Infinity's Shore

PART TWO

LEGENDS TELL OF MANY PRECIOUS TEXTS that were lost one bitter evening, during an unmatched disaster some call the Night of the Ghosts, when a quarter of the Biblos Archive burned. Among the priceless volumes that vanished by that cruel winter’s twilight, one tome reportedly showed pictures of Buyur — the mighty race whose lease on Jijo expired five thousand centuries ago.

Scant diary accounts survive from witnesses to the calamity, but according to some who browsed the Xenoscience Collection before it burned, the Buyur were squat beings, vaguely resembling the bullfrogs shown on page ninety-six of Clear’s Guide to Terrestrial Life-Forms, though with elephantine legs and sharp, forward-looking eyes. They were said to be master shapers of useful organisms, and had a reputation for prodigious wit.

But other sooner races already knew that much about the Buyur, both from oral traditions and the many clever servant organisms that flit about Jijo’s forests, perhaps still looking for departed masters. Beyond these few scraps, we have very little about the race whose mighty civilization thronged this world for more than a million years.

HOW could so much knowledge be lost in a single night? Today it seems odd. Why weren’t copies of such valuable texts printed by those first-wave human colonists, before they sent their sneakship tumbling to ocean depths? Why not place duplicates all over the Slope, safeguarding the learning against all peril?

In our ancestors’ defense, recall what tense times those were, before the Great Peace or the coming of the Egg. The five sapient races already present on Jijo (excluding glavers) had reached an edgy balance by the time starship Tabernacle slinked past Izmunuti’s dusty glare to plant Earthlings illicitly, the latest wave of criminal colonists to plague a troubled world. In those days, combat was frequent between urrish clans and haughty qheuen empresses, while hoonish tribes skirmished among themselves in their ongoing ethical struggle over traeki civil rights. The High Sages had little influence beyond reading and interpreting the Speaking Scrolls, the only documents existing at the time.

Into this tense climate dropped the latest invasion of sooner refugees, who found an unused eco-niche awaiting them. But human colonists were not content simply to take up tree farming as another clan of illiterates. Instead, they used the Tabernacle’s engines one last time before sinking her. With those godlike forces they carved Biblos Fortress, then toppled a thousand trees, converting their pulp into freshly printed books.

The act so astonished the Other Five, it nearly cost human settlers their lives. Outraged, the queens of Tarek Town laid siege to the vastly outnumbered Earthlings. Others, equally offended by what seemed heresy against the Scrolls, held back only because the priest sages refused sanctioning holy war. That narrow vote gave human leaders time to bargain, to cajole the different tribes and septs with practical advice from books, bribing them with useful things. Spoke cleats for g’Kek wheels. Better sails for hoonish captains. And, for urrish smiths, the long-sought knack of brewing clear glass.

How things had changed just a few generations later, when the new breed of scholar sages gathered to affirm the Great Peace, scribing their names on fresh paper and sending copies to each hamlet on the Slope. Reading became a common habit, and even writing is no longer viewed as sin.

An orthodox minority still objects to the clatter of printing presses. They piously insist that literacy fosters memory, and thus attachment to the same conceits that got our spacefaring ancestors in trouble. Surely, they claim, we must cultivate detachment and forgetfulness in order to tread the Path of Redemption.

Perhaps they are right. But few these days seem in a hurry to follow glavers down that blessed trail. Not yet. First, we must prepare our souls.

And wisdom, the New Sages declare, can be nurtured from the pages of a book.

from Forging the Peace, a Historical Meditation-Umble,

by Homer Auph-puthtwaoy

Kaa

STRANDED, BY UNYIELDING FATE, ON IFNI’S SHORE.

Stranded, like a beached whale, barred from ever going home.

Five ways stranded—

First, cut off from Earth by hostile aliens bearing a death grudge toward Terrans in general, and the Streaker crew in particular, though Kaa never quite understood why.

Second, banished from Earth’s home galaxy, blown off course, and off-limits, by a caprice of hyperspace — though many on the crew still blamed Kaa, calling it “pilot’s error.” Third, starship Streaker taking refuge on a taboo world, one scheduled to have a respite from sapient minds. An ideal haven, according to some. A trap, said others.

Fourth, when the vessel’s weary engines finally ceased their labors, depositing the Streaker in a realm of ghosts, deep in this planet’s darkest corner, far from air or light.

And now, this, Kaa thought. Abandoned, even by a crew of castaways!

Of course Lieutenant Tsh’t didn’t put it that way, when she asked him to stay behind in a tiny outpost with three other volunteers for company.

“This will be your first important command, Kaa. A chance to show what you’re made of.”

Yeah, he thought. Especially if I’m speared by a hoonish harpoon, dragged onto one of their boats, and slit open.

That almost happened yesterday. He had been tracking one of the native sailing craft, trying to learn its purpose and destination, when one of his young assistants, Mopol, darted ahead and began surfing the wooden vessel’s rolling bow wake … a favorite pastime on Earth, where dolphins frequently hitched free rides from passing ships. Only here it was so dumb, Kaa hadn’t thought to forbid it in advance.

Mopol offered that lawyerly excuse later, when they returned to the shelter. “B-besides, I didn’t do any harm.” “No harm? You let them see you!” Kaa berated. “Don’t you know they started throwing spears into the water, just as I got you out of there?” Mopol’s sleek torso and bottle beak held a rebellious stance. “They never saw a dolphin before. Prob’ly thought we were some local kind of fish.” “And it’s gonna stay that way, do you hear?”

Mopol grunted ambiguous assent, but the episode unnerved Kaa.

A while later, dwelling on his own shortcomings, he worked amid clouds of swirling bottom mud, splicing optical fiber to a cable the submarine Hikahi had laid, on its return trip to Streaker’s hiding place. Kaa’s newly emplaced camera should let him spy more easily on the hoon colony whose sheltered docks and camouflaged houses lay perched along the nearby bay. Already he could report that hoonish efforts at concealment were aimed upward, at shrouding their settlement against the sky, not the sea. That might prove important information, Kaa hoped.

Still, he had never trained to be a spy. He was a pilot, dammit!

Not that he ever used to get much practice during the early days of Streaker’s mission, languishing in the shadow of Chief Pilot Keepiru, who always got the tough, glamorous jobs. When Keepiru vanished on Kithrup, along with the captain and several others, Kaa finally got a chance to practice his skill — for better and worse.

But now Streaker’s going nowhere. A beached ship needs no pilot, so I guess I’m expendable.

Kaa finished splicing and was retracting the work arms of his harness when a flash of silver-gray shot by at high speed, undulating madly. Sonar strafed him as waves of liquid recoil shoved his body. Clickety dolphin laughter filled the shallows.

Admit it, star seeker!

You did not hear or see me,

Sprinting from the gloom!

In fact, Kaa had known the youth was approaching for some time, but he did not want to discourage Zhaki from practicing the arts of stealth.

“Use Anglic,” he commanded tersely.

Small conical teeth gleamed in a beam of slanted sunshine as the young Tursiops swung around to face Kaa. “But it’s much easier to speak Trinary! Sometimes Anglic makes my head hurt.” Few humans, listening to this exchange between two neo-dolphins, would have understood the sounds. Like Trinary, this underwater dialect consisted mostly of clipped groans and ratchetings. But the grammar was close to standard Anglic. And grammar guides the way a person thinks — or so Creideiki used to teach, when that master of Keeneenk arts lived among the Streaker crew, guiding them with his wisdom.

Creideiki has been gone for two years, abandoned with Mr. Orley and others when we fled the battle fleets at Kithrup. Yet every day we miss him — the best our kind produced.

When Creideiki spoke, you could forget for a while that neo-dolphins were crude, unfinished beings, the newest and shakiest sapient race in the Five Galaxies.

Kaa tried answering Zhaki as he imagined the captain would.

“The pain you feel is called concentration. It’s not easy, but it enabled our human patrons to reach the stars, all by themselves.” “Yeah. And look what good it did them,” Zhaki retorted.

Before Kaa could answer, the youth emitted the need-air signal and shot toward the surface, without even performing a wariness spiral to look out for danger. It violated security, but tight discipline seemed less essential as each Jijoan day passed. This sea was too mellow and friendly to encourage diligence.

Kaa let it pass, following Zhaki to the surface. They exhaled and drew in sweet air, faintly charged with distant hints of rain. Speaking Anglic with their gene-modified blowholes out of the water called for a different dialect, one that hissed and sputtered, but sounded more like human speech.

“All right-t,” Kaa said. “Now report.”

