Brightness Reef (38 page)

Then it happens-a sudden twang, like a plucked vio-lus string, loud as thunder.

The deployer chief cries- “Release the brake!”

An operator leaps for a lever . . . too late as bucking convulsions hit the derrick, like backlash on a fishing pole when a big one gets away. Only this recoil is massive, unstoppable.

We all gasp or vurt at the sight of Huphu, a small black figure clinging to the farthest spar as the crane whips back and forth.

One paw, then another, loses its grip. She screams.

The tiny noor goes spinning across space, barely missing the hawser’s cyclone whirl amid a frothing patch of sea. Staring in helpless dismay, we see our mascot plunge into the abyss that already swallowed Ziz, Wuphon’s Dream, and all the hopes and hard work of two long years.

Legends

The urs tell of a crisis of breeding.

Out among the stars, they were said to live longer than they do on Jijo, with spans much enhanced by artificial means. Moreover, an urs never stops wanting a full pouch, tenanted either with a husband or with brooding young. There were technical ways to duplicate the feeling, but to many, these methods just weren’t the same.

Galactic society is harsh on over-breeders, who threaten the billion-year-old balance. There is constant dread of another wildfire—a conflagration of overpopulation, like one that burned almost half the worlds in Galaxy Three, a hundred or so million years ago.

Especially, those species who reproduce slowly, like hoon, seem to have a deep-set fear of “low-K” spawners, like urs.

Legend tells of a conflict over this matter. Reading between the lines of ornate urrish oral history, it seems the bards must be telling of a lawsuit—one judged at the higher levels of Galactic society.

The urs lost the suit, and a bitter war-of-enforcement that followed.

Some of the losers did not wish to settle, even then. They turned one ship toward forbidden spaces, there to search for a wild prairie they could call home.

A place to hear the clitter-clatter of myriad little urrish feet.

Asx

A STRANGE MESSAGE HAS COME ALL THE WAY from Tarek Town, sent by Ariana Foo, emeritus High Sage of human sept.

The exhausted urrish runner collapsed to her knees after dashing uphill from the Warril Plain, so spent that she actually craved water, raw and undiluted.

Center now, my rings. Spin your ever-wavering attention round the tale of Ariana Foo, as it was read aloud by Lester Cambel, her successor. Did not the news send vaporous wonder roiling through my/our core-that a mysterious injured outlander showed up one day near the Upper Roney? A stranger who might possibly be some lost comrade of the star-god visitors who now vex our shared exile! Or else, she speculates, might he be one who escaped these far-raiding adventurers? Could his wounds show evidence of shared enmity?

Ariana recommends we of the Council cautiously investigate the matter at our end, perhaps using truth-scryers, while she performs further experiments at Biblos.,

The forayers do seem to have other interests, beyond seeking pre-sentient species to ravish from Jijo’s fallow peace. They feign nonchalance, yet relentlessly query our folk, offering rewards and blandishments for reports of “anything strange.”

How ironic those words, coming from them.

Then there is the bird.

Surely you recall the metal bird, my rings? Normally, we would have taken it for yet another Buyur relic, salvaged from the entrails of a dead-dying mule-spider. Yet the sooner girl swears she saw it move! Saw it travel great distances, then fight and kill a Rothen machine!

Was that not the very evening the forayers buried their station, as though they were now fearful of the dread sky?

Our finest techies examine the bird-machine, but with scant tools available they learn little, save that energies still throb within its metal breast. Perhaps the contingent Lester has sent east-to ingather the human sooner band according to our law-will find out more.

So many questions. But even with answers, would our dire situation change in the least?

Were there time, i would set my/our varied rings the task of taking up different sides and arguing these mysteries, each question pouring distinct scents to coat our moist core, dripping syllogisms like wax, until only truth shines through a lacquered veneer. But there is no time for the traeki approach to problem solving. So we sages debate in the dry air, without even rewq to mediate the inadequacies of language. Each day is spent buying futile delays in our destiny.

As for Ariana’s other suggestion, we have employed truth-scryers during discussions with the sky-humans. According to books of lore, this passive form of psi should be less noticeable than other techniques.

