by David Brin
My last hazy memories of our “rescue” swarm with violent images until I blacked out … to wake in this cell, delirious and alone.
Sometimes the phuvnthus do something “helpful” to my spine, and it hurts so much that I’d willingly spill every secret I know. That is, if the phuvnthus ever asked questions, which they never do.
So I never allude to the mission we four were given by Uriel the Smith — to seek a taboo treasure that her ancestors left on the seafloor, centuries ago. An offshore cache, hidden when urrish settlers first jettisoned their ships and high-tech gadgets to become just one more fallen race. Only some dire emergency would prompt Uriel to violate the Covenant by retrieving such contraband.
I guess “emergency” might cover the arrival of alien robbers, plundering the Gathering Festival of the Six Races and threatening the entire Commons with genocide.
Eventually, the pangs in my spine eased enough for me to rummage through my rucksack and resume writing in this tattered journal, bringing my ill-starred adventure up to date. That raised my spirits a bit. Even if none of us survives, my diary might yet make it home someday.
Growing up in a little hoonish village, devouring human adventure stories by Clarke and Rostand, Conrad and Xu Xiang, I dreamed that people on the Slope would someday say, “Wow, that Alvin Hph-wayuo was some storyteller, as good as any old-time Earther.”
This could be my one and only chance.
So I spent long miduras with a stubby charcoal crayon clutched in my big hoon fist, scribbling the passages that lead up to this one — an account of how I came to find myself in this low, low state.
— How four friends built a makeshift submarine out of skink skins and a carved-out garu log, fancying a treasure hunt to the Great Midden.
— How Uriel the Smith, in her mountain forge, threw her support behind our project, turning it from a half-baked dream into a real expedition.
— How we four snuck up to Uriel’s observatory, and heard a human sage speak of starships in the sky, perhaps bringing foretold judgment on the Six Races.
— And how Wuphon’s Dream soon dangled from a pole near Terminus Rock, where the Midden’s sacred trench passes near land. And Uriel told us, hissing through her cloven upper lip, that a ship had indeed landed up north. But this cruiser did not carry Galactic magistrates. Instead another kind of criminal had come, worse even than our sinner ancestors.
So we sealed the hatch, and the great winch turned. But on reaching the mapped site, we found that Uriel’s cache was already missing! Worse — when we went looking for the damned thing, Wuphon’s Dream got lost and tumbled off the edge of an undersea cliff.
Flipping back some pages, I can tell my account of the journey was written by someone perched on a knife-edge of harrowing pain. Yet, there is a sense of drama I can’t hope to match now. Especially that scene where the bottom vanished beneath our wheels and we felt ourselves fall toward the real Midden.
Toward certain death.
Until the phuvnthus snatched us up.
So, here I am, swallowed by a metal whale, ruled by cryptic silent beings, ignorant whether my friends still live or if I am alone. Merely crippled, or dying.
Do my captors have anything to do with starship landings in the mountains?
Are they a different enigma, rising out of Jijo’s ancient past? Relics of the vanished Buyur perhaps? Or ghosts even older still?
Answers seem scarce, and since I’ve finished recounting the plummet and demise of Wuphon’s Dream, I daren’t waste more precious paper on speculation. I must put my pencil down, even if it robs my last shield against loneliness.
All my life I’ve been inspired by human-style books, picturing myself as hero in some uttergloss tale. Now my sanity depends on learning to savor patience.
To let time pass without concern.
To live and think, at last, just like a hoon.
Asx
YOU MAY CALL ME ASX.
you manicolored rings, piled in a high tapered heap, venting fragrant stinks, sharing the victual sap that climbs our common core, or partaking in memory wax, trickling back down from our sensory peak.
you, the rings who take up diverse roles in this shared body, a pudgy cone nearly as tall as a hoon, as heavy as a blue qheuen, and slow across the ground like an aged g’Kek with a cracked axle.
you, the rings who vote each day whether to renew our coalition.
From you rings i/we now request a ruling. Shall we carry on this fiction? This “Asx”?
