Robert Silverberg - New Springtime

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First published in The New Springtime, April 1990

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First published in The New Springtime, April 1990

ISBN 1-930936-25-7

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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

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sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now.

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

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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 calling to flesh.

That was all right, Kundalimon thought. I am flesh; and yet I am of the Nest.

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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.”

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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.”

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“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

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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.

After a time they turned back. As they neared the place where they had left Kaldo Tikret, they heard a

sudden hoarse cry for help, strange and strangled-sounding.

“Hurry!” Vyrom cried. “He's in trouble.”

Sipirod caught her mate by the wrist. “Wait.”

“Wait?”

“If something's wrong, no sense both of us plunging into it together. Let me go up ahead and see what's

happening.”

She slipped through the underbrush and stepped out into the clearing. Out of the lake rose a gorynth's

black shining neck, perhaps that of the same monster they had heard hooting earlier. The huge creature's

body lay submerged. Only its curving upper surface was visible, like a row of sunken barrels; but its

neck, five times the length of a man and ornamented by triple rows of blunt black spines, arched up and

outward and down again, and at the end of it was Kaldo Tikret, caught in its powerful jaws. He was still

calling for help, but more feebly, now. In another moment he would be under the water.

“Vyrom!” she shouted.

He came running, brandishing his spear. But where to hurl it? What little of the gorynth's body could be

seen was heavily armored with thick overlapping scales that would send his spear bouncing aside. The

long neck was more vulnerable, but a difficult target. Then even that disappeared, and Kaldo Tikret with

it, down into the dark turbid water. Black bubbles came upward.

The water churned for a time. They watched in silence, uneasily grooming their fur.

Abruptly Sipirod said, “Look. Another caviandi, over there by the sack. Probably trying to free its

mate.”

“Aren't we going to try to do anything for Kaldo Tikret?”

She made a chopping gesture. “What? Jump in after him? He's done for. Don't you understand that?

Forget him. We have caviandis to catch. That's what we're paid for. Faster we find the second one,

faster we can start getting ourselves out of this wretched place and back to Dawinno.” The black surface

of the lake began just then to grow still. “Done for, yes. Just as you said before: smart and lucky, that's

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what you have to be.”

Vyrom shivered. “Kaldo Tikret wasn't lucky.”

“Not very smart, either. Now, if I slip around to the side, while you come up behind me with the other

sack—”

* * * *

In central Dawinno, the official sector, a workroom on the second sublevel of the House of Knowledge:

bright lights, cluttered laboratory benches, fragments of ancient civilizations scattered around everywhere.

Plor Killivash delicately presses the firing-stud on the small cutting tool in his hand. A beam of pale light

descends and bathes the foul-smelling, misshapen lump of he-knew-not-what, big as a bushel and

tapered like an egg, that he has been brooding over all week. He focuses it and makes a quick shallow

cut, and another, and another, slicing a fine line in its outer surface.

A fisherman had brought the thing in the week before, insisting that it was a Great World relic, a

treasure-chest of the ancient sea-lord folk. Anything that might be sea-lord material was Plor Killivash's

responsibility. Its surface was slimy with a thick accretion of sponges and coral and soft pink algae, and

sour dirty sea-water dripped constantly from its interior. When he rapped it with a wrench it gave off a

hollow thudding sound. He had no hope for it at all.

Perhaps if Hresh had been around he might have felt less disheartened. But the chronicler was away

from the House of Knowledge this day, calling at the villa of his half-brother Thu-Kimnibol.

Thu-Kimnibol's mate, the lady Naarinta, was seriously ill; and Plor Killivash, who was one of three

assistant chroniclers, was as usual finding it hard to take his work seriously in Hresh's absence. Somehow

when he was on the premises Hresh managed to infuse everyone's labors with a sense of important

purpose. But the moment he left the building, all this pushing about of the sad shards and scraps of history

became a mere absurdity, an empty pointless grubbing in the rubble of a deservedly forgotten antiquity.

The study of the ancient days began to seem a meaningless pastime, a miserable airless quest into sealed

vaults containing nothing but the stink of death.

Plor Killivash was a sturdy burly man of Koshmar descent. He had been to the University, and was very

proud of that. Once he had had some hope of becoming head chronicler himself some day. He was sure

he had the inside track, because he was the only Koshmar among the assistants. Io Sangrais was Beng,

and Chupitain Stuld belonged to the little Stadrain tribe.

They were University people too, of course; but there were good political reasons for keeping the

chroniclership away from a Beng, and nobody imagined that it would ever go to anyone from so trifling a

group as the Stadrains. But far as Plor Killivash cared these days, they could have it, either one of them.

Let someone else be head chronicler after Hresh, that was how Plor Killivash felt nowadays. Let

someone else supervise the task of hacking through these millennia-thick accumulations of rubble.

Once, like Hresh before him, he had felt himself possessed by an almost uncontrollable passion for

penetrating and comprehending the mysteries of the vast pedestal of Earthly history atop which this

newborn civilization that the People had created sat, like a pea atop a pyramid. Had longed to mine

deep, digging beyond the icy barrenness of the Long Winter period into the luxurious wonder of the

Great World. Or even—why set limits? why any limits at all?—even into the deepest layers of all, into

those wholly unknown empires of the almost infinitely remote era of the humans, who had ruled the Earth

before the Great World itself had arisen. Surely there must be human ruins left down there, somewhere

far below the debris of the civilizations that had followed theirs.

