by David Brin
So, they came after all, she had thought, hearing the news, concealing satisfaction while her crew mates expressed noisy chagrin, bemoaning that they now seemed cornered by relentless enemies on a forlorn world.
Tsh’t wanted to tell them the truth, but dared not. That good news must wait.
Ifni grant that I was right.
Tsh’t paused outside the bridge, filling her gene-altered lungs with oxy-water. Enriching her blood to think clearly before setting in motion the next phase of her plan.
There is just one true option for a client race, when your beloved patrons seem overwhelmed, and all other choices are cut off.
May the gods of Earth’s ancient ocean know and understand what I’ve done.
And what I may yet have to do.
Sooners
Nelo
ONCE, A BUYUR URBAN CENTER STRETCHED BETWEEN two rivers, from the Roney all the way to the far-off Bibur.
Now the towers were long gone, scraped and hauled away to distant seas. In their place, spiky ferns and cloudlike voow trees studded a morass of mud and oily water. Mulc-spider vines laced a few rounded hummocks remaining from the great city, but even those tendrils were now faded, their part in the demolition nearly done.
To Nelo, this was wasteland, rich in life but useless to any of the Six Races, except perhaps as a traeki vacation resort.
What am I doing here? he wondered. I should be back in Dolo, tending my mill, not prowling through a swamp, keeping a crazy woman company.
Behind Nelo, hoonish sailors cursed low, expressive rumblings, resentful over having to pole through a wretched bog. The proper time for gleaning was at the start of the dry season, when citizens in high-riding boats took turns sifting the marsh for Buyur relics missed by the patient mulc beast. Now, with rainstorms due any day, conditions were miserable for exploring. The muddy channels were shallow, yet the danger of a flash flood was very real.
Nelo faced the elderly woman who sat in a wheelchair near the bow, peering past obscuring trees with a rewq over her eyes.
“The crew ain’t happy, Sage Foo,” he told her. “They’d rather we waited till it’s safe.”
Ariana Foo answered without turning from her search. “Oh, what a great idea. Four months or more we’d sit around while the swamp fills, channels shift, and the thing we seek gets buried in muck. Of course, by then the information would be too late to do any good.”
Nelo shrugged. The woman was retired now. She had no official powers. But as former High Sage for all humans on Jijo, Ariana had moral authority to ask anything she wanted — including having Nelo leave his beloved paper mill next to broad Dolo Dam, accompanying her on this absurd search.
Not that there was much to do at the mill, he knew. With commerce spoiled by panic over those wretched starships, no one seems interested in buying large orders.
“Now is the best time,” Ariana went on. “Late in dry season, with water levels low, and the foliage drooping, we get maximum visibility.”
Nelo took her word. With most young men and women away on militia duties, it was mostly adolescents and old-timers who got drafted into the search party. Anyway, Nelo’s daughter had been among the first to find the Stranger from Space in this very region several months ago, during a routine gleaning trip. And he owed Ariana for bringing word about Sara and the boys — that they were all right, when last she heard. Sage Foo had spent time with Nelo’s daughter, accompanying Sara from Tarek Town to the Biblos Archive.
He felt another droplet strike his cheek … the tenth since they left the river, plunging into this endless slough. He held his hand under a murky sky and prayed the real downpours would hold off for a few more days.
Then let it come down! The lake is low. We need water pressure for the wheel, or else I’ll have to shut down the mill for lack of power.
His thoughts turned to business — the buying and gathering of recycled cloth from all six races. The pulping and sifting. The pressing, drying, and selling of fine sheets that his family had been known for ever since humans brought the blessing of paper to Jijo.
A blessing that some called a curse. That radical view now claimed support from simple villagers, panicked by the looming end of days—
A shout boomed from above.
“There!” A wiry young hoon perched high on the mast, pointing. “Hr-r … It must be the Stranger’s ship. I told you this had to be the place!”
Wyhuph-eihugo had accompanied Sara on that fateful gleaning trip — a duty required of all citizens. Lacking a male’s throat sac, she nevertheless umbled with some verve, proud of her navigation.
