Brightness Reef

Asx

Suddenly, their questions take a new turn. An edge of tension — not quite fear, but a cousin to that universal passion — abruptly colors the invaders’ speech.

Then, in a single night, their apprehension takes hasty physical form.

They have buried their black station!

Do you recall the surprise, my rings? At dusk there it was, serene, arrogantly uncaring of the open sky. A cubic shape, blatant in its artificiality.

When we returned at dawn, a great heap of dirt lay there instead. From the size of the mound, Lester surmised the station must have scooped a hole, dropped itself inside, and piled the detritus on top, like a borer-beetle fleeing a digbat.

Lester’s guess is proven right when Rann, Kunn, and Besh emerge from below, ascending a smooth, dark tunnel to resume discussions under the canopy-of-negotiation. This time they choose to focus on machines. Specifically-what devices remain from Buyur days? They want to know if ancient relics still throb with vital force.

This happens on some fallow worlds, they say. Sloppy races leave countless servant drones behind when they depart, laying their worlds down for an aeon of rest. Near-perfect and self-repairing, the abandoned mechanisms can last a long time, wandering masterless across a terrain void of living voices.

They ask — have we seen any mechanical orphans?

We try to explain that the Buyur were meticulous. That their cities were dutifully scraped away, or crushed and seeded with deconstructors. Their machine servants were infected with meme-compulsions, driving those still mobile to seek nests in the deep trench we call the Midden. All this we believe, yet the sky-humans seem to doubt our word.

They ask (again!) about visitations. What clues have we seen of other ships coming stealthfully, for purposes vaguely hinted at but never said aloud?

As planned, we dissemble. In old human tales and books, it is a technique oft used by the weak when confronted by the strong.

Act stupid, the lore suggests. Meanwhile, watch and listen closely.

Ah, but how much longer can we get away with it? Already Besh questions those who come for healing. In their gratitude, some will surely forget our injunctions.

The next stage will start soon, while our preparations are barely begun.

The fourth human forayer, Ling, returns from her research trip. Did.she not leave with the young heretic, Lark? Yet she comes back alone.

No, we tell her. We have not seen him. He did not come this way. Can you tell us why he abandoned you? Why he left you in the forest, his assigned task undone?

We promise her another guide. The qheuen naturalist, Uthen. Meanwhile, we placate.

If only our rewq had not abandoned us! When i/we ask Lester about the woman’s mood — what he can read from her demeanor — he only shudders and says he cannot say.

Sara

A concert was arranged by an impromptu group of passengers and crew, on the fantail of the Hauph-woa, to welcome the Stranger back among the living.

Ulgor would play the violus, a stringed instrument based on the Earthling violin, modified to suit deft, ur-rish fingers. While Ulgor tuned, Blade squatted his blue-green carapace over a mirliton-drum, stroking its taut membrane with his massive, complex tongue, causing it to rumble and growl. Meanwhile, all five legs held jugs filled to varied levels with water. Tentative puffs from his speech vents blew notes across each opening.

Pzora, the traeki pharmacist, modestly renounced any claim to musical talent but agreed to take up some metal and ceramic chimes. The hoonish helmsman would sing, while the professional scriven-dancer honored the makeshift group by agreeing to accompany them in the g’Kek manner, with graceful motions of his eyestalks and those famous dancing arms, calling to mind the swaying of trees, or wind-driven rain, or birds in flight.

They had asked Sara to round out a six, but she declined. The only instrument she played was her father’s piano, back in Nelo’s house by the great dam, and even at that her proficiency was unremarkable. So much for the supposed correlation between music and mathematics, she thought ironically. Anyway, she wanted to keep an eye on the Stranger, in case events threw him into another hysterical fit. He seemed calm so far, watching through dark eyes that seemed pleasantly surprised by nearly everything.

Was this a symptom? Head injuries sometimes caused loss of memory — or even ability to make memories — so everything was forever new.

At least he can feel some joy, she thought. Take the way he beamed, every time she approached. It felt strange and sweet for someone to be so reliably happy to see her. Perhaps if she were prettier, it wouldn’t be so befuddling. But the handsome dark outlander was a sick man, she recalled. Out of his proper mind.

And yet, she pondered further, what is the past but a fiction, invented by a mind in order to go on functioning? She had spent a year fleeing memory, for reasons that had seemed important then.

Now it just doesn’t amount to much.

She worried about what was going on up in the Rim-mers. Her brothers stayed close to her thoughts.

If you’d accepted Taine’s original proposal of marriage, you might have had little ones by now, and their future to fret about, as well.

Refusing the august gray-headed sage had caused a stir. How many other offers would there be for the hand of a shy papermaker’s daughter without much figure, a young woman with more passion for symbols on a page than dancing or the other arts of dalliance? Soon after turning Taine down, Joshu’s attentions had seemed to ratify her decision, till she realized the young bookbinder might only be using her as a diversion during his journeyman year in Biblos, nothing more.

Ironic, isn’t it? Lark could have his pick of young women on the Slope, yet his philosophy makes him choose celibacy. My conclusions about Jijo and the Six are the opposite to his. Yet I’m alone too.

Different highways, arriving at the same solitary dead end.

And now come gods from space, diverting us all onto a road whose markings we can’t see.

They still lacked a sixth for the concert. Despite having introduced string instruments to Jijo, humans traditionally played flute in a mixed sextet. Jop was an adept, but the farmer declined, preferring to pore over his book of scrolls. Finally, young Jomah agreed to sit in for luck, equipped with a pair of spoons.

So much for the vaunted contribution of Earthlings to musical life on Jijo.

Hidden under Blade’s heavy shell, the mirliton groaned a low, rumbling note, soon joined by a mournful sigh from one of the jugs under Blade’s left-front leg. The qheuen’s seeing-band winked at Ulgor, and the urs took her cue to lift the violus, laying the double bow across the strings, drawing twin wavering notes, embellishing the mirliton’s basso moan. A multilevel chord was struck. It held…

The moment of duet harmony seemed to stretch on and on. Sara stopped breathing, lest any other sound break the extraordinary consonance. Even Fakoon rolled forward, visibly moved.

If the rest is anything like this…

Pzora chose the next instant to pile in, disrupting the aching sweetness with an eager clangor of bells and cymbals. The Dolo pharmacist seemed zealously unaware of what er had shattered, rushing ahead of the beat, halting, then pushing on again. After a stunned instant, members of the hoonish crew roared with laughter. Noor on the masts chittered as Ulgor and Blade shared looks that needed no rewq to interpret — equivalents to a shrug and a wink. They played on, incorporating Pzora’s enthusiasm in a catchy four-part rhythm.

Sara recalled being taught piano by her mother, from music that was actually written down, now a nearly forgotten art. Jijoan sextets weaved their impromptu harmonies out of separate threads, merging and diverging through one congenial coincidence after another. Human music used to work that way in most pre-Contact cultures, before the Euro-West hit on symphonies and other more rigorous forms. Or so Sara had read.

Overcoming shyness, Jomah started rattling his spoons as Blade puffed a calliope of breathy notes. The hoonish helmsman inflated his air sac to answer the mirliton’s rumble, singing an improvisation, without words in any known language.

Then Fakoon wheeled forward, arms swaying delicately, reminding Sara of gently rising smoke.

What had been exquisite, then humorous, soon took on a quality even more highly prized.

Unity.

She glanced at the Stranger, his face overcome with emotion, eyes delighting in Fakoon’s opening moves. The left hand thumped his blanket happily, beating time.

