Brightness Reef u-4

by David Brin

  That is not what we see now!

  Rather, a quivering thing, suffering its own death tremors, creeps off of Ro-pol’s face… taking much of that face with it! The very same brow and cheek and chin we had been pondering — these make up the body of the creature, which must have ridden the Rothen as a rewq rides one of the Six, nestled so smoothly in place that no join or seam was visible before.

  Does this explain the dissonance? The clashing colors conveyed by our veteran rewq? When some parts of Ro-kenn’s face relayed tart emotions, others always seemed cool, unperturbed, and friendly.

  It crawls aside, and onlookers gasp at what remains — a sharply narrower face, chinless and spiny, with cranial edges totally unlike a human being’s.

  Gone is the mirage of heavenly comeliness in Earth-ling terms. Oh, the basic shape remains humanoid, but in a tapered, predatory caricature of our youngest sept.

  “Hr-rm … I have seen this face before,” croons Phwhoon-dau, stroking his white beard. “In my readings at Biblos. An obscure race, with a reputation for—”

  Rann whips the coverings back over the corpses, while Ro-kenn shrilly interrupts, “This is the final outrage!”

  Our rewq now clearly show Ro-kenn as two beings, one a living mask. Gone is the patient amusement, the pretense at giving in to blackmail. Until now, we had nothing to blackmail with.

  Until now.

  The Rothen points to Rann, commanding — “Break radio silence and recall Kunn, now!”

  “The prey will be warned,” Rann objects, clearly shaken. “And the hunters. Dare we risk—”

  “We’ll take that chance. Obey now! Recall Kunn, then clear all of these away.”

  Ro-kenn motions at the crowd, the sycophants, and all six sages.

  “No one leaves to speak of this.”

  The robots start to rise, crackling with dire strength. A moan of dread escapes the crowd.

  Then — as is sometimes said in Earthling tales — All Hell Breaks Loose.

  The Stranger

  He strums the dulcimer slowly, plucking one low note at a time, feeling nervous over what he plans to attempt, yet also pleased by how much he is remembering.

  About urs, for instance. Ever since first regaining consciousness aboard the little riverboat, he had tried to pin down why he felt so friendly toward the four-footed beings, despite their prickly, short-tempered natures. Back at the desert oasis, before the bloody ambush, he had listened to the ballad recited by the traitor Ulgor, without understanding more than a few click-phrases, here and there. Yet the rhythmic chant had seemed strangely familiar, tugging at associations within his battered brain.

  Then, all at once, he recalled where he heard the tale before. In a bar, on faraway—

  —on faraway—

  Names are still hard to come by. But now at least he has an image, rescued from imprisoned memory. A scene in a tavern catering to low-class sapient races like his own, frequented by star travelers sharing certain tastes in food, music, and entertainment. Often, songs were accepted as currency in such places. You could buy rounds of drinks with a good one, and he seldom had to pay cash, so desired were the tunes warbled by his talented crewmates.

  …crewmates…

  Now he confronts another barrier. The tallest, harshest wall across his mind. He tries once more but fails to come up with a melody to break it down.

  Back to the bar, then. With that recollection had come things he once knew about urs. Especially a trick he used to pull on urrish companions when they dozed off, after a hard evening’s revelry. Sometimes he would take a peanut, aim carefully, and—

  The Stranger’s train of thought breaks as he realizes he is being watched. UrKachu glares at him, clearly irritated by the increasing loudness of the thrumming dulcimer. He quickly mollifies the leader of the urrish ambushers by plucking at the string more softly. Still, he does not quite stop. At a lower, quieter level, the rhythm is mildly hypnotic, just as he intended it to be.

  The other raiders — both urs and men — lie down or snooze through the broiling middle of the day. So does Sara, along with Prity and the other captives. The Stranger knows he should rest, too, but he feels too keyed up.

