by David Brin
Again, our wheeled friend teetered at the edge, spreading two eyestalks far apart and sticking out a third for good measure. “It looks like a balloon of some sort, Alvin. A tube, wrapped around the Dream like a life preserver. A circular — Ziz!”
That matched my own guess. A traeki torus, inflated beyond anything we might have thought possible.
Everybody turned to stare at Tyug, the Mount Guenn Master of Mixes. The full-sized traeki shuddered, letting out a colored cloud that smelled like released tension.
“A precaution. One that i/we contemplated in consultation with our lord, Uriel. A safeguard of unknown, untried efficacy.
“Glad we/i are to have vlenned a success. These rings, and those below, anticipate relishing recent events. Soon. In retrospect.”
“In other words-ords,” Pincer interpreted, “stop staring like a bunch of day-blind glavers. Let’s go fetch ’em back-ack-ack!”
XVIII. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
Legends
It is said that earlier generations interpreted the Scrolls in ways quite different than we do now, in our modern Commons.
Without doubt, each wave of immigrants brought to the Slope a new crisis of faith, from which beliefs emerged restructured, changed.
At the start, every fresh arrival briefly held advantages, bearing godlike tools from the Five Galaxies. Newcomers kept these powers for intervals ranging from a few months to more than eight years. This helped each sept establish a secure base for their descendants, as humans did at Biblos, the hoon on Hawph Island, and the g’Kek at Dooden Mesa.
Yet each also knew its handicaps — a small founding population and ignorance about how to live a primitive existence on an unknown world. Even the haughty gray queens conceded they must accept certain principles, or risk vendetta from all the others combined. The Covenant of Exile set rules of population control, concealment, and Jijo-preservation, as well as proper ways to handle dross. These fundamentals continue to this day.
It is all too easy to forget that other matters were settled only after mordant struggle.
For instance, bitter resistance to the reintroduction of metallurgy, by urrish smiths, was only partly based on qheuens protecting their tool-monopoly. There was also a sincere belief, on the part of many hoon and traeki, that the innovation was sacrilege. To this day, some on the Slope will not touch reforged Buyur steel or let it in their villages or homes, no matter how many times the sages rule it safe for “temporary” use.
Another remnant belief can be seen among those puritans who despise books. While paper itself can hardly be faulted — it decays well and can be used to reprint copies of the Scrolls — there is still a dissident minority who call the Biblos trove a vanity at best, and an impediment to those whose goal should lie in blessed ignorance. In the early days of human life on Jijo, such sentiments were exploited by urrish and qheuen foes — until the great smiths discovered profit in the forging of type, and book-addiction spread unstoppably throughout the Commons.
Strangely, it is the most recent crisis-of-faith that shows the least leftover effects today. If not for written accounts, it would be difficult to believe that, only a century ago, there were many on the Slope who loathed and feared the newly arrived Holy Egg. Yet at the time there were serious calls for the Explosers Guild to destroy it! To demolish the stone-that-sings, lest it give away our hiding place or, worse, distract the Six away from following the same path already blamed by glavers.
“If it is not in the Scrolls, it cannot be sacred.”
That has always been the declaration of orthodoxy, since time immemorial. And to this day it must be confessed — there is no mention in the Scrolls of anything even remotely like the Egg.
Rety
Dark, clammy, stifling. Rety didn’t like the cave. It must be the stale, dusty air that made her heart pound so. Or else the painful scrapes on her legs, after sliding down a twisty chute to this underground grotto, from a narrow entrance in a boo-shrouded cleft.
Or maybe what made her jumpy was the way shapes kept crowding in from all sides. Each time Rety whirled with her borrowed lantern, the creepy shadows turned out to be knobs of cold, dead rock. But a little voice seemed to say — Always… so far! But a real monster may wait around the next bend.
She set her jaw and refused to listen. Anyone who called her scared would be a liar!
Does a scared person slink into dark places at night? Or do things they was told not to do, by all the big fat chiefs of the Six?
A weight wriggled in her belt pouch. Rety reached past the fur-lined flap to stroke the squirming creature. “Don’t spook, yee. It’s just a big hole in the groun’.”