You can tell what kind of man he used to be, she mused. Even horribly mutilated, in awful pain, he spends his waking time enthralled by good things.

The thought seemed to catch in her throat. Taken by surprise, Sara turned away, hiding a choking wave of sadness that abruptly blurred her vision.

Tarek Town appeared soon after, perched between the merging rivers Roney and Bibur.

From afar it seemed no more than a greenish knoll, like any other hill. Grayish shapes studded the mound, as if boulders lay strewn over the slopes. Then the Hauph-woa rounded one last oxbow turn, and what had seemed solid from a distance now spread open — a huge, nearly hollow erection of webbing, festooned with greenery. The “boulders” were the protruding tips of massive towers, enmeshed in a maze of cables, conduits, rope bridges, netting, ramps, and sloping ladders, all draped under lush, flowing foliage.

The air filled with a humid redolence, the scent of countless flowers.

Sara liked to squint and imagine Tarek in other days, back when it was but a hamlet to the mighty Buyur, yet a place of true civilization, humming with faithful machines, vibrant with the footsteps of visitors from far star systems, thronging with sky-craft that settled gracefully on rooftop landing pads. A city lively with aspirations that she, a forest primitive, might never imagine.

But then, as the noon crew poled the Hauph-woa toward a concealed dock, no amount of squinting could mask how far Tarek had fallen. Out of a multitude of windows, only a few still shone with million-year-old glazing. Others featured crude chimneys, staining once-smooth walls with the soot of cook fires. Wide ledges where floating aircraft once landed now supported miniature orchards or coops for noisy herd chicks. Instead of self-propelled machines, the streets swarmed with commerce carried on the backs of tinkers and traders, or animal-drawn carts.

High up a nearby tower, some young g’Kek sped around a rail-less ramp, heedless of the drop, their spokes blurry with speed. Urban life suited the wheeled sept. Rare elsewhere, g’Kek made up the town’s largest group.

Northward, crossing Tarek’s link to the mainland, lay a “recent” ruin of stone blocks — the thousand-year-old city wall, erected by the Gray Queens who long ruled here, until a great siege ended their reign, back when the Dolo paper mill was new. Scorch marks still smeared the fallen bulwark, testimony to the violent birth of the Commons-of-Six.

However many times she passed through Tarek Town, it remained a marvel. Jijo’s closest thing to a cosmopolitan place, where all races mixed as equals.

Along with hoon-crewed vessels, countless smaller boats skimmed under lacy, arching bridges, rowed by human trapper-traders, bringing hides and wares to market. River-traeki, with amphibious basal segments, churned along the narrow canals, much faster than their land-bound cousins managed ashore.

Near the river confluence, a special port sheltered two hissing steam-ferries, linking forest freeholds on the north bank to southern grasslands where urrish hordes galloped. But on a sloping beach nearby, Sara saw some blue qheuens climb ashore, avoiding ferry tolls by walking across the river bottom, a talent useful long ago, when blue rebels toppled the Queens’ tyranny — helped by an army of men, traeki, and hoon.

In all the tales about that battle, none credits the insurgents with a weapon I think crucial — that of language.

It took some time for the Hauph-woa to weave through a crowd of boats and tie up at a cramped wharf.

The jammed harbor helped explain the lack of upstream traffic.

Soon as the moorings were tied, Hauph-woa’s contingent of noor squalled and blocked the gangways, demanding their pay. Rumbling a well-pleased umble song of gratitude, the ship’s cook went down the row of black-furred creatures, handing out chunks of hard candy. Each noor tucked one sourball in its mouth and the rest into a waterproof pouch, then leaped over the rail to cavort away between bumping, swaying hulls, risking death by narrow margins.

As usual, the Stranger watched with a complex mixture of surprise, delight, and sadness in his eyes. He spurned a stretcher, and went down the ramp leaning on a cane, while Pzora puffed with pride, having delivered a patient from death’s door to the expert healers of Tarek Town. While Prity went to hail a rickshaw, they observed the hoonish crew strain with block and tackle, lifting crates from the hold, many of them bound from Nelo’s paper works for various printers, scribes, and scholars. In their place, stevedores gently lowered ribboned packages, all bound from Tarek for the same destination.

—Pottery shards and slag from urrish forges.

—Used-up ceramic saws from qheuenish woodcarving shops.

—Worn-out printers’ type and broken violin strings.

—Whatever parts of the deceased that could not be counted on to rot away, such as the bones of cremated humans and urs, hoonish vertebrae, g’Kek axles, and traeki wax crystals. The glittering dust of ground-up qheuen carapaces.

—And always lots of ancient Buyur junk — it all wound up on dross boats, sent to the great Midden, to be cleansed by water, fire, and time.

An urrish rickshaw driver helped them usher the injured man onto her low four-wheeled cart, while Pzora stood behind, holding the Stranger’s shoulders with two tendril-hands. “You’re sure you don’t need me to come along?” Sara asked, having second thoughts.

Pzora waved her gently away. “It is a short distance to the clinic, is it not? Have you not urgent matters to attend? Have i not our own tasks to perform? All-of-you shall meet all-of-us again, tonight. And our lucky patient will your fine selves perceive on the morrow.”

The Stranger’s dark eyes caught hers, and he smiled, patting her hand. There was no sign of his former terror of the traeki.

I guess I was wrong about his injury. He does acquire memories.

Maybe in Tarek we can find out who he is. If family or friends can be brought, they’ll help him more than I ever could. That evoked a pang, but Sara reminded herself that she was no longer a child, tending a wounded chipwing. What matters is that he’s well cared for. Now Pzora’s right. I’ve got other matters to attend.

The anarchic style of Tarek Town meant there was no one “official” at the dock to greet them. But merchants hurried to the quay, eager for their cargoes. Others came in search of news. There were rumors of horrible events up north and east. Of landings by frost-covered Zang ships, or whole towns leveled by titanic rays. Gossip told of a populace herded toward mass trials, conducted by insectoid judges from the Galactic Institute of Migration. One credulous human even argued with Jop, insisting the farmer was mistaken, since everyone knew Dolo Village was destroyed.

That explains why no boats came upstream, Sara thought. From Tarek, the intruder ship must have seemed to lay a streak of fire right over Sara’s hometown.

Rumors were a chief stock in trade of all harbors, but surely cooler heads prevailed elsewhere?

Prity signaled that all of Nelo’s crates were signed for, save the one she pulled on a wheeled dolly to be hand carried to Engril the Copier. Sara bade farewell to the other Dolo emissaries, agreeing to meet them again tonight and compare notes.

“Come, Jomah,” she told Henrik’s son, who was staring at the bustle and tumult of city life. “We’ll take you to your uncle first.”

Voices seemed subdued in the harborside market; the haggling was sullen, perfunctory. Most buyers and sellers did not even wear rewq while dickering with members of other races — a sure sign they were only going through the motions.

One shopkeeper, an elegant gray qheuen with intricate, gold-fleck shell decorations, held up two claw-hands and counted nine jagged toe-pads, indicating by a slant of her cupola that it was her final offer. The trader, a rustic-looking red, hissed in dismay, gesturing at the fine salt crystals she had brought all the way from the distant sea. While passing, Sara overheard the city qheuen’s reply.

“Quality or amount, what difference does it make? The price, why should you or I care?”

The answer shocked Sara. An urbane gray, indifferent over a commercial transaction? The locals must be in a state, all right.

As if we in Dolo were any better?

