Brightness Reef u-4

by David Brin

  Although she lacked a rewq, Lark figured a wry smile would convey his reply.

  You assume too much, my dear. It blinded you, preventing you from asking sound questions. It also made you patronizing, when we might have been friends.

  All right, maybe that was too complex to transmit by facial expression alone. Perhaps what his smirk actually said was — Such nerve! You accuse me of hiding things?

  “I protest!” interjected the male sky-human, Rann, towering over all but the hoon and a few traeki as he stepped forward. “You have no right to meddle with the property of others!”

  Phwhoon-dau crooned softly, “Hr-r — then you avow ownership of this invasive thing, placed without permission in our most sacred site?”

  Rann blinked. Clearly he hated the present weakness of the aliens’ position, having to fence words with savages. Confused, the tall sky-human turned to Ro-kenn for guidance. While they conferred, heads close together, Lester Cambel continued.

  “The purpose of this contraption was what had us stymied for a while. Fortunately, I’d already been doing some research on Galactic technologies, so the texts were somewhat familiar. Finally, I found it listed under psi emitters!”

  “Here’s the switch, sir,” an aide declared. “Ready when you are.”

  Lester Cambel stood up, raising both hands.

  “People! This is a first and final warning. We’ve no idea what we’re about to set off. I assume nothing fatal, since our guests aren’t flying out of here at top speed.

  However, since we’ve no time for careful experiments, I advise you to at least step back. The cautious among you may retreat some greater distance, perhaps twice the diameter of the Egg. I’ll count down from ten.”

  Uthen wanted to stay and watch, Lark thought. But I made him go hide those library disk-things we found.

  Did I actually do him a favor?

  Cambel drew a deep breath.

  “Ten!”

  “Nine!”

  “Eight!”

  Lark had never seen a g’Kek outrace an urs before. But as the crowd dissolved, some of the Six showed surprising haste to depart. Others remained, tethered by curiosity.

  Courage is one trait that binds any true union, he thought with some pride.

  “Seven!”

  “Six!”

  Now Ro-kenn himself glided forward. “I avow ownership of this device, which—”

  “Five!”

  “Four!”

  Ro-kenn hurried, speaking louder to be heard past the tumult. “—which consists merely of instrumentation, innocently emplaced—”

  “Three!”

  “Two!”

  Faster, in frantic tones. “—to study patterns cast by your revered and sacred—”

  “One!”

  “Now!”

  Some humans instinctively brought their hands up to their ears, crouching and squinting as if to protect their eyes against an expected flash. Urs pressed arms over pouches. g’Keks drew in their eyes, while qheuens and traeki squat-hugged the ground. Rewq cringed, fleeing the intense emotions pouring from their hosts. Whatever a “psi emitter” might be, everyone was about to find out.

  Lark tried to ignore instinct, taking his cue instead from Ling. Her response to the countdown seemed a queer mix of anger and curiosity. She clasped both hands together, turning to meet his eyes at the very moment Cambel’s aide stroked a hidden switch.

  Asx

  Confusion brims our central core, oozing through the joint-seals that bind us/we/i/me, seeping bewilderment down our outer curves, like sap from a wounded tree.

  This voice, this rhythmic recitation, can it be what we know it not to be?

  The Egg’s patternings have stroked us so many ways. This ruction has familiar elements, like the Sacred One’s way of singing…

  Yet — there is also a metallic tang, simplistic, lacking the Egg’s sonorous pitch and timbre.

  One sub-cadence draws us toward it, clattering like a hasty quintet of claws, pulling our attention, as if down a dark underground funnel.

  Suddenly, i/we coalesce, submerging into strange existence as a unified being. One encased in a hard shell.

  Pentagonal resentment surges. This “me” is filled with rage.

  How dare they tell me I am free!

  What unnatural law is this Code of the Commons? This rule that “liberates” my kind from the sweet discipline we once knew, imposed by our gracious queens?

