Brightness Reef u-4

by David Brin

  “Privacy wasps may stop the tiniest robots,” Cambel said. “But what about something the size of this little fellow?”

  “Honestly, sir. I can’t imagine how he got past—”

  Cambel waved off the apology. “There was no harm done this time, son. It’s mostly their contempt that protects us — their confidence we have nothing worth spying on. Just be more careful from now on, eh?”

  He patted the young man’s arm and turned to follow as yee hurried outside. The path seemed brightly lit by moonshine, piercing through gently waving forest branches. Still clearly perplexed, the guard set his jaw and gripped his weapon — a kind of pole with a sharp-looking knife-thing at one end — standing with legs slightly apart, in the center of the entrance. When the scrape of Cambel’s footsteps faded, Rety counted twenty duras, then made her own move. Faking calm, she sauntered toward the young guard, who swiveled when she was close.

  Rety gave a smile and an easygoing wave. “Well, guess I’m all done for the night.” She yawned, sidling past his bulk, sensing his startled indecision. “Boy I’ll tell ya, that science sure is hard work! Well, g’night.”

  Now she was outside, gratefully inhaling fresh mountain air and trying not to break into a run. Especially when he shouted — “Hey, stop right there!”

  Swiveling around but continuing to walk backward down the path, Rety delayed him a few more seconds by grinning broadly. “Yeah? You need somethin’?”

  “What… who are you—?”

  “Got something here I figure the sage’d want to be seein’,” she replied with deceptive truthfulness, patting her belt pouch and still backing away.

  The guard started toward her.

  With a joyful shout, Rety spun about and took off into the forest, knowing pursuit was hopeless at this point. He had lost his chance, the stinker! Still, she was kind of glad that he tried.

  yee met her where they had agreed, by the log bridge, halfway to the place where she was to join Rann. On spying her, the little urs yelped and seemed to fly into her arms.

  He was less pleased on trying to burrow into his accustomed place, only to find a cold hard object taking up the pouch. Rety tucked him into the folds of her jacket, and after a moment he seemed to find that acceptable.

  “yee tell wife, yee see—”

  “We did it!” Rety chortled gleefully, unable to contain the rush of an adventure so well closed. The chase had been a perfect way to finish, leaping and laughing as she ran through the forest, leaving the big oaf to flounder in the dark while she circled around, then slinked right past the noisy guard on her way back to the Glade.

  “You were great, too,” she told yee, sharing credit. “Would’ve been harder to do it without you.” She hugged his little body till he complained with a series of short grunts. “Did you have any trouble getting away from Cambel?” she asked.

  “wiseman human no problem, yee get ’way good, but then—”

  “Great, then it’s over. We better go now, though. If Rann has to wait, he may not be in as good a mood as—”

  “—but then yee see something on way to meet wife! whole herd of urs… qheuens… hoons… men … all going sneak-sneak in dark, carry big boxes!”

  Rety hurried down a side trail leading toward the rendezvous point. “Hm-hm? Do tell? Prob’ly one of those silly pilgrim things, headin’ up to pray to that big rock they think is a god.” She had only contempt for the superstitions of planet-grubbing sooners. To her, all the talk she’d heard about the Slopies’ fabulous “Egg” was just more scare-you-in-the-dark stuff, like those tales of ghosts and huge beasts and spirit glavers that were common campfire fare back in the Gray Hills, especially since Jass and Bom took over. Whenever times were hard, the hunters would argue into the night, seeking some reason why the prey animals might be angry, and ways to appease them.

  “herd of sneakers not go holy rock!” yee protested, “head wrong way! no white robes, no sing-songs! just sneak-sneak, I say! sneak with boxes to ’nother cave!”

  Rety’s interest was almost piqued, yee sure seemed to think it important…

  But just then the trail turned to overlook the little valley where the sky-humans dwelled. Moonlight spilled across pavilions that seemed strangely less well camouflaged now, in the vivid dimness.

