Brightness Reef

Asx

We sages preach that it is foolish to assume. Yet, during this, our greatest crisis, the invaders often turn out to know much that we thought safely hidden.

Should this surprise us, my rings? Are they not star-gods from the Five Galaxies?

Worse, have we been united? Have not many of the Six rashly exercised their right of dissent, currying favors from the sky-humans against our advice? Some of these have simply vanished — including the sooner girl who so vexed Lester with her ingratitude, daring to steal back the treasure she had brought, which intrigued our human sage for days on end. Does she even now dwell within the buried station, pampered as a g’Kek might groom a favorite zookir? Or else, did the sky-felons simply delete her, as a traeki voids its core of spent mulch, or as Earthling tyrants used to eliminate quislings who had finished serving their purpose?

For every secret the raiders uncover, there are as many ways they seem shockingly ignorant, for sky-gods.

It is a puzzlement — and small solace as we contemplate the proud, intimidating visitor who this morn came before the Council of Sages.

My rings, has memory of this event yet coated your waxy cores? Do you recollect the star-human, Rann, making his request? Asking that several from his group be invited along, when next we commune with the Holy Egg?

The request was courteous, yet it had aspects of a command.

We should not be surprised. How could the aliens not notice what is happening?

At first discernible only to the most sensitive, the tremors strengthen till now they pervade this corner of our world.

—curling the mists that rise from geysers and steam pools,

—guiding patterned flocks of passing birdlings,

—waking dormant rewq, both in caves and in our pouches,

—even permeating the myriad blue colors of the sky.

“We have heard much about your sacred stone,” Rann said. “Its activity triggers fascination in our sensoria. We would see this wonder for ourselves.”

“Very well,” Vubben answered for the Six, wrapping three eyestalks in a gesture of assent. Indeed how could we refuse?

“Pray tell-how many will be in your party?”

Rann bowed again, imposing for a human, as tall as any traeki, broad in the shoulders as a young hoon. “There will be three. Myself and Ling, you have met. As for the third, his revered name is Ro-kenn, and it is incumbent to realize how you are about to be honored. Our master must be shown all expressions of courtesy and respect.”

With varied eyes, visors, and sight patches, we sages winked and winced amazement. All save Lester Cambel, who muttered softly next to our traeki stack,

“So the bloody Dakkins had one underground with them, all along.”

Humans are surprising creatures, but Lester’s breach in tact so stunned our rings that “i” was unanimously amazed. Did he not fear being overheard?

Apparently not. Through our rewq, i read Lester’s ill-regard for the man across from us, and for this news.

As for the rest of the Council, it did not take rewq to note their curiosity.

At long last, we were about to meet the Rothen.

Lark

Smiling ironically, Lark finished the first page of the letter and put down his pen. He blew on the paper, then picked up his portable blotter, rolling the felt across the still damp lines of ink. He took a fresh sheet out of the leather portfolio, dipped the pen in the ink cup and resumed.

Lark hesitated. Even such veiled hints might be too much to risk. In normal times it would be unthinkable for anyone to tamper with someone else’s mail. But such things used to be done by frantic factions during ancient Earthly crises, according to historical accounts. Anyway, what good would it do Sara to worry? Feeling like a wastrel, he crumpled the second sheet and started fresh.

He paused to dip his pen in the cup of fresh ink.

Lark took a sip from an earthenware cup of springwater. He dipped the pen again.

Now for the big news everyone’s excited about. It seems we’re about to get our first glimpse of one of these mysterious beings! Within hours, one or more Rothen are scheduled to emerge from their buried station and join a pilgrimage to the reawakening Egg! All this time, we never guessed their starship had left any of them behind with Rann and the others.

The Commons is tense as a violus that’s been strung too tight. You could cut the anxiety here with an overused metaphor.

I’d better wrap this up if I’m to slip it in the mail packet.

Let’s see. You also asked about “neural taps.” Do the aliens use such things to communicate directly with computers and other devices?

I was going to answer yes. Ling and the rest do carry tiny devices that bring them voice and data information, arriving as if by magic from afar.

Then I reread your account of the Stranger’s injury and reconsidered. The forayers command their machines by voice and gesture. I never saw anything like a brain-direct computer link, or the sort of “instant man-machine rapport” Ariana spoke of.

Now that I think about it

Lark dipped the pen again, poised to continue, then stopped.

Footsteps clattered on the gravel path beyond his tent. He recognized the heavy, scrape-ratchet of a gray qheuen. Nor was it the casual, unpretentious rhythm of Uthen. This was a stately twist-and-swivel cadence, using a complex ripple of alternating feet — a difficult aristocratic step, taught by chitinous matriarchs who sometimes styled themselves royal queens.

