by David Brin
Takeoff was surprisingly gentle, a wafting motion, rising and turning, then the sky-boat swept away so quickly that he had no chance to survey the Glade and its surroundings, or to seek the hidden valley of the Egg. By the time he turned around to press close against the window, the continent was already sweeping underneath as they hurtled southward, many times faster than a catapulted stone. Only minutes later, they dropped away from the alpine hills, streaking over a wide-open plain of steppe grass, which bowed and rippled like the ever-changing surface of a phosphorescent sea. At one point, Lark spotted a drove of galloping stem-chompers, a genus of native Jijoan ungulates, which trumpeted distress and reared away from the airboat’s passing shadow. A band of urrish herders stretched their sinuous necks in expressions of curiosity mixed with dread. Near the adults, a group of early middlings gamboled and snapped in mock battle, ignoring their elders’ sudden, dark focus on the heavens.
“Your enemies certainly are graceful creatures,” Ling commented.
Lark turned and stared at her. What’s she going on about now?
Ling must have misinterpreted his look, hurrying as if to placate. “Of course I mean that in a strictly limited sense, the way a horse or other animal can be graceful.”
Lark pondered before answering. “Hrm. It’s too bad your visit disrupted Gathering. We’d normally be having the Games about now. That’s when you’d see real grace in action.”
“Games?’ Oh, yes. Your version of the fabled Olympics. Lots of running and jumping around, I suppose?”
He nodded guardedly. “There are speed and agility events. Others let our best and bravest test their endurance, courage, adaptability.”
“All traits highly prized by those who brought humanity into being,” Ling said. Her smile was indulgent, faintly condescending. “I don’t imagine any of the six species go up against each other directly in any events, do they? I mean, it’s hard to picture a g’Kek outrunning an urs, or a qheuen doing a pole vault!” She laughed.
Lark shrugged. Despite Ling’s hint regarding a subject of great moment — the question of human origins — he found himself losing interest in the conversation.
“Yes, I suppose it could be. Hard. To picture.”
He turned to look back out the window, watching the great plain sweep by — wave after wave of bending grass, punctuated by stands of dark boo or oases of gently swaying trees. A distance requiring several days to cross by caravan was dismissed in a few brief duras of blithe flight. Then the smoldering mountains of the southern range swarmed into view.
Besh, the forayer pilot, banked the craft to get a closer look at Blaze Mountain, circling at an angle so that Lark’s window stared vertiginously on a vast lava apron where past eruption layers spilled across a country that was both ravaged and starkly renewed. For an instant, he glimpsed the smelters that lay clustered halfway up the mighty eminence. Fashioned to resemble native magma tubes and floes, the forge vented steam and smoke no different from that exhaled by nearby wild apertures. Of course, the camouflage was never meant to endure scrutiny as close as this.
Lark saw Besh share a knowing glance with Kunn, who tapped one of his magical viewing screens. Out of several score glowing red lights, outlining the mountain’s shape, one was marked by sharp symbols and glowing arrows. Dotted lines traced underground passages and workrooms where famed urrish smiths labored to make tools out of those special alloys sanctioned by the sages, second in quality only to those produced farther south, near the peak of towering Mount Guenn.
Incredible, Lark thought, trying to memorize the level of detail shown on Kunn’s screen, for his report to Lester Cambel. Clearly that monitor had little to do with the ostensible purpose of this mission — scouting for advanced “candidate” life-forms. From a few brief exchanges, Lark reckoned Kunn was no biologist. Something in the man’s stance, his way of moving, reminded one of Dwer stalking through a forest, only more deadly. Even after generations of relative tranquillity, a few men and women on the Slope still carried themselves like that, experts whose chief job was to circulate each summer from village to village, training local human militias.
Just in case.
Each of the other five races had similar specialists. A prudent policy, since even now there were regular minor crises — a criminal act here, a wayward tribe of soon-ers there, and spates of hot-tempered friction between settlements. Enough to make “peacetime warrior” no contradiction in terms.
