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  The Queen of Springtime

  ( New Springtime - 2 )

  Robert Silverberg

  The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was a thing that happened every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside. But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

  Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land.

  But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now.

  The Queen of Springtime

  by Robert Silverberg

  1

  The Emissary

  As he came over the knife-edge summit of the bare rock-strewn hill and turned to descend into the warm green valley that was his destination, Kundalimon felt the wind change. For weeks it had been at his back, hard and dry and biting, as he journeyed from the interior of the continent toward its southwestern coast. But it was blowing from the south, now: a sweet soft wind, almost a caress, carrying a host of strange fragrances toward him out of the city of the flesh-folk down below.

  He could only guess at what those fragrances were.

  One was a smell that he supposed might be like that of the lust of serpents, and another something like the scent of burning feathers, and there was a third that he imagined was the smell of sea-things that have been brought in nets, angrily thrashing, to the land. And then one that might almost have been the smell of the Nest — the flavor of black root-earth from the deepest passageways below the ground.

  But he knew he was deceiving himself. Where he was now could not have been farther from the Nest, its familiar odors and textures.

  With a hiss and a jab of his heels Kundalimon signaled his vermilion to halt, and paused a moment, breathing deeply, sucking the city’s complex vapors deep down into his lungs in the hope that those strange fragrances would turn him to flesh again. He needed to be flesh, this day. He was hjjk now, in soul if not in body. But today he had to put aside all that was hjjk about himself, and meet these flesh-folk as if he truly were one of them. Which he had been once, long ago.

  He would need to speak their language, such few scraps of it as he remembered from his childhood. Eat their foods, however much they nauseated him. And find a way to touch their souls. On him, much depended.

  Kundalimon had come here to bring the flesh-folk the gift of Queen-love, the greatest gift he knew. To urge them to open their hearts to Her. Cry out to them to accept Her embrace. Beg them to let Her love flood their souls. Then, only then, could Queen-peace continue in the world. If his mission failed, the peace must end, and there would be warfare at last between flesh-folk and hjjk: strife, waste, needless death, interruption of Nest-plenty.

  It was a war that the Queen did not want. War was never an integral and necessary aspect of Nest-plan except as a last resort. But the imperatives of Nest-plan were clear enough. If the flesh-folk refused to embrace the Queen in love, to allow Her joy to bring gladness to their souls, then war would be impossible to avert.

  “Onward,” he told the vermilion, and the ponderous scarlet beast went shambling forward, down the steep hillside, into the lushly vegetated valley.

  In just a few hours now he would reach the City of Dawinno, the great southern capital, the mother-nest of the flesh-folk. Where that race’s largest swarm — hisrace, once, but no more — had its home.

  Kundalimon stared in mingled wonder and disdain at the scene before him. The richness of it all was awesome; and yet something in him scorned this soft place, felt a dark and potent contempt for its superabundance. Wherever he glanced, there was such lavishness as made his head throb. All that foliage, dewy and shining in the morning light! Those golden-green vines, madly profligate, climbing tremendous trees with lunatic energy! From the boughs of squat long-armed shrubs there dangled heavy red fruits that looked as though they could quench your thirst for a month. Thick, sultry bushes with furry blue-tinged leaves sprouted absurdly huge clusters of shimmering lavender berries. The grass, close-packed and succulent with bright scarlet blades, seemed to be offering itself eagerly for the delight of hungry wanderers.

  And the gaudy flocks of plump noisy birds, pure white with startling bands of crimson on their huge beaks — the small clamorous big-eyed beasts scrambling in the underbrush — the little winged insects flashing wings of rainbow color—

  Too much, Kundalimon thought, too much, too much, much much too much. He missed the austerity of his northern homeland, the dry sparse plains where a patch of withered grass was cause for song, and one met one’s food with proper reverence, knowing how lucky one was to have this pouchful of hard gray seeds, this strip of dried brown meat.

  A land like this, where all manner of provender lay everywhere about for the mere taking, seemed undisciplined and overloving. A sloppy easy place that had the look of a paradise: but in the final truth it must surely do harm to its unsuspecting inhabitants in the guise of benefit. Where the nourishment is too easy, soul-injury is the inevitable result. In a place like this, one can starve faster with a full gut than an empty one.

  And yet this very valley was the place where he had been born. But it had had little time to place its imprint on him. He had been taken from it too young. This was Kundalimon’s seventeenth summer, and for thirteen of those years he had dwelled among the servants of the Queen in the far north. He was of the Nest now. Nothing was flesh about him except his flesh itself. His thoughts were Nest-thoughts. His soul was a Nest-soul. When he spoke, the sounds that came most readily to his tongue were the harsh clicks and whispers of hjjk speech. Still, much as he would deny it, Kundalimon knew that beneath all that lay the inescapable truth of the flesh. His soul might be of the Nest but his arm was flesh; his heart was flesh; his loins were flesh. And now at last he was returning to this place of flesh where his life had begun.

  The flesh-folk city was a maze of white walls and towers, cradled in rounded hills beside an immense ocean, just as Nest-thinker had said. It soared and swooped like some bizarre giant sprawling organism over the high green ridges that flanked the great curving bay.

