Brightness Reef (64 page)

This thought thread is leading somewhere, he realizes, feeling some excitement. Avidly, he follows it. The woman in his dreams . . . she longs for a man . . . a hero who was lost long ago . . . a year or two ago . . . lost along with crewmates . . . and also along with . . .

. . . along with the Captain . . .

Yes, of course/ The commander they all missed so terribly, gone ever since a daring escape from that wretched water world. A world of disaster and triumph.

He tries conjuring an image of the Captain. A face. But all that comes to mind is a gray flash, a whirl of bubbles, and finally a glint of white, needlelike teeth. A smile unlike any other. Wise and serene.

Not human.

And then, out of nowhere, a soft warbling emerges. A sound never before heard on the Slope.

My good silent friend . . .

Lost in winter’s dread stormcloud . . .

Lonely . . . just like me . . . *

The whistles, creaks, and pops roll out of his mouth before he even knows he’s speaking them. His head rocks back as a dam seems to shatter in his mind, releasing a flood of memories.

The music he’d been looking for was of no human making, but the modern tongue of Earth’s third sapient race. A language painfully hard for humans to learn, but that rewarded those who tried. Trinary was nothing like Galactic Two or any other speech, except perhaps the groaning ballads sung by great whales who still plumbed the homeworld’s timeless depths.

Trinary.

He blinks in surprise and even loses his rhythm on the plucked dulcimer. A few urs lift their heads, staring at him blankly till he resumes the steady cadence, continuing reflexively while he ponders his amazing rediscovery. The familiar/uncanny fact that had eluded him till now.

His crewmates-perhaps they still await him in that dark, dreary place where he left them.

His crewmates were dolphins.

Beware, ye damned who seek redemption.

Time is your friend, but also your great foe.

Like the tires of Izmunuti,

It can fade before you are ready.

Letting in, once more,

the things from which you fled.

The Scroll of Danger

Alvin’s Tale

I TRIED READING FINNEGANS WAKE ONCE UPON A time.

Last year.

A lifetime ago.

It’s said that no non-Earthling has ever grokked that book. In fact, the few humans who managed the feat spent whole chunks of their lifespans going over Joyce’s masterpiece, word by obscure word, with help from texts written by other obsessed scholars. Mister Heinz says no one on the Slope has any hope at all of fathoming it.

Naturally, I took that as a challenge, and so the next time our schoolteacher headed off to Gathering, I nagged him to bring a copy back with him.

No, I’m not about to say I succeeded. Just one page into it, I knew this was a whole different venture from Ulysses. Though it looks like it’s written in prespace English, the Wake uses Joyce’s own language, created for a single work of art. Hoonish patience would not solve this. To even begin to understand, you have to share much of the author’s context.

What hope had I? Not a native speaker of Irish-English. Not a citizen of early twentieth-century Dublin. Not human. I’ve never been inside a “pub” or seen a “quark” close up, so I can only guess what goes on in each.

I recall thinking—maybe a little arrogantly—If I can’t read this thing, I doubt anyone else on Jijo ever will.

The crisp volume didn’t look as if anyone had tried, since the Great Printing. So why did the human founders waste space in Biblos with this bizarre intellectual experiment from a bygone age?

That was when I felt I had a clue to the Tabernacle crew’s purpose, in coming to this world. It couldn’t be for the reasons we’re told on holy days, when sages and priests read from the sacred Scrolls. Not to find a dark corner of the universe to engage in criminally selfish breeding, or to resign from the cosmos, seeking the roads of innocence. In either of those cases, I could see printing how-to manuals, or simple tales to help light the way. In time, the books would turn brittle and go to dust, when humans and the rest of us are ready to give them up. Kind of like the Eloi folk in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

In neither case did it make any sense to print copies of Finnegans Wake.

Realizing this, I picked up the book once more. And while I did not understand the story or allusions any better than before, I was able to enjoy the flow of words, their rhythms and sounds, for their own extravagant sake. It wasn’t important anymore that I be the only person to grok it.

In fact, there came a warm feeling as I turned the pages and thought—someday, someone else is going to get more out of this than I did.