A narrow head and a sinuous neck snaked toward her, three eyes glittering in the soft flamelight. A squeaky voice protested.
“yee not spooked! dark good! on plains, li’l man-urs love hidey-holes, till find warm wife!”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t mean—”
“yee help nervous wife!”
“Who’re you calling nervous, you little—”
Rety cut short. Maybe she should let yee feel needed, if it helped him keep his own fear under control.
“ow! not so tight!” The male yelped, echoes fleeing down black corridors. Rety quickly let go and stroked yee’s ruffled mane. “Sorry. Look, I bet we’re gettin’ close, so let’s not talk so much, okay?”
“okay, yee shut up. wife do too!”
Rety’s lips pressed. Then anger flipped into a sudden urge to laugh. Whoever said male urs weren’t smart must’ve never met her “husband.” yee had even changed his accent, in recent days, mimicking Rety’s habits of speech.
She raised the lantern and resumed picking her way through the twisty cavern, surrounded by a sparkle of strange mineral formations, reflecting lamplight off countless glittering facets. It might have been pretty to look at, if she weren’t obsessed with one thing alone. An item to reclaim. Something she once, briefly, had owned.
My ticket off this mudball.
Rety’s footprints appeared to be the first ever laid in the dust — which wasn’t surprising, since just qheuens, and a few humans and urs, had a knack for travel underground, and she was smaller than most. With luck, this tunnel led toward the much larger cave she had seen Lester Cambel enter several times. Following the chief human sage had been her preoccupation while avoiding the group of frustrated men and women who wanted her to help guide them over the mountains. Once she knew for sure where Cambel spent his evenings, she had sent yee scouring the underbrush till he found this offshoot opening, bypassing the guarded main entrance.
The little guy was already proving pretty darn useful. To Rety’s surprise, married life wasn’t so bad, once you got used to it.
There was more tight wriggling and writhing. At times, she had to squirm sideways or slide down narrow chutes, making yee complain when he got squeezed. Beyond the lantern’s dim yellow puddle, she heard soft tinkling sounds as water dripped into black pools, slowly sculpting weird underground shapes out of Jijo’s raw mineral juices. With each step Rety fought a tightness in her chest, trying to ignore her tense imagination, which pictured her in the twisty guts of some huge slumbering beast. The rocky womb kept threatening to close in from all sides, shutting the exits, then grinding her to dust.
Soon the way narrowed to a corkscrew horizontal tube that was tight even for her. She had to send yee ahead before attempting the contorted passage, pushing the lantern along in front of her.
Yee’s tiny hooves clattered on gritty limestone. Soon she heard a welcome hoarse whisper.
“is good! hole opens up, little ways more, come wife, faster!”
His chiding almost made her snort angrily-not a wise idea with her cheek, nose, and mouth scraping rank dust. Contorting her body to turn the next corner, she suddenly felt certain the walls were moving!
She recalled what Dwer’s brother had said about this region, when he led her down that last stretch to the Glade, past steaming sulfur vents. Lark had ca
lled this a land of earthquakes, and seemed to think it a good thing!
Twisting uneasily, her hip jammed in a stone cleft.
I’m caught!
Thought of entrapment sent a whimpering moan surging past flecked lips as she thrashed, banging her knee agonizingly. The world really was closing in!
Her forehead struck stone, and pain-dazzles swarmed her dimming vision. The candle lantern rattled from her clutching fingertips, almost toppling over.
“easy, wife! stop! stay!”
The words bounced off the warped mirror of her panic. Stubbornly, Rety kept striving against cold stone, groaning and pushing futilely… until…
Something clicked inside her. All at once, she went limp, suddenly resigned to let the mountain do whatever it wanted with her.
Moments after she stopped fighting, the walls miraculously seemed to stop moving. Or had it been her, all along?
“better now? good-good, now move left leg … left! good, stop now. okay roll other way. go-o-o-ood wife!”
