by David Brin
{What did you expect? That I would show you all the things that I am capable o—
{…that I would show you all the…
{…that I would show . . .}
When the voice in Dwer’s head trailed off, his first reaction was relief. He had other worries, like an agonizing crick in his neck and a right arm that looked as if it had been dipped in a jeweler’s vat, and that seemed about to cramp from the repetitive hacking, hacking, hacking. Now if only the chattering noor would shut up too, with its shrill keening. Mudfoot’s piercing chitters crescendoed, rising in pitch beyond the limit of Dwer’s direct hearing but not past ability to scrape a vexing runnel under his skull.
Through it all, a nagging worry bothered Dwer.
I left the glaver all tied up. Will she die of thirst if I never make it back?
“Left!” Rety shouted. He quickly obeyed, swinging as far as possible, trusting her swift reflexes to warn of jets of yellow sap.
“Okay, clear!” she called.
The machete slipped. Dwer fumbled at the wrist strap three times before getting a grip to resume chopping the slender vines filling the chimney overhead, cutting off the swiftly failing twilight. If they didn’t make it out by full nightfall, every advantage would belong to the crazy mulc-spider.
Now a sound he had dismissed as background noise grew too loud to ignore. A low rumbling counterbass overrode the noor’s yapping. All around Rety and Dwer, the hedge began vibrating. A number of brittle vines shuddered to dust while others sprouted cracks and dripped fluids — red, orange, and milky — noxious additions to a fog that already stung human eyes. Through that blur, Dwer blinked upward to see Mudfoot, perched nimbly atop the hedge of vines, withdrawing in snarling defiance as something new entered view from the south — something that hovered in the air, without any visible means of support!
A machine! A symmetrical, slab-sided form with gleaming flanks that reflected the sunset, drifting to a point just above the shuddering hedge.
Suddenly, its belly blazed forth a bitter light that diffracted past the vines. The slender beam lanced right past Rety and Dwer, as if probing for something deeper…
“It’s hunting the bird!” Rety crouched beside Dwer, seizing his arm and pointing.
“Never mind the damn bird!” he cursed. The hedge was shaking worse than ever. Dwer dragged her behind him just as a sundered tube whipped past, spurting caustic fluid, splattering a trail of fizzing agony along his back as he shielded the girl. Purple spots swarmed across his field of vision, and the machete slipped its thong to fall, clattering off branches on its way down.
Now it seemed as if the hedge were alive with stark, fleeing shadows, as the floating machine’s searchlight narrowed to a searing needle that scorched anything it touched.
By the same light Dwer glimpsed the bird-thing, trapped inside its cage of ropy mesh and coated with a golden patina, erupting now in a dance of evasion, leaping back and forth as it tried to dodge the burning ray of light, its feathers already smoldering in spots. Rety let out a throaty cry of anger, but it was all the two humans could do simply to hold on.
Finally, the bird-thing seemed to give up. It stopped ducking and instead spread its four wings in a pitiful effort to create a shielding canopy, which began to smoke as the blazing shaft struck home and stayed. Only the little bird-machine’s head poked out, snaking upward to gape toward the aggressor with one open, staring eye.
Dwer was watching in horrified amazement, mixed with stunned pity, when that dark, jadelike eye abruptly exploded.
The blinding flash was the last thing he clearly remembered for a long time to come.
VII. THE BOOK OF THE SEA
Do not make poisons that you cannot use.
Use all of the poisons that you make.
If others must clean up after you,
Do not act offended when they exact a price.
—The Scroll of Advice
Alvin’s Tale
So there we were, just arrived at the top-end tram platform after a long ride from Wuphon Port, and no sooner do Huck, Pincer, and me step off the tram car (with little Huphu riding Pincer’s shell for luck) than our urrish pal, Ur-ronn, gallops up all flushed and bothered. Without offering so much as a greeting-preamble, she commences to prancing, snaking her narrow head back and forth, and hissing at us in that awful version of GalTwo she must’ve picked up back when she was grub-sized, foraging in the grass out on the Warril Plain. You know the dialect I mean — the one that drops every other double-click phrase stop, so at first all I could make out was a bunch of basso tone pulses conveying frenzied excitement.