At last! Nelo thought. Now Ariana can make her sketches, and we can leave this awful place. The crisscrossing mulc cables made him nervous. Their boat’s obsidiantipped prow had no trouble slicing through the desiccated vines. Still it felt as if they were worming deeper into some fiendish trap.
Ariana muttered something. Nelo turned, blinking.
“What did you say?”
The old woman pointed ahead, her eyes glittering with curiosity.
“I don’t see any soot!”
“So?”
“The Stranger was burned. His clothes were ashen tatters. We thought his ship must have come down in flames — perhaps after battling other aliens high over Jijo. But look. Do you see any trace of conflagration?”
The boat worked around a final voow grove, revealing a rounded metal capsule on the other side, gleaming amid a nest of shattered branches. The sole opening resembled the splayed petals of a flower, rather than a door or hatch. The arrival of this intruder had cut a swathe of devastation stretching to the northwest. Several swamp hummocks were split by the straight gouge, only partly softened by regrown vegetation.
Nelo had some experience as a surveyor, so he helped take sightings to get the ship’s overall dimensions. It was small — no larger than this hoonish boat, in fact — certainly no majestic cruiser like the one that clove the sky over Dolo Town, sending its citizens into hysteria. The rounded flanks reminded Nelo of a natural teardrop, more than anything sapient-made.
Two pinpoints of moisture dotted his cheek and forehead. Another struck the back of his hand. In the distance, Nelo heard a sharp rumble of thunder.
“Hurry closer!” Ariana urged, flipping open her sketchpad.
Murmuring unhappily, the hoons leaned on their poles and oars to comply.
Nelo stared at the alien craft, but all he could think was dross. When Sixers went gleaning through Buyur sites, one aim was to seek items that might be useful for a time, in a home or workshop. But useful or not, everything eventually went into ribboned caskets to be sent on to the Great Midden. Thus colonists imagined they were helping cleanse Jijo — perhaps doing more good than harm to their adopted world.
“Ifni!” Nelo sighed under his breath, staring at the vehicle that brought the Stranger hurtling out of space. It might be tiny for a starship, but it looked hard as blazes to move by hand.
“We’ll be in for a hell of a job draggin’ this thing out of here, let alone gettin’ it down to sea.”
Again, off to the south, the sound of thunder boomed.
Ewasx
WE JOPHUR ARE TAUGHT THAT IT IS TERRIBLE TO BE traeki — a stack lacking any central self. Doomed to a splintered life of vagueness and blurry placidity.
ALL SING PRAISES to the mighty Oailie, who took over from the too-timid Poa, completing the final stages of our Uplift.
Those same Oailie who designed new master rings to focus and bind our natures.
Without rings like Me, how could our race ever have become great and feared among the Five Galaxies?
AND YET, even as I learn to integrate your many little selves into our new whole, I am struck by how vivid are these older drippings that I find lining our inner core! Drippings that date from before My fusion with your aged pile of rings. How lustrous clear these memories seem, despite their counterpointing harmonies. I confess, existence had intensity and verve when you/we were merely Asx.
PERHAPS this surprise comes because I/Myself am so young, only recently drawn from the side of our Ship Commander — from that great one’s very own ring-of-embryos.
Yes, that is a high heritage. So imagine the surprise of finding Myself in this situation! Designed for duties in the dominion caste, I am wedded, for pragmatic reasons, to a haphazard heap of rustic toruses, ill educated and filled with bizarre, primitive notions. I have been charged to make the best of things until some later time, when surgery-of-reconfiguration can be performed—
AH. THAT DRAWS A REACTION FROM SOME OF YOU? Our second ring of cognition, in particular, finds this notion disturbing.
Fear not, My rings! Accept these jolts of painful love soothing, to remind you of your place — which is not to question, only to serve. Be assured that the procedure I refer to is now quite advanced among the mighty Jophur. When a ring is removed for reassembly in a new stack, often as many as half of the other leftover components can be recovered and reused as well! Of course, most of you are elderly, and the priests may decide you carry other-race contaminations, preventing incorporation into new mounds. But accept this pledge. When the time comes, I, your beloved master ring, shall very likely make the transition in good health, and take fond memories of our association to My glorious new stack.
