And, yes, yes, the dream is coming, and it is the same.
Surely her majesty has slipped once more into the black abyss of time past. I say the words that unlock the portals of her spirit, link my mind with hers, and see a fearful strangeness. The stars, of which she gives me just the most fleeting of glimpses before her gaze turns away from them, seem to have an unfamiliar look: the constellations I so quickly see do not appear to be the constellations we know today. They must be those of some long-ago epoch. The stars in their courses travel great distances over time.
And what I behold under these strange skies is bleakness and horror. We are in a hideous city. It is an era I have never seen in her dreams before, an awful one. The buildings are brutal towers, looming inexorably. On myriad interlacing roadways, vehicles move like swarming beetles. I see an ashen sky; I see stunted trees with blackened leaves; I see hordes of people with faces twisted in anguish. The air itself has a poisonous-looking pall. It is the past, yes; it is one of those dark predecessor civilizations, ridden with pain and error, out of which we have emerged into sunlight and joy. What can this terrible ancient era be, if not the dreadful world of eight, ten, twelve thousand years ago, that grim time so proud of the frenzied, furious industriousness that its builders mistook for wealth, from which the benevolence of her majesty’s dynasty has emancipated us all forever?
“Majesty,” I say softly. “Give me this dream.”
I utter the words of transfer and the dream enters me in all its fury. For a moment I recoil; but I am skilled in my art, and quickly I engulf the images, neutralize them, dissipate them, and then it is over and I am rising, trembling, drenched in sweat, fighting nausea. It will take me a while to recover. But I am used to that. Her majesty’s face is tranquil. She sleeps like a happy child. The Vizier comes to me and we embrace, mask against mask. “Well done,” he says. “But I fear this is not the last of them.”
The day that follows is a happy one. Strength and joy flow from her majesty from dawn to dusk. It is a day of golden sunlight, of cloudless skies, of unfolding blossoms and rising fragrance. The great lawns sweeping down to the river have never looked greener; the river’s pure flow is a celestial blue. We are a blessed people. We will not make the mistakes of yesteryear. Our civilization will endure eternally.
But at midnight the Vizier summons me again.
“Another,” he says. “The third night. This one will be the worst.”
Smiling, I tell him, “Whatever it is, I am ready.”
Indeed I am. For sixty years now I have guarded her majesty against the terrors of the night, and we have moved together from triumph to triumph. In the privacy of my soul I flatter myself with the thought that I am essential to the realm—that without my diligence and skill, the Queen-Goddess would be ridden nightly by horror and torment and all the world would be the worse for that.
I don my mask. The Vizier dons his. The Queen, ever youthful, ever beautiful, is asleep. Signs of tension are visible on her brow. The dream is coming. I say the words. The link is formed.
It comes now, the dream.
Her wandering mind has entered that same ancient era, but this night there are significant differences. The brutal towers now are shattered: charred stumps are everywhere. Those interlacing roads are twisted and broken. Vehicles lie piled in rusting heaps along their margins. The air is black and oily. The citizens—there are just a few in the ruined streets—have a dazed, stunned look. Some dreadful thing has happened. The dreaming mind of the Queen-Goddess must have found the very end of the former era, the disastrous climactic time of the Great Collapse, when all assumptions were overthrown and the corrosive prosperity of the day tumbled overnight into that dreary poverty out of which, after so many centuries, our Imperial government created the serene, lovely epoch in which we live today.