Worse, a moment later she starts nipping at us, like we were a bunch of pack donkeys to be herded down the hall!
“Hrrrrm! Now hold it right there,” I insisted. “Nothing ever gets done right by letting yourself get so igsee frantic. Whatever you’ve got to say can surely wait for a proper hello to friends you haven’t seen in weeks. After all — yi-houongwa!”
Yes, that was a hoonish throat-blat of pain. Huck had rolled one of her main-wheels over my left foot.
“Varnish it, Alvin. You sound just like your father!”
My father? I thought. How utterly ungloss.
“Haven’t you been listening to Ur-ronn?” Huck went on.
My sac panted a few times as I ran back over the last few duras, piecing together some of what Ur-ronn was nattering about.
It was a wild tale all right, and we’ve told each other some whoppers.
“Hr-r-r — a starship?” I stared at our urrish pal. “You mean it this time? It’s not just a comet, like you tried fooling us with a year ago?”
Ur-ronn stamped a forefoot, knowing I had her nailed. Switching to Anglic, she swore. “This tine for real! Ve-lieve ne! I heard Uriel and Gyfz talking. They caught it on flates!”
On plates, I translated from the way her cleft upper lip mangles some Anglic consonants. Photographic plates. Maybe Ur-ronn wasn’t having us on, after all. “Can we see?” I asked.
An urrish moan of frustration. “You jeekee file of scales and fur! That’s where I veen trying to take you guys since the tran stoffed!”
“Oh.” I bowed with a sweep of one arm. “Well then, what are we waiting around here for? Let’s go!”
Years ago, Uriel the Smith inherited the Mount Guenn works from Ur-tanna, who was liege-heir to Ulennku, who got the sprawling underground mill from her own dying master, the great Urnunu, who rebuilt those mighty halls after quakes shook the Slope like a wet noor during the Year of the Egg. Before that, the tale goes back to a misty time before humans brought paper memory to Jijo, when wisdom had to fit in someone’s living head or else be lost. Back to days when urrish settlers had to fight and prove themselves more than mere galloping savages, roaming the grassy plains, beholden to high-caste qheuens for everything they owned.
Ur-ronn used to recite the legend during our adventure trips. Even allowing for exaggeration, those must’ve been brave urs who climbed fuming volcano heights to build the first crude forges near fiery lava springs, toiling through cinders and constant danger to learn the secret of reworking Buyur metal and break the Gray Queens’ tool-monopoly forever.
It kind of makes you glad humans didn’t come any sooner, ’cause the answers would’ve been right there in some book — how to make knives and lenses and windows and such. Sure, it would’ve made it easier for the other exile races to free themselves from dominion by qheuenish woodcarvers. On the other hand, all you have to do is hear Ur-ronn’s lisping tale to know what pride her folk won from all that work and sacrifice.
They did it themselves, you see, earning liberty and self-respect. Ask any hoon how we’d feel without our swaying ships. Earthling lore has made improvements, but no one gave us the sea! Not our far-off Guthatsa patrons, or the Great Galactic Library, or our selfish ancestors who dumped us on Jijo, naive and unready. It’s a proud thing to have done it for ourselves.
Pride can be important, when you don’t have muc
h else.
Before entering the forge-inferno, Pincer-Tip draped a water-soaked mantle over his soft red carapace. I gathered my cloak around me while Huck checked her goggles and axle-guards. Then Ur-ronn led us past overlapping leather curtains into the Works.
We hurried along a walkway of treated boo, hung between bubbling pools that glowed white with Jijo’s blood heat. Cleverly diverted updrafts guided smoldering vapors into stone baffles, venting them outside to look no different than any other smoker on Mount Guenn’s flank.
Huge buckets dangled overhead — one filled with reclaimed Buyur scrap and the other with a sandy mix — each waiting to be dipped in that blazing heat, then poured into clay molds. Urrish workers hauled pulleys and ladles. Another twirled a big glob of liquid glass at the end of a tube, spinning it round and round to form a flat whirling disk that turned solid as it thinned and cooled, a window destined for homes far away from here.
