The Uplift War

by David Brin

  “We Earthlings know better than most how unfair life can be. Perhaps not since the Progenitors themselves has a clan understood so well. Our beloved human patrons nearly destroyed our more beloved Earth before they learned wisdom. Chims and dolphins and gorillas are only the beginnings of what would have been lost had they not grown up in time.”

  Her voice dropped, went hushed. “As the true Garthlings were lost, fifty thousand years ago, before they ever got the chance to blink in amazement at a night sky and wonder, for the first time, what that light was that glimmered in their minds.”

  Gailet shook her head. “No. The war to protect Potential has gone on for many aeons. It did not finish here. It may, indeed, never end.”

  When Gailet turned away there was at first only a long, stunned silence. The applause that followed was scattered and uncomfortable. But when she returned to Sylvie’s and Fiben’s embrace, Gailet smiled faintly.

  “That’s tellin’ ’em,” he said to her.

  Then, inevitably, it was Fiben’s turn. Megan Oneagle read a list of accomplishments that had obviously been gone over by some publicity department hack in order to hide how dirty and smelly and founded on simple dumb luck it all had been. Read aloud this way, it all sounded unfamiliar. Fiben hardly remembered doing half the stuff attributed to him.

  It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why he’d been selected to go last. Probably, he assumed, it had been out of pure spite. Following an act like Gailet will be pure murder, he realized.

  Megan called him forward. The hated shoes almost made him trip as he made his way to the dais. He saluted the Planetary Coordinator and tried to stand straight as she pinned on some garish medal and an insignia making him a reserve colonel in the Garth Defense Forces. The cheers of the crowd, especially the chims, made his ears feel hot, and it only got worse when, per Gailet’s instructions, he grinned and waved for the cameras.

  Okay, so maybe I can stand this, in small doses.

  When Megan offered him the podium Fiben stepped forward. He had a speech of sorts, scrawled out on sheets in his pocket. But after listening to Gailet he decided he had better merely tell them all thank you and then sit down again.

  Struggling to adjust the podium downward, he began. “There’s just one thing I want to say, and that’s—YOWP!”

  He jerked as sudden electricity coursed through his left foot. Fiben hopped, grabbing the offended member, but then another shock hit his right foot! He let out a shriek. Fiben glanced down just in time to see a small blue brightness emerge slightly from beneath the podium and reach out now for both ankles. He leaped, hooting loudly, two meters into the air—alighting atop the wooden lectern.

  Panting, it took him a moment to separate the panicked roaring in his ears from the hysterical cheering of the crowd. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and stared.

  Chims were standing on their folding chairs and waving their arms. They were jumping up and down, howling. Confusion reigned in the ranks of the polished militia honor guard. Even the humans were laughing and clapping uproariously.

  Fiben glanced, dumbfounded, back at Gailet and Sylvie, and the pride in their eyes explained what it all meant.

  They thought that was my prepared speech! he realized.

  In retrospect he saw how perfect it was, indeed. It broke the tension and seemed an ideal commentary on how it felt to be at peace again.

  Only I didn’t write it, damnit!

  He saw a worried look on the face of his lordship the mayor of Port Helenia. No! Next they’ll have me running for office! Who did this to me?

  Fiben searched the crowd and noticed immediately that one person was reacting differently, completely unsurprised. He stood out from the rest of the crowd partly due to his widely separated eyes and waving tendrils, but also because of his all too human expression of barely contained mirth.

  And there was something else, some nonthing that Fiben somehow sensed was there, floating above the laughing Tymbrimi’s wafting coronae.

  Fiben sighed. And if looks alone could maim, Earth’s greatest friends and allies would have to send a replacement ambassador to the posting on Garth right away.

  When Athaclena winked at Fiben, it just confirmed his suspicions.

  “Very funny,” Fiben muttered caustically under his breath, even as he forced out another grin and waved again to the cheering crowds.

  “T’rifically funny, Uthacalthing.”

