by David Brin
—Collected Fables of Jijo’s Seven. Third Edition. Department of Folklore and Language, Biblos. Year 1867 of Exile.
Asx
Suddenly, their questions take a new turn. An edge of tension — not quite fear, but a cousin to that universal passion — abruptly colors the invaders’ speech.
Then, in a single night, their apprehension takes hasty physical form.
They have buried their black station!
Do you recall the surprise, my rings? At dusk there it was, serene, arrogantly uncaring of the open sky. A cubic shape, blatant in its artificiality.
When we returned at dawn, a great heap of dirt lay there instead. From the size of the mound, Lester surmised the station must have scooped a hole, dropped itself inside, and piled the detritus on top, like a borer-beetle fleeing a digbat.
Lester’s guess is proven right when Rann, Kunn, and Besh emerge from below, ascending a smooth, dark tunnel to resume discussions under the canopy-of-negotiation. This time they choose to focus on machines. Specifically-what devices remain from Buyur days? They want to know if ancient relics still throb with vital force.
This happens on some fallow worlds, they say. Sloppy races leave countless servant drones behind when they depart, laying their worlds down for an aeon of rest. Near-perfect and self-repairing, the abandoned mechanisms can last a long time, wandering masterless across a terrain void of living voices.
They ask — have we seen any mechanical orphans?
We try to explain that the Buyur were meticulous. That their cities were dutifully scraped away, or crushed and seeded with deconstructors. Their machine servants were infected with meme-compulsions, driving those still mobile to seek nests in the deep trench we call the Midden. All this we believe, yet the sky-humans seem to doubt our word.
They ask (again!) about visitations. What clues have we seen of other ships coming stealthfully, for purposes vaguely hinted at but never said aloud?
As planned, we dissemble. In old human tales and books, it is a technique oft used by the weak when confronted by the strong.
Act stupid, the lore suggests. Meanwhile, watch and listen closely.
Ah, but how much longer can we get away with it? Already Besh questions those who come for healing. In their gratitude, some will surely forget our injunctions.
The next stage will start soon, while our preparations are barely begun.
The fourth human forayer, Ling, returns from her research trip. Did.she not leave with the young heretic, Lark? Yet she comes back alone.
No, we tell her. We have not seen him. He did not come this way. Can you tell us why he abandoned you? Why he left you in the forest, his assigned task undone?
We promise her another guide. The qheuen naturalist, Uthen. Meanwhile, we placate.
If only our rewq had not abandoned us! When i/we ask Lester about the woman’s mood — what he can read from her demeanor — he only shudders and says he cannot say.
Sara
A concert was arranged by an impromptu group of passengers and crew, on the fantail of the Hauph-woa, to welcome the Stranger back among the living.
Ulgor would play the violus, a stringed instrument based on the Earthling violin, modified to suit deft, ur-rish fingers. While Ulgor tuned, Blade squatted his blue-green carapace over a mirliton-drum, stroking its taut membrane with his massive, complex tongue, causing it to rumble and growl. Meanwhile, all five legs held jugs filled to varied levels with water. Tentative puffs from his speech vents blew notes across each opening.
Pzora, the traeki pharmacist, modestly renounced any claim to musical talent but agreed to take up some metal and ceramic chimes. The hoonish helmsman would sing, while the professional scriven-dancer honored the makeshift group by agreeing to accompany them in the g’Kek manner, with graceful motions of his eyestalks and those famous dancing arms, calling to mind the swaying of trees, or wind-driven rain, or birds in flight.
They had asked Sara to round out a six, but she declined. The only instrument she played was her father’s piano, back in Nelo’s house by the great dam, and even at that her proficiency was unremarkable. So much for the supposed correlation between music and mathematics, she thought ironically. Anyway, she wanted to keep an eye on the Stranger, in case events threw him into another hysterical fit. He seemed calm so far, watching through dark eyes that seemed pleasantly surprised by nearly everything.
Was this a symptom? Head injuries sometimes caused loss of memory — or even ability to make memories — so everything was forever new.