  He misses Pzora, though it does seem strange to long for the healing touch of a Jophur—

  No, that is the wrong word. Pzora is not one of those fearsome, cruel beings, but a traeki — something quite different. As he grows a little better at names, he is going to have to remember that.

  Anyway, he has work to do. In the time remaining, he must learn to use the rewq that Sara bought for him — a strange creature whose filmy body covers his eyes, causing soft colors to waft around every urs and human, turning the shabby tent into a pavilion of revealing hues. He finds unnerving the way the rewq quivers over his flesh, using a sucker to feed from veins near the gaping wound in his head. Yet he cannot turn down a chance to explore yet another kind of communication. Sometimes the confusing colors coalesce to remind him of the last time he communed with Pzora, back at the oasis. There had been a moment of strange clarity when their cojoined rewqs seemed to help convey exactly what he wanted.

  Pzora’s answering gift lies inside the hole in his head — the one place the raiders would never think to search.

  He resists an urge to slip his hand inside, to check if it’s still there.

  All in good time.

  While he sits and strums, the oppressive heat slowly mounts. Urrish and human heads sink lower to the ground, where night’s lingering coolness can still be dimly felt. He waits and tries to remember a little more.

  His biggest blank zone — other than the loss of language — covers the recent past. If ten fingers represent the span of his life up to now, most of the final two digits are missing. All he has are the shreds that cling whenever he wakes from a dream. Enough to know he once roamed the linked galaxies and witnessed things none of his kind ever saw before. The seals holding back those memories have resisted everything he’s tried so far — drawing sketches, playing math games with Prity, wallowing in Pzora’s library of smells. He remains fairly certain the key will be found in music. But what music?

  Sara snores softly nearby, and he feels a swelling of grateful fondness in his heart… combined with a nagging sense that there is someone else he should be thinking about. Another who had his devotion before searing fate swatted him out of the sky. A woman’s face flickers at a sharp angle to his thoughts, passing too swiftly to recognize — except for the wave of strong feelings it evokes.

  He misses her… though he can’t imagine that she feels the same, wherever she may be.

  Whoever she may be.

  More than anything else, he wishes he could put his feelings into words, as he never did during all the dangerous times they spent together… times when she was pining for another… for a better man than he.

  This thought thread is leading somewhere, he realizes, feeling some excitement. Avidly, he follows it. The woman in his dreams… she longs for a man… a hero who was lost long ago… a year or two ago… lost along with crewmates… and also along with…

  …along with the Captain…

  Yes, of course/ The commander they all missed so terribly, gone ever since a daring escape from that wretched water world. A world of disaster and triumph.

  He tries conjuring an image of the Captain. A face. But all that comes to mind is a gray flash, a whirl of bubbles, and finally a glint of white, needlelike teeth. A smile unlike any other. Wise and serene.

  Not human.

  And then, out of nowhere, a soft warbling emerges. A sound never before heard on the Slope.

  * My good silent friend…

  Lost in winter’s dread stormcloud…

  Lonely… just like me… *

  The whistles, creaks, and pops roll out of his mouth before he even knows he’s speaking them. His head rocks back as a dam seems to shatter in his mind, releasing a flood of memories.

  The music he’d been looking for was of no human making, but th
e modern tongue of Earth’s third sapient race. A language painfully hard for humans to learn, but that rewarded those who tried. Trinary was nothing like Galactic Two or any other speech, except perhaps the groaning ballads sung by great whales who still plumbed the homeworld’s timeless depths.

  Trinary.

  He blinks in surprise and even loses his rhythm on the plucked dulcimer. A few urs lift their heads, staring at him blankly till he resumes the steady cadence, continuing reflexively while he ponders his amazing rediscovery. The familiar/uncanny fact that had eluded him till now.

  His crewmates — perhaps they still await him in that dark, dreary place where he left them.

  His crewmates were dolphins.

  XXV.THE BOOK OF THE SEA

  Beware, ye damned who seek redemption.

  Time is your friend, but also your great foe.

  Like the tires of Izmunuti,

  It can fade before you are ready.

