by David Brin
"Water just ahead."
That was the message, sent back by Jeni Shen.
So, Lark thought. I was right.
Then he added-
So far.
The liquid was oily and cold. It gave off a musty aroma. None of which stopped two eager young blues from creeping straight into the black pool, trailing mule-fiber line from a spool. Hoons with hand pumps kept busy inundating air bladders while Lark steeled himself to enter that dark, wet place.
Having second thoughts?
Jeni checked his protective suit of skink membranes. It might ward off the chill, but that was the least- of Lark's worries.
I can take cold. But there bad better be enough air.
The bladders were an untested innovation. Each was a traeki ring, thick-ribbed to hold gas under pressure. Jeni affixed one to his back, and showed him how to breathe through its fleshy protrusion-a rubbery tentacle that would provide fresh air and scrub the old.
You grow up depending on traeki-secreted chemicals to make native foods edible, and traeki-distilled alcohol to liven celebrations. A traeki pharmacist makes your medicine in a chem-synth ring. Yet you're revolted by the thought of putting one of these things in your mouth.
It tasted like a slimy tallow candle.
Across the narrow chamber, Ling and Rann adjusted quickly to thisJijoan novelty. Of course they had no history to overcome, associating traekis with mulch and rotting garbage.
"Come on," Jeni chided in a low voice that burned his ears. "Don't gag on me, man. You're a sage now. Others are watchin'!"
He nodded-two quick head jerks-and tried again. Fitting his teeth around the tube, Lark bit down as she had taught. The burst of air did not stink as bad as expected. Perhaps it contained a mild relaxant. The pharmacist designers were clever about such things.
Let's hope their star-god cousins don't think of this, as well.
That assumption underlay Lark's plan. Jophur commanders might be wary against direct subterranean assault. But where the buried route combined with water, the invaders might not expect trouble.
The Rothen underestimated us. By Ifni and the Egg, the Jophur may do the same.
Each diver also wore a rewq symbiont to protect the eyes and help them see by the dim light Of hand-carried phosphors. Webbed gloves and booties completed the ensemble.
Ling's tripping laughter made him turn around, and Lark saw she was pointing at him as she guffawed.
"You should talk," he retorted at the ungainly creature she had become, more monstrous than an unmasked Rothen. Hoons paused from laying down cargo by the waterline, and joined in the mirth, umbling good-naturedly while their pet noors grinned with needlelike teeth.
Lark pictured the scene up above, past overlying layers of rock, in the world of light. The Jophur dreadnought squatted astride the mountain glen, thwarting the glade stream in its normal seaward rush. The resulting lake now stretched more than a league uphill.
Water seeks its own level. We must now be several arrowflights from shore. That's a long way to swim before we get to the lake itself.
It couldn't be helped. Their goal was hard to reach, in more ways than one.
Bubbles in the pool. One qheuen cupola broached the surface, followed by another. The young blues crawled ashore, breathing heavily through multiple leg vents, reporting in excited GalSix.
"The way to open water-it is clear. Good time-this we made. To the target-we shall now escort you."
Cheers lifted from the hoons and urs, but Lark felt no stirring. They weren't the ones who would have to go the rest of the way.
Water transformed the cavities and grottoes. Flippers kicked up clouds of silt, filling the phosphor beams with a myriad of distracting speckles. Lark's trusty rewq pulled tricks with polarization, transforming the haze to partial clarity. Still, it took concentration to avoid colliding with jagged limestone outcrops. The guide rope saved him from getting lost.
Cave diving felt a lot like being a junior sage of the Commons-an experience he never sought or foresaw in his former life as a scientist heretic.
How ungainly swimming humans appeared next to the graceful young qheuens, who seized the rugged walls with flashing claws, propelling themselves with uncanny agility, nearly as at-home in freshwater as on solid ground.
His skin grew numb where the skink coverings pulled loose. Other parts grew hot from exertion. More upsetting was the squirmy traeki tentacle in his mouth, anticipating his needs in unnerving ways. It would not let him hold his breath, as a man might do while concentrating on some near-term problem, but tickled his throat to provoke an exhalation. The first time it happened, he nearly retched. (What if he chucked up breakfast? Would he and the ring both asphyxiate? Or would it take his gift as a tasty, predigested bonus?)
Lark was so focused on the guide rope that he missed the transition from stony catacombs to a murky plain of sodden meadows, drowned trees, and drifting debris. But soon the silty margins fell behind as daylight transformed the Glade of Gathering-now the bottom of an upland lake-giving commonplace shapes macabre unfamiliarity.
The guide rope passed near a stand of lesser boo whose surviving stems were tall enough to reach the surface, far overhead. Qheuens gathered around one tube, sucking down drafts of air. When sated, they spiraled around Lark and the humans, nudging them toward the next stretch of guide rope.
