by David Brin
Anyway, it was Huck who first suggested heading over the Line, and I’m still not sure whether that’s giving a friend due credit or passing on blame.
“I know where there’s something to read,” she said one day, when summer was just getting its early start here in the south.
Yowg-wayuo had already caught us, vegetating under the pier, skipping rocks at dome-bobbers and bored as noors in a cage. Sure enough, he right-prompt sent us up the long access ramp to repair the village camouflage trellis, a job I always hate and I’ll be glad when I’m too big to be drafted into doing it anymore. We hoon aren’t as fond of heights as those tree-hugging humans and their chimp pets, so let me tell you it can be dizzifying having to crawl atop the wooden lattice arching over all the houses and shops of Wuphon, tending a carpet of greenery that’s supposed to hide our town against being seen from space.
I have doubts it’d really work, if The Day ever comes that everyone frets about. When sky-gods come to judge us, what good will a canopy of leaves do? Will it spare us punishment?
But I don’t want to be called a heretic. Anyway, this ain’t the place to talk about that.
So there we were, high over Wuphon, all exposed with the bare sun glaring down, and Huck blurts her remark like a sudden burst of hollow hail.
“I know where there’s something to read,” she says.
I put down the lath strips I was carrying, laying them across a clump of black iris vines.-Below, I made out the pharmacist’s house, with its chimney spilling distinct traeki smells. (Do you know that different kinds of plants grow above a traeki’s home? It can be hard working there if the pharmacist happens to be making medicine while you’re overhead!)
“What’re you talking about?” I asked, fighting a wave of wooziness. Huck wheeled over to pick up one of the laths, nimbly bending and slipping it in where the trellis sagged.
“I’m talking about reading something no one on the Slope has ever seen,” she answered in her crooning way, when she thinks an idea’s gloss. Two eyestalks hovered over her busy hands, while a third twisted to watch me with a glint I know too well. “I’m talking about something 50 ancient, it makes the oldest scroll on Jijo look like Joe Dolenz just printed it, with the ink still wet!”
Huck spun along the beams and joists, making me gulp when she popped a wheelie or swerved past a gaping hole, weaving flexible lath canes like reeds in a basket. We tend to see g’Keks as frail beings, because they prefer smooth paths and hate rocky ground. But those axles and rims are nimble, and what a g’Kek calls a road can be narrow as a plank.
“Don’t give me that,” I shot back. “Your folk burned and sank their sneakship, same as every race who skulked down to Jijo. All they had were scrolls — till humans came.”
Huck rocked her torso, imitating a traeki gesture that means, Maybe you’re right, but i/we don’t think so.
“Oh, Alvin, you know even the first exiles found things on Jijo to read.”
All right, so I wasn’t too swift on the grok. I’m plenty smart in my own way-steady and thorough is the hoonish style-but no one ever accused me of being quick.
I frowned, mimicking a human “thoughtful” expression I once saw in a book, even though it makes my forehead hurt. My throat sac throbbed as I concentrated.
“Hrrrrrm… Now wait just a minute. You don’t mean those wall markings sometimes found—”
“On the walls of old Buyur buildings, yes! The few not smashed or eaten by mulc-spiders when the Buyur left, a million years ago. Those same markings.”
“But weren’t they mostly just street signs and such?”
“True,” she agreed with one dipping eyestalk. “But there were really strange ones in the ruins where I first lived. Uncle Lorben was translating some into GalTwo, before the avalanche hit.”
I’ll never get used to how matter-of-factly she can speak about the disaster that wiped out her family. If anything like it happened to me, I wouldn’t talk again for years. Maybe ever.
“Uncle swapped letters with a Biblos scholar about the engravings he found. I was too little to understand much. But clearly there are savants who want to know about Buyur wall writings.”
And others who wouldn’t like it, I recall thinking. Despite the Great Peace, there are still folk in all six races ready to cry heresy and warn of an awful penance, about to fall from the sky.
“Well, it’s too bad all the carvings were destroyed when… you know.”
