Its buildings—whitewashed clusters of high domes, spidery aerial bridges high above the ground linking spiky-tipped towers, massive dark octagonal stone structures surrounded by the delicate traceries of pink fretwork walls—had a kind of consistency of style from one block to the next, but it was an alien consistency, a style that reminded him curiously of the imaginary Vengiboneeza that he had seen once in his dreams. They had been designed and built by people whose experiences had been nothing like those of his own people, whose history was in every way different, other than that they too had waited out the Long Winter in cocoons.
Those who dwelled here were folk who knew not Hresh, nor Koshmar nor Torlyri nor Thu-Kimnibol, nor any of the great Bengs, and they spoke a different language, a sibilant, whispering thing of which Nortekku couldn’t comprehend a single word, and when they had reached the city-building stage of civilization they had built a city that reflected all those differences. There are only certain ways one can handle the enclosing of space, Nortekku knew—that was what architecture was primarily about, he believed, the enclosing of space. And there are only certain things one can do with light, with form, with proportion. And yet, given all that, many sorts of variants were possible within those basics: variant materials, variant strategies of structural support, and variant kinds of ornament, of cornices, windows, façades, pediments, colonnades. Wherever he looked here, he saw variants from what he considered the norm. Everything, everything, was different here. Yissou was different from Dawinno, yes, and Bornigrayal different from both of those in other ways, but this place was—does the phrase make sense, he wondered?—more different still. He felt a kind of vertigo of the soul, walking among its infinity of strange buildings. This too was like a dream, the oddest kind of dream, in which one could not only see but also touch, and feel.
Thalarne sometimes accompanied him on these walks, sometimes not. When she was with him he tried to make clear the impact that this place was having on him. Sempinore had produced an odd reversal in their relationship: when the center of their discourse had been the world’s ancient past, she was the teacher, he the novice, but now he was leading the way, endlessly analyzing and explaining the unfamiliar and sometimes almost unbelievable structural assumptions by which the buildings of Sempinore had been put together, and she followed his discourses as well as she could.
At last the reprovisioning job was complete and the time had come for the next stage of their journey.
Two Hjjks had come on board now. Nortekku glumly watched them arrive: like all their kind they were towering figures, taller than any man, with long gleaming bodies marked horizontally with bands of yellow and black, fearsome-looking beaks, narrow tapering heads topped by great feathery antennae, glittering blue-black eyes, deep constrictions marking the boundaries between head and thorax, thorax and abdomen. They were, he supposed, their guides, the two who had discovered the Sea-Lord colony across the Inland Sea. Apparently they were going to sleep on the main deck. They laid out a little Hjjk domain for themselves there, nailing talismans of plaited grass to the planks, setting up small wooden shrines that contained some smooth egg-shaped white stones, installing a cupboard that held a stock of the dried fruit and sun-parched meat that was their food.
He knew he would never understand Hjjks, nor come to have any liking for them. It was, he supposed, some kind of inherent racial animosity, something that had run through him from birth, inbred in blood and bone. To him they were unsightly, ominous things, dry and cold of soul, alien, remote, dangerous. Some of that feeling was a legacy of the things he had been taught in school about the early wars between People and Hjjks for territory in the first years of the New Springtime, but that was just history now. The Hjjks posed no sort of menace at all. The old system of dominance by a central Queen operating out of a central Nest had been shattered by a civil war; the Queen of Queens had been put to death by her own military caste, in a punitive action typical of the icy Hjjk mentality, after a rebellion by the lesser Queens.
Now, Nortekku knew, each Nest was independent and the People’s old sense of the Hjjks as an implacable monolithic entity had been replaced by an awareness that, divided as they were, they could no longer be any sort of threat. The two species lived together, not exactly in friendship—never that—but with a sort of cool mutual toleration. There was commerce now, not warfare, between the two species. Hjjks moved freely through the cities of the People and had taken up residence in certain sectors of them. It was too warm and humid for them in Dawinno, but you saw them wherever you went in Yissou, and there had been many of them in Bornigrayal, too. Even so, Nortekku still felt a reflexive stiffening of his spine whenever he was near one; and now there would be two of them as his companions for the rest of the voyage.
Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan could be seen up on deck with them most of the day, huddling in close conversations conducted in low, conspiratorial tones, the two Bornigrayans muttering in their rapid-fire Bornigrayan way and the Hjjks answering in their own harsh, chittering manner. Nortekku saw much sketching of diagrams, and handing of them back and forth, and a good deal of gesturing and pointing. There was something oddly secretive, almost unsavory, about these discussions that Nortekku found very puzzling. They made no attempt to draw their fellow archaeologist Thalarne into them, let alone Nortekku. He never even learned the names of the two Hjjks, if indeed—he had never been sure on that point—Hjjks had individual names. Well, he thought, whatever the Hjjks and the Bornigrayans had to say to each other was no concern of his. He was here to see the Sea-Lords; that, and to be with Thalarne.
The second voyage was wholly different from the first one. The Inland Sea was the most placid body of water imaginable, waveless, tideless, a shimmering blue pathway offering no challenges of any sort. The whole day long the sun filled the sky like a beacon, bright, huge, astonishingly warm, drawing them on to the south. From the side of the deck Nortekku could see the creatures of the depths in all their abundance, great schools of silvery fish swarming almost at the surface, occasional solitary giants hanging motionless nearby like underwater balloons and feeding, it seemed, on the great wads of seaweed that lay in clumps all about, and swift predators with the fins along their backs raised up into view like swords cutting the air. Once a mountainous turtle paddled close beside the ship, extended its long neck to stare at him in a glassy, unintelligent way, and slowly closed one eye in a grotesque parody of a wink. Such a profusion of maritime life, Nortekku realized, could not have developed just in the relatively few years since the thawing of the world. Whatever havoc the Long Winter had worked among the citizens of the Great World, it must not have brought complete devastation to these denizens of this warm sea.
In just a few days the shore came into view ahead of them, a long low line of sand and trees. The air was warm and soft. It was easy to believe that in this blessed place the Long Winter had never come, or, if it had, that it had brushed the land with only the gentlest of touches. They coasted westward past white beaches lined with trees of a kind Nortekku had never seen before, thick stubby brown trunks jutting upward from the sand to culminate in a single amazing explosion of long, jagged green leaves at the summit, like a crown of feathers. Farther back he saw wild tangles of vines all snarled together, blooming so profusely that they formed great blurts of color, a solid mass of magenta here, a burst of brilliant orange there, a huge spread of scarlet just beyond.
Late that afternoon they pulled into a protected cove where steamy mist was hovering above the water. Bubbles were visible along the western curve of the little bay, suggesting that a stream of heated water must be rising here from some volcanic furnace below the sea.
Large brown animals, perhaps as many as ten of them, were splashing about in the surf, diving, surfacing, beating the water with their flipperlike limbs, uttering loud trumpeting snorts. Nortekku assumed at first, carelessly, unthinkingly, that they were nothing more than seagoing mammals—akin, perhaps, to the good-natured barking bewhiskered beasts
that often could be seen frolicking off the coast near Dawinno. But then, as the ship’s dinghy carried him closer to the shore, he saw the luminous glow of what had to be intelligence in their sea-green eyes, and realized with a quick hard jolt of understanding and something not far from terror what these beings actually were.
It was if a doorway in time had rolled suddenly open and a segment of the ancient world had come jutting through.
Of course the two Hjjks who stood distressingly close by him in the dinghy were survivors of the Great World themselves, but one took the survival of the Hjjks for granted: they had never gone away, they had been part of the landscape from the first moment when the People began coming forth from their cocoons. Sea-Lords, though, were a dead race, extinct, the next thing to legendary. Yet here they were, seven, eight, ten of them close at hand in the steamy pinkish water of this cove, and more appearing now on shore, emerging from the trees that lined the beach and clumsily moving down toward the edge of the water on their flipperlike hind legs.