On Jijo, things get stored away that seem dead, but that only sleep.

I’ve been pondering that very thought while lying here in constant pain, trying to bear it stoically whenever strange, silent beings barge into my cell to poke me with heat, cold, and prickly sharpness. I mean, should I feel hope as metal fingers probe my wounds? Or sour gloom that my blank-faced tenders refuse to answer any questions, or even to speak? Shall I dwell on my awful homesickness? Or on the contrary thrill over having discovered something wonderfully strange that no one on the Slope ever suspected, not since the g’Keks first sent their sneakship tumbling into the deep?

Above all, I wondered—am I prisoner, patient, or specimen?

Finally I realized—I just don’t have any framework to decide. Like the phrases in Joyce’s book, these beings seem at once both strangely familiar and completely unfathomable.

Are they machines?

Are they denizens of some ancient submarine civilization?

Are they invaders? Do they see us as invaders?

Are they Buyur?

I’ve been avoiding thinking about what’s really eating away at me, inside.

Come on, Alvin. Face up to it.

I recall those final duras, when our beautiful Wuphon’s Dream shattered to bits. When her hull slammed against my spine. When my friends spilled into the metal monster’s mouth, immersed in cold, cold, cold, cruel water.

They were alive then. Injured, dazed, but alive.

Still alive when a hurricane of air forced out the horrid dark sea, leaving us to flop, wounded and half dead, down to a hard deck. And when sun-bright lights half-blinded us, and creepy spider-things stepped into the chamber to look over their catch.

But memory blurs at that point, fading into a hazy muddle of images-until I awoke here, alone.

Alone, and worried about my friends.

Legends

We know that in the Five Galaxies, every star-faring race got its start through the process of uplift, receiving a boost to sapience from the patrons that adopted them. And those patrons were bestowed the same boon by earlier patrons, and so on, a chain of beneficence stretching all the way back to misty times wken there were more than five linked galaxies—back to the fabled Progenitors, who began the chain, so very long ago.

Where did the Progenitors themselves come from?

To some of the religious alliances that wrangle testily across the space lanes, that very question is anathema, or even likely to provoke a fight.

Others deal with the issue by claiming that the ancient ones must have come from somewhere else, or that the Progenitors were transcendent beings who descended graciously from a higher plane in order to help sapient life get its start

Of course one might suggest that such facile answers simply beg the question, but it’s unwise to suggest it too loudly. Some august Galactics do not take it kindly when you point out their inconsistencies.

Finally, there is one cult—the Affirmers—who hold the view that the Progenitors must have self-evolved on some planet, boot-strapping to full sapiency all by themselves—a prodigious, nigh-impossible feat. One might imagine that the Affirmers would be more friendly to Earthlings than most of the more fanatical alliances. After all, many Terrans still believe our race did the very same thing, uplifting ourselves in isolation, without help from anyone.

Alas, don’t expect much sympathy from the Affirmers, who see it as arrogant hubris for mere wolflings to make such a claim. Self-uplift, they maintain, is a phenomenon of the highest and most sacred order—not for the likes of creatures like us.

A Pragmatist’s Introduction to Galactology, by Jacob Demwa, reprinted from the original by Tarek Printers Guild, Year-of-Exile 1892.

Dwer

IT DID NO GOOD TO SHOUT OR THROW STONES AT the glavers. The pair just retreated to watch from a distance with blank, globelike eyes, then resumed following when the human party moved on. Dwer soon realized there would be no getting rid of them. He’d have to shoot the beasts or ignore them.

“You have other things to keep you busy, son,” Danel Ozawa ruled.

It was an understatement.

The clearing near the waterfall still reeked of urs, donkey, and simla when Dwer warily guided Danel’s group across the shallow ford. From then on, he borrowed a tactic from the old wars, reconnoitering each day’s march the night before, counting on urrish diurnal habits to keep him safe from ambush-though urs were adaptable beings. They could be deadly even at night, as human fighters used to find out the hard way.

Dwer hoped this group had lazy habits, after generations of peace.

Rising at midnight, he would scout by the light of two smaller moons, sniffing warily each time the trail of hoofprints neared some plausible ambuscade. Then, at dawn, he would hurry back to help Danel’s donkey train plod ahead by day.