Long before details loomed through the silty haze, he made out their target by its glow. Rann and Ling thrashed flippers, passing Jeni in their haste. By the time Lark caught up, they were pressing hands against a giant slick sarcophagus, the hue of yellow moonrise. Within lay a cigarshaped vessel, the Rothen ship, their home away from home, now sealed in a deadly trap.
The two starfarers split up, he swimming right and she left. By silent agreement, Jeni accompanied the big man- despite their size difference, she was the one more qualified to keep an eye on Rann. Lark kept near Ling, watching as she moved along the golden wall.
Though he had more experience than other Sixers with Galactic god machines, it was his first time near this interloper whose dramatic coming so rudely shattered Gathering Festival, many weeks ago. So magnificent and terrible it had seemed! Daunting and invincible. Yet now it was helpless. Dead or implacably imprisoned.
Tentatively, Lark identified some features, like the jutting anchors that held a ship against quantum probability fluctuations . . . whatever that meant. The self-styled techies who worked for Lester Cambel were hesitant about even the basics of starcraft design. As for the High Sage himself, Lester had taken no part in Lark's briefing, choosing instead to brood in his tent, guilt-ridden over the doom he helped bring on Dooden Mesa.
Despite the crowding sense of danger, Lark. discovered a kind of spooky beauty, swimming in this realm where sunlight slanted in long rippling shafts, filled with sparkling motes-a silent, strangely contemplative world.
Besides, even wrapped in skink membranes, Ling's athletic body was a sight to behold.
They rounded the star cruiser's rim, where a sharp shadow abruptly cut off the sun. It might be a cloud, or the edge of a mountain. Then he realized-
It's the jophur ship.
Though blurred by murky water, the domelike outline sent shivers down his back. Towering mightily at the lake's edge, it could have swallowed the Rothen vessel whole.
A strange thought struck him.
First the Rothen awed us. Then we saw their "majesty" cut down by real power. What if it happens again? What kind of newcomer might overwhelm the fophur''A hovering mountain range? One that throws the whole Slope into
night? He pictured successive waves of "ships," each vaster
than before, matching first the moons, then all Jijo, and- why not?-the sun or even mighty Izmunuti!
Imagination is the most amazing thing. It lets a groundhugging savage fill his mind with fantastic unlikelihoods.
Churning bubbles nearly tore the rewq off his face as Ling sped up, kicking urgently. Lark hurried after . . . only to arr
est himself moments later, staring.
Just ahead, Ling traced the golden barrier with one hand, just meters from a gaping opening. A hatchway, backlit by a radiant interior. Several figures stood in the portal-three humans and a Rothen lord, wearing his appealing symbiotic mask. The quartet surveyed their all-enclosing golden prison with instruments, wearing expressions of concern.
Yet, all four bipeds seemed frozen, embedded in crystal time.
Up close, the yellow cocoon resembled the preservation beads left by that alpine mule spider, the one whose mad collecting fetish nearly cost Dwer and Rety their lives, months back. But this trap was no well-shaped ovoid. It resembled a partly melted candle, with overlapping golden puddles slumped around its base. The Jophur had been generous in their gift of frozen temporality, pouring enough to coat the ship thoroughly.
Like at Dooden Mesa, Lark thought.
It seemed an ideal way to slay one's enemies without using destructive fire. Maybe the Jophur can't risk damaging Jijo's ecospbere. That would be a major crime before the great Institutes, like gene raiding and illegal settlement.
On the other hand, the untraeki invaders hadn't been so scrupulous in scything the forest around their ship. So perhaps the golden trap had another purpose. To capture, rather than kill? Perhaps the g'Kek denizens of Dooden Mesa might yet be rescued from their shimmering tomb.
That had been Lark's initial thought, three days ago. In hurried experiments, more mule-spider relics were thawed out, using the new traeki solvents. Some of the preserved items had once been alive, birds and bush creepers that long ago fell into the spider's snare.
All emerged from their cocoons quite dead.
Perhaps the Jophur have better revival methods, Lark thought at the time. Or else they don't mean to restore their victims, only to preserve them as timeless trophies.
Then, night before last, an idea came to Lark in the form of a dream.
The hivvern lays its eggs beneath deep snow, which melts in the spring, letting each egg sink in slushy mud, which then hardens all around. Yet the ground softens again, when rainy season comes. Then the bivvern larva emerges, swimming free.
When he wakened, the idea was there, entire.
A spaceship has a sealed metal shell, like the hivvern egg. The Rothen ship may be trapped, but its crew were never touched.
Those within may yet live.
And now proof stood before him. The four in the hatchway were clearly aware of the golden barrier surrounding their ship, examining it with tools at hand.
Just one problem-they did not move. Nor was there any sign they knew? they were being observed from just a hoon's length away.
Treading water, Ling scrawled on her wax-covered note board and raised it for Lark to see.
TIME DIFFERENT INSIDE.
He fumbled with his own board, tethered to his waist.
TIME SLOWER?
Her answer was confusing. PERHAPS.
OR ELSE QUANTIZED. FRAME-SHIFTED.