“When the mountain killed my folks? Yeah. Too bad. Say, Alvin, will you pass a couple more strips over to me? I can’t quite reach—”
Huck teetered on one wheel, the other spinning madly. I gulped and passed over the lengths of slivered boo. “Thanks,” Huck said, landing back on the beam with a shuddering bounce, damped by her shocks. “Now where was I? Oh yeah. Buyur wall writings. I was going to suggest how we can find some engravings no one’s ever seen. At least none of us exile Sixers.”
“How could that be?” My throat sac must have fluttered in confusion, making burbly sounds. “Your people came to Jijo two thousand years ago. Mine almost as long. Even humans have been here a few hundred. Every inch of the Slope is explored, and each Buyur site poked into, scores of times!”
Huck stretched all four eyes toward me.
“Exactly!”
Floating from her cranial tympanum, the Anglic word seemed stressed with soft accents of excitement. I stared for a long time and finally croaked in surprise.
“You mean to leave the Slope? To sneak beyond the Rift?”
I should have known better than to ask.
All it would have taken was a shift in the roll of Ifni’s dice, and this would be a very different tale. Things came that close to going the way Huck wanted.
She kept badgering me, for one thing. Even after we finished repairing the lattice and went back to loitering near the ships moored under huge, overhanging gingourv trees, she just kept at it with her special combination of g’Kek wit and hoonlike persistence.
“Come on, Alvin. Haven’t we sailed to Terminus Rock dozens of times and dared each other to keep on going? We even did it, once, and no harm ever came!”
“Just to the middle of the Rift. Then we scurried home again.”
“So? Do you want that shame sticking forever? This may be our last chance!”
I rubbed my half-inflated sac, making a hollow, rumbling sound. “Aren’t you forgetting, we already have a project? We’re building a bathy, in order to go diving—”
She cut loose a blat of disgust. “We talked it over last week and you agreed. The bathy reeks.”
“I agreed to think about it. Hrm. After all, Pincer has already built the hull. Chewed it himself from that big garu log. And what about the work the rest of us put in, looking up old Earthling designs, making that compressor pump and cable? Then there are those wheels you salvaged, and Ur-ronn’s porthole—”
“Yeah, yeah.” She renounced all our labors with a dismissive twirl of two stalks. “Sure, it was fun working on that stuff during winter, when we had to sit indoors anyway. Especially when it looked like it’d never actually happen. We had a great game of pretend.
“But things are getting serious! Pincer talks about actually making a deep dive in a month or two. Didn’t we agree that’s crazy? Didn’t we, Alvin?” Huck rolled closer and did something I’ve never heard another g’Kek do. She rumbled an umble at me, mimicking the undertone a young hoon female might use if her big, handsome male was having trouble seeing things her way.
“Now wouldn’t you rather come with me to see some uttergloss writings, so burnish and ancient they were written with computers and lasers and such? Hr-rm? Doesn’t that beat drowning in a stinky dross coffin, halfway to the bottom of the sea?”
Time to switch languages. While I normally find Anglic more buff than smug old star-god tongues, even Mister Heinz agrees that its “human tempos and loose logical structure tend to favor impetuous enthusiasms.”
Right then, I needed the opposit
e, so I shifted to the whistles and pops of Galactic Two.
“Consideration of (punishable) criminality — this has not occurred to thee?”
Unfazed, she countered in GalSeven, the formal tongue most favored by humans.
“We are minors, friend. Besides, the border law is meant to thwart illicit breeding beyond the permitted zone. Our gang has no such intent!”
Then, in a quick flip to Galactic Two—
“—Or hast thee (perverted) designs to attempt (strange, hybrid) procreation experiments with this (virginal female) self?”
What a thought! Plainly she was trying to keep me off balance. I could feel control slip away. Soon I’d find myself vowing to set sail for those dark ruins you can dimly see from Terminus Rock, if you aim an urrish telescope across the Rift’s deep waters.
Just then, my eye caught a familiar disturbance under the placid bay. A ruddy shape swarmed up the sandy bank until a dappled crimson carapace burst forth, spraying saltwater. From that compact pentagonal shell, a fleshy dome raised, girdled by a glossy black ring.
