Brightness Reef u-4

by David Brin

  Time passed. We fell into a rhythmic routine. I pushed, Huck steered, Ur-ronn aimed the headlights, and Pincer was pilot. Pretty soon, it began to feel like we were old hands at this.

  Huck asked — “What were you saying, Pincer, just before we landed? Something you saw?”

  “Sonething with lots of teeth, I vet!” Ur-ronn teased. “Isn’t this just avout when we’re suffosed to see nonsters?”

  Monsters, I thought. My umble annexed a laugh-quaver.

  Pincer took the teasing well. “Give it time, chums. You never can tell when… there! Over to the left; that’s what I saw before!”

  The Dream listed a bit as Huck and Ur-ronn leaned forward to look, causing the rear wheels to lose half their traction. “Hey!” I complained.

  “Well, I be despoked—” Huck murmured.

  “And I vee drenched,” Ur-ronn added.

  All right, so I whined a bit — “Come on, you grass-fed bunch of sour-mulching—”

  Just then the ground slanted a bit more, and my narrow tunnel view finally swept across the scene they’d all been staring at.

  “Hr-rm-rm!” I exclaimed. “So that’s what got you all stirred up? A bunch of dross coffins?”

  They lay scattered across the ocean floor, canted at all angles, many half buried in the mud. Scores of them. Mostly oblong and rectangular, though a few were barrel-shaped. Naturally, all traces had vanished of the ribbons that once bedecked them, honoring the bones or spindles or worn-out tools cast off by some earlier generation of sooners.

  “But dross ships never come into the Rift,” Huck complained, pushing two stalks toward my face. “Ain’t that right, Alvin?”

  I twisted to peer past her damn floating eyes.

  “They don’t. Still, the Rift is officially part of the Midden. Another section of the same down-sucking whatsit.”

  “A tectonic suvduction zone,” Ur-ronn put in.

  “Yeah, thanks. So it’s a perfectly legal place to dump dross.”

  “But if no ships come, how did it get here?”

  I was trying to make out which kinds of coffins were present and which were missing. That could help pin down when the spill had been made. There were no human-style chests or urrish reed baskets, which wasn’t surprising. So far I’d only seen g’Kek and qheuenish work, which could make the site pretty darn old.

  “The cartons arrived the same way we did, Huck,” I explained. “Somebody dumped them off the cliff at Terminus Rock.”

  Huck gasped. She started to speak, then paused, and I could almost hear wheels turning in her head. Dumping from land just isn’t done. But she must have already reasoned that this place was an acceptable exception. If a portion of the Midden really did pass right underneath Terminus Rock, and assuming there must have once been settlements nearby, this would have been a cheaper way of burying Grandpa than sending his coffin out to sea by boat.

  “But then how did the boxes get so far from land? We’ve come cables and cables by now.”

  “Tides, mudslides,” Pincer answered. But I rumbled I negation.

  “You forget how the Midden’s supposed to work. It sucks stuff in, isn’t that right, Ur-ronn?”

  Ur-ronn whistled despair over my insistent oversimplifying. She motioned with two hands. “One tectonic flate slides under the other, you see, creating a trench and drawing old sea floor along with it.”

  “To be dragged underground, melted, and renewed, pushing underneath the Slope and making volcanoes. Yeah, I get it.” Huck turned all four stalks forward, pensively. “Hundreds of years since these were dumped, and the dross has only come this far from where it fell?”

  Only few seconds ago, she had been amazed by how great a distance the crates had come from the cliff! I guess it goes to show how different time can seem, when you shift from the perspective of a person’s lifetime to the life cycles of a world. In comparison, I don’t suppose humans have much to brag about, living twice as long as urs. We’re all bound for Jijo’s slow digestion soon enough, whether or not alien invaders leave us alone.

  Pincer and Ur-ronn consulted their maps, and shortly we were under way again, leaving that boneyard where another generation of sinners made their slow way toward pardon in melted stone.

  About half a midura later, with a sense of great relief, we found Uriel’s “jack.”

  By that time my arms and legs ached from row-boating the crank handle at least a couple of thousand times, responding to Pincer’s insistent commands of “speed up!” or “slow down!” or “can’t you go any faster?” Of the four of us, he alone seemed to be enjoying himself, without any qualms or physical ague.