His perplexed look conveyed more than written words. Ling wiped the board and scratched again.
DO EXACTLY AS I DO.
He nodded, watching her carefully. Ling swished her arms and legs to turn away from the ship. Imitating her, Lark found himself looking across the poor wounded Glade. All the trees had been shattered by ravening beams, left to submerge under the rising lake. Turbid water made everything hazy, but Lark thought he saw? bones mixed among the splinters. Urrish ribs and hoonish spines, jumbled with grinning human skulls. Not the way bodies ought to be drossed. Not respectful of the dead, or Jijo.
Perhaps theJophur will let us seed a mule spider in this new lake, he mused. Something ought to be done to clean up the mess.
He was jarred by Ling's nudge. TURN BACK NOW, her wax board said. Lark copied her maneuver again . . . and stared in surprise for a second time.
They had moved!'
As before, statues stood in the hatchway. Only now their poses were all changed! One human pointed outward wearing an amazed look. Another seemed to peer straight at Lark, as if frozen in midrealization.
They did all this while we were turned away? Time's flow within the golden shell was stranger than he could begin to comprehend.
THIS MAY TAKE SOME DOING, Ling Wrote.
Lark met her eyes, noting they held tense, hopeful irony.
He nodded.
You could say that again.
I SPENT MOST OF THE RETURN TRIP WITH MY NOSE buried in my journal, reviewing all the things that I've seen and heard since Wuphon's Dream plunged below Terminus Rock. Pincer kindly chewed my pencil to a point for me. Then I lay down and wrote down the section before this one.
What began as a guess grew into reinforced conviction.
Concentration also diverted attention from nervous anticipation and the pain in my slowly healing spine. My friends tried wheedling me, but I lapsed into hoonish stubbornness, refusing to confide in them. After all, the phuvnthus had gone to great lengths to hide their identity.
The spinning voice said it was to protect us. Maybe that was just patronizing glaver dreck. Typical from grown-ups. But what if he told the truth? How can I risk my friends?
When the time comes, I'll confront the voice alone.
SHE DRIFTED IN A CLOUD OF MATHEMATICS. All around her floated arcs and conic sections, glowing, as though made of enduring fire. Meteors streaked past, coruscating along paths smoothly ordained by gravity.
Then more stately shapes joined the frolicking figures and she guessed they might be planets whose routes were elliptical, not parabolic. Each had its own reference frame, around which all other masses seemed to move.
Rising, falling ...
Rising, falling ...
The dance spoke of a lost science she had studied once, in an obscure text from the Biblos Archive. Its name floated through her delirium-orbital mechanics-as if managing the ponderous gyres of suns and moons were no more complex than maintaining a windmill or waterwheel.
Dimly, Sara knew physical pain. But it came to her as if through a swaddling of musty clothes, like something unpleasant tucked in a bottom pantry drawer. The strong scent of traeki unguents filled her nostrils, dulling every agony except one . . . the uneasy knowledge-I've been harmed.
Sometimes she roused enough to hear speech . . . several lisping urrish voices . . . the gruff terseness of Kurt the Exploser ... and one whose stiff, pedantic brilliance she knew from happier days.
Purofsky. Sage of mysteries . . .
But what is he doing here?
. . . and where is here? •
At one point she managed to crack her eyelids in hopes of solving the riddle. But Sara quickly decided she must still be dreaming. For no place could exist like the one she witnessed through a blurry haze-a world of spinning glass. A universe of translucent saucers, disks and wheels, tilting and rolling against each other at odd angles, reflecting shafts of light in rhythmic bursts.
It was all too dizzying. She closed her eyes against the maelstrom, yet it continued in her mind, persisting in the form of abstractions.
A sinusoidal wave filled her mental foreground, but no longer the static shape she knew from inked figures in books. Instead, this one undulated like ripples on a pond, with time the apparent free variable.
Soon the first wave was joined by a second, with twice the frequency, then a third with the peaks and troughs compressed yet again. New cycles merged, one after another, combining in an endless series-a transform- whose sum built toward a new complex figure, an entity with jagged peaks and valleys, like a mountain range.
Out of order . . . chaos . . .
Mountains brought to mind the last thing Sara had seen, before spilling off the volcano's narrow path, tumbling over sharp stones toward a river of fire.
Flashes from a distant peak . . . long-short, short-long, medium-short-short . . .
Coded speech, conveyed by a language of light, not unlike GalTwo . . .
Words of urgency, of stealth and battle . . .
When he sang to her, she knew it was the Stranger . . . Emerson ... by his odd accent and the way the lyrics flowed, smoothly from memory, as a liquid stream, without thought to any particular word or phrase. Yet the song was no oddly syncopated Earthling ballad, but a Jijoan folk ballad, familiar as a lullaby. Sara's mother sang it to her, whenever she was ill-as Sara used to murmur it to the man from space, soon after he crashed on Jijo, barely clinging to life.