At least he can feel some joy, she thought. Take the way he beamed, every time she approached. It felt strange and sweet for someone to be so reliably happy to see her. Perhaps if she were prettier, it wouldn’t be so befuddling. But the handsome dark outlander was a sick man, she recalled. Out of his proper mind.
And yet, she pondered further, what is the past but a fiction, invented by a mind in order to go on functioning? She had spent a year fleeing memory, for reasons that had seemed important then.
Now it just doesn’t amount to much.
She worried about what was going on up in the Rim-mers. Her brothers stayed close to her thoughts.
If you’d accepted Taine’s original proposal of marriage, you might have had little ones by now, and their future to fret about, as well.
Refusing the august gray-headed sage had caused a stir. How many other offers would there be for the hand of a shy papermaker’s daughter without much figure, a young woman with more passion for symbols on a page than dancing or the other arts of dalliance? Soon after turning Taine down, Joshu’s attentions had seemed to ratify her decision, till she realized the young bookbinder might only be using her as a diversion during his journeyman year in Biblos, nothing more.
Ironic, isn’t it? Lark could have his pick of young women on the Slope, yet his philosophy makes him choose celibacy. My conclusions about Jijo and the Six are the opposite to his. Yet I’m alone too.
Different highways, arriving at the same solitary dead end.
And now come gods from space, diverting us all onto a road whose markings we can’t see.
They still lacked a sixth for the concert. Despite having introduced string instruments to Jijo, humans traditionally played flute in a mixed sextet. Jop was an adept, but the farmer declined, preferring to pore over his book of scrolls. Finally, young Jomah agreed to sit in for luck, equipped with a pair of spoons.
So much for the vaunted contribution of Earthlings to musical life on Jijo.
Hidden under Blade’s heavy shell, the mirliton groaned a low, rumbling note, soon joined by a mournful sigh from one of the jugs under Blade’s left-front leg. The qheuen’s seeing-band winked at Ulgor, and the urs took her cue to lift the violus, laying the double bow across the strings, drawing twin wavering notes, embellishing the mirliton’s basso moan. A multilevel chord was struck. It held…
The moment of duet harmony seemed to stretch on and on. Sara stopped breathing, lest any other sound break the extraordinary consonance. Even Fakoon rolled forward, visibly moved.
If the rest is anything like this…
Pzora chose the next instant to pile in, disrupting the aching sweetness with an eager clangor of bells and cymbals. The Dolo pharmacist seemed zealously unaware of what er had shattered, rushing ahead of the beat, halting, then pushing on again. After a stunned instant, members of the hoonish crew roared with laughter. Noor on the masts chittered as Ulgor and Blade shared looks that needed no rewq to interpret — equivalents to a shrug and a wink. They played on, incorporating Pzora’s enthusiasm in a catchy four-part rhythm.
Sara recalled being taught piano by her mother, from music that was actually written down, now a nearly forgotten art. Jijoan sextets weaved their impromptu harmonies out of separate threads, merging and diverging through one congenial coincidence after another. Human music used to work that way in most pre-Contact cultures, before the Euro-West hit on symphonies and other more rigorous forms. Or so Sara had read.
Then Fakoon wheeled forward, arms swaying delicately, reminding Sara of gently rising smoke.
What had been exquisite, then humorous, soon took on a quality even more highly prized.
Unity.
She glanced at the Stranger, his face overcome with emotion, eyes delighting in Fakoon’s opening moves. The left hand thumped his blanket happily, beating time.
You can tell what kind of man he used to be, she mused. Even horribly mutilated, in awful pain, he spends his waking time enthralled by good things.
The thought seemed to catch in her throat. Taken by surprise, Sara turned away, hiding a choking wave of sadness that abruptly blurred her vision.
Tarek Town appeared soon after, perched between the merging rivers Roney and Bibur.