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It had seemed so wonderfully appealing. To live billions of lives extending across millions of years. To

stand upon old Earth and feel that you had been present when it was the crossroads of the stars. Flood

your mind with strange sights, strange languages, the thoughts of other minds of unspeakable brilliance.

Absorb and comprehend everything that had ever been, on this great planet that had seen so very much

in its long span, realm piled upon realm back to the dawn of history.

But he had been a boy then. Those were a boy's thoughts, unfettered by practical considerations. Now

Plor Killivash was twenty and he knew just how difficult it was to make the lost and buried past come

alive. Under the harsh pressures of reality, that fiery passion to uncover ancient secrets was slipping from

him, just as you could see it going even from Hresh himself, year by year. Hresh, though, had had the

help of miraculous Great World devices, now no longer usable, to give him visions of the worlds that had

existed before this world. For one who had never had the advantage of such wondrous things, the work

of a chronicler was coming to seem nothing but doleful dreary slogging, carrying with it much frustration,

precious little reward.

Somber thoughts on a somber day. And somberly Plor Killivash made ready to cut open the artifact

from the sea.

The slim figure of Chupitain Stuld appeared in the doorway. She was smiling, and her dark violet eyes

were merry.

“Still drilling? I was sure you'd be inside that thing by now.”

“Just another little bit to go. Stick around for the great revelation.”

He tried to sound lighthearted about it. It wouldn't do to let his gloom show through.

She had her own frustrations, he knew. She too felt increasingly adrift amidst the mounded-up fragments

of crumbled and eroded antiquity that the House of Knowledge contained.

Glancing at her, he said, “What's happening with those artifacts you've been playing with? The ones the

farmers found in Senufit Gorge.”

Chupitain Stuld laughed darkly. “That box of junk? It's all so much sand and rust.”

“I thought you said it was from a pre-Great World level seven or eight million years old.”

“Then it's sand and rust seven or eight million years old. I was hoping you were having better luck.”

“Some chance.”

“You never can tell,” Chupitain Stuld said. She came up beside the workbench. “Can I help?”

“Sure. Those tractor clamps over there: bring them into position. I've just about sawed through the last

of it now, and then we can lift the top half.”

Chupitain Stuld swung the clamps downward and fastened them. Plor Killivash made the final intensity

adjustment on his cutter. His fingers felt thick and coarse and clumsy. He found himself wishing Chupitain

Stuld had stayed in her own work area. She was lovely to behold, small and delicate and extremely

beautiful, with the soft lime-green fur that was common in her tribe. Today she wore a yellow sash and a

mantle of royal blue, very elegant. They had been coupling-partners for some months now and even had

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twined once or twice. But all the same he didn't want her here now. He was convinced that he was going

to bungle things as he made the last incision and he hated the idea that she'd be watching as he did.

Well. No more stalling, he tells himself. Checks his calibrations one last time. Draws his breath in

sharply. At last forces himself to press the trigger. The beam licks out, bites into the artifact's shell-like

wall. One quick nibble. He cuts the beam off. A dark line of severance has appeared. The upper half of

the object moves minutely away from the lower half.

“You want me to pull up on the tractor harness?” Chupitain Stuld asked.

“Yes. Just a little.”

“It's giving, Plor Killivash! It's going to lift!”

“Easy, now—easy—”

“Wouldn't it be wonderful if this thing's full of sea-lord amulets and jewels! And maybe a book of history

of the Great World. Written on imperishable plates of golden metal.”

Plor Killivash chuckled. “Why not a sea-lord himself, fast asleep, waiting to be awakened so he can tell

us all about himself? Eh?”

The halves were separating. The weighty upper one rose a finger's-breadth's distance, another, another.

A burst of sea-water came cascading out as the last inner seal broke.

For an instant Plor Killivash felt a flicker of the excitement he had felt when he was new here, five or six

years before, and it had seemed every day that they were making wondrous new inroads into the

mysteries of the past. But the odds were that this thing was worthless. There was very little of the Great

World left to find, seven thousand centuries after its downfall. The glaciers grinding back and forth across

the face of the land had done their work all too well.

“Can you see?” Chupitain Stuld asked, trying to peer over the top of the opened container.

“It's full of amulets and jewels, all right. And a whole bunch of fantastic machines in perfect

preservation.”

“Oh, stop it!”

He sighed. “All right. Here—look.”

He scooped her up to perch on his arm, and they looked in together.

Inside were nine leathery-looking translucent purplish globes, each the size of a man's head, glued to the

wall of the container by taut bands of a rubbery integument. Dim shapes were visible within them. Organs

of some kind, looking shrunken and decayed. A fierce stench of rot came forth. Otherwise nothing.

Nothing but a coating of moist white sand along the sides of the container, and a shallow layer of opaque

water at the bottom.

“Not sea-lord artifacts, I'm afraid,” Plor Killivash said.

“No.”

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Robert Silverberg - New Springtime

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