They displayed no sign of fear. The ones that had been in the water ceased to splash and snort, and now had gathered in a silent group to watch the dinghy’s approach, but they seemed quite calm. So too did the ones on shore, collecting now in five or six groups just at the fringe of the sea. They were handsome animals, Nortekku thought, telling himself instantly that he must not call them animals, must never think of them that way. Their kind had been among the rulers of the world when his own ancestors had been apes chattering in the trees.
There might have been sixty of them all told, though others, possibly, might be lingering on the far side of the line of shallow dunes that rose just behind the trees, or out of sight at sea. They were gracefully tapering creatures, sturdily built, bigger and obviously stronger than men, with powerful, robust bodies that had a dense layer of sleek brown fur plastered close to their skin. Both their upper and lower sets of limbs were flipperlike, though Nortekku saw that their hands had capable-looking fingers with opposable thumbs. Their heads too were tapered, long and narrow, but with high-domed foreheads that indicated the force and capacity of the minds housed within.
“Such sadness,” Thalarne said softly. “Do you see it, Nortekku? That look in their eyes—that misery, that pain—”
Yes. It was impossible not to perceive it, even from a distance: a look of the deepest sorrow, almost of grief. Those big glossy eyes, so close in color to her own, seemed without exception disconsolate, desolate, shrouded in lamentation. There was a touch of anger in those eyes, too, he thought, a hot blast of fury plainly visible behind that sadness. He asked himself whether he had any right to project emotion of any sort on these beings of another species, whose true feelings probably could not be read with any accuracy. And then he looked again, and it was the same as before: sorrow, grief, heartbreak, rage. They were strong, agile, handsome, graceful beings: they should have been happy creatures on this happiest of coasts. But that did not appear to be the case.
The dinghy came to rest in the shallows. “Is there a village here?” Thalarne asked Siglondan, as they scrambled ashore.
“We didn’t find one last time, if by a village you mean permanent structures. They live mostly in the water, though they come up on shore for some part of every day and settle down for naps under the trees.”
“Then they have no tools, either? Nothing that we’d call a culture?”
“Not any more. But they have language. They have a knowledge of their own race’s history. We think that they may keep some shrines containing objects of Great World provenance somewhere not very far inland. They’ve pretty much reverted to a natural existence, but there’s no doubt that they’re genuine Sea-Lords.” Pretentiously Siglondan added, “It’s almost impossible for one to comprehend the full awesomeness of the discovery.”
“Awesome, yes,” Thalarne said. “And sad. So very sad. These pitiful creatures.”
The Bornigrayan woman gave her an odd look. “Pitiful, did you say?” But Thalarne had already begun to wander off. Nortekku moved along after her. He glanced down toward the group of Sea-Lords by the shore; then, hastily, he glanced away. The thought of transgressing on the privacy of these beings whom he had come such a great distance to behold made him ill at ease. That expression of deep-seated melancholy mingled with rage that he imagined he saw in those huge glossy green eyes, whether it was really there or not, was something that suddenly he could not bear to see.
He considered what small stock of information he had about the Sea-Lord civilization of the Great World days. About all there was was the account in the book that Hresh had written, he who so many years ago had penetrated the ruined cities of the ancients and looked with his own eyes on their way of life by means of machines of theirs, no longer functional now, that had given him glimpses of their actual time.
The Sea-Lords, Hresh said, had been created by the humans out of some species of intelligent sea-going mammal, just as they had created the People out of apes. Like all mammals they breathed air, not water, but they were much more at home in the sea than on land, where they moved about with some degree of difficulty. When they were on land they traveled in cunningly made chariots that moved on silver treads, controlling them with manipulations of their flipper-fingers. Mainly, though, they lived at sea, guiding the vessels that carried all manner of costly merchandise from one part of the Great World to another. The other Great World races depended heavily on them. When they were in port, Hresh said, in the taverns and shops and waterfront restaurants that they frequented, they behaved like the bold, swaggering princes of the sea that they were.