  Letting in, once more,

  the things from which you fled.

  —The Scroll of Danger

  Alvin’s Tale

  I tried reading Finnegans Wake once upon a time.

  Last year.

  A lifetime ago.

  It’s said that no non-Earthling has ever grokked that book. In fact, the few humans who managed the feat spent whole chunks of their lifespans going over Joyce’s masterpiece, word by obscure word, with help from texts written by other obsessed scholars. Mister Heinz says no one on the Slope has any hope at all of fathoming it.

  Naturally, I took that as a challenge, and so the next time our schoolteacher headed off to Gathering, I nagged him to bring a copy back with him.

  No, I’m not about to say I succeeded. Just one page into it, I knew this was a whole different venture from Ulysses. Though it looks like it’s written in prespace English, the Wake uses Joyce’s own language, created for a single work of art. Hoonish patience would not solve this. To even begin to understand, you have to share much of the author’s context.

  What hope had I? Not a native speaker of Irish-English. Not a citizen of early twentieth-century Dublin. Not human. I’ve never been inside a “pub” or seen a “quark” close up, so I can only guess what goes on in each.

  I recall thinking — maybe a little arrogantly — If I can’t read this thing, I doubt anyone else on Jijo ever will.

  The crisp volume didn’t look as if anyone had tried, since the Great Printing. So why did the human founders waste space in Biblos with this bizarre intellectual experiment from a bygone age?

  That was when I felt I had a clue to the Tabernacle crew’s purpose, in coming to this world. It couldn’t be for the reasons we’re told on holy days, when sages and priests read from the sacred Scrolls. Not to find a dark corner of the universe to engage in criminally selfish breeding, or to resign from the cosmos, seeking the roads of innocence. In either of those cases, I could see printing how-to manuals, or simple tales to help light the way. In time, the books would turn brittle and go to dust, when humans and the rest of us are ready to give them up. Kind of like the Eloi folk in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

  In neither case did it make any sense to print copies of Finnegans Wake.

  Realizing this, I picked up the book once more. And while I did not understand the story or allusions any better than before, I was able to enjoy the flow of words, their rhythms and sounds, for their own extravagant sake. It wasn’t important anymore that I be the only person to grok it.

  In fact, there came a warm feeling as I turned the pages and thought — someday, someone else is going to get more out of this than I did.

  On Jijo, things get stored away that seem dead, but that only sleep.

  I’ve been pondering that very thought while lying here in constant pain, trying to bear it stoically whenever strange, silent beings barge into my cell to poke me with heat, cold, and prickly sharpness. I mean, should I feel hope as metal fingers probe my wounds? Or sour gloom that my blank-faced tenders refuse to answer any questions, or even to speak? Shall I dwell on my awful homesickness? Or on the contrary thrill over having discovered something wonderfully strange that no one on the Slope ever suspected, not since the g’Keks first sent their sneakship tumbling into the deep?

  Above all, I wondered — am I prisoner, patient, or specimen?

  Finally I realized — I just don’t have any framework to decide. Like the phrases in Joyce’s book, these beings seem at once both strangely familiar and completely unfathomable.

  Are they machines?

  Are they denizens of some ancient submarine civilization?

  Are they invaders? Do they see us as invaders?

  Are they Buyur?

  I’ve been avoiding thinking about what’s really eating away at me, inside.

  Come on, Alvin. Face up to it.

  I recall those final duras, when our beautiful Wuphon’s Dream shattered to bits. When her hull slammed against my spine. When my friends spilled into the metal monster’s mouth, immersed in cold, cold, cold, cruel water.

  They were alive then. Injured, dazed, but alive.

  Still alive when a hurricane of air forced out the horrid dark sea, leaving us to flop, wounded and half dead, down to a hard deck. And when sun-bright lights half-blinded us, and creepy spider-things stepped into the chamber to look over their catch.

  But memory blurs at that point, fading into a hazy muddle of images — until I awoke here, alone.