Townsfolk mostly gathered in small groups, gossiping in dialects of their own kind. Many of the hoons carried iron-shod canes — usually a perquisite of captains — while urrish tinkers, herders, and traders kept close to their precious pack beasts. Each urs carried an ax or machete sheathed at her withers, useful tools in the dry woods and plains where they dwelled.

So why did the sight make Sara feel edgy?

Come to think of it, many humans were behaving much the same, walking in close company, armed with tools suitable for chopping, digging, hunting — or uses Sara did not want to think about. The g’Kek populace kept to their apartments and studios.

I’d better find out what’s going on, and soon, Sara thought.

It was a relief when the tense market zone ended at the glaring brightness of the Jumble.

Till now, they had walked in shade, but here an opening gaped under the shelter-canopy. Once towering structures lay in heaps, their neat geometries snapped, splintered and shoved together, giving the place its name. Scummy fluid shimmered between the shattered stones, where oily bubbles formed and popped, relics of a time when this place was caustic, poisonous, and ultimately restoring.

Jomah shaded his eyes. “I don’t see it,” he complained.

Sara resisted an impulse to pull him back out of the light. “See what?”

“The spider. Isn’t it s’pozed to be here, in the middle?”

“This spider’s dead, Jomah. It died before it could do much more than get started. That’s why Tarek Town isn’t just another swamp full of chewed-up boulders, like we have east of Dolo.”

“I know that. But my father says it’s still here.”

“It is,” she agreed. “We’ve been passing beneath it ever since the boat docked. See all those cables overhead? Even the ramps and ladders are woven from old mulc-spider cords, many of them still living, after a fashion.”

“But where’s the spider?”

“It was in the cables, Jomah.” She motioned toward the crisscrossing web, twining among the towers. “United, they made a life form whose job was to demolish this old Buyur place. But then one day, before even the g’Kek came to Jijo, this particular spider got sick. The vines forgot to work together. When they went wild, the spider was no more.”

“Oh.” The boy pondered this awhile, then he turned around. “Okay, well there’s another thing I know is around here—”

“Jomah,” Sara began, not wanting to squelch the child, who seemed so much like Dwer at that age. “We have to get—”

“I heard it’s here near the Jumble. I want to see the horse.”

“The ho—” Sara blinked, then exhaled a sigh. “Oh! Well, why not. If you promise we’ll go straight to your uncle’s, right after. Yes?”

The boy nodded vigorously, slinging his duffel again.

Sara picked up her own bag, heavy with notes from her research. Prity wheeled the dolly behind.

Sara pointed. “It’s this way, near the entrance to Earthtown.”

Ever since the Gray Queens’ menacing catapults were burned, Tarek Town had been open to all races. Still, each of the Six had a favored section of town, with humans holding the fashionable south quarter, due to wealth and prestige generated by the book trade. The three of them walked toward that district under a shaded loggia that surrounded the Jumble. The arching trellises bloomed with fragrant bowlflowers, but even that strong scent was overwhelmed as they passed the sector where urs traders kept their herds. Some unmated urrish youths loitered by the entrance. One lowered her head, offering a desultory snarl at Sara.

Suddenly, all the urs lifted their long necks in the same direction, their short, furry ears quivering toward a distant rumble that came rolling from the south. Sara’s reflex thought was thunder. Then a shiver of concern coursed her spine as she turned to scan the sky.

Can it be happening again?

Jomah took her arm and shook his head. The boy listened to the growling echo with a look of professional interest. “It’s a test. I can tell. No muffling from confinement or mass loading. Some exploser is checking his charges.”

She muttered — “How reassuring.” But only compared to the brief, fearsome thought of more god-ships tearing across the heavens.

The young urs were eyeing them again. Sara didn’t like the look in their eyes.

“All right then, Jomah. Let’s go see the horse.”

The Statuary Garden lay at the Jumble’s southern end. Most of the “art works” were lightly scored graffiti, or crude caricatures scratched on stone slabs during the long centuries when literacy was rare on the Slope. But some rock carvings were stunning in their abstract intricacy — such as a grouping of spherical balls, like clustered grapes, or a jagged sheaf of knifelike spears, jutting at pugnacious angles — all carved by the grinding teeth of old-time gray matriarchs who had lost dynastic struggles during the long qheuenish reign and were chained in place by victorious rivals, whiling away their last days under a blazing sun.

A sharply realistic bas relief, from one of the earliest eras, lay etched on a nearby pillar. Slow subsidence into corrosive mud had eaten away most of the frieze. Still, in several spots one could make out faces. Huge bulging eyes stared acutely from globelike heads set on bodies that reared upward with supple forelegs raised, as if straining against the verdict of destiny. Even after such a long time, the eyes seemed somehow lit with keen intelligence. No one on Jijo had seen expressions of such subtlety or poignancy on a glaver’s face for a very long time.

In recent years, Tarek’s verdant canopy had been diverted over this part of the Jumble, putting most of the carvings under shade. Even so, orthodox zealots sometimes called for all the sculptures to be razed. But most citizens reasoned that Jijo already had the job in hand. The mulc-spider’s ancient lake still dissolved rock, albeit slowly. These works would not outlive the Six themselves.

Or so we thought. It always seemed we had plenty of time.

“There it is!” Jomah pointed excitedly. The boy dashed toward a massive monument whose smooth flanks appeared dappled by filtered sunshine. Humanity’s Sacrifice was its title, commemorating the one thing men and women had brought with them to Jijo that they esteemed above all else, even their precious books.

Something they renounced forever, as a price of peace.

The sculpted creature seemed poised in the act of bounding forward, its noble head raised, wind brushing its mane. One had but to squint and picture it in motion, as graceful in full gallop as it was powerful. Mentioned lovingly in countless ancient human tales, it was one of the great legendary wonders of old Earth. The memorial always moved Sara.

“It isn’t like a donkey at all!” Jomah gushed. “Were horses really that big?”

Sara hadn’t believed it herself, till she looked it up. “Yes, they got that big, sometimes. And don’t exaggerate, Jomah. Of course it looks quite a bit like a donkey. They were cousins, after all.”

Yeah, and a garu tree is related to a grickle bush.

In a hushed voice Jomah asked, “Can I climb up on top?”

“Don’t speak of that!” Sara quickly looked around. No urrish faces were in sight, so she relented a little and shook her head. “Ask your uncle. Maybe he’ll take you down here at night.”

Jomah looked disappointed. “I bet you’ve been up there, haven’t you?”

Sara almost smiled. She and Dwer had indeed performed the ritual when they were teens, late on a chill winter’s eve, when most urs were snug among their wallow mates. No triple-eyes, then, to grow inflamed at a sight that so enraged them for the first century after Earthlings landed — that of human beings magnified by symbiosis with a great beast that could outrun any urs. Two creatures, amplified into something greater than either one alone.

They thought, after the second war, that it would put us down forever to demand all the horses, then wipe the species out.

I guess they learned different.

Sara shook off the bitter, unworthy thought. It all happened so long ago, before the Great Peace or the coming of the Egg. She glanced up past the stone figure and the flower-draped skeleton of the ancient Buyur town, toward a cloud-flecked sky. They say when poison falls from heaven, its most deadly form will be suspicion.

The Explosers Guild occupied a building whose formal name was Tower of Chemistry, but that most Tareki-ans called the Palace of Stinks. Tubes of treated boo climbed the spire’s flank like parasitic vines, puffing and steaming so the place vaguely resembled Pzora after a hard day in the pharmacy. Indeed, after humans, traeki were most numerous among those passing through the front portal, or riding a counterweighted lift to upper floors, where they helped make items coveted throughout the Slope — matches for lighting cook stoves, oils to treat qheuen shells against Itchyflake, soaps for cleaning human and hoon garments, lubricants to keep elderly g’Kek rolling after Dry-Axle set in — as well as paraffin for reading lamps, ink for writing, and many other products, all certified to leave no lasting trace in Jijo’s soil. Nothing to worsen punishment when the inevitable Day of Days came.

