“Even more continents?” Nortekku said. This was dizzying.
“Who knows? Nobody’s ever been there. But it’s a round planet, Nortekku. You keep going east, sooner or later you reach the Western Ocean’s far side, and if we could sail across it we’d be back at our own coast again. I find it hard to believe that there’s nothing but empty ocean west of us.”
“The Sea-Lords,” he said. “Come back to the Sea-Lords. You told me, when I first came in, that there’s a ship due to sail from here at the end of the week, and you’re planning to be on it. To go and look for that colony of Sea-Lords, is that it? And you want me to accompany you?”
“Of course,” Thalarne said.
It was too much, flooding in all in a single moment like this. His head was swimming. One day he had simply been trying to repair a spat with his lover, and the next, practically, he found himself aboard an airwagon heading for the other side of the continent, and then—new continents—living Sea-Lords—a voyage to the eastern hemisphere, to the shores of the Inland Sea—
She sat him down and poured wine for him, and she told him a little about the arrangements she had made for the new expedition and her hopes of what they would find out there across the ocean, and her fears, too, and of a good deal else, while he listened spellbound, though only partly convinced that any of this was really happening. Perhaps, Nortekku thought, he was still back in Yissou, lost in some fever-dream. Perhaps he had never even left Dawinno.
But the whiplash sound of an icy wind against the window reminded him that he really was in wintry Bornigrayal, and that the dark, emerald-eyed woman beside him actually was Thalarne, whom he had not lost after all, and that he and she were talking quite seriously about taking passage aboard some ocean-going vessel and crossing the sea in quest of survivors of a race that had thought to be extinct for seven hundred thousand years. He moved closer to her. By imperceptible stages they found themselves embracing, and then, after only a moment of shared uncertainty—shall we couple first? Or twine?—they made their choice and slid to the floor and were hard at it, coupling for the first time in—what, two weeks? Three? She arched her back against his chest, pressing herself close, and awaited him. How good it was to reunite with her now! First the coupling, the simpler communion, the basic one, the old primitive thing that all creatures enjoyed. And then later, he hoped, they would twine. But for now he lost himself in her rich scent, in the warmth of her. He clasped her tight, and cupped her breasts in his hands, and from her came a gasp of joy as he thrust himself into her.
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.”