by Brin, David
At eleven and a half cables, a sudden chill swept the cabin, causing fog briefly to form. Every hard surface abruptly went damp and Huck cranked up the dehumidifier. I reached out to touch the garuwood hull, which seemed markedly cooler. Wuphon's Dream turned and tilted slightly, facing a new tug, no longer the same languid downward drift. From soundings, we had known to expect a transition to a deep frigid current. Still, it was unnerving.
"Adjusting ballast for trim," Huck announced. Closest to dead center, she used Uriel's clever pumps to shift water among three tanks till the spirit levels showed an even keel. That would be vital on reaching bottom, lest we topple over at the very moment of making history.
I thought about what we were doing. In Galactic terms, it was consummately primitive, of course. Earth history makes for much more flattering comparisons- which may be one reason we four find it so attractive. For instance, when Jules Verne was writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, no human had ever gone as far down into the oceans of Terra as we were heading today. We savages of Jijo.
Huck shouted-"Look! Is that something down below?"
Those eyes of hers. Even peering past Pincer and Ur-ronn, she had glimpsed bottom first. Ur-ronn turned the eik beams and soon the three of them were back at it again, driving me crazy with oohs, ahs, and k-k-k-k wonderment clicks. In frustration I turned the crank, making the rear wheels thrash till they yelled at me to quit, and agreed to describe what they saw.
"There's a wavy kind of plant," Pincer said, his voice no longer stuttering. "And another kind that's all thin and skinny. Don't know how they live, with no light getting down here. There's lots of that kind, sort of waving about. And there are snaky trails in the mud, and some kind of weird fishes dodging in and out of the skinny plants. ..."
After a bit more of that, I would've gladly gone back to wonderment clicks. But I kept quiet.
"... And there are some kurtle crabs-bright red and bigger than any I ever seen before! And what's that, Ur-ronn, a mudworm? You think so? What a mud-worm! . . . Hey, what's that thing? Is that a dro-"
Ur-ronn interrupted, "Half a cavle to bottom. Signaling the surface crew to slow descent."
Sharp electric sparks broke the cabin's darkness as she touched a contact key, sending coded impulses from our battery up an insulated strand, woven through the hawser. It took a few duras for the rumbling grumble of the deploying drums to change pitch as the brakes dug in. Wuphon's Dream jerked, giving us all a start. Huphu's claws raked my shoulder.
The descent slowed. It was specially agonizing for me, not knowing how much farther bottom lay, when we'd make contact, or with how much force. Naturally, nobody was confiding in good old Alvin!
"Hey, fellas," Pincer resumed, "I think I just saw-"
"Adjusting trim!" Huck announced, peering with one eye at each of the spirit levels.
"Refocusing the lights," Ur-ronn added. "Ziz shows one yellow tentacle to starvoard. Current flowing that direction, five knots."
Pincer murmured-"Fellas? I thought I just saw . . . oh, never mind. Bottom appears to slope left, maybe twenty degrees."
"Turning forward wheels to compensate," Huck responded. "Alvin, we may want a slow rearward crank on the driver wheels."
That jerked me out of any resentful mood. "Aye-aye," I said, turning the zigzag bar in front of me, causing the rear set of wheels to rotate. At least I hoped they were responding. We wouldn't know for sure till we hit the ground.
"Here it comes," Huck announced. And then, apparently recollecting her missed estimates during the trial run, she added-"This time for sure. Brace yourselves!"
When I write about all this someday from these notes, perhaps I'll describe sudden billows of mud as we plowed into the ocean floor, gouging a long furrow, sending vegetation tumbling and blind subsea creatures fleeing in panic. Maybe I'll throw in fierce saltwater spray from a blown seal or two, tightened frantically by the heroic crew, in the nick of time.
What I probably won't admit in print is that I couldn't even tell the exact moment when our wheels touched down. The event was, well, more than a bit murky. Like sinking a probe fork into the rind of a shuro fruit and not being quite sure whether you've speared the core nut yet.
"Murky" also described the scene around us as slime-swirls spiraled, slowly settling to reveal a dead-black world, except down twin corridors of dazzling blue cast by the eiks. What I could see of those narrow tunnels snowed a slanting plain of mud, broken here and there by pale slim-stemmed "plants" that needed no sunlight to thrive, though I couldn't begin to guess what else they lived on. Their leaves or fronds seemed to wave back and forth, as if in a breeze. No animal life moved in our beams, which wasn't that surprising. Wouldn't we top-dwellers hide if some weird vessel plunged into our midst from above, casting forth both noise and a searing gaze?
Forcing the comparison, I wondered if any suboceanic locals thought their judgment day had just come.
With her telegraph key, Ur-ronn pulsed the message everyone above waited to hear. We are down, she sent. All is well.
Yes, it lacks the poetic imagery of flags planted, eagles landed, or infinitives boldly split. I shouldn't complain. Not all urs are born to recite epic sagas on demand. Still, I think I'll change it in rewrite-if I ever get the chance, which right now seems pretty unlikely.
Again, sparks jumped the tiny gap, this time without Ur-ronn touching it. A reply from above.
Welcome news. Proceed.
"Ready, Alvin?" Pincer called back. "All ahead, one quarter."
I responded-"Ahead one quarter, aye, Captain."
My back and arm muscles flexed. The crank seemed reluctant at first. Then I felt the magnetic clutch take hold-a strange sense of attachment to once-living g'Kek parts that I tried not thinking about. The special mud treads worked as I felt resistance. Wuphon's Dream shuddered forward.
I concentrated on maintaining a steady pace. Pincer shouted steering instructions at Huck while holding Uriel's map for reference. Ur-ronn correlated our bearing with her compass. The hawser and air hose resumed transmitting the distant rumble of deployer drums, unreeling more tether so we might wander ever farther from safety. The confined space resonated with my deep work umble, but no one complained. The sound wrapped itself around me till I felt encircled by hoonish shipmates, making the cramped confinement more bearable. Like a ship far at sea, we were all alone, dependent on Ifni's luck and our own resourcefulness to make it home again.
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, pushin
g 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 twined, 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 ner
vously. "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?"
