“What tribe is this?” Torlyri asked.
“A very stupid one, I think,” said Hresh.
“They look something like us,” Torlyri said.
“Very little like us,” snapped Koshmar.
“But they move swiftly, this strange tribe,” Hresh said.
“Not so swiftly that we can’t slaughter them if they bother us,” Koshmar said. “Gods! This is no tribe! These are no humans! All they are is animals. Vermin. And look: the city! Vengiboneeza will be ours. Spears, everyone! Torches! On to Vengiboneeza!”
Vermin they might be, and stupid vermin also, yet the strange animals proved very troublesome. They would not descend from the trees, but pelted Koshmar’s people with fruit and branches and even their own green dung, crying out incomprehensible insults all the while. Galihine was knocked down by a heavy purple fruit that struck her between the shoulders, and Haniman was struck by a huge papery gray globe that turned out to be the nest of a swarm of angry stinging insects half a finger’s length long.
But Koshmar and her warriors advanced steadily, using spears, throwing-sticks, darts, and the rest of their weapons; and gradually the other tribe retreated. Hresh, watching the battle from a safe place, was dismayed and horrified by these forest-folk. How ugly they were, how debased, how — inhuman! They had the shape of people, or something almost like it, but they acted and carried themselves like mere beasts. The torches terrified them, as if they had never seen fire before. They used their sensing-organs simply as a tail, like any trivial wild creature, as though that organ had no powers at all except that of allowing them to swing through the treetops.
All the same, Hresh thought, they look not so very different from us. That was the worst part. We are human, they are beasts; and they are not so very different from us! There but for the grace of the gods go we!
In half an hour the battle was over. The forest-chatterers were gone; the way to Vengiboneeza lay open.
“Let me go in first,” Hresh begged. “I found it. I want to be first.”
Koshmar, chuckling, nodded amiably. “You are still Hresh-full-of-questions, aren’t you? Yes. Go.”
Suddenly taken aback at having been granted with such ease the thing he had requested, Hresh nevertheless turned without hesitation, and slipped through the massive gate of three heavy green pillars that stood open at the threshold of Vengiboneeza.
To his astonishment, three figures that he recognized at once as members of the sapphire-eyes race waited just within. He had seen their like many times, when running his hands over the pages of the books of the chronicles: massive beings, standing upright on great thick-thighed legs, supported by heavy sensing-organs — or were they simply tails? They held their small forearms outstretched in a gesture that seemed plainly to be one of invitation. Their huge heavy-lidded eyes, of a blue so deep they seemed to be not eyes but seas, were radiant with wisdom and power.
Hresh reared back, startled. Twice these beings had ruled the world: once in the ancientmost times, before any humans had even existed, in a long-ago civilization that an earlier onslaught of death-stars had destroyed; and then again late in the human era, when the few survivors of that first lost sapphire-eyes empire had brought themselves back to greatness a second time. Reptiles by ancestry, of crocodilian stock, descended from creatures that had long been content to lie torpid in the mud of tropical rivers, they had managed to rise far above that level; but the return of the death-stars had shattered the sapphire-eyes’ realm once again, and this time there had been no survivors in that new terrible cold. Or so the chronicles in their misty difficult way declared, and so Thaggoran had taught.
“No,” Hresh whispered. “You can’t exist. You all died with the Great World!”
The sapphire-eyes on the left raised one of its little forearms inquiringly.
“How could we have died, little monkey, when we were never alive?” It spoke in a stiff, antiquated way, strange but understandable.
“Never alive?”
“Only machines,” said the one on the right.
“Placed here to welcome human beings at winter’s end into the city of our masters, in whose image we were made,” said the center sapphire-eyes.
“Machines,” said Hresh, absorbing it, digesting it. “Made in the image of your masters. Who died in the Long Winter. I see. I see.” He came up as close to them as he dared, craning his neck to peer into the deep mysteries of their gleaming eyes. “We can go into the city, then? You’ll show us all that it holds?”
He was trembling with awe. He had never seen anything so majestic as these three. And yet he felt an obscure sense of disappointment. All they were were clever artificials of some sort. Not really alive. He had wanted them to be true sapphire-eyes folk, miraculously sustained through the time of cold. But it was impossible. He put that hope aside.
Then he said, after a moment, “Why did you call me ‘little monkey’? Don’t you recognize a human being when you see one?”
The three sapphire-eyes made strange hissing sounds, which Hresh felt to be laughter. He heard another sound from behind him: little gasps and sighs of wonder. He glanced quickly back and saw Koshmar and Torlyri and the rest, standing with mouths agape.
“But you are a little monkey,” said the center sapphire-eyes. “And those are larger monkeys, standing behind you. And it was monkeys of a different and more foolish kind that attacked you in the forest.”
“ Theywere monkeys, perhaps. We are human beings,” said Hresh firmly.
“Ah, no,” said the left-hand sapphire-eyes, and made the little hissing sound again. “Not humans, no. The humans departed long ago, at the outset of the Long Winter.”
“Departed?”
“They are gone, yes. You are only their distant cousins, do you see? Both you and the forest-folk who chatter in the treetops.”
Hresh felt his face flaming with bewilderment and dismay.
“I believe none of this.”
“It is so. You and the forest folk—”
“I forbid you to speak of us and them in the same breath!”
“But they are your kin, little monkey.”
“No! No!”
“Oh, your kind is far superior in matters of the mind, that I will grant. But never confuse yourselves with humans, child. You are not made from human stock, but of something other, something similar, perhaps something of a different line of descent from the ancient ancestor of humans and monkeys both: a second attempt, perhaps, at achieving what the gods achieved with humans.”
Hresh stared. Confusion and wrath choked his throat. These are malicious lies, he thought. Intended to confound and discomfort him, because he had been so rash as to intrude on the age-old solitude of these three malevolent artificials.
“You are somewhat like the humans,” said the left-hand sapphire-eyes, “but not very much so. I assure you of that. They had no hair on their bodies, the humans, and they had no tails, and they—”
“This isn’t a tail!” cried Hresh, indignant. “It’s a sensing-organ!”
“A modified tail, yes,” the sapphire-eyes went on implacably. “It is quite good, it is truly remarkable, in fact. But you are not human. There no longer are humans here. What you are is monkeys, or the children of monkeys. The humans are gone from the earth.”
The incredible words were crushing. They had to be lying, they were toying with him, trying to torment and humiliate him with this hideous impossible slur. But he could not throw it off with the contempt it deserved. He felt his anger giving way to despair.
“Not — human?” Hresh said, close to tears, feeling very small and ugly. “Not — human? No. No. It isn’t possible.”