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.

The caviandis stand all but motionless, watching him. They seem tense. The elegant little fingers of their finely formed hands contract nervously and open again, over and over. Their whiskered snouts twitch. But their huge shining unblinking eyes are like deep pools of dark liquid, still, serene, unfathomable.

Hresh surrounds them now with his second sight, and they show their innerness to him more fully. Much is unclear. But he draws a vision from them of a peaceful, undemanding life, lived close to the fabric of nature.

They are not human, as he understands that concept: they have no wish to grow or expand in any way, to yearn, to reach outward, to achieve mastery over anything except their own little stream. Yet in their own way their minds are strong. To be aware of their own existence: that in itself puts them far beyond most of the animals of the wilderness. They have a sense of past and future. They have traditions. They have history.

And the scope of that history is surprising. The caviandis are aware of the ancientness of the world, the great long curving arc of time that lies behind all the beings of the New Springtime. They feel the pressure of the vanished epochs, the succession of the lost eras. They know that kings and emperors have come and gone, that great races have arisen and flourished and fallen and have been forgotten beyond hope of recall. They understand that these are the latter days upon a world that has suffered and been transformed and grown old, and now is young again.

Most keenly do they know of the Long Winter. It lives vividly in their souls. From their minds come images of the sky turning dark as the plummeting death-stars raise clouds of dust and smoke. Of snow, of hail, of the burden of ice building up across the land. They show Hresh glimpses of ragged survivors of the early cataclysms trekking across the frozen landscape, seeking places where they would be safe: caviandis, hjjks, even the People themselves, fleeing toward the cocoons where they will wait out the interminable eons of cold.

Hresh has long wondered how many of the wild creatures that he has collected to live in his garden have come down through the ages of the Long Winter. How could they have survived it unprotected? Surely most of the former species had perished with the Great World. There must have been a new creation as the Earth slowly turned warm again. Perhaps, he has thought, the rays of the returning sun engendered new creatures from the thawing soil — or, more likely, the gods had transformed the older, cold-resistant creatures into the new beasts of the Springtime. It was Dawinno’s work.