The other dolphin tossed his head. “The red crabs suspect nothing. They f-fixate on their crayfish pensss. Only rarely does one look up when we c-come near.” “They aren’t crabs. They’re qheuens. And I gave strict orders. You weren’t to go near enough to be seen!” Hoons were considered more dangerous, so Kaa had kept that part of the spy mission for himself. Still, he counted on Zhaki and Mopol to be discreet while exploring the qheuen settlement at the reef fringe. I guess I was wrong.

“Mopol wanted to try some of the reds’ delicaciesss, so we p-pulled a diversion. I rounded up a school of those green-finned fishies — the ones that taste like Sargasso eel — and chased ’em right through the q-qheuen colony! And guess what? It turns out the crabs have pop-up nets they use for jussst that kind of luck! As soon as the school was inside their boundary, they whipped those things up-p and snatched the whole swarm!” “You’re lucky they didn’t snag you, too. What was Mopol doing, all this time?”

“While the reds were busy, Mopol raided the crayfish pens.” Zhaki chortled with delight. “I saved you one, by the way. They’re delisssh.” Zhaki wore a miniharness fastened to his flank, bearing a single manipulator arm that folded back during swimming. At a neural signal, the mechanical hand went to his seamed pouch and drew out a wriggling creature, proffering it to Kaa.

What should I do? Kaa stared at the squirmy thing. Would accepting it only encourage Zhaki’s lapse of discipline? Or would rejection make Kaa look stodgy and unreasonable?

“I’ll wait and see if it makes you sick,” he told the youth. They weren’t supposed to experiment on native fauna with their own bodies. Unlike Earth, most planetary ecosystems were mixtures of species from all across the Five Galaxies, introduced by tenant races whose occupancy might last ten million years. So far, many of the local fishoids turned out to be wholesome and tasty, but the very next prey beast might have its revenge by poisoning you.

“Where is Mopol now?”

“Back doing what we were told,” Zhaki said. “Watching how the red crabs interact with hoonsss. So far we’ve seen ’em pulling two sledge loads toward the port, filled with harvested ssseaweed. They came back with cargoes of wood. You know. ch-chopped tree trunks.” Kaa nodded. “So they do trade, as we suspected. Hoons and qheuens, living together on a forbidden world. I wonder what it means?” “Who knows? If they weren’t mysterious, they wouldn’t be eateesss. C-can I go back to Mopol now?” Kaa had few illusions about what was going on between the two young spacers. It probably interfered in their work, but if he raised the issue, Zhaki would accuse him of being a prude, or worse, “jealous.” If only I were a real leader, Kaa thought. The lieutenant should never have left me in charge.

“Yes, go back now,” he said. “But only to fetch Mopol and return to the shelter. It’s getting late.” Zhaki lifted his body high, perched on a thrashing tail.

Yes, oh exalted!

Your command shall be obeyed,

As all tides heed moons.

With that, the young dolphin did a flip and dived back into the sea. Soon his dorsal fin was all Kaa saw, glinting as it sliced through choppy swell.

Kaa pondered the ambiguous insolence of Zhaki’s last Trinary burst.

In human terms — by the cause-and-effect logic the patron race taught its dolphin clients — the ocean bulged and shifted in response to the gravitational pull of sun and moon. But there were more ancient ways of thinking, used by cetacean ancestors long before humans meddled in their genes. In those days, there had never been any question that tides were the most powerful of forces. In the old, primal religion, tides controlled the moon, not vice versa.

In other words, Zhaki’s Trinary statement was sassy, verging on insubordination.

Tsh’t made a mistake, Kaa mused bitterly, as he swam toward the shelter. We should never have been left here by ourselves.

Along the way, he experienced the chief threat to his mission. Not hoonish spears or qheuen claws, or even alien battlecruisers, but Jijo itself.

One could fall in love with this place.

The ocean’s flavor called to him, as did the velvety texture of the water. It beckoned in the way fishlike creatures paid him respect by fleeing, but not too quick to catch, if he cared to.

Most seductive of all, at night throbbing echoes penetrated their outpost walls — distant rhythms, almost too low to hear. Eerie, yet reminiscent of the whale songs of home.

Unlike Oakka, the green-green world — or terrible Kithrup — this planet appeared to have a reverent sea. One where a dolphin might swim at peace.

And possibly forget.

Brookida was waiting when Kaa cycled through the tiny airlock, barely large enough for one dolphin at a time to pass into the shelter — an inflated bubble, half-filled with water and anchored to the ocean floor. Against one wall, a lab had been set up for the metallurgist geologist, an elderly dolphin whose frailty had grown as Streaker fled ever farther from home.

Brookida’s samples had been taken when the Hikahi followed a hoonish sailboat beyond the continental shelf, to a plunging abyssal trench, where the ship had proceeded to dump its cargo overboard! As casks, barrels, and chests fell into the murk, a few were snagged by the submarine’s gaping maw, then left here for analysis as the Hikahi returned to base.

Brookida had already found what he called “anomalies,” but something else now had the aged scientist excited.

“We got a message while you were out. Tsh’t picked up something amazing on her way to Streaker!” Kaa nodded. “I was here when she reported, remember? They found an ancient cache, left by illegal settlers when—” “That’s nothing.” The old dolphin was more animated than Kaa had seen Brookida in a long time.

“Tsh’t called again later to say they rescued a bunch of kids who were about to drown.” Kaa blinked.

“Kids? You don’t mean—”

“Not human or fin. But wait till you hear who they are … and how they came to be d-down there, under the sea.”

Alvin

A FEW SCANT DURAS BEFORE IMPACT, PART OF THE wall of debris ahead of us began to move. A craggy slab, consisting of pitted starship hulls, magically slipped aside, offering the phuvnthu craft a long, narrow cavity.

Into it we plummeted, jagged walls looming near the glass, passing in a blur, cutting off the searchlight beam and leaving us in shadows. The motors picked up their frantic backward roar … then fell away to silence.

A series of metallic clangs jarred the hull. Moments later the door to our chamber opened. A clawed arm motioned us outside.

Several phuvnthus waited — insectoid-looking creatures with long, metal-cased torsos and huge, glassy-black eyes. Our mysterious saviors, benefactors, captors.

My friends tried to help me, but I begged them off.

“Come on, guys. It’s hard enough managing these crutches without you all crowding around. Go on. I’ll be right behind.”

At the intersection leading back to my old cell, I moved to turn left but our six-legged guides motioned right instead. “I need my stuff,” I told the nearest phuvnthu-thing. But it gestured no with a wave of machinelike claws, barring my path.

Damn, I thought, recalling the notebook and backpack I had left behind. I figured I’d be coming back.

A twisty, confused journey took us through all sorts of hatches and down long corridors of metal plating. Ur-ronn commented that some of the weld joins looked “hasty.” I admired the way she held on to her professionalism when faced with awesome technology.

I can’t say exactly when we left the sea dragon and entered the larger base/camp/city/hive, but there came a time when the big phuvnthus seemed more relaxed in their clanking movements. I even caught a snatch or two of that queer, ratcheting sound that I once took for speech. But there wasn’t time for listening closely. Just moving forward meant battling waves of pain, taking one step at a time.

At last we spilled into a corridor that had a feel of permanence, with pale, off-white walls and soft lighting that seemed to pour from the whole ceiling. The peculiar passage curved gently upward in both directions, till it climbed out of sight a quarter of an arrowflight to either side. It seemed we were in a huge circle, though what use such a strange hallway might serve, I could not then imagine.

Even more surprising was the reception committee! At once we faced a pair of creatures who could not look more different from the phuvnthus — except for the quality of having six limbs. They stood upright on their hind pair, dressed in tunics of silvery cloth, spreading four scaly webbed hands in a gesture I hopefully took to mean welcome. They were small, rising just above my upper knees, or the level of Pincer’s red chitin shell. A frothy crown of moist, curly fibers topped their bulb-eyed heads. Squeaking rapidly, they motioned for us to follow, while the big phuvnthus retreated with evident eagerness.

We four Wuphonites consulted with a shared glance … then a rocking, qheuen-style shrug. We turned to troop silently behind our new guides. I could sense Huphu purring on my shoulder, staring at the little beings, and I vowed to drop my crutches and grab the noor, if she tried to jump one of our hosts. I doubted they were as helpless as they looked.

All the doorways lining the hall were closed. Next to each portal, something like a paper strip was pasted to the wall, always at the same height. One of Huck’s eyestalks gestured toward the makeshift coverings, then winked at me in Morse semaphore.

SECRETS UNDERNEATH!