Unitary beings — the humans, urs, and other dear partners in exile — stubbornly use that term, Asx, to signify this loosely affiliated pile of fatty toruses, as if we/i truly had a fixed name, not a mere label of convenience.
Of course unitary beings are all quite mad. We traeki long ago resigned ourselves to living in a universe filled with egotism.
What we could not resign ourselves to — and the reason for our exile here on Jijo — was the prospect of becoming the most egotistical of all.
Once, our/my stack of bloated tubes played the role of a modest village pharmacist, serving others with our humble secretions, near the sea bogs of Par Wet Sanctuary. Then others began paying us/me homage, calling us “Asx,” chief sage of the Traeki Sept and member of the Guiding Council of the Six.
Now we stand in a blasted wasteland that was formerly a pleasant festival glade. Our sensor rings and neural tendrils recoil from sights and sounds they cannot bear to perceive. And so we are left virtually blind, our component toruses buffeted by the harsh fields of two nearby starships, as vast as mountains.
Even now, awareness of those starships fades away. …
We are left in blackness.
• • •
What has just happened!
Be calm, my rings. This sort of thing has transpired before. Too great a shock can jar a traeki stack out of alignment, causing gaps in short-term memory. But there is another, surer way to find out what has happened. Neural memory is a flimsy thing. How much better off we are, counting on the slow/reliable wax.
Ponder the fresh wax that slithers down our common core, still hot-slick, imprinted with events that took place recently on this ill-fated glade, where once gay pavilions stood, and banners flapped in Jijo’s happy winds. A typical festival, the annual gathering of Six Races to celebrate their hundred-year peace. Until—
Is this the memory we seek?
Behold … a starship comes to Jijo! Not sneaking by night, like our ancestors. Not aloofly, like a mysterious Zang globule. No, this was an arrogant cruiser from the Five Galaxies, commanded by aloof alien beings called Rothen.
Trace this memory of our first sight of Rothen lords, emerging at last from their metal lair, so handsome and noble in their condescension, projecting a majestic charisma that shadowed even their sky-human servants. How glorious to be a star god! Even gods who are “criminals” by Galactic law.
Did they not far outshine us miserable barbarians? As the sun outglows a tallow candle?
But we sages realized a horrifying truth. After hiring us for local expertise, to help them raid this world, the Rothen could not afford to leave witnesses behind.
They would not leave us alive.
No, that is too far back. Try again.
What about these other livid tracks, my rings? A red flaming pillar erupting in the night? An explosion, breaking apart our sacred pilgrimage? Do you recall the sight of the Rothen-Danik station, its girders, twisted and smoking? Its cache of biosamples burned? And most dire — one Rothen and a sky human killed?
By dawn’s light, foul accusations hurled back and forth between Ro-kenn and our own High Sages. Appalling threats were exchanged.
No, that still took place over a day ago. Stroke wax that is more recent than that.
Here we find a broad sheet of terror, shining horribly down our oily core. Its colors/textures blend hot blood with cold fire, exuding a smoky scent of flaming trees and charred bodies.
Do you recall how Ro-kenn, the
surviving Rothen master, swore vengeance on the Six Races, ordering his killer robots forward?
“Slay everyone in sight! Death to all who saw our secret revealed!”
But then behold a marvel! Platoons of our own brave militia. They spill from surrounding forest. Jijoan savages, armed only with arrows, pellet rifles, and courage. Do you now recall how they charged the hovering death demons … and prevailed!
The wax does not lie. It happened in mere instants, while these old traeki rings could only stare blankly at the battle’s awful ruin, astonished that we/i were not ignited into a stack of flaming tubes.
Though dead and wounded lay piled around us, victory was clear. Victory for the Six Races! Ro-kenn and his godlike servants were disarmed, wide-eyed in their offended surprise at this turn of Ifni’s ever-tumbling dice.
Yes, my rings, i know this is not the final memory. It took place many miduras in the past. Obviously something must have happened since then. Something dreadful.
