Brightness Reef u-4

by David Brin

  Abruptly, Taine’s aristocratic bearing broke as he cursed and slapped his neck, then peered at his hand, frowning in disappointment. Sara glanced at Bonner, who whispered, “Parrot ticks. Such annoyances. If one gets in your ear, Ifni help you. I heard everything double for a week, till Vorjin fished the damn thing out.”

  Ariana Foo made an emphatic throat-clearing sound,

  drawing their attention forward. “I’ve already explained to the others, Sara, my belief that your Stranger is a man from the stars. Further research illuminates the nature of his injuries.”

  Her chimp assistant passed out sheets of paper, streaked from hasty, hand-cranked photocopying, showing the stylized profile of a man’s head, with arrows and captions pointing to parts. Most of the words were gibberish to Sara, though Lark might have found them familiar.

  “I recalled reading about this once and was lucky enough to find the reference quickly. It seems that when our ancestors departed Earth, experiments had been taking place with the objective of creating direct connections between computers and living human brains.”

  Sara heard an awed hiss from somewhere in back. To many of the Six, the word computer carried superstitious power. The crews of every sneakship to reach Jijo had melted all their digital calculating engines, down to the very smallest, before sinking their star-cruisers in the depths of the Midden. No other possession had such potential for betraying illegal sapience on a forbidden world.

  Sara had read a few gaudy stories from Earth days, in which the author used mind-to-computer links in the narrative. She had always dismissed them as a metaphor, like legends of humans flying with feathers glued to their arms. But Ariana said the notion was once taken seriously.

  “This illustration shows some of the brain areas being proposed for neural-electronic junctions at the time our ancestors departed,” Ariana continued. “Research surely proceeded during the three hundred years since. In fact, it’s my belief that our Stranger possessed the product- an aperture which let him commune with computers and other devices, inset just above the left ear.”

  Now it was Sara’s turn to gasp. “Then his—”

  Ariana held up a hand. “It is a safe guess that his burns and lesser injuries resulted when his ship or flying craft crash-landed in the Eternal Swamp, not far from where Sara and her friends found him. Alas, his miraculous escape from fiery death was spoiled by one bit of bad luck, when the artificial connector attached to his head was violently ripped away, taking with it portions of his left temporal lobe.

  “I needn’t add, this is the portion of the human brain most closely identified with speech.”

  Sara could only blink. Through the glass, she saw the man Ariana referred to, eyes bright and interested, watching the g’Kek doctors prepare their apparatus.

  “I’d have thought such damage would kill him,” Bon-ner said, summarizing her own surprise.

  “Indeed, he seems to have made a remarkable recovery. Were he not adult and male, with a rigid synaptic structure, perhaps he might have roused speech from the semidormant right temporal lobe, as some children and women do, after suffering damage to the left side. As things stand, there remains one possib—” She paused, noticing a waving of eyestalks in the next room.

  “Well, I see our good doctors are ready, so let’s proceed.”

  Ariana opened a listening vent under the nearest pane of glass. At almost the same moment, Sara felt a sudden sharp pain on her thigh, and Taine slapped his neck again. “Damn pests!” he muttered, and glanced sideways at Sara. “Things have been going to hell in more ways than one around here.”

  Good old, cheerful Taine, she thought, quashing an urge to brush at her own neck. Parrot ticks were generally harmless-another mysterious vestige of Buyur times. Who would ever want the “symbiosis” of a creature who attached itself to one of your veins and repaid you by reiterating every sound you heard? The Buyur must have been strange beings indeed.

  In the next room, one of the g’Kek doctors opened a large album whose thick sleeves held several dozen slim black disks. The physician delicately removed one and •laid it on a round platform which began to spin.

  “An elenentary sfring action device,” Ulgor explained. “Easily constructed fron scraf netal and slices of voo.”

  “A primitive but effective analog storage and retrieval system,” Taine elucidated.

  “Safely nondigital,” Bonner added.

  “Yesss,” the blue qheuen, Blade, hissed in agreement. “And I hear it plays music. Sort of.”