  Postscript and Acknowledgments

  First we feared the other creatures who shared the Earth with us. Then, as our power grew, we thought of them as our property, to dispose of however we wished. The most recent fallacy (a rather nice one, in comparison) has been to play up the idea that the animals are virtuous in their naturalness, and it is only humanity who is a foul, evil, murderous, rapacious canker on the lip of creation. This view says that the Earth and all her creatures would be much better off without us.

  Only lately have we begun embarking upon a fourth way of looking at the world and our place in it. A new view of life.

  If we evolved, one must ask, are we then not like other mammals in many ways? Ways we can learn from? And where we differ, should that not also teach us?

  Murder, rape, the most tragic forms of mental illnesses—all of these we are now finding among the animals as well as ourselves. Brainpower only exaggerates the horror of these dysfunctions in us. It is not the root cause. The cause is the darkness in which we have lived. It is ignorance.

  We do not have to see ourselves as monsters in order to teach an ethic of environmentalism. It is now well known that our very survival depends upon maintaining complex ecological networks and genetic diversity. If we wipe out Nature, we ourselves will die.

  But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure.

  Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers.

  The author gratefully acknowledges his debt to those who looked over this work in manuscript form, helping with everything from aspects of natural simian behavior to correcting bad grammar outside quotation marks.

  I want to thank Anita Everson, Nancy Grace, Kristie McCue, Louise Root, Nora Brackenbury, and Mark Grygier for their valued insights. Professor John Lewis and Ruth Lewis also offered observations, as did Frank Catalano, Richard Spahl, Gregory Benford, and Daniel Brin. Thanks also to Steve Hardesty, Sharon Sosna, Kim Bard, Rick Sturm, Don Coleman, Sarah Bartter, and Bob Goold.

  To Lou Aronica, Alex Berman, and Richard Curtis, my gratitude for their patience.

  And to our hairy cousins, I offer my apologies. Here, have a banana and a beer.

  David Brin

  November 1986

  DAVID BRIN is the author of many other previous novels, Sundiver, The Uplift War, Startide Rising, The Practice Effect, The Postman, Heart of the Comet (with Gregory Benford), Earth, Glory Season, and Brightness Reef, as well as the short-story collections The River of Time and Otherness. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and has been a NASA consultant and a physics professor. He lives in southern California.

  SARA

  There is a word-glyph.

  It names a locale where three states of matter coincide—two that are fluid, swirling past a third that is adamant as coral.

  A kind of froth can form in such a place. Dangerous, deceptive foam, beaten to a head by fate-filled tides. No one enters such a turmoil voluntarily.

  But sometimes a force called desperation drives prudent sailors to set course for ripping shoals.

  A slender shape plummets through the outer fringes of a mammoth star. Caterpillar-ribbed, with rows of talonlike protrusions that bite into spacetime, the vessel claws its way urgently against a bitter gale.

  Diffuse flames lick the scarred hull of ancient cerametal, adding new layers to a strange soot coating. Tendrils of plasma fire seek entry, thwarted (so fa
r) by wavering fields.

  In time, the heat will find its way through.

  Midway along the vessel’s girth, a narrow wheel turns, like a wedding band that twists around a nervous finger. Rows of windows pass by as the slim ring rotates. Unlit from within, most of the dim panes only reflect stellar fire.

  Then, rolling into view, a single rectangle shines with artificial color.

  A pane for viewing in two directions. A universe without, and within.

  Contemplating the maelstrom, Sara mused aloud.

  “My criminal ancestors took their sneakship through this same inferno on their way to Jijo … covering their tracks under the breath of Great Izmunuti.”

  Pondering the forces at work just a hand’s breadth away, she brushed her fingertips against the crystal surface that kept actinic heat from crossing the narrow gap. One part of her—book-weaned and tutored in mathematics—could grasp the physics of a star whose radius was bigger than her homeworld’s yearly orbit. A red giant, in its turgid final stage, boiling a rich stew of nuclear-cooked atoms toward the black vacuum of space.

