It was the fifth week of the journey. Torlyri, rising at daybreak as always so that she could make the sunrise-offering, rolled and stretched and clambered to her feet. The sun bathed her in a cheerful glow. Quietly she went out of the camp where everyone still lay sleeping, and searched until she found a suitable site for performing her offering, a little way to the west. It seemed a holy place: a sheltered declivity where thousands of small red-backed insects were industriously building an intricate turreted structure out of the sandy earth. She knelt beside it, said the words, named the Names, prepared the offering.

The dawn sunlight felt strong and warm and good. She had begun to notice, in the past few days, that the weather seemed to be growing more agreeable. At first she had awakened stiff and shivering in a cold mist every day, but now the morning air seemed softer and milder, though not yet soft, not yet mild.

It was a sign that stirred hope in her. Perhaps this really was the New Springtime, after all.

Torlyri had never been certain of that. Like all the rest of the tribe she had allowed herself to be swept along out of the cocoon by Koshmar’s insistent optimism. Out of love for Koshmar she had not voiced any strong opposition, but Torlyri knew that there were some within the tribe who would have preferred to remain in the cocoon. Going forth was a tremendous step. It was such a change that Torlyri could scarcely believe they had done it. The tribe had lived in its cocoon forever; or almost forever, which was the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of years, so poor old Thaggoran had always said! It was impossible for Torlyri to imagine what sort of span of time hundreds of thousands of years might be, or even a thousand years. A thousand years was forever. A hundred thousand years was a hundred times forever.

But they had obediently come marching out, after living a hundred times forever in their cocoon. Like people walking in their dreams they had followed Koshmar outside, into a world of sudden dangers.

Those ferocious snarling chittering rat-wolves: a lucky thing the tribe had had some warning of them, or they would have taken more lives than just two, that was certain. Then the bloodbirds — what a ghastly task that had been, beating them off! And the leathery-winged ones who followed them. And then after them, there had been—

There was no end, Torlyri knew, to the perils that lurked in these plains. And it was cold out here, even now, and dry and dishearteningly bleak, and there were no walls. There were no walls. The cocoon offered total security: here there was none at all.

What if they had come out of the cocoon too early?

True, it had been centuries since the last great cataclysm, according to Thaggoran. But this might just be one of the quiet intervals between one death-star and the next.

Minbain had expressed the same anxiety a day or two before, when she had come to Torlyri to have the communion of Mueri. It was the third time in a week that Minbain had asked for that communion. The march seemed harder on her than on most of the other women, perhaps because she was older, though there were others even older than Minbain who were bearing up well. But she was haggard and dejected, and full of uncertainties.

“Thaggoran used to tell us,” Minbain said, “that as much as five thousand years would go by in peace, in the time when the death-stars were falling. But that didn’t mean that it was all over. Always, after a time of no death-stars, a new death-star would come. How can we be sure that the world has seen the last of them?”

“Yissou the Protector has brought us forth,” said Torlyri soothingly, hating herself for the smoothness with which she spoke the comforting lie.

“And if it wasn’t the Protector who brought us forth?” Minbain asked. “If it was the Destroyer?”

“Peace,” Torlyri whispered. “Come close to me, Minbain. Let me ease your soul.”

But there was little repose for her own. Though she strived to hide it, she was as fearful as Minbain. There was no assurance that this was the true Time of Coming Forth. Torlyri believed that the gods did mean them well; but there was no comprehending the workings of the gods, who might in their great wisdom have led the tribe into fatal error. How could anyone know what was to come? Why, tomorrow or the next day or the day after that the terrible fire of a death-star’s tail might be seen streaming across the heavens, and then the whole world would shake with the force of the collision, and the sky would grow black and the sun would be hidden and all warmth would flee and all warmth-loving creatures that were unable to find shelter in time would perish. That had happened so often before, in the seven hundred thousand years of the Long Winter: how could they be certain it would not happen again? The tribe owed it to humanity to preserve itself until the world’s long nightmare was finally over.

It is possible that we are the only ones left anywhere, Torlyri thought.

The idea was frightening. Just one fragile little band of some sixty men and women and children standing between humankind and extinction! Can we dare take any risk of destruction, she wondered, if we are the sole remnant of our kind? It was as though they bore the burden of all the millions of years of humanity’s stay upon the earth: everything coming down to this one little band, these few frail stragglers wandering the bleak plains. And that was terrifying.

Still, the days were growing warmer.

It would have been folly for the People to huddle in their cocoon until the end of time, waiting for absolute knowledge that it was finally safe to emerge. The gods never gave you absolute knowledge of anything. You had to take your chances, and have faith. Koshmar believed it was safe to have come forth. The omens told her so. And Koshmar was the chieftain. Torlyri knew she could never see things with the clear, bold sight of Koshmar. That was why Koshmar was chieftain, and she a mere priestess.

She busied herself now with the sunrise-offering. Gradually she began to feel better. Yissou did protect and nourish. The gods had not betrayed them by allowing Koshmar to bring the People forth. All would be well. They had passed through great danger, and dangers aplenty still waited for them ahead: but all would be well. They dwelled in the protection of Yissou.

The Time of Going Forth had made the invention of a new sunrise rite necessary. No more the daily interchange of things from within the cocoon and things from without. Instead, now, Torlyri filled a bowl every evening with bits of grass and soil from whatever place they happened to have been spending the night at, and in the morning she waved it toward the four corners of the sky and invoked the protection of the gods, and then she carried that bowl’s contents onward to empty it that evening at the next campsite. That way Torlyri constructed a continuity of sacredness as the People made their way across the face of this unfamiliar world.

Creating that continuity seemed vital to her. With Thaggoran dead, it was as though the whole past had been lopped away, and the tribe orphaned, left now without ancestors or heritage. They were stumbling forward in the dark, guessing at all they must do. With their yesterdays so cruelly severed from them by the death of their chronicler, they must build a new skein of history stretching into the years to come.

When Torlyri was done with that morning’s rite she rose to return to camp. Unexpectedly something moved beneath her feet, in the earth. She looked down, scuffed at the sandy ground, felt it quiver in response to her probing. Putting down her bowl, she brushed away the surface soil and exposed what looked like a thick glossy pink cord buried a short distance underneath. It wriggled in a convulsive way as if annoyed. Gingerly she touched a fingertip to it, and it wriggled again, so vigorously that two arm’s lengths of it burst free of the ground and arched into the air like a straining cable. The head and the tail of the thing remained hidden.