“I never spotted your tribe in any of my expeditions east, so I’d guess you’re from quite a ways south of east, beyond the Venom Plain. Is it the Gray Hills? I hear that country’s so twisty, it could hide a small tribe, if they’re careful.”
Her brown eyes filled with a weary pang. “You’re wrong. I didn’t come from . . . that place.”
She trailed off lamely, and Dwer felt sympathy. He knew all about feeling awkward around one’s own kind. The loner’s life made it hard getting enough experience to overcome his own shyness.
Which is why I have to make it to Gathering! Sara had given him a letter to deliver to Plovov the Analyst. Coin-cidentally, Plovov’s daughter was a beauty, and unbetrothed. With luck, Dwer might get a chance to ask Glory Plovov out for a walk, and maybe tell a story good enough to impress her. Like how he stopped last year’s migration of herd-moribul from stampeding over a cliff during a lightning storm. Perhaps he wouldn’t stammer this time, making her giggle in a way he didn’t like.
Suddenly he was impatient to be off. “Well, no sense worrying about it now.” He motioned for Rety to lead the glaver again. “You’ll be assigned a junior sage to speak for you, so you won’t face the council alone. Anyway, we don’t hang sooners anymore. Not unless we have to.”
His attempt to catch her eye with a wink failed, so the joke went flat. She studied the ground as he retied the tether, and they resumed moving single file.
A rising humidity turned into mist as they neared the noise of plunging water. Where the trail rounded a switchback, a streamlet fell from above, dropping staccato spatters across an aquamarine pool. From there, water spilled over a sheer edge, resuming its steep journey toward the river far below, and finally the sea.
The way down to the pool looked too treacherous to risk with Rety and the glaver, so he signaled to keep going. They would intersect the brook again, farther along.
But the noor leaped from rock to rock. Soon they heard him splashing joyfully as they plodded on.
Dwer found himself thinking of another waterfall, way up where the Great Northern Glacier reached a towering cliff at the continent’s edge. Every other year, he hunted brankur pelts there, during spring thaw. But he really made the journey in order to be on hand when the ice dam finally broke, at the outlet of Lake Desolation.
Huge, translucent sheets would tumble nearly a kilometer, shattering to fill the sky with crystal icebows, bringing the mighty falls back to life with a soul-filling roar.
In his fumbling way, he once tried describing the scene to Lark and Sara-the shouting colors and radiant noise-hoping practice would school his clumsy tongue. Reliably, his sister’s eyes lit up over his tales of Jijo’s marvels beyond the narrow Slope. But good old cheerful Lark just shook his head and said-“These fine marvels would do just as well without us.”
But would they? Dwer wondered.
Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn’t that what “sapience” is for?
Someday, he hoped to take his wife-and-mate to Desolation Falls. If he found someone whose soul could share it the way his did.
The noor caught up a while later, sauntering by with a smug grin, then waiting to shake its sleek back, spraying their knees as they passed. Rety laughed. A short sound, curt and hurried, as if she did not expect any pleasure to last long.
Farther down the trail, Dwer halted where an outcrop overlooked the cascade, a featherlike trickle, dancing along the cliff face. The sight reminded Dwer of how desperately dry he felt. It also tugged a sigh, akin to loneliness.
“Come on, sprig. There’s another pool down a ways, easy to get to.”
But Rety stood for a time, rooted in place, with a line of moisture on her cheek, though Dwer guessed it might have come from floating mist.
Asx
THEY DO NOT SHOW THEIR FACES. PLANS MIGHT go astray. Some of us might survive to testify. So naturally, they hide their forms.
Our scrolls warn of this possibility. Our destiny seems foredoomed.
Yet when the starship’s voice filled the valley, the plain intent was to reassure.
“(Simple) scientists, we are.
“Surveys of (local, interesting) lifeforms, we prepare.
“Harmful to anyone, we are not.”
That decree, in the clicks and squeaks of highly formal Galactic Two, was repeated in three other standard languages, and finally-because they saw men and pans among our throng-in the wolfling tongue, Anglic.
“Surveying (local, unique) lifeforms, in this we seek your (gracious) help.
“Knowledge of the (local) biosphere, this you (assuredly) have.
“Tools and (useful) arts, these we offer in trade.