  We hoon elect our captains, then obey without question while any sort of emergency is going on — and this whole voyage qualified in my mind as a screaming emergency — so I tucked away any resentment for later, when I pictured getting even with Pincer in many colorful ways. Maybe the gang’s next project should be a hot-air balloon. Make him the first qheuen to fly since they gave up starships. It’d serve him right.

  By the time Huck finally yelled “Eureka!” my poor muscles and pivots felt as if we’d covered the entire width of the Rift, and then some. My first relieved thought was — No wonder Uriel provided so much hawser and hose!

  Only after that did I wonder — How did she know where to tell us to look for this jeekee thing?

  It stood half buried in the mud, about twelve cables south of where we first touched down. Judging from the portion that was visible from my “vantage point” way in back, it consisted of long spikes, each pointed outward in a different direction, as if aimed toward the six faces of a cube. Each spike had a big knob at the end, hollow I guessed, to prevent sinking in the muck. It was obviously meant to be found, being colored a garish swirl of reds and blues. Red to really stand out at short range, since the color’s almost totally absent underwater, and blue to be visible from farther away, if your beam happened to sweep across it in the deep darkness. Even so, you had to be within less than a cable to see the thing, so we’d never have come across it without Uriel’s instructions. Still, it took two search spirals before we stumbled on the jack.

  It was the strangest thing any of us had ever encountered. And don’t forget, I’ve heard a g’Kek umble and witnessed a traeki vlen.

  “Is it Buyur-uyur?” Pincer asked, superstitious awe invading his voice vents, along with a returned stammer.

  “I bet a pile of donkey mulch that’s not Buyur-made,” Huck said. “What do you think, Ur-ronn?”

  Our urs pal stretched her neck past Pincer, her muzzle drying a patch of the bubble window. “No way the Vuyur would’ve vuilt anything so frightful-ghastly,” she agreed. “It’s not their style.”

  “Of course it’s not their style,” Huck continued. “But I know whose it is.”

  We all stared at her. Naturally, she milked the moment, pausing till we were on the verge of pummeling her.

  “It’s urrish,” she concluded with a tone of smug conviction.

  “Urrish!” Pincer hissed. “How can you be so—”

  “Exflain,” Ur-ronn demanded, snaking her head to peer at Huck. “This ovject is sophisticated. Uriel could forge nothing like it. Not even Earthlings have such craft.”

  “Exactly! It’s not Buyur, and no one currently living on the Slope could make it. That leaves just one possibility. It must have been left here by an original sooner star-ship, when one of the Six Races — seven if you include glavers — first arrived on Jijo, before the settlers scuttled their craft and joined the rest of us as primitives. But which one left it? I’d eliminate us g’Keks on account of we’ve been here so long that I’ll bet the jack would’ve moved a lot farther into the Rift by now. The same probably holds for glavers, qheuens, and traeki.

  “Anyway, the clincher is that Uriel knew exactly where to find it!”

  Fur riffled around the rim of Ur-ronn’s nostril. Her voice turned colder than the surrounding ocean. “You suggest a conspiracy.”

  g’Kek stalks tw
ined, a shrug.

  “Not a horribly vile one,” Huck assured. “Maybe just a sensible precaution.

  “Think about it, mates. Say you’ve come to plant a sooner colony on a forbidden world. You must get rid of anything that’d show on a casual scan by some Institute surveyor, so your ship and complex gear have to go. Nearby space is no good. That’s the first place cops’d check. So you sink it amid all the stuff the Buyur dumped when they left Jijo. Sounds good so far.

  “But then you ask yourself — what if an unforeseen emergency crops up? What if someday your descendants need something high-tech to help ’em survive?”

  Ur-ronn lowered her conical head. In the dimness I could not tell if it denoted worry or rising anger. I hurried to cut in.

  “Hr-rm. You imply a long view of things. A secret kept for generations.”

  “For centuries,” Huck agreed. “Uriel no doubt was told by her master, and so on back to the first urrish ancestors. And before Ur-ronn snaps one of my heads off, let me rush to add that the urs sages showed great restraint over the years, never seeking to use this cache during their wars with qheuens, then humans, even when they were getting their tails whipped.”