I know this fact will bring you all great satisfaction, contemplating it within our common core.
Lark
CATHEDRAL–LIKE STILLNESS FILLED THE BOO FOREST — a dense expanse of gray-green columns, towering to support the sky. Each majestic trunk had a girth like the carapace of a five-clawed qheuen. Some stretched as high as the Stone Roof of Biblos.
Now I know how an insect feels, scuttling under a sea of pampas grass.
Hiking along a narrow lane amid the giant pillars, Lark often could reach out his arms and brush two giant stems at the same time. Only his militia sergeant seemed immune to a sense of confinement infecting travelers in this strange place of vertical perspectives. Other guards expressed edginess with darting eyes that glanced worriedly down crooked aisles at half-hidden shadows.
“How far is it to Dooden Mesa?” Ling asked, tugging the straps of her leather backpack. Perspiration glistened down her neck to dampen the Jijoan homespun jerkin she wore. The effect was not as provocative as Lark recalled from their old survey trips together, when the sheer fabric of a Danik jumpsuit sometimes clung to her biosculpted figure in breathtaking ways.
Anyway, I can’t afford that, now that I’m a sage. The promotion brought only unpleasant responsibilities.
“I never took this shortcut before,” Lark answered, although he and Uthen used to roam these mountains in search of data for their book. There were other paths around the mountain, and the wheeled g’Keks nominally in charge of this domain could hardly be expected to do upkeep on such a rough trail. “My best guess is we’ll make it in two miduras. Want to rest?”
Ling pushed sodden strands from her eyes. “No. Let’s keep going.”
The former gene raider seemed acutely aware of Jeni Shen, the diminutive sergeant, whose corded arms cradled her crossbow like a beloved child. Jeni glanced frequently at Ling with hunter’s eyes, as if speculating which vital organ might make a good target. Anyone could sense throbbing enmity between the two women — and that Ling would rather die than show weakness before the militia scout.
Lark found one thing convenient about their antagonism. It helped divert Ling’s ire away from him, especially after the way he earlier used logic to slash her beloved Rothen gods. Since then, the alien biologist had been civil, but kept to herself in brooding silence.
No one likes to have their most basic assumptions knocked from under them — especially by a primitive savage.
Lark blew air through his cheeks — the hoonish version of a shrug.
“Hr-rm. We’ll take a break at the next rise. By then we should be out of the worst boo.”
In fact, the thickest zone was already behind them, a copse so dense the monstrous stems rubbed in the wind, creating a low, drumming music that vibrated the bones of anyone passing underneath. Traveling single file, edging sideways where the trunks pressed closest, the party had watched for vital trail marks, cut on one rounded bole after the next.
I was right to leave Uthen behind, he thought, hoping to convince himself. Just hold on, old friend. Maybe we’ll come up with something. I pray we can.
Visibility was hampered by drifting haze, since many of the tall boo leaked from water reserves high above, spraying arcs of fine droplets that spread to saturate the misty colonnade. Several times they passed clearings where aged columns had toppled in a domino chain reaction, leaving maelstroms of debris.
Through the fog, Lark occasionally glimpsed other symbols, carved on trunks beyond the trail. Not trail marks, but cryptic emblems in GalTwo and GalSix … accompanied by strings of Anglic numbers.
Why would anyone go scrawling graffiti through a stand of greatboo?
He even spied dim figures through the murk — once a human, then several urs, and finally a pair of traeki — glimpsed prowling amid rows of huge green pillars. At least he hoped the tapered cones were traeki. They vanished like ghosts before he could tell for sure.
Sergeant Shen kept the party moving too fast to investigate. Lark and his prisoner had been summoned by two of the High Sages — a command that overruled any other priority. And despite the difficult terrain, recent news from the Glade of Gathering was enough to put vigor in their steps.
Runners reported that the Jophur dreadnought still blocked the sacred valley, squatting complacently inside its swathe of devastation, with the captive Rothen ship doubly imprisoned nearby — first by a gold cocoon, and now a rising lake as well. The Jophur daily sent forth a pair of smaller vessels, sky-prowling daggers, surveying the Slope and the seas beyond. No one knew what the star gods were looking for.