  The g’Kek doctor gently lowered a wooden armature until a slender stylus touched the rim of the spinning disk. Almost at once, low strains of melody began crooning from the machine’s hornlike speaker. A strange tinny melody — accompanied by faint crackling pops — which seemed to tickle the roots of Sara’s hair.

  “These disks are originals,” Ariana Foo said, “pressed by the Tabernacle colonists at the same time as the Great Printing. Nowadays, only a few experts play them. Earthly musical forms aren’t popular in the modern Commons, but I’m betting our Stranger won’t agree.”

  Sara had heard of the disk-playing device. It seemed bizarre to listen to music with no living performer involved. Almost as bizarre as the music itself, which sounded unlike anything she had heard. Sara quickly recognized some instruments — violins, drums, and horns-which was natural, since string and wind instruments had been introduced to Jijo by Earthlings. But the arrangement of notes was strange, and Sara soon realized — what seemed most eerie was its orderliness.

  A modern Jijoan sextet involved the blending of six solo performers, each spontaneously merging with the others. Half the excitement came from waiting for unpredictable, felicitous blendings of harmony, emerging and then vanishing once more, much like life itself. No two performances were ever the same.

  But this is purely human music. Complex chords coiled and gyred in sequences that reiterated with utter disciplined precision. As in science, the point is to make something repeatable, verifiable.

  She glanced at the others. Ulgor seemed fascinated, twitching her left hand-cluster — the one used for fingering notes on a violus. Blade rocked his heavy carapace in bewilderment, while young Jomah, sitting next to his stolid uncle, seemed twitchy with confused ennui.

  Although she’d never heard its like, something felt ineffably familiar about the orderly sweep and flow of harmony. The notes were like… integers, the phrases like geometric figures.

  What better evidence that music can be like mathematics?

  The Stranger was reacting, as well. He sat forward, flushed, with clear recognition in his squinting eyes. Sara felt a wave of concern. Too much more emotional turbulence might push the poor exhausted man past his limit.

  “Ariana, is all of this going somewhere?” she asked.

  “In a minute, Sara.” The sage held up her hand once more. “That was just the overture. Here comes the part we’re interested in.”

  How does she know? Sara wondered. Apparently, the breadth of Ariana’s eclectic knowledge stretched even to obscure ancient arts.

  Sure enough, in moments the instrumental arrangement crescendoed and paused. Then a new element joined in — the unmistakable twang of human voices. After missing the first few stanzas, Sara bent forward, concentrating to make out queerly accented words.

  For today our pirate ’prentice

  rises from indenture freed,

  Strong his arm and keen his scent is,

  he’s a pirate now indeed.

  The effect on the Stranger was profound. He stood up, trembling. The emotion spilling across his face was not simply recognition, but joyful surprise.

  Then — to his own clear amazement as much as Sara’s — he opened his mouth and sang along!

  Pour, oh pour, the pirate sherry,

  fill, oh fill, the pirate glass.

  And to make us more than merry,

  let the pirate bumper pass!

  Sara stood up, too, staring in astonishment. From Ari
ana Foo came a shout of satisfaction.

  “Aha! A hit with the very first try! Even with the cultural cue, I expected to work through many before finding one he knew.”

  “But his injury!” objected Taine. “I thought you said—”

  “Quite right,” Bonner cut in. “If he can’t speak, how can he sing?”

  “Oh, that.” Ariana dismissed the miracle with a wave. “Different functions. Different parts of the brain. There are precedents in the medical references. I’m told it’s even been observed here on Jijo, once or twice.

  “No, what startles me is the cultural persistence this experiment demonstrates. It’s been three hundred years. I’d have thought by now Galactic influences would overwhelm all native Earthly—” The old woman paused, as if realizing she was running off on a tangent. “Well, never mind that. Right now what matters is that our off-planet visitor seems to have found a way to communicate, after all.”

  Even in the dimness, Ariana’s smile was broad and anything but humble.

  Sara laid her hand on the glass, feeling its cool slickness vibrate to the music in the next room, which had passed on to a new song. The cadence slowed and melody changed, though apparently not the topic.