It is a much more powerful vision than last night’s, and I know that afterward I will reverberate with it for hours, but so be it. I will take it from her and all will be well. “Majesty,” I say, as ever. “Give me—”
But then her head shifts, and she murmurs in her sleep, and the perspective changes and she shows me the sky, not the brief glimpse of last night but a long, slow, clear view, and everything is wrong. The moon, our familiar pockmarked moon, is a chipped and broken thing, and the stars whose patterns I have studied so well are not the stars of some vanished yesterday nor the stars of today but stars strung across the sky in some utterly unknown configuration. And in that moment all my strength leaves me, for I know this dream to be too huge to swallow. It is the future, not the past, through which the Queen-Goddess walks tonight, and what it shows is that the cycle of destruction will come round again, that our green and golden era that we thought to be invulnerable will not last eternally after all, that we too will be swept away as all earlier civilizations of Earth have been swept away. I can protect her against the past, but there is no way I can stave off the onrushing future, and I fling my mask aside and crouch and weep while the Vizier, maskless and stunned as well, comes hurrying to my side.
A PIECE OF THE GREAT WORLD
After publishing my anthology Between Worlds, for which I had written the novella “The Colonel Returns to the Stars,” Andrew Wheeler of the Science Fiction Book Club asked Gardner Dozois to edit a similar anthology of novellas, this one dealing with tales of the far future, and in the summer of 2004 Gardner invited me to write a story for it.
The far-future tale had held a particular fascination for me ever since I was a small boy discovering H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I had written plenty of them myself—the novels Son of Man and At Winter’s End are the most significant of them, I think—and I had edited several anthologies of stories with far-future themes by other writers. So I told Dozois at once that I would be happy to take part.
As it happened, I had been looking just then at At Winter’s End and its sequel, The Queen of Springtime, which were about to be reissued by the University of Nebraska Press. At Winter’s End, a long, intricate book that I had written in 1986 and early 1987, is set in a post-apocalyptic world nearly a million years in the future. The Earth has been bombarded by a cloud of comets that sent it into a 700,000-year-long ice age. The vastly evolved human beings of that era have fled to another world, leaving behind an assortment of artificially created successor races: a reptilian one (the “sapphire-eyes folk”), an insectoidal one (the “hjjks,”) a dolphin-derived one (the “sea-lords,”) a plant-derived one (the “vegetals”), and a robotic one (the “mechanicals,”) plus an anthropoid race derived from one of the species of higher apes, who call themselves the People. The People have waited out the long winter in subterranean cocoons, and several of the other races have survived the catastrophe in one way or another, and now, with warmth returning to the world, the People are emerging into a vastly changed environment.
I had planned it as a trilogy. At Winter’s End would tell the story of the emergence from the underground cocoons and the founding of the first new surface settlements; The Queen of Springtime, which I wrote in 1988, would describe the evolution of those primitive settlements into an advanced urban culture; and the third volume, The Summer of Homecoming, would bring the vanished humans back to Earth and explain many of the mysteries I had set up in the first two books. But my publisher of that time—Warner Books—was in a state of perpetual upheaval, and the two long books, which had cost me an enormous effort to produce, were not particularly successful commercially, and when the time came to write the third of the trilogy the current Warner editor not only had his own idea of how I should write the book, radically different from what I was proposing, but also offered me a radically reduced advance for writing it. I turned the deal down. I wanted to write my novel, not his, and, since the first two books had been so difficult to write, I was not interested in spending close to a year writing the third one for a very much smaller guarantee.
That third book will never be written, now. Publishers are not interested in buying the third volume of a b
roken trilogy that was begun by some other house twenty years before, and in any case I no longer feel I have the stamina to write that third volume, which would have been at least as challenging to do as the troublesome first two volumes were. So all that the world will ever see of The Summer of Homecoming is the lengthy outline that the University of Nebraska Press printed as an appendix to its edition of The Queen of Springtime.
With one exception. I was reading through that outline just as Gardner Dozois’ request for a far-future novella reached me, and I saw right away that one section of my proposed book could be reshaped into a stand-alone story of the right length. Thus “A Piece of the Great World,” which I wrote in the closing months of 2004 and the early days of 2005, came into being, and Dozois included it, along with five other tales of the distant future, in his anthology One Million A.D., which the Science Fiction Book Club published in December, 2005.