“Confidentially, shall we (mutually) exchange?”
Recall, my rings, how our perplexed peoples looked to one another. Could such vows be trusted? We who dwell on Jijo are already felons in the eyes of vast empires. So are those aboard this ship. Might two such groups have reason for common cause?
Our human sage summed it up with laconic wit. In Anglic, Lester Cambel muttered wisely—“Confidentially, my hairy ancestors’ armpits!”
And he scratched himself in a gesture that was both oracular and pointedly apropos.
Lark
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FOREIGNERS CAME, a chain of white-robed pilgrims trekked through a predawn mist. There were sixty, ten from each race.
Other groups would come this way during festival, seeking harmony patterns. But this company was different-its mission more grave.
Shapes loomed at them. Gnarled, misgrown trees spread twisted arms, like clutching specters. Oily vapors merged and sublimed. The trail turned sharply to avoid dark cavities, apparently bottomless, echoing mysteriously. Knobs of wind-scoured rock teased form-hungry agents of the mind, stoking the wanderers’ nervous anticipation. Would the next twisty switchback, or the next, bring it into sight—Jijo’s revered Mother Egg?
Whatever organic quirks they inherited, from six worlds in four different galaxies, each traveler felt the same throbbing call toward oneness. Lark paced his footsteps to a rhythm conveyed by the rewq on his brow.
I’ve been up this path a dozen times. It should be familiar by now. So why can’t I respond?
He tried letting the rewq lay its motif of color and sound over the real world. Feet shuffled. Hooves clattered. Ring nubs swiveled and wheels creaked along a dusty trail pounded so smooth by past pilgrims that one might guess this ritual stretched back to the earliest days of exile, not a mere hundred or so years.
Where did earlier folk turn, when they needed hope?
Lark’s brother, the renowned hunter, once took him by a secret way up a nearby mountain, where the Egg could be seen from above, squatting in its caldera like the brood of a storybook dragon, lain in a sheer-sided nest. From that distant perspective, it might have been some ancient Buyur monument, or a remnant of some older denizens of Jijo, aeons earlier-a cryptic sentinel, darkly impervious to time.
With the blink of an eye, it became a grounded star-ship-an oblate lens meant to glide through air and ether. Or a fortress, built of some adamantine essence, light-drinking, refractory, denser than a neutron star. Lark even briefly pictured the shell of some titanic being, too patient or proud to rouse itself over the attentions of mayflies.
It had been disturbing, forcing him to rethink his image of the sacred. That epiphany still clung to Lark. Or else it was a case of jitters over the speech he was supposed to give soon to a band of fierce believers. A sermon calling for extreme sacrifice.
The trail turned-and abruptly spilled into a sheer-walled canyon surrounding a giant oval form, a curved shape that reared fantastically before the pilgrims, two arrowflights from end to end. The pebbled surface curved up and over those gathered in awe at its base. Staring upward, Lark knew.
It couldn’t be any of those other things I imagined from afar.
Up close, underneath its massive sheltering bulk, anyone could tell the Egg was made of native stone.
Marks of Jijo’s fiery womb scored its flanks, tracing the story of its birth, starting with a violent conception, far underground. Layered patterns were like muscular cords. Crystal veins wove subtle dendrite paths, branching like nerves.
Travelers filed slowly under the convex overhang, to let the Egg sense their presence, and perhaps grant a blessing. Where the immense monolith pressed into black basalt, the sixty began a circuit. But while Lark’s sandals scraped gritty powder, chafing his toes, the peacefulness and awe of the moment were partly spoiled by memory.
Once, as an arrogant boy of ten, an idea took root in his head-to sneak behind the Egg and take a sample.
It all began one jubilee year, when Nelo the Papermaker set out for Gathering to attend a meeting of his guild, and his wife, Melina the Southerner, insisted on taking Lark and little Sara along.
“Before they spend their lives working away at your paper mill, they should see some of the world.”
How Nelo must have later cursed his consent, for the trip changed Lark and his sister.
All during the journey, Melina kept opening a book recently published by the master printers of Tarek Town, forcing her husband to pause, tapping his cane while she read aloud in her lilting southern accent, describing varieties of plant, animal, or mineral they encountered along the path. At the time, Lark didn’t know how many generations had toiled to create the guidebook, collating oral lore from every exile race. Nelo thought it a fine job of printing and binding, a good use of paper, or else he would have forbidden exposing the children to ill-made goods.