Despite smells that made Prity chuff in disgust, Sara felt a lightening of her spirit inside the tower. All races mixed in the lobby, without any of the cliquishness she’d seen elsewhere in town. The hustle of commerce, with crisp murmurs in the language of science, showed some folk weren’t letting the crisis drive them to gloom or hostility. There was just too much to do.

Three floors up, Explosers Hall seemed to boil with confusion. Men and boys shouted or hurried by, while guildswomen with clipboards told hoon helpers where to push barrels of ingredients. Off in a corner, gray-headed human elders bent over long tables, consulting with traeki colleagues whose hardworking secretion rings were adorned with beakers, collecting volatile drippings. What had seemed chaotic gradually resolved as Sara saw patterned order in the ferment.

This crisis may be confusing to others, but it’s what explosers have spent all their lives thinking about. In this place, the mood would be fierce dedication. It was the first justification for optimism Sara had seen.

Jomah gave Sara a swift, efficient hug, then marched over to a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, poring over schematics. Sara recognized the paper, which Nelo made in special batches once a year, for painters and explosers.

A family resemblance went beyond features of face or posture, to the man’s expression when he set eyes on Jomah. A lifted eyebrow was all Kurt the Exploser betrayed as Jomah placed a long leather tube in his calloused palm.

Is that all? I could have delivered it for Henrik myself. No need to send the boy on what might be a perilous mission.

If anyone knew about events up the Rimmers, it would be those in this room. But Sara held back. The explosers seemed busy. Besides, she had her own source of information, nearby. And now it was time to go there.

Engril the Copier refilled cups of tea while Sara read a slim sheaf of pages — a chronology of events and conjectures that had arrived from the Glade of Gathering, by urrish galloper, this very morning. Sara’s first emotion was a flood of relief. Till now, there had been no way of knowing which rampant rumor to believe. Now she knew the landing in the mountains had occurred without casualties. Those at Gathering were safe, including her brothers. For the time being.

In the next room, Engril’s aides could be seen duplicating photostats of the report’s pen-and-ink illustrations, while an offset press turned out printed versions of the text. Soon copies would reach notice boards in Tarek Town, then surrounding hives, hamlets, and herds.

“Criminals!” Sara sighed, putting down the first page. She couldn’t believe it. “Criminals from space. Of all the possibilities—”

“It always seemed the most far-fetched,” Engril agreed. She was a portly, red-headed woman, normally jovial and motherly but today more somber than Sara recalled. “Perhaps it wasn’t much discussed because we dared not think of the consequences.”

“But if they came illegally, isn’t that better than Institute police putting us all under arrest? Crooks can’t report us without admitting their own crime.”

Engril nodded. “Unfortunately, that logic twists around the other way. Criminals cannot afford to let us report them.”

“How reasonable a fear is that? It’s been several thousand years since the g’Kek came, and in all that time there’s been just this one direct contact with Galactic culture. The ancients calculated a half-million-year gap before the next orbital survey, and two million before a major inspection.”

“That’s not so very long.”

Sara blinked. “I don’t get it.”

The older woman lifted a steaming pot. “More tea? Well, it’s like this. Vubben suspects these are gene raiders. If true, the crime has no — what did the ancients call it? — no sculpture of limitations? No time limit for punishing perpetrators. Individuals from the foray party might be long dead, but not the species or Galactic clan they represent, which can still be sanctioned, from the eldest patron race down to the youngest client. Even a million years is short by the reckoning of the Great Library, whose memory spans a thousand times that long.”

“But the sages don’t think we’ll even be around in a million years! The ancestors’ plan— the Scrolls—”

“Gene raiders can’t count on that, Sara. It’s too serious a felony.”

Sara shook her head. “All right, let’s say some distant descendants of the Six are still around by then, telling blurry legends about something that happened long ago. Who would believe their story?”

Engril lifted her shoulders. “I can’t say. Records show there are many jealous, even feuding, factions among the oxygen-breathing clans of the Five Galaxies. Perhaps all it would take is a hint, just a clue, to put rivals on the scent. Given such a hint, they might sift the biosphere of Jijo for stronger proof. The entire crime could come unraveled.”

Silence fell as Sara pondered. In Galactic society, the greatest treasures were biological — especially those rare natural species rising now and then out of fallow worlds. Species with a spark called Potential. Potential to be uplifted. To be adopted by a patron race and given a boost — through teaching and genetic manipulation- crucial to cross the gap from mere clever beasts to starfaring citizens. Crucial, unless one believed the Earthlihgs’ legend of lonely transcendence. But who in all the Five Galaxies credited that nonsense?

Both wilderness and civilization had roles to play in the process by which intelligent life renewed itself. Neither could do it alone. The complex, draconian rules of migration — including forced abandonment of planets, systems, even whole galaxies — were meant to give biospheres time to recover and cultivate feral potential. New races were then apportioned for adoption, according to codes time-tested over aeons.

The raiders hoped to bypass those codes. To find something precious here on Jijo, off limits and ahead of schedule. But then, even if they made a lucky strike, what could they do with their treasure?

Take some mated pairs far away from here, to some world the thieves already control, and seed the stock quietly, nudging them along with gene infusions so they fit into a natural-seeming niche. Then wait patiently for millennia, or much longer, till the time seems right to “find” the treasure, right under their noses. Eureka!

“So you’re saying,” she resumed, “the raiders may not want to leave witnesses. But then why land here on the Slope? Why not beyond the Sunrise Desert, or even the small continent on the far side of Jijo, instead of barging in on us!”

Engril shook her head. “Who can say? The forayers claim to want our expertise, and they say they’re willing to pay for it. But we are the ones likely to pay in the end.”

Sara felt her heart thud. “They— have to kill us all.”

“There may be less drastic answers. But that’s the one that strikes the sages as most practical.”

“Practical!”

“From the raiders’ point of view, of course.”

Sara absorbed this quietly. To think, part of me looked forward to meeting Galactics, and maybe asking to peek at their portable libraries.

Through the door to Engril’s workshop, she glimpsed the copier’s assistants hard at work. One girl piloted a coelostat, a big mirror on a long arm that followed the sun, casting a bright beam through the window onto whatever document was being duplicated. A moving slit scanned that reflected light across a turning drum of precious metal, cranked by two strong men, causing it to pick up carbon powder from a tray, pressing it on fresh pages, making photostatic duplicates of drawings, art works, designs — anything but typescript text, which was cheaper to reproduce on a printing press.

Since this technology came to Jijo, nothing so dire had ever been copied.

“This is awful news,” Sara murmured.

Engril agreed. “Alas, child, it’s not the worst. Not by far.” The old woman motioned toward the report. “Read on.”

Hands trembling, Sara turned more sheets over. Her own memory of the starship was of a blurry tablet, hurtling overhead, shattering the peaceful life of Dolo Village. Now sketches showed the alien cylinder plain as day, even more fearsome standing still than it had seemed in motion. Measurements of its scale, prepared by engineering adepts using arcane means of triangulation, were hard to believe.

Then she turned another page and saw two of the plunderers themselves.

She stared, dismayed, at the portrayal. “My God.”