  That was meant to calm Ur-ronn? I rushed to save Huck from mutilation. “Perhaps — hrm — humans and qheuens had their own caches, so there was a standoff.” Then my own words sank in. “Maybe those caches are being sought now, while we serve as Uriel’s dipping claw, in search of this one.”

  There was a long silence.

  Then Pincer spoke.

  “Sheesh-eesh-eesh. Those aliens up at the Glade must really have the grown-ups spooked.”

  Another pause, then Huck resumed. “That’s what I’m hoping all of this is about. The aliens. A mutual effort of the Six, pooling resources, and not something else.”

  Ur-ronn’s neck twisted nervously. “What do you nean?”

  “I mean, I’d have liked Uriel’s word of honor that we’re down here seeking powers for the defense of all the Commons.”

  Not simply to arm urrish militia, in some of the grudge fights we’ve heard rumors about, I thought, finishing Huck’s implication. There was a tense moment when I could not predict what would happen next. Had tension, worry, and Tyug’s drugs strung our urrish friend to the point where Huck’s baiting would make her snap?

  Ur-ronn’s neck slowly untwisted. An effort of will, I saw by the dim light of the phosphors. “You have…” she began, breathing heavily. “You have the oath of this urs, that it will ve so.”

  And she repeated the vow in Galactic Two, following it with a laborious effort to spit on the floor, not an easy act for one of her kind. A sign of sincerity.

  “Hr-rm, well, that’s great,” I said, umbling for peace. “Not that any of us ever thought any different. Right, Huck? Pincer?”

  Both of them hurried to agree, and some of the tension passed. Underneath, however, seeds of worry had been laid. Huck, I thought, you’d bring a jar full of scorpions in a lifeboat, then drop it just to see who swims the best.

  We got under way again and soon were near enough to see how big the jack really was. Each of the bulbous balloonlike things at its spiky tips was larger than Wuphon’s Dream. “There’s one of the cables Uriel talked about,” Pincer announced, waving a claw toward one spike, from which a glossy black strand made a relatively straight line, though buried in places, aimed north, in the direction we had come.

  “I bet anything that line’s broken somewhere tween here and the cliffs,” Huck ventured. “Prob’ly used to go all the way to some secret cleft or cave near Terminus Rock. From there the cache might’ve been hauled in without an urs ever having to get her hooves wet. That end point may’ve gotten cut in an avalanche or quake, like the one that killed my folks. This jack thing is a backup, so the cord can be picked up again, even if the first end point is lost.”

  “Good thinking. It does explain one thing that had me puzzled — why Uriel had so much equipment on hand. Stuff that proved so useful for diving. In fact, it makes me wonder why she needed us at all. Why didn’t she have a hidden bathy of her own in the first place?”

  Ur-ronn was getting over her funk. “A g’Kek accountant inventories the forge warehouse regularly. He’d notice anything as un-urrish as a suvnarine, just lying around, ready to ve used.”

  Her voice was sarcastic. Yet Huck agreed.

  “The difficult parts were there, the pumps and valves and gaskets. I’m sure Uriel and her predecessors figured they could whip up a hull and the rest in a matter of months. Who ever expected an emergency to strike so quick? Besides, we bunch of crazy kids offered a perfect cover story. No one will associate us with god-caches from the Galactic past.”

  “I prefer to think,” Pincer interjected, with a dramatically miffed tone of voice, “that the real reason Uriel begged pretty-please to be allowed to join our team was the superior design and craftsmanship of our ship-hip.”

  We quit bickering to stare at him for a moment — then laughter filled the tiny cabin, making the hull vibrate and waking Huphu from her nap.

  The four of us felt better then, ready to get on with the mission. The hard part was over, it appeared. All we had to do now was order Ziz to attach a clamp to the cord on the jack’s other side and signal Uriel to haul away. There would then be a long wait while we slowly rose up toward the surface, since g’Keks and urs are even more likely than humans to get the bends if air pressure changes too rapidly. From books we knew it’s an awful way to die, so a tedious ascent was an accepted necessity. We had all packed snacks, as well as personal articles to help pass the time.

