Silverberg, Robert - New Springtime 01 - At Winter's End.pdf - Robert Silverberg - chomikbob7

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"Tingling, richly detailed and fascinating ... a long, absorbing, far-future saga with substantial

characters and a plot that adds up. Silverberg's best full-length outing for many a long year."

—Kirkus Reviews

* * * *

"An intriguing exercise in world-building ... [on] a temporal scale to beggar most imaginations."

—Analog

* * * *

"Strong realism ... and a fine sense of detail."

—Locus

* * * *

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"A solid, dramatic novel ... expands on the mixed terrors and pleasures of freedom."

—Publishers Weekly

* * * *

"Befits his stature as one of the genre's grandmasters ... his multilayered approach, combining

adept action sequences with insightful philosophical examinations of cultural chaos, creates a

book full of diverse delights."

—Austin American-Statesman

* * * *

"An endearing mix of adventure quest and allegory about the dawn of man ... complex characters

and interesting storytelling."

—Dow Jones

* * * *

"Written in precise, yet effortless prose, Silverberg's imagery is sharp and he evokes a sense of

wonder."

—Rave Reviews

* * * *

"Silverberg is our best."

—Fantasy & Science Fiction

For TERRY CARR

Who was here for the beginning of this one, though not the end

An axe-age, a sword-age,

shields shall be sundered;

A wind-age, a wolf-age,

ere the world falls.

The sun turns black,

Earth sinks in the sea,

The hot stars down

from heaven are whirled;

Fierce grows the steam

and the life-feeding flame

Till fire leaps high

about heaven itself.

—Elder Edda

Everyone on Earth for a million years or more had known that the death-stars were coming, that

the Great World was doomed. One could not deny that; one could not hide from that. They had

come before and surely they would come again, for their time was immutable, every twenty-six

million years, and their time had come ‘round once more. One by one they would crash down

terribly from the skies, falling without mercy for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of

years, bringing fire, darkness, dust, smoke, cold, and death: an endless winter of sorrows. Each of

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the peoples of Earth addressed its fate in its own fashion, for genetics is destiny—even, in a

strange way, for life-forms that have no genes. The vegetals and the sapphire-eyes people knew

that they would not survive, and they made their preparations accordingly. The mechanicals knew

that they could survive if they cared to, but they did not care to. The sea-lords understood that

their day was done and they accepted that. The hjjk-folk, who never yielded any advantage

willingly, expected to come through the cataclysm unharmed, and set about making certain of

that.

And the humans—the humans—

The Hymn of the New Springtime

It was a day like no day that had ever been in all the memory of the People. Sometimes half a year or

more might go by in the cocoon where the first members of Koshmar's little band had taken refuge

against the Long Winter seven hundred centuries ago, and there would be not one single event worthy of

entering in the chronicles. But that morning there were three extraordinary happenings within the span of

an hour, and after that hour life would never again be the same for Koshmar and her tribe.

First came the discovery that a ponderous phalanx of ice-eaters was approaching the cocoon from

below, out of the icy depths of the world.

It was Thaggoran the chronicler who came upon them. He was the tribe's old man: it was his title as well

as his condition. He had lived far longer than any of the others. As keeper of the chronicles it was his

privilege to live until he died. Thaggoran's back was bowed, his chest was sunken and hollow, his eyes

were forever reddened at the rims and brimming with fluid, his fur was white and grizzled with age. Yet

there was vigor in him and much force. Thaggoran lived daily in contact with the epochs gone by, and it

was that, he believed, which sustained and preserved him: that knowledge of the past cycles of the world,

that connection with the greatness that had flourished in the bygone days of warmth.

For weeks Thaggoran had been wandering in the ancient passageways below the tribal cocoon.