“Are you seeking anybody in particular? This we asked, just yesterday. Is there a person, being, or group we should look for in your name?”

Their leader-the one answering to the name-label Rann-seemed to grow tense, then recovered swiftly, confidently, smiling in the manner of his kind.

“It is always our desire to seek strangeness. Have you observed strange things?”

In that moment of revealed strain, one of our scryers claimed to catch something-a brief flash of color. A dark shade of gray, like the hue of a Great Qheuen’s carapace. Only this surface seemed more supple, with a lissome litheness that undulated nimbly, free of adornment by hair, scale, feather, or torg.

The glimpse ended quickly. Still the scryer felt an association-with water.

What else did she describe, my rings, during that scant fey moment?

Ah, yes. A swirl of bubbles.

Scattered in formations, numerous as stars.

Bubbles growing into globes the size of Jijo’s moons. Glistening. Ancient. Ageless.

Bubbles filled with distilled wonder . . . sealed in by time.

Then nothing more.

Well and alas, what more could be asked? What are we but amateurs at this kind of game? Phwhoon-dau and Knife-Bright Insight point out that even this slim “clue” might have been laid, adroitly, in the scryer’s thoughts, in order to distract us with a paradox.

Yet at times like these, when our rewq and the Holy Egg seem to have abandoned us, it is such slender stems that offer wan hope to the drowning.

In her message, Ariana promised to send another kind of help. An expert whose skill may win us leverage with our foes, perhaps enough to make the invaders willing to bargain.

Oh, Ariana, how we/i have missed your wily optimism! If fire fell from heaven, you would see a chance to bake pots. If the entire Slope shuddered, then sank into the Midden’s awful depths, you would find in that event cause to cry out—opportunity!

Sara

DESPITE URGENT ORDERS TO HIDE BY DAY, THE steamship Gopher broke her old record, bolting upstream from Tarek Town, against the Bibur’s springtime flood, boilers groaning as pistons beat their casings, an exuberance of power unsurpassed by anything else on Jijo, save her sister ship, the Mole. Mighty emblems of human technology, they were unapproachable even by clever urrish smiths, laboring on high volcanoes.

Sara recalled her own first ride, at age fifteen, newly recruited to attend advanced studies in Biblos and fiercely proud of her new skills-especially the knack of seeing each clank and chug of the growling steam engine in terms of temperatures, pressures, and pounds of force. Equations seemed to tame the hissing brute, turning its dismaying roar into a kind of music.

Now all that was spoiled. The riveted tanks and pulsing rocker-arms were exposed as primitive gadgets, little more advanced than a stone ax.

Even if the star-gods leave without doing any of the awful things Ariana Foo predicts, they have already harmed us by robbing us of our illusions.

One person didn’t seem to mind. The Stranger lingered near the puffing, straining machinery, peering under the rockers, insisting with gestures that the engine chief open the gear box and let him look inside. At first, the human crew members had been wary of his antics; but soon, despite his mute incapacity with words, they sensed a kindred spirit.

You can explain a lot with hand motions, Sara noted. Another case of language adapting to needs of the moment-much as each wave of Jijoan colonists helped reshape the formal Galactic tongues they had known, culminating when humans introduced half a million texts printed mostly in Anglic, a language seemingly built out of chaos, filled with slang, jargon, puns, and ambiguity.

It was a warped mirror image of what had happened back on Earth, where billion-year-old grammars were pushing human culture toward order. In both cases the driving force was a near monopoly on knowledge.

That was the obvious irony. But Sara knew another- her unusual theory about language and the Six—so heretical, it made Lark’s views seem downright orthodox.

Maybe it is past time I came back to Biblos, to report on my work . . . and to confront everything I’m afraid of—

The Stranger seemed happy, engrossed with his fellow engineers and closely observed by Ariana Foo from her wheelchair. So Sara left the noisy engine area, moving toward the ship’s bow, where a thick mist was cleaved by the Gopher’s headlong rush. Tattered breaks in the fog showed dawn brightening the Rimmer peaks, south and east, where the fate of the Six would be decided.