Lark laid down his pen and closed the portfolio. A low, wide silhouette loomed against the tent flap. Harullen’s voice was accompanied by fluting sighs from three speech vents, each singing a different note in a high qheuenish dialect of Galactic Six.

“Friend Lark, are you within? Please greet me. I come bearing precious gifts.”

Lark lifted the flap, shading his eyes as he emerged from dimness to face the lowering sun, poking sharp rays between rows of forest giants. “I greet you, Harul-len, faith-comrade,” he replied in the same language.

Harullen wore pilgrim’s robes draped across his pentagonal carapace, leaving the central cupola uncovered. The g’Kek-woven finery shimmered under glancing sunshine. It took a moment for Lark’s adapting eyes to spot what else was different — something wound around the qheuen’s ash-colored cupola.

“Aha,” he commented, slipping into a more relaxed sevenish dialect. “So it’s true. The mask renews its offer.”

“To take nourishment of our bodies in exchange for revelation of the soul. Indeed. The mask returns among us. Caves which had seemed barren now swarm with labile young rewq, even as the Egg resumes its patterning song. Are these not good omens? Shall we rejoice?”

With a snap of one claw, Harullen signaled to a lornik, which had been crouching out of view behind its master. The small servant creature hurried around the qheuen’s great flank, scuttling and twisting in a four-legged imitation of Harullen’s own stately walk. With small, three-fingered hands it bore a box of polished wood, showing fluted traces of personal tooth-carving.

“From among this crop of cave fledglings, there were many shaped for noble human brows,” Harullen continued. “Please accept these to choose from, as offerings of deep esteem.”

Lark took the box from the lornik, knowing better than to thank or make eye contact with the shy creature. Unlike chimps and zookirs, lorniks seemed able to bond only with the race that brought their ancestors to Jijo, nearly a thousand years ago.

He lifted the delicately grooved lid of the gift box, which by qheuenish tradition had been gnawed by the giver and could never be used again for any other purpose. Inside, resting on a bed of garu sawdust, several clusters of brown-speckled tendrils quivered, coupled by colored bands of translucent film.

There’s been so little time. I’ve had so many duties. This really is a fine favor…

Still, all told, Lark would rather have gone to the caves and picked his next rewq for himself, as he had done on three other occasions since passing puberty. It seemed strange to choose one out of a box. What was he to do with the others?

Several tentacles raised tentatively, reaching toward the light, then twisting, searching. Only one pair showed no indecision, wafting gently in Lark’s direction, spreading a gossamer web between them.

Well, it’s a humaniform rewq, all right, he thought. It looks new, robust.

To feel diffident was only natural. A person usually held on to a personal rewq for many years. It had been painful to watch helplessly as the last one wasted in its moss-lined pouch, during the many weeks the Egg was silent. Nor could he share someone else’s symbiont. Among humans, one was more likely to pass around a toothbrush than a rewq.

“My gratitude is manifest in acceptance of this unexcelled gift,” he said. Though reluctant, Lark lifted the squirming mass to his brow.

His former rewq had been like a pair of old shoes — or a favorite pair of urrish-made sunglasses — comfortable and easy to use. This one twitched and wriggled in agitated eagerness, palpating his temples in avid search of rich surface veins where it might feed. The gauzy membrane spread taut over Lark’s eyes, rippling with the rewq’s own excitement, conveying nothing more useful than a wave of vertigo. It would take time to reach an understanding with the new creature. Ideally you let your old one teach the new, during an overlapping time before the elderly rewq died.

Ifni’s miracles often have ironic timing. We had to face the aliens for so long without the help rewq might have offered. Now, at a critical moment, they return so suddenly that they may only prove a distracting hindrance.

Still, for courtesy’s sake, he pretended pleasure, bowing and thanking Harullen for the fine gift. With luck, Harullen’s own rewq would be noisy too, and not convey any of Lark’s own mixed feelings.

The heretic leader’s satisfaction was evident in a mincing, clattering dance of feet and dangling claws. The film over Lark’s eyes added a blur of sparks that might be translated qheuenish emotions — or else just static from the excited, untrained rewq.

Then Harullen abruptly changed the subject, slipping into Anglic.

“You know that the time of pilgrimage is almost at hand?”

“I was just writing a letter. I’ll don my robe and join our group at the Wheel Stone in a midura.”

Partly because Ling requested Lark’s presence, the . Sages had granted the heretical faction two sixes among the twelve twelves selected to make the first climb, setting forth to greet the rousing Egg. Since hearing the news, Lark had felt a familiar heat coming from the knob of stone that hung by a thong around his neck. His reminder and penance. No pilgrimage was ever easy wearing that amulet.

“Very well, then,” Harullen replied. “At the Wheel Stone we shall consider the zealots’ latest entreaty before proceeding to join…”

The heretic’s voice trailed off, muffling as he crouched down, drawing all five legs into his carapace, bringing his sensitive tongue into contact with the ground. This time, Lark’s rewq conveyed a vivid image of emotions — a halo depicting distaste mixed liberally with disapproval.