  A soft hum warbled from the west, and a glint drew her eye as a glistening teardrop shape floated into view, folding away two delicate wings as it descended. Rety felt a tingle, recognizing the small flying boat of the forayers, returning from another mysterious expedition. She watched, transfixed, as the lovely thing settled gracefully to the valley floor. A hole opened, swallowing it into the ground.

  Excitement filled Rety’s lungs, and her heart felt light.

  “Hush, husband,” she told yee when he complained of being ignored. “We got some tradin’ and dickerin’ to do.

  “Now’s when we’ll see if they pay what they promised.”

  Asx

  My rings, you need not my weakly focused musings to inform you. Surely all of you must feel it, deep within each oily torus core?

  The Egg. Slowly, as if rising from a deep torpor, it wakens!

  Perhaps now the Commons will be filled once more with comity, with union of spirit, with the meshed resolve that once bound jointly our collective wills.

  Oh, let it be so!

  We are so fractured, so far from ready. So far from worthy.

  Oh, let it be so.

  Sara

  The stacks were infested with polisher bees, and the music rooms thronged with hungry, biting parrot fleas, but the chimps on the maintenance staff were too busy to fumigate for minor pests.

  While taking some air in the west atrium, Sara watched several of the hairy workers help a human librarian pack precious volumes into fleece-lined crates, then seal them with drippings from a big red candle. Gobbets of wax clung to the chimps’ matted fur, and they complained to each other with furtive hand signs.

  This is not correct, Sara interpreted one worker’s flurry of gestures and husky grunts. In this intemperate haste, we are making regrettable errors.

  The other replied, How true, my associate! This volume of Auden should not go in among Greek classics! We shall never get these books properly restacked when this crisis finally blows over, as surely it must.

  Well, perhaps she was generous in her mental translation. Still, the chimps who labored in these hallowed halls were a special breed. Almost as special as Prity.

  Overhead towered the atrium of the Hall of Literature, spanned by bridges and ramps that linked reading rooms and galleries, all lined with shelves groaning under the weight of books, absorbing sound while emitting a redolence of ink, paper, wisdom, and dusty time. Weeks of, frantic evacuation, hauling donkey-loads to faraway caves, had not made a dent in the hoard — still crammed with texts of every color and size.

  Sage Plovov called this hall — dedicated to legend, magic, and make-believe — the House of Lies. Yet Sara always felt this place less burdened by the supremacy of the past than in those nearby structures dedicated to science. After all, what could Jijo’s savages ever add to the mountain of facts brought here by their godlike ancestors? A mountain said to be like a sand grain next to the Great Galactic Library. But the tales in this hall feared no refutal by ancient authority. Good or bad, great or forgettable, no work of literature was ever provably “false.”

  Plovov said — “It’s easy to be original when you don’t have to care whether you’re telling the truth. Magic and an arise from an egomaniac’s insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.”

  Of course, Sara agreed. On the other hand, she also thought Plovov was jealous.

  When humans came to Jijo, the effect on the other five races must have been like when Earth met Galactic culture. After centuries with just a handful of engraved scrolls, the urs, g’Kek, and others reacted to the flood of paper books with both suspicion and voracious appetite. Between brief, violent struggles, nonhumans devoured Terr
an fables, dramas, and novels. When they wrote stories of their own, they imitated Earthly forms — like ersatz Elizabethan romances featuring gray-shelled queens, or Native North American legends recast for urrish tribes.

  But lately, a flowering of new styles had also started emerging, from heroic adventures to epic poems set in strange meters and rhymes, unraveling the last shreds of order from dialects of GalSeven, and even GalTwo. Printers and binders had as many orders for new titles as reprints. Scholars debated what it all might mean — an outbreak of heresy? Or a freeing of the spirit?

  Few dared use the term renaissance.

  All of which may end in a matter of days or weeks, Sara pondered glumly. News from the Glade — brought by a kayak pilot braving the Bibur rapids — showed no change in the sages’ grim appraisal of the alien gene-raiders, or their intent.