Won’t Lark and Dwer be surprised to see me!

Oh, they’II probably yell that I should have stayed safe at home. I’ll answer that I have a job to do, just as important as theirs, and they shouldn’t be such gender-menders. And we’ll all try hard not to show how happy we are to see each other.

But first, Sage Foo wanted this side trip to check her notion about the Stranger, despite Sara’s instinct to protect the wounded man from further meddling.

Those instincts have caused me enough trouble. Is it not time to temper them with reason?

One ancient text called it “nurturing mania,” and it might have seemed cute when she was a child, nursing hurt creatures of the forest. Perhaps it would have posed no problem, if she followed the normal life path of Jijoan women, with children and a fatigued farmer-husband tugging at her, demanding attention. What need, then, to sublimate maternal instincts? What time for other interests, without all the labor-saving tools tantalizingly described in Terran lore? Plain as she was, Sara felt certain she would have been successful at such a modest life and made some simple, honest man happy.

If a simple life was what I wanted.

Sara tried to shrug the wave of introspection. The cause of her funk was obvious.

Biblos. Center of human hopes and fears, focus of power, pride, and shame, the place where she once found love—or its illusion—and lost it. Where the prospect of a “second chance” drove her off in panicked flight. Nowhere else had she felt such swings of elation and claustrophobia, hope and fear.

Will it still be standing when we round the final bend?

If the roof-of-stone had already fallen—

Her mind shied away from the unendurable. Instead, she drew from her shoulder bag the draft manuscript of her second paper on Jijoan language. It was past time to consider what to say to Sage Bonner and the others, if they confronted her.

What have I been doing? Demonstrating on paper that chaos can be a form of progress. That noise can be informing.

I might as well tell them I can prove that black is white, and up is down!

Evidence suggests that long ago, when terran tribes were nomadic or pre-agricultural, most language groups were more rigidly structured than later on. For example, Earth scholars tried rebuilding proto-Indo-European, working backward from Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, and German, deriving a mother tongue strictly organized with many cases and declensions. A rule-based structure that would do any Galactic grammar proud.

In the margin, Sara noted a recent find from her readings, that one native North American tongue, Cherokee, contained up to seventy pronouns-ways to say “I” and “you” and “we”—depending on context and personal relationship—a trait shared with GalSix.

To some, this implies humans must have once had patrons, who uplifted Earthling man-apes. Teachers who altered our bodies and brains and also taught a stern logic, through languages tailored to our needs.

Then we lost our guides. Through our own fault? Abandonment? No one knows.

After that, the theory goes, all Earthly languages devolved, spiraling back toward the apelike grunts protohumans used before uplift. .
  
At the time our ancestors left Earth for Jijo,

Galactic advisers were counseling that Anglic and other “wolfling” tongues be dropped in favor of codes designed for thinking beings.

Their argument can be illustrated by playing the game of Telephone.

Take a dozen players, seated in a circle. Whisper a complex sentence to one, who then whispers the same message to the next, and so on. Question: how soon is the original meaning lost amid confusion and slips of the tongue? Answer: in Anglic, noise can set in from the very start. After just a few relays, a sentence can become hilariously twisted.

The experiment yields different results in Rossic and Nihanic, human grammars that still require verb, noun, and adjective endings specific to gender, ownership, and other factors. If a mistake creeps into a Rossic Telephone message, the altered word often stands out, glaringly. Acute listeners can often correct it automatically.

In pure Galactic languages, one might play Telephone all day without a single error. No wonder the game was unknown in the Five Galaxies, until humans arrived.

Sara had quickly recognized a version of Shannon coding, named after an Earthling pioneer of information theory who showed how specially coded messages can be restored, even from a jumble of static. It proved crucial to digital speech and data transmission, in pre-Contact human society.

Indo-European was logical, error-resistant, like Galactic tongues that suit computers far better than chaotic Anglic.

To many, this implied Earthlings must have had patrons in the misty past. But watching the Stranger commune happily with other engineers, in a makeshift language of grunts and hand gestures, reminded Sara