From afar it seemed no more than a greenish knoll, like any other hill. Grayish shapes studded the mound, as if boulders lay strewn over the slopes. Then the Hauph-woa rounded one last oxbow turn, and what had seemed solid from a distance now spread open — a huge, nearly hollow erection of webbing, festooned with greenery. The “boulders” were the protruding tips of massive towers, enmeshed in a maze of cables, conduits, rope bridges, netting, ramps, and sloping ladders, all draped under lush, flowing foliage.
The air filled with a humid redolence, the scent of countless flowers.
Sara liked to squint and imagine Tarek in other days, back when it was but a hamlet to the mighty Buyur, yet a place of true civilization, humming with faithful machines, vibrant with the footsteps of visitors from far star systems, thronging with sky-craft that settled gracefully on rooftop landing pads. A city lively with aspirations that she, a forest primitive, might never imagine.
But then, as the noon crew poled the Hauph-woa toward a concealed dock, no amount of squinting could mask how far Tarek had fallen. Out of a multitude of windows, only a few still shone with million-year-old glazing. Others featured crude chimneys, staining once-smooth walls with the soot of cook fires. Wide ledges where floating aircraft once landed now supported miniature orchards or coops for noisy herd chicks. Instead of self-propelled machines, the streets swarmed with commerce carried on the backs of tinkers and traders, or animal-drawn carts.
High up a nearby tower, some young g’Kek sped around a rail-less ramp, heedless of the drop, their spokes blurry with speed. Urban life suited the wheeled sept. Rare elsewhere, g’Kek made up the town’s largest group.
Northward, crossing Tarek’s link to the mainland, lay a “recent” ruin of stone blocks — the thousand-year-old city wall, erected by the Gray Queens who long ruled here, until a great siege ended their reign, back when the Dolo paper mill was new. Scorch marks still smeared the fallen bulwark, testimony to the violent birth of the Commons-of-Six.
However many times she passed through Tarek Town, it remained a marvel. Jijo’s closest thing to a cosmopolitan place, where all races mixed as equals.
Along with hoon-crewed vessels, countless smaller boats skimmed under lacy, arching bridges, rowed by human trapper-traders, bringing hides and wares to market. River-traeki, with amphibious basal segments, churned along the narrow canals, much faster than their land-bound cousins managed ashore.
Near the river confluence, a special port sheltered two hissing steam-ferries, linking forest freeholds on the north bank to southern grasslands where urrish hordes galloped. But on a sloping beach nearby, Sara saw some blue qheuens climb ashore, avoiding ferry tolls by walking across the river bottom, a talent useful long ago, when blue rebels toppled the Queens’ tyranny — helped by an army of men, traeki, and hoon.
In all the tales about that battle, none credits the insurgents with a weapon I think crucial — that of language.
It took some time for the Hauph-woa to weave through a crowd of boats and tie up at a cramped wharf.
The jammed harbor helped explain the lack of upstream traffic.
Soon as the moorings were tied, Hauph-woa’s contingent of noor squalled and blocked the gangways, demanding their pay. Rumbling a well-pleased umble song of gratitude, the ship’s cook went down the row of black-furred creatures, handing out chunks of hard candy. Each noor tucked one sourball in its mouth and the rest into a waterproof pouch, then leaped over the rail to cavort away between bumping, swaying hulls, risking death by narrow margins.
As usual, the Stranger watched with a complex mixture of surprise, delight, and sadness in his eyes. He spurned a stretcher, and went down the ramp leaning on a cane, while Pzora puffed with pride, having delivered a patient from death’s door to the expert healers of Tarek Town. While Prity went to hail a rickshaw, they observed the hoonish crew strain with block and tackle, lifting crates from the hold, many of them bound from Nelo’s paper works for various printers, scribes, and scholars. In their place, stevedores gently lowered ribboned packages, all bound from Tarek for the same destination.
—Pottery shards and slag from urrish forges.
—Used-up ceramic saws from qheuenish woodcarving shops.
—Worn-out printers’ type and broken violin strings.
—Whatever parts of the deceased that could not be counted on to rot away, such as the bones of cremated humans and urs, hoonish vertebrae, g’Kek axles, and traeki wax crystals. The glittering dust of ground-up qheuen carapaces.
