Robert Silverberg - The Queen of Springtime

“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.

This is great folly, Hresh thought.

The hjjks fear change because they’ve lived through so great a fall, and they dread some further descent. But change comes anyway. It was precisely because the Great World had done so well at insulating itself from change, Hresh told himself, that the gods had sent the death-stars upon them. The Great World had attained a kind of perfection, and perfection is something the gods cannot abide.

What the hjjks who had survived the catastrophe of the Long Winter still refused to comprehend was that Dawinno would inevitably have his way with them, whether they liked it or not. The Transformer always did. No living thing was exempt from change, no matter how deep in the earth it tried to hide, no matter how desperately it clung to its rituals of life. One had to respect the hjjks for what they had made out of the shards and splinters of their former existence. It was rigid, and therefore doomed, but in its own way it was awesomely perfect.

Building a different kind of static society wasn’t the answer. And for the first time in a long while Hresh saw hope for his own erratic, turbulent, unpredictable folk. Perhaps the world will be ours after all, he thought. Simply because we are so uncertain in our ways.

He had no idea how much time had passed. An hour, a day, perhaps a year. He knew that he had been lost in the strangest of dreams. There was absolute silence in the royal chamber. The Queen-attendants stood still as statues beside him.

Once more Hresh heard the tolling of the Queen’s great voice in his mind:

“Is there anything else you wish to know, child of questions?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I thank You for sharing Your wisdom with me, great Queen.”

With quick fierce strokes of his spearpoint Salaman sketched a map in the dark, moist earth.

“This is the City of Yissou” — a tight circle, unbroken and unbreakable — “and this is where we are now, three days’ march to the northeast. Here is where the land begins to rise, the long wooded ridge that leads to Vengiboneeza. You remember, Thu-Kimnibol, we rode out that way together once.”

Thu-Kimnibol, peering intently at the sketch, grunted his assent.

“This,” said Salaman, drawing a triangle to the right of what he had already inscribed in the ground, “is Vengiboneeza, utterly infested with hjjks. Here” — he poked the ground viciously, some distance beyond the triangle — “is a lesser Nest, where the hjjks dwell who slaughtered our Acknowledgers. Here, here, and here” — three more angry jabs — “are other small Nests. Then there’s a great open nothingness, unless we’re greatly mistaken. And here” — he strode five paces upward, and gouged a ragged crater there — “is the thing we seek, the Nest of Nests itself.”

He turned and looked up at Thu-Kimnibol, who seemed immense to him this morning, mountainous, twice his true size. And his true size had been more than big enough.

Last night Salaman’s spy Gardinak Cheysz had come to him to confirm what the king already suspected: that the friendship between Thu-Kimnibol and his kinswoman was more than a friendship, that in fact they were coupling-partners now. Perhaps twining-partners as well. Was that something recent? Apparently so, Gardinak Cheysz thought. At least the two of them had never been linked in gossip in the past.

An end to all hope of mating him with Weiawala, then. A pity, that. It would have been useful linking him to the royal house of Yissou. Now Thu-Kimnibol’s unexpected romance with the daughter of Taniane made it all the more likely that he’d emerge as the master of the City of Dawinno when Taniane was gone. A king there, instead of a chieftain? Salaman wondered what that would mean for himself and for his city. Perhaps it was for the best. But very possibly not.

Thu-Kimnibol said, “And what plan do you propose, now?”

Salaman tapped the ground with his spear. “Vengiboneeza is the immediate problem. Yissou only knows how many hjjks are swarming in there, but it has to be a million or more. We need to neutralize them all before we can proceed northward, or otherwise there’ll be a tremendous hjjk fortress at our backs, cutting us off, as we make our way toward the great Nest.”

“Agreed.”

“Do you know much about the layout of Vengiboneeza?”

“The place is unknown to me,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

“Mountains here, to the north and east. A bay here. The city between them, protected by walls. Thick jungle down here. We came through that jungle, on the migration from the cocoon, before you were born. It’s a hard city to attack, but it can be done. What I suggest is a two-pronged assault, using those Great World weapons of yours. You come in from the waterfront side, with the Loop and the Line of Fire, and create a distraction. Meanwhile I descend out of the hills with the Earth-Eater and the Bubble Tube and blow the city to bits. If we strike swiftly and well, they’ll never know what hit them. Eh?”

He sensed trouble even before Thu-Kimnibol spoke.

“A good plan,” said the bigger man slowly. “But the Great World weapons have to stay in my possession.”

“What?”

“I can’t share them with you. They’re mine only on loan, and I’m responsible for their safety. They can’t be offered to anyone else. Not even you, my friend.”

Salaman felt a burst of hot fury like molten rock flooding his veins. Bands of fire were tightening around his forehead. He wanted to bring his spear up in a single heedless gesture and bury it in Thu-Kimnibol’s gut; and it took all the strength within him to restrain himself.

Trembling with the effort to seem calm, he said, “This comes as a great surprise, cousin.”

“Does it? Why, then, I’m sorry, cousin.”

“We are allies. I thought there would be a sharing of the weapons.”

“I understand. But I’m obliged to protect them.”

“Surely you know I’d treat them with care.”

“Beyond any doubt you would,” said Thu-Kimnibol smoothly. “But if they were taken from you somehow — if the hjjks of Vengiboneeza managed to ambush you, let’s say, and the weapons were lost — the shame, the blame, all that would fall upon me for having let them out of my hands. No, cousin, it’s impossible. You create the seaside distraction, we’ll destroy Vengiboneeza from above. And then we will go on together, in all brotherhood, to the Nest.”