I grokked her meaning. So our hosts did not want us to read their door signs. That implied they used one of the alphabets known to the Six. I felt the same curiosity that emanated from Huck. At the same time, though, I readied myself to stop her, if she made a move to tear off one of the coverings. There are times for impulsiveness. This was not one of them.

A door hatch slid open with a soft hiss and our little guides motioned for us to enter.

Curtains divided a large chamber into parallel cubicles. I also glimpsed a dizzying array of shiny machines, but did not note much about them, because of what then appeared, right in front of us.

We all stopped in our tracks, facing a quartet of familiar-looking entities — an urs, a hoon, a red qheuen, and a young g’Kek!

Images of ourselves, I realized, though clearly not reflections in a mirror. For one thing, we could see right through the likenesses. And as we stared, each figure made beckoning motions toward a different curtained nook.

After the initial shock, I noticed the images weren’t perfect portraits. The urrish version had a well groomed pelt, and my hoonish counterpart stood erect, without a back brace. Was the difference meaningful? The hoonish caricature smiled at me in the old-fashioned way, with a fluttering throat sac, but no added grimace of mouth and lips that Jijoan hoons had added since humans came.

“Yeah right,” Huck muttered, staring at the ersatz g’Kek in front of her, whose wheels and spokes gleamed, tight and polished. “I am so sure these are sooners, Alvin.”

I winced. So my earlier guess was wrong. There was no point rubbing it in.

“Hr-rm … shut up, Huck.”

“These are holographic frojections,” Ur-ronn lisped in Anglic, the sole Jijoan language suitable for such a diagnosis. The words came from human books, inherited since the Great Printing.

“Whatever you s-say,” Pincer added, as each ghost backed away toward a different curtained cell. “What d-d-do we do now?”

Huck muttered. “What choice do we have? Each of us follows our own guy, and see ya on the other side.”

With an uneven bumping of her rims, she rolled after the gleaming g’Kek image. A curtain slid shut after her.

Ur-ronn blew a sigh. “Good water, you two.”

“Fire and ash,” Pincer and I replied politely, watching her saunter behind the urrish cartoon figure.

The fake noon waved happily for me to enter the cubby on the far right.

“Name, rank, and serial number only,” I told Pincer.

His worried—“Huh?”—aspirated from three leg vents in syncopation. When I glanced back, his cupola eye still whirled indecisively, staring in all directions except at the translucent qheuen in front of him.

A hanging divider closed between us.

My silent guide in hoonish form led me to a white obelisk, an upright slab, occupying the center of the small room. He pantomimed stepping right up to it, standing on a small metal plate at its base. When I did so, I found the white surface soft against my face and chest. No sooner were my feet on the plate than the whole slab began to tilt … rotating down and forward to become a table, with my own poor self lying prone on top. Huphu scrambled off my shoulders, muttering guttural complaints, then yowled as a tube lifted up from below and snaked toward my face!

I guess I could have struggled, or tried to flee. But to what point? When colored gas spilled from the tube, the odor reminded me of childhood visits to our Wuphon infirmary. The House of Stinks, we kids called it, though our traeki pharmacist was kindly, and always secreted a lump of candy from an upper ring, if we were good.…

As awareness wavered, I recall hoping there would be a tasty sourball waiting for me this time, as well.

“G’night,” I muttered, while Huphu chittered and wailed. Then things kind of went black for a while.

Asx

STROKE THE FRESH-FLOWING WAX, MY RINGS, streaming hot with news from real time.

Here, trace this ululation, a blaring cry of dismay, echoing round frosted peaks, setting stands of mighty greatboo a-quivering.

Just moments earlier, the Rothen ship hovered majestically above its ruined station, scanning the Glade for signs of its lost spore buds, the missing members of its crew.

Angry the throbbing vessel seemed, broody and threatening, ready to avenge.

Yet we/i remained in place, did we not, my rings? Duty rooted this traeki stack in place, delegated by the Council of Sages to parley with these Rothen lords.

Others also lingered, milling across the trampled festival grounds. Curious onlookers, or those who for personal reasons wished to offer invaders loyalty.

So we/i were not alone to witness what came next. There were several hundred present, staring in awe as the Rothen starship probed and palped the valley with rays, sifting the melted, sooty girders of its ravaged outpost.

Then came that abrupt, awful sound. A cry that still fizzes, uncongealed, down our fatty core. An alarm of anguished dread, coming from the ship itself!

Shall we recall more? Dare we trace this waxy trail yet further? Even though it gives off painful molten heat?

Yes?

You are brave, my rings.…

Behold the Rothen ship — suddenly bathed in light!

Actinic radiance pours onto it from above … cast by a new entity, shining like the blazing sun.

It is no sun, but another vessel of space! A ship unbelievably larger than the slim gene raider, looming above it the way a full-stacked traeki might tower over a single, newly vlenned ring.

Can the wax be believed? Could anything be as huge and mighty as that luminous mountain-thing, gliding over the valley as ponderous as a thunderhead?

Trapped, the Rothen craft emits awful, grating noises, straining to escape the titanic newcomer. But the cascade of light now presses on it, pushing with force that spills across the vale, taking on qualities of physical substance. Like a solid shaft, the beam thrusts the Rothen ship downward against its will, until its belly scours Jijo’s wounded soil.

A deluge of saffron color flows around the smaller cruiser, covering the Rothen craft in layers — thickening, like gobs of cooling sap. Soon the Rothen ship lies helplessly encased. Leaves and twigs seem caught in midwhirl, motionless beside the gold-sealed hull.

And above, a new power hovered. Leviathan.

The searing lights dimmed.

Humming a song of overpowering might, the titan descended, like a guest mountain dropping in to take its place among the Rimmers. A stone from heaven, cracking bedrock and reshaping the valley with its awful weight.

Now the wax stream changes course. The molten essence of distilled chagrin veers in a new direction.

Its heading, my rings?

Over a precipice.

Into hell.

Rety

RETY THOUGHT ABOUT HER BIRD. THE BRIGHT bird, so lively, so unfairly maimed, so like herself in its stubborn struggle to overcome.

All her adventures began one day when Jass and Bom returned from a hunting trip boasting about wounding a mysterious flying creature. Their trophy — a gorgeous metal feather — was the trigger she had been waiting for. Rety took it as an omen, steadying her resolve to break away. A sign that it was time, at last, to leave her ragged tribe and seek a better life.

I guess everybody’s looking for something, she pondered, as the robot followed another bend in the dreary river, meandering toward the last known destination of Kunn’s flying scout craft. Rety had the same goal, but also dreaded it. The Danik pilot would deal harshly with Dwer. He might also judge Rety, for her many failings.

She vowed to suppress her temper and grovel if need be. Just so the starfolk keep their promise and take me with them when they leave Jijo.

They must! I gave ’em the bird. Rann said it was a clue to help the Daniks and their Rothen lords search …

Her thoughts stumbled.

Search for what?

They must need somethin’ awful bad to break Galactic law by sneakin’ to far-off Jijo.

Rety never swallowed all the talk about “gene raiding”—that the Rothen expedition came looking for animals almost ready to think. When you grow up close to nature, scratching for each meal alongside other creatures, you soon realize everybody thinks. Beasts, fish … why, some of her cousins even prayed to trees and stones!

Rety’s answer was—so what? Would a gallaiter be less smelly if it could read? Or a wallow kleb any less disgusting if it recited poetry while rolling in dung? By her lights, nature was vile and dangerous. She had a bellyful and would gladly give it up to live in some bright Galactic city.

Rety never believed Kunn’s people came across vast space just to teach some critters how to blab.

Then what was the real reason? And what were they afraid of?

The robot avoided deep water, as if its force fields needed rock or soil to push against. When the river widened, and converging tributaries became rivers themselves, further progress proved impossible. Even a long detour west offered no way around. The drone buzzed in frustration, hemmed by water on all sides.

“Rety!” Dwer’s hoarse voice called from below. “Talk to it again!”

“I already did, remember? You must’ve wrecked its ears in the ambush, when you ripped out its antenna thing!”

“Well … try again. Tell it I might … have a way to get across a stream.”

Rety stared down at him, gripped by snakelike arms. “You tried to kill it a while back, an’ now you’re offerin’ to help?”

He grimaced. “It beats dying, wandering in its clutches till the sun burns out. I figure there’s food and medicine on the flying boat. Anyway, I’ve heard so much about these alien humans. Why should you get all the fun?”

She couldn’t tell where he stopped being serious, and turned sarcastic. Not that it mattered. If Dwer’s idea proved useful, it might soften the way Kunn treated him.

And me, she added.

“Oh, all right.”

