“That won’t happen.”
“No. I don’t expect that it would. But I’ll tell you what position I’ll take if it did. If Dawinno wants to sign away its birthright to the hjjks, say I, well, so be it, but nothing that Dawinno signs is going to be binding on us. The City of Yissou will never recognize the authority of the hjjks in anything, so long as I live. Which goes for my sons as well.”
“You needn’t worry,” said Thu-Kimnibol. “The hjjk treaty’s a dead thing. That isn’t what I came here to discuss with you.”
“What is, then?”
“I’m here to propose an alliance, cousin. Dawinno and Yissou, joined together for a single purpose.”
Salaman sat forward, grasping the sides of the throne. “And what would that purpose be, cousin?”
There was a strange new light in Thu-Kimnibol’s dark chilly eyes. “To make war on the hjjks,” he said, “and slaughter them like vermin.”
The zoological garden, near sundown. It is the eve of the Festival of Dawinno, and everyone is getting ready for the games. All but Hresh, ever contrary. Alone he wanders among his animals, thinking that it’s time to see what the minds of his caviandis are really like.
Sometimes, when he was younger, he would go about secretly trying to walk the way he imagined a sapphire-eyes would, slow and heavy, in an attempt to think like one. He remembers that now. Hold yourself like one, move like one, maybe you can make your mind work the way their minds worked. And also trying now and then to walk like a Dream-Dreamer, like a human, when no one was looking: pretending he was long and thin and skinny-shanked and had no sensing-organ. But the more he tried it, the more he felt like an ape. A monkey, even, just a jumped-up monkey. He would tell himself, then, that he was being too harsh on himself and on the People. We are much more than apes, very much more than monkeys. He still has to tell himself that once in a while. He’s been telling himself that nearly all his life. Even believing it, most of the time. Look at the city, for example. Is Dawinno so trivial? Everything we’ve accomplished here: he knows it’s a tremendous achievement. But sometimes when he sleeps Hresh dreams he’s back in the cocoon, a scrawny boy again, kick-wrestling and cavern-soaring and hoping without much luck to sneak a peek at old Thaggoran’s secret box of chronicles. That idle, empty, stagnant life. Living like animals, though we gave ourselves names, invented rites and ceremonies, even kept historical records. Why didn’t we die of boredom? he often wonders. Spending seven hundred thousand years penned up in those little caverns, doing nothing in particular. No wonder we came erupting out building enormous cities and filling them with our young. All that lost time to make up. All those dark stifled years. Build, grow, discover, fight. Yes. And here we are. What good has it all done? All our ambitions. All our schemes. Our grand projects.
What good, the water-strider asked us once, when we wanted to know the way to Vengiboneeza? What good? What good? What good? All we are is furry monkeys playing at being human.
No. No. No. No.
We are the ones to whom the gods gave the world.
Time to walk like a caviandi, now. Time to find out what they’re really like.
They’ve acclimated well to life in Hresh’s little park. His workmen have diverted the stream that flowed through the garden so that it forks, and the left-hand branch of it now runs down the patch of sloping, uneven terrain that has become the caviandis’ territory. Here, behind gossamer fences strong enough to hold back a vermilion, the two gentle beasts fish, sun themselves, patiently work at constructing a network of shallow subterranean tunnels flanking the stream on both sides. They seem to have recovered from the terror of their capture. Sometimes Hresh sees them sitting side by side on the great smooth pink rock above their nest, staring raptly at the rooftops and white walls of the residential district just beyond the park’s boundaries, as though looking toward the palaces of some unattainable paradise.
He no longer doubts they’re intelligent. It’s the quality of that intelligence that he wants to measure. But first he has had to give them some time to get used to their captivity. They have to be calm, trusting, accessible, before he attempts any sort of deep contact with them.
He approaches them now. Entering their enclosure, he takes a seat on a rock next to the stream and waits for them to come close. The two sleek, slender, big-eyed purple beasts are at the other side, near the fence, standing upright as they often do. They seem curious about his presence. But still they hold back.
Gradually he activates his second sight at low level, letting the field of perception that it creates spread out in a sphere around him.
He feels the tingling warmth of contact. He senses the auras of their souls and perhaps the workings of their minds. But what he picks up is nothing more than a dull undercurrent, a vague uncertain throbbing of distant sentience.
Cautiously Hresh sharpens the focus.
This is nothing new to him, this experiencing of alien minds. Many of the creatures of the New Springtime are capable of thought, perhaps all of them. And could communicate with him, he suspects, if only he learned how to detect their emanations.
Over the years he has on occasions spoken, after a fashion, with goldentusks and xlendis and taggaboggas and vermilions. He remembers the clangorous mental voice of the water-strider, rising to its great height to mock the wandering folk of Koshmar’s tribe as they searched for lost Vengiboneeza. And Young Hresh crouching behind a rock, listening by second sight to the bloodthirsty chanting of a pack of rat-wolves who spoke a dreadful howling language, the words of which were nevertheless unmistakably clear to him: “Kill — kill — flesh — flesh!”
He had even, once, when the tribe was only a few days out of the cocoon, heard with chilled fascination the dry buzzing silent mind-speech of a hjjk, greeting the tribe with cool scorn during a chance encounter in a bleak, chill meadow.
Everywhere in the world mind speaks to mind, creature hails creature in the voiceless speech of the spirit. It is not unusual. The world had long ago reached a time in the unfolding of its growth when such abilities were widespread. Virtually everything can speak, though some species have very little to say, and that little is often simple and dim.
But these caviandis now — standing there on their hind legs, their delicate hands outstretched, their whiskered snouts twitching thoughtfully, their dark luminous eyes warm and gleaming — Hresh suspects that they are extraordinary, that they are something more than mere beasts of the field—
He raises his sensing-organ, which intensifies the emanation that is coming from him. They don’t draw back.
“I am Hresh,” he says. “You have nothing to fear from me.”
There is a stillness, an absence of contact. Then a whirling node of disturbance appears within the stillness, like a tiny red sun being born in the black shield of the heavens, and after a time the female caviandi says, in the silent voice of the mind, “I am She-Kanzi.”
“I am He-Lokim,” says the male.
Names! They have names! They have a sense of themselves as individual entities!
Hresh shivers with astonishment.
He has never found the concept of naming anywhere but among the People. The animals whose minds he has explored all seem to go nameless, as trees might, or rocks. Not even the hjjks use names, or so the story goes. They have no thought of themselves as individual beings separate from the mass of the Nest.
But here are She-Kanzi and He-Lokim proclaiming themselves to exist as their own selves. And the names, Hresh realizes almost at once, are more than mere labels. He comes to see that those two statements, “I am She-Kanzi,” “I am He-Lokim,” describe a whole cluster of complex things that he can barely comprehend, having to do with the two caviandis’ relationship to each other, to the other creatures of their kind, to the world in general, and even, possibly, to the caviandi gods, if he understands the emanation rightly. He doubts that he does. He suspects that what he has taken from it is no more than a rough first approximation. But even that much is amazing.