Brightness Reef (30 page)

“Hold it, you unbuff hoon! . . . Okay, I can see now ... a whole lot of stars . . . more stars. . . . Hey, there’s nothing but stars in here!”

“Huck,” I murmured, “did I ask you to keep it quiet?”

Ur-ronn whistled a sigh. “Of course there’s only stars, you hoof-stinky g’Kek! Did you think you could count the fortholes on an orviting starshif with this little tele-scofe? At that height, it’ll twinkle like any other foint source.”

I was impressed. We all know Ur-ronn is the best mechanic in our bunch, but who figured she knew astronomy, as well?

“Here, give ne a chance to look. It’s fossible I can tell which star isn’t a star, if its fosition changes in relation to others.”

Huck’s wheels spun angrily in air, but she could no more deny the fairness of Ur-ronn’s request than keep me from lowering her to the ground. I straightened with relief, and some crackling of cartilage, as she rolled away, grumbling. Ur-ronn had to put both forehooves on the chair in order to rise up and peer through the eyepiece.

For a few moments, our urrish pal was silent; then she trilled frustration. “They really are all just stars, far as I can tell. Anyway, I forgot-a starshif in orvit would drift out of view in just a few duras, even with the tracking engine turned on.”

“Well, I guess that’s it,” I said, only half disappointed. “We’d better head on back now-“

That’s when I saw that Huck was gone. Whirling, I finally spied her, heading straight for the doorway I had seen earlier!

“Remember what we discussed?” she called rearward at us, speeding toward the back-lit rectangle. “The real evidence will be on those photographic plates you say Gybz spoke of. That’s what we came up here to look at in the first place. Come on!”

I admit staring like a stranded fish, my throat sac blatting uselessly while Huphu gouged my scalp, gathering purchase for a spring. Ur-ronn took off in a mad scramble after Huck, trying desperately to tackle her by the spokes before she reached the door—

which swung open, I swear, at that very instant, casting a painful brightness that outlined a human silhouette. A short, narrow-shouldered male whose fringe of head hair seemed aflame in the glare of several lanterns behind him. Blinking, raising a hand to shade my eyes, I could dimly make out several easels in the room beyond, bearing charts, measuring rules, and slick glass plates. More square plates lay racked on shelf after shelf, crowding the walls of the little room.

Huck squealed to a stop so suddenly her axles glowed. Ur-ronn nearly rammed her, halting in frantic haste. We all froze, caught in the act.

The human’s identity wasn’t hard to guess, since only one of his race lived on the mountain at the time. He was only known far and wide as the most brilliant of his kind, a sage whose mind reached far, even for an Earth-ling, to grasp many of the arcane secrets that our ancestors once knew. One whose intellect even the mighty self-assured Uriel bowed before.

The Smith of Mount Guenn was not going to be pleased with us for intruding on her guest.

Sage Purofsky stared for a long moment, blinking into the darkness beyond the doorway, then he raised a hand straight toward us, pointing.

“You!” he snapped in a strangely distracted tone of voice. “You surprised me.”

Huck was the first of us to recover.

“Um, sorry . . . uh, master. We were just, er .
 
.
 
.”

Cutting her off, but without any trace of rancor, the human went on.

“It’s just as well, then. I was about to ring for somebody. Would you kindly take these notes to Uriel for me?”

He held out a folded sheaf of papers, which Huck accepted in the grasp of one quivering tentacle-arm. Her half-retracted eyestalks blinked in surprise.

“That’s a good lad,” the savant went on absentmindedly, and turned to go back into the little room. Then Sage Purofsky stopped and ‘swiveled to face us once more.

“Oh, please also tell Uriel that I’m now sure of it. Both ships are gone. I don’t know what happened to the bigger one, the first one, since it appeared only by lucky accident on one early set of plates, before anyone knew to look for it. That orbit can’t be solved except to say I think it may have landed. But even a rough calculation based on the last series shows the second ship de-orbiting, heading into an entry spiral down to Jijo. Assuming no later deviations or corrections, its course would have made landfall some days ago, north of here, smack dab in the Rimmers.”

His smile was rueful, ironic.