Shinestones were what he sought, precious gems of high splendor, useful in the craft of divination. The

subterranean passageways in which he prowled had been carved by his remote ancestors, burrowing this

way and that through the living rock with infinitely patient labor, when they first had come here to hide

from the exploding stars and black rains that destroyed the Great World. No one in the past ten thousand

years had found a shinestone in them. But Thaggoran had dreamed three times this year that he would

add a new one to the tribe's little store of them. He knew and valued the power of dreams. And so he

went prowling in the depths almost every day.

He moved now through the deepest and coldest tunnel of all, the one called Mother of Frost. As he

crept cautiously on hands and knees in the darkness, searching with his second sight for the shinestones

that he hoped were embedded in the walls of the passageway somewhere close ahead, he felt a sudden

strange tingling and trembling, a feathery twitching and throbbing. The sensation ran through the entire

length of his sensing-organ, from the place at the base of his spine where it sprouted from his body all the

way out to its tip. It was the sensation that came from living creatures very near at hand.

Swept by alarm, he halted at once and held himself utterly still.

Yes. He felt a clear emanation of life nearby: something huge turning and turning below him, like a thick

sluggish auger drilling through stone. Something alive, here in these cold lightless depths, roaming the

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mountain's bleak dark heart.

“Yissou!” he muttered, and made the sign of the Protector. “Emakkis!” he whispered, and made the sign

of the Provider. “Dawinno! Friit!”

In awe and fear Thaggoran put his cheek to the tunnel's rough stone floor. He pressed the pads of his

fingers against the chilly rock. He aimed his second sight outward and downward. He swept his

sensing-organ from side to side in a wide arc.

Stronger sensations, undeniable and incontrovertible, came flooding in. He shivered. Nervously he

fingered the ancient amulet dangling on a cord about his throat.

A living thing, yes. Dull-witted, practically mindless, but definitely alive, throbbing with hot intense vitality.

And not at all far away. It was separated from him, Thaggoran perceived, by nothing more than a layer of

rock a single arm's-length wide. Gradually its image took form for him: an immense limbless thick-bodied

creature standing on its tail within a vertical tunnel scarcely broader than itself. Great black bristles thicker

than a man's arm ran the length of its meaty body, and deep red craters in its pale flesh radiated powerful

blasts of nauseating stench. It was moving up through the mountain with inexorable determination, cutting

a path for itself with its broad stubby boulderlike teeth: gnawing on rock, digesting it, excreting it as moist

sand at the far end of a massive fleshy body thirty man-lengths long.

Nor was it the only one of its kind making the ascent. From the right and the left now Thaggoran pulled

in other heavy pulsing emanations. There were three of the great beasts, five, maybe a dozen of them.

Each was confined in its own narrow tunnel, each embarked upon an unhurried journey upward.

Ice-eaters, Thaggoran thought. Yissou! Was it possible?

Shaken, astounded, he crouched motionless, listening to the pounding of the huge animals’ souls.

Yes, he was certain of it now: surely these were ice-eaters moving about. He had never seen one—no

one alive had ever seen an ice-eater—but he carried a clear image of them in his mind. The oldest pages

of the tribal chronicles told of them: vast creatures that the gods had called into being in the first days of

the Long Winter, when the less hardy denizens of the Great World were perishing of the darkness and

the cold. The ice-eaters made their homes in the black deep places of the earth, and needed neither air

nor light nor warmth. Indeed they shunned such things as if they were poisons. And the prophets had said

that a time would come at winter's end when the ice-eaters would begin to rise toward the surface, until

at last they emerged into the bright light of day to meet their doom.

Now, it seemed, the ice-eaters had commenced their climb. Was the endless winter at last reaching its

end, then?

Perhaps these ice-eaters merely were confused. The chronicles testified that there had been plenty of

false omens before this. Thaggoran knew the texts well: the Book of the Unhappy Dawn, the Book of the

Cold Awakening, the Book of the Wrongful Glow.

But it made little difference whether this was the true omen of spring or merely another in the long skein

of tantalizing disappointments. One thing was sure: the People would have to abandon their cocoon and

go forth into the strangeness and mystery of the open world.