  We who are blue — we who are red — surely we yearn to serve, deep in our throbbing bile nodes! To work and fight selflessly, assisting gray dynastic ambitions! Was that not our way among the stars, and before?

  The native way of all qheuens?

  Who dared bring an end to those fine days, forcing alien notions of liberty into carapaces too stiff for a deadly drug called freedom?

  Humans dared impose these thoughts, breaking up the union of our well-ordered hives! Theirs is the fault, the shell-bound debt to pay.

  And pay they shall!

  After that, there will be other scores to settle…

  i/we writhe, experiencing what it feels like to crouch and run on five strong legs. Legs meant for service. Not to a mere nest, crouched behind some puny dam, or to some vast abstraction like the Commons, but to grand gray matrons, noble, gorgeous, and strong.

  Why does this vivid perception flood through our dazzled core?

  It must be the Rothen artifice — their psi-device — part of their scheme to influence each race of the Six. Tricking us into doing their will.

  Quivers of surprise shake our/my rings. Even after so many years of friendship, i/we had never realized — the qheuen point of view is so weird!

  Yet no weirder than the next sensation that comes barging into our shared consciousness.

  The feel of galloping hooves.

  A hot breath of the dry steppes.

  The burning flare of a psyche at least as egocentric as any human being.

  Now I am urrish-ka! Solitary, proud as the day I emerged from the grass, little more than a beast. Nervous, but self-reliant.

  I may join the tribe or clan that adopts me off the plain.

  I may obey a leader — for life has hierarchies that one must endure.

  Yet inside I serve one mistress. Me!

  Can humans ever know how their gross smell scrapes my nostril membranes? They make good warriors and smiths, it’s true. They brought fine music to Jijo. These are valid things.

  Yet one conceives how much better the world would be without them.

  We had fought our way up high before they came. From the plains to fiery mountaintops, we stretched our necks over all others on Jijo — till these bipeds dragged us down, to be just another race among Six.

  Worse, their lore reminds us — (me!) — how much we have lost. How much is forgotten.

  Each day they make me recall how low and brief my life is doomed to be, here on this spinning ball of mud, with bitter oceans all around…

  The indignant narration gallops past our ability to follow. Its resentful thread is lost, but another takes its place, imposed from the outside by a force that throbs through the little mountain vale.

  This beat is much easier to follow. A cadence that is heavy, slow to anger — and yet, once roused, its ire seems hopeless to arrest short of death.

  It is not a rhythm to be rushed. Still, it beckons us…

  Beckons us to ponder how often the quicker races tease we poor, patient hoon,

  how they swirl around us,

  how often they seem to talk fast on purpose,

  how they set us to the most dangerous tasks,

  to face the sea alone, although each lost ship wrenches a hundred loved ones, tearing our small families apart with wrenching pain.

  Humans and their stinking steamboats, they have kept the skills, pretending to share, but not really. Someday they will leave us rotting here, while they go off on ships made of pure white light.

  Should this be allowed? Are there ways th
ey can be made to pay?

  Confusion reigns.

  If these pernicious messages were meant for each separate race — to sway it toward aggression — then why are we/i receiving all of them? Should the Rothen not have targeted each sept to hear one theme, alone?

  Perhaps their machine is damaged, or weak.

  Perhaps we are stronger than they thought.

  Breaking free of the hoonish rhythm, we sense that two layers of bitter song remain. One is clearly meant for Earthlings. Reverence is its theme. Reverence and pride.

  We are superior. Others specialize but we can do anything! Chosen and raised by mighty Rothen, it is proper that we be greatest, even as castaways on this slope of savages.

  If taught their place, the others might learn roles of worthy service…

  we/i recall a phrase. Direct empathic transmission — a technique used by Galactic science for the better part of half a billion years.

  Knowing makes the manipart stream of voice seem more artificial, tinny, even self-satirical. Of course this message was to have been amplified somehow through our Holy Egg, at a time when we would be most receptive. Even so, it is hard to imagine such prattle winning many believers.