——————
The expedition to the ancestral cocoon would be setting out very soon now. Nortekku was still deep in the task of preparing for it, studying up on the accounts of the events of two centuries before. For weeks he had been poring over the accounts of the emergence of the People from the cocoons when the Long Winter had finally ended—out into that strange, empty world, where the debris flung up by the death-stars still hovered in the upper levels of the atmosphere and a rippling mesh of color streamed in the sky, rainbow nets of amethyst, copper, topaz, crimson, radiant green. He had read too of the famous trek across the continent to the ruins of ancient Vengiboneeza, and of the founding of the first cities of the New Springtime. By then he had become so caught up in the story that he kept pushing his research backward and ever backward across the ages, digging hungrily, compulsively.
There was so much to absorb. He wondered if he would ever master it all. The years fluttered before him, going in reverse. He moved step by step from the tale of the Time of Going Forth back to the era of the cocoons itself, the 700,000 years of life underground during the Long Winter that had preceded the Going Forth, and from there to the dire onslaught of the death-stars that had brought on the deep snows and black winds of the Long Winter. Then he went farther back yet, to the glorious civilization known as the Great World that the winter of the death-stars had destroyed, when all was in motion and great caravels circled the globe laden with merchandise of fabulous richness and splendor, and onward even into what little was known of that shadowy era, millions of years before the Great World had existed, when the vanished human race had dominated the world.
Nortekku had never cared much about all that before—he was an architect by profession, looking toward the future, not the past. But Thalarne, who was an archaeologist, did, and he cared very much about Thalarne, with whom he was about to go off on an expedition of the highest archaeological significance. So for her sake he went tunneling deep into these historical matters that he had not thought about since his schoolboy days.
He studied the way of life of the cocoon era until he began to feel like a cocoon-dweller himself. Those snug cozy burrows, insulated chambers deep in the ground, self-sufficient, sealed away from the cold, carved out by the patient labor of generations—what marvels of architecture they must have been! A maze of passageways twisting and forking like serpents, a network of intricate ventilation shafts providing fresh air, clusters of luminescent glowberries for lighting, water pumped up from streams far underground, special chambers for raising crops and livestock—
Soon he and Thalarne would be venturing into the holiest cocoon of all, the one from which Hresh and Koshmar and the rest of the great city-builders had come. When all of the planning was complete, a week or ten days from now, they would set out from Yissou in a cavalcade of motor vehicles on a journey that would take them halfway across the continent in search of the supposed site of the ancestral cocoon. Together they would uncover its buried secrets. Thalarne would be at his side, a woman like no woman he had ever known, beautiful slender Thalarne of the emerald eyes and the dark sleek fur, Thalarne of the quick, questing mind and the elegant vibrant body—Thalarne—oh, how he loved her!
But then everything fell apart.
First, practically on the eve of departure, they quarreled. It was over a trifle, an absurd trifle. And then, just as Nortekku was beginning to believe that everything had been patched up, Thalarne’s mate Hamiruld came to him unexpectedly with news that the expedition was cancelled.
“Cancelled?” Nortekku said, amazed. “But I’m almost finished with all the arrangements! How—why—?”
Hamiruld shrugged. He appeared scarcely to care. Hamiruld was marvelously indifferent to almost everything, up to and including Nortekku’s months-long romance with his mate. “She asked me to tell you that something else has come up, something more important. That’s all I know.”
“All because of that stupid argument we had?”
Another shrug. Hamiruld’s bland reddish-gray eyes seemed to be gazing into some other dimension. Idly he patted down a tangle in his fur. “I wouldn’t know about that. Something more important, she said.”
Nortekku felt as though he had been punched. Cancelled? Cancelled? Just like that?
“If that’s so,” he said to Hamiruld, “I’ve got to talk to her right now. Where is she? At home, or at the Institute?”
“Neither one,” Hamiruld said.
“Neither?”
“I’m afraid she’s gone,” said Hamiruld mildly.