Rety spoke directly to the machine, as she had been taught.

“Drone Four! Hear and obey commands! I order you to let us down so’s we can haggle together about how to pass over this here brook. The prisoner says he’s got a way mebbe to do it.”

The robot did not respond at first, but kept cruising between two high points, surveying for any sign of a crossing. But finally, the humming repulsors changed tone as metal arms lowered Dwer, letting him roll down a mossy bank. For a time the young man lay groaning. His limbs twitched feebly, like a stranded fish.

More than a little stiff herself, Rety hoisted her body off the upper platform, wincing at the singular touch of steady ground. Both legs tingled painfully, though likely not as bad as Dwer felt. She got down on her knees and poked his elbow.

“Hey, you all right? Need help gettin’ up?”

Dwer’s eyes glittered pain, but he shook his head. She put an arm around his shoulder anyway as he struggled to sit. No fresh blood oozed when they checked the crusty dressing on his thigh wound.

The alien drone waited silently as the young man stood, unsteadily.

“Maybe I can help you get across water,” he told the machine. “If I do, will you change the way you carry us? Stop for breaks and help us find food? What d’you say?”

Another long pause — then a chirping note burst forth. Rety had learned a little Galactic Two during her time as an apprentice star child. She recognized the upward sliding scale meaning yes.

Dwer nodded. “I can’t guarantee my plan’ll work. But here’s what I suggest.”

It was actually simple, almost obvious, yet she looked at Dwer differently after he emerged from the stream, dripping from the armpits down. Before he was halfway out, the robot edged aside from its perch above Dwer’s head. It seemed to glide down the side of the young hunter’s body until reaching a point where its fields could grip solid ground.

All the way across the river, Dwer looked as if he wore a huge, eight-sided hat, wafting over his head like a balloon. His eyes were glazed and his hair stood on end as Rety sat him down.

“Hey!” She nudged him. “You all right?”

Dwer’s gaze seemed fixed far away. After a few duras though, he answered.

“Um … I … guess so.”

She shook her head. Even Mudfoot and yee had ceased their campaign of mutual deadly glares in order to stare at the man from the Slope.

“That was so weird!” Rety commented. She could not bring herself to say “brave,” or “thrilling” or “insane.”

He winced, as if messages from his bruised body were just now reaching a dazed brain. “Yeah … it was all that. And more.”

The robot chirruped again. Rety guessed that a triple upsweep with a shrill note at the end meant—That’s enough resting. Let’s go!

She helped Dwer onto a makeshift seat the robot made by folding its arms. This time, when it resumed its southward flight, the two humans rode in front with Mudfoot and little yee, sharing body heat against the stiff wind.

Rety had heard of this region from those bragging hunters, Jass and Bom. It was a low country, dotted with soggy marshes and crisscrossed by many more streams ahead.

Alvin

I WOKE FEELING WOOZY, AND HIGH AS A CHIMP that’s been chewing ghigree leaves. But at least the agony was gone.

The soft slab was still under me, though I could tell the awkward brace of straps and metal tubes was gone. Turning my head, I spied a low table nearby. A shallow white bowl held about a dozen familiar-looking shapes, vital to hoon rituals of life and death.

Ifni! I thought. The monsters cut out my spine bones!

Then I reconsidered.

Wait You’re a kid. You’ve got two sets. In fact, isn’t it next year you’re supposed to start losing your first …

I really was that slow to catch on. Pain and drugs can do it to you.

Looking in the bowl again, I saw all my baby vertebrae. Normally, they’d loosen over several months, as the barbed adult spines took over. The accident must have jammed both sets together, pressing the nerves and hurrying nature along. The phuvnthus must have decided to take out my old verts, whether the new ones were ready or not.

Did they guess? Or were they already familiar with hoons?

Take things one at a time, I thought. Can you feel your toe hooks? Can you move them?

I sent signals to retract the claw sheaths, and sensed the table’s fabric resist as my talons dug in. So far so good.

I reached around with my left hand, and found a slick bulge covering my spine, tough and elastic.

Words cut in. An uncannily smooth voice, in accented Galactic Seven.

“The new orthopedic brace will actively help bear the stress of your movements until your next-stage vertebroids solidify. Nevertheless, you would be well advised not to move in too sudden or jerky a manner.”

The fixture wrapped all the way around my torso, feeling snug and comfortable, unlike the makeshift contraption the phuvnthus provided earlier.

“Please accept my thanks,” I responded in formal GalSeven, gingerly shifting onto one elbow, turning my head the other way. “And my apologies for any inconvenience this may have cause—”

I stopped short. Where I had expected to see a phuvnthu, or one of the small amphibians, there stood a whirling shape, ghostly, like the holographic projections we had seen before, but ornately abstract. A spinning mesh of complex lines floated near the bed.

“There was no inconvenience.” The voice seemed to emerge from the gyrating image. “We were curious about matters taking place in the world of air and light. Your swift arrival — plummeting into a sea canyon near our scout vessel — seemed as fortuitous to us as our presence was for you.”

Even in a drugged state, I could savor multilevel irony in the whirling thing’s remarks. While being gracious, it was also reminding me that the survivors of Wuphon’s Dream owed a debt — our very lives.

“True,” I assented. “Though my friends and I might never have fallen into the abyss if someone had not removed the article we were sent to find in more shallow waters. Our search beyond that place led us to stumble over the cliff.”

The pattern of shifting lines took a new slant of bluish, twinkling light.

“You assert ownership over this thing you sought? As your property?”

Now it was my turn to ponder, wary of a trap. By the codes laid down in the Scrolls, the cache Uriel had sent us after should not exist. It bent the spirit and letter of the law, which said that sooner colonists on a forbidden world must ease their crime by abandoning their godlike tools. It made me glad to be speaking a formal dialect, forcing more careful thought than I might have used in our local patois.

“I assert … a right to inspect the item … and reserve an option to make further claims later.”

Purple swirls invaded the spinning pattern, and I could almost swear it seemed amused. Perhaps this strange entity already had pursued the same line of questioning with my pals. I may be articulate — Huck says no one can match me in GalSeven — but I never claimed to be the brightest one in our gang.

“The matter can be discussed another time,” the voice said. “After you tell us of your life, and recent events in the upper world.”

This triggered something in me … call it the latent trading instinct that lurks in any hoon. A keenness for the fine art of dickering. Carefully, tenderly, I sat up, allowing the supple back brace to take most of the strain.

“Hr-r-rm. You’re asking us to give away the only thing we have to barter — our story, and that of our ancestors. What do you offer in exchange?”

The voice made a pretty good approximation of a rueful hoonish rumble.

“Apologies. It did not occur to us that you would look at it that way. Alas, you have already told us a great deal. We will now return your information store. Please accept our contrition over having accessed it without expressed permission.”

A door slid open and one of the little amphibian creatures entered the cubicle, bearing in its four slim arms my backpack!

Better yet, on top lay my precious journal, all battered and bent, but still the item I most valued in the world. I snatched up the book, flipping its dog-eared pages.

“Rest assured,” the spinning pattern enounced. “Our study of this document, while enlightening, has only whetted our appetite for information. Your economic interests are undiminished.”

I thought about that. “You read my journal?”

“Again, apologies. It seemed prudent, when seeking to understand your injuries, and the manner of your arrival in this realm of heavy wet darkness.”

Once again, the words seemed to come at me with layers of meaning and implications I could only begin to sift. At the time, I only wanted to end the conversation as soon as possible, and confer with Huck and the others before going any further.

“I’d like to see my friends now,” I told the whirling image, switching to Anglic.

It seemed to quiver, as if with a nod.

“Very well. They have been informed to expect you. Please follow the entity standing at the door.”

The little amphibian attended while I set foot on the floor, gingerly testing my weight. There were a few twinges, just enough to help me settle best within the support of the flexible body cast. I gripped the journal, but glanced back at my knapsack and the bowl of baby vertebrae.

“These items will be safe here,” promised the voice.

I hope so, I thought. Mom and Dad will want them … assuming that I ever see Mu-phauwq, and Yowg-wayuo again … and especially if I don’t.

“Thank you.”

The speckled pattern whirled.

“It is my pleasure to serve.”

Holding my journal tight, I followed the small being out the door. When I glanced back at the bed, the spinning projection was gone.

Asx

HERE IT IS, AT LAST. THE IMAGE WE HAVE SOUGHT, now cool enough to stroke.

Yes, my rings. It is time for another vote. Shall we remain catatonic, rather than face what will almost certainly be a vision of pure horror?

Our first ring of cognition insists that duty must take precedence, even over the natural traeki tendency to flee unpleasant subjectivities.