Harullen resumed. “There is another on the trail. One whose stone-hard lineage is belied by disorderly foot-haste.”

One whose what is what? Lark puzzled. Sometimes the way other races used Anglic left him confused. Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing the chaotic human language had become so popular on Jijo.

Soon he also felt ground-tremors, tickling the soles of his feet. A five-beat vibration even more familiar than Harullen’s earlier footsteps. Similar to that rhythmic beat, yet simpler, less aristocratic, a pace too hurried and eager to waste time on etiquette or show.

Another armored form burst into view, trailing twigs and leaves.

Like Harullen, Uthen the Taxonomist was dressed for pilgrimage — in a carelessly draped, once-white rag that flapped behind him like somebody’s old bedsheet. His carapace was a slightly deeper shade of slate than his disdainful cousin’s. Like Harullen, Uthen wore a new rewq, which might explain his stumbling progress, twice veering off the path as if distracted by swarms of buzzing insects. Lark peeled his own reluctant symbiont back from his eyes. He needed no help reading his colleague’s excitement.

“Lark-ark, Harullen-en,” Uthen stammered out several vents, in unmatched timbres. Harullen scornfully turned his cupola while the newcomer caught his breath.

“Come quickly, both of you. They’ve come out!”

“Who’s come—?” Lark began, before realizing that Uthen could mean but one thing.

He nodded. “Just give me a dura.”

Lark ducked back under the tent flap, fumbled for his own pilgrimage robe, then paused by the writing desk. He snatched the unfinished letter from under the folio and slid it into a sleeve, along with a sharpened pencil. Ink was more elegant and wouldn’t smudge. Still, Sara wouldn’t give a damn, so long as the letter got there and contained the latest news.

“Come on!” Uthen urged, impatiently, when Lark reemerged. “Hop aboard and let’s hoof it!” The gray qheuen scientist dipped one end of his shell to the ground. This time, Harullen groaned annoyance. Sure, kids did it all the time, but it wasn’t dignified for an adult gray — especially one with ancestry like Uthen’s — to go around carrying a human on his back. Still, they would move faster now, toward the Meadow of Concealed Aliens, hurrying to see the wonder that had emerged.

If anything, Ling understated when she called them beautiful.

Lark had never envisioned anything quite like them. Not when leafing through ancient picture books, or reading pre-Contact works of space fiction. Not even in his dreams.

In the vernacular of Jijo’s exiled tribes, it was common to call all Galactics “star-gods.” Yet here, strolling a forest clearing, were beings that seemed all but literally worthy of the name, so exquisite were they to behold. Lark could stand it only for moments at a stretch, then had to look away lest his eyes fill with tears and his chest begin to ache.

Ling and the other forayer humans formed a guard of honor around their noble patrons, while vigilant robots hovered. Occasionally, one of the tall stoop-shouldered Rothen crooked a finger, beckoning Rann or Besh to lean upward and explain something, like children called on to recite, gesturing at a nearby tree, one of the tent-pavilions, a herd of spline beasts, or a shy infant g’Kek.

Crowds gathered. Proctors of Gathering, armed with red-dyed sticks, kept people from pressing too close, but there seemed small likelihood of a shameful outburst. Hardly anyone even whispered, so thick was the atmosphere of awe.

The effect seemed greatest on the humans present, most of whom stared with hushed wonderment and bewildered familiarity. Rothen were humanoid to an uncanny degree, with high noble foreheads, wide sympathetic eyes, eloquent noses, and droopy, soft-fringed eyebrows that seemed to purse with sincere, attentive interest in anyone or everything they encountered. Nor were these parallels coincidental, Lark supposed. Physical and emotional affinities would have been cultivated during the long process of uplift, tens of thousands of years ago, when Rothen experts tinkered and modified a tribe of graceless but promising apes back on Pliocene Earth, altering them gradually into beings almost ready for the stars.

That assumed these creatures really were humanity’s long-hidden patrons, as Ling claimed. Lark tried to retain an attitude of cautious neutrality but found it hard in the face of such evidence. How could this race be any other than humankind’s lost patrons?

When the two august visitors were introduced to the assembled High Sages, Lark drew comfort from the serene expressions of Vubben, Phwhoon-dau, and the others, none of whom wore rewq for the occasion. Even Lester Cambel remained composed — at least on the outside — when presented to Ro-kenn and Ro-pol, whose names Rann proclaimed for all to hear.

By human standards, Ro-kenn appeared to be male. And though Lark tried not to be overly influenced by analogies, the more delicate-featured Ro-pol struck him as possibly female. The crowd murmured when the two smiled — revealing small white teeth — conveying apparent pleasure at the meeting. Ro-pol’s grin creased in ways that might even be called dimples. The word merry tempted Lark, as a way to describe the slighter Rothen’s cheerful mien. It wouldn’t be hard to like a face like that, so warm, open, and filled with understanding.