They were assisted by several gray qheuens who, in one of Jijo’s ironies, turned out to be the other sept well suited to these conditions. The grays may even be happier than when their queens used to dominate the Commons. But I never could read much expression on their stony cupolas. I often wonder how our wild, emotional Pincer could be related to them.
Farther from the heat, half a dozen g’Keks skittered across the smooth floor, handling account ledgers, while a traeki specialist with throbbing synthi rings tasted each mix to certify the mill’s products would rust or decay in less than two hundred years, as required by the sages.
Some orthodox scroll-pounders say we shouldn’t have smithies at all — that they’re vanities, distracting us from salvation through forgetfulness. But I think the place is gloss, even if the smoke frets my throat sac and sets my spine-scales itching.
Ur-ronn led us through more curtains into the Laboratory Grotto, where Uriel studies the secrets of her art — both those hard-won by her ancestors and others delved from human texts. Clever breezes freshened the air, allowing us to loosen our protections. Pincer gratefully doffed his heavy mantle and doused his red carapace at a shower-alcove. Huphu splashed eagerly while I sponged my sac. Ur-ronn kept her distance from the water, preferring a brief roll in some clean dry sand.
Huck skittered down a hallway lined with many doors, peering into various laboratory chambers. “Hsst! Alvin!” she whispered urgently, waving me over with one arm and two eyestalks. “Come look. Care to guess who’s here again?”
“Who is it?” Pincer whistled, leaving five wet trails of prints behind him. Ur-ronn daintily avoided the moist tracks with her rattling hooves.
I already had a pretty good idea who Huck was talking about, since no ship passenger enters Wuphon without being known to the harbor master — my mother. She hadn’t announced anything, but I knew from overheard snatches that the latest dross ship had brought an important human visitor, one who debarked at night, heading straight to the Mount Guenn tram.
“Hrrrm. I’ll bet you a sweetboo cane it’s that sage again,” I ventured before arriving at the door. “The one from Biblos.”
Huck’s rear-facing eye looked disappointed, and she groused — “Lucky guess” — while making space for the rest of us.
I knew this room. Many’s the previous visit I used to stand at the doorway and stare at the goings-on within. The huge chamber held Uriel’s mystery machine-a gimcrackery of gears, cables, and revolving glass that seemed to fill the vaulted cavern with grinding motion like one of those Victorian factories you read about in books by Dickens. Only this device didn’t make a single blessed thing, as far as any of us could ever tell. Only countless glitters of light as whirling crystal disks spun like hundreds of ghostly little g’Keks, rolling against each other madly, futilely, going noplace the faster they spun.
I glimpsed the human visitor, bent over a trestle table with a precious-looking folio spread open before him, pointing at a diagram, while Uriel rocked in a circle, lifting one leg at a time, shaking her pelted head in disagreement. The smith’s gray-fringed nostril blew exasperation.
“With all due resfect, Sage Furofsky, you night have gone to Gathering instead of coning all this way. I cannot see how this vook is relevant to our frovlen — to our quandary.”
The human wore the black cloak of a lesser sage, the kind who dwell in the sacred halls of Biblos with half a million printed tomes for company, tending wisdom handed down for three hundred years. He was hoonish-handsome, which happens when one of their males gets gray head fleece and lets his facial fur grow long, an effect enhanced by a noble long nose. This worthy jabbed again at the ancient page, so hard I feared he’d hurt the priceless text.
“But I tell you this algorithm is exactly what you need! It can be executed in a tenth the space, with far fewer parts, if you’d just consider—”
I can’t write what followed, because it was in that dialect of Anglic called Engineering, and even my hoonish memory won’t help me write words I can’t understand or spell. The sage must have come to help Uriel in her project. Anyone who knew her could predict Uriel’s resistance.
Beyond those two we saw Urdonnol, a younger urrish techie, who the Master trusted with general upkeep of this whatever-it-is machine, stretching beyond the farthest reach of the single overhead skylight. Urdonnol peered through the shuddering, squeaking assembly, reaching in to tighten an elastic belt or lubricate a bearing. As senior apprentice, she was two hooves toward being Uriel’s heir.