Engril nodded. “Indeed. Now you see why we delayed printing a new edition of the Dispatch. Already some hotheads among the qheuens and urs, and even a few traeki and hoon, have begun muttering about human collusion. There’s even talk of breaking the Great Peace.

“Of course, it may never come to that. If the interlopers find what they seek soon enough, there may not he time for war to break out among the Six. We human exiles may get to prove our loyalty in the most decisive way — by dying alongside everyone else.”

Engril’s bleak prospect made awful sense. But Sara looked at the older woman, shaking her head.

“You’re wrong. That’s not the worst thing.” Her voice was hoarse with worry. Engril looked back at her, puzzled. “What could be worse than annihilation of every sapient being on the Slope?”

Sara lifted the sketch, showing a man and a woman, unmistakably human, caught unawares by a hidden artist as they looked down haughtily on Jijo’s savages.

“Our lives mean nothing,” she said, tasting bitter words. “We were doomed from the moment our ancestors planted their outlaw seed on this world. But these” — she shook the paper angrily — “these fools are dabbling in an ancient game no human being could possibly know how to play well.

“They’ll perform their theft, then slay us to erase all witnesses, only to get caught anyway.

“And when that happens, the real victim will be Earth.”

Asx

They have found the valley of the innocents. We tried hard to conceal it, did we not, my rings? Sending them to a far-off vale — the glavers, lorniks, chimpanzees, and zookirs. And those children of our Six who came to Gathering with their parents, before the ship pierced our lives.

Alas, all efforts at concealment were unavailing. A robot from the black station followed their warm trail through the forest to a sanctuary that was not as secret as we hoped.

Among our sage company, Lester was the least surprised.

“They surely expected us to try hiding what we value most. They must have sought the deep-red heat spoor of our refugees, before it could dissipate.” His rueful smile conveyed regret but also respect. “It’s what I would have done, if I were them.”

Anglic is a strange language, in which the subjunctive form allows one to make suppositions about impossible might-have-beens. Thinking in that tongue, i (within my/our second ring-of-cognition) understood Lester’s expression of grudging admiration, but then i found it hard to translate for my/our other selves.

No, our human sage is not contemplating betrayal.

Only through insightful empathy can he/we learn to understand the invaders.

Ah, but our foes learn about us much faster. Their robots flutter over the once-secret glen, recording, analyzing — then swooping to nip cell or fluid samples from frightened lorniks or chimps. Next, they want us to send individuals of each species for study, and seek to learn our spoken lore. Those g’Kek who know zookirs best, the humans who work with chimps, and those qheuens whose lorniks win medallions at festivals — these “native experts” must come share their rustic expertise. Though the interlopers speak softly of paying well (with trinkets and beads?), there is also implied compulsion and threat.

our rings quiver, surprised, when Lester expresses satisfaction.

“They must think they’ve uncovered our most valued secrets.”

“Have they not?” complains Knife-Bright Insight, snapping a claw. “Are not our greatest treasures those who depend on us?”

Lester nods. “True. But we could never have hidden them for long. Not when higher life-forms are the very thing the invaders desire. It’s what they expect us to conceal.

“But now, if they are smug, even satiated for a while, we may distract them from learning about other things, possible advantages that offer us — and our dependents — a slim ray of hope.”

“How can that ve?” demanded Ur-Jah, grizzled and careworn, shaking her black-streaked mane. “As you said — what can we conceal? They need only pose their foul questions, and those profane rovots gallop forth, piercing any secret to its hoof and heart.”

“Exactly,” Lester said. “So the important thing is to keep them from asking the right questions.”

Dwer

His first waking thought was that he must be buried alive. That he lay — alternately shivering and sweltering-in some forgotten sunless crypt. A place for the dying or the dead.

But then, he wondered muzzily, what stony place ever felt like this? So sweaty. Threaded by a regular, thudding rhythm that made the padded floor seem to tremble beneath him.

Still semi-incoherent — with eyelids stubbornly stuck closed — he recalled how some river hoons sang of an afterlife spent languishing within a narrow fetid space, listening endlessly to a tidal growl, the pulse-beat of the universe. That fate seemed all too plausible in Dwer’s fading delirium, while he struggled to shake off the wrappers of sleep. It felt as if fiendish imps were poking away with sharp utensils, taking special pains with his fingers and toes.

As more roiling thoughts swam into focus, he realized the clammy warmth was not the rank breath of devils. It carried an aroma much more familiar.

So was the incessant vibration, though it seemed higher-pitched, more uneven than the throaty version he’d grown up with, resounding through each night’s slumber, when he was a boy.

It’s a water wheel. I’m inside a dam!

The chalky smell stung his sinuses with memory. A qheuen dam.

His rousing mind pictured a hive of twisty chambers, packed with spike-clawed, razor-tooth creatures, scrambling over each other’s armored backs, separated by just one thin wall from a murky lake. In other words, he was in one of the safest, most heartening places he could ask.

But… how? The last thing I recall was lying naked in a snowstorm, halfway gone, with no help in sight.

Not that Dwer was astonished to be alive. I’ve always been lucky, he thought, though it dared fate to muse on it. Anyway, Ifni clearly wasn’t finished with him quite yet, not when there were still more ways to lure him down trails of surprise and fate.

It took several tries to open his heavy, reluctant eyelids, and at first the chamber seemed a dim blur. Tardy tears washed and diffused the sole light — a flame-flicker coming from his left.

“Uh!” Dwer jerked back as a dark shape loomed. The shadow resolved into a stubby face, black eyes glittering, tongue lolling between keen white teeth. The rest of the creature reared into view, a lithe small form, black pelted, with agile brown paws.

“Oh… it’s you,” Dwer sighed in a voice that tasted scratchy and stale. Sudden movements wakened flooding sensations, mostly unpleasant, swarming now from countless scratches, burns, and bruises, each yammering a tale of abuse and woe. He stared back at the grinning noor beast, amending an earlier thought.

I was always lucky, till I met you.

Gingerly, Dwer pushed back to sit up a bit and saw that he lay amid a pile of furs, spread across a sandy floor strewn with bits of bone and shell. That untidy clutter contrasted with the rest of the small chamber — beams, posts, and paneling, all gleaming in the wan light from a candle that flickered on a richly carved table. Each wooden surface bore the fine marks of qheuen tooth-work, all the way down to angle brackets sculpted in lacy, deceptively strong filigrees.

Dwer held up his hands. White bandages covered the fingers, too well wrapped to be qheuen work. He felt hesitant relief on counting to ten and gauging their length to be roughly unchanged-though he knew sometimes frostbite stole the tips even when doctors saved the rest. He quashed an urge to tear the dressings with his teeth and find out right away.

Patience. Nothing you do now will change what’s happened. Stabbing pins-and-needles told him that he was alive and his body was struggling to heal. It made the pain easier to handle.

Dwer kicked aside more furs to see his feet — which were still there, thank the Egg, though his toes also lay under white wrappings, if there were still any toes down there. Old Fallon had gone on hunting for many years, wearing special shoes, after one close call on the ice turned his feet into featureless stumps. Still, Dwer bit his lip and concentrated, sending signals, meeting resistance, nevertheless commanding movement. Tingling pangs answered his efforts, making him wince and hiss, but he kept at it till both legs threatened cramps. At last, he sagged back, satisfied. He could wriggle the critical toes, the smallest and largest on each foot. They might be damaged, but he would walk or run normally.

Relief was like a jolt of strong liquor that went to his head. He even laughed aloud — four short, sharp barks that made Mudfoot stare. “So, do I owe you my life? Did you dash back to the Glade, yapping for help?” he crooned.