The same might also be true of Kunn. Looking lethally competent didn’t mean he was coiled, preparing to wreak murder.
What’s your purpose, Kunn? Lark wondered, watching symbols flash across the screen, crisscrossing reflections of the outlander’s face. What, exactly, are you looking for?
Blaze Mountain fell behind them as the little vessel now seemed to leap ahead at a new angle, spearing across a brilliant whiteness known as the Plain of Sharp Sand. For a long time, low dunes swept past, undulating in windswept perfection. Lark saw no caravans laboring across the sparkling desert, carrying mail or trade goods to isolated settlements of The Vale. But then, no one sane ranged those searing wastes by day. There were hidden shelters down there, where travelers awaited nightfall, which even Kunn’s rays shouldn’t be able to pick out/amid the glaring immensity.
That pale dazzle was nothing compared to the next sudden transition, crossing over from the sand ocean to the Spectral Flow, a blurry expanse of shifting colors that made Lark’s eyes sting. Ling and Besh tried to peer at it past their sheltering hands, before finally giving up, while Kunn muttered sourly at the static on his display. Lark struggled against a natural reflex to squint, endeavoring instead to loosen his habitual way of focusing. Dwer had once explained that it was the only way to let oneself see in this realm where exotic crystals cast an ever-changing wildness of luminance.
That had been shortly after Dwer won master hunter status, when he hurried home to join Lark and Sara at their mother’s bedside, during the illness that finally took her away, turning Nelo almost overnight into an old man. Melina accepted no food during that final week, and very little drink. Of her two eldest, whose minds she had doted on, day in, day out, ever since arriving in Dolo to be a papermaker’s wife, she now seemed to need nothing. But from her youngest child, she devoured tales of his wanderings, the sights, sounds, and sensations of far corners of the Slope where few ever trod. Lark recalled feeling a jealous pang when he saw the contentment Dwer’s stories gave in her last hours, then chiding himself for having such unworthy thoughts.
That memory swept over him starkly, apparently triggered by the stabbing colors.
Some credulous folk among the Six said these layers of poison stone had magical properties, poured into them by aeons of overlapping volcanic effusions. “Mother Jijo’s blood,” they called it. At that moment, Lark could almost credit the superstition, so struck was he by uncanny waves of familiarity. As if he had been here before, sometime long ago.
With that thought, his eyes seemed to adjust — to open up, letting the muddle of swirling hues blossom into mirage canyons, figment valleys, ghost cities, and even whole phantom civilizations, vaster than the greatest Buyur sites…
Then, just as he was starting to enter fully into the experience, the blur of illusion suddenly ended, cut off as the Spectral Flow plunged into the sea. Besh banked the craft again, and soon the sweeping domain of color vanished like a dream, replaced on the left by a more normal desert of windswept igneous rock.
The line of crashing surf became like a fabled highway, pointing toward lands unknown. Lark fumbled to unfasten his seat belt, moving across the aisle to stare over the great ocean. So vast, he thought. Yet this was nothing compared to the immensities Ling and her comrades spanned with hardly a thought. His eyes peered in hopes of spotting a camouflaged dross-hauler, its gray-green sails slicing the wind, bearing sacred caskets to their final rest. From this height, he might even glimpse the Midden itself, dark blue waters-of-forgetfulness covering a plunge so deep that it
s trench could take all the arrogant excesses of a dozen mighty civilizations and still bless them with a kind of absolution — oblivion.
They had already dashed beyond the farthest of Lark’s lifetime travels, seeking data for his ever-hungry charts. Even looking with a practiced eye, he found few scattered traces of sapient habitation — a hoonish fishing hamlet, a red qheuen rookery — tucked under rocky clefts or bayou-root canopies. Of course, at this speed something important might sweep by in the time it took to switch windows, which he did frequently as Besh rolled the craft, playing instruments across both shore and sea.
Even those few signs of settlement ceased when they reached the Rift, crossing a few hundred arrowflights west of the distant, hatchet-shape of Terminus Rock.
