“So Goshevan parted the hair of his abdomen to show me a thin band of hard white skin I had taken for an appendectomy scar. ‘Cut here,’ he said, and after nerve-blocking him, cut I did until I came to a strange-looking organ adjoining the large intestine where his appendix should have been. ‘It’s a false ovary,’ he said. ‘Clever are the breeders of Darkmoon. Come. Cut again and see what I’ve brought with me.’ I removed the false organ, which was red and slippery and made of one of those pungently sweet-smelling bioplastics they synthesize on Darkmoon. I made a quick incision and out spilled thousands of unfertilized ova and a sac of sperm floating in krydda suspension to keep them fresh and vital. He pointed at the milky sperm sac and said, ‘The seed of Darkmoon’s finest Mutts. I had originally hoped to train hundreds of sled teams.’

  “How Goshevan brought the dogs to term and trained them, I do not know because I didn’t see him again for two winters. I thought perhaps that he’d been caught and banished or had his head split open and had his plasm sucked out by some filthy slel necker.

  “But as you will see, Goshevan was a resourceful man and hard to kill. He came again to my shop on the deepest of deep winter nights when the air was so black and cold that even on the greatest of the glissades and slidderies, The Run and The Way, nothing moved. In the hallway of my shop he stood like a white bear, opening his shagshay furs and removing the balaclava from his face with powerful, sweeping motions. I could see beneath his furs one of those black and gold, heated kamelaikas that the racers wear on festival days when they wish to keep warm and still have their limbs free for stroking. ‘This is my noble savage?’ I said to him as I fingered his wonderfully warm under-suit. ‘Even a f-fanatic such as I must make some concessions to survival,’ he said. And I asked him, ‘What will you do when the batteries die?’ He gave me a look that was at once fearful and bursting with excitement, and he said, ‘When the batteries die, I will either be dead or I will have found my home.’

  “He said goodbye to me and went out onto the gliddery where his dogs were up on their hind legs, straining at their harnesses as they whined and barked and pushed their black noses into his parka. From my window, I could see him fumbling with the stiff leather straps and thumping the side of the lead dog with his huge mittens. He adjusted the load three times before he had it to his liking, taking pains that the sacks of dog meal were balanced and tightly lashed to the wooden frame. Then he was off, whistling in a curious manner as he glided around the corner of the cetic’s shop and disappeared into the cold.”

  The tearoom felt cold as I said these words. I noticed that the young man was pursing his narrow lips tightly as he fiddled with his coffee. All at once, he let out his breath in a puff of steam that seemed to hang in the air. “But that isn’t the end of your story, is it, Cutter? You haven’t told the moral: how poor Goshevan died on the ice brokenhearted and disavowing his dream.”

  “Why is it you young people always want an ending? Does our universe come to an end or does it fold in upon itself? Are the Agathanians at the end of human evolution or do they represent a new species? And so on, and so on. Is there any end to the questions impatient young men ask?”

  I took a quick gulp of the bitter kvass, burning my lips and throat so that I sat there dumbly sucking in the cold air like an old bellows. “No, you are right,” I gasped out. “That is not the end of my story.”

  “Goshevan drove his dogs straight out onto the frozen Starnbergersee. Due west he went, running fast across the wind-packed snow for six hundred miles. He came to the first of the Thousand Islands and found mountains shrouded in evergreen forests where the thallows nested atop the steep granite cliffs filling the air for miles with their harsh cawings. But he found no Alaloi, and he urged his dogs carefully across the crevasses of the Fairleigh ice-shelf, back out onto the sea.

  “Fifteen islands he crossed without finding a trace of a human being. He had been gone sixty-two days when the crushing, deadly silent cold of deep winter began yielding to the terrible storms of midwinter spring. During a snow so heavy and wet that he had to stop every hundred yards to scrape the frozen slush from the steel runners of his sled, his lead dog, Yuri the Fierce, pulled them into a crevasse. Though he dug his boots into the sloppy snow and held on to the sled with all his strength, the pendulating weight of Yuri, Sasha and Ali as they swung back and forth over the lip of the ice was such that he felt himself being slowly dragged into the crevasse. It was only by the quick slashing of his hunting knife that he saved himself and the rest of his team. He cut the harness from which his strongest dogs dangled and watched helplessly as they tried to dig their black claws into the sides of the crevasse, all the while yelping pitifully as they fell to the ice below.

  “Goshevan was stunned. Though the snow had stopped and he was within sight of the sixteenth and largest of the Thousand Islands, he realized he could go no farther without rest. He erected his tent and fed the dogs from the crumbly remnants of the last bag of food. There came a distant hissing that quickly grew into a roar as the storm returned, blasting across the Starnbergersee with such ferocity that he spent all that day and night tending the ice-screws of his tent so that he wouldn’t be blown away. For nine days he lay there shivering inside his sleeping sack as the wind-whipped ice crystals did their work. By the tenth day, the batteries to his heated kamelaika were so low that he threw them in disgust against the shredded, useless walls of his tent. He dug a cave in the snow and pulled the last two of his starving dogs into the hole so that they might huddle close and keep each other warm. But Gasherbrum the Friendly, the smartest of his dogs, died on the eleventh day. And on the morning of the twelfth day, his beloved Kanika, whose paws were crusted with ice and blood, was as still as a deep winter night.

  “When the storm broke on the fifteenth day, Goshevan was so crazy with thirst that he burned his frostbitten lips upon the metal cup in which he was melting snow. And though he was famished and weak as a snow worm, he could not bring himself to eat his dogs because he was both father and mother to them, and the thought of it made him so sick he would rather have died.

  “From the leather and wood of his sled he fashioned a crude pair of snowshoes and set out across the drifts for a huge blue and white mountain he could see in the distance puncturing the sky. Kweitkel it was called, as he would later learn. Kweitkel, which meant ‘white mountain’ in the language of the Devaki, who were the tribe of Alaloi who found him dying in the thick forests of its eastern slope.

  “His rescuers—five godlike men dressed in angelic white, or so it seemed to his fevered, delirious mind—brought him to a huge cave. Some days later he came awake to the wonderful smells of hot soup and roasting nuts. He heard soft voices speaking a strange, musical language that was a delight to his ear. Two children, a boy and a girl he thought, were sitting at the corners of the luxurious fur which covered him, peeking at him coyly through the spread-out fingers of their little hands and giggling

  “A man with great shoulders and a beard as black as a furfly came over to him. Between his blunt, scarred fingers he held a soup bowl made from yellowed bone and scrimshawed with intricate figures of diving whales. As Goshevan gulped the soup, the man asked, ‘Marek? Patwin? Olorun? Nodin? Mauli?’ Goshevan, half-snowblind and weak in the head as he was, forgot that I had made him so that no one among the Alaloi could tell him from his brothers. He thought he was being accused of being an alien so he shook his head furiously back and forth at the sound of each name. At last, when Lokni, which was the big man’s name, had given up trying to discover the tribe to which he belonged, Goshevan pointed to his chest and said, ‘I am man. I’m just a man.’ ‘Iaman,’ Lokni repeated. ‘Ni luria la Devaki.’ And so it was that Lokni of the Devaki welcomed Goshevan of the Iaman tribe to his new home.

  “Goshevan gained strength quickly, gorging upon a salty cheese curdled from shagshay milk and the baldo nuts the Devaki stored against the storms of midwinter spring. And though Katerina, who was Lokni’s wife, offered him thick mammoth steaks running red with the life’s blood beneath a charcoaled crust, he would eat no meat. He, who all his life had eaten only soft, decerebrated cultured meats, was horrified that such gentle people took their nourishment from the flesh of living animals. ‘I don’t think I can teach these savages the few right-actioned ways of civilized man,’ he said to himself. ‘Why should they listen to me, a total stranger?’ And so for the first time since Summerworld he came to question the wisdom of what he had done.

  “By the time Goshevan had put on fifty pounds of new muscle, the storms of midwinter spring had given way to the fine weather of false winter. There came cool sunny days; the occasional powdery snows were too light to cover the alpine fireweed and snow dahlia which blanketed the lower slopes of Kweitkel. The thallows were molting and the furflys laying eggs. For Tuwa, the mammoth, came calving time, and for the Devaki, it was time to slaughter mammoth.

  “Goshevan was sick. Though he had quickly learned the language of the Devaki, and learned also to tolerate his body lice and filthy hair, he did not know how he could kill an animal. But when Lokni unsmilingly slapped a spear into his hand, he knew he would have to hunt with the eighteen other men, many of whom had come to wonder about his strange ways and questioned his manhood.

  “At first the hunt went well. In one of the lovely valleys of Kweitkel’s southern foothills, they spotted a mammoth herd gorging on arctic timothy and overripe, half-fermented snow apple. The great hairy beasts were carousing and drunkenly trampling through the acres of alpine fireweed which were everywhere aflame with bright reds and oranges and so beautiful that Goshevan wanted to cry. They drove the trumpeting mammoths down the valley and into a bog where three calves fell quickly beneath flint-tipped spears. But then Lokni mired himself near the edge of the bog, and Wemilo was trampled by an enraged cow. It fell to Goshevan to help Lokni. Though he reached out with his spear into the bog until his shoulder joint popped, he failed to close the distance. He heard voices and shouting and thunder and felt the ground moving beneath him. As he looked up to see the red-eyed cow almost upon him, he realized that the men were praying for his ghost, for it was known that no single man could stand against Tuwa’s charge.

  “Goshevan was terrified. He cast his spear at the mammoth’s eye with such a desperate force that the point drove into the brain, and the great beast fell like a mountain. The Devaki were stunned. Never had they seen such a thing, and Haidar and Alani, who had doubted his bravery, said that he was more than a man. But Goshevan knew his feat was the result of blind luck and my surgery, and thus he came to despise himself because he had killed a magnificent being and was therefore less than a man.

  “In the cave that night, the Devaki made a feast to mourn the passing of Tuwa’s anima and to wish Wemilo’s ghost enlightenment on the other side of day. Lokni sliced his own ear off his head with a sharp obsidian flake and laid the bloody flap of skin on Wemilo’s cold forehead so that he might always hear the prayers of the tribe. Katerina bound her husband’s wound with feather moss while the other women scattered snow dahlias over Wemilo’s crushed body.

  “Then Lokni turned to Goshevan and said, ‘A man, to be a man, must have a woman, and you are too old to take a virgin bride.’ He went over to Lara, who was sobbing over Wemilo’s grave. ‘Look at this poor woman. Long ago her father, Arani, deserted her to live with the hairless people of the Unreal City. She has no brothers. And now Wemilo dances with the stars. Look at this poor beautiful woman whose hair is still black and shiny and whose teeth are straight and white. Who will be a man to this woman?’

  “Goshevan looked at Lara and though her eyes were full of tears, they were also hot and dark, full of beauty and life. He felt very excited and said, ‘A man would be a fool not to desire this woman.’ And then he thought to comfort her by saying, ‘We’ll be married and have many fine children to love.’

  “A hush fell over the cave. The Devaki looked at each other as if they couldn’t believe their ears. And Ushi wondered aloud, ‘How can he not know that Lara has three daughters and one son?’ ‘Of course I know,’ Goshevan said. ‘It only means she is very fertile and will have no trouble bearing me sons.’ Then Ushi let out a cry and began tearing at her hair. Katerina hid her eyes beneath her hand and Lokni asked, ‘How can it be, Goshevan, that you do not know the Law?’ And Goshevan, who was angry and confused, replied, ‘How can I know your law when I’m from a faraway tribe?’ Lokni looked at him and there was death in his eyes. ‘The Law is the Law,’ he said, ‘and it is the same for every Alaloi. It can only be that the storm stole away your memory and froze part of your soul.’ And then, because Lokni didn’t want to kill the man who had saved his life and was about to marry his sister, he explained the Law.

  “ ‘She may have but one more child. A woman may have five children: One child to give to the Serpent’s Breath of deep winter, one child for the tusks of Tuwa, the mammoth. One child for the fever that comes in the night.’ Lokni paused a moment as the Law passed from lip to lip, and all the tribe except Goshevan were chanting: ‘A boy to become a man; a girl to become Devaki, Mother of the People.’

  “Lokni cupped his hand around the back of Goshevan’s neck and squeezed as he said, ‘If we become too many, we will kill all the mammoth and have to hunt silk belly and shagshay for food. And when they are gone, we will have to cut holes in the ice of the sea so to spear the seals when they come up to breathe. When the seals are gone, we will be forced to murder Kikilia, the whale, who is wiser than we and as strong as God. When all the animals are gone, we will dig tangleroot and eat the larvae of furflys and break our teeth as we gnaw the lichen from the rocks. At last we will be so many, we will murder the forests to plant snow apple so that men will come to lust for land, and some men will come to have more land than others. And when there is no land left, the stronger men will get their sustenance from the labor of weaker men, who will have to sell their women and children so that they might have mash to eat. The strongest men will make war on each other so that they might have still more land. Thus we will become hunters of men and be doomed to hell in living and hell on the other side. And then, as it did on Earth in the time before the swarming, fire will rain from the sky, and the Devaki will be no more.”

  “And so Goshevan, who really wanted only one son, came to accept the Law of the Alaloi, for who knew better than he the evils of owning slaves and lying with whores?

  “He married Lara at the end of false winter. In her long black hair, she replaced the snow dahlias of her mourning time with the fire flowers of the new bride and set to sewing him the new shagshay parka he would need when deep winter came. Each Devaki made them a wedding gift. Eirene and Jael, the two giggling children who had first greeted him so many months before, gave him a pair of mittens and a carved tortrix horn for him to fill with the potent beer that was brewed each winter from mashed tangleroot. His finest gift, a work of breathtaking art and symmetry, was the spear that Lokni gave him. It was long and heavy and tipped with a blade of flint so sharp that it cut through cured mammoth hide as easily as cheese.”

  I finished my drink, pausing a moment to catch my breath. The sounds the young man’s marble cup made against the cold hard table seemed gritty and overloud. I smelled cinnamon and honey; a minute later the domestic served raisin bread spread with honey-cheese and brought us fresh pots of coffee. Outside the tearoom, I could hear the soft clack-clack of steel skates against the ice of the gliddery. I wondered who would be so foolish, or desperate, to be out on such a night. The young man took my hand in his, staring at me so intently that I had to look away. “And Goshevan?” he asked. “He was happy with the beautiful Lara? He was happy, wasn’t he?”

  “He was happy,” I said, trying to slip my old hand from the young man’s grip. “He was so happy he came to regard his body lice as his ‘little pets’ and didn’t care that he would have to pass the rest of his days without a bath. His stuttering, which had embarrassed him all his life and caused him great shame, came to a sudden end as he found the liquid vowels and smooth consonants of the Devaki language rolling easily off his tongue. He loved Lara’s children as his own and loved Lara as only a desperate and romantic man can love a woman. Though she had none of the exotic skills of the courtesans with whom he had been so familiar, she loved him with such a strength and passion that he came to divide his life into two parts: the time before Lara, which was murky and dim and full of confused memories, and the time after, which was full of light and joy and laughter. So it happened that when, the following midwinter spring, she pointed to her belly and smiled, he knew with a sureness that he had not spent his life in vain and was as happy as a man could be.

  “The deep powder snows of winter were falling as Lara swelled like the ripened baldo nuts which the women picked and stored in great barrels staved with mammoth ribs and covered with mammoth hides. ‘It will be a boy,’ she said to him one night in early deep winter when the slopes of Kweitkel were silvery with the light of the moons. ‘When I was carrying my girls I was sick every morning of the three seasons of growing. But with this one I wake up as hungry as Tuwa in midwinter spring.’

  “When her time came, Katerina shooed Lokni and Goshevan, uncle and father, to the front of the cave where they waited while the women did their secret things. It was a night of such coldness that old Amalia said comes but twice every hundredyear. To the north, they could see green curtains of light hanging down from the black starry sky. ‘The firefalls,’ Lokni said. ‘Sometimes they are faint and green as you see and other times as red as blood. The spirit of Wemilo and all our ancestors light the deep winter night to give us hope against the darkness.’ And then he pointed at a bright triangle of stars twinkling brightly above the eastern horizon. ‘Wakanda, Eanna, and Farfara,’ he said. ‘Men live there, I think. Shadow men without bodies. It is said they have no souls and take their nourishment from light.’ And so they sat there for a long time shivering in their shagshay furs, talking of the things men talk about when they are full of strange longing and wonder at the mystery of life.