by Brin, David
Acting with hot-blooded decisiveness, Ur-Jah and Les-ter call for volunteers to leap into that smoky pit, reckless of their own lives, heroically attempting rescue. But how could anyone survive within the wrecked station? Can anyone be found alive?
We all share the same thought. All members of the Six. All of my rings.
Who can doubt the power of the Egg? Or the fury of a planet scorned?
The Stranger
Doors seem to open with every song he rediscovers, as if old melodies are keys to unlock whole swaths of time. The earlier the memory, the more firmly it seems attached to a musical phrase or snippet of lyrics. Nursery rhymes, especially, take him swiftly down lanes of reclaimed childhood.
He can picture his mother now, singing to him in the safety of a warm room, lying sweetly with ballads about a world filled with justice and love-sweet lies that helped fix his temperament, even when he later learned the truth about a bitter, deadly universe.
A string of whimsical ditties brings back to mind the bearded twins, two brothers who for many years shared the Father Role in his family-web, a pair of incurable jokers who routinely set all six of the young web-sibs giggling uncontrollably at their quips and good-natured antics. Reciting some of the simplest verses over and over, he finds he can almost comprehend the crude punchlines-a real breakthrough. He knows the humor is puerile, infantile, yet he laughs and laughs at the old gag-songs until tears stream down his cheeks.
Arianafoo plays more records for him, and several release floods of excitement as he relives the operettas and musical plays he used to love in late adolescence. A human art form, to help ease the strain as he struggled, along with millions of other earnest young men and women, to grasp some of the lofty science of a civilization older than most of the brightest stars. He felt poignant pain in recovering much of what he once had been. Most words and facts remain alien, unobtainable-even his mother's name, or his own, for that matter-but at least he begins to feel like a living , being, a person with a past. A man whose actions once had meaning to others. Someone who had been loved.
Nor is music the only key! Paper offers several more. When the mood strikes, he snatches up a pencil and sketches with mad abandon, using up page after page, compelled to draw even though he knows each sheet must cost these impoverished folk dearly.
When he spies Prity doodling away, graphing a simple linear equation, he delightedly finds that he understands! Math was never his favored language, but now he discovers a new love for it. Apparently, numbers hadn't quite deserted him the way speech had.
There is one more communion that he realizes while being treated by Pzora, the squishy pile of donut-rings that used to frighten him so. It is a strange rapport, as foreign to words as day is to night. Robbed of speech, he seems better attuned to notice Pzora's nuances of smell and touch. Tickling shimmers course his body, triggered by the healer's ever-changing vapors. Again, his hands seem to flutter of their own accord, answering Pzora's scent-queries on a level he 'can only dimly perceive.
One does not need words to notice irony. Beings shaped much like this one had been his deadly foes-this he knew without recalling how. They were enemies to all his kind. How strange then that he should owe so much to a gentle pile of farting rings.
All these tricks and surprises offer slim rays of hope through his desolation, but it is music that seems the best route back to whoever he once was. When Arianafoo offers him a choice of instruments, laid out in a glass case, he selects one that seems simple enough to experiment with, to use fishing for more melodies, more keys to unlock doors.
His first awkward efforts to play the chosen instrument send, clashing noises down the twisty aisles of this strange temple of books, hidden beneath a cave of stone. He strives diligently and manages to unloose more recollections of childhood, but soon discovers that more recent memories are harder to shake free. Perhaps in later life he had less time to learn new songs, so there were fewer to associate with recent events.
Events leading to a fiery crash into that horrid swamp.
The memories are there, he knows. They still swarm through his dreams, as they once thronged his delirium. Impressions of vast, vacuum vistas. Of vital missions left undone. Of comrades he feels shamed to have forgotten.
Bent over the instrument with its forty-six strings, he hammers away, one and two notes at a time, seeking some cue, some tune or phrase that might break the jam-up in his mind. The more it eludes him, the more certain he grows that it is there.