  Well, Bloor should be there by now. Sara’s plan might not dissuade the sky-humans from genocide, but a folk as helpless as the Six must be willing to try anything.

  Including Ariana’s crazy notion. Even if it’s cruel.

  The voice of the elderly sage carried from the chamber behind Sara.

  “There now, dear. You’ve struggled long enough with that one. Let’s see what you can make of this nice book. Have you ever seen symbols and words like these before?”

  Sighing, Sara turned around to reenter the Children’s Wing.

  The Stranger sat near Ariana Foo’s wheelchair, surrounded by volumes bearing bright colors and simple text, printed in large friendly type. Though his face was haggard, the tall dark man resignedly accepted yet another book and ran his hand over the dots, slashes, and bars of a GalTwo teaching rhyme — a primer meant for young urrish middlings. Sara was unsurprised when his lips pursed and his tongue clicked as he worked across the page, laboriously. His eyes recognized the symbols, but clearly, no sense was being made of the sentence-phrase itself.

  It had been the same with books in GalSix, Anglic, and GalSeven, tearing Sara’s heart to see his frustration turn into torment. Perhaps only now was the injured man coming to know fully what had been ripped away from him. What he had forever lost.

  Ariana Foo, on the other hand, seemed eminently satisfied. She beamed at Sara. “This is no rube from the outer hamlets,” the old woman ruled. “He was an educated person, familiar with every language currently in use among the Six. If we have time, we must take him to the Linguistics Wing and try some of the forgotten dialects! Galactic Twelve would clinch it. Only three scholars on Jijo know any of it today.”

  “What’s the point?” Sara asked. “You’ve made your case. Why not let him be?”

  “In a minute, dear. One or two more, then we’ll be off. I’ve saved the best for last.”

  Two library staff members watched nervously as Ariana reached over to a stack of books by her side. Some were priceless, with rings set in their spines where chains normally kept them locked to their shelves. The archivists clearly did not like seeing them pawed by a speechless barbarian.

  Unwilling to watch, Sara turned away.

  The rest of the Children’s Wing was placid — and contained few children. Scholars, teachers, and traveling librarians from all six races came here to study, copy, or select books to borrow, carrying their precious cargo by cart, boat, or pack donkey to settlements throughout the Slope. Sara observed a red qheuen carefully gather some of the heavy, brass-bound albums required by her kind, assisted by two lorniks trained as assistants and page-turners. One lornik swatted at a polisher bee that was working its way across the cover of a book, rubbing its abdomen amorously across the jacket, buffing it to a fine sheen and erasing part of the title. No one knew what function the insectoids once served for the departed Buyur, but they were a damned nuisance nowadays.

  Sara saw others from every race, educators who refused to let a mere crisis interfere with the serious task of instructing the next generation. Beyond the qheuen, an elderly traeki selected volumes treated to resist the fluids emitted by new stacks of rings, too clumsy to control their secretions.

  A low moan brought Sara back around to see the Stranger holding before him a long, slim book so old, the colors had gone all dingy and gray. The man’s dark features clouded with clashing emotions. Sara had no time to read the title, only to glimpse a skinny black feline figure on the cover, wearing a red-and-white-striped stovepipe hat. Then, to the librarians’ gasping dismay, he clutched the volume tightly to his chest, rocking back and forth with eyes closed.

  “Something from his childhood, I’ll warrant,” Ariana Foo diagnosed, scribbling on her pad. “According to the indexes, this fable was widely popular among children in northwestern Earth civilization almost continuously for over three centuries, so we can tentatively localize his cultural origins…”

  “How nice. Then you’re finished?” Sara demanded, caustically.

  “Hm? Oh, yes, I suppose so. For now. Get him settled down will you, pet? Then bring him along. I’ll be waiting in the main Listening Parlor.” With that, Ariana nodded briskly to the chim assigned to push her chair, leaving Sara behind to deal with the upset Stranger.

  He was muttering to himself, as he did from time -to time, repeating the same short phrase, over and over. Something that wormed its way out, despite the damage to his brain. In this case, it was clearly nonsense, sparked by intense emotion.

