Coupling is nothing, Koshmar thought angrily.

She told herself that she was being illogical. And then she told herself that all these matters were far beyond logic. The heart has a logic of its own, she told herself.

“Taniane has had her first twining, and Orbin, and now it is Hresh’s time,” Torlyri said. “And then Haniman.”

“How fast time moves. Sometimes I still think of him as that mischievous boy who tried to slip past you through the hatch, that day when the ice-eaters came and the Dream-Dreamer awoke. That strange day seems terribly long ago. And so does Hresh’s boyhood.”

“This has all been so odd,” said Torlyri. “For the old man of the tribe to have been someone not even old enough to twine.”

“Do you think it will change him, once he begins?”

“Change him? How so?”

“We depend on him so much,” Koshmar said. “There’s such wisdom in that strange little head of his. But children change, sometimes, when they first begin to twine. Have you forgotten that, Torlyri? And Hresh is only a child still. That is something we must never let ourselves forget. Once he finds a twining-partner he may give himself up to nothing but twining for many months, and what will happen to the exploration of Vengiboneeza? He might even begin showing interest in coupling.”

Torlyri said, with a shrug, “And if he did? Would that be so bad?”

“He has responsibilities, Torlyri.”

“He’s a boy just becoming a man. Do you mean to take his youth away from him? Let him twine all he likes. Let him couple, if that’s what he wants. Let him mate, even.”

“Mate? The chronicler, taking a mate?”

“This is the New Springtime, Koshmar. There’s no need to hold him to old customs.”

“The old man should not mate,” Koshmar said stiffly. “No more than the chieftain or the offering-woman. Twine, yes. Couple, if coupling is desired. But take a mate ? How can that be? We are selected by the gods as people apart from others.” Koshmar shook her head. “We’ve strayed from our subject. How soon are you planning to do Hresh’s initiation?”

“Two days. Three. If he has no duties which will get in the way.”

“Good,” said Koshmar. “Do it as soon as you can. Tell me when you do. And then we must watch him, to see that he does not change.”

Torlyri said, smiling, “I’m sure he’ll be no different afterward. Remember that he has the Barak Dayir, Koshmar. What can twining do for him that the Wonderstone has not already done fiftyfold?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

There was a long moment of awkward silence.

“Koshmar?” said Torlyri, at last.

“Yes?”

Torlyri hesitated. “Do you still want to twine?”

“Of course,” said Koshmar, softening, becoming eager.

“Before we do, one more question.”

“Go on.”

“The offering-woman, you said, should not mate.”

Koshmar stared. This was something entirely new. She had not realized the situation was so bad.

“It has never been done,” she said coolly. “Not the chieftain, nor the old man, nor the offering-woman. Coupling, yes, if they wished. And twining, certainly. But never mating. Never. We are people apart.”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

There was a silence again, an ugly one.

Koshmar said at length, “Are you asking for permission to take Lakkamai as your mate, Torlyri?”

“We would like to take each other as our mates, yes,” said Torlyri cautiously.

“You are asking permission of me.”

Torlyri regarded her with a steady gaze. “It is the New Springtime, Koshmar.”

“Do you mean to say that you think not even my permission is needed? Say what’s on your mind, Torlyri! Say what is in your soul!”

“I have never felt things like this before.”

“No doubt that’s true,” said Koshmar sharply.

“What shall I do, Koshmar?”

“Perform your services to the gods and to the people,” Koshmar said. “Take Hresh for his initiation. Make the daily offerings. Bring your goodness to those about you, as you always have.”

“And Lakkamai?”

“Do as you wish with Lakkamai.”

A third time Torlyri fell into silence. Koshmar allowed it to go on and on. Finally Torlyri said, “Do you want to twine with me now, Koshmar?”

“Another time,” Koshmar said. “In truth I’m very weary this evening, and I think it would not be a good twining.” She turned away. Bleakly she said, “I wish you joy, Torlyri. You understand that, don’t you? I wish you nothing but joy.”

Now Hresh began going into the ruins by himself, as if daring Koshmar to object; but she seemed not to care, or perhaps not even to notice. More often than not the Great World was his destination. The squat many-levered machine in the vault beneath the tower in the plaza of the thirty-six towers held an irresistible appeal.

By now he knew that the floating slab of stone that took him down to the lower-level vault would return automatically to the level above after a certain span of time; and so he no longer needed to bring Haniman or anyone else with him to operate the mechanism when he made his descents. Whatever risks there might be, he was willing to accept them for the sake of keeping others from sharing his journeys to the distant past. The Great World was his private treasure-trove, to mine as he pleased.

The procedure was the same every time. Activate the black stone stab; descend to the machine; grasp the Barak Dayir with his sensing-organ; seize the levers. And the Great World would spring to life, vivid and astonishing.

He never entered it at the same point twice. The physical structure of the city was different every time. It was as though all the long history of fabulous Vengiboneeza lay stored up in the machine, all its hundreds of thousands of years of growth and transformation, and it would randomly offer him any slice of the past that it wished, sometimes an early Vengiboneeza barely beginning its glittering expansion, sometimes a version of the city that surely must date from one of the final years, so close to the layout of the ruins was it.

There was no better evidence of how energetic and dynamic a place Vengiboneeza had been than the constant change Hresh observed in it. Only occasionally did he see any familiar landmarks — the waterfront boulevards, the thirty-six towers of the plaza, the tower that had become the temple of the People, the districts of villas on the mountainsides. Sometimes they were there, sometimes not. The squat potent Citadel was the only changeless and invulnerable place, whenever Hresh’s soul soared back across the gulf of the ages.

On one occasion he might vanish into a time when tall white palisades rose like spears along the streets of the lower part of town, and the city was full of sea-lords, parading up from the quay by the scores in their gleaming silver chariots. Another time, banners of some intangible force, a crackling tumult of colored lights, would be whirling overhead, and a vast procession of hjjk-folk would be winding down into the mountain, unimaginable millions of them filing one by one into the city, which absorbed them as though its capacity were infinite. Or there would be some convocation of humans in progress — he grudgingly conceded now that that was what they were, for he saw little alternative, though still he hoped desperately that he had misinterpreted the evidence he had found — seventy or eighty of the hairless thin-limbed ones sitting in a wide circle in a central plaza of the city just below the Citadel. They were exchanging silent thoughts from which he was utterly excluded, however hard he tried to penetrate their mysteries.

But mainly Vengiboneeza was a city of the sapphire-eyes. They dominated it. For every ten members of the other races that Hresh saw, there might be a hundred of the reptilians, or a thousand. He saw them wherever he looked, heavy-thighed, long-jawed, monstrous of form, brilliant of eye, radiating strength and wisdom and contentment.