Perhaps the Danik scout boat came back from its survey trip, carrying one of the fierce sky-human warriors who worship Rothen patron masters. Or else the main Rothen starship may have returned, expecting a trove of bioplunder, only to find their samples destroyed, their station ruined, and comrades taken hostage.
That might explain the scent of sooty devastation that now fills our core.
But no later memories are yet available. The wax has not congealed.
To a traeki, that means none of it has really happened.
Not yet.
Perhaps things are not as bad as they seem.
It is a gift we traeki reacquired when we came to Jijo. A talent that helps make up for the many things we left behind, when we abandoned the stars.
A gift for wishful thinking.
Rety
THE FIERCE WIND OF FLIGHT TORE DAMPNESS FROM her streaming eyes, sparing her the shame of tears running down scarred cheeks. Still, Rety could weep with rage, thinking of the hopes she’d lost. Lying prone on a hard metal plate, clutching its edge with hands and feet, she bore the harsh breeze as whipping tree branches smacked her face and caught her hair, sometimes drawing blood.
Mostly, she just held on for dear life.
The alien machine beneath her was supposed to be her loyal servant! But the cursed thing would not slow its panicky retreat, even long after all danger lay far behind. If Rety fell off now, at best it would take her days to limp back to the village of her birth, where less than a midura ago there had been a brief, violent ambush.
Her brain still roiled. In just a few heartbeats her plans had been spoiled, and it was all Diver’s fault!
She heard the young hunter moan, held captive by metal arms below her perch. But as the wounded battle drone fled recklessly onward, Rety turned away from Dwer’s suffering, which he had only brought on himself, trekking all the way to these filthy Gray Hills from his safe home near the sea—the Slope—where six intelligent races lived at a much higher level of ignorant poverty than her own birth clan of wretched savages. Why would slopies hike past two thousand leagues of hell to reach this dreary wasteland?
What did Dwer and his pals hope to accomplish? To conquer Rety’s brutish relatives?
He could have her smelly kinfolk, for all she cared! And the band of urrish sooners Kunn subdued with fire from his screeching scout boat. Dwer was welcome to them all. Only, couldn’t he have waited quietly in the woods till after Rety and Kunn finished their business here and flew off again? Why did he have to rush things and attack the robot with her aboard?
I bet he did it out of spite. Prob’ly can’t stand knowing that I’m the one Jijo native with a chance to get away from this pit hole of a planet.
Inside, Rety knew better. Dwer’s heart didn’t work that way.
But mine does.
When he groaned again, Rety muttered angrily, “I’ll make you even sorrier, Dwer, if I don’t make it off this mudball ’cause of you!”
So much for her glorious homecoming.
At first it had seemed fun to pay a return visit, swooping from a cloud-decked sky in Kunn’s silver dart, emerging proudly to amazed gasps from the shabby cousins, who had bullied her for fourteen awful years. What a fitting climax to her desperate gamble, a few months ago, when she finally found the nerve to flee all the muck and misery, setting forth alone to seek the fabled Slope her great-grandparents had left behind, when they chose the “free” life as wild sooners.
Free of the sages’ prying rules about what beasts you may kill. Free from irky laws about how many babies you can have. Free from having to abide neighbors with four legs, or five, or that rolled on humming wheels.
Rety snorted contempt for the founders of her tribe.
Free from books and medicine. Free to live like animals!
Fed up, Rety had set out to find something better or die trying.
The journey had nearly killed her — crossing icy torrents and parched wastes. Her closest call came traversing a high pass into the Slope, following a mysterious metal bird into a mulc spider’s web. A web that became a terrifying trap when the spider’s tendrils closed around her, oozing golden drops that horribly preserved. …
Memory came unbidden — of Dwer charging through that awful thicket with a gleaming machete, then sheltering her with his body when the web caught fire.
She recalled the bright bird, glittering in flames, treacherously cut down by an attacking robot just like her “servant.” The one now hauling her off to Ifni-knew-where.
Rety’s mind veered as a gut-wrenching swerve nearly spilled her overboard. She screamed at the robot.
