Brightness Reef (56 page)

Each of us was coming to terms with death in our own way, alone, facing the approaching end of our personal drama.

I missed my parents. I mourned along with them, for my loss was in many ways as bitter to me as it would be to them, though I wouldn’t have to endure for years the sorrow they’d carry, on account of my foolish need for adventure. I stroked and umbled Huphu, while Ur-ronn whistled a plains lament and Huck drew all four eyes together, looking inward, I supposed, at her life.

Then, out of nowhere, Pincer shouted a single word that overrode the keening of our fears. A word we had heard from his vents before, too many times, but never quite like this. Never with such tones of awe and wonder.

“Monsters-ers-ers!” he yelled.

Then, with rising terror and joy, he cried it out again. “Monsters!”

No one has come to answer my call. I’m stuck lying here with a back that won’t bend and a terrible need for that bucket. My pencil is worn down and I’m almost out of paper ... so while I’m waiting I might as well push on to the real dramatic moment of our fall.

All was confusion inside Wuphon’s Dream as we plunged toward our doom. We tumbled left and right, banging against the inner hull, against cranks, handles, levers, and each other. The view outside, when I could see past my wildly gesturing comrades, was a jumbled confusion of phosphorescent dots caught in the eik beams, plus occasional glimpses of a rising cliff face, and then quick flashes of something else.

Something-or some things-lustrous and gray. Agile, flitting movements. Then curious strokings, rubbing our vessel’s hull, followed by sharp raps and bangs all along the flanks of our doomed boat.

Pincer kept babbling about monsters. I honestly thought he’d gone crazy, but Ur-ronn and Huck had changed their wailing cries and were leaning toward the glass, as if transfixed by what they saw. It was all so noisy, and Huphu was clawing my aching backside between frenzied attacks on the walls.

I felt sure I made out Huck saying something like-

“What-or who-could they possibly be?”

That’s when the whirling shapes divided, vanishing to both sides as a new entity arrived, causing us all to gasp.

It was huge, many times the size of our bathy, and it swam with easy grace, emitting a growl as it came. From my agonizing prison at the back, I could not make out much except two great eyes that seemed to shine far brighter than our failing eik beams.

And its mouth. I recall seeing that all too well, as it spread wide, rushing to meet us.

The hull groaned, and there were more sharp bangs. Ur-ronn yelped as a needle spray of water jetted inward, ricocheting back at me.

Numb with fear, I could not stop my whirling brain long enough to have a single clear thought, only a storm of notions.

These were Buyur ghosts, I guessed, come to punish living fools who dared invade their realm.

They were machines, cobbled together from relics and remnants that had tumbled into the Rift since long before the Buyur, in epochs so old, even the Galactics no longer recalled.

They were home-grown sea monsters. Jijo’s own. Products of the world’s most private place.

These and other fancies flashed through my muddled brain as I watched, unable to look away from those terrible onrushing jaws. The Dream buffeted and bucked-in sea currents, I now suppose, but at the time it felt she was struggling to get away.

The jaws swept around us. A sudden surge brought us hurtling to one side. We hit the interior of the great beast’s mouth, crashing with such force that the beautiful glass bubble cracked. Frosted patterns spread from the point of impact. Ur-ronn wailed, and Huck rolled her eyestalks tight, like socks going in a drawer.

I grabbed Huphu, ignoring her tearing claws, and took a deep breath of stale air. It was awful stuff, but I figured it would be my last chance.

The window gave up at the same moment the air hose snapped.

The dark waters of the Rift found their rapid way into our shattered ship.

Legends

It took twenty years to recover the first human band of sooners—a sizeable group who fled to the scrublands south of the vale, rejecting the Covenant of Exile that their leaders had signed, just before the Tabernacle went tumbling to the depths. They risked both desolation and the law in order to get away, and had to be dragged back, shuddering in dread, all because they could not bring themselves to trust hoon or traeki.

In retrospect this seems so ironic, since it was qheuens and urs who caused human settlers grief during two subsequent centuries of war. Why then did so many Earthlings fear the peaceful ringed ones, or our cheerful friends with the broad shoulders and booming voices? The star-cousins of both traeki and hoon must have seemed quite different when our ancestors’ first starships emerged onto the lanes of Galaxy Four.