His tiny voice was a lifeline she clutched for the few duras — for the eternity — that it took to win Free. At last, the clutch of the stony passage eased, and she slithered down a sandy bank in a flowing, almost liquid liberation that felt just like being born.
When next she looked up, yee had the lantern cradled in both arms, bowing with forelegs bent.
“good brave wife! no wife ever like yee’s amazing wife!”
This time Rety could not hold it in. She covered her mouth with both hands, yet her escaping laughter bounced off the fluted walls. Combed by stalactites, it came back as a hundred soft echoes of her joy to be alive.
The sage was pondering her bird.
He peered at it, wrote on a notepad, then poked it with some shiny tool.
Rety seethed. The gold-green machine was hers. Hers! She had pursued it from the southern marshes to the Rimmers, rescued it from a greedy mulc-spider, won it with her sweat, suffering, and dreams. She would choose who, if anybody, got to study it.
Anyway, what was a savage shaman going to achieve with his crude glass lenses and such? The tools lying near the bird might have impressed the old Rety, who thought Dwer’s hunting bow was so great. But all that changed after meeting Besh, Rann, and the other star-humans. Now she knew — despite all his airs, Lester Cambel was just like Jass or Bom, or any of the other idiots back in the Gray Hills. Stupid braggarts. Bullies. Always taking things that didn’t belong to them.
Under the bright flare of a mirrored oil lamp, Cambel flipped through a book. Its pages crackled, as if they had not been turned in a very long time. Rety couldn’t make out much from her vantage point, perched on a cleft high up one craggy cavern wall. Not that she could read, anyway. Most of each page seemed to be taken up with drawings with lots of little crisscrossing lines. Nothing much resembled a bird.
Come on, yee, she thought, restlessly. I’m countin’ on you!
She was taking a big risk. The little male had assured her he could handle it, but what if he got lost while sneaking around to the other side? Or forgot his lines? Rety would be furious if the little guy wound up getting hurt!
Cambel’s assistant stood up and left the chamber, perhaps on some brief errand, or else to retire for the night. Either way, this was a perfect time! Come on, yee!
After so long writhing through dark passages, always fearful the little candle would go out, Rety found the cool brilliance of the sage’s lamp harsh to the eyes. With reluctance she had blown out her own light while creeping the last few meters, lest its glow draw attention. Now she regretted it. What if I have to retreat the way I came? She couldn’t willingly face that path again. But as a last resort, if someone were chasing her…?
Too bad she had no way to restart the candle. Maybe I should’ve learned to use one of those “match” things the Slopies boast about. She had been too awed by the sudden burst of flame to pay close attention when Dwer, and later Ur-Jah, tried showing how they worked. It was all the fault of Jass and Bom, of course, who didn’t like womenfolk controlling fire on their own.
But fire’s just fine for scaring or burning women, ain’t it? she pondered angrily, touching her face. Maybe I’ll come back someday, Jass. Maybe I’ll bring another kind of fire.
Rety reentered her favorite fantasy, flying off to live with the sky-humans on their home star. Oh, at first she’d start out as a sort of pet or mascot. But just give her time! She’d learn whatever it took in order to rise up, until she became so important…
So important that some great Rothen prince would put a ship — fleet of ships! — at her command, to go with her back to Jijo.
It was fun picturing the look on Jass’s smug handsome face, when the sky over the Gray Hills went dark at noon, and then her words booming from above—
“you wise mister human sir?”
The tiny voice shook her back to the present. She sought down below — and spied yee trotting nervously near the leg of Lester Cambel’s chair.
“Hm? What was that?” Cambel asked, yee jumped as the chair scraped back, pushed by the sage, who peered about in confusion.
“message for wise human! message from wise grandma urs, Ur-Jah!”
Now Cambel looked down, first amazed, then quizzically intrigued.
“Yes, small one? And how did you get down here past the guard?”
“guard he look out for danger, look right past yee. is yee danger?”
The tiny urs laughed, mimicking Rety’s own nervous giggle. She hoped Cambel didn’t recognize the similarity.