  Abstract knowledge was fine. But Sara’s spine also trembled with a superstitious shiver, spawned by her upbringing as a savage sooner on a barbarian world. This Earthship, Streaker, might be hapless prey—desperately fleeing a titanic hunter many times its size—but the dolphin-crewed vessel still struck Sara as godlike and awesome, carrying more mass than all the wooden dwellings of the Slope. In her wildest dreams, dwelling in a treehouse next to a groaning water mill, she never imagined that destiny might take her on such a ride, swooping through the fringes of a hellish star.

  Especially Izmunuti, whose very name was fearsome. To the Six Races, huddling in secret terror on Jijo, it stood for the downward path. A door that swung just one way, toward exile.

  For two thousand years, emigrants had slinked past the giant star to find shelter on Jijo. First the wheeled g’Kek race, frantically evading genocide. Then came traekis—gentle stacks of waxy rings who were fleeing their own tyrannical relations—followed by qheuens, hoons, urs, and humans, all settling in a narrow realm between the Rimmer Mountains and a surf-stained shore. Each wave of new arrivals abandoned their starships, computers, and other high-tech implements, sending every god-machine down to the sea, tumbling into Jijo’s deep midden or forgetfulness. Breaking with the past, all six clans of former skylords settled down to rustic lives, renouncing the sky forever.

  Until the Civilization of the Five Galaxies finally stumbled on the commonwealth of outcasts.

  The day had to come, sooner or later; the Sacred Scrolls had said so. No band of trespassers could stay hidden perpetually. Not in a cosmos that had been catalogued for over a billion years, where planets such as Jijo were routinely declared fallow, set aside for rest and restoration. Still, the sages of the Commons of Jijo had hoped for more time.

  Time for the exile races to prepare. To purify themselves. To seek redemption. To forget the galactic terrors that made them outcasts in the first place.

  The Scrolls also foresaw that august magistrates from the Galactic Migration Institute would alight to judge the descendants of trespassers. But instead, the starcraft that pierced Jijo’s veil this fateful year carried several types of outlaws. First gene raiders, then murderous opportunists, and finally a band of Earthling refugees even more ill-fated than Sara’s hapless ancestors.

  I used to dream of riding a starship, she thought, pondering the plasma storm outside. But no fantasy was ever like this—fleeing with dolphins through a fiery night, chased by a battleship full of angry Jophur.

  Fishlike cousins of humans, pursued through space by egotistical cousins of traeki.

  The coincidence beggared Sara’s imagination.

  Anglic words broke through her musing, in a voice Sarah always found vexingly sardonic.

  “I have finished calculating the hyperspatial tensor, oh Sage.

  “It appears you were right in your earlier estimate. The mysterious beam that emanated from Jijo a while ago did more than cause disrumptions in this giant star. It also triggered a state-change in a fossil dimensional-nexus, lying dormant just half a mictaar away.”

  Sara mentally translated into terms she was used to, from the archaic texts that had schooled her.

  Half a mictaar. In flat space, that would come to roughly a twientieth of a parsec.

  Very close, indeed.

  “So, the beam reactivated an old transfer point.” She nodded. “I knew it.”

  “Your foresight would be more impressive if I understood your methods. Humans are noted for making lucky guesses.”

  Sara turned away from the fiery spectacle outside. The office they had given her seemed like a palace, roomier than the reception hall in a qheuen rookery, with lavish fixtures she had only seen described in books two centuries out of date. This suite once belonged to a man named Ignacio Metz—killed during one of Streaker’s previous dire encounters—an expert in the genetic-uplifting of dolphins. A true scientist, not a primitive with academic pretensions, like Sara.

  From the desk-console, a twisted blue blob drifted closer—a languid, undulating shape she found as insolent as the voice it emitted.

  “Your so-called wolfling mathematics hardly seems up to the task of predicting such profound effects on the continuum. Why not just admit that you had a hunch?”

  Sara bit her lip. She would not give the Niss Machine the satisfaction of a hot response.