Is it agreed? Shall we be Asx, and meet reality as it comes? How do you rule, my rings?

stroke the wax.…

follow the tracks.…

see the mighty starship come.…

Humming a song of overwhelming power, the monstrous vessel descends, crushing every remaining tree on the south side of the valley, shoving a dam across the river, filling the horizon like a mountain.

Can you feel it, my rings? Premonition. Throbbing our core with acrid vapors?

Along the starship’s vast flank a hatch opens, large enough to swallow a small village.

Against the lighted interior, silhouettes enter view.

Tapered cones.

Stacks of rings.

Frightful kin we had hoped never again to see.

Sara

SARA LOOKED BACK FONDLY AT LAST NIGHT’S WILD ride, for now the horses sped up to a pace that made her bottom feel like butter.

And to think, as a child I wished I could gallop about like characters in storybooks.

Whenever the pace slackened, she eyed the enigmatic female riders who seemed so at home atop huge, mythological beasts. They called themselves Illias, and their lives had been secret for a long time. But now haste compelled them to travel openly.

Can it really be just to get Kurt the Exploser where he wants to go?

Assuming his mission is vital, why does he want my help? I’m a theoretical mathematician with a sideline in linguistics. Even in math, I’m centuries out of date by Earth standards. To Galactics I’d be just a clever shaman.

Losing altitude, the party began passing settlements — at first urrish camps with buried workshops and sunken corrals hidden from the glowering sky. But as the country grew more lush, they skirted dams where blue qheuen hives tended lake-bottom farms. Passing a riverside grove, they found the “trees” were ingeniously folded masts of hoonish fishing skiffs and khuta boats. Sara even glimpsed a g’Kek weaver village where sturdy trunks supported ramps, bridges, and swaying boardwalks for the clever wheeled clan.

At first the settlements seemed deserted as the horses sped by. But the chick coops were full, and the blur canopies freshly patched. Midday isn’t a favorite time to be about, especially with sinister specters in the sky. Anyone rousing from siesta glimpsed only vague galloping figures, obscured by dust.

But attention was unavoidable later, when members of all six races scurried from shelters, shouting as the corps of beasts and riders rushed by. The grave Illias horsewomen never answered, but Emerson and young Jomah waved at astonished villagers, provoking some hesitant cheers. It made Sara laugh, and she joined their antics, helping turn the galloping procession into a kind of antic parade.

When the mounts seemed nearly spent, the guides veered into a patch of forest where two more women waited, dressed in suede, speaking that accent Sara found tantalizingly familiar. Hot food awaited the party — along with a dozen fresh mounts.

Someone is a good organizer, Sara thought. She ate standing up — a pungent vegetarian gruel. Walking helped stretch kinked muscles.

The next stage went better. One of the Illias showed Sara a trick of flexing in her stirrups to damp the jouncing rhythm. Though grateful, Sara wondered.

Where have these people lived all this time?

Dedinger, the desert prophet, caught Sara’s eye, eager to discuss the mystery, but she turned away. The attraction of his intellect wasn’t worth suffering his character. She preferred spending her free moments with Emerson. Though speechless, the wounded starman had a good soul.

Villages grew sparse south of the Great Marsh. But traeki flourished there, from tall cultured stacks, famed for herbal industry, all the way down to wild quintets, quartets, and little trio ring piles, consuming decaying matter the way their ancestors must have on a forgotten homeworld, before some patron race set them on the Path of Uplift.

Sara daydreamed geometric arcs, distracting her mind from the heat and tedium, entering a world of parabolas and rippling wavelike forms, free of time and distance. By the time she next looked up, dusk was falling and a broad river flowed to their left, with faint lights glimmering on the other bank.

“Traybold’s Crossing.” Dedinger peered at the settlement, nestled under camouflage vines. “I do think the residents have finally done the right thing … even if it inconveniences wayfarers like us.”

The wiry rebel appeared pleased. Sara wondered.

Can he mean the bridge? Have local fanatics torn it down, without orders from the sages?

Dwer, her well-traveled brother, had described the span across the Gentt as a marvel of disguise, appearing like an aimless jam of broken trees. But even that would not satisfy fervent scroll thumpers these days.

Through twilight dimness she spied a forlorn skeleton of charred logs, trailing from sandbar to sandbar.

Just like at Bing Hamlet, back home. What is it about a bridge that attracts destroyers?

Anything sapient-made might be a target of zealotry, these days.

The workshops, dams, and libraries may go. We’ll follow glavers into blessed obscurity. Dedinger’s heresy may prove right, and Lark’s prove wrong.

She sighed. Mine was always the unlikeliest of all.

Despite captivity, Dedinger seemed confident in ultimate success for his cause.

“Now our young guides must spend days trying to hire boats. No more rushing about, postponing Judgment Day. As if the explosers and their friends could ever have changed destiny.”

“Shut up,” Kurt said.

“You know, I always thought your guild would be on our side, when the time came to abandon vanities and take redemption’s path. Isn’t it frustrating, preparing all your life to blow up things, only to hold back at the crucial moment?”

Kurt looked away.

Sara expected the horsewomen to head to a nearby fishing village. Hoonish coracles might be big enough to ferry one horse at a time, though that slow process would expose the Illias to every gawking citizen within a dozen leagues. Worse, Urunthai reinforcements, or Dedinger’s own die-hard supporters, might have time to catch up.

But to her surprise, the party left the river road, heading west down a narrow track through dense undergrowth. Two Illias dropped back, brushing away signs of their passage.

Could their settlement lie in this thicket?

But hunters and gleaners from several races surely went browsing through this area. No secret horse clan could remain hidden for more than a hundred years!

Disoriented in a labyrinth of trees and jutting knolls, Sara kept a wary eye on the rider in front of her. She did not relish wandering lost and alone in the dark.

Gaining altitude, the track finally crested to overlook a cluster of evenly spaced hills — steep mounds surrounding a depression filled with dense brush. From their symmetry, Sara thought of Buyur ruins.

Then she forgot about archaeology when something else caught her eye. A flicker to the west, beckoning from many leagues away.

The mountain’s wide shoulders cut a broad wedge of stars.

Near its summit, curved streaks glowed red and orange.

Flowing lava.

Jijo’s blood.

A volcano.

Sara blinked. Might they already have traveled to—

“No,” she answered herself. “That’s not Guenn. It’s Blaze Mountain.”

“If only that were our destination, Sara. Things’d be simpler.” Kurt spoke from nearby. “Alas, the smiths of Blaze Peak are conservative. They want no part of the hobbies and pastimes that are practiced where we’re headin’.”

Hobbies? Pastimes? Was Kurt trying to baffle her with riddles?

“You can’t still reckon we’re going all the way to—”

“To the other great forge? Aye, Sara. We’ll make it, don’t fret.”

“But the bridge is out! Then there’s desert, and after that, the Spec …”

She trailed off as the troop turned downward, into the thorn brake between the hills. Three times, riders dismounted to shift clever barriers that looked like boulders or tree trunks. At last, they reached a small clearing where the guides met and embraced another group of leather-clad women. There was a campfire … and the welcome aroma of food.

Despite a hard day, Sara managed to unsaddle her own mount and brush the tired beast. She ate standing, doubtful she would ever sit again.

I should check Emerson. Make sure he takes his medicine. He may need a story or a song to settle down after all this.

A small figure slipped alongside, chuffing nervously.

No — Go — Hole—Prity motioned with agile hands. Scary — Hole.

Sara frowned.

“What hole are you talking about?”

The chimp took Sara’s hand, pulling her toward several Illias, who were shifting baggage to a squat, boxy object.

A wagon, Sara realized. A big one, with four wheels, instead of the usual two. Fresh horses were harnessed, but to haul it where? Surely not through the surrounding thicket!

Then Sara saw what “hole” Prity meant — gaping at the base of a cone hill. An aperture with smooth walls and a flat floor. A thin glowing stripe ran along the tunnel’s center, continuing downhill before turning out of sight.

Jomah and Kurt were already aboard the big wagon, with Dedinger strapped in behind, a stunned expression on his aristocratic face.

For once Sara agreed with the heretic sage.

Emerson stood at the shaft entrance and whooped, like a small boy exploring a cave first with his own echoes. The starman grinned, happier than ever, and reached for her hand. Sara took his while inhaling deeply.

Well, I bet Dwer and Lark never went anywhere like this. I may yet be the one with the best story to tell.