“In other words, the warning we sent up to the Glade may be somewhat superfluous.” Purofsky rubbed his eyes tiredly and sighed. “By now our colleagues at Gathering probably know a lot more about what’s going on than we do.”

I swear, he sounded more disappointed than worried over the arrival of something the exiles of Jijo had feared for two thousand years.

We all, even Huphu, stared for a long time-even after the man thanked us again, turned around, and closed the door behind him, leaving us alone with our only company millions of stars, like pollen grains scattered on a shimmering ocean, stretching over our heads. A sea of darkness that suddenly felt frighteningly near.

Legends

There is a word we are asked not to say too often. And to whisper, when we do.

The traeki ask this of us, out of courtesy, respect, and superstition.

The word is a name—with just two syllables—one they fear ever to hear again.

A name they once called themselves.

A name presumably still used by their cousins, out on the star-lanes or the Five Galaxies.

Cousins who are mighty, terrifying, resolute, pitiless, and single-minded.

How different that description seems to make our own sept of ringed ones, from those who still roam the cosmos, like gods. Those Jophur.

Of all the races who came to Jijo in sneakships, some, like qheuens and humans, were obscure and almost unknown in the Five Galaxies. Others, like g’Keks and glavers, had reputations of modest extant, among those needing their specialised skills. Hoon and urs had made a moderate impression, so much that Earthlings knew of them before landing, and worried.

But it is said that every oxygen-breathing, starfaring clan is familiar with the shape of stacked rings, piled high, ominous and powerful.

When the traeki sneakship came, the g’Kek took one look at the newcomers and went into hiding for several generations, cowering in fright until, at last, they realised—these were different rings.

When qheuen settlers saw them already here, they very nearly left again, without unloading or even landing their sneakship.

How came our beloved friends to have such a reputation to live down? How came they to be so different from those who still fly in space, using that awful name?

Reflections on the Six, Ovoom Press, Year-of-Exile 1915

Asx

EITHER THE INVADERS ARE TRYING TO CONFUSE us, or else there is something strange about them. At first, their powers and knowledge appeared as one might expect-so far above us that we seem as brutish beasts. Dared we contrast our own meager wisdom, our simple ways, against their magnificent, unstoppable machines, their healing arts, and especially the erudition of their piercing questions about Jijoan life? Erudition showing the vast sweep and depth of records at their command, surely copied from the final survey of this world, a million years ago. Yet . . .

They seem to know nothing about lorniks or zookirs.

They cannot hide their excitement, upon measuring specimen glavers, as if they have made a great discovery.

They make puzzling, nonsensical remarks concerning chimpanzees.

And now they want to know everything about mule-spiders, asking naive questions that even this inexpert stack of manicolored rings could answer. Even if all of our/my toruses of sapiency were vlenned away, leaving nothing but instinct, memory, and momentum.

The sigil of the Great Library was missing from the bow of the great vessel that left their station here. We thought its absence a mere emblem of criminality. A negative symbol, denoting a kind of skulking shame.

Can it mean more than that? Much more?

Sara

OROM ENGRIL’S SHOP ON PIMMIN CANAL, IT WAS but a short walk to the clinic where Pzora had taken the Stranger yesterday. Engril agreed to meet Sara there with Bloor the Portraitist. Time was short. Perhaps Sara’s idea was foolish or impractical, but there would be no better moment to broach it, and no better person to present it to than Ariana Foo.

A decision had to be made. So far, the omens weren’t good.

The emissaries from Dolo Village had gathered last night, in a tavern near the Urrish Quarter, to discuss what each of them had learned since the Hauph-woa docked. Sara showed a copy of the sages’ report, fresh from Engril’s copy shop, expecting it to shock the others. But by that evening even Pzora knew most of the story.

“I see three possibilities,” the stern-browed farmer Jop had said, nursing a mug of sour buttermilk. “First-the story’s an Egg-cursed lie. The ship really is from the great Institutes, we’re about to be judged as the Scrolls say, but the sages are spreading a pebble-in-my-hoof fable about bandits to justify musterin’ the militia, preparin’ for a fight.”

“That’s absurd!” Sara had complained.