He begins to suspect it is no human song he seeks, but something quite different. Something both familiar and forever strange.
That night, he dreams several times about water. It seems natural enough, since Sara had made it clear they would be departing on the steamboat tomorrow, leaving behind the great hall of paper books, heading for the mountain where the starship landed.
Another ship voyage might explain the vague, watery images.
Later, he knew better.
XXI. THE BOOK OF THE SEA
In traveling the downward path,
that of redemption,
be not unaware of what you seek.
To divorce your racial destiny
from your former clan,
from your associations,
from the patrons who first gave
your species speech,
and reason, and starflight.
You are saying that they failed
the first time.
That someone else should have
a new chance to adopt your kind
and try again.
There is nobility in this gamble.
Nobility and courage.
But do not expect gratitude from
those you have spurned.
--The Scroll of Exile
Alvin's Tale
THE DAY CAME. AFTER ALL OUR FANTASIES, preparations, and endless details, there we were at last, the four of us, standing by the open hatch of Wuphon's Dream.
"Shoulda built a raft instead," Huck muttered nervously, while static from her nearest wheel hub made my leg hair stand out. "There's lots of rivers we could've explored all summer, all by ourselves. Done some nice quiet fishing, too."
I was hyperventilating my throat sacs, as if packing their livid tissues with pure oxygen would help much where we were going! Fortunately, Tyug had provided each of us with mild relaxant drugs, which might explain Ur-ronn's easy composure.
"I couldn't've gone on a raft," Ur-ronn replied, in flat deadpan tones. "I'd've gotten wet."
We all turned to stare at her, then each of us, in our own way, burst out laughing. Pincer whistled, Huck guffawed, and I umbled till it hurt. Oh, Ur-ronn-what a character!
"You're right," added Pincer-Tip. "The hot-air balloon would have been a much better plan. Let's talk Uriel into doing a retrofit-fit."
"Hush up, you two!" Huck chided, a little unfairly, since she had started it. We all turned as Uriel approached, Tyug following two paces behind. The traeki's little partial, Ziz, now recovered from its distending ordeal, lay back in its assigned cage, under the Dream's bubble window.
"You have your charts?" Uriel inspected Pincer's pouch to make sure. Made of laminated plastic by a human-invented process, the sheets were tough, durable, and therefore somewhat less than legal. But we were heading for the Midden anyway, so wasn't it all right? We had studied the course chosen by Uriel, to follow as soon as the Dream's wheels touched the muddy bottom.
"Compass?"
Both Pincer and Ur-ronn were equipped. Huck's magnetically driven axles shouldn't interfere much, if she didn't get too excited.
"We've gone over contingency tactics and rehearsed as nuch as fossifle, given our haste. I hope." Uriel shook her head in the manner of a human expressing regret. "There's just one thing left to cover, an ovject you are to seek out, while down there. A thing I need you to find."
Huck craned an eyestalk around to semaphore me.
See? I told you so! she flashed in visual GalTwo. Huck h
ad maintained for days that there must be some item Uriel desperately wanted. An ulterior motive for all this support. Something we alone, with our amateur bathy, were qualified to find. I ignored her smug boast. The problem with Huck is that she's right just often enough to let her think it's a law of nature.
"This is what you are looking for," Uriel said, lifting up a sketch pad so that no one but we four could see, showing a spiky shape with six points, like a piece in a child's game of jacks. Tendrils, or long cables, stretched outward from two of the arms, trailing in opposite directions off the page. I wondered if it might be some kind of living thing.
"It is an artifact we need rather urgently," Uriel went on. "Even nore infortant than the artifact, however, is the strand of wire running away fron it. It is this strand that you seek, that you shall seize and fasten with the retrieval cord, so that we can haul it vack."