“Idiot! No one’s shooting at you anymore! There were just a few slopies, and they were all afoot. Nothing on Jijo could catch you now!”
But the frantic contraption plunged ahead, riding a cushion of incredible god force.
Rety wondered, Could it sense her contempt? Dwer and two or three friends, equipped with crude fire sticks, had taken just a few duras to disable and drive off the so-called war bot, though at some cost to themselves.
Ifni, what a snarl. She pondered the sooty hole where Dwer’s surprise attack had ripped out its antenna. How’m I gonna explain this to Kunn?
Rety’s adopted rank as an honorary star god was already fragile. The angry pilot might simply abandon her in these hills where she had grown up, among savages she loathed.
I won’t go back to the tribe, she vowed. I’d rather join wild glavers, sucking bugs off dead critters on the Poison Plain.
It was all Dwer’s fault, of course. Rety hated listening to the young fool moan.
We’re heading south, where Kunn flew off to. The robot must be rushin’ to report in person, now that it can’t farspeak anymore.
Having witnessed Kunn’s skill at torture, Rety found herself hoping Dwer’s leg wound would reopen. Bleeding to death would be better by far.
The fleeing machine left the Gray Hills, slanting toward a tree-dotted prairie. Streams converged, turning the brook into a river, winding slowly toward the tropics.
The journey grew smoother and Rety risked sitting up again. But the robot did not take the obvious shortcut over water. Instead, it followed each oxbow curve, seldom venturing past the reedy shallows.
The land seemed pleasant. Good for herds or farming, if you knew how, and weren’t afraid of being caught.
It brought to mind all the wonders she had seen on the Slope, after barely escaping the mulc spider. Folk there had all sorts of clever arts Rety’s tribe lacked. Yet, despite their fancy windmills and gardens, their metal tools and paper books, the slopies had seemed dazed and frightened when Rety reached the famous Festival Glade.
What had the Six Races so upset was the recent coming of a starship, ending two thousand years of isolation.
To Rety, the spacers seemed wondrous. A ship owned by unseen Rothen masters, but crewed by humans so handsome and knowing that Rety would give anything to be like them. Not a doomed savage with a scarred face, eking out a life on a taboo
world.
A daring ambition roused … and by pluck and guts she had made it happen! Rety got to know those haughty men and women—Ling, Besh, Kunn, and Rann—worming her way into their favor. When asked, she gladly guided fierce Kunn to her tribe’s old camp, retracing her earlier epic journey in a mere quarter day, munching Galactic treats while staring through the scout boat’s window at wastelands below.
Years of abuse were repaid by her filthy cousins’ shocked stares, beholding her transformed from grubby urchin to Rety, the star god.
If only that triumph could have lasted.
• • •
She jerked back when Dwer called her name.
Peering over the edge, Rety saw his windburned face, the wild black hair plastered with dried sweat. One buckskin breech leg was stained ocher brown under a makeshift compress, though Rety saw no sign of new wetness. Trapped by the robots unyielding tendrils, Dwer clutched his precious hand-carved bow, as if it were the last thing he would part with before death. Rety could scarcely believe she once thought the crude weapon worth stealing.
“What do you want now?” she demanded.
The young hunter’s eyes met hers. His voice came out as a croak.
“Can I … have some water?”
“Assumin’ I have any,” she muttered, “name one reason I’d share it with you!”
Rustling at her waist. A narrow head and neck snaked out of her belt pouch. Three dark eyes glared — two with lids and one pupilless, faceted like a jewel.
“wife be not liar to this one! wife has water bottle! yee smells its bitterness.”
Rety sighed over this unwelcome interruption by her miniature “husband.”
“There’s just half left. No one tol’ me I was goin’ on a trip!”
The little urrish male hissed disapproval, “wife share with this one, or bad luck come! no hole safe for grubs or larvae!”
Rety almost retorted that her marriage to yee was not real. They would never have “grubs” together. Anyway, yee seemed bent on being her portable conscience, even when it was clearly every creature for herself.