And now—to have retrogressed to the simple life of water-going beasts—
The crewmen were putting up tents under the trees. Nortekku watched them for a while. Not that the sight of tents being raised was so fascinating, but just now he wanted to avoid coming close to the Sea-Lords, or even to look in their direction.
Siglondan and Kanibond Graysz didn’t appear to feel any such inhibition. They and their two Hjjk confederates went quickly down to the nearest Sea-Lord group and involved themselves in what looked very much like a conversation with them. Nortekku could hear the clicking, buzzing sound of Hjjk-speak, then the quick chatter of the Bornigrayans, and then the Hjjks again, speaking in brief outbursts with long spans of silence between them. From time to time the Sea-Lords seemed to reply, with a sort of clipped grunting that had the cadence and phrasing of language. After each burst of it the Hjjks spoke again to the two Bornigrayans, as if interpreting what had just been said.
But how had the Hjkks learned the Sea-Lord language? By second sight, perhaps. Hjjks, Nortekku knew, had a kind of second sight that was much more powerful than that of the People. They were able to speak directly to minds with it: that was how they had first communicated with the newly emerged People in the early days of the Going Forth. Perhaps they had used it to develop some understanding of Sea-Lord speech, too.
Thalarne now had joined the group and was listening attentively. Curiosity overcame Nortekku’s uneasiness: it felt foolish to hang back like this. He took himself down the sloping strand to the place close by the water where the others were gathered but the gathering broke up just as he arrived. The Sea-Lords headed into the water and the two Bornigrayans, with the pair of Hjjks, went off up the beach. Thalarne alone remained.
She gave him a stricken look as he approached.
“What was all that about?” Nortekku asked.
She seemed to be struggling to shape an answer. Then she said, “There’s something very bad going on here, but I’m not altogether sure what it is. All I can tell you is that we aren’t just imagining what we think we see in their eyes. One good look will tell you that. It’s very clear that these people are aware of their own tragedy. They know what they once were; they know what they are now. You just have to look into those eyes and you know that they’re the eyes of people who can’t understand why they’re still alive, and don’t want to be any more. People who wish they w
ere dead, Nortekku.”
Who wish they were dead? For a moment Nortekku made no reply. He had never seen her look so deeply unnerved. It was easy enough to believe that there was something tragic about the expression in these creatures’ eyes: he had seen it himself, from far away. But how could she be certain of this startling interpretation of it? The grunting speech of the Sea-Lords and the mind-speech of the Hjjks were closed books to her, Nortekku knew.
“You heard the Hjjks tell this to Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan?”
She shook her head. “I got there too late to hear anything important. It was all winding down by then. I’m speaking purely intuitively.”
“Ah. I see. And you trust that intuition, Thalarne?”
“Yes. I do.” She was steadier now. “I looked into those eyes, Nortekku. And what they were saying was, We want to die. Show us how to do it. You are great ones who can cross the mighty sea; surely you can give this little thing to us. Surely. Surely. Surely.”
That was going much too far, Nortekku told himself. This was hardly the method of science, as he understood that concept. The look in their eyes: was something like that a sufficient basis for so fantastic a theory? But Thalarne seemed wholly carried away by it. He had to be careful here. Cautiously he said, “You may be right. But I just can’t help but think that you’re making an awfully big intuitive leap.”
“Of course I am. And I’ve already told you I’m not fully sure of it myself. Just go and stand close to them, though, and you can see for yourself. Those eyes are sending a message without any ambiguity at all. They’re pleading for it, Nortekku. They’re crying out for it.”
“For death.”
“For death, yes. For the extinction that somehow was denied them when the rest of the Great World was destroyed. They want to die, Nortekku, but they don’t know how to manage it. It’s almost as if they’re saying they want us to kill them. To put them out of their misery.”