For once, Mudfoot seemed set aback, as if the noor knew it was being mocked.

Aw, cut it out, Dwer told himself. For all you know, it might even be true.

Most of his other hurts were the sort he had survived many times before. Several were sewn shut with needle and thread, cross-stitched by a fine, meticulous hand. Dwer stared at the seam-work, abruptly recognizing it from past experience. He laughed again, knowing his rescuer from tracks laid across his own body.

Lark. How in the world did he know?

Clearly, his brother had managed to find the shivering group amid the snowdrifts, dragging him all the way to one of the qheuen freeholds of the upper hills. And if I made it, Rety surely did. She’s young and would chew off Death’s arm, if He ever came for her.

Dwer puzzled for a while over blotchy, pale stains on his arms and hands. Then he recalled. The mulc-spider’s golden fluid — someone must have peeled it off, where it stuck.

Those places still felt strange. Not exactly numb so much as preserved — somehow offset in time. Dwer had a bizarre inkling that bits of his flesh were younger now than they had been before. Perhaps those patches would even outlive his body for a while, after the rest of him died.

But not yet, One-of-a-Kind, he mused.

It’s the mulc-spider who’s gone. Never got to finish her collection.

He recalled flames, explosions. I better make sure Rety and the glaver are all right.

“I don’t guess you’d run and fetch my brother for me, would you?” he asked the noor, who just stared back at him.

With a sigh, Dwer draped a fur over his shoulders, then gingerly pushed up to his knees, overruling waves of agony. Lark would resent him popping any of those fine stitches, so he took it easy, standing with one hand pressed against the nearest wall. When the dizziness passed, he shuffled on his heels to the ornate table, retrieving the candle in its clay holder. The doorway came next, a low, broad opening covered by a curtain of hanging wooden slats. He had to stoop, pushing through the qheuen-shaped portal.

A pitch-black tunnel slanted left and right. He chose the leftward shaft, since it angled upward a bit. Of course, blue qheuens built their submerged homes to a logic all their own. Dwer used to get lost even in familiar Dolo Dam, playing hide-and-seek with Blade’s creche-mates.

It was painful and awkward keeping most of his weight gingerly on the heels. Soon he regretted the stubborn impulse that sent him wandering like this, away from his convalescent bed. But a few duras later, his stubbornness was rewarded by sounds of anxious conversation, echoing from somewhere ahead. Two speakers were clearly human — male and female — while a third was qheuen. None were Lark or Rety, though mumbled snatches rang familiar. And tense. Dwer’s hunter-sensitivity to strong feelings tingled like his frostbitten fingers and toes.

“…our peoples are natural allies. Always have been. Recall how our ancestors helped yours throw off the tyranny of the grays?”

“As my folk succored yours when urrish packs stalked humans everywhere outside Biblos Fortress? Back when our burrows sheltered your harried farmers and their families, till your numbers grew large enough to let you fight back?”

The second voice, aspirated from two or more leg-vents, came from a qheuen matron, Dwer could tell. Probably lord of this snug mountain dam. He didn’t like the snatches of conversation he had heard so far. He blew out the candle, shuffling toward the soft glow of a doorway up ahead.

“Is that what you are asking of me now?” the matriarch went on, speaking with a different set of vents. The timbre of her Anglic accent changed. “If refuge is your need against this frightful storm, then I and my sisters offer it. Five fives of human settlers, our neighbors and friends, may bring their babes and chimps and smaller beasts. I am sure other lake-mothers in these hills will do the same. We’ll protect them here until your criminal cousins depart, or till they blast this house to splinters with their almighty power, setting the lake waters boiling to steam.”

The words were so unexpected, so free of any context in Dwer’s foggy brain, that he could not compass them.

The male human grunted. “And if we ask for more?”

“For our sons, you mean? For their rash courage and spiky claws? For their armored shells, so tough and yet so like soft cheese when sliced by Buyur steel?” The qheuen mother’s hiss was like that of a bubbling kettle. Dwer counted five overlapping notes, all vents working at once.

“That is more,” she commented after a pause. “That is very much more indeed. And knives of Buyur steel are like whips of soft boo, compared to the new things we all fear.”

Dwer stepped around the corner, where several lanterns bathed the faces of those he had been listening to. He shielded his eyes as two humans stood — a dark stern-looking man in his mid-forties and a stocky woman ten years younger, with light-colored hair severely tied back from a broad forehead. The qheuen matron rocked briefly, lifting two legs to expose flashes of claw.

“What new things do you fear, revered mother?” Dwer asked hoarsely. Turning to the humans, he went on. “Where are Lark and Rety?” He blinked. “And there… was a glaver, too.”

“All are well. All have departed for the Glade, bearing vital information,” the qheuen whistle-spoke. “Meanwhile, until you recover, you honor this lake as our guest. I am known as Tooth Slice Shavings.” She lowered her carapace to scrape the floor.

“Dwer Koolhan,” he answered, trying awkwardly to bow with arms crossed over his chest.

“Are you all right, Dwer?” the man asked, reaching toward him. “You shouldn’t be up and about.”

“I’d say that’s up to Captain Koolhan himself,” the woman commented. “There’s much to discuss, if he’s ready.”

Dwer peered at them.

Danel Ozawa and… Lena Strong.

He knew her. They had been scheduled to meet at Gathering, in fact. Something having to do with that stupid tourism idea.

Dwer shook his head. She had used a word, strange and dire-sounding.

Captain.

“The militia’s been called up,” he reasoned, angry with his mind for moving so slowly.

Danel Ozawa nodded. As chief forester for the Central Range, he was nominally Dwer’s boss, though Dwer hardly saw him except at Gatherings. Ozawa was a man of imposing intellect, a deputy sage, sanctioned to make rulings on matters of law and tradition. As for Lena Strong, the blond woman was aptly named. She had been a crofter’s wife until a tree fell — accidentally, she claimed — on her shiftless husband, whereupon she left her home village to become one of the top lumberjack-sawyers on the river.

“Highest-level alert,” Ozawa confirmed. “All companies activated.”

“What… all? Just to collect a little band of sooners?”

Lena shook her head. “The girl’s family beyond the Rimmers? This goes far beyond that.”

“Then—”

Memory assailed Dwer. The blurry image of a hovering monster, firing bolts of flame. He croaked, “The flying machine.”

“That’s right.” Danel nodded. “The one you encountered—”

“Lemme guess. Some hotheads dug up a cache.”

Dreamers and ne’er-do-wells were always chasing rumors of a fabled hoard. Not rubble but a sealed trove buried on purpose by departing Buyur. Dwer often had to round up searchers who strayed too far. What if some angry young urs actually found an ancient god-weapon? Might they test it first on two isolated humans, trapped in a mulc-spider maze, before going on to settle larger grudges?

Lena Strong laughed out loud.

“Oh, he’s a wonder, Danel. What a theory. If only it were true!”

Dwer lifted a hand to his head. The vibration of the water wheel seemed labored, uneven. “Well? What is true?” he demanded testily, then stared at the expression on Ozawa’s face. The older man answered with a brief eye-flick heavenward.

“No,” Dwer whispered.

He felt strangely remote, detached.

“Well then iz all over, an’ I’m out of a job — no?”

The two humans grabbed his arms as he let go of the thing that had kept him going until now, the force that had dragged him upward out of unconsciousness in the first place: duty.

Galactics. Here on the Slope, he thought as they bore his weight back down the hall. So it’s come at last. Judgment Day.