  She closed her eyes and listened as the Stranger plunged ahead with throaty joy, outracing the recording in his eagerness to be heard at last.

  Away to the cheating world go you,

  where pirates all are well-to-do.

  But I’ll be true to the song I sing…

  and live and die a Pi-i-rate King!

  XIX. THE BOOK OF THE SEA

  Scrolls

  Of galaxies, it is said, there were once seventeen, linked and bound together, by tubes of focused time.

  One by one, those frail tubes snapped, sundered as the universe stretched its aging seams. Of galaxies, the Progenitors knew eleven.

  Six more have parted ways, in the ages since, stranding distant cousins to unknown fates. Of galaxies, our immediate ancestors knew five.

  What if it should happen once again, while we seek redemption in this fallow spiral?

  Will anyone come down to claim us, once our innocence is restored?

  In our own sky, of Galaxies we see but one.

  —The Scroll of Possibilities

  Alvin’s Tale

  I don’t wish to dwell too much on my own role in what came next. Let’s just say that as a young male hoon, I seemed best suited to dangle at the end of the redeployed hawser, sitting in a makeshift sling while the crew lowered me toward the dark blue waters of the Rift.

  After dropping below the edge, all I could see of the others were a few hoon and urrish faces, plus a pair of g’Kek eyestalks, peering down at me. Then even those blended into the rocks and I was alone, dangling like bait on a hooked line. I tried not to look at the long drop below, but soon a gusting wind set the hawser swaying, reminding me of the slender support overhead.

  During the lonely descent I had time to ask myself — “What the heck am I doing here?”

  It became a kind of mantra. (If I recall that word right, since it’s not in the dictionary I have with me in this cold, hard place.) Repeated often enough, the phrase soon lost some of its horrid fascination, instead taking on a queerly pleasant cadence. By the halfway point, I was umbling—

  “What the heck. I am doing. Here!”

  In other words, a deed is being done, and I’m the one doing it, so why not do it right? An Anglic way of phrasing a very hoonish thought.

  Anyway, I guess I did a good job of convincing myself, ’cause I didn’t panic when they overshot at the end. My furry legs got well dunked before the brakes firmed and the tether stopped jouncing. It took a moment to gather breath and start umbling at Huphu, calling her to swim over from Wuphon’s Dream, almost an arrowflight away. Haste was vital, since the bathy was slowly drifting out from the placid water under Terminus Rock. Soon she’d hit the Rift Current, and we might never see her again.

  This time Huphu didn’t make me wait. She dove in and swam toward me like a little black dartfish, clearly not badly harmed by her plummet off the bluff.

  What’s that sick joke they tell about noors? If you ever have to kill one, it will take a quart of traeki poison, a qheuen’s claw, a human’s arrow, and a rack of urrish insults. That assumes a hoon first distracts the beast with a first-class umble, and even so, it’s best to have a g’Kek roll back and forth over the corpse a few times, just to be sure.

  All right, it’s juvenile humor, but also respectful in a way. I couldn’t help spine-laughing over it while waiting for our indestructible Huphu. Finally, she clambered up my leg and into my arms, wallowing in my happy umble. I sensed she was still frightened, since for once she made no effort to pretend nonchalance or to hide her happiness to see me.

  Still, time was short. Soon as I could, I slipped a harness of tough cord over Huphu’s shoulders and urged her back down to the sea.

  Urdonnol’s plan seemed a good one… that is, if Huphu understood my instructions… if the Dream hadn’t already drifted beyond reach… if Huphu managed to hook the cable’s end onto the bathy’s grommet fixture… if the subtraeki, Ziz, could hold on awhile longer in its hugely distended form, bearing up the weight of all that dangling metal… if the re-spliced hawser would bear the burden when the crew above hauled away…

  There were so many ifs. Is this why Earthlings chose to call their goddess of luck and chance Ifni? Her capricious whims sure do swing back and forth. As on that day, when she first cursed our enterprise with calamity, then tossed her dice again the other way. Throughout the following tense midura, we all worried and wondered what her next clattering roll would bring-till at last Huphu and I stood atop the cliff together, dripping beside the beautiful flank of Wuphon’s Dream, staring in amazement as Tyug carefully deflated and tended Ziz. Meanwhile, Pincer and Huck rolled round and round the bathy, inspecting nervously for damage, and Ur-ronn supervised the crew hauling in the rest of the dangling cable.

