“Yes, I suppose so. Ultimately.”

“Then I will kill this bishop. And the stone in the web will fall.”

Part Three:

Thanakar in Love

S pring is the bitterest season of the year. A man in autumn, looking back on the bloodshed and the frenzied cruelty of these seasons long before his birth, is terrified by visions of the future. Perhaps from a high window he can see men and women working in the endless afternoon, free in their own fields. They are happy, for they were born and grew up in the sunlight, in summer and in autumn, amid the birth and rebirth of new ideas, new technologies, new freedoms, new pursuits. The grip of tyranny has loosened from their lives.

But civilization is bound to a wheel among the stars, and already in autumn the nights are getting cold. The snow will come, the world will start to die as men, caught up in the process of their own survival, will abandon all they love, let it recede into the past, a memory of Paradise. New sciences, new art, all the new ways of making, the new freedoms will be lost under the snow. And all that time the priests will wait, blind and quiet in their temples as the world dies around them and new men are born who can’t even remember, and then they will take all the strands of power back into their own hands, slowly, patiently, one by one.

Spring is the starving time in Charn, eight thousand days from Paradise thaw until the sugar rain, and nothing grows until the rain comes. But a few things reawaken, and when the ashes of the waterfront were still heaped up in lingering piles, Doctor Thanakar experienced a new sensation—happiness. He could feel it inside him like a seed as he limped along the palace galleries between his laboratory and his apartments, between the apartments of his patients.

Prince Abu had not come home for days, but finally the commissar had found him living in a cave, an antinomial bolt-hole where he had waited out the danger, dazed and weak in everything but will. He had not wanted to return, so the commissar had waited till he slept, and then had him bound and drugged and carried home. He had woken in his own bed, in an uncharacteristic rage, and since then no one had seen him, for he had locked his door. For a few days the doctor had sent messages, and pounded on the door and waited outside, and sketched frustrated caricatures of his friend, emphasizing his baldness and his fat.

The door was shut, and Thanakar pretended that he didn’t mind, pretended he was still angry at the way the prince had ordered him away the night of the riots. He was used to his friend. Abu was a man without the strength to resist. Fragile, clumsy, apologetic, he swallowed grievances until they choked him, and then spit them back in fits of petulance, forgettable and soon forgotten.