It makes sense, Lark thought. If the Rothen really are our patrons, wouldn’t they have ingrained us with similar esteem patterns?

Nor were Earthlings alone affected. After all, the Six Races had a lot of experience with each other. You didn’t have to be a qheuen to sense the charisma of a stately queen, so why shouldn’t an urs, or hoon, or g’Kek sense this potent humanoid magnetism? Even without rewq, most of the nonhumans present seemed caught up in the prevailing mood — hope.

Lark recalled Ling’s assurance that the forayer mission would succeed without incident, and Jijo’s Commons needn’t be changed in any but positive ways. “It will all work out,” she had said.

Ling had also told him the Rothen were special beings, even among high Galactic clans. Operating in deliberate obscurity, they had quietly arranged for Old Earth to lie fallow, off the colonization lists, for half a billion years, an accomplishment with implications Lark found hard to imagine. Needing no fleets or weapons, the Rothen were influential, mystical, mysterious — in many ways godlike even compared with those beings whose vast armadas thundered across the Five Galaxies. No wonder Ling and her peers thought themselves above so-called “laws” of migration and uplift, as they sifted Jijo’s biosphere for some worthy species to adopt. No wonder she seemed fearless over the possibility of being caught.

The newly cave-fledged rewq also appeared dazzled, ever since the tall pair emerged from the buried research station. The one on Lark’s brow trembled, casting splashy aurae around the two Rothen till he finally had to peel it back.

Lark tried to wrest control over his thoughts, reclaiming a thread of skepticism.

It may be that all advanced races learn to do what the Rothen are doing now — impressing those beneath themon the ladder of status. Perhaps we’re all extra-susceptible on account of being primitives, having no other experience with Galactics.

But skepticism was slippery as the Rothen emissaries conversed with the sages in voices that seemed warm, compassionate. A robot amplified the discourse for all to hear.

“We two now express grateful and respectful honors for your hospitality,” Ro-kenn said in a very prim, grammatically perfect GalSixish.

“Furthermore, we now express regret for any anxiety our presence may have generated among your noble Commons,” Ro-pol added. “Only of late have we come to realize the depth of your unease. Overcoming our natural reticence — our shyness, if you will — we now emerge to soothe your quite unwarranted fears.”

Again, whispers of tentative hope from the crowd — not an easy emotion for Jijoan exiles.

Ro-kenn spoke again.

“Now we express joy and appreciation to have been invited to attend your sacred rites. One of us shall accompany you on this eve, to witness the wonderment inherent in, and remarkably expressed by, your renowned and Holy Egg.”

“Meanwhile,” Ro-pol continued, “the other of us shall withdraw to contemplate how best to reward your Commons for your pains, your worries, and your hard sequestered lives.”

Ro-pol appeared to muse on the problem for a moment, choosing her words.

“Some gift, we foresee. Some benefaction to help you through the ages ahead, as each of your cojoined races seeks salvation down the long, courageous path known as Return-to-innocence.”

A murmur coursed the ranks of onlookers — pleasure at this surprising news.

Now each of the sages took turns making a welcoming speech, starting with Vubben, whose aged wheels squeaked as he rolled forward to recite from one of the oldest scrolls. Something apropos about the ineffable nature of mercy, which drifts upward from the ground when least expected, a grace that cannot be earned or even merited, only lovingly accepted when it comes.

Lark let the neophyte rewq slip back over his eyes. The Rothen pair remained immersed in a nimbus of confused colors, so while Vubben droned on, he turned and scanned the assembled onlookers.

Of course rewq offered no magic window to the soul. Mostly, they helped make up for the fact that each race came equipped with brain tissue specifically adapted for reading emotional cues from its own kind. Rewq were most effective when facing another rewq-equipped being, especially if the two symbionts first exchanged empathy hormones.

Is that why the sages aren’t wearing theirs now? In order to protect secret thoughts?

From the throng he picked up ripples of fragile optimism and mystical wonder, cresting here and there with spumelike waves of near-religious fervor. There were other colors, however. From several dozen qheuens, hoon, urs, and men — proctors and militia guards — there flowed cooler shades of duty. Refusal to be distracted by anything short of a major earthquake.

Another glittering twinkle Lark quickly recognized as a different kind of duty, more complex, focused, and vain. It accompanied a brief reflection off a glass lens. Bloor and his comrades at work, Lark guessed. Busy recording the moment.

Lark’s symbiont was working better now. In fact, despite its lack of training, it might never again be quite this sensitive. At this moment almost every rewq in the valley was the same age, fresh from caves where they had lately mingled in great piles, sharing unity enzymes. Each would be acutely aware of the others, at longer than normal range.

