Queen of Springtime (11 page)

“That is unthinkable, yes.” he said.

“So it is. But you seem to take it very calmly. It hardly seems to matter to you at all.”

“Must we talk about these things now? It’s a sad day, Taniane. I’ve just seen my brother’s beloved mate lowered into the fire.”

She seemed to stiffen. “By the Five, Hresh, we’ll see everyone we know lowered into that fire. And then some day our turns will come, and it won’t be as pretty as it is in that little sermon you always preach! But the dead are dead, and we’re still here, with plenty of trouble to cope with. This request for a peace treaty, Hresh: there’s nothing innocent or friendly about it. It has to be a maneuver in some larger game that we aren’t able at this time to comprehend. For us to sign it—”

“Please, Taniane.”

She ignored him. “—would indeed be unthinkable, just as you say. Hresh, they want to take three quarters of the world away from us under the guise of a treaty of friendship, and you won’t even raise your voice?”

He said, after a while, “You know I won’t ever give my support to a surrender to the hjjks. But before I take a public position there’s more I need to learn. The hjjks are complete mysteries to me. To everyone. Our ignorance affects our dealings with them. What are they, really? Nothing more than oversized ants? A vast swarm of soulless bugs? If that’s all that they are, how could they have been part of the Great World? There may be much more to them than we think. I want to know.”

“You always want to know! But how will you find out? You’ve spent your whole life studying everything there ever was in this world and the worlds that went before it, and the best you can say after all that is that the hjjks are total mysteries to you!”

“Perhaps Nialli—”

“Nialli, yes. I’ve ordered her to speak with the envoy and bring me whatever she can discover. But will she? Will she, do you think? Who can say? She wears a mask, that girl. That girl is more mysterious than the hjjks themselves!”

“Nialli’s difficult, yes. But I think she’ll be of great help to us in this.”

“Perhaps so,” said Taniane. But there wasn’t much conviction in her voice.

The center of the city: the familiar confines of the House of Knowledge. A good place of refuge on a difficult day. Hresh found his assistants Chupitain Stuld and Plor Killivash there, huddling over some bits of rubble in one of the ground-floor offices. They seemed surprised to see him. “Will you be working today?” Plor Killivash asked. “We thought—”

“No, not working,” he said. “I simply want to be here. I’ll be upstairs. I won’t want to be disturbed.”

The House of Knowledge was a white slender spear of a tower, hardly a stone’s throw wide but many stories high—the tallest building in the city, in fact. Its narrow circular galleries, in which Hresh had stored the fruits of a lifetime of inquiry, coiled around and around, narrowing as they rose, like a great serpent coiled within the tower’s walls. At the summit of the whole structure was a parapet completely encircling the tip of the building to form a lofty balcony. From there Hresh could see virtually the whole of the great city that he had envisioned and laid out and brought into being.

A warm sultry wind was blowing. In his right hand he held a small silvery sphere that he had found long ago in the ruins of Vengiboneeza. With it, once, he had been able to conjure visions of the ancient magnificent epochs of the Great World. In his left lay a similar metal ball, golden-bronze in color. It was the master control instrument that governed the Great World construction machines he had used to build Dawinno, in a place where nothing at all had existed but marshes and swamps and tropical forests.

Both these globes, the silver one and the golden-bronze one, had long since burned out. They were of no value to him, or anyone, now. Within its translucent skin Hresh could see the master control’s core of shining quicksilver stained and blackened by corrosion.

As he hefted the two dead instruments thoughts of the Great World came into his mind. He was swept by powerful envy for the people of that vanished era. How stable their world had been, how tranquil, how serene! The various parts of that grand civilization had meshed like the gears of some instrument designed by the gods. Sapphire-eyes and humans, hjjks and sea-lords, vegetals and mechanicals, they all had lived together in harmony and unity, and discord was unknown. Surely it was the happiest time the world had ever known.

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 out 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.