“Gone? Where?” This was bewildering. Nortekku wanted to shake him.
“I don’t actually know,” said Hamiruld, giving Nortekku a quick, pallid little smile. “She left very quickly, last night, without telling me where she was going. I didn’t see her. All there was was this message, asking me to let you know that the expedition was off.” There seemed to be a glint of malice behind the smile. Perhaps Hamiruld isn’t quite as indifferent to things as he leads one to believe, Nortekku thought.
Cancelled. Something more important has come up.
What do I do now, he wondered?
It was his engagement to the Princess Silina of Dawinno—or, rather, an indirect consequence of his impulsive breaking off of that engagement—that had brought Nortekku into contact with Thalarne in the first place. Giving him not the slightest hint of his intentions, Nortekku’s father had arranged a marriage for his only child with the vapid but highborn Silina, whose ancestral line went back to some helmet-wearing chieftain of the Beng tribe that had played such a key part in the early days of the city-founding era.
The elder Nortekku was one of the wealthiest and most successful members of the merchant class that was coming to wield the real economic and political power in Dawinno. For him the mating would provide his family with the touch of aristocracy that was the only asset it lacked. To his son, though, it felt like an intolerable intrusion on his freedom of choice. He had never been involved with any one woman for very long, had never even considered taking any of them as his mate, had not even been thinking about such things. And he had seen enough of silly Silina over the years, in the course of the regular social round of the Dawinnan upper classes, to know that she was close to the last woman he would want as his mate, assuming he wanted one at all.
He tried to keep those feelings hidden. He did try. But then, with plans for the nuptials already far along, it all suddenly overflowed in him. Angrily Nortekku told his father that he rejected the entire arrangement and was indignant that it had been set up without consulting him. He would never marry, he said, never, never, never—not the Princess Silina, not anyone. All of which was met, just as heatedly, with a blazing glare, a snarl of fury, and a quick, explicit threat of disinheritance.
“As you wish,” Nortekku replied, without a moment’s hesitation. He had never had any interest in his father’s wealth or in the dreary commercial pursuits that had created it. He had taken up architecture as his profession instead of going into the family firm because he wanted to accomplish something in his own right, not simply become t
he passive beneficiary of the older man’s boundless riches. Yearning to penetrate deep secrets, he had aspired originally to be an astronomer; but although there was poetry in him there was not quite enough mathematics, and so the choice had fallen upon architecture instead. “Keep your money, father. Give it to the poor. I’m not for sale.”
“So you’ll go to her family, then, and tell them to their faces that you’re breaking off the betrothal? Just like that, sorry, it was all a mistake, goodbye, poof! What do you think Prince Vuldimin will say?”
That was a difficult one. Prince Vuldimin, the shrewd and powerful cousin of King Falid of Yissou, was Nortekku’s most important client at the moment, and Nortekku’s whole professional relationship with him was an outgrowth of the marital negotiations. Vuldimin had come to Dawinno earlier in the year in search of an architect to design a new palace for him in the countryside outside Yissou, a palace that would favor the bright, airy, swooping look of modern Dawinnan architecture rather than the crabbed and somber style typical of Yissou.
That project fell to Nortekku because Vuldimin was distantly related to Silina’s father, who was, for all his lofty ancestry, an impoverished aristocrat eager to see Silina married off to a man of wealth and importance. He saw the job of designing Vuldimin’s palace as a useful step in the building of his future son-in-law’s career, and arranged a meeting between Nortekku and the prince. It went very well: Vuldimin spelled out his ideas for the new palace, Nortekku dared to make some suggestions for bettering them, and Vuldimin showed what appeared to be unfeigned enthusiasm. And so two contracts were drawn up, one pledging the troth of Silina and Nortekku, the other engaging Nortekku as the architect of Vuldimin’s palace. The voiding of one contract now might well cause the other to be broken as well, with disastrous results for Nortekku’s career.