Alvin

I FOUND MY FRIENDS IN A DIM CHAMBER WHERE frigid fog blurred every outline. Even hobbling with crutches, my awkward footsteps made hardly a sound as I approached the silhouettes of Huck and Ur-ronn, with little Huphu curled on Pincer’s carapace. All faced the other way, looking downward into a soft glow.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked. “Is this any way to greet—”

One of Huck’s eyestalks swerved on me.

“We’re-glad-to-see-you’re-all-right-but-now-shut-up-and-get-over-here.”

Few other citizens of the Slope could squeeze all that into a single GalThree word-blat. Not that skill excused her rudeness.

“Hr-rm. The-same-to-you-I’m-sure, oh-obsessed-being-too-transfixed-to-offer-decent-courtesy,” I replied in kind.

Shuffling forward, I noted how my companions were transformed. Ur-ronn’s pelt gleamed, Huck’s wheels were realigned, and Pincer’s carapace had been patched and buffed smooth. Even Huphu seemed sleek and content.

“What is it?” I began. “What’re you all staring …”

My voice trailed off when I saw where they stood — on a balcony without a rail, overlooking the source of both the pale glow and the chill haze. A cube — two hoon lengths on a side, colored a pale shade of brownish yellow — lay swathed in a fog of its own making, unadorned except by a symbol embossed on one face. A spiral emblem with five swirling arms and a bulbous center, all crossed by a gleaming vertical bar.

Despite how far the people of the Slope have fallen, or how long it’s been since our ancestors roamed as star gods, that emblem is known to every grub and child. Inscribed on each copy of the Sacred Scrolls, it evokes awe when prophets and sages speak of lost wonders. On this frosted obelisk it could only mean one thing — that we stood near more knowledge than anyone on Jijo could tally, or begin to imagine. If the human crew of sneakship Tabernacle had kept printing paper books till this very day, they could have spilled only a small fragment of the trove before us, a hoard that began before many stars in the sky.

The Great Library of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies.

I’m told moments like these can inspire eloquence from great minds.

“J-j-jeez,” commented Pincer.

Ur-ronn was less concise.

“The questions …,” she lisped. “The questions we could ask …”

I nudged Huck.

“Well, you said you wanted to go find something to read.”

For the first time in all the years I’ve known her, our little wheeled friend seemed at a loss for words. Her stalks trembled. The only sound she let out was a gentle keening sigh.

Asx

If only we/i had nimble running feet,

i/we would use them now, to flee.

If we/i had burrowers’ claws,

i/we would dig a hole and hide.

If we/i had the wings,

i/we would fly away.

Lacking those useful skills, the member toruses of our composite stack nearly vote to draw permanently, sealing out the world, negating the objective universe, waiting for the intolerable to go away.

It will not go away.

So reminds our second torus of cognition.

Among the greasy trails of wisdom that coat our aged core, many were laid down after reading learned books, or holding lengthy discussions with other sages. These tracks of philosophical wax agree with our second ring. As difficult as it may be for a traeki to accept, the cosmos does not vanish when we turn within. Logic and science appear to prove otherwise.

The universe goes on. Things that matter keep happening, one after another.

Still, it is hard to swivel our trembling sensor rings to face toward the mountain dreadnought that recently lowered itself down from heaven, whose bulk seems to fill both valley and sky.

Harder to gaze through a hatchway in the great ship’s flank — an aperture broad as the largest building in Tarek Town.

Hardest to regard the worst of all possible sights — those cousins that we traeki fled long ago.

Terrible and strong — the mighty Jophur.

How gorgeous they seem, those glistening sap rings, swaying in their backlit portal, staring without pity at the wounded glade their vessel alters with its crushing weight. A glade thronging with half-animal felons, a miscegenous rabble, the crude descendants of fugitives.

Exiles who futilely thought they might elude the ineludable.

Our fellow Commons citizens mutter fearfully, still awed by the rout of the smaller Rothen ship — that power we had held in dread for months — now pressed down and encased in deadly light.

Yes, my rings, i/we can sense how some nearby Sixers — the quick and prudent — take to their heels, retreating even before the landing tremors fade. Others foolishly mill toward the giant vessel, driven by curiosity, or awe. Perhaps they have trouble reconciling the shapes they see with any sense of danger.

As harmless as a traeki, so the expression goes. After all, what menace can there be in tapered stacks of fatty rings?

Oh, my/our poor innocent neighbors. You are about to find out.

Lark

THAT NIGHT HE DREAMED ABOUT THE LAST TIME HE saw Ling smile — before her world and his forever changed.

It seemed long ago, during a moonlit pilgrimage that crept proudly past volcanic vents and sheer cliffs, bearing shared hope and reverence toward the Holy Egg. Twelve twelves of white-clad celebrants made up that procession — qheuens and g’Keks, traekis and urs, humans and hoons — climbing a hidden trail to their sacred site. And accompanying them for the first time, guests from outer space — a Rothen master, two Danik humans, and their robot guards — attending to witness the unity rites of a quaint savage tribe.

He dreamed about that pilgrimage in its last peaceful moment, before the fellowship was splintered by alien words and fanatical deeds. Especially the smile on her face, when she told him joyous news.

“Ships are coming, Lark. So many ships!

“It’s time to bring you all back home.”

Two words still throbbed like sparks in the night. Rhythmically hotter as he reached for them in his sleep.

… ships …

… home …

… ships …

… home …

One word vanished at his dream touch — he could not tell which. The other he clenched hard, its flamelike glow increasing. Strange light, pushing free of containment. It streamed past flesh, past bones. A glow that clarified, offering to show him everything.

Everything except …

Except now she was gone. Taken away by the word that vanished.

Pain wrenched Lark from the lonely night phantasm, tangled in a sweaty blanket. His trembling right hand clenched hard against his chest, erupting with waves of agony.

Lark exhaled a long sigh as he used his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right, forcing them apart one by one. Something rolled off his open palm—

It was the stone fragment of the Holy Egg, the one he had hammered from it as a rebellious child, and worn ever since as penance. Even as sleep unraveled, he imagined the rocky talisman throbbing with heat, pulsing in time to the beating of his heart.

Lark stared at the blur-cloth canopy, with moonlight glimmering beyond.

I remain in darkness, on Jijo, he thought, yearning to see once more by the radiance that had filled his dream. A light that seemed about to reveal distant vistas.

Ling spoke to him later that day, when their lunch trays were slipped into the tent by a nervous militiaman.

“Look, this is stupid,” she said. “Each of us acting like the other is some kind of devil spawn. We don’t have time for grudges, with your people and mine on a tragic collision course.”

Lark had been thinking much the same thing, though her sullen funk had seemed too wide to broach. Now Ling met his eyes frankly, as if anxious to make up for lost time.

“I’d say a collision’s already happened,” he commented.

Her lips pressed a thin line. She nodded.

“True. But it’s wrong to blame your entire Commons for the deeds of a minority, acting without authority or—”

He barked a bitter laugh. “Even when you’re trying to be sincere, you still condescend, Ling.”

She stared for a moment, then nodded. “All right. Your sages effectively sanctioned the zealots’ attack, post facto, by keeping us prisoner and threatening blackmail. It’s fair to say that we’re already—”

“At war. True, dear ex-employer. But you leave out our own casus belli.” Lark knew the grammar must be wrong, but he liked showing that even a savage could also drop a Latin phrase. “We’re fighting for our lives. And now we know genocide was the Rothen aim from the start.”

Ling glanced past him to where a g’Kek doctor drew increasing amounts of nauseating fluid from the air vents of a qheuen, squatting unconscious at the back of the shelter. She had worked alongside Uthen for months, evaluating local species for possible uplift. The gray’s illness was no abstraction.

“Believe me, Lark. I know nothing of this disease. Nor the trick Ro-kenn allegedly pulled, trying to broadcast psiinfluentials via your Egg.”

“Allegedly? You suggest we might have the technology to pull off something like that, as a frame-up?”

Ling sighed. “I don’t dismiss the idea entirely. From the start you Jijoans played on our preconceptions. Our willingness to see you as ignorant barbarians. It took weeks to learn that you were still literate! Only lately did we realize you must have hundreds of books, maybe thousands!”

An ironic smile crossed his face, before Lark realized how much the expression revealed.

“More than that? A lot more?” Ling stared. “But where? By Von Daniken’s beard — how?”

Lark put aside his meal, mostly uneaten. He reached over to his backpack and drew forth a thick volume bound in leather. “I can’t count how many times I wanted to show you this. Now I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”

In a gesture Lark appreciated, Ling wiped her hands before accepting the book, turning the pages with deliberate care. What seemed reverence at first, Lark soon realized was inexperience. Ling had little practice holding paper books.