  “…a wocket in my pocket…” he said again and again, chortling poignantly, “…a wocket in my pocket…”

  Gently, firmly, Sara managed to pry the ancient tome out of his trembling hands, returning the treasure to the disapproving librarians. With patience she encouraged the wounded man to stand, though his dark eyes were fogged with a kind of misery Sara found she could fathom. She, too, had lost someone precious to her.

  Only the one he was mourning was himself.

  Two g’Kek savants met them by the entrance to the Listening Parlor, physician researchers who had examined the Stranger soon after he arrived in Biblos. One now took him by the hand.

  “Sage Foo wishes you to attend her in the observing room, next door,” the other one said. One eyestalk gestured toward an opening farther down the hall. When the Stranger looked at Sara questioningly, she gave him an encouraging nod. His trusting smile only made her feel wor.se.

  The observing room was dimly illuminated by light streaming in through two circular windows — exquisite slabs of spun glass, flawless except for the characteristic central stem — which looked into another chamber where the two g’Kek doctors could be seen seating the Stranger before a large box with a crank on one side and a trumpetlike horn rising from the other.

  “Come in, pet. And please close the door.”

  It took several duras for Sara’s eyes to adapt and see who sat with Ariana. By then it was too late to flee.

  The whole party from Tarek Town was present, along with two humans dressed in scholars’ robes. Ulgor and Blade had reason to be here, of course. Blade had helped rescue the Stranger from the swamp, and Ulgor was an honorary delegate from Dolo Village. Even Jop had an official interest. But why were Jomah and Kurt the Exploser in the room? Whatever cryptic guild business brought them from Tarek, the old man and boy now watched the proceedings with the silent intensity that was a trademark of their family and craft.

  The human scholars turned toward her.

  Banner and Taine — the very persons she had hoped to avoid during this visit.

  Both men rose to their feet.

  Sara hesitated, then bowed at the waist. “Masters.”

  “Dear Sara.” Bonner sighed, leaning on his cane more than she recalled when she had last seen the balding topologist. “How we’ve missed you in these dusty halls.”

  “As I’ve missed you, master,” she replied, surprised how true it was. Perhaps in the numbness after Joshu’s passing, she had closed off too many good memories as well as bad. The warmth of the old savant’s hand on her arm recalled their many walks, discussing the arcane, endlessly fascinating habits of shapes, the sort that
could be described with symbols but never seen by human eyes.

  “Please don’t call me master anymore,” he asked. “You are an adept now, or should be soon enough. Come, have a seat between us, like old times.”

  A bit too much like old times, Sara realized, meeting the eyes of the other mathematician-sage. The tall, silver-haired algebraist seemed unchanged, still distant, enigmatic. Taine nodded and spoke her name, then sat again facing the windows. Typically, he had chosen the position farthest from the nonhumans in the room.

  Sage Taine’s discomfort around the other septs was not rare. A minority felt that way in every race, a reaction deep-rooted in ancient drives. What mattered was how you dealt with it, and Taine was unfailingly polite to the urs or g’Kek teachers who came to consult him about the binomial theorem. Given the handicap, it was just as well the tall savant could live a scholar’s cloistered life… like the one Sara herself had expected—

  —until a visiting bookbinder became an unlikely suitor, filling Sara’s heart with unexpected possibilities.

  —until she boldly announced to her confused colleagues a new focus for her studies, language, of all things.

  —until Joshu sickened when pepper pox swept through the Valley of the Bibur, a plague that took its victims with agonizing suddenness, and she had to watch another woman perform the rites of mourning, knowing that everyone was watching, to see how she’d react.

  —until, after the funeral, Sage Taine approached her with stiff formality and renewed his earlier proposal of marriage.

  —until, in a rush, she fled this place of dust and memories, running home to her treehouse overlooking the great dam where she was born.

  Now it all circled around again. Taine had seemed so austerely beautiful when she first came to Biblos in her teens, a towering figure, impressive beyond compare. But things had changed inside her since. Everything had changed.