I should warn Bloor. His people shouldn’t wear rewq. If it lets me spot them, it might help robots, too.

Another swirl caught his eye, flashing bitterly from the far end of the Glade, standing out from the prevailing mood like a fire burning on an ice-field. There was no mistaking a flare of acrid hate.

Finally he made out a shaggy snakelike neck, rising from the profile of a small centaur. Rewq-mediated colors, like a globe of distilled loathing, obscured the head itself.

The wearer of that distant, powerful symbiont suddenly seemed to notice Lark’s focused regard. Shifting her attention from aliens and sages, she turned to face Lark directly. Across a crowd of shifting, sighing citizens, they watched each other’s colors. Then, in unison each pulled back their rewq.

In clear light, Lark met her unblinking stare — the urrish leader of the zealot cause. A rebel whose malice toward invaders was stronger than Lark had realized. With those three fierce eyes turned his way, Lark needed no symbiont to translate the zealot’s feelings toward him.

Under the late afternoon sun, her neck twisted and she snarled an urrish smile of pure, disdainful contempt.

The pilgrimage commenced at dusk, with long forest shadows pointing toward a hidden mountain pass. Twelve twelves of chosen citizens represented all the Commons, along with two star-humans, four robots, and one tall ancient being whose shambling gait hinted great strength under glossy white robes.

Judging by his so-humanlike smile, Ro-kenn seemed to find delight in countless things, especially the rhythmic chanting — a blending of vocal contributions from all races — as the assembly set out past steaming vents and sheer clefts, weaving its slow way toward the hidden oval Valley of the Egg. The Rothen’s long-fingered hands stroked slim-boled welpal trees, whose swaying resonated with emanations from that secret vale. Most humans would hear nothing till they got much closer.

In Lark’s heart, dark feelings churned. Nor was he alone. Many, especially those farthest from Ro-kenn’s cheerful charisma, still felt uneasy about guiding strangers to this sacred place.

The procession marched, rolled, and slithered, wending higher into the hills. Soon the heavens glittered with formations of sparkling lights — brittle bright clusters and nebulae — divided by the dark stripe of the Galactic disk. If anything, the sight reinforced the starkly uneven order of life, for tonight’s guests would shortly cross those starscapes, whether they departed in peace or betrayal. To them, Jijo would become another quaint, savage, perhaps mildly interesting spot they had visited once in long, deified lives.

The last time Lark came up this way — so earnest about his self-appointed mission to save Jijo from invaders like himself — no one had any thought of starships cruising Jijo’s sky.

Yet they were already up there, preparing to land.

What is more frightening? The danger you already dread, or the trick the universe hasn’t pulled on you yet? The one to make all prior concerns seem moot.

Lark hoped none of this gloom carried into his letter to Sara, which he had finished in a hurried pencil scrawl by the headwaters of the Bibur after the Rothen emerged. The kayak pilot added Lark’s note to a heavy bundle from Bloor, then set off in a flash of oars, speeding down the first set of spuming rapids in a pell-mell rush toward Biblos, two days’ hard rowing away.

On his way back to rendezvous with the other heretics, he had stopped to watch the alien aircraft glide out of its dark tunnel like a wraith, rising on whispering engines. Lark glimpsed a small human silhouette, hands and face pressed against an oval window, drinking in the view. The figure looked familiar… but before he could raise his pocket ocular, the machine sped away, eastward, toward a cleft where the largest moon was rising above the Rimmer Range.

Now, as the evening procession entered a final twisty canyon leading to the Egg, Lark tried putting temporal concerns aside, preparing for communion. It may be my last chance, he thought, hoping this time he might fully take part in the wholeness others reported, when the Egg shared its full bounty of love.

Drawing his right arm inside his sleeve, he grasped the rocky flake, despite its growing heat. A passage from the Scroll of Exile came to mind — an Anglic version, modified for Earthlings by one of the first human sages.

The passage ended on a strange note of combined reverence and defiance.

Not long after that scroll gained acceptance in the human sept, one winter’s day, ground tremors shook the Slope. Trees toppled, dams burst, and a terrible wind blew. Panic swept from mountains to sea amid reports that Judgment Day had come.

Instead, bursting through a cloud of sparkling dust, the Egg appeared. A gift out of Jijo’s heart.

A gift which must be shared tonight — with aliens.

What if they achieved what he had always failed? Or worse, what if they reacted with derisive laughter, declaring that the Egg was a simple thing that only yokels would take seriously — like fabled Earth-natives worshipping a music box they found on the shore?

Lark struggled to push out petty thoughts, to tune himself with the basso rumble of the hoon, the qheuens’ calliope piping, the twanging spokes of the g’Keks, and all of the other contributions to a rising song of union. He let it take over the measured pace of his breathing, while warmth from the stone fragment seemed to swell up his hand and arm, then across his chest, spreading relaxed detachment.