The sole other candidate was Ur-ronn, partly because of our pal’s school scores, and also because she’s the nearest of Uriel’s scent-cousins to survive from steppe-grub to adult. No doubt Urdonnol worked here — tending the Master’s personal project — to improve her chances, though she clearly hated the big machine.
Miniature centaur figures moved amid the whirling disks, making delicate adjustments. Urrish males, normally rare to see outside their wives’ pouches, tightened belts and gears under Urdonnol’s terse direction. Striking a blow for equality, I guess.
I bent and whispered to Huck, “So much for all that talk about — hr-hrrm — starships! If they really saw one, they wouldn’t be fooling with toy gadgets right now!”
Ur-ronn must’ve overheard me. She swung her long muzzle, wearing a wounded look. Two out of three eyes narrowed. “I heard Uriel and Gyfz,” she hissed. “Anyhow, what does a snarty-fants like you know?”
“Enough to know all these whirling glass yo-yos don’t have hair on a qheuen’s backside to do with visiting spaceships!”
Even if we hadn’t been snapping at each other, it wasn’t easy for a gang like ours to peer discreetly into a room, the way you read about humans doing in detective stories. Still, those inside mightn’t have noticed us, if Huphu the noor hadn’t chosen that moment to go bounding in, yipping at those spinning pulleys and disks. Before we knew it, she leaped onto a leather belt and was running in place like mad, snapping toward a pair of cringing urs husbands.
Urdonnol noticed, waving her arms, displaying the bright glands under both brood pouches.
“This event signifies? It signifies?” the apprentice demanded with slurred interrogative trills. Her agitation grew as the Master snaked a grizzled snout around to peer at the commotion.
Despite stereotypes, a hoon can act quickly if he sees a clear need. I rushed over to snatch Huphu, rumbling my very best umble, and rejoined the others, girding for a group tongue-lashing.
“Behavior that is (astonishingly, horrifyingly) unacceptable,” declared Urdonnol in GalTwo. “Interruption of an important congress by (knavish, microcephalic, unhousebroken)—”
Uriel cut in, breaking Urdonnol’s insult-stream before the fuming, stamping Ur-ronn could be provoked to responding in kind.
“That will do, Urdonnol,” the Master commanded in GalSeven. “Kindly take the youngsters to Gybz, who has business of ers own with them, then hurry back. We have several more models to run before we are through for the day.”
“It shall be done,” Urdonnol replied in the same tongu
e. Turning to us with an aggressive neck-stretch, the older prentice said — “Come along, you gaggle of jeekee adventurers.”
She said it with dripping scorn, which is possible in GalSeven, though not as harsh as Anglic.
“Come swiftly. It’s been decided to take you up on your offer.
“Your grand plan.
“Your one-way expedition to Hell.”
VIII. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
Legends
It is said that glavers are an example to us all. Of the seven races to plant exile colonies on the slope, they alone have escaped this prison where their ancestors consigned them. They did this by finding, and traveling, the Path of Redemption.
Now they are innocent, no longer criminals, having become one with Jijo. In time, they may even be renewed, winning that blessed rarity — a second chance at the stars.
It is a source of some frustration to Earthlings — the youngest sept to come here — that humans never got to meet glavers as thinking, speaking beings. Even the hoon and urs arrived too late to know them at their prime, when glavers were said to have been mighty intellects, with a talent for deep race memory. Watching their descendants root through our garbage middens, it is hard to picture the race as great starfarers and the patrons of three noble client-lines.
What desperation brought them here, to seek safety in oblivion?
The g’Keks tell us, by oral tradition, that it was the result of financial setbacks.
Once (according to g’Kek lore), glavers were said to be among those rare breeds with a knack for conversing with Zang — the hydrogen-breathing civilization existing aloofly in parallel to the society of races that use oxygen. This aptitude enabled glavers to act as intermediaries, bringing them great wealth and prestige, until a single contractual mistake reversed their fortunes, landing them in terrible debt.