Unfortunately, most galactology records burned in the Great Fire. But other accounts tell of relentless hostility by mighty, enigmatic star-lords calling themselves Jophur, who took a leading role in the Sequestration of Mudaun. That fearsome atrocity led directly to the Tabernacle exodus—an outrage executed with single-minded precision and utter resoluteness. Traits not often observed in traeki here on the Slope.

It is also said that hoon were at Mudaun, portrayed in the accounts as dour, officious, unhappy beings. A race of stern accountants, dedicated to population control and tabulating the breeding rates of other races, unswayed by appeals to mercy or forbearance.

Could anyone recognise, in these descriptions, the two most easy-going members of the Six?

No wonder hoon and traeki seem the least prone to nostalgia about good old days, back when they new about as gods of space.

Annals of the Jijoan Commons

Sara

WITH DAWN BLEACHING THE EASTERN SKY, weary travelers trudged into Uryutta’s Oasis after a long night march across the parched Warril Plain—a teeming, thirsty crowd of donkeys and simlas, humans and hoon. Even urrish pilgrims stepped daintily to the muddy shore and dipped their narrow heads, wincing at the bitter, unmasked taste of plain water.

Full summer had broken over the high steppe, when hot winds ignited rings of circle grass, sending herds stampeding amid clouds of dust. Even before the present crisis, wayfarers avoided the summer sun, preferring the cool moonlight for travel. Urrish guides bragged they would know the plain blindfolded.

That’s fine for them, Sara thought, swishing her aching feet in the oasis spring. An urs doesn’t fall on her face when a chance stone turns underfoot. Me, I like to see where I’m going.

Predawn light revealed mighty outlines to the east. The Rimmers, Sara thought. The mixed-race expedition was making good time, hurrying to reach the Glade before events there reached a climax. On the plus side, she was anxious to see her brothers, and to learn how well Bloor was implementing her idea. There might also be medical help for her ward, the Stranger, if it seemed safe to reveal him to the aliens. A big if. Nor had she quite given up on getting to see one of the fabled library consoles of the Great Galactics.

Yet there was also much to fear. If the star-gods did plan on wiping out all witnesses, it would surely start at the Glade. Above all, Sara worried that she might be taking the Stranger into the hands of his enemies. The dark, ever-cheerful man seemed eager to go, but did he really understand what was involved?

A whistling sigh fluted from Pzora’s corrugated cone, as the traeki siphoned water from the pond, fatigued despite having ridden all the way in a donkey-drawn chariot. A new rewq draped across Pzora’s sensor ring, one of two Sara had bought from the fresh supply at Kandu Landing, to help the traeki pharmacist treat the wounded alien, even though she wasn’t keen on the symbionts herself.

A chain of bubbles broke the surface near Sara’s foot. By Loocen’s silver light, she made out Blade, from Dolo Village, resting underwater. The hasty trek had been hard on red qheuens, and blues like Blade, as well as those humans too big to burden a donkey. Sara had been allowed to mount every even-numbered midura. Even so, her body ached. Serves me right for leading a bookish, cloistered life, she thought.

A raucous cheer rose up where urrish donkey-drivers piled grass and dung to make a campfire. Simla blood was drained into a tureen, followed by chopped meat, and soon they were slurping tepid sanguinary stew, lifting their long necks to swallow, then bending for more—sinuous silhouettes whose rise and fall was eerily accompanied by the Stranger’s plinking dulcimer. Meanwhile a hoon cook, proud of her multirace cuisine, banged pots and sprinkled powders until spicy aromas finally overcame the stench of roast simla, restoring even Sara’s queasy appetite.

A little while later, full dawn revealed stunning tan-and-green mountains towering across the eastern horizon. The Stranger laughed as he worked shirtless, helping Sara and the other humans do a typical camp-chore assigned to Earthlings—erecting shelters of g’Kek blur cloth, to shade travelers and beasts through the blazing day. The star-man’s muteness seemed no handicap at working with others. His pleasure at being alive affected all those around him, as he taught the others a wordless song to help pass the time.

Two more days, Sara thought, glancing up toward the pass. We’re almost there.

