And afterward, when they had coupled, and rested, perhaps even dozed a little while, their sensing-organs came into contact, idly, nudging playfully, at first, and then touching in what was not a playful way at all, and they entered twining mode, made ready for the true union of souls, the joining that only the People could do, the linking of their perceptors in the deepest, most intense, most intimate contact that was possible between one person and another. The essence that was Thalarne came flooding into him, and all that was Nortekku into her. He felt her love—no question of it—and her excitement at everything that was opening before them now, the new quest and their own companionship in the weeks to come.
They slept, then. They rose and put together a sort of a meal. They coupled a second time. No twining, this time—one did not twine often; it was too intense—and then they slept again, and when Nortekku woke just after dawn there was a light carpeting of shining snow over the grounds outside the building. Nortekku had never seen snow at such close range before. Snow was wholly unknown in and around Dawinno, certainly, where it was summer all year round, and even up by chillier Yissou it was a once-in-a-decade event, so they said. Since the end of the Long Winter the world had grown warmer year by year, and, having spent his whole life in the benign climate of the Western Coast, Nortekku had come to assume that all the world now enjoyed similar temperate weather. Not true, it seemed. Here on the other side of the continent things were different. They were not as distant yet in Bornigrayal from the days of the Long Winter as were those who lived on the other coast.
Since Thalarne was still asleep, he went downstairs and walked in the snow for a time. Scooped some up in his hand: it burned like flame against his bare skin. He shivered and wrapped his arms about himself. This must have been what the Long Winter was like, he thought, something like this snowy morning, though on a much greater scale. Snowdrifts many times higher than a man’s head; vast expanses of blinding whiteness, stretching off as far as anyone could see; black icy winds, relentless, remorseless, raking the land like scythes. No leaf in sight, no blade of grass. How awful!
He cast his mind back across the ages, tried once again, as he had so many times before, to imagine the Long Winter’s onset: the death-stars plummeting from the sky—the legend had it that they came every twenty-six million years, clusters of jagged stones falling out of the heavens, crashing down to engender such clouds of dust and smoke that the sky turned black and there was darkness on the face of the Earth and its inhabitants were cut off from the warmth of the sun for century after century. Whole races had died out in that terrible winter and those that survived did so by creeping off into safe hiding places until the agony of the planet was over. And when it was over the Great World was gone and the inheritors of the planet were the simpler folk who called themselves the People.
The Great World peoples could have saved themselves, so said the Book of Hresh that that great wise man had set down toward the end of his life, in the first generation after the Time of Going Forth. Their wisdom would have been equal to that task. But they had calmly chosen to die instead, all but the Hjjks, who, like insects of every sort, seemed to intend to endure until the end of time. According to Hresh, though, the others had convinced themselves that it was the great design of divine Dawinno to replace old races by new ones from time to time in the course of the world’s history: the ancient humans had given way to the peoples of the Great World, and now it was the turn of the Great World peoples to vanish in favor of the furry folk of the cocoons, whose turn it would be, so Hresh supposed, to yield the stage eventually themselves someday. Dawinno was the deity of transformations, was he not? He destroyed and then he created, all in the service of eternal change and renewal.
So the Sapphire-Eyes and the Vegetals, who were not in any way fitted to withstand cold, had done nothing to protect themselves against it, and the Mechanicals, those intelligent machines, saw that they would have no purpose once the others had died, and let themselves be overtaken by the snowfall in open country, where their rusted remains could still be found all these many years later, and the Dream-Dreamer race disappeared somewhere also, except for those few who settled among the People in the cocoons, and those did not outlast the Long Winter. And, though scientists knew that the oceans themselves had not completely frozen over during the Long Winter, it was believed that the Sea-Lords, too, had found the new climate too much for them.
Evidently not, if Thalarne’s tale of that degenerate band on the southern shore of the Inland Sea had any substance to it. To some small extent they had defied Dawinno’s great plan of extinction, just as the Hjjks had done. What, Nortekku wondered, would old Hresh have made of that?
He had had enough of walking through the snow. He went back inside and found that Thalarne had awakened.
“Did you enjoy it, the snow?” she asked.
He rubbed his tingling hands together. “An interesting experience, I suppose. But a little of it goes a long way.”
“You’ll find it much warmer where we’re going. More like your own city.”
“Good,” he said. “Excellent.”
While they breakfasted she told him more of the details of the venture on which they were about to embark.
The sea voyage would take two weeks, possibly three. That was staggering in itself: cooped up for such a long time in what he envisioned as some sort of wooden container, tossing on the turbulent breast of an ocean so great in size that his imagination was unable to encompass it. He was restless by nature. It would be difficult, he knew, to get through the days and nights of such a long voyage without growing a little fretful, maybe more than a little. But he did not share his anxiety about that with her.
And he would have to prepare himself, Thalarne said, for a certain amount of discomfort. Did he know what seasickness was? The winter seas in these latitudes were not easy. Nortekku brushed that part of it aside also, making a fine show of not thoroughly heartfelt bravado. They would be together: what could a few bothersome storms matter? Their initial destination, she said, was Sempinore, a port city on the southern coast of the northern continent. There they would spend a week or so replenishing their supplies, and then they would set out southward across the Inland Sea, a journey of only a few days, to the secret location of the Sea-Lord colony on the northern shore of the other continent.
It was all going to take much longer than he had expected, he saw. Nortekku fidgeted a bit, thinking about the expenses. After a time he said, “I hate to bring this up, but I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with the cost of this much traveling. You ought to know, Thalarne, that I’m not a rich man. My father is, yes, but he and I—”
“There won’t be any expense,” she said crisply. “The entire expedition is being underwritten by a syndicate of wealthy and prominent Western Coast individuals, both from Dawinno and Yissou, which is how I happened to learn about the project at all. Our friend Prince Til-Menimat, for one.”
“So he’s behind this one, too? How did he get to be part of it?”