  “Show me the tensor,” she ordered tersely. “And a chart … a graphic … that includes all three gravity wells.”

  The billowing holographic creature managed to imply sarcasm with an obedient bow.

  “As you wish.”

  A cubic display two meters on a side lit up before Sara, far more vivid than the illustrations she had grown up with—flat, unmoving diagrams printed on paper pages.

  A glowing mass roiled in the center, representing Izmunuti, a fireball glowing the color of wrath. Tendrils of its engorged corona waved like medusan hair, reaching beyond the limits of any normal solar system. But those lacy filaments were fast being drowned under a new disturbance. During the last few miduras, something had stirred the star to an abnormal fit of rage. Abrupt cycolinic storms began throwing up gouts of dense plasma, tornado-like funnels, rushing far into space.

  And we’re going to pass through some of the worst of it, she thought.

  How strange that all this violent upheaval might have originated in a boulder of psi-active stone back home on primitive Jijo. Yet she felt sure it was all triggered somehow by the Holy Egg.

  Already half-immersed in this commotion, a green pinpoint plunged toward Izmunuti at frantic speed, aimed at a glancing near-passage, its hyperbolic orbit marked by a line that bent sharply around the giant star. In one direction, that slim trace led all the way back to Jijo, where Streaker’s escape attempt had begun two exhausting days ago, breaking for liberty amid a crowd of ancient derelicts—reactivated from ocean bottom junk piles for one last, glorious, screaming run through space.

  One by one, those decoys had failed, or dropped out, or were snared by the enemy’s clever capture-boxes, until only Streaker remained, plummeting for the brief shelter of stormy Izmunuti.

  As for the forward direction …

  Instrument readings relayed by the bridge crew enabled the Niss Machine to calculate their likely heading. Apparently, Gillian Baskin had ordered a course change, taking advantage of a gravitational slingshot around the star to fling Streaker toward galactic north and east.

  Sara swallowed hard. The destination had originally been her idea. But as time passed, she grew less certain.

  “The new T-point doesn’t look very stable,” she commented, following the ship’s planned trajectory to the top left corner of the holo unit, where a tight mesh of curling lines funneled through an empty-looking zone of interstellar space. Reacting to her close regard, the display monitor enhanced that section. Rows of symbols glowed, showing details of the local hyper spa
tial matrix.

  She had predicted this wonder—the reawakening of something old. Something marvelous. For a brief while, it had seemed like just the miracle they needed. A gift from the Holy Egg. An escape route from a terrible trap.

  But on examining the analytical profiles, Sara concluded that the cosmos was not being all that helpful, after all.

  “There are connection tubes opening up to other spacetime locales. But they seem rather … scanty.”

  “Well, what can you expect from a nexus that is only a few miduras old? One that was only recently yanked from slumber by a force neither of us can grasp?”

  After a pause, the Niss unit continued. “Most of the transfer stigmata leading away from this nexus are still on the order of a Planck width. Some promising threads do appear to be coalescing, and may even be safely traversable by a starship, in a matter of weeks. Of course, that will be of little use to us.”

  Sara nodded. The pursuing Jophur battleship would hardly give Streaker that much time. Already the mighty Polkjhy had abandoned its string of captured decoys in order to focus all its attention on the real Streaker, keeping the Earthship bathed in long-range scanning rays.

  “Then what does Gillian Baskin hope to accomplish by heading toward a useless …”

  She blinked, as realization lurched within her rib cage.

  “Oh. I see.”

  Sara stepped back, and the display resumed its normal scale. Two meters away, at the opposite comer, neat curves showed the spatial patterns of another transfer point. The familiar, reliably predictable one that every sneakship had used to reach Izmunuti during the last two millennia. The only quick way in or out of this entire region of Galaxy Four.

  But not always. Once, when Jijo had been a center of commerce and civilization under the mighty Buyur, traffic used to flux through two hyperdimensional nexi. One of them shut down when Jijo went fallow, half a million years ago, coincidentally soon after the Buyur departed.