  Still, I was anxious to get on with it. Claustrophobia was nothing compared with the ordeal that would commence when everyone onboard — each in his or her unique way — started feeling the need to go, as some Earthling books politely put it, “to the bathroom.”

  There would be, it seemed, one slight difficulty in clamping on to the second cord.

  We saw the problem at once, upon rolling around to look at the Jack’s other side.

  The second cord was missing.

  Or rather, it had been cut. Fresh-looking metal fibers waved gently in the subsea currents, hanging like an unbraided urrish tail from one of the jack’s spiky ends.

  Nor was that all. When Ur-ronn cast our beams across the ocean floor, we saw a wavy trail in the mud, meandering south, in which direction the cord apparently had been dragged. None of us knew how to tell if this was done days, or jaduras, or years ago. But the word recent came to mind. No one had to say it aloud.

  Electric sparks flashed as Ur-ronn reported the situation to those waiting in the world of air and light. Surprise was evident in a long delay. Then an answer came back down, crackling pulses across the tiny spark gap.

  If in good health, follow trail for two cables, then report.

  Huck muttered. “As if we’ve got any choice, with Uriel controlling the winch. Like a little case of narcosis or the cramp-jitters would make a difference to her?”

  This time, Ur-ronn didn’t turn around, but both tails switched Huck’s torso sharply, just below the neckline.

  “Ahead one half, Alvin,” Pincer commanded. With a sigh, I bent over to begin again.

  So we set forth, keeping one beam focused on the snake-trail through the mud, while Ur-ronn cast the other searchlight left and right, up and down. Not that seeing a threat in advance would give us any kind of useful warning. There was never a vessel as unarmed, slow, and helpless as Wuphon’s Dream. That severed cord we had seen — it had been made by beings using Galactic technology, intended to survive millennia underwater and still retain immense strength. Whatever had sliced it apart wasn’t anything I wanted to make angry.

  A deeper, more solemn mood filled the cabin as we crept onward. After cranking for more than a midura against the ever-changing traction of slippery muck, my arms and back were starting to feel the stinging tingle of second-stage fatigue. I was too tired to umble. Behind me, Huphu expressed her boredom by rummaging thr
ough my backpack, tearing open a package of pish fish sandwiches, nibbling part of it and scattering the rest through the bilge. Splashing noises and a wet tickling on my toe-pads told of water accumulating down there — whether.from excess humidity, or some slow leak, or our own disgusting wastes, I didn’t care to guess. The aroma inside was starting to get both complex and pretty damn ripe. I was fighting another onset of confinement dread when Pincer let out a shrill yell.

  “Alvin, stop! Back up! I mean engines back full!”

  I wish I could report that I saw what caused this outburst, but my view was blocked by frenzied silhouettes. Besides, I had my hands full fighting the momentum of the crank, which seemed determined to keep turning in the same direction despite me, driving the wheels ever forward. I held the wooden rods in a strangle grip and heaved with all my might, feeling something pop in my spine. Finally, I managed to slow the axles, then at last bring them to a stop. But for all my grunting effort, I could not make them turn the other way.

  “I’m getting a list!” Huck announced. “Tilting forward and to port.”

  “I didn’t see it coming!” Pincer cried out. “We were climbing a little hill, then it just came out of nowhere, I swear!”

  Now I could feel the tilt. The Dream was definitely tipping forward even as Huck frantically pumped ballast aft. The eik beams seemed to flail around the darkness up ahead, offering an unsettling view of yawning emptiness where before there had been a gently sloping plain.

  I finally managed to get the crank turning backward, but any sense of victory was short-lived. One of the magnetic clutches — attached to a wheel salvaged from Huck’s aunt, I believe — gave way. The remaining roller bit hard into the mud, with the effect of abruptly slewing us sideways.

  The beams now swung along the lip of the precipice we were poised upon. Apparently, what we had thought was the main floor of the Rift had been but a shelf along the outskirts of the actual trench. The true gash now gaped, ready to receive us, as it had received so many other things that would never again partake in affairs up where stars glittered bright.