“Pincer!” I cried, glad of a distraction from Huck’s hot enthusiasm. “Come over and help me talk to this silly—”
But the young qheuen burst ahead, cutting me off even before water stopped burbling from his speech vents.
“M-m-mo-mo-mon—”
Pincer’s not as good at Anglic as Huck and me, especially when excited. But he uses it to prove he’s as humicking modern as anyone. I held up my hands. “Easy, pal! Take a breath. Take five!”
He exhaled a deep sigh, which emerged as a pair of bubble streams where two spiky legs were still submerged. “I s-s-seen ’em! This time I really s-seen ’em!”
“Seen what?” Huck asked, rolling across squishy sand.
The vision band rimming Pincer’s dome looked in all directions at once. Still, we could feel our friend’s intense regard as he took another deep breath, then sighed a single word.
“Monsters!”
II. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
Legends
The better part of a million years has passed since the Buyur departed Jijo, obeying Galactic rules of planetary management when their lease on this world expired, whatever they could not carry off, or store in lunar caches, the Buyur diligently destroyed, leaving little more than vine-crusted rubble where their mighty cities once towered, gleaming under the sun.
Yet even now, their shadow hangs over us — we cursed and exiled savages — reminding us that gods once ruled on Jijo.
Living here as illegal squatters — as sooners who must never dwell beyond this strip between the mountains and the sea — we of the Six Races can only look with superstitious awe at eroded Buyur ruins. Even after books and literacy returned to our Commons, we lacked the tools and skills to analyze the remains or to learn much about Jijos last lawful tenants. Some recent enthusiasts, styling themselves archaeologists, have begun borrowing techniques from dusty Earthling texts, but these devotees cannot even tell us what the Buyur looked like, let alone their habits, attitudes, or way of life.
Our best evidence comes from folklore.
Though glavers no longer speak — and so are not counted among the Six — we still have some of the tales they used to tell, passed on by the g’Keks, who knew glavers best, before they devolved.
Once, before their sneakship came to Jijo, when glavers roamed the stars as full citizens of the Five Galaxies, it is said that they were on intimate terms with a race called the Tunnuctyur, a great and noble clan. In their youth, these Tunnuctyur had been clients of another species — the patron that uplifted them, giving the Tunnuctyur mastery of speech, tools, and sapiency. Those patrons were called Buyur, and they came from Galaxy Four — from a world with a huge carbon star in its sky.
According to legend, these Buyur were known as clever designers of small living things.
They were also known to possess a rare and dangerous trait — a sense of humor.
—Mystery of the Buyur
by Hau-uphtunda, Guild of Freelance Scholars, Year-of-Exile 1908.
Asx
Hear, my rings, the song i sing. let its vapors rise amid your cores, and sink like dripping wax. It comes in many voices, scents, and strengths of time. It weaves like a g’Kek tapestry, flows like a hoon aria, gallops and swerves in the manner of urrish legend, and yet turns inexorably, as with the pages of a human book.
The story begins in peace.
It was springtime, early in the second lunar cycle of the nineteen hundred and thirtieth year of our exile-and-crime, when the Rothen arrived, manifesting unwelcome in our sky. Shining sunlike in their mastery of air and aether, they rent the veil of our concealment at the worst of all possible times — during the vernal gathering-of-tribes, near the blessed foot of Jijo’s Egg.
There we had come, as so often since the Emergence, to hear the great ovoid’s music. To seek guidance patterns. To trade the produce of our varied talents. To settle disputes, compete in games, and renew the Commons. Above all, seeking ways to minimize the harm done by our ill-starred presence on this world.
Gathering — a time of excitement for the young, work for the skilled, and farewells for those nearing the end of years. Already there had spread rumors — portents — that this assembly would be momentous. More than a usual quota from each clan had come. Along with sages and roamers, grafters and techies, many simple folk of two legs, four and five-and of wheel and ring-followed drumbeats along still-frosted mountain tracks to reach the sacred glades. Among each race, manifold had felt the tremors — stronger than any since that provident year when the Egg burst from Jijo’s mother soil, shedding hot birth-dust, then settling to rule our fractious passions and unite us.