Probably never saw one before, outside a museum.

Rows of small type were punctuated by lithographed illustrations. Ling exclaimed over the flat, unmoving images. Many of the species shown had passed through the Danik research pavilion during the months she and Lark worked side by side, seeking animals with the special traits her Rothen masters desired.

“How old is this text? Did you find it here, among all these remnants?” Ling motioned toward a stack of artifacts preserved by the mulc spider, relics of the long-departed Buyur, sealed in amber cocoons.

Lark groaned. “You’re still doing it, Ling. For Ifni’s sake! The book is written in Anglic.”

She nodded vigorously. “Of course. You’re right. But then who—”

Lark reached over and flipped the volume to its title page.

A PHYLOGENETIC INTERDEPENDENCE PROFILE OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ON THE JIJOAN SLOPE

“This is part one. Part two is still mostly notes. I doubt we’d have lived long enough to finish volume three, so we left the deserts, seas, and tundras for someone else to take on.”

Ling gaped at the sheet of linen paper, stroking two lines of smaller print, below the title. She looked at him, then over toward the dying qheuen.

“That’s right,” he said. “You’re living in the same tent with both authors. And since I’m presenting you with this copy, you have a rare opportunity. Care to have both of us autograph it? I expect you’re the last person who’ll get the chance.”

His bitter sarcasm was wasted. Clearly she didn’t understand the word autograph. Anyway, Ling the biologist had replaced the patronizing alien invader. Turning pages, she murmured over each chapter she skimmed.

“This would have been incredibly useful during our survey!”

“That’s why I never showed it to you.”

Ling answered with a curt nod. Given their disagreement over the lightness of gene raiding, his attitude was understandable.

Finally, she closed the volume, stroking the cover. “I am honored by this gift. This accomplishment. I find I cannot grasp what it must have taken to create it, under these conditions, just the two of you.…”

“With the help of others, and standing on the shoulders of those who came before. It’s how science works. Each generation’s supposed to get better, adding to what earlier ones knew.…”

His voice trailed off as he realized what he was saying.

Progress? But that’s Sara’s apostasy, not mine!

Anyway, why am I so bitter? So what if alien diseases wipe out every sapient being on Jijo? Weren’t you willing to see that as a blessing, a while ago? Didn’t it seem an ideal way to swiftly end our illegal colony? A harmful invasion that should never have existed in the first place?

Over the course of Uthen’s illness, Lark came to realize something — that death can sometimes seem desirable in abstract, but look quite different when it’s in your path, up close and personal.

If Harullen the Heretic had lived, that purist might have helped Lark cling to his belief in Galactic law, which for good reason forbade settlements on fallow worlds. It was our goal to atone for our ancestors’ egotistical sin. To help rid Jijo of the infestation.

But Harullen was gone, sliced to bits by a Rothen robot, and now Lark grappled with doubts.

I’d rather Sara were right. If only I could see nobility here. Something worth enduring. Worth fighting for.

I don’t really want to die.

Ling pored through the guidebook again. Better than most, she could appreciate the work he and Uthen spent their adult lives creating. Her professional esteem helped bridge the chasm of their personalities.

“I wish I had something of equal value to give you,” she said, meeting his eyes again.

Lark pondered.

“You really mean that?”

“Of course I do.”

“All right then, wait here. I’ll be right back.”

At the rear of the shelter, the g’Kek physician indicated with twined eyestalks that Uthen’s condition was unvaried. Good news, since each change till now had been for the worse. Lark stroked his friend’s chitin carapace, wishing he could impart comfort through the gray’s stupor.

“Is it my fault you caught this bug, old friend? I made you go with me into the station wreckage, rummaging for alien secrets.” He sighed. “I can’t make up for that. But what’s in your bag may help others.”

He lifted Uthen’s private satchel and took it back to Ling. Reaching inside, he felt several slablike objects, cool to the touch.

“Earlier, we found something that you might help me learn to read. If you meant your promise.”

He put one of the flat lozenges in her hand — pale brown and smooth as glass, with a spiral shape etched on each face.

Ling stared at it for several duras. When she looked up, there was something new in her countenance. Was it respect for the way he had cornered her? Trapping her with the one other trait they shared — a compelling sense of honor?

For the first time since they met, Ling’s eyes seemed to concede that she was dealing with an equal.

Asx

CALM DOWN, MY RINGS. NO ONE CAN FORCE YOU to stroke wax against your will.

As traeki we are each of us sovereign, free not to recall intolerable memories before we are ready.

Let the wax cool a little longer—a majority of rings demands—before we dare look again.

Let the most recent terror wait.

But our second cognition ring demurs. It insists — we/i should delay no longer confronting the dread news about Jophur, our terrible cousins, arriving on Jijo.

Our second ring of cognition reminds us of the Quandary of Solipsism — the riddle that provoked our traeki founders to flee the Five Galaxies.

Solipsism. The myth of the all-important self.

Most mortal sapient beings hold this conceit, at one level or another. An individual can perceive others by sight, touch, and empathy, yet still reckon them as mere figments or automatons. Caricatures, of little importance.

Under solipsism, the world exists for each solitary individualist.

Examined dispassionately, it seems an insane concept. Especially to a traeki, since none of us can thrive or think alone. Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success.

Madness seems essential in order to be “great.”

Terran sages knew this paradox from their long isolation. Ignorant and lonely, humans wallowed in one bizarre superstition after another, frantically trying concepts that no uplifted species would consider for even a dura. According to wolfling tales, humans wrestled endlessly with their own overpowering egos.

Some tried suppressing selfness, seeking detachment. Others subsumed personal ambition in favor of a greater whole — family, religion, or a leader.

Later they passed through a phase in which individualism was extolled as the highest virtue, teaching their young to inflate the ego beyond all natural limits or restraint. Works from this mad era of the self are found in the Biblos Archive, with righteous, preening rage flowing across every page.

Finally, Just before contact, there emerged another approach.

Some of their texts use the word maturity.

We traeki — newly uplifted from the pensive swamps of our homeworld — seemed safe from achieving greatness, no matter how many skills our patrons, the blessed Poa, inserted in our rings. Oh, we found it pleasant to merge in tall, wise stacks. To gather learned wax and travel the stars. But to our patrons’ frustration, we never found appealing the fractious rivalries that churn the Five Galaxies. Frantic aspiration and zeal always seemed pointless to our kind.

Then the Poa brought in experts. The Oailie.

The Oailie pitied our handicap. With great skill, they gave us tools for achievement. For greatness.

The Oailie gave us new rings—

Rings of power.

Rings of self-centered glory.

Rings that turned mere traeki into Jophur.

Too late, we and the Poa learned a lesson — that ambition comes at a cost.

We fled, did we not, my rings?

By a fluke, some traeki managed to shuck these Oailie “gifts,” and escape.

Only a few wax-crystal remembrance cells survive from those days. Memories laced with dread of what we were becoming.

At the time, our ancestors saw no choice but flight.

And yet … a pang of conscience trickles through our inner core.

Might there have been another way?

Might we have stayed and fought somehow to tame those awesome new rings? Futile as our forebears’ exodus now seems … was it also wrong?

Since joining the High Sages, this traeki Asx has pored over Terran books, studying their lonely, epochal struggle — a poignant campaign to control their own deeply solipsistic natures. A labor still under way when they emerged from Earth’s cradle to make contact with Galactic civilization.

The results of that Asx investigation remain inconclusive, yet i/we found tantalizing clues.

The fundamental ingredient, it seems, is courage.

Yes, my rings?

Very well then. A majority has been persuaded by the second ring of cognition.

We/i shall once again turn to the hot-new-dreadful waxy trail of recent memory.

Glistening cones stared down at the confused onlookers who remained, milling on the despoiled glade. From a balcony high a-flank the mountain ship, polished stacks of fatty rings dripped luxuriously as they regarded teeming savages below — we enthralled members of six exile races.

Shifting colors play across their plump toruses — shades of rapid disputation. Even at a great distance, i/we sense controversy raging among the mighty Jophur, as they quarrel among themselves. Debating our fate.

Events interrupt, even as our dribbling thought-streams converge.

Near.

At last we have come very near the recent. The present.

Can you sense it, my rings? The moment when our dreadful cousins finished arguing what to do about us? Amid the flashing rancor of their debate, there suddenly appeared forceful decisiveness. Those in command — powerful ring stacks whose authority is paramount — made their decree with stunning confidence.

Such assuredness! Such certainty! It washed over us, even from six arrowflights away.

Then something else poured from the mighty dreadnought.

Hatchet blades of infernal light.