Sheesh, I thought. The four of us were modernist gloss-junkies who would gladly raid the Midden for treasure, even in defiance of the Scrolls. But now to have a sage order us to do that very thing? No wonder she preferred not letting nearby citizens in on this heresy!
"Will do!" Pincer exclaimed, briefly teetering on two legs in order to salute with three. As for the rest of us, we already stood on the ramp. What were we going to do? Use this as an excuse to back out?
All right, I considered it. So strap me to the Egg and sing till I confess.
I was the last one aboard-unless you count Huphu, who scampered through my legs as I was about to dog the hatch. I tightened the wheel and the skink-bladder seals spread thin, oozing like immunity caulk between a traeki's member rings. The closing shut us off from nearly all sound-except the hissing, gurgling, rumbling, and sighing of four frightened kids just coming to realize what a fix all their humicking daydreams had gotten them into.
It took half a midura to make certain the air system and dehumidifiers worked. Pincer and Ur-ronn went over a checklist up front and Huck tested her steering bars, while I squatted in the very back with nothing to do but stroke the crank that I would use, whenever the Dream needed the services of an "engine." To pass the time, I umbled Huphu, whose claws were a welcome distraction, scratching a nervous itch that tickled the outer surface of my heart spine.
If we die, please let Uriel at least drag our bodies home, I thought, and maybe it was a prayer, like humans often do in tight spots, according to books I've read. Let my folks have a life-bone for vuphyning, to help them in their grief and disappointment over how I misspent the investment of their love.
XXII. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
Legends
Anyone who travels by riverboat, and listens to the compelling basso of a hoonisn helmsman, knows something of the process that once made them starfaring beings.
For one thing, the sound is clearly where their race-name comes from. According to legend, the Guthatsa patrons who originally adopted and uplilted presapient hoon were entranced by the musical trait. While splicing in speech, reason, and other niceties, the Guthatsa also worked to enhance the penetrating, vibrant output of the hoonisn throat sac, so that it might enrich their clients' adulthood, when they took up mature responsibilities in Galactic society.
It would, the Guthatsa predicted, help make the hoon better patrons when their turn came to pass on the gift of wisdom, continuing the billion-year-old cycle of intellect in the Five Galaxies.
Today we know our hoonish neighbors as patient, decent folk, slow to anger, though doughty in a fix. It is hard to reconcile this image with the reaction of urrish and later human settlers, on first learning that the Tall Ones dwelled on Jijo--a response of animosity and fear.
Whatever the initial reasons for that loathing, it soon ebbed, then vanished within a single generation. Whatever quarrels divided our star-god ancestors, we on Jijo do not share them. These days, it is hard to find anyone among the Six who can claim not to like the hoon.
Yet there remains a mystery--why do they dwell on Jijo at all? Unlike other races of the Six, they tell no tale of persecution, or even of a quest for breeding space. When asked why their sneakship defied great odds to seek this hidden refuge, they shrug and cannot answer.
A sole clue lies in the Scroll of Redemption, where we read of an inquiry by the last glaver sage, who asked a first-generation hoonish settler why his folk came, and got this deeply-umbled answer--
"To this (cached) haven, we came, (in hope) seeking.
"On a (heartfelt) quest to recover the (lamented) spines of (lost) youth.
"Here we were sent, on the advice of (wise, secret) oracles.
"Nor was the (danger-ridden) trip in vain.
"For behold what, in (delighted) surprise, we already have won!"
At that point, the hoon colonist was said to point at a crude raft, fashioned from boo logs and sealed with tree sap--earliest precursor of all the vessels to follow, plying Jijo's rivers and seas.
From our perspective, a thousand years later, it is hard to interpret the meaning of it all. Can any of us today imagine our shaggy friends without boats? If we try to picture them cruising space in starships, do we not envision those, too, running before storm and tide, sluicing their way between planets by keel, rudder, and sail?
By that logic, does it not follow that urs once "galloped" across Galactic prairies, with stellar winds blowing their waving tails? Or that any star-craft fashioned by humans ought to resemble a tree?
--from A Re-appraisal of Jijoan Folklore,
by Ur-Kintoon and Herman Chang-Jones
Tarek City Printers, Year-of-Exile 1901.
Dwer
IT WAS A MIDURA PAST NIGHTFALL WHEN THE EMBER crossed the sky, a flicker that grew briefly as it streaked by, crossing the heavens to descend southeast. Dwer knew it was no meteor, because the spark traveled below the clouds.
Only after it was gone, dropping beyond the next rank of forested knolls, did he hear a low, muttering purr, barely above the rustling of the tree branches.
Dwer might never have noticed if his dinner had agreed with him. But his bowels had been shaky ever since the four humans began supplementing their meager supplies with foraged foods. So he sat at the makeshift latrine, in a cleft between two hills, waiting for his innards to decide whether to accept or reject his hard-won evening meal.
The others were no better off. Danel and Jenin never complained, but Lena blamed Dwer while her intestines growled.
"Some mighty hunter. You've been over the pass dozens of times and can't tell what's poison from what's not?"
"Please, Lena," Jenin had asked. "You know Dwer never crossed the Venom Plain. All he can do is look for stuff that's like what he knows."
Danel tried his hand at peacemaking. "Normally, we'd eat the donkeys as their packs lightened. But they're weak after recent stream-crossings, and we can't spare any from carrying our extra gear."
He referred to the weight of books, tools, and special packages that were meant to make human life beyond the Rimmers somewhat more than purely savage. If it was finally decided to stay here forever. Dwer still hoped it wouldn't come to that.
"One thing we do know," Danel went on. "Humans can survive here in the Gray Hills, and without all the vat processes we're used to back home. Right now we're adjusting to some local microbes, I'm sure. If the sooner band got used to them, so can we."
Yes, Dwer had thought, but survival doesn't mean comfort. If Rety's any indication, these sooners are a grumpy lot. Maybe we're getting a taste of how they got that way.
Things might improve once Danel set up vats of his own, growing some of the yeasty cultures that made many Jijoan foods palatable to humans, but there would be no substitutes for the traeki-refined enzymes that turned bitter ping fruit and bly-yoghurt into succulent treats. Above all, Dwer and the other newcomers would count on the sooners to explain which local foods to avoid.
Assuming they cooperate. Rety's relatives might not appreciate having the new order-of-life explained to them. I wouldn't either, in their position. While Danel
was skilled at negotiation and persuasion, Dwer's role would be to back up the sage's words, giving them force of law.
From Rety's testimony, her tribe likely totaled no more than forty adults. The social structure sounded like a typical macho-stratified hunting band-a standard human devolution pattern that old Fallon long ago taught Dwer to recognize-with a fluid male-ranking order enforced by bluster, personal intimidation, and violence.
The preferred approach to ingathering such a group, worked out by Dwer's predecessors, was to make contact swiftly and dazzle the sooners with gifts before shock could turn into hostility, buying time to map the web .of alliances and enmities within the band. After that, the procedure was to choose some promising middle-ranked males and help those candidates perform a coup, ousting the formerly dominant group of bully boys, whose interest lay in keeping things as they were. The new leaders were then easy to persuade to "come home."
It was a time-tested technique, used successfully by others faced with the task of retrieving wayward human clans. Ideally, it shouldn't prove necessary to kill anybody.
Ideally.
In truth, Dwer hated this part of his job.
You knew it might come to this. Now you pay for all the freedom you've had.
If gentle suasion didn't work, the next step was to call in militia and hunt down every stray. The same hard price had been agreed to by every sept in the Commons, as an alternative to war and damnation.
But this time things are different.
This time we don't have any law on our side-except the law of survival.
Instead of bringing illegal settlers back to the Slope, Ozawa planned to take over Rety's band. Guiding them toward a different way of life, but one still hidden from sight.