  Did they actually think we would fall for this?

  Another fact penetrates our attention: There is no layer for the wheeled ones! Why is that? Why are the g’Kek left out? Is it because of their apparent uselessness in a program of genocidal war?

  Or because they were already extinct, out there among the stars?

  One resonance remains. A drumbeat, like hammers pounding on stacks of stiff round tubes. A reverberation that howls in a manner this composite self finds eerily familiar.

  Yet, in some ways it is the most alien of all.

 
 

  We shrivel back, dismayed. This egomania is far greater than any of the other broadcasts, even those aimed at urs and men! And yet — it is aimed at traeki!

  Do you see what is happening, my rings? Is this a taste of the proud willfulness that used to flow from coercive despot-toruses? Those tyrant psyches that once dominated our cognition rings? Overlord-collars that were abandoned on purpose by the traeki founders, when they fled to Jijo?

  Is this is how resentment tasted to those haughty Jophur? (Yes, shudder at the name!)

  Mighty beings who still prowl the stars, in our image. Ring cousins whose waxy cores are ruled by monomaniacal ravings.

  If so, why do these rantings mean so little to our mani-colored segments? Knowing them for what they are, why do they seem so banal? So uncompelling?

  The demonstration ends. All the scraping emissions fade as power runs out of the alien device. No matter. We now know the purpose of this tangle of cables and balls. To cast poison, amplified and lent credibility by passage through the Egg.

  All around the meadow, anger seethes at this blasphemy, at this puerile appeal to our basest animosities. Passions that were obsolete even before the Egg appeared.

  Is this how poorly you think of us, star-lords? That we might be fooled into doing your dirty work?

  We perceive the crowd regathering, a muttering fuming throng, contemptuous of the bobbing hissing robots. Humans, urs, and others mix more freely now, sharing a heady kind of elation, as if we Six have passed an awful test. Passed it stronger and more unified than ever.

  Is this the worst they can do to us?

  That is a question i overhear several times.

  Yes, my rings, it occurs to us that the Glade is but a small part of the Slope, and we present here make up only a fragment of the Commons.

  Is this the worst they can do to us?

  Alas, if only it were so.

  Sara

  The Urunthai liked to travel fast and light, not burdening their donkeys any more than necessary. The Urunthai also believed in the Path of Redemption — they did not much approve of books.

  The librarians never had a chance.

  Still, the trio of gray-robed archivists protested desperately when they saw the late afternoon bonfire. Two humans and their chimp assistant tore frantically at their bonds, pleading, entreating, trying to throw themselves across the wax-sealed crates they had been escorting to safety.

  The ropes saved their lives. Watching with arbalests cocked, the painted Urunthai guards would not have flinched at shooting a clutch of pasty-skinned text-tenders.

  “You like fire?” one warrior taunted in thickly accented Anglic. “Fire cleanses. It vurns away dross. It can do the sane thing with flesh. Hoo-nan flesh, vurns so nice.”

  The librarians were reduced to silent weeping as flames licked the wax, then split the wooden chests, tumbling cascades of volumes that fluttered like dying birds. Paper pages flared as brief meteors, yielding whatever ink-scribed wisdom they had preserved for centuries.

  Sara was glad Lark and Nelo couldn’t see this.

  Many texts were copied, during the Great Printing or after. The loss may not be as had as it looks.

  Yet how much longer would those duplicates endure this kind of age, filled with self-righteous sects and crusades, each convinced of their own lock on truth?

  Even if the star-gods never wreck Biblos, or force the explosers to do it for them, fanatics like Jop and UrKachu will only grow more numerous and bold as the social fabric unravels.

  As if to illustrate the point, a squadron of Jop’s comrades entered camp before sundown — a dozen hard-looking men equipped with bows and swords, who slaked their parched throats at the oasis without turning their backs on UrKachu’s clansmen, but glanced with satisfaction at the pyre of dying books.