—And always lots of ancient Buyur junk — it all wound up on dross boats, sent to the great Midden, to be cleansed by water, fire, and time.
An urrish rickshaw driver helped them usher the injured man onto her low four-wheeled cart, while Pzora stood behind, holding the Stranger’s shoulders with two tendril-hands. “You’re sure you don’t need me to come along?” Sara asked, having second thoughts.
Pzora waved her gently away. “It is a short distance to the clinic, is it not? Have you not urgent matters to attend? Have i not our own tasks to perform? All-of-you shall meet all-of-us again, tonight. And our lucky patient will your fine selves perceive on the morrow.”
The Stranger’s dark eyes caught hers, and he smiled, patting her hand. There was no sign of his former terror of the traeki.
I guess I was wrong about his injury. He does acquire memories.
Maybe in Tarek we can find out who he is. If family or friends can be brought, they’ll help him more than I ever could. That evoked a pang, but Sara reminded herself that she was no longer a child, tending a wounded chipwing. What matters is that he’s well cared for. Now Pzora’s right. I’ve got other matters to attend.
The anarchic style of Tarek Town meant there was no one “official” at the dock to greet them. But merchants hurried to the quay, eager for their cargoes. Others came in search of news. There were rumors of horrible events up north and east. Of landings by frost-covered Zang ships, or whole towns leveled by titanic rays. Gossip told of a populace herded toward mass trials, conducted by insectoid judges from the Galactic Institute of Migration. One credulous human even argued with Jop, insisting the farmer was mistaken, since everyone knew Dolo Village was destroyed.
That explains why no boats came upstream, Sara thought. From Tarek, the intruder ship must have seemed to lay a streak of fire right over Sara’s hometown.
Rumors were a chief stock in trade of all harbors, but surely cooler heads prevailed elsewhere?
Prity signaled that all of Nelo’s crates were signed for, save the one she pulled on a wheeled dolly to be hand carried to Engril the Copier. Sara bade farewell to the other Dolo emissaries, agreeing to meet them again tonight and compare notes.
“Come, Jomah,” she told Henrik’s son, who was staring at the bustle and tumult of city life. “We’ll take you to your uncle first.”
Voices seemed subdued in the harborside market; the haggling was sullen, perfunctory. Most buyers and sellers did not even wear rewq while dickering with member
s of other races — a sure sign they were only going through the motions.
One shopkeeper, an elegant gray qheuen with intricate, gold-fleck shell decorations, held up two claw-hands and counted nine jagged toe-pads, indicating by a slant of her cupola that it was her final offer. The trader, a rustic-looking red, hissed in dismay, gesturing at the fine salt crystals she had brought all the way from the distant sea. While passing, Sara overheard the city qheuen’s reply.
“Quality or amount, what difference does it make? The price, why should you or I care?”
The answer shocked Sara. An urbane gray, indifferent over a commercial transaction? The locals must be in a state, all right.
As if we in Dolo were any better?
Townsfolk mostly gathered in small groups, gossiping in dialects of their own kind. Many of the hoons carried iron-shod canes — usually a perquisite of captains — while urrish tinkers, herders, and traders kept close to their precious pack beasts. Each urs carried an ax or machete sheathed at her withers, useful tools in the dry woods and plains where they dwelled.
So why did the sight make Sara feel edgy?
Come to think of it, many humans were behaving much the same, walking in close company, armed with tools suitable for chopping, digging, hunting — or uses Sara did not want to think about. The g’Kek populace kept to their apartments and studios.
I’d better find out what’s going on, and soon, Sara thought.
It was a relief when the tense market zone ended at the glaring brightness of the Jumble.
Till now, they had walked in shade, but here an opening gaped under the shelter-canopy. Once towering structures lay in heaps, their neat geometries snapped, splintered and shoved together, giving the place its name. Scummy fluid shimmered between the shattered stones, where oily bubbles formed and popped, relics of a time when this place was caustic, poisonous, and ultimately restoring.
Jomah shaded his eyes. “I don’t see it,” he complained.