“Oh yeah? Then why’ve all the units been called up? Humans drilling in every village. Urrish cavalry wheelin’ in all directions, and the hoons oilin’ their old catapults, as if they could shoot down.a starship by hurlin’ rocks.” He shook his head. “What if the sages’ve got some fantasy about resisting? It wouldn’t be the first time leaders were driven mad by an approaching end to their days of petty power.”

“But what of these sketches?” asked the scriven-dancer, Fakoon. The g’Kek touched one of Engril’s reproductions, portraying a pair of humans dressed in one-piece suits, staring brazenly at sights both new to them and yet somehow pathetic in their eyes.

Jop shrugged. “Ridiculous on the face of it. What would humans be doin’ out here? When our ancestors left Earth on an aged thirdhand tub, not a single human scientist understood its workings. The folks back home couldn’t have caught up with galactic standard tech for another ten thousand years.”

Sara watched Blade and the hoon captain react with surprise. It was no secret, what Jop had said about human technology at the time of exile, but they must find it hard to picture. On Jijo, Earthlings were the engineers, the ones most often with answers.

“And who would want to ferfetrate such a hoax?” Ulgor asked, lowering her conical head. Sara read tension in the urs’s body stance. Uh-oh, she thought.

Jop smiled. “Why, maybe some bunch that sees opportunity, amid the chaos, to besmirch our honor and have one last chance at revenge before Judgment Day.”

Human and urs faced each other, each grinning a bright display of teeth-which could be taken equivocally as either friendly or threatening. For once, Sara blessed the sickness that had caused nearly everyone’s rewq to curl up and hibernate. There would have been no ambiguity with symbionts to translate~the meaning in Jop’s and Ulgor’s hearts.

At that moment, a squirt of pinkish steam jetted between the two-a swirling fume of cloying sweetness. Jop and Ulgor retreated from the cloud in opposite directions, covering their noses.

“Oops, i express repentance on our/my behalf. This pile’s digestive torus still retains, processes, deletes the richness of esteemed hoonish shipboard fare.”

Unperturbed, the captain of the Hauph-woa said- “How fortunate for you, Pzora. As to the subject at hand, we must still decide what advice to send back to Dolo Village and the settlements of the Upper Roney. So let me ask Jop. . . . Hrrrm—what if we consider a simpler theory-there is no hoax by the honored sages, brr?”

Jop still waved the air in front of his face, coughing. “That brings us to possibility number two-that we are being tested. The Day has come at last, but the noble Galactics are undecided what to do with us. Maybe the great Institutes hired human actors to play this role, offering us a chance to tip the scales one way through right action, or the other by choosing incorrectly. As for what advice we send upriver, I say we counsel that demolition should proceed according to the ancient plan!”

Blade, the young qheuen delegate, reared back on three legs, lifting his blue carapace, stammering and hissing so that his initial attempts at Anglic came out garbled. He switched to Galactic Two.

“Madness you betray! This (lunatic) thing, how can you say? Our mighty dam (glorious to see and smell) must fall? For what reason, if our (illicit) existence on Jijo he already known?”

Jop explained, “True, we can’t hide our crime of colonization. But we can start the process of removing our works from this scarred world. By showing our good intentions, we’ll prove we merit leniency.

“What we must not do-and I fear our sages may be fooled-is offer any cooperation to these humans who pretend to be gene raiders. No bribes or service, since that, too, must be part of the test.”

Ulgor snorted doubt. “And fossivility three? What if they turn out to ve felons, after all?”

Jop had shrugged. “Then the same answer holds. Passive resistance. Fade into the countryside. Tear down our cities-“

“Burn the libraries,” Sara cut in, and Jop glanced her way, then nodded, curtly.

“Above all else. They are the roots of conceit. Our outrageous pretense at remaining civilized.” He waved around him at the old Buyur chamber that had been converted to a tavern, the soot-stained walls adorned with spears, shields, and other souvenirs of the bloody siege of Tarek Town. “Civilized!” Jop laughed again. “We’re like parrot-ticks, reciting verses we do not understand, pathetically miming the ways of the mighty. If pirates have indeed come, such vanities can only lessen our skill at burrowing down. Our only chance of survival will be to blend in with Jijo’s animals. To become the

innocents that glavers are, in their blessed salvation. A salvation we might have achieved by now, had humans not foiled nature with our so-called Great Printing.