A series of towering cliffs and deep subsea canyons split the land here. Jagged promontories alternated with seemingly bottomless fingers of dark sea, as if some great claw had gouged parallel grooves almost due east, to form a daunting natural barrier. Dwelling beyond this border labeled you an outlaw, cursed by the sages and by the Holy Egg. But the alien flier made quick work of the realm of serrated clefts and chasms, dismissing them like minor ruts across a well-traveled road.
League after league of sandy scrublands soon passed by, punctuated at long intervals by stark fragments of ancient cities, eroded by wind, salt, and rain. Explosions and pulverizing rays must have shattered the mighty towers, just after the last Buyur tenant turned off the lights. In time, the ceaseless churning of the Midden and its daughter volcanoes would grind even these sky-stabbing stumps to nothing.
Soon the sky-boat left the continent altogether, streaking over chains of mist-shrouded isles.
Even Dwer never dreamed of going this far.
Lark decided not to mention this trip to the lad without discussing it first with Sara, who understood tact and hurt feelings better than either brother.
Then reality hit home. Sara’s back in Dolo. Dwer may be sent off east, hunting glavers and sooners. And when the aliens finish their survey, we all may meet our end, far from those we love.
Lark sank into his seat with a sigh. For a while there, he had actually been enjoying himself. Damn memory, for reminding him the way things were!
For the rest of the trip he kept low-key and businesslike, even when they finally landed near forests eerily different from those he knew, or while helping Ling haul aboard cages filled with strange, marvelous creatures. Professionalism was one pleasure Lark still allowed himself — a relish for studying nature’s ways. But there remained little zest or wonder in the thought of flying.
It was after nightfall when Lark finally shuffled back to his own shabby tent near the Glade — only to find Harul-len waiting there with news.
The low massive figure took up fully half the shelter. At first, standing in the entry with only dim moonlight behind him, Lark thought it was Uthen, his friend and fellow naturalist. But this qheuen’s ash-colored carapace wasn’t scarred from a lifetime digging into Jijo’s past. Harullen was a bookworm, a mystic who spoke with aristocratic tones reminiscent of Gray Queens of old.
“The zealots sent a message,” the heretic leader announced portentously, without even asking Lark about his day.
“Oh? Finally? And what do they say?” Lark dropped his daypack by the entrance and sagged onto his cot.
“As you predicted, they desire a meeting. It is arranged for tonight at midnight.”
Echo-whispers of the final word escaped speaking vents in back, as the qheuen shifted his weight. Lark suppressed a groan. He still had a report to prepare for the sages, summarizing everything he’d learned today. Moreover, Ling wanted him bright and early the next morning, to help evaluate the new specimens.
And now this?
Well, what can you expect when you play games of multiple loyalty? Old-time novels warn how hard things can get when you serve more than one master.
Events were accelerating. Now the rumored, secretive rebel organization had finally offered to talk. What choice had he but to go?
“All right,” he told Harullen. “Come get me when it’s time. Meanwhile, I have work to do.”
The gray qheuen departed silently, except for a faint clicking of claws on the rocky trail. Lark struck a match that sputtered rank fumes before settling enough to light his tiny oil lamp. He unfolded the portable writing table Sara had given him when he graduated from the Roney School, what seemed a geologic age ago. Pulling out a sheet of his father’s best writing paper, he then shaved black powder from a half-used ink stick into a clay mortar, mixed the dust with fluid from a small bottle, and ground the mixture with a pestle till all the lumps were gone. Lark used his pocket knife to sharpen his tree-staller quill pen. At last he dipped the tip into the ink, paused for a moment, and began to write his report.
It was true, Lark realized later, during a tense conclave by the wan opal glow of Torgen, the second moon. Tentatively, suspiciously, the zealots were indeed offering alliance with Harullen’s loose-knit society of heretics.
Why? The two groups have different aims. We seek to reduce, then end, our illegal presence on this fragile world. The zealots only want the old status quo back, our hidden secrecy restored, as it was before the raider ship came — and perhaps a few old scores settled along the way.
