From them radiated the stern conviction of their own enduring superiority. We will be here after you are gone, the hjjk-folk announced with every movement of their arrogant antennae. And it was clear that they would regard the instant disappearance of all members of the other races as a considerable boon. Yet no one begrudged the presence here of these inimical insect-people. Hresh saw them actively mingling, acquiring, trading.
Here too were the vegetals, the delicate flower-folk, gathering in little groups on sunny porches. The petals of their faces were yellow or red or blue, and in the center of each was a single golden eye. Their central stems were sturdy, their limbs much less so, pliant and soft. They spoke in mild whispering tones, with much rustling of leaves and elegant gesturing of branches. There was a soft poetry in their movements and sounds.
By what miracle had it happened, Hresh wondered, that plants had learned to speak and walk about? He was able to look within the souls of these vegetals and see the knotty fibers and sinews of true brains, little hard clumps nestling in the protected place where their head-petals joined their central stems. In his trek across the plains he had not encountered plants that had minds; but of course these vegetals that he saw were ancient creatures. Their kind had been swept away by the bitter storms of the Long Winter, and perhaps nothing like them had been capable of surviving into the era of the People.
The mechanicals were much in evidence. Hresh saw them hard at work in every district of the city, those massive dome-headed, jointed-legged metal beings. They were constructing, repairing, cleansing, demolishing. So they were the servants of the sapphire-eyes; and yet they had clear, strong minds and a sharp awareness of their own existence. Machines they might be, but to Hresh they were more comprehensible than the hjjk-folk. Each was an individual, with a distinct identity and no little pride in that identity.
A scarcer group were the sea-lords, but this, Hresh realized, must be owing to the difficulties they experienced in getting about on land. They were sleek brown tight-furred beings, tapered in a graceful way, with robust frames and flipperlike limbs. Plainly they were creatures of the water, though they breathed the air of Vengiboneeza with no sign of discomfort. Each was installed in a cunning chariot on silver treads, which was operated by deft manipulations of the sea-lord’s flipper tips. Sea-lords were to be found mainly in the districts near the waterfront, sensibly enough, in taverns and shops and restaurants. Their took was a bold and haughty one, as if each regarded himself as a prince among princes. Perhaps it was so.
On and on he drifted, and the Great World glittered about him in the fullness of its brightness. What had existed only as the blurred memory of a memory in the oldest pages of the chronicles was alive for him. For him there was no time outside the time of his vision. This was the world as it had been before the disaster; this was the world at the summit of its highest civilization, when miracles were everyday things.
He had become a citizen of that world. Moving through the streets of ancient Vengiboneeza, he paused now to bow to some sapphire-eyes lord, paused to exchange pleasantries with a group of blushing twittering vegetals, paused to let a sea-lord in a magnificent gleaming chariot go past him. He knew himself to be at the hub of the universe. All epochs of every star converged here. There had never been anything like it in the universe before. It was his great and unique privilege to be seeing it. He wanted to roam every street, to inspect every building, to see and comprehend everything: to live in two worlds from now on, to retain, if he could, his citizenship in this doomed land of the long-gone past.
If this is a dream, he thought, it is the finest dream that anyone ever had.
Very little of what he saw bore much resemblance to the ruined Vengiboneeza he had come to know. Perhaps half a dozen of these great buildings, he thought, had survived into his own time. The rest were entirely different, as was the pattern of the streets. He knew that this place was Vengiboneeza, for the arrangement of the city between the mountains and the water was the same; but the city must have been built and rebuilt many times over during its long span of existence. He had a powerful sense of it as a living, changing thing, as a gigantic creature that breathed and moved.
More than ever, now, Hresh perceived the complexity of the Great World, and felt dismayed and disheartened by the task that he knew the People would face in attempting to achieve so lofty an ambition as to equal the achievements of that lost civilization. But once again he told himself that even the Great World had not been built in an afternoon. The labor of millions, across thousands of years, had created it. Given enough time, the People could do just as well.
He ventured onward, hovering like a wraith, peering here, peering there, trying to take it all in before this vision, like the last, was snatched from him.
And after a time he realized that there was one thing he had not seen here.
My own kind, Hresh thought. Where are we?
He counted carefully. Of the Six Peoples of whom the chronicles spoke, those who had shared this vanished world in peace, Hresh had seen five thus far: sapphire-eyes, hjjks, vegetals, mechanicals, sea-lords. Humans were the sixth people. He had seen none at all. Dazzled by the richness and strangeness of it all, he had not become aware of the absence of that one race until now.
He searched the city to its boundaries; and there were no humans to be found. Through one broad plaza after another, up this grand boulevard and that, into the wineshops of the harbor and the white marble villas of the foothills he sought them, hoping for a glimpse of dark thick fur, of bright alert eyes, of sensing-organs proudly erect. Nothing. Not one. It was as if humanity was wholly unknown in this antique Vengiboneeza of the high great era.
But during this quest Hresh came from time to time upon creatures of another kind familiar to him: curious frail beings sparsely distributed in the great city, scattered by twos and threes through Vengiboneeza like precious gems on a sandy shore. They were tall and slender, and walked upright as the People did. Their skulls were high-vaulted; their lips were thin; their skins were pale and bare of fur; their eyes glowed with a mysterious violet hue. And from them came an emanation of great antiquity and power, rooted in a sense of self so firm that it was overwhelming, it was crushing in its complacent force.
Hresh had seen these people before, carved on the walls of the subterranean vault where he had commenced this journey across time. He had seen one in the cocoon itself: that enigmatic sleeping creature who had dwelled so long among the People without ever entering into the life of the tribe. They were the Dream-Dreamer folk. Haniman, all innocence, had asked if they were one of the Six Peoples when he saw them amid the statuary of the vault, and Hresh had said no, no, they must be folk from some other star. But now he was not so sure. Now a dread suspicion of the truth began to hatch and grow within his soul.
He saw them moving through the city in silence, aloof mysterious creatures, like kings, like gods. They seemed almost to float a little way above the pavement. Then he came to a building that he recognized, the dark flat heavy-walled structure that he had called the Citadel, windowless, stark, looming in somber majesty on a great hill and looking just as it did in his own time. There he found dozens of the creatures going to and fro, as if this was their special hostelry, or perhaps their palace. They paid him no notice. He watched them approach the building one by one and touch their long fingers to its sides, and pass through as though the walls were mere insubstantial mist; and when they emerged it was the same way.