There was nothing more to do. No way he could make any difference at all.

Apparently, the sages didn’t agree. They thought fate might yet be diverted, or at least modified somehow.

Lester Cambel and his aides are making plans, Dwer realized the next morning as he met the two humans again, this time by the shore of the forest-shrouded mountain lake. Even the dam wore trees, softening its graceful outline, helping root the structure firmly to the landscape. Stretched out on an elegant wooden bench, Dwer sipped a cool drink from a goblet of urrish glass as he faced the two envoys who had been sent all the way to see him.

Clearly the leaders of Earthling-Sept were playing a complex, multilayer game — balancing species self-interest against the good of the Commons as a whole. Bluff, open-faced Lena Strong seemed untroubled by this ambivalence, but not Danel Ozawa, who explained to Dwer the varied reactions of other races to the invaders being human.

I wish Lark had stayed. He could have made sense of all this. Dwer’s mind still felt woozy, even after a night’s restoring sleep.

“I still don’t get it. What are human adventurers doing out here in Galaxy Two? I thought Earthlings were crude, ignorant trash, even in their own little part of Galaxy Four!”

“Why are we here, Dwer?” Ozawa replied. “Our ancestors came to Jijo just decades after acquiring star drive.”

Dwer shrugged. “They were selfish bastards. Willing to endanger the whole race just to find a place to breed.”

Lena sniffed, but Dwer kept his chin raised. “Nothing else makes sense.”

Our ancestors were self-centered scoundrels — Lark had put it one day.

“You don’t believe the stories of persecution and flight?” Lena asked. “The need to hide or die?”

Dwer shrugged.

“What of the g’Keks?” Ozawa asked. “Their ancestors claimed persecution. Now we learn their race was murdered by the Inheritors’ Alliance. Does it take genocide to make the excuse valid?”

Dwer looked away. None of the g’Keks he knew had died. Should he mourn millions who were slaughtered long ago and far away?

“Why ask me?” he murmured irritably. “Can anything I do make a difference?”

“That depends.” Danel leaned forward. “Your brother is brilliant but a heretic. Do you share his beliefs? Do you think this world would be better off without us? Should we die out, Dwer?”

He saw they were testing him. As a top hunter, he’d be valuable to the militia — if he could be trusted. Dwer sensed their eyes, watching, weighing.

Without doubt, Lark was a deeper, wiser man than anyone Dwer knew. His arguments made sense when he spoke passionately of higher values than mere animal reproduction — certainly more sense than Sara’s weird brand of math-based, what-if optimism. Dwer knew firsthand about species going extinct — the loss of something beautiful that would never be recovered.

Maybe Jijo would be better off resting undisturbed, according to plan.

Still, Dwer knew his own heart. He would marry someday, if he found the right partner, and he would sire as many kids as his wife and the sages allowed, drinking like a heady wine the love they gave, in return for his devotion.

“I’ll fight, if that’s what you’re askin’,” he said in a low voice, perhaps ashamed to admit it. “If that’s what it takes to survive.”

Lena grunted with a curt, satisfied nod. Danel let out a soft sigh.

“Fighting may not be necessary. Your militia duties will be taken up by others.”

Dwer sat up. “Because of this?” He motioned toward the bandages on his feet and left hand. Those on the right were already off, revealing that the middle finger was no longer the longest, a disconcerting but noncrippling amputation, healing under a crust of traeki paste. “I’ll be up and around soon, good as ever.”

“Indeed, I am counting on it.” Ozawa nodded. “We need you for something rather arduous. And before I explain, you must swear never to inform another soul, especially your brother.”

Dwer stared at the man. If it were anyone else, he might have laughed scornfully. But he trusted Ozawa. And much as Dwer loved and admired his brother, Lark was without any doubt a heretic. “It’s for the good?” he asked.

“I believe so,” the older man said, in apparent sincerity.

Dwer sighed unhappily. “All right then. Let’s hear what you have in mind.”

Asx

The aliens demanded to see chimpanzees, I then marveled over those we brought before them, as I if they had never seen the like before.

“Your chimps do not speak! Why is that?”

Lester proclaims mystification. Chimpanzees are capable of sign language, of course. But have other traits been added since the Tabernacle fled to Jijo?

The invaders seem unimpressed with Lester’s demurral, and so are some of our fellow Sixers. For the first time, i/we sense something hidden, deceitful, in the manner of my/our human colleague. He knows more than he tells. But our skittish rewq balk at revealing more.

Nor is this our sole such worry. Qheuens refuse to speak further regarding lorniks. Our g’Kek cousins reel from the news that they are the last of their kind. And all of us are appalled to witness alien robots returning to base laden with gassed, sleeping glavers, kidnapped from faraway herds for analysis under those once-gay pavilions we lent our guests.

“Is this the return of innocence, promised in the Scrolls?” Ur-Jah asks, doubt dripping like fumes from her lowered snout. “How could a blessing arise out of base crime?”

If only we could ask the glavers. Is this what they wanted, when they chose the Path of Redemption?

Lark

“Well, look who it is. I’m surprised you have the nerve to show your face around here.”

The forayer woman’s grin seemed at once both sly and teasing. She peeled off elastic gloves, turning from a glaver on a lab bench with wires in its scalp. There were several of the big trestle tables, where human, g’Kek, and urrish workers bent under cool, bright lamps, performing rote tasks they had been taught, helping their employers test animals sampled from sundry Jijoan ecosystems.

Lark had dropped his backpack by the entrance. Now he picked it up again. “I’ll go if you want.”

“No, no. Please stay.” Ling waved him into the laboratory shelter, which had been moved to a shielded forest site the very night Lark last saw the beautiful intruder, the same evening the black station buried itself under a fountain of piled dirt and broken vegetation. The basis for both actions was still obscure, but Lark’s superiors now thought it must have to do with the violent destruction of one of the interlopers’ robots. An event his brother must have witnessed at close hand.

Then there was the testimony of Rety, the girl from over the mountains, supported by her treasure, a strange metal machine, once shaped like a Jijoan bird. Was it a Buyur remnant, as some supposed? If so, why should such a small item perturb the mighty forayers? Unless it was like the tip of a red qheuen’s shell, innocuous at first sight, poking over a sand dune, part of much more than it seemed? The “bird” now lay in a cave, headless and mute, but Rety swore it used to move.

Lark had been ordered back down to the Glade before his brother could confirm the story. He knew he shouldn’t worry. Danel Ozawa was qualified to tend Dwer’s wounds. Still, he deeply resented the recall order.

“Will you be needing me for another expedition?” he asked Ling.

“After you abandoned me the last time? We found human tracks when we finally got to where our robot went down. Is that where you rushed off to? Funny how you knew which way to go.”

He shouldered his pack. “Well, if you don’t need me, then—”

She swept a hand before her face. “Oh, never mind. Let’s move on. There’s plenty of work, if you want it.”

Lark glanced dubiously at the lab tables. Of Jijo’s Six, all three of the races with good hand-eye coordination were employed. Outside, hoons and qheuens also labored at the behest of aliens whose merest trinkets meant unimaginable wealth to primitive savages. Only traeki were unseen among the speckled tents, since the ringed ones seemed to make the raiders nervous.

Sepoy labor. That was the contemptuous expression Lena Strong had used when she brought Lark new orders at Tooth-Slice Shavings’ Dam. An old Earth term, referring to aborigines toiling for mighty visitors, paid in beads.

