Robert Silverberg: A Time of Changes

The Lowlands are flanked by two immense mountain ranges: the Huishtors in the east, the Threishtors in the west. These mountains begin on Velada Borthan’s northern coast, virtually at the shores of the North Polar Sea, and march southward, gradually curving inland; the two ranges would join not far from the Gulf of Sumar if they were not separated by Stroin Gap. They are so high that they intercept all winds. Therefore their inland slopes are barren, but the slopes facing the oceans enjoy fertility.

Mankind in Velada Borthan has carved out its domain in the two coastal strips, between the oceans and the mountains. In most places the land is at best marginal, so that we are hard put to have all the food we need, and life is constant struggle against hunger. Often one wonders why our ancestors, when they came to this planet so many generations ago, chose Velada Borthan as their settling-place; the farming would have been far easier in the neighboring continent of Sumara Borthan, and even swampy Dabis might have offered more cheer. The explanation we are given is that our forefathers were stern, diligent folk who relished challenge, and feared to let their children dwell in a place where life might be insufficiently harsh. Velada Borthan’s coasts were neither uninhabitable nor unduly comfortable; therefore they suited the purposes. I believe this to be true, for certainly the chief heritage we have from those ancient ones is the notion that comfort is sin and ease is wickedness. My bondbrother Noim, though, once remarked that the first settlers chose Velada Borthan because that was where their starship happened to come down, and, having hauled themselves across all the immensities of space, they lacked the energy to travel onward even one more continent in quest of a better home. I doubt it, but the slyness of the idea is characteristic of my bondbrother’s taste for irony.

The firstcomers planted their initial settlement on the western coast, at the place we call Threish, that is, the place of the Covenant. They multiplied rapidly, and, because they were a stubborn and quarrelsome tribe, they splintered early, this group and that going off to live apart. Thus the nine western provinces came into being. To this day there are bitter border disputes among them.

In time the limited resources of the west were exhausted, and emigrants sought the eastern coast. We had no air transport then, not that we have a great deal now; we are not a mechanically minded people, and we lack natural resources to serve as fuel. Thus they went east by groundcar, or whatever served as groundcars then. The three Threishtor passes were discovered, and the bold ones bravely entered the Burnt Lowlands. We sing long mythic epics of the hardships of these crossings. Getting over the Threishtors into the Lowlands was difficult, but getting out on the far side was close to impossible, for there is only one route over the Huishtors out of the red-soil country fit for humans, and that is by way of Salla’s Gate, the finding of which was no small task. But they found it and poured through, and established my land of Salla. When the quarreling came, a good many went north and founded Glin, and later others went south to settle in holy Manneran. For a thousand years it was sufficient to have but three provinces in the east, until in a new quarrel the small but prosperous maritime kingdom of Krell carved itself out of a corner of Glin and a corner of Salla.

There also were some folk who could not abide life in Velada Borthan at all, and put to sea from Manneran, sailing off to settle in Sumara Borthan. But one need not speak of them in a geography lesson; I will have much to say of Sumara Borthan and its people when I have begun to explain the changes that entered my life.

This cabin where I hide myself now is a shabby thing. Its clapboard walls were indifferently put together to begin with, and now are crazed, so that gaps yawn at the joins and no angle is true. The desert wind passes through here unhindered; my page bears a light coating of red soil, my clothes are caked with it, even my hair has a red tinge. Lowlands creatures crawl freely in with me: I see two of them moving about the earthen floor now, a many-legged gray thing the size of my thumb and a sluggish two-tailed serpent not so long as my foot. For hours they have circled one another idly, as though they wish to be mortal foes but cannot decide which of them is to eat the other. Dry companions for a parched time.

I should not mock this place, though. Someone troubled to drag its makings here, in order that weary hunters might have shelter in this inhospitable land. Someone put it together, doubtless with more love than skill, and left it here for me, and it serves me well. Perhaps it is no fit home for a septarch’s son, but I have known my share of palaces, and I no longer need stone walls and groined ceilings. It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself. In this our world we are forbidden by custom to make our souls known to others, yes, but why has no one before me observed that that same custom, without intending it, keeps us from coming to know ourselves? For nearly all my life I kept the proper social walls between myself and others, and not till the walls were down did I see I had walled myself away from myself as well. But here in the Burnt Lowlands I have had time to contemplate these matters and to arrive at understanding. This is not the place I would have chosen for myself, but I am not unhappy here.

I do not think they will find me for some while yet.

Now it is too dark in here to write. I will stand by the cabin door and watch the night come rolling across the Lowlands toward the Huishtors. Perhaps there will be hornfowl drifting through the dusk, heading home from an empty hunt. The stars will blaze. Schweiz once tried to show me the sun of Earth from a mountaintop in Sumara Borthan, and insisted he could see it, and begged me to squint along the line of his pointing hand, but I think he was playing a game with me. I think that that sun may not be seen at all from our sector of the galaxy. Schweiz played many a game with me when we traveled together, and perhaps he will play more such games one day, if ever we meet again, if still he lives.

Last night in a dream my bondsister Halum Helalam came to me.

With her there can never be more games, and only through the slippery-walled tunnel of dreams is she apt to reach me. Therefore while I slept she glowed in my mind more brightly than any star that lights this desert, but waking brought me sadness and shame, and the memory of my loss of her who is irreplaceable.

Halum of my dream wore only a light filmy veil through which her small rosy-tipped breasts showed, and her slim thighs, and her flat belly, the belly of an unchilded woman. It was not the way she often dressed in life, especially when paying a call on her bondbrother, but this was the Halum of my dream, made wanton by my lonely and troubled soul. Her smile was warm and tender and her dark shining eyes glistened with love.

In dreams one’s mind lives on many levels. On one level of mine I was a detached observer, floating in a haze of moonlight somewhere near the roof of my hut, looking down upon my own sleeping body. On another level I lay asleep. The dream-self that slept did not perceive Halum’s presence, but the dream-self that watched was aware of her, and I, the true dreamer, was aware of them both, and also aware that all I saw was coming to me in a vision. But inevitably there was some mingling of these levels of reality, so that I could not be sure who was the dreamer and who the dreamed, nor was I certain that the Halum who stood before me in such radiance was a creature of my fantasy rather than the living Halum I once had known.