  How strange to live above the ground in that exposed way, in such a dizzying host of separate structures all tangled together. All of them so rigid and hard, so little like the supple corridors of the Nest. And those strange gaping areas of open space between them.

  What an alien and repellent place! And yet beautiful, in its fashion. How was that possible, repellent and beautiful both at once? For a moment his courage wavered. He knew himself to be neither flesh nor Nest and he felt suddenly lost, a creature of the indeterminate mid-haze, belonging to neither world.

  Only for a moment. His fears passed. Nest-strength reasserted itself in him. He was a true servant of the Queen; how then could he fail?

  He threw back his head and filled his lungs with the warm aromatic breeze from the south. Laden as it was with city-smells, with flesh-folk smells, it stirred his body to quick hot response: flesh callin
g to flesh. That was all right, Kundalimon thought. I am flesh; and yet I am of the Nest.

  I am the emissary of the Queen of Queens. I am the speaker of the Nest of Nests. I am the bridge between the worlds.

  He made a joyous clicking sound. Calmly he rode forward. After a time he saw tiny figures in the distance, flesh-folk, looking his way, pointing, shouting. Kundalimon nodded and waved to them, and spurred his vermilion onward toward the place called Dawinno.

  A day’s ride to the south and east, in the swampy lakelands on the far side of the coastal hills that lay inland of the City of Dawinno, the hunters Sipirod, Kaldo Tikret, and Vyrom moved warily through the fields of luminous yellow moss-flower. A heavy golden mist shimmered in the air. It was the pollen of the male moss-flower, rising in thick gusts to seek the female fields farther to the south. A string of long, narrow phosphorescent lakes, choked with stringy blue algae, stretched before them. The time was early morning. Already the day was stiflingly hot.

  Old Hresh the chronicler had sent them out here. He wanted them to bring him a pair of caviandis, the lithe quick fish-hunting creatures that lived in watery districts like this.

  Caviandis were harmless, inoffensive animals. But not much else in this region was harmless, and the three hunters moved with extreme caution. You could die quickly in these swamps. Hresh had had to promise a thick wad of exchange-units to get them to take on the task at all.

  “Does he want to eat them, do you think?” Kaldo Tikret asked. He was stubby and coarse, a crossbreed, with sparse chocolate fur tinged with the gold of the Beng tribe, and dull amber eyes. “I hear that caviandi is tasty stuff.”

  “Oh, he’ll eat them, all right,” said Vyrom. “I can see it from here, the whole picture. He and his lady the chieftain, and their crazy daughter, sitting down at table together in their finest robes, yes. Feasting on roast caviandi, cramming it in with both their hands, swilling down the good wine.” He laughed and made a broad, comfortably obscene gesture, switching his sensing-organ briskly from side to side. Vyrom was gap-toothed and squint-eyed, but his body was long and powerful. He was the son of the sturdy warrior Orbin, who had died the year before. He still wore a red mourning band on his arm. “That’s how they live, those lucky rich ones. Eat and drink, eat and drink, and send poor fools like us out into the lakelands to snare their caviandis for them. We should catch an extra caviandi for ourselves, and roast it on our way back, as long as we’ve come all this way to get some for Hresh.”

  “Fools indeed is what you are,” Sipirod said, and spat. Sipirod was Vyrom’s mate, sinuous and quick-eyed, a better hunter than either of the others. She was of the Mortiril tribe, a small one long since swallowed up in the city. “The two of you. Didn’t you hear the chronicler say that he wanted the caviandis for his science? He wants to study them. He wants to talk to them. He wants them to tell him their history.”

  Vyrom guffawed. “What kind of history can caviandis have? Animals, that’s all they are.”

  “Hush,” said Sipirod harshly. “There are other animals here who’d gladly eat your flesh today. Keep your wits on your work, friend. If we’re smart, we’ll come out of this all right.”

  “Smart and lucky,” Vyrom said.

  “I suppose. But smart makes lucky happen. Let’s get moving.”

  She pointed ahead, into the steamy tropical wilderness. Diamond-eyed khut-flies half the size of a man’s head buzzed through the yellow air, trapping small birds with lightning swoops of their sticky tendrils and sucking the juices from them. Coiling steptors dangled by their tails from the branches of oily-barked trees, harrowing the black waters of the swampy lakes for fish. A long-beaked round creature with mud-colored fur and eyes like green saucers, standing high on naked stalk-like legs like stilts, waded through the shallows, scooping up struggling gray mud-crawlers with clumsy pouncing grabs of surprising efficiency. Far away, something that must have been of terrible size bellowed again and again, an ominous low rumbling sound.

  “Where are all these caviandis?” Vyrom asked.

  “By fast-flowing streams,” said Sipirod. “Such as feed these filthy sluggish lakes here. We’ll see a few of them on the other side.”

  “I’d be glad to be done with this job in an hour,” Kaldo Tikret said, “and get myself back to the city in one piece. What idiocy, risking our lives for a few stinking exchange-units—”

  “Not so few,” Vyrom said.

