Brightness Reef

by David Brin

  The Stranger sat near Ariana Foo's wheelchair, surrounded by volumes bearing bright colors and simple text, printed in large friendly type. Though his face was haggard, the tall dark man resignedly accepted yet another book and ran his hand over the dots, slashes, and bars of a GalTwo teaching rhyme-a primer meant for young urrish middlings. Sara was unsurprised when his lips pursed and his tongue clicked as he worked across the page, laboriously. His eyes recognized the symbols, but clearly, no sense was being made of the sentence-phrase itself.

  It had been the same with books in GalSix, Anglic, and GalSeven, tearing Sara's heart to see his frustration turn into torment. Perhaps only now was the injured man coming to know fully what had been ripped away from him. What he had forever lost.

  Ariana Foo, on the other hand, seemed eminently satisfied. She beamed at Sara. "This is no rube from the outer hamlets," the old woman ruled. "He was an educated person, familiar with every language currently in use among the Six. If we have time, we must take him to the Linguistics Wing and try some of the forgotten dialects! Galactic Twelve would clinch it. Only three scholars on Jijo know any of it today."

  "What's the point?" Sara asked. "You've made your case. Why not let him be?"

  "In a minute, dear. One or two more, then we'll be off. I've saved the best for last."

  Two library staff members watched nervously as Ariana reached over to a stack of books by her side. Some were priceless, with rings set in their spines where chains normally kept them locked to their shelves. The archivists clearly did not like seeing them pawed by a speechless barbarian.

  Unwilling to watch, Sara turned away.

  The rest of the Children's Wing was placid-and contained few children. Scholars, teachers, and traveling librarians from all six races came here to study, copy, or select books to borrow, carrying their precious cargo by cart, boat, or pack donkey to settlements throughout the Slope. Sara observed a red qheuen carefully gather some of the heavy, brass-bound albums required by her kind, assisted by two lorniks trained as assistants and page-turners. One lornik swatted at a polisher bee that was working its way across the cover of a book, rubbing its abdomen amorously across the jacket, buffing it to a fine sheen and erasing part of the title. No one knew what function the insectoids once served for the departed Buyur, but they were a damned nuisance nowadays.

  Sara saw others from every race, educators who refused to let a mere crisis interfere with the serious task of instructing the next generation. Beyond the qheuen, an elderly traeki selected volumes treated to resist the fluids emitted by new stacks of rings, too clumsy to control their secretions.

  A low moan brought Sara back around to see the Stranger holding before him a long, slim book so old, the colors had gone all dingy and gray. The man's dark features clouded with clashing emotions. Sara had no time to read the title, only to glimpse a skinny black feline figure on the cover, wearing a red-and-white-striped stovepipe hat. Then, to the librarians' gasping dismay, he clutched the volume tightly to his chest, rocking back and forth with eyes closed.

  "Something from his childhood, I'll warrant," Ariana Foo diagnosed, scribbling on her pad. "According to the indexes, this fable was widely popular among children in northwestern Earth civilization almost continuously for over three centuries, so we can tentatively localize his cultural origins. . . ."

  "How nice. Then you're finished?" Sara demanded, caustically.

  "Hm? Oh, yes, I suppose so. For now. Get him settled down will you, pet? Then bring him along. I'll be waiting in the main Listening Parlor." With that, Ariana nodded briskly to the chim assigned to push her chair, leaving Sara behind to deal with the upset Stranger.

  He was muttering to himself, as he did from time -to time, repeating the same short phrase, over and over. Something that wormed its way out, despite the damage to his brain. In this case, it was clearly nonsense, sparked by intense emotion.

  ". . . a wocket in my pocket . . ." he said again and again, chortling poignantly, ". . . a wocket in my pocket . . ."

  Gently, firmly, Sara managed to pry the ancient tome out of his trembling hands, returning the treasure to the disapproving librarians. With patience she encouraged the wounded man to stand, though his dark eyes were fogged with a kind of misery Sara found she could fathom. She, too, had lost someone precious to her.

  Only the one he was mourning was himself.

  Two g'Kek savants met them by the entrance to the Listening Parlor, physician researchers who had examined the Stranger soon after he arrived in Biblos. One now took him by the hand.

  "Sage Foo wishes you to attend her in the observing room, next door," the other one said. One eyestalk gestