by David Brin
I’m probably starting to look like an oldtime Indian, he thought with some amusement. He leapt over a fallen log and slipped down along a lefthand fork in the trail.
As a child he had made much of his family name. Little Robert Oneagle had never had to take turns as a bad guy when the kids played Confederation Uprising. He always got to be a Cherokee or Mohawk warrior, whooping it up in make-believe spacesuit and warpaint, zapping the dictator’s soldiers during the Power Satellite War.
When this is all over I’ve got to find out more about the family gene-history, Robert thought. I wonder how much of it really is Amerindian stock.
White, fluffy stratus clouds slid along a pressure ridge to the north, appearing to keep pace with him as he jogged along the ridgetops, across the long hills leading toward home.
Toward home.
The phrase came easily now that he had a job to do out under the trees and open sky. Now he could think of those catachtonian caves as home. For they did represent sanctuary in uncertain times.
And Athaclena was there.
He had been away longer than expected. The trip had taken him high into the’ mountains as far away as Spring Valley, recruiting volunteers, establishing communications, and generally spreading the word.
And of course, he and his fellow partisans had also had a couple of skirmishes with the enemy. Robert knew they had been little things — a small Gubru patrol trapped here and there — and annihilated to the last alien. The Resistance only struck where total victory seemed likely. There could be no survivors to tell the Gubru high command that Earthlings had learned to become invisible.
However minor, the victories had done wonders for morale. Still, while they might make things a bit warm for the Gubru up in the mountains, but what was the use if the enemy stayed out of reach?
Most of his trip had been taken up doing things hardly related to the Resistance. Everywhere Robert had gone he found himself surrounded by chims who whooped and chattered at the sight of him — the sole remaining free human. To his frustration they seemed perfectly happy to make him unofficial judge, arbitrator, and godfather to newborn babies. Never before had he felt so heavily the burdens that Uplift demanded of the patron race.
Not that he blamed the chims, of course. Robert doubted that in their species’ brief history so many chims had ever been cut off from humans for so long.
Wherever he went, it became known that the last human in the mountains would not visit any pre-invasion building or, indeed, even see anyone wearing any clothing or artifact of non-Garth origin. As word spread how the alien gasbots found their targets, chims were soon moving whole communities. Cottage industries sprang up, resurrecting the lost arts of spinning and weaving, of tanning and cobbling.
Actually, the chims in the mountains were doing rather well. Food was plentiful and the young still attended school. Here and there a few responsible types had even begun to reorganize the Garth Ecological Reclamation Project, keeping the most urgent programs going, improvising to replace the lost human experts.
Perhaps they don’t really need us, he remembered thinking.
His own kind had come within a hair’s breadth of turning Earth-homeworld into an ecological Chelmno, in the years just before humanity awakened into sanity. A horrible calamity was averted by the narrowest of margins. Knowing that, it was humbling to see so many so-called clients behaving more rationally than men had only a century before Contact.
Do we really have any right to play god with these people? Maybe when this blows over we should just go away and let them work out their future for themselves.
A romantic idea. There was a rub, of course.
The Galactics would never let us.
So he let them crowd around him, ask his advice, name their babies after him. Then, when he had done all he could for the time being, he took off down the trail for home. Alone, since by now no chim could keep up with his pace.
The solitude of the last day or so had been welcome. It gave him time to think. He had begun learning a lot about himself these last few weeks and months, ever since that horrible afternoon when his mind had crumpled under pounding fists of agony and Athaclena had come into his mind to rescue him. Oddly, it had not turned out to be the beasts and monsters of his neuroses that mattered most. Those were easily dealt with once he faced them and knew them for what they were. Anyway, they were probably no worse than any other person’s burdens of unresolved business from the past.
No, what had been more important was coming to grips with what he was as a man. That was an exploration he had only just begun, but Robert liked the direction the journey seemed to be heading.
He jogged around a bend in the mountain trail and came out of the hill’s shadow with the sun on his back. Ahead, to the south, lay the craggy limestone formations concealing the Valley of Caves.
Robert stopped as a metallic glint caught his eye. Something sparkled over the prominences beyond the valley, perhaps ten miles away.
Gasbots, he thought. Over in that area Benjamin’s techs had begun laying out samples of everything from electronics to metals to clothing, in an effort to discover what it was the Gubru robots homed in on. Robert hoped they had made some progress while he was away.
And yet, in another sense he hardly cared anymore. The new longbow felt good in his hand. The chims in the mountains preferred powerful homemade crossbows and arbalests, requiring less coordination but greater simian strength to crank. The effect had been the same with all three weapons… dead birds. The use of ancient skills and archaic tools had turned into a galvanizing theme, resonating with the mythos of the Wolfling Clan.
There were disturbing consequences as well. Once, after, a successful ambush, he had noticed some of the local mountain chens drifting away from camp. He slipped into the shadows and followed them to what appeared to be a secret cook fire, in a side canyon.
Earlier, while they had stripped the vanquished Gubru of their weapons and carried off the bodies, he had noticed some of the chims glancing back at him furtively, perhaps guiltily. That night he watched from a dark hillside as long-armed silhouettes danced in the firelight under the windblown stars. Something roasted on a spit over the flames, and the wind carried a sweet, smoky aroma.
Robert had had a feeling there were a few things the chims did not want seen by their patrons. He faded back into the shadows and returned to the main camp, leaving them to their ritual.
The images still flickered in his mind like feral, savage fantasies. Robert never asked what had been done with the bodies of the dead Galactics, but since then he could not think of the enemy without remembering that aroma.
If only there were a way to get more of them to come into the mountains, he pondered. Only under the trees did it seem possible to hurt the invaders.
The afternoon was aging. Time to finish the long jog home. Robert turned and was about to start down into the valley when he stopped suddenly. He blinked. There was a blur in the air. Something seemed to flutter at the edge of his vision, as if a tricky moth were dancing just within his blind spot. It didn’t seem to be possible to look at the thing.
Oh, Robert thought.
He gave up trying to focus on it and looked away, letting the odd non-thing chase him instead. Its touch laid open the petals of his mind like a flower unfolding in the sun. The fluttering entity danced timidly and winked at him … a simple glyph of affection and mild amusement. . . easy enough for even a thick-thewed, hairy-armed, road-smelly, pinkish-brown human to understand.
“Very funny, Clennie.” Robert shook his head. But the flower opened still wider and he kenned warmth. Without having to be told, he knew which way to go. He turned off the main trail and leapt up a narrow game path.
Halfway to the ridgetop he came upon a brown figure lounging in the shade of a thornbush. The chen looked up from a paperpage book and waved lazily.
“Hi, Robert. You’re lookin’ a lot better’n when.I saw you last.”
“Fiben!” Robert
grinned. “When did you get back?”
The chim suppressed a tired yawn. “Oh, ’bout an hour ago. The boys down in th’ caves sent me right up here to see her nibs. I picked up somethin’ for her in town. Sorry. Didn’t get anythin’ for you, though.”
“Did you get into any trouble in Port Helenia?”
“Hmmm, well, some. A little dancin’, a little scratchin’, a little hootin’.”
Robert smiled. Fiben’s “accent” was always thickest when he had big news to downplay, the better to draw out the story. If allowed to get away with it, he would surely keep them up all night.
“Uh, Fiben …”
“Yeah, yeah. She’s up there.” The chim gestured toward the top of the ridge. “And in a right fey mood, if you ask me. But don’t ask me, I’m just a chimpanzee. I’ll see you later, Robert.” He picked up his book again, not exactly the model of a reverent client. Robert grinned.
“Thanks, Fiben. I’ll see ya.” He hurried up the trail.
Athaclena did not bother to turn around as he approached, for they had already said hello. She stood at the hilltop looking westward, her face to the sun, holding her hands outstretched before her.
Robert at once sensed that another glyph floated over Athaclena now, supported by the waving tendrils of her corona. And it was an impressive thing. Comparing her little greeting, earlier, to this one would be like standing a dirty limerick next to “Xanadu.” He could not see it, neither could he even begin to kenn its complexity, but it was there, nearly palpable to his heightened empathy sense.
Robert also realized that she held something between her hands… like a slender thread of invisible fire — intuited more than seen — that arched across the gap from one hand to the other.
“Athaclena, what is—”
He stopped then, as he came around and saw her face.
Her features had changed. Most of the humaniform contours she had shaped during the weeks of their exile were still in place; but something they had displaced had returned, if only momentarily. There was an alien glitter in her gold-flecked eyes, and it seemed to dance in counterpoint to the throbbing of the half-seen glyph.
Robert’s senses had grown. He looked again at the thread in her hands and felt a thrill of recognition.
“Your father… ?”
Athaclena’s teeth flashed white. “W’ith-tanna Uthacalthing bellinarri-t’hoo, haoon’nda!…”
She breathed deeply through wide-open nostrils. Her eyes — set as wide apart as possible — seemed to flash.
“Robert, he lives!”
He blinked, his mind overflowing with questions. “That’s great! But… but where! Do you know anything about my mother? The government? What does he say?”
She did not reply at once. Athaclena held up the thread. Sunlight seemed to run up and down its taut length. Robert might have sworn that he heard sound, real sound, emitting from the thrumming fiber.
“W’ith-tanna Uthacalthing!” Athaclena seemed to look straight into the sun.
She laughed, no longer quite the sober girl he had known. She chortled, Tymbrimi fashion, and Robert was very glad that he was not the object of that hilarity. Tymbrimi humor quite often meant that someone else, sometime soon, would definitely not be amused.
He followed her gaze out over the Vale of Sind, where a flight of the ubiquitous Gubru transports moaned faintly as they cruised across the sky. Unable to trace more than the outlines of her glyph, Robert’s mind searched for and found something akin to it in the human fashion. In his mind he pictured a metaphor.
Suddenly, Athaclena’s smile was something feral, almost catlike. And those warships, reflected in her eyes, seemed to take on the aspect of complacent, rather unsuspecting mice.
PART THREE
The Garthlings
The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.
CHARLES GALTON DARWIN
Natural selection won’t matter soon, not anywhere near as much as conscious selection. We will civilize and alter ourselves to suit our ideas of what we can be. Within one more human lifespan, we will have changed ourselves unrecognizably.
GREG BEAR
43
Uthacalthing
Inky stains marred the fen near the place where the yacht had foundered. Dark fluids oozed slowly from cracked, sunken tanks into the waters of the broad, flat estuary. Wherever the slick trails touched, insects, small animals, and the tough salt grass all died.
The little spaceship had bounced and skidded when it crashed, scything a twisted trail of destruction before finally plunging nose first into the marshy river mouth. For days thereafter the wreck lay where it had come to rest, slowly leaking and settling into the mud.
Neither rain nor the tidal swell could wash away the battle scars etched into its scorched flanks. The yacht’s skin, once allicient and pretty, was now seared and scored from near-miss after near-miss. Crashing had only been the final insult.
Incongruously large at the stern of a makeshift boat, the Thennanin looked across the intervening flat islets to survey the wreck. He stopped rowing to ponder the harsh reality of his situation.
Clearly, the ruined spaceship would never fly again. Worse, the crash had made a sorrowful mess of this patch of marshlands. His crest puffed up, a rooster’s comb ridged with spiky gray fans.
Uthacalthing lifted his own paddle and politely waited for his fellow castaway to finish his stately contemplation. He hoped the Thennanin diplomat was not about to serve up yet another lecture on ecological responsibility and the burdens of patronhood. But, of course, Kault was Kault.
“The spirit of this place is offended,” the large being said, his breathing slits rasping heavily. “We sapients have no business taking our petty wars down into nurseries such as these, polluting them with space poisons.”
“Death comes to all things, Kault. And evolution thrives on tragedies.” He was being ironic, but Kault, of course, took him seriously. The Thennanin’s throat slits exhaled heavily.
“I know that, my Tymbrimi colleague. It is why most registered nursery worlds are allowed to go through their natural cycles unimpeded. Ice ages and planetoidal impacts are all part of the natural order. Species are tempered and rise to meet such challenges.
“However, this is a special case. A world damaged as badly as Garth can only take so many disasters before it goes into shock and becomes completely barren. It is only a short time since the Bururalli worked out their madness here, from which this planet has barely begun to recover. Now our battles add more stress… such as that filth.”
Kault gestured, pointing at the fluids leaking from the broken yacht. His distaste was obvious.
Uthacalthing chose, this time, to keep his silence. Of course every patron-level Galactic race was officially environmentalist. That was the oldest and greatest law. Those spacefaring species who did not at least declare fealty to the Ecological Management Codes were wiped out by the majority, for the protection of future generations of sophonts.
But there were degrees. The Gubru, for instance, were less interested in nursery worlds than in their products, ripe pre-sentient species to be brought into the Gubru Clan’s peculiar color of conservative fanaticism. Among the other lines, the Soro took great joy in the manipulation of newly fledged client races. And the Tandu were simply horrible.
Kault’s race was sometimes irritating in their sanctimonious pursuit of ecological purity, but at least theirs was a fixation Uthacalthing could understand. It was one thing to burn a forest, or to build a city on a registered world. Those types of damage would heal in a short time. It was quite another thing to release long-lasting poisons into a biosphere, poisons which would be absorbed and accumulate. Uthacalthing’s own distaste at the oily slicks was only a little less intense than Kault’s. But nothing could be done about it now.
“The Earthlings had a good emergency
cleanup team on this planet, Kault. Obviously the invasion has left it inoperative. Perhaps the Gubru will get around to taking care of this mess themselves.”
Kault’s entire upper body twisted as the Thennanin performed a sneezelike expectoration. A gobbet struck one of the nearby leafy fronds. Uthacalthing had come to know that this was an expression of extreme incredulity.
“The Gubru are slackers and heretics! Uthacalthing, how can you be so naively optimistic?” Kault’s crest trembled and his leathery lids blinked. Uthacalthing merely looked back at his fellow castaway, his lips a compressed line.
“Ah. Aha,” Kault rasped. “I see! You test my sense of humor with a statement of irony.” The Thennanin made his ridge crest inflate briefly. “Amusing. I get it. Indeed. Let us proceed.”
Uthacalthing turned and lifted his oar again. He sighed and crafted tu’fluk, the glyph of mourning for a joke not properly appreciated.
Probably, this dour creature was selected as ambassador to an Earthling world because he has what passes for a great sense of humor among Thennanin. The choice might have been a mirror image of the reason Uthacalthing himself had been chosen by the Tymbrimi … for his comparatively serious nature, for his restraint and tact.
No, Uthacalthing thought as they rowed, worming by patches of struggling salt grass. Kault, my friend, you did not get the joke at all. But you will.
It had been a long trek back to the river mouth. Garth had rotated more than twenty times since he and Kault had to abandon the crippled ship in midair, parachuting into the wilderness. The Thennanin’s unfortunate Ynnin clients had panicked and gotten their parasails intertangled, causing them to fall to their deaths. Since then, the two diplomats had been solitary companions.
At least with spring weather they would not freeze. That was some comfort.
It was slow going in their makeshift boat, made from stripped tree branches and parasail cloth. The yacht was only a few hundred meters from where they had sighted it, but it took the better part of four hours to wend through the frequently tortuous channels. Although the terrain was very flat, high grass blocked their view most of the way.