  Alone, and worried about my friends.

  XXVI. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE

  Legends

  We know that in the Five Galaxies, every star-faring race got its start through the process of uplift, receiving a boost to sapience from the patrons that adopted them. And those patrons were bestowed the same boon by earlier patrons, and so on, a chain of beneficence stretching all the way back to misty times wken there were more than five linked galaxies — back to the fabled Progenitors, who began the chain, so very long ago.

  Where did the Progenitors themselves come from?

  To some of the religious alliances that wrangle testily across the space lanes, that very question is anathema, or even likely to provoke a fight.

  Others deal with the issue by claiming that the ancient ones must have come from “somewhere else,” or that the Progenitors were transcendent beings who descended graciously from a higher plane in order to help sapient life get its start.

  Of course one might suggest that such facile answers simply beg the question, but it’s unwise to suggest it too loudly. Some august Galactics do not take it kindly when you point out their inconsistencies.

  Finally, there is one cult — the Affirmers — who hold the view that the Progenitors must have self-evolved on some planet, boot-strapping to full sapiency all by themselves — a prodigious, nigh-impossible feat. One might imagine that the Affirmers would be more friendly to Earthlings than most of the more fanatical alliances. After all, many Terrans still believe our race did the very same thing, uplifting ourselves in isolation, without help from anyone.

  Alas, don’t expect much sympathy from the Affirmers, who see it as arrogant hubris for mere wolflings to make such a claim. Self-uplift, they maintain, is a phenomenon of the highest and most sacred order — not for the likes of creatures like us.

  — A Pragmatist’s Introduction to Galactology, by Jacob Demwa, reprinted from the original by Tarek Printers Guild, Year-of-Exile 1892.

  Dwer

  It did no good to shout or throw stones at the glavers. The pair just retreated to watch from a distance with blank, globelike eyes, then resumed following when the human party moved on. Dwer soon realized there would be no getting rid of them. He’d have to shoot the beasts or ignore them.

  “You have other things to keep you busy, son,” Danel Ozawa ruled.

  It was an understatement.

  The clearing near the waterfall still reeked of urs, donkey, and simla when Dwer warily guided Danel’s group across the shallow ford. From then on, he borrowed a tactic from
the old wars, reconnoitering each day’s march the night before, counting on urrish diurnal habits to keep him safe from ambush — though urs were adaptable beings. They could be deadly even at night, as human fighters used to find out the hard way.

  Dwer hoped this group had lazy habits, after generations of peace.

  Rising at midnight, he would scout by the light of two smaller moons, sniffing warily each time the trail of hoofprints neared some plausible ambuscade. Then, at dawn, he would hurry back to help Danel’s donkey train plod ahead by day.

  Ozawa thought it urgent to catch up with the urrish band and negotiate an arrangement. But Dwer worried. How does he expect they’ll react? Embracing us like brothers? These are criminals. Like Rety’s band. Like us.

  The spoor grew fresher. Now the urs were just a week ahead of them, maybe just a few days.

  He began noting other traces. Soft outlines in the sand. Broken stone flakes. Fragments of a moccasin lace. Smudged campfires more than a month old.

  Rety’s band. The urs are heading straight for the heart of their territory.

  Danel took the news calmly. “They must figure as we did. The human sooners know a lot about life in these hills. That’s valuable experience, whether it can be bought, borrowed—”

  “Or tortured out of ’em,” Lena Strong finished, whetting one of her knives by the evening’s low red coals. “Some urrish clans used to keep human prisoners as drudges, before we broke ’em of the habit.”

  “A habit they learned from the queens. There’s no call to assume slavery is a natural urs behavior. For that matter, back on Old Earth humans used to—”

  “Yeah, well, we still have a problem,” Dwer interrupted. “What to do when we catch up.”

  “Right!” Lena inspected the knife-edge. “Do we pounce fast, taking the urs all bunched together? Or do it hoon-style — picking them off one at a time.”