The sage nodded, gravely. “No, I suppose not. Unless someone gets you angry, my friend, which I’ll strive not to do. So now, what’s this about a message at this time of night?”
yee did a little dance with his hooves and lifted both arms dramatically, “urgent time for talk-talk, look at dead birdie later! go Ur-Jah now. now!”
Rety feared his vehemence would rouse suspicion. But the balding human put down his tools at once and stood up. “Well then, let’s go.”
Rety’s hopes soared, then sank as Cambel lifted the bird with both hands.
No! Put it down!
As if prodded by her tense mental urging, the sage paused, shook his head, and put the machine back, picking up his notebook instead.
“Lay on, Macduff,” he said to yee, motioning with a sweep of one arm.
“great sage says what?” the small urs tilted his head.
“I said… oh, never mind. An obscure allusion. Guess I’m just tired. Shall I carry you, sir?”
“no! yee lead wise human, walk this way! this way!” and he scampered off eagerly, pausing impatiently and backtracking several times as the sage followed ploddingly behind.
When they both had vanished up the tunnel leading toward the main entrance, Rety wasted no time slithering down the crumbly, slanting limestone wall till she tumbled bottom-first onto the floor of the laboratory cave. She scrambled up and hurried to the table where her bird lay, headless as it had been ever since the fight with the alien robot.
Its breast lay spread open like a carcass at a feast, exposing innards like none Rety had ever seen, glittering like jewels. What did the stinker do, gut it like a herd chick? She fought to check her rage. Rann might not pay if the fools have ruined it by mucking inside!
She looked closer. The opening was too clean to have been hacked with a knife. In fact, when she hesitantly touched the bird’s ribcage, it seemed to roll smoothly around the line where it was still connected — like the hinged door she had seen on a big cabinet, and marveled at, while visiting the forayers’ medical tent.
I see. You just close it like… this.
She lifted the smaller section through an arc, till it swung shut with a decisive click.
Now Rety regretted her haste. There was no more chance to look closer at the little flashings inside. Oh, well. None of my biznis, anyway, she thought, and plucked up her prize. At least I don’t pretend I’m anythin’ but a sooner an’ a savage.
; Though not forever. Once I get off Jijo, I’ll learn. I’ll learn all right!
The bird was heavier than she recalled. Briefly, her heart felt full. She had her treasure back! She crammed the heavy bird-thing into her pouch, bypassing the books strewn across the table as she hurried off, following the same path yee and Lester Cambel had taken, an easy stand-up trail leading toward the outside world.
The way was lit by little lamps, hanging from a thin boo pipe stapled to the hall. Tiny flames flickered an eerie blue color, leaving wide pools of shadow in between. Dim light also spilled from several side chambers, now mostly empty of workers as it was nighttime outside. One cell, however, seemed to blaze with bulky lanterns. Before tiptoeing past, Rety warily eyed two human occupants — who were luckily turned away, murmuring with low voices. Drawings of the star-gods, their aircraft, and other tools lay tacked on a dozen or so easels. The cube-shaped station — which Rety had never seen unburied — lay revealed in fine detail, more grand than some shattered Buyur site. Yet it seemed minute next to the monstrous tube depicted on the next sketch, floating above the forest.
My starship, she mused, though cowed by the thought of boarding the huge vessel when it returned for the forayers. She must remember to hold her chin up that day and show no fear.
The artists had caught Rann’s distant amused gaze, and Kunn’s sharp hunter’s glare as he adjusted the claw arm of a hovering robot. The pale intensity of Besh balanced Ling’s dusky half-cynical expression. Rety knew they were only drawings, like the ones some old grandpas used to scratch on a cliff overlooking the wintering cave, back in the Gray Hills. Still, the lifelike accuracy seemed spooky and magical. The Slopies are studying the star-men. What could it mean?
Rety almost tripped in her haste to get away. Whatever they’re planning, it won’t come to much. She set her mind back to getting out of this place and making the rendezvous, in time.
The mustiness began to lift and the harsh echoes softened. Soon she heard voices ahead… Lester Cambel trading words with a second human. Rety tiptoed to the next bend and peered around. The human sage could be seen talking to the cave guard, who looked down at yee with a chagrined expression.