  “Even so. It’s not worth it.” On the way out, they had talked of their chances of running into something ugly here. Did it make sense, dying for a few exchange-units? Of course not. But that was how it was: you liked to eat regularly, you went hunting where they told you to hunt, and you caught what they wanted you to catch. That was how it was. They tell us, we do. “Let’s get it over with,” Kaldo Tikret said.

  “Right,” said Sipirod. “But first we have to cross the swamp.”

  She led the way, tiptoeing as if she expected the spongy earth to swallow her if she gave it her full weight. The pollen became thicker as they moved southward toward the nearest of the lakes. It clung to their fur and blocked their nostrils. The air seemed tangible. The heat was oppressive. Even during the bleak days of the Long Winter this must have been a land of mild weather, and here, as the New Springtime surged yearly toward greater warmth, the lake country lay in the grip of an almost unbearable sultriness.

  “You see any caviandis yet?” Vyrom asked.

  Sipirod shook her head. “Not here. By the streams. The streams.”

  They went onward. The distant rumbling bellow grew louder.

  “A gorynth, sounds like,” Kaldo Tikret said moodily. “Maybe we ought to head in some other direction.”

  “There are caviandis here,” said Sipirod.

  Kaldo Tikret said, scowling, “And we’re risking our lives so the chronicler will have his caviandis to study. By the Five, it must be their coupling he wants to study, don’t you think?”

  “Not him,” said Vyrom, with a laugh. “I’ll bet he doesn’t care a hjjk’s turd for coupling, that one.”

  “He must have, at least once,” Kaldo Tikret said. “There’s Nialli Apuilana, after all.”

  “That wild daughter of his, yes.”

  “On the other hand, did he have anything to do with the making of her? If you ask me, Nialli Apuilana sprouted in Taniane’s womb without any help from Hresh. There’s nothing about her that’s his. They look like sisters, that pair, not mother and daughter.”

  “Be quiet,” Sipirod said, giving the two men a louring look. “All this chatter does us no good here.”

  Kaldo Tikret said, “But they say Hresh is too deep in his studies and his spells to spare any time for coupling. What a waste! I tell you, if I could have either one in my bed for an hour, the mother or the daughter—”

  “Enough,” said Sipirod more sharply. “If you don’t have any respect for the chieftain or her daughter, at least show some for your own neck. Those are treasonous words. And we have work to do. See, there?”

  “Is that a caviandi?” Vyrom murmured.

  She nodded. A hundred paces ahead, where a swift narrow stream flowed into the stagnant algae-fouled lake, a creature the size of a half-grown child crouched by the water’s edge, trolling for fish with quick sweeps of its large hands. Its purple body was slender, with a stiff mane of yellow hair standing up along its neck and spine. Sipirod beckoned to the men to be still and began to creep up silently behind it. At the last moment the caviandi, taken altogether by surprise, looked around. It made a soft sighing sound and huddled frozen where it was.

  Then, rising on its haunches, the creature held up its hands in what might have been a gesture of submission. The caviandi’s arms were short and plump, and its outstretched fingers seemed not very different from those of the hunters. Its eyes were violet-hued and had an unexpected gleam of intelligence in them.

  No one moved.

  After a long moment the caviandi bolted suddenly and attempted to run for it. But it made
the mistake of trying to enter the forest behind it instead of going into the lake, and Sipirod was too quick. She rushed forward, diving and sliding along the muddy ground, leaving a track behind her. Catching the animal by the throat and midsection, she swung it upward, holding it aloft. It squealed and kicked in anguish until Vyrom came up behind her and popped it into a sack. Kaldo Tikret tied the sack shut.

  “That’s one,” said Sipirod with satisfaction. “Female.”

  “You stay here and guard it,” Vyrom said to Kaldo Tikret. “We’ll go find us another one. Then we can get out of this place.”

  Kaldo Tikret wiped a clot of yellow moss-pollen from his shaggy muzzle. “Be quick about it. I don’t like standing here by myself.”

  “No,” said Vyrom, jeering. “Some hjjks might sneak up on you and carry you away.”

  “Hjjks? You think I’m worried about hjjks?” Kaldo Tikret laughed. In quick bold hand-movements he drew the stark outline of one of the insect-men in the air, the towering elongated body, the sharp constrictions between head and thorax, thorax and abdomen, the long narrow head, the jutting beak, the jointed limbs. “I’d tear the legs right off any hjjk who tried to give me trouble,” he said, acting it out in fierce pantomime, “and stuff them into its bunghole. What would hjjks be doing in country this hot, though? But there are dangers enough. Make it quick, will you?”

  “Quick as we can,” said Sipirod.

  But their luck had changed. An hour and a half she and Vyrom trudged futilely through the swamps, until their fur was miserably soggy and stained a bright yellow everywhere. The moss-flowers, tirelessly pumping forth their pollen, turned the sky dark with it, and everything that was phosphorescent or luminescent in the jungle began to glow and pulsate. Some lantern-trees lit up like beacons and the moss itself gleamed brightly and somber bluish radiance came from the lakes. Of other caviandis they found none at all.