Melina made it a game, associating real things with their depictions among the ink lithographs. What might have been a tedious trip for two youngsters became an adventure outshadowing Gathering itself, so that by the time they arrived, footsore and tired, Lark was already in love with the world.
The same book, now yellow, worn, and obsolete thanks to Lark’s own labors, rested like a talisman in one cloak-sleeve. The optimistic part of my nature. The part that thinks it can learn.
As the file of pilgrims neared the Egg’s far side, he slipped.a hand into his robe to touch his other amulet. The one he never showed even Sara. A stone no larger than his thumb, wrapped by a leather thong. It always felt warm, after resting for twenty years next to a beating heart.
My darker side. The part that already knows.
The stone felt hot as pilgrims filed by a place Lark recalled too well.
It was at his third Gathering that he finally had screwed up the nerve-a patrician artisan’s son who fancied himself a scientist-slinking away from the flapping pavilions, ducking in caves to elude passing pilgrims, then dashing under the curved shelf, where only a child’s nimble form might go, drawing back his sampling hammer. ...
In all the years since, no one ever mentioned the scar, evidence of his sacrilege. It shouldn’t be noticeable among countless other scratches marring the surface up close. Yet even a drifting mist didn’t hide the spot when Lark filed by.
Should he still be embarrassed by a child’s offense, after all these years?
Knowing he was forgiven did not erase the shame.
The stone grew cooler, less restive, as the procession moved past.
Could it all be illusion? Some natural phenomenon, familiar to sophisticates of the Five Galaxies? (Though toweringly impressive to primitives hiding on a forbidden world.) Rewq symbionts also came into widespread use a century ago, offering precious insight into the moods of other beings. Had the Egg brought them forth, as some said, to help heal the Six of war and discord? Or were they just another quirky marvel left by Buyur gene-wizards, from back when this galaxy thronged with countless alien races?
After poring through the Biblos archives, Lark knew his confusion was typical when humans puzzled over the sacred. Even the great Galactics, whose knowledge spanned time and space, were riven by clashing dogmas. If mighty star-gods could be perplexed, what chance had he of certainty?
There’s one thing both sides of me can agree on.
In both his scientific work and the pangs of his heart, Lark knew one simple truth—We don’t belong here.
That was what he told the pilgrims later, in a rustic amphitheater, where the rising sun surrounded the Egg’s oblate bulk with a numinous glow. They gathered in rows, sitting, squatting, or folding their varied torsos in attentive postures. The qheuen apostate, Harullen, spoke first in a poetic dialect, hissing from several leg vents, invoking wisdom to serve this world that was their home, source of all their atoms. Then Harullen tilted his gray carapace to introduce Lark. Most had come a long way to hear his heresy.
“We’re told our ancestors were criminals,” he began with a strong voice, belying his inner tension. “Their sneakships came to Jijo, one at a time, running the patrols of the great Institutes, evading wary deputy globes of the Zang, hiding their tracks in the flux of mighty Izmunuti, whose carbon wind began masking this world a few thousand years ago. They came seeking a quiet place to perform a selfish felony.
“Each founding crew had excuses. Tales of persecution or neglect. All burned and sank their ships, threw their godlike tools into the Great Midden, and warned their offspring to beware the sky.
“From the sky would come judgment, someday—for the crime of survival.”
The sun crept past the Egg’s bulk, stabbing a corner of his eye. He escaped by leaning toward his audience.
“Our ancestors invaded a world that was set aside after ages of hard use. A world needing time for its many species, both native and artificial, to find restored balance, from which new wonders might emerge. The civilization of the Five Galaxies has used these rules to protect life since before half of the stars we see came alight.
“So why did our ancestors flout them?”
Each g’Kek pilgrim watched him with two eyestalks raised far apart and the other two tucked away, a sign of intense interest. The typical urrish listener pointed her narrow head not toward Lark’s face but his midriff, to keep his center of mass in view of all three black slits surrounding her narrow snout. Lark’s rewq highlighted these signs, and others from hoon, traeki, and qheuen.