Close, he thought. A tracery of soft patterns began taking shape in his mind. A weblike meshing of vague spirals, made up partly of images, partly of sound.

It’s almost as if something is trying to—

“Is this, not exciting?” a voice broke in from Lark’s right, splitting his concentration into broken shards. “I believe I can feel something now! It’s quite unlike any psi phenomenon I have experienced. The motif is highly unusual.”

Ignore her, Lark thought, clinging to the patterns. Maybe she’ll go away.

But Ling kept talking, sending words clattering up avenues that could not help hearing them. The harder he tried holding on, the quicker detachment slipped away. Lark’s hand now clenched a clammy ball of rock and twine, warm with his body heat alone. He let go in disgust.

“We picked up some tremors on instruments several days ago. The cycles have been rising in strength and complexity for some time.”

Ling seemed blithely unaware of having done anything wrong. That, in turn, made Lark’s simmering resentment seem both petty and futile. Anyway, her beauty by moonlight was even more unnerving than usual, cutting through his anger to a vulnerable loneliness within.

Lark sighed. “Aren’t you supposed to be guarding your boss?”

“Robots do the real guarding — as if we have anything to fear. Ro-kenn gave Rann and me permission to look around while he talks to your sages, preparing them for what’s about to happen.”

Lark stopped so suddenly, the next pilgrim in line had to stumble to avoid him. He took Ling’s elbow. “What are you talking about? What’s about to happen?”

Ling’s smile carried a touch of the old sardonicism.

“You mean you haven’t guessed by now? Oh, Lark. Think about the coincidences.

“For two thousand years sooners of various races lived on this world, squabbling and slowly devolving. Then humans came and everything changed. Though you started few and helpless, soon your culture became the most influential on the planet.

“Then, just a few generations after your arrival, a miracle suddenly erupts out of the ground, this spirit guide you all revere.”

“You mean the Egg,” he said, brow furrowing.

“Exactly. Did you really think the timing accidental? Or that your patrons had forgotten you?”

“Our patrons.” Lark frowned. “You mean… you’re implying the Rothen knew all along—”

“About the voyage of the Tabernacle? Yes! Ro-kenn explained it to us this morning, and now everything makes sense! Even our own arrival on Jijo is no accident, dear Lark. Oh, our mission is partly to seek deserving presapients, to join our clan. But more than that, we came for you. Because the experiment is finished!”

“Experiment?” He felt an involuntary disorientation.

“An arduous trial for your small branch of humanity, castaway and forgotten — or so you thought — on a savage world. It sounds harsh, but the road of uplift is hard when a race is destined for the heights our patrons plan for us.”

Lark’s mind whirled. “You mean our ancestors were meant to sneak down to Jijo? As part of an ordeal that’s supposed to… transform us somehow? The Egg was — is — part of some Rothen scheme—”

“Design,” Ling corrected, a kind of elation invading her voice. “A grand design, Lark. A test, which your folk passed brilliantly, I’m told, growing stronger, smarter, and more noble even as this awful place tried to grind you down.

“And now the time has come to graft this successful offshoot back onto the main trunk, helping all of humanity to grow, thrive, and better face the challenges of a dangerous universe.”

Her grin was joyful, exuberant.

“Oh, Lark, when I spoke to you last, I thought we might be taking a few human castaways with us, when we go.

“But now the news is pure and grand, Lark.

“Ships are coming. So many ships!

“It is time to bring you all back home.”

Asx

Astonishment! This news bellows through our waxy cavities, driving out the Egg’s pattern/resonance with acrid vapors of surprise.

we/i/we/i/we… cannot coalesce as Asx. Nor contemplate these tidings with any sense of unity.

The worst rumors of recent months — spread by irredentist urrish chiefs and bitter gray queens — claimed that humans might abandon Jijo, departing with their sky-cousins, leaving the other five to fester and be damned.

Yet even that dark fantasy left one solace to the rest of us.

One comfort.

The Egg.

Now, we are told—

(disbelieve it!)

(but how?)

—that the holy ovoid was never ours! Only humans’, all along! Its dual purpose — to guide Earthlings toward greatness while at the same time soothing, domesticating we other Five!

Taming the other septs, in order to keep humans safe during their brief stay on Jijo.

Now this is topped by insulting “kindness,” as Ro-kenn says the Egg will be left as a parting gift.

Left as a token,

a trifle,

a gratuity for our pains.

Left to shame us all!

Pause, my rings. Pause. Ensure fairness. Stroke vapors across the wax drippings. Remember.

Did not Lester Cambel seem as dismayed as the rest of us?

Did not all the sages resolve to conceal this news? Lest rumors do great harm?