Ozawa thought it urgent to catch up with the urrish band and negotiate an arrangement. But Dwer worried. How does he expect they’ll react? Embracing us like brothers? These are criminals. Like Rety’s band. Like us.

The spoor grew fresher. Now the urs were just a week ahead of them, maybe just a few days.

He began noting othertraces. Soft outlines in the sand. Broken stone flakes. Fragments of a moccasin lace. Smudged campfires more than a month old.

Rety’s band. The urs are heading straight for the heart of their territory.

Danel took the news calmly. “They must figure as we did. The human sooners know a lot about life in these hills. That’s valuable experience, whether it can be bought, borrowed-“

“Or tortured out of ‘em,” Lena Strong finished, whetting one of her knives by the evening’s low red coals. “Some urrish clans used to keep human prisoners as drudges, before we broke ‘em of the habit.”

“A habit they learned from the queens. There’s no call to assume slavery is a natural urs behavior. For that matter, back on Old Earth humans used to-“

“Yeah, well, we still have a problem,” Dwer interrupted. “What to do when we catch up.”

“Right!” Lena inspected the knife-edge. “Do we pounce fast, taking the urs all bunched together? Or do it hoon-style-picking them off one at a time.”

Jenin sighed unhappily. “Oh, Lena. Please stop.” She had been cheerful throughout the journey, until hearing all this talk of fighting. Jenin had joined this trek in order to be a founding mother of a new race, not to hunt down beings who had once been her neighbors.

Dwer’s heart felt the same pain as Jenin, though his pragmatic side agreed with Lena.

“If we have to, I’d rather do it fast,” he muttered, glancing at the donkey carrying their most secret, unspeakable “tools.”

“It shouldn’t come to that,” Danel insisted. “First let’s ascertain who they are and what they want. Perhaps we can make common cause.”

Lena snorted. “Send an emissary? Give away our presence? You heard Dwer. There’s over a dozen of ‘em!”

“Don’t you think we should wait for the second

group, then?” Jenin asked. “They were supposed to be right behind us.”

Lena shrugged. “Who knows how long they’ll take? Or if they got lost? The urs could find us first. And there’s the human tribe to consider.”

“Rety’s old band.”

“Right. Want to let them get killed or enslaved? Just on account of we’re too scared to-“ •

“Lena!” Danel cut her off. “That will do for now. We’ll see what’s to be done when the time comes. Meanwhile, poor Dwer should get some sleep. We owe him whatever rest he can get.”

“That ain’t half what he’s owed.” Lena muttered, causing Dwer to glance her way, but in the pre-moonrise dimness, he could make out only shadows.

“G’night all,” he said, and slipped away to seek his bedroll.

Mudfoot looked up from the blanket, chuttering testily over having to move. The creature did help warm things up at night, which partly made up for its vexing way of licking Dwer’s face while he slept, harvesting perspiration from his forehead and lip.

Dwer lay down, turned over-and blinked in surprise at two pairs of giant round eyes, staring back at him from just three meters away.

Jeekee glavers.

Normally, one simply ignored the placid creatures. But he still couldn’t shake the memory of that pack of them, clustered greedily around a dead gallaiter.

He tossed a dirt clod vaguely their way. “Go on! Get!”

Just as vaguely, the pair turned and sauntered off. Dwer glanced at Mudfoot.

“Why not make yourself a hit useful and keep those pests away?”

The noor just grinned back at him.

Dwer pulled the blanket over his chin, trying to settle down. He was tired and ached from sore muscles and bruises. But slumber came slowly, freighted with troubling dreams.

He woke to a soft touch, stroking his face. Irritably, he tried to push the noor away.

“Quit it, furball! Lick a donkey turd, if you want salt so bad.”

After a surprised pause, a hushed voice answered.

“Reckon I never been welcomed to a man’s bed half so sweetly.”

Dwer rolled onto an elbow, rubbing one eye to make out a blurred silhouette. A woman.

“Jenin?”

“Would you prefer her? I won the toss, but I’ll fetch her if you like.”