For the fullness of the catastrophe was at once apparent to Thaggoran. His years of roving these dark

abandoned passageways had inscribed an indelible map of their intricate patterns in lines of brilliant

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scarlet on his mind. The upward route of these vast indifferent monsters drilling slowly through earth and

rock would in time carry them crashing through the heart of the dwelling-chamber where the People had

lived so many thousands of years. There could be no doubt of that. The worms would be coming up right

below the place of the altarstone. And the tribe was no more capable of halting them in their blind ascent

than it would be of trapping an onrushing death-star in a net of woven grass.

Far above the cavern where Thaggoran knelt eavesdropping on the ice-eaters, Torlyri the

offering-woman, who was the twining-partner of Koshmar the chieftain, was at that moment nearing the

exit hatch of the cocoon. It was the moment of sunrise, when Torlyri went forth to make the daily offering

to the Five Heavenly Ones.

Tall, gentle Torlyri was renowned for her great beauty and sweetness of soul. Her fur was a lustrous

black, banded with two astonishing bright spirals of white that ran the whole length of her body. Powerful

muscles rippled beneath her skin. Her eyes were soft and dark, her smile was warm and easy. Everyone

in the tribe loved Torlyri. From childhood on she had been marked for distinction: a true leader, one to

whom others might turn at any time for counsel and support. But for the mildness of her spirit, she might

well have become chieftain herself, and not Koshmar; but beauty and strength alone are insufficient. A

chieftain must not be mild.

So it was to Koshmar and not Torlyri that they had come, on that day, nine years earlier, when the old

chieftain Thekmur had reached the limit-age. “This is my death-day,” sinewy little Thekmur had

announced to Koshmar. “And so this is your crowning-day,” said Thaggoran. Thus Koshmar was made

chieftain, as it had been agreed five years before that. For Torlyri a different destiny had been decreed.

When, not long afterward, it was the time of Gonnari the offering-woman to pass through the hatch as

Thekmur had, Thaggoran and Koshmar came to Torlyri to place the offering-bowl in her hands. Then

Koshmar and Torlyri embraced, with warm tears in their eyes, and went before the tribe to accept the

election; and a little later that day they celebrated their double accession more privately, with laughter and

love, in one of the twining-chambers.

“Now it is our time to rule,” Koshmar told her that day. “Yes,” Torlyri said. “At last, our time is here.”

But she knew the truth, which was that now it was Koshmar's time to rule, and Torlyri's time to serve.

Yet were they not both servants of the People, chieftain as well as offering-woman?

Each morning for the past nine years Torlyri had made the same journey, when the silent signal came

through the eye of the hatch to tell her that the sun had entered the sky: out of the cocoon by the

sky-side, up and up through the interior of the cliff along the winding maze of steep narrow corridors that

led toward the crest, and at last to the flat area at the top, the Place of Going Out, where she would

perform the rite that was her most important responsibility to the People.

There, each morning, Torlyri unfastened the exit hatch and stepped across the threshold, cautiously

passing a little way into the outer world. Most members of the tribe crossed that threshold only three

times in their lives: on their naming-day, their twining-day, and their death-day. The chieftain saw the

outer world a fourth time, on her crowning-day. But Torlyri had the privilege and the burden of entering

the outer world each morning of her life. Even she was permitted to go only as far as the offering-stone of

pink granite flecked with sparkling flakes of fire, six paces beyond the gate. Upon that holy stone she

would place her offering-bowl, containing some little things of the inner world, a few glowberries or some

yellow strands of wall-thatching or a bit of charred meat; and then she would empty yesterday's bowl of

its offerings and gather something of the outer world to take within, a handful of earth, a scattering of

pebbles, half a dozen blades of redgrass. That daily interchange was essential to the well-being of the

tribe. What it said to the gods each day was: We have not forgotten that we are of the world and we

are in the world, even though we must live apart from it at this time. Someday we will come forth

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Silverberg, Robert - New Springtime 01 - At Winter's End.pdf

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