It is useless. Even now, eavesdropping citizens rush off, dispersing exaggerated versions of what they overheard, casting a poison up and down the chain of pilgrims, shattering the rhythms that had been uniting us.

Yet from the majestic Rothen, we sense cheerful un-awareness that anything is wrong!

Is this what it means to be a god? To know not what harm you do?

Ripples of infection spread along the twisty trail. The worship-chant breaks apart, dissolving into many twelves of muttering individuals.

Now, from my/our highest peak, we perceive another disturbance, propagating from the front of the procession! The two disruptions meet like waves on a storm-tossed lake, rolling through each other in a great spume of noise.

“The way is blocked,” a galloping messenger cries, hastening back with word. “A rope barrier bars the path, with a banner upon it!”

This can only be the work of zealots.

Frustration spins round our core. The fanatics chose a fine time to make their gesture!

We sages must go see. Even Vubben makes haste, and my basal segments labor to keep up. Ro-kenn strides with graceful ease, seeming unperturbed.

And yet, my rings, is this variance we observe, in Ro-kenn’s aura? Through our rewq, we sense discrepancy between parts of his face, as if the Rothen’s outward calm masks a canker of seething wrath.

Can rewq read so much from an alien form we just met, this very day? Is it because i have one of the few older rewq, surviving from earlier days? Or do we notice this because traeki are tuned to perceive disunity of self?

Ahead — the defiant banner.

Above — perched on cliffs, shouting youths brandish foolish (but brave!) weapons.

Below — Phwhoon-dau, with his booming voice, calls to them, asking them to state their demands.

Their reply? Echoing down canyons and steam-fumaroles — a command that the aliens depart! Never to return. Or else suffer vengeance by the greatest force on Jijo.

!?!?

The zealots threaten the Rothen with the Egg?

But did not Ro-kenn just claim the great ovoid as his to command?

Across the Rothen’s visage flows what i interpret as cool amusement. He calls the zealots’ bluff.

“Shall we see who has the power to back up their claims?” the star-god asks. “This night the Egg, and all Jijo, will sing our truth.”

Lester and Vubben plead for restraint, but Ro-kenn ignores them. Still smiling, he commands robots to each side of the gorge, to seize the anchor bolts holding the barrier in place. Overhead, the rebel leader stretches her long neck, keening a curse in plains dialect, invoking the sacred power of Jijo to renew. To cleanse impudent dross with fire.

The young zealot is a fine showman, stamping her hooves, foretelling awful punishments. Our more credulous rings find it possible, for a moment, to believe—

—to believe—

—to believe—

What is happening?

What — is — happening?

What impressions pour

in

now,

faster than

wax can melt?

Then penetrate

awareness,

ring after

ring

in a manner that

makes

all events

equal in both

timing and

import?

What is happening?

—twin lightning bolts outline many twelves of pilgrims, their shadows fleeing from white flame…

—crackling metal complains… shattered… unable to fly… a pair of tumbling cinders…

—after-image of demolition… two junk piles smolder… more dross to collect and send to sea…

With other eye-patches, we/i glimpse horrified surprise on the face of Rann, the sky-human.

—surrounding Ro-kenn, a schism of variance like a traeki sundered between one ring that is jolly and a neighbor filled with wrath…

And now, though surfeited with impressions, suddenly there is more!

—with eye-patches on the opposite side, we are first to glimpse a fiery spike…

—a searing brightness climbs the western sky . rising from the Glade of Gathering . .

—the ground beneath us trembles…

—actual sound takes a while longer to arrive, battling upward through thin air to bring us a low groan, like thunder!

At last, the pace of events slows enough for our spinning vapors to keep up. Happenings occur in order. Not disjointed, parallel.

Review, my rings!

Did we perceive two robots destroyed, even as they tore down the zealots’ barrier?

Then were we dazzled by some vast explosion behind us? Toward the Glade of Gathering?

What had been a pilgrimage of union dissolves into a mob. Small groups hurry downhill toward a dusty, moon-lit pall, left by that brief flame. Humans hang close together, for protection, clinging to their remaining hoonish and qheuenish friends, while other qheuens and many urs clatter by, aloof, scornful, even threatening in their manner.

Ro-kenn no longer walks but rides a cushioned plate between his two remaining robots, speaking urgently into a handheld device, growing more agitated by the moment. His human servants seem in shock.

The female, Ling, holds the arm of Lark, our young human biologist. Uthen offers a ride, and they climb aboard his broad gray back. All three vanish down the trail after Ro-kenn.

Bravely, Knife-Bright Insight proposes similarly to carry this pile of rings, this Asx!

Can i/we refuse? Already, Phwhoon-dau totes Vubben in his strong, scaly arms. The hoon sage lugs the g’Kek so both might hurry downhill and see what has happened.