Ah, Gathering.
This latest pilgrimage may not yet have solidified as waxy memory. But try to recall slowly wending our now-aged pile of rings aboard ship at Far Wet Sanctuary, to sail past the glistening Spectral Flow and the Plain of Sharp Sand.
Did not those familiar wonders seem to pale when we reached the Great Marsh and found it in bloom? Something seen once in a traeki lifetime? A sea of color — flowering, fruiting, and already dying gaudily before our senses. Transferring from boat to barge, we travelers rowed amid great pungency, under avenues of million-petalled sylph canopies.
Our companions took this as an omen, did they not, my rings? The humans in our midst spoke of mysterious Ifni, the capricious one, whose verdicts are not always just but are ever-surprising.
Do you recall other sights/experiences? The weaver villages? The mulc-spiders and hunting camps? And finally that arduous climb, twist by twist of our straining foot-pads, through the Pass of Long Umbras to reach this green vale where, four traeki generations ago, geysers steamed and rainbows danced, celebrating the dark ovoid’s emergence?
Recollect, now, the crunch of volcanic gravel, and how the normally obedient rewq-beast trembled on our head-ring, mutinously refusing to lay itself over our eyelets, so that we arrived in camp barefaced, unmasked, while children of all Six Races scurried, shouting, “Asx! Asx! Asx, the traeki, has come!”
Picture the other High Sages-colleagues and friends-emerging from their tents to walk, slither, roll, and greet us with this epithet. This label they regard as permanently attached to “me” — a fiction that i humor.
Do you recall all that, my rings?
Well, patience then. Memories congeal like dripping wax, simmering to coat our inner core. Once there, they can never be forgotten.
On Jijo there is a deep shine in the section of sky farthest from the sun. We are told this is rare on worlds catalogued by the Great Galactics, an effect of carbon grains — the same ones that seed the hollow hail-grains sent by Izmunuti, the glaring star-eye in a constellation humans call Job’s Torment. It is said our ancestors studied such traits of their new home before burning and burying their ships.
It is also said that they simply “looked it all up” in a portable branch of the Galactic Library-before consigning even that
treasure to flames on the day called Never-Go-Back.
There was no hollow hail that spring morning, when the other sages emerged to salute our rings, calling us/me Asx. As we gathered under a pavilion, i learned that our rewq was not the only one grown skittish. Not even the patient hoon could control his translation-helper. So we sages conferred without the little symbionts, fathoming each other by word and gesture alone.
Of all whose ancestors chose hopeless exile on this world, the g’Kek are senior. So to Vubben fell the role — Speaker of Ignition.
“Are we guilty for the failure of rantanoids?” Vubben asked, turning each eye toward a different point of the compass. “The Egg senses pain in the life-field whenever potential is lost.”
“Hrrrm. We argue the point endlessly,” the hoon sophist, Phwhoon-dau, replied. “Lark and Uthen tell of a decline. Rantanoids aren’t yet extinct. A small number remain on an Yuqun Isle.”
The human sage, Lester Cambel, agreed. “Even if they are past hope, rantanoids are just one of countless species of root-grubbers. No reason to figure they were specially blessed.”
Ur-Jah retorted that her own ancestors, long ago and far away, had been little root-grubbers.
Lester conceded with a bow. “Still, we aren’t responsible for the rise and fall of every species.”
“How can you know?” Vubben persisted. “We who lack most tools of science, left to flounder in darkness by our selfish forebears, cannot know what subtle harm we do by stepping on a leaf or voiding our wastes in a pit. None can predict what we’ll be held accountable for, when The Day comes. Even glavers, in their present state of innocence, will be judged.”
That was when our aged qheuenish sage, whom we call Knife-Bright Insight, tilted her blue carapace. Her voice was a soft whisper from one chitin thigh.
“The Egg, our gift in the wilderness, knows answers. Truth is its reward to an open mind.”