Emerson

HE HAS NEVER BEEN ESPECIALLY FOND OF HOLES. This one both frightens and intrigues Emerson.

It is a strange journey, riding a wooden wagon behind a four-horse team, creaking along a conduit with dimpled walls, like some endless stretched intestine. The only illumination — a faintly glowing stripe — points straight ahead and behind, toward opposite horizons.

The duality feels like a sermon. After departing the hidden forest entrance, time became vague — the past blurry and the future obscure. Much like his life has been ever since regaining consciousness on this savage world, with a cavity in his head and a million dark spaces where memory should be.

Emerson can feel this place tugging associations deep within his battered skull. Correlations that scratch and howl beyond the barriers of his amnesia. Dire recollections lurk just out of reach. Alarming memories of abject, gibbering terror, that snap and sting whenever he seeks to retrieve them.

Almost as if, somehow, they were being guarded.

Strangely, this does not deter him from prodding at the barricades. He has spent much too long in the company of pain to hold it in awe any longer. Familiar with its quirks and ways, Emerson figures he now knows pain as well as he knows himself.

Better, in fact.

Like a quarry who turns at bay after growing bored with running — and then begins hunting its pursuer — Emerson eagerly stalks the fear scent, following it to its source.

The feeling is not shared. Though the draft beasts pant and their hooves clatter, all echoes feel muffled, almost deathlike. His fellow travelers react by hunching nervously on the narrow bench seats, their breath misting the chill air.

Kurt the Exploser seems a little less surprised by all this than Sara or Dedinger, as if the old man long suspected the existence of a subterranean path. Yet, his white-rimmed eyes keep darting, as if to catch dreaded movement in the surrounding shadows. Even their guides, the taciturn women riders, appear uneasy. They must have come this way before, yet Emerson can tell they dislike the tunnel.

Tunnel.

He mouths the word, adding it proudly to his list of recovered nouns.

Tunnel.

Once upon a time, the term meant more than a mere hole in the ground, when his job was fine-tuning mighty engines that roamed the speckled black of space. Back then it stood for …

No more words come to mind. Even images fail him, though oddly enough, equations stream from some portion of his brain less damaged than the speech center. Equations that explain tunnels, in a chaste, sterile way — the sort of multidimensional tubes that thread past treacherous shoals of hyperspace. Alas, to his disappointment, the formulas lack any power to yank memories to life.

They do not carry the telltale spoor of fear.

• • •

Also undamaged is his unfailing sense of direction. Emerson knows when the smooth-walled passage must be passing under the broad river, but no seepage is seen. The tunnel is a solid piece of Galactic workmanship, built to last for centuries or eons — until the assigned time for dismantling.

That time came to this world long ago. This place should have vanished along with all the great cities, back when Jijo was lain fallow. By some oversight, it was missed by the great destroyer machines and living acid lakes.

Now desperate fugitives use the ancient causeway to evade a hostile sky, suddenly filled with ships.

While still vague on details, Emerson knows he has been fleeing starships for a very long time, along with Gillian, Hannes, Tsh’t, and the crew of Streaker.

Faces flicker, accompanying each name as recall agony makes him grunt and squeeze his eyelids. Faces Emerson pines for … and desperately hopes never to see again. He knows he must have been sacrificed somehow, to help the others get away.

Did the plan succeed? Did Streaker escape ahead of those awful dreadnoughts? Or has he suffered all of this for nothing?

His companions breathe heavily and perspire. They seem taxed by the stale air, but to Emerson it is just another kind of atmosphere. He has inhaled many types over the years. At least this stuff nourishes the lungs …

… unlike the wind back on the green-green world, where a balmy day could kill you if your helmet failed.…

And his helmet did fail, he now recalls, at the worst possible time, while trying to cross a mat of sucking demiveg, running frantically toward—

Sara and Prity gasp aloud, snapping his mental thread, making him look up to see what changed.

At a brisk pace the wagon enters a sudden widening of the tunnel, like the bulge where a snake digests its meal. Dimpled walls recede amid deep shadows, where dozens of large objects dimly lurk — tubelike vehicles, corroded by time. Some have been crushed by rock falls. Piles of stony debris block other exits from the underground vault.

Emerson lifts a hand to stroke a filmy creature riding his forehead, as lightly as a scarf or veil. The rewq trembles at his touch, swarming down to lay its filmy, translucent membrane over his eyes. Some colors dim, while others intensify. The ancient transit cars seem to shimmer like specters, as if he is looking at them not through space, but time. It is almost possible to imagine them in motion, filled with vital energies, hurtling through a network that once girdled a living, global civilization.

The horsewomen sitting on the foremost bench clutch their reins and peer straight ahead, enclosed by a nimbus of tension made visible by the rewq. The film shows Emerson their edgy, superstitious awe. To them, this is no harmless crypt for dusty relics, but a macabre place where phantoms prowl. Ghosts from an age of gods.

The creature on his brow intrigues Emerson. How does the little parasite translate emotions — even between beings as different as human and traeki — and all without words? Anyone who brought such a treasure to Earth would be richly rewarded.

To his right, he observes Sara comforting her chimpanzee aide, holding Prity in her arms. The little ape cringes from the dark, echoless cavern, but the rewq’s overlaid colors betray a fringe of deceit in Prity’s distress. It is partly an act! A way to distract her mistress, diverting Sara from her own claustrophobic fears.

Emerson smiles knowingly. The hues surrounding Sara reveal what the unaided eye already knows — that the young woman thrives on being needed.

“It’s all right, Prity,” she soothes. “Shh. It’ll be all right.”

The phrases are so simple, so familiar that Emerson understands them. He used to hear the same words while thrashing in his delirium, during those murky days after the crash, when Sara’s tender care helped pull him back from that pit of dark fire.

The vast chamber stretches on, with just the glowing stripe to keep them from drifting off course. Emerson glances back to see young Jomah, seated on the last bench with his cap a twisted mass between his hands, while his uncle Kurt tries to explain something in hushed tones, motioning at the distant ceiling and walls — perhaps speculating what held them up … or what explosive force it would take to bring them crashing down. Nearby, with fastened hands and feet, the rebel, Dedinger, projects pure hatred of this place.

Emerson snorts annoyance with his companions. What a gloomy bunch! He has been in spots infinitely more disturbing than this harmless tomb … some of them he can even remember! If there is one sure truth he can recall from his former life, it is that a cheerful journey goes much faster, whether you are in deep space or the threshold of hell.

From a bag at his feet, he pulls out the midget dulcimer Ariana Foo had given him back at the Biblos Archive, that ornate hall of endless corridors stacked high with paper books. Not bothering with the hammers, he lays the instrument on his lap and plucks a few strings. Twanging notes jar the others from their anxious mutterings to look his way.

Though Emerson’s ravaged brain lacks speech, he has learned ways to nudge and cajole. Music comes from a different place than speech, as does song.

Free association sifts the shadowy files of memory. Early drawers and closets, undammed by the traumas of later life. From some cache he finds a tune about travel down another narrow road. One with a prospect of hope at the end of the line.

It spills forth without volition, as a whole, flowing to a voice that’s unpracticed, but strong.

“I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal,

Fifteen miles down the Erie Canal.

She’s a good old worker and a good

old pal,

Fifteen miles down the Erie Canal.

We’ve hauled some cargo in our day,

Filled with lumber, coal, and hay,

And we know every inch of the way,

From Albany to Buffalo-o-o.…”

Amid the shadows, they are not easily coaxed from their worries. He too can feel the weight of rock above, and so many years. But Emerson refuses to be oppressed. He sings louder, and soon Jomah’s voice joins the refrain, followed tentatively by Sara’s. The horses’ ears flick. They nicker, speeding to a canter.

The subterranean switching yard narrows again, walls converging with a rush. Ahead, the glowing line plunges into a resuming tunnel.

Emerson’s voice briefly falters as a flicker of memory intrudes. Suddenly he can recall another abrupt plunge … diving through a portal that opened into jet vacuum blankness … then falling as the universe converged on him from all sides to squeeze.…

And something else.

A row of pale blue eyes.

Old Ones …

But the song has a life of its own. Its momentum pours unstoppably from some cheerful corner of his mind, overcoming those brief, awful images, making him call out the next verse with a vigor of hoarse, throaty defiance.

“Low bridge, everybody down!

Low bridge! ’cause we’re comin’

to a town.

And you’ll always know your neighbor,

Always know your pal,

If you ever navigate along the Erie Canal.”

His companions lean away from the rushing walls. Their shoulders press together as the hole sweeps up to swallow them again.