By majority ballot, our rings choose to accept the offer. But after several duras of jouncing qheuenish haste, there are calls for a recount! Somehow, we clamp down, managing to hang on to her horny shell, wishing we had walked.

Time passes through a gelatin of suspense, teasing us with idle speculation. Darkness swallows wisdom. Glittering stars seem to taunt.

Finally, at an overlooking bluff, we jostle with others for a view.

Can you sense it, my rings?

Unified now, in shock, i see a steaming crater, filled with twisted metal. The sanctuary where Ro-kenn and the sky-humans dwelled among us for weeks. Their buried outpost — now a fiery ruin.

Acting with hot-blooded decisiveness, Ur-Jah and Les-ter call for volunteers to leap into that smoky pit, reckless of their own lives, heroically attempting rescue. But how could anyone survive within the wrecked station? Can anyone be found alive?

We all share the same thought. All members of the Six. All of my rings.

Who can doubt the power of the Egg? Or the fury of a planet scorned?

The Stranger

Doors seem to open with every song he rediscovers, as if old melodies are keys to unlock whole swaths of time. The earlier the memory, the more firmly it seems attached to a musical phrase or snippet of lyrics. Nursery rhymes, especially, take him swiftly down lanes of reclaimed childhood.

He can picture his mother now, singing to him in the safety of a warm room, lying sweetly with ballads about a world filled with justice and love — sweet lies that helped fix his temperament, even when he later learned the truth about a bitter, deadly universe.

A string of whimsical ditties brings back to mind the bearded twins, two brothers who for many years shared the Father Role in his family-web, a pair of incurable jokers who routinely set all six of the young web-sibs giggling uncontrollably at their quips and good-natured antics. Reciting some of the simplest verses over and over, he finds he can almost comprehend the crude punchlines — a real breakthrough. He knows the humor is puerile, infantile, yet he laughs and laughs at the old gag-songs until tears stream down his cheeks.

Arianafoo plays more records for him, and several release floods of excitement as he relives the operettas and musical plays he used to love in late adolescence. A human art form, to help ease the strain as he struggled, along with millions of other earnest young men and women, to grasp some of the lofty science of a civilization older than most of the brightest stars.

He felt poignant pain in recovering much of what he once had been. Most words and facts remain alien, unobtainable — even his mother’s name, or his own, for that matter — but at least he begins to feel like a living , being, a person with a past. A man whose actions once had meaning to others. Someone who had been loved.

Nor is music the only key! Paper offers several more. When the mood strikes, he snatches up a pencil and sketches with mad abandon, using up page after page, compelled to draw even though he knows each sheet must cost these impoverished folk dearly.

When he spies Prity doodling away, graphing a simple linear equation, he delightedly finds that he understands! Math was never his favored language, but now he discovers a new love for it. Apparently, numbers hadn’t quite deserted him the way speech had.

There is one more communion that he realizes while being treated by Pzora, the squishy pile of donut-rings that used to frighten him so. It is a strange rapport, as foreign to words as day is to night. Robbed of speech, he seems better attuned to notice Pzora’s nuances of smell and touch. Tickling shimmers course his body, triggered by the healer’s ever-changing vapors. Again, his hands seem to flutter of their own accord, answering Pzora’s scent-queries on a level he can only dimly perceive.

One does not need words to notice irony. Beings shaped much like this one had been his deadly foes — this he knew without recalling how. They were enemies to all his kind. How strange then that he should owe so much to a gentle pile of farting rings.

All these tricks and surprises offer slim rays of hope through his desolation, but it is music that seems the best route back to whoever he once was. When Arianafoo offers him a choice of instruments, laid out in a glass case, he selects one that seems simple enough to experiment with, to use fishing for more melodies, more keys to unlock doors.

His first awkward efforts to play the chosen instrument send, clashing noises down the twisty aisles of this strange temple of books, hidden beneath a cave of stone. He strives diligently and manages to unloose more recollections of childhood, but soon discovers that more recent memories are harder to shake free. Perhaps in later life he had less time to learn new songs, so there were fewer to associate with recent events.

Events leading to a fiery crash into that horrid swamp.

The memories are there, he knows. They still swarm through his dreams, as they once thronged his delirium. Impressions of vast, vacuum vistas. Of vital missions left undone. Of comrades he feels shamed to have forgotten.

Bent over the instrument with its forty-six strings, he hammers away, one and two notes at a time, seeking some cue, some tune or phrase that might break the jam-up in his mind. The more it eludes him, the more certain he grows that it is there.

He begins to suspect it is no human song he seeks, but something quite different. Something both familiar and forever strange.

That night, he dreams several times about water. It seems natural enough, since Sara had made it clear they would be departing on the steamboat tomorrow, leaving behind the great hall of paper books, heading for the mountain where the starship landed.

Another ship voyage might explain the vague, watery images.

Later, he knew better.