  The two groups have a common goal. An end to literary “vanities.” Replacing the current sages. Hewing closer to the dictates of the Scrolls.

  Later, when we’re all firmly on the Path, we can return to slaughtering and ambushing each other, deciding who’s top predator on a sinking pyramid of redeemed animals.

  The blaze collapsed, spewing sparks and curled paper scraps that seemed to swoop in whirling air currents. Standing next to Sara, the Stranger caught one in his hand and peered, as if trying to read what it once said. Perhaps he recognized something that was much like him, in a poignant way. Once eloquent, it had now lost the magic of speech.

  The librarians weren’t alone watching with horrified, soot-streaked faces. A young mated pair of hoonish pilgrims clutched each other, umbling a funeral dirge, as if a loved one’s heart spine lay in the filthy coals. Several qheuens stared in apparent dismay, along with — lest we forget — a handful of sorrowful urrish traders.

  The smoke-stench made her think of darkness. The kind that does not end with dawn.

  “All right, everybody! Your attention, please. Here is the plan.”

  It was Jop, breaking the somber silence, approaching as part of a foursome, with UrKachu, Ulgor, and a grim, sunburned man whose rugged face and flinty hardness made him seem almost a different species from the soft, bookish librarians. Even the Urunthai treated this human with grudging deference. Painted warriors stepped quickly out of his way. Sara found him familiar somehow.

  “We’ll be leaving in two groups,” Jop went on. “The larger will proceed to Salty Hoof Marsh. If any militia platoons hear o’ this raid and care to give chase, that’s the first place they’ll look, so some of you may be ‘rescued’ in a week or so. That’s fine by us.

  “The smaller group’s gonna go faster. Humans will ride, switchin’ to fresh donkeys every half midura. Don’t cause trouble or even think of sneakin’ off in the dark. The Urunthai are expert trackers, and you won’t get far. Any questions?”

  When no one spoke, Jop shoved a finger at the Stranger. “You. Over there.” He gestured where the biggest, strongest-looking beasts were tethered single file, beside the oasis pond. The Stranger hesitated, glancing at Sara.

  “It’s all rig
ht. She can go along. Can’t have our hostage goin’ sick on us, eh?” Jop turned to Sara. “I expect you’ll be willin’ to take care of him awhile longer.”

  “If I can take my bags. And Prify, of course.”

  The four leaders muttered among themselves. UrKachu hissed objections, but Ulgor sided with the humans, even if it meant sacrificing some of the booty robbed from the caravan merchants. Two donkeys had their trade goods dumped on the ground, to make room.

  Another argument erupted when the Stranger straddled the animal he had been assigned, with his feet almost dragging on both sides. He refused to surrender the dulcimer, keeping the instrument clutched under one arm. With ill temper, UrKachu snorted disgust but gave in.

  From her own perch on a sturdy donkey, Sara watched the hard-faced man gesture toward Kurt the Exploser, sitting with his nephew, silently watching events unfold.

  “And you, Lord Exploser,” Jop told Kurt with a respectful bow, “I’m afraid there are questions my friends want to ask, and this is no place to persuade you to answer “em.”

  Ignoring the implied threat, the gray-bearded man from Tarek Town carried his satchel over to the donkey train, with Jomah close behind. When a pair of Urunthai reached for the valise, Kurt spoke in a soft, gravelly voice.

  “The contents are… delicate.”

  They backed away. No one interfered as he chose a pack beast, dumped its load of plunder on the ground, and tied the valise in place.

  Equal numbers of human radicals and Urunthai warriors made up the rest of the “fast group.” The men looked almost as ungainly on their donkeys as the tall Stranger, and more uncomfortable. For many, it must be their first experience riding.

  “You aren’t coming?” Sara asked Jop.

  “I’ve been away from my farm too long,” he answered. “Also, there’s unfinished business in Dolo. A certain dam needs tendin’ to, the sooner the better.”