  Finally, the two severed ends lay side by side on the stony mesa, burned, frayed, and torn.

  “This will not haffen again!” I overheard our urrish friend mutter. It was in that tone of voice an urs uses when she makes a prediction, a vow, and means she’ll rip the neck off anyone who tries to make a liar out of her.

  The next day Uriel returned, galloping into camp accompanied by armed assistants and a retinue of pack donkeys. With her came messages that had arrived by semaphore-and-runner relay from the far north, which she read aloud that evening, with the Dandelion Cluster as a shimmering backdrop above the glistening Rift. Wearing the robes of a lesser sage, the smith summarized what had occurred at Gathering — the coming not just of starships but star-criminals. Beings capable of bringing an end to the Great Peace, the Commons, and perhaps every member of the Six.

  I couldn’t see Huck’s reaction when Uriel told in passing that the g’Kek race was now extinct among the stars, their last survivors reduced to savages, wheeling primitive tracks in the dust of Jijo. My tunnel of attention was still centered on other startling news.

  The forayers were humans!

  Everyone knows Earthlings weren’t much more than animals in the eyes of the Galactic god-clans, only three hundred years ago. So what were mere humans doing, trying to pull a complicated theft across such distances?

  Then I realized, since Uriel was addressing us in formal GalTwo, I’d been thinking in that tongue, seeing events the way a Galactic would. Things looked quite different when I rephrased the question in Anglic.

  Three hundred years? That’s an eternity! In that time humans moved from sailboats to their first starships. By now, who knows? Maybe they own half the universe!

  All right, I’ve probably read way too much stuff by Doc Smith and “Star-Smasher” Feng. But while most folks on the bluff that night expressed shock that wise, cultured human beings could ever do such things, I knew an inner truth about them. One that weaves through Earthling literature like a never-absent umble tone. />
  As long as their race survives, some among them will be wolves.

  It amazed us all when Uriel said the project would continue.

  Amid talk of militia call-ups, emergency camouflage repairs, and possibly having to fight for our lives against overwhelming power, I expected the smith to order us all back to Wuphon and Mount Guenn at once, putting our backs to labor for the common good. So we stared when instead she acted as if this were important, this silly diving expedition of ours.

  I even said so to her face.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked the next day as Uriel oversaw resplicing the hawser and air hose. “Don’t you have urgent things to worry about?”

  Her neck stretched upward, lifting the center, pupil-less eye almost even with my own.

  “And what would you have us do instead? Turn out weafons? Convert our forge into a factory of death?” Her single nostril flared, revealing the twisty membranes that lock in moisture, making urrish breath as dry as wind off the Plain of Sharp Sand.

  “We urs know death well, young Hph-wayuo. It scales our legs and dries our husvand fouches all too soon. Or else we hurry it along with fights and feuds, as if glory could ever requite our haste to die. A great nany urs look fondly on those days when Earthlings were our finest foes, when heroes roared across the frairie, wheeling and charging recklessly.

  “I, too, feel that call. And like others, I resist. This is an age for another kind of hero, young fellow. A warrior who thinks.”

  Then she turned back to her labors, directing workers with severe attention to detail. Her response left me confused, unsatisfied… but also, in some way I could not quite fathom, just a bit more proud than I had been before.

  It took two days to complete the overhaul and triple-check all systems. By that time, the mass of onlookers had changed. Many of the originals had hurried home on hearing Uriel’s news. Some had militia duties, or were eager to perform destructive sacraments prescribed by the oldest scrolls. Others rushed back to save their property against premature dressing by the devout, or simply to be with loved ones during the expected last of days.