“Oh, don’t look so sour.” Ling laughed. “It would serve you right if I put you to work staining nerve tissue, or shoveling the longsnout pens… No, stop.” She grabbed Lark’s arm. All signs of mockery vanished. “I’m sorry. There really are things I want to discuss with you.”

“Uthen is here.” He pointed to the far end of the tent, where his fellow biologist, a large male qheuen with a slate gray carapace, held conference with Rann, one of the two male forayers, a tall massive man in a tight-fitting uniform.

“Uthen knows incredible detail about how different species relate to each other.” Ling agreed with a nod. “That’s not easy on a planet that has had infusions of outsider species every twenty million years or so, for aeons. Your lore is impressive, given your limitations.”

Had she any idea how far Jijoan “lore” really went? So far, the sages had not released his detailed charts, and Uthen must be dragging all five feet, cooperating just enough to stay indispensable. Yet the aliens seemed easily impressed by sketchy glimmers of local acumen, which only showed how insultingly low their expectations were.

“Thanks,” Lark muttered. “Thanks a lot.”

Ling sighed, briefly averting her dark eyes. “Crampers, can’t I say anything right, today? I don’t mean to offend. It’s just… look, how about we try starting from scratch, all right?” She held out a hand.

Lark looked at it. What was he expected to do now?

She reached out with her left hand to take his right wrist. Then her right hand clasped his.

“It’s called a handshake. We use it to signify respect, amicable greeting, or agreement.”

Lark blinked. Her grip was warm, firm, slightly moist.

“Oh, yes… I’ve rea— heard of it.”

He tried to respond when she squeezed, but it felt so strange, and vaguely erotic, that Lark let go sooner than she seemed to expect. His face felt warm.

“Is it a common gesture?”

“Very common, I hear. On Earth.”

You hear? Lark leaped on the passing phrase and knew it had begun again — their game of hints and revelations, mutual scrutiny of clues and things left unsaid.

“I can see why we gave it up, on Jijo,” he commented. “The urs would hate it; their hands are more personal than their genitals. Hoons and qheuens would crush our hands and we’d squash the tendrils of any g’Kek who tried it.” His fingers still felt tingly. He resisted an urge to look them over. Definitely time to change the subject.

“So,” Lark said, trying for a businesslike tone of equality, “you’ve never been to Earth?”

One eyebrow raised. Then she laughed. “Oh, I knew we couldn’t hire you for just a handful of biodegradable toys. Don’t worry, Lark; you’ll be paid in answers — some answers — at the end of each day. After you’ve earned them.”

Lark sighed, although in fact the arrangement did not sound unsatisfactory.

“Very well, then. Why don’t you tell me what it is you want to know.”

Asx

Each day we strive to mediate stress among our factions, from those urging cooperation with our uninvited guests, to others seeking means to destroy them. Even my/our own sub-selves war over these options.

Making peace with felons, or fighting the unfightable.

Damnation or extinction.

And still our guests question us about other visitors! Have we seen other outsiders lately, dropping from the sky? Are there Buyur sites we have not told them about? Sites where ancient mechanisms lurk, alert, still prone to vigorous action?

Why this persistence? Surely they can tell we are not lying — that we know nothing more than we have told.

Or is that true, my rings? Have all Six shared equally with the Commons, or are some withholding vital information, needed by all?

That i should think such a thing is but another measure of how far we are fallen, we unworthy, despicable sooners. We, who surely have farther yet to fall.

Rety

Under a smaller, shabbier tent, in a dense grove some secret distance from the research station, Rety threw herself onto a reed mat, pounding it with both fists.,

“Stinkers. Rotten guts an’ rancy meat. Rotten, rotten, rotten!”

She had good reason to thrash in outrage and self-pity. That liar, Dwer, had told her the sages were good and wise. But they turned out to be horrid!

Oh, not at the beginning. At first, her hopes had shot up like the geysers back home in the steaming Gray Hills. Lester Cambel and the others seemed so kind, easing her dread over being punished for her grandparents’ crime of sneaking east, over the forbidden mountains. Even before questioning her, they had doctors tend her scrapes and burns. It never occurred to Rety to fear the unfamiliar g’Kek and traeki medics who dissolved away drops of clinging mule-fluid, then used foam to drive off the parasites that had infested her scalp for as long as she could remember. She even found it in her to forgive them when they dashed her hopes of a cure for the scars on her face. Apparently, there was a limit even to what Slopies could accomplish.

From the moment she and Lark strode into the Glade of Gathering, everyone seemed awfully excited and distracted. At first Rety thought it was because of her, but it soon grew clear that the real cause was visitors from the sky!

No matter. It still felt like coming home. Like being welcomed into the embrace of a family far bigger and sweeter than the dirty little band she had known for fourteen awful years.

At least it felt that way for a while.

Till the betrayal.

Till the sages called her once again to their pavilion and told her their decision.

“It’s all Dwer’s fault,” she muttered later, nursing hot resentment. “Him an’ his rotten brother. If only I could’ve snuck in over the mountains without being seen. No one would’ve noticed me in all this ruckus.” Rety had no clear notion what she would have done after that. The oldsters back home had been murky in their handed-down tales about the Slope. Perhaps she could make herself useful to some remote village as a trapper. Not for food — Slopies had plenty of that — but for soft furs that’d keep townfolk from asking too closely where she came from.

Back in the Gray Hills, such dreams used to help her pass each grinding day. Still, she might never have found the guts to flee her muddy clan but for the beautiful bright bird.

And now the sages had taken it away from her!

“We are grateful for your part in bringing this enigmatic wonder to us,” Lester Cambel said less than an hour ago, with the winged thing spread on a table before him. “Meanwhile though, something terribly urgent has come up. I hope you’ll understand, Rety, why it’s become so necessary for you to go back.”

Back? At first, she could not bring herself to understand. She puzzled while he gabbled on and on.

Back?

Back to Jass and Bom and their strutting ways? To the endless bullying of those big, strong hunters? Always boasting around the campfire about petty, vicious triumphs that grew more exaggerated with each telling? To those wicked oafs who used fire-tipped sticks to punish anyone who dared to talk back to them?

Back to where mothers watched half their babies waste away and die? To where that hardly mattered, because new babies kept on coming, coming and coming, till you dried up and died of old age before you were forty? Back to all that hunger and dirt?

The human sage had muttered words and phrases that were supposed to sound soothing and noble and logical. But Rety had stopped listening.

They meant to send her back to the tribe!

Oh, it might be fine to see Jass’s face when she strode into camp, clothed and equipped with all the wonders the Six could offer. But then where would she be? Condemned once more to that awful life.

I won’t go back. I won’t!

With that resolution, Rety rolled over, wiped her eyes, and considered what to do.

She could try running away, taking shelter elsewhere. Rumors told that all was not in perfect harmony among the Six. So far, she had obeyed Cambel’s request not to blab the story of her origins. But Rety wondered — might some urrish or qheuen faction pay for the information? Or invite her to live among them?

It’s said the urs sometimes let a chosen human ride upon their backs, when the human’s light enough, and worthy.

Rety tried to picture life among the galloping clans, roaming bold and free across the open plains with wind blowing through her hair.

Or what about going to sea with hoons? There were islands nobody had ever set foot on, and flying fish, and floating mountains made of ice. What an adventure that would be! Then there were the traeki of the swamps…

A new thought abruptly occurred to her. Another option that suddenly appeared to lie open. One so amazing to contemplate that she just lay there silently for several duras, hands unclenching at last from their tightly clutched fists. Finally, she sat up, pondering with growing excitement a possibility beyond any other ambition she had ever conceived.

The more she thought about it, the better it began to seem.