Despite what happened on the night the great ship landed — havoc befalling Asx and others on the Glade — the High Sages were preparing to send another embassy of brave volunteers, hoping to parley. No one asked Lark to serve as an envoy. The Sages had other duties planned for him.
Humans weren’t the only ones to cheat a little, when their founding generation came to plant a taboo colony on forbidden Jijo.
For more than a year after it made landfall, the Tabernacle’s crew delayed sending their precious ship to an ocean abyss. A year spent using god tools to cut trees and print books … then storing the precious volumes in a stronghold that the founders carved beneath a great stone overhang, protected by high walls and a river. During those early days — especially the urrish and qheuen wars — Biblos Fortress served as a vital refuge until humans grew strong enough to demand respect.
The Gray Queens also once had such a citadel, sculpted by mighty engines when they first arrived, before their sneakship fell beneath the waves. The Caves of Shood, near present-day Ovoom Town, must have seemed impregnable. But that maze of deep-hewn caverns drowned under a rising water table when blue and red workers dropped their slavish maintenance duties, wandering off instead to seek new homes and destinies, apart from their chitin empresses.
Dooden Mesa was the oldest of the sooner ramparts. After Tarek Town, it formed the heart of g’Kek life on Jijo, a place of marvelous stone ramps that curved like graceful filigrees, allowing the wheeled ones to swoop and careen through a swirl of tight turns, from their looms and workshops to tree-sheltered platforms where whole families slept with their hubs joined in slowly rotating clusters. Under an obscuring blur-cloth canopy, the meandering system resembled pictures found in certain Earthling books about pre-contact times — looking like a cross between an “amusement park” and the freeway interchanges of some sprawling city.
Ling’s face brightened with amazed delight when she regarded the settlement, nodding as Lark explained the lacy pattern of narrow byways. Like Biblos, Dooden Rampart was not meant to last forever, for that would violate the Covenant of Exile. Someday it all would have
to go — g’Kek elders conceded. Still, the wheeled ones throbbed their spokes in sinful pride over their beloved city. Their home.
While Ling marveled, Lark surveyed the busy place with fresh poignancy.
It is their only home.
Unless the Rothen lied, it seems there are no more g’Kek living among the Five Galaxies.
If they die on Jijo, they are gone for good.
Watching youngsters pitch along graceful ramps with reckless abandon, streaking round corners with all four eyestalks flying and their rims glowing hot, Lark could not believe the universe would let that happen. How could any race so unique be allowed to go extinct?
With the boo finally behind them, the party now stood atop a ridge covered with normal forest. As they paused, a zookir dropped onto the path from the branches of a nearby garu tree — all spindly arms and legs, covered with white spirals of fluffy torg. Treasured aides and pets of the g’Kek, zookirs helped make life bearable for wheeled beings on a planet where roads were few and stumbling stones all too many.
This zookir squinted at the party, then scampered closer, sniffing. Unerringly, it bypassed the other humans, zeroing in on Lark.
Trust a zookir to know a sage—so went a folk saying. No one had any idea how the creatures could tell, since they seemed less clever than chimps in other ways. Lark’s promotion was recent and he wore the new status of “junior sage” uncomfortably, yet the creature had no trouble setting him apart. It pressed damp nostrils against his wrist and inhaled. Then, cooing satisfaction, it slipped a folded parchment in Lark’s hand.
MEET US AT THE REFUGE — That was all it said.
Lester Cambel
APAIR OF HIGH SAGES WAITED IN A NARROW CANYON, half a league away. Lester Cambel and Knife-Bright Insight, the blue qheuen whose reputation for compassion made her a favorite among the Six.
Here, too, the paths were smooth and well suited for g’Keks, since this was part of their Dooden Domain. Wheeled figures moved among the meadows, looking after protected ones who lived in thatched shelters beneath the trees. It was a refuge for sacred simpletons — those whose existence promised a future for the Six Races — according to the scrolls.