But the gods in their mercy had brought them forth now into the world and the old strictures no longer applied. The world was huge; the tribe was small; food was easy to find. Now it was the desire of the gods that they be fruitful and multiply. Death would come when the gods willed it, but only then. This now was the season of life, of joy, of the growth of the tribe, said Koshmar.

“And how long will we live, then?” Minbain asked. “Will we live forever?”

“No,” said Koshmar, “not forever. Only for the natural time, however long that is.”

“Yes,” called Galihine, “and how long is that?”

“As long as the chroniclers have lived,” Koshmar said. “For they alone have lived their natural time.”

Still the faces were blank.

“How long is that ?” Galihine repeated.

Koshmar looked toward Hresh. “Tell me, boy: what was the name of the chronicler who kept the casket before Thaggoran?”

“Thrask,” Hresh said.

“Thrask, yes. I had forgotten, because I was so young when he died. Hardly any of you were born in Thrask’s time, but I tell you this, that he lived to be old and bent, and his fur was entirely white. And that is the natural time.”

“To be old and bent,” Konya said, shivering a little. “I’m not sure I like that.”

“For warriors,” young Haniman said with sudden impudence, “the natural time will be much shorter, Konya.”

The meeting dissolved in laughter. Koshmar could see that there was more uneasiness than she had anticipated: death for some was freedom, she realized, and not the brutal interruption of life that it seemed to her. They would learn. They would come to understand the new ways. And even if they struggled with these ideas, their children would not, and their children’s children would have trouble so much as believing that anything like a limit-age and a death-day had ever been imposed on the tribe.

But Koshmar saw that she could not only abolish death; she must encourage life. And so another of her new laws revoked the restrictions on childbearing. No longer, she decreed, would breeding be limited to just a few couples of the tribe, and they permitted to conceive only as often as was necessary to provide replacements for those who had reached the limit-age. From now on anyone above the age of twining might have children in any number. Not only might: should. The tribe was too small. That must change.

At once new couples began coming to her to ask for the coupling-rites. The first were Konya and Galihine, and then Staip and Boldirinthe. Then, most surprisingly, Harruel came with Minbain, who had brought forth Hresh by her mate Samnibolon. Samnibolon had died of a fever long ago. Did Minbain truly mean to breed again? Koshmar wondered if there had ever been a woman who had borne two children, two by different fathers. It was not the custom. But this was a new age, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. Had she not said that it was everyone’s obligation to breed who could? Then why not Minbain, since she was still of childbearing age? Why not any of us?

Why not you, Koshmar?a voice within her unexpectedly asked.

It was so odd an idea that she burst out laughing. I am a chieftain, she answered herself, trying to imagine herself lying in a bower with her belly grown huge and women clustered around to comfort her while a baby tried to force its way out of her body. For that matter, she could not even think of herself in a man’s embrace, his hands on her breasts, his hands pushing her legs apart. Or — how did they like to do it? The woman thrust down against the ground on her face, the man’s weight descending on her from behind — no, no, it was not for her, the chieftainship was enough of a burden for her—

And why not Torlyri?the same mischievous voice asked.

Koshmar caught her breath and clutched her side as though she had been kicked in the stomach. Warm good Torlyri, her Torlyri? Why, she was the mother of the whole tribe, was Torlyri. She had no need to bring forth babes of her own. How could the offering-woman take time for childrearing, anyway? She had so much else to do.

Still, the image would not go from her: Torlyri in the arms of some warrior whose face she could not see, Torlyri gasping and sighing, Torlyri’s sensing-organ thrashing about the way they did during coupling, Torlyri’s thighs opening—

No. No. No. No.

Why not Torlyri?the voice said again.

Koshmar clenched her fists.

These are new times, yes, she told herself. But Torlyri is mine.

Taniane said, “What did those sapphire-eyes things mean, when they said we were monkeys and not humans?”

“Nothing,” Hresh told her. “It was just a stupid lie. They were only trying to belittle us.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“Because we are alive,” said Hresh. “And they are things that never were, built by a race that is dead.”

Harruel said, “They called us monkeys. I know what monkeys are. I killed the two that attacked you in the jungle. I killed more when we were entering the city. I wish I had killed them all, the filthy dung-throwing beasts. What are these things, these monkeys, that are supposed to be our kin?”

“Animals,” Hresh said. “Just animals.”

“And we are just animals too?”

“We are human beings,” said Hresh.

He said such things as though there could be no question of their truth. But in fact he felt no certainty, only a dark morass of confusion.

To be human, he thought, was a grand and glorious thing. It was to be a link in an infinite chain of achievement descending from the world’s most ancient times. To be a monkey, or even the cousin of a monkey, was to be scarcely better than one of those foul-smelling chattering stupid things that swung by their sensing-organs — no, Hresh corrected himself, by their tails — from the trees of the jungle beyond the city’s edge.

Are we humans, then, Hresh asked himself, or are we monkeys?

In the chronicles, in the Book of the Way, it was written that at winter’s end the humans would come forth from their hiding places and journey to ruined Vengiboneeza, and obtain there the things they needed to gain power over all the world. So Hresh understood the text to say; and he understood the chronicles to mean the People, where the Book of the Way spoke of “humans.”

But was that so? The chronicles were not written in the simple words of everyday speech; they were composed of encapsulated thought-packets to which a reader had access by the powers of mind. There was much scope for misinterpretation in that. What leaped from the vellum page to his fingers and from his fingers to his mind, when he studied the Book of the Way, was a concept that seemed to mean the People, that is, those-for-whom-this-book-has-been-written. But it could just as readily mean humans-who-are-distinct-from-the-People. When Hresh examined the text more closely, he saw that the only unarguable reading was one which said that those-who-deem-themselves-to-be-humans would come to Vengiboneeza at winter’s end to claim the treasures of the city.

One could deem oneself to be human, though, without truly being human.

The sapphire-eyes’ artificials, Hresh told himself, say that we are monkeys, or the descendants of monkeys. Koshmar angrily replies that we are human. Who is right? Does the Book of the Way mean that we will come to Vengiboneeza, or some mysterious they ?

Everything else in the Book of the Way appeared to be intended for the People. It was their book, written by them, for them. When the Book of the Way says “humans,” Hresh thought, it must surely be referring to us. But does the Book of the Way really say “humans” Hresh wondered? Or was that merely the reading that the People had given the word, because they had come over the centuries to regard themselves as human, when in fact they were not?