with the same Nest-thinker. They seemed indistinguishable. After a while he fell into the habit of regarding them all as one, a single individual—Nest-thinker.

  Nest-thinker it was who opened the mysteries of the Nest to him, Nest-thinker who showed him how every aspect of the life of the Nest was coordinated perfectly with every other aspect, Nest-thinker who instructed him in Nest-truth, who taught him the intricacies of Egg-plan and Queen-love, who offered him the comfort of Nest-bond.

  It was Nest-thinker, ultimately, who brought him before the Queen.

  That was the deepest mystery of all: the city’s giant immobile monarch, hidden in a chamber sunken far beneath the other levels, guarded by the elite caste of Queen-attendants—warriors of immense size and indomitable valor who encircled Her place of repose in an impenetrable legion.

  “The Queen can never die,” Nest-thinker told Hresh. “She was born when the world was youn
g and will live to its final age.” Was he supposed to take that literally? Surely the Queen’s life-span was great. Perhaps she lived so long that to the others she seemed immortal. But immortal?

  Hresh had no idea how long he had been in the Nest before they took him to the Queen. Time had little meaning here: his days often passed in a dreamy haze of contemplation. He had slipped into a strange peaceful otherness. The storms of the outer world, the turmoil and bustle of the City of Dawinno, seemed to him now like phantasms out of some other life. But ultimately a day arrived when Nest-thinker said to him, “You are for the Queen today. Follow me.”

  Together they descended a narrow, spiraling ramp, its earthen floor worn to a high polish by the passage of generations of feet. Hresh wondered if any of those feet had been feet like his. He doubted it. Very likely only the hard bristly claws of hjjks had traveled this way before today.

  Down and down and downward still they went. The shaft was like an auger boring its way backward through the depths of time. Crisp unknown odors floated up toward him. A pulsing black glow was the only illumination.

  The deeper they went, the faster they moved. The long-legged Nest-thinker set an unrelenting pace. Hresh came close to growing dizzy as the shaft wound on and on. But some unknown force steadied his soul: perhaps from Nest-thinker, perhaps from the Queen Herself.

  Then at last they reached the holy of holies.

  It was a long oval chamber with a high, rounded ceiling. Instead of roof-beams there was a vaulting of hexagonal plates overhead, fitted one against the other in a way that looked invulnerable even to the mightiest tremor of the earth. At one end of the chamber—the end where Nest-thinker and Hresh had entered—was a platform where the Queen-attendants stood packed close together, their weapons pointing outward. The Queen filled all the rest of the room, end to end, wall to wall.

  She was a colossal tubular vessel of flesh, soft and pink, not remotely hjjk-like in any way, without eyes, without beak, without limbs, without features of any sort. But he felt himself to be in the presence of an extraordinary being, of such power and force that it was all he could do to keep himself from falling to his knees before Her.

  And yet this was only a minor Queen, Hresh knew. This was just a subordinate of the great Queen of Queens.

  The only sound in the chamber was that of his own breathing. He pressed his hands to his sides, digging them deep into his fur to stop them from trembling. Queen-attendants came up close against him, surrounding him on all sides, their hard shells and bristly limbs pressing tight. Their blades lightly pricked his flesh. If he made so much as the slightest unexpected move those blades would plunge deep.

  A voice that was like the tolling of an awesome bell spoke in his mind.

  “You have the contact focus with you?”

  He understood somehow that the Queen meant the Barak Dayir.

  “Yes.”

  “Use it.”

  He drew the Wonderstone from its pouch. It felt fiery in his hand. A profound chill of fear coursed through him, but it was met at once by a neutralizing warmth that seemed to come from the Queen.

  He took a deep breath and entered into union with the stone.

  At once there is a sound like a crack of thunder, or perhaps the world splitting apart on its hinges. His mind goes soaring across a vast abyss. As if he has dissolved, as if he is traveling on the wind. Impossible for him to comprehend where he is or what is happening; he has a sense only of an immensity containing an immensity, and, somewhere deep within it, a heart of fire burning with the power of ten thousand suns.

  He is no longer aware of Nest-thinker’s presence, of the Queen-attendants, even of his own body. There is only that immensity surrounding him.

  “What are you?” he asks.

  “You know Me as the Queen of Queens.”

  He understands. He is within the Queen, and not the minor one of the Nest he knows. All Nests are linked; all Queens are aspects of the one Queen. And that greatest of hjjks who lies in the realm of mysteries in the north has a Wonderstone too: holds it embedded within Her vast flesh, indeed, and it is that Wonderstone now that speaks to his. The union of the Wonderstones joins him to the Queen of Queens. He is engulfed in that gigantic mass of alien flesh.

  Hresh remembers now his mentor Noum om Beng saying, so very long ago, “We had what you call a Barak Dayir also. But our Wonderstone was taken by the hjjks.” Yes, and swallowed by their Queen; and this was it, the other contact focus, the Wonderstone that the Bengs had had and lost, the twin to the ancient magical thing he holds clutched in his sensing-organ.