The oasis was named for a nomad warrior who had lived soon after urrish settlement on Jijo, when their numbers were still small, and their planet-bound crafts pitifully crude. In those olden times, Uryutta fled east from the rich grazing lands of Znunir, where her tribal chiefs had vowed fealty to mighty Gray Queens. Uryutta led her fellow rebels to this wadi in the vast dry plain, to nurse their wounds and plot a struggle for freedom from qheuen dominance.

Or so went the legend Sara heard that afternoon, after sleeping through the hottest part of the day—a slumber during which she had dreamed vaguely of water, cool and clear, raising a terrible thirst. She slaked it at the spring, then rejoined the other travelers under the big tent for another meal.

With a few hours still to go before dusk, and a leaden heat still pressing outside, tinkers and pack-handlers gathered around a storyteller, accompanying her recital with foot-stamps and switched braided tails. Even after gaining books and printing, urs still loved the oral tradition, its extravagance and impromptu variations. When the bard’s chant reached the Battle of Znunir Trading Post, elongated heads swayed together. Triplet eyes stared past the poet toward times gone by.

So the traitor cavalry scattered

Willing slaves, the cowards were driven

Into the trap Uryutta had fashioned

Tumbling screaming through Deep Stink Crevasse

There to mix sulfurous death smells

With their own dry-pouch, death-fearing rankness.

Listeners hissed contempt for gutless renegades. Sara pulled out her notebook and took notes on the antiquated storytelling dialect, already devolved from GalTwo, long before humans came.

Then wheeled Uryutta, ready to confront

The dread footmen of gray qheuen matrons

Males in armor, males with weapons

Of sharp-edged hardwood, flashing so brightly

And clattering claws, keen to tear hide,

Poised now to flay us in shreds for their mothers.

This time the urs listeners vented repeated low grunts, marking respect for a tough foe, a sound humans first heard the third generation after arriving, when Earthlings won their own place in the pre-Commons chaos.

Now is the time! Our chief gives the signal.

Bring forth the weapons, tools newly fashioned.

Bring forth the longsticks, come forth you strongbacks.

Stab now to miss, but stab hard below!

Bear now the burden. Bear it, you strongbacks!

Heave! Claws a-flashing, over they go!

At first Sara had trouble following the action. Then she understood Uryutta’s combat innovation—using “long-sticks,” or rods of boo, to tip over the invincible qheuen infantry. Urrish volunteers served as living fulcrums, braving snapping” claws and crushing weight while their fellows heaved, toppling one qheuen after another.

Despite the ecstatic song of vengeful slaughter, Sara knew the historical Uryutta’s victories had been shortlived, as qheuens adjusted their tactics. It took a later breed of heroes—the warrior smiths of Blaze Mountain—to finally drive gray tyrants off the high plains. And still the queens thwarted the rising Commons, until humans brought new-old skills to the art of war.

Not all the urs were celebrating past glories. The caravan chief and her aides knelt on a peko-skin rug, planning the next trek. From their gestures over a map, they clearly meant to skip the next oasis and make a hard dash for the foothills by sunrise.

Oh, my aching feet, Sara thought.

The chief raised her conical head, hissing as one human pilgrim neared a tent flap.

“Got to go,” explained Jop, the Dolo tree farmer.

“What, leaking again? Are you ill?”

Jop had spent most of the journey immersed in a copy of the Scroll of Exile, but now he seemed affable. He laughed. “Oh, no. I jest drank too much lovely spring water. Time to give it back to Jijo. That’s all.”

While the flap was briefly up, Sara glimpsed bubbles in the pond again. Blade was back under, soaking for the next hard march. Was he also blocking out the storyteller’s victory paean over defeated qheuens?

The flap fell, and Sara looked around the pavilion-shelter.

Kurt the Exploser used a compass to draw loopy arcs on sheets of graph paper, growling over his labors, making a papermaker’s daughter wince as he crumpled one sheet after another in frustration. Nearer to Sara, Prity also drew abstract figures, more economically, in a patch of sand. Pulling at her furry chin, she consulted a topology text Sara had brought from Biblos.

My, what an intellectual caravan, Sara observed sardonically. A would-be priest, a designer of things that go bang, a geometrical chimpanzee, and a fallen mathematician, all hurrying toward possible destruction. And that just begins our list of oddities.