Still, envoys of the two groups gathered in the dead of night, near a steaming fumarole, by the winding path leading to the silent nest of the Egg. Most of those in the conspiracy wore heavy cloaks to hide their identities. Harullen, who was among the few still to possess a functioning rewq, was asked to remove the squirming symbiont from his sensory cupola, lest the delicate creature burn itself out in the atmosphere of strained intrigue. Creatures of the Great Peace, rewq were not suited for times of war.
Or is it because the zealots don’t want us to see too much, Lark pondered. Not for nothing were rewq called the “mask that reveals.” Their near-universal hibernation was as troubling as the heavy silence of the Egg itself.
Before starting, the zealots first cracked open several jars, releasing swarms of privacy wasps around the periphery-an ancient ritual whose origins had been lost but that now made earnest sense, after discoveries of the last few days. Then the urrish spokesman for the cabal stepped forward, speaking in Galactic Two.
“Your association sees opportunity in the (greatly lamented) coming of these felons,” she accused. The whistles and clicks were muffled by a cowl, obscuring all but the tip of her muzzle. Still, Lark could tell she wasn’t many seasons past a middling, with at most one husband pouched under an arm. Her diction implied education, possibly at one of the plains academies where young urs, fresh from the herd, gathered within sight of some steaming volcano, to apprentice in their finest arts. An intellectual, then. All full of book learning and the importance of her own ideas.
Yeah, a part of him answered honestly. In other words, not too different from yourself.
Harullen answered the rebel’s challenge, making a political point by speaking Anglic.
“What do you mean by that strange proposition?”
“We mean that you perceive, in these (disliked/unwelcome) aliens, a chance to see your ultimate goals fulfilled!”
The urs stamped a foreleg. Her insinuation sent angry murmurs through the heretic delegation. Yet Lark had seen it coming.
Harullen’s gray carapace rocked an undulating circle. A traeki gesture, which the ringed ones called Objection to Unjust Impeachment.
“You imply that we condone our own murder. And that of every sapient on Jijo.”
The urrish conspirator imitated the same motion, but in reverse — Reiteration of Indictment.
“I do so (emphatically) imply. I do so (in brutal frankness) mean. All know this is what you heretics (misguidedly) desire.”
Lark stepped forward. If the zealots’ murmur included any anti-human slurs, he ignored them.
“That is not (negation reiterated) what we desire!” Lark complained, garbling the qualifier trill-phrase in his ha
ste to speak up.
“There are two reasons for this,” he continued, still struggling in GalTwo.
“First among our grounds (for rebuttal) is this — the aliens (greedy to extreme fault) must not only eliminate all sapient witnesses (to crime/to theft) who might testify in a Galactic court. They must also wipe out the native stock of any (unlucky) species they steal from Jijo! Otherwise, how embarrassing would it be someday, when the (foolish) thieves announce their adoption of a new client race, only to be confronted with proof that it was stolen from this world? For this reason they must exterminate the original population, when they depart.
“This we (in righteousness) cannot allow! Genocide of innocent life is the very crime our group was (in selfless righteousness) formed to fight!”
Harullen and the other heretics shouted approval.
Lark found his throat too dry to continue in Galactic Two. He had made the gesture. Now he switched to Anglic.
“But there is another reason to resist being slaughtered by the aliens.
“There is no honor in simply being killed. Our group’s goal is to seek agreement, consensus, so that the Six shall do the right thing slowly, painlessly, voluntarily, by means of birth control, as an act of nobility and devotion to this world we love.”
“The effect, in the end, would ve identical,” the urrish speaker pointed out, slipping into the same language Lark used.
“Not when the truth is finally revealed! And it will be, someday, when this world has new legal tenants, who take up the common hobby of archaeology.”
That statement triggered confused silence. Even Harullen rotated his cupola to stare at Lark.
“Exflain, flease.” The urrish rebel bent her forelegs, urging him to continue. “What difference will archaeology signify, once we and all our descendants are long gone, our hoof bones littering the wallows of the sea?”