  “Now you will see,” says the Queen.

  The heavens split wide. The years roll away, back and back and back, and the Barak Dayir traces a narrow flaming line across the centuries into the distant past. The Queen wishes to show him the vastness of Her race’s heritage.

  He sees the world buried in the ice of the Long Winter: he sees tongues of frost creeping down into lands that had never known cold, and green tenderness blackening under the onslaught. Creatures to which he could not give names searching desperately for refuge, and folk of his own kind fleeing pitifully hither and yon. The tall pale tailless creatures whom he knew as humans move among them, saying, Come, come, here is the cocoon, you will be saved.

  And also he sees legions of hjjks, leaning unperturbed on their spears as the black wind whipped swirling snowflakes past them.

  Onward, then, back, back, into the time before the cold, into the glory of the Great World, even. Huge slow-bodied quick-witted crocodilian sapphire-eyes folk on the porticos of their marble villas; sea-lords in their carriages, vegetals, mechanicals, all the strange and wondrous beings of that glorious era. Humans, again. And hjjks, always hjjks, myriads of them, perfectly organized, clear-minded and cold-eyed, living ever in accordance with the vast millennia-spanning scheme that was Egg-plan, moving among the other races, often spending years at a time in the Great World cities before returning to the Nest from which they came.

  Will She take him backward even to the time before the Great World?

  No. No, the voyage has reached its end. Hresh feels himself drawn forward again with dizzying speed, the images leaping past, everything in rapid motion, comet-tails in the sky, death-stars crashing down, the air turning black, the first snowstorms, the withered leaves, the world entombed in ice, the stoic patience of the doomed sapphire-eyes, the panicky flight of the desperate beasts, and the hjjks again, always the hjjks moving calmly outward to take possession of the frozen world even as the other races abandoned it.

  There was a great stillness in the royal chamber.

  They were in the Nest again. A sense of the age-old grandeur and perfection of the hjjk world resonated like the swelling sounds of an immense symphony in Hresh’s soul.

  The Queen said, “Now you see us as we are. Why, then, do you make yourselves our enemies?”

  “I am not your enemy.”

  “Your people refuse to live in peace with us. Your people even now prepare to attack us.”

  “What they do is wrong,” Hresh said. “I ask your forgiveness for it. I ask you to tell me if there is any way for your people and mine to live peacefully together.”

  There was silence again, a very long one.

  “I offered a treaty,” the Queen said.

  “Is that the only way? To pen us up in the parts of the world that we already hold, and prevent us from going forth to explore the rest?”

  “What value is it, this exploring? One piece of land is much like another. There are not so many of you that you need the entire world.”

  “But to give up all hope of reaching outward into the unknown places—”

  “Reaching outward! Reaching outward!” That huge pealing voice rang with royal contempt. “That is all you want, you little furry ones! Why not be content with what you have?”

  “Is Egg-plan not a constant reaching-out?” Hresh asked boldly.

  The Queen responded with a kind of enormous chuckl
e, as though answering a child so impudent that he was charming. “Egg-plan is the realization and fulfillment of that which has existed since before the beginning of time. It is not the creation of anything new, but only the final actualization of what has always been. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Hresh. “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Your kind, boiling out of its hiding places when the time of cold ended, spreading like a disease over the land, multiplying your numbers unchecked, covering the Earth with cities of stone, fouling the land, darkening the air, staining the rivers as you turn them to your own use, pushing yourselves onward into places where you were never meant to be—you are the foe of Nest-truth. You are the enemy of Egg-plan. You are a wild force upon the orderly world. You are a plague, and must be contained. To eradicate you is impossible; but you must be contained. Do you understand Me, child of questions? Do you understand?”

  “Yes. I understand, now.”

  His sensing-organ tightened on the Barak Dayir. His entire body shivered with the force of the revelations sweeping through it.

  He understood, beyond any doubt. And he knew that what he had come to see was more than the Queen had realized She was telling him.

  The hjjks of the New Springtime were mere shadows of those who had lived during the time of the Great World. Those ancient hjjks had been venturers, voyagers, a race of bold merchants and explorers. They had journeyed the length and breadth of this and perhaps many other worlds as well in pursuit of their aims, lacing a bright red line of accomplishment through the rich fabric of the Great World.

  But the Great World was long gone.

  What were these hjjks who had survived? Still a great race, yes. But a fallen one, which had lost all of its technical skills and all of its outward thrust. They had become a profoundly conservative people, clinging to the fragments of their ancient glory and permitting nothing new to emerge.

  What was it they most wanted, after all? Nothing more than to dig holes in the ground and live in the dark, performing eternal repetitive cycles of birth and reproduction and death, and once in a while sending their overflow population forth to dig a new hole somewhere else and start the cycle going there. They believed that the world could only be sustained by proper maintenance of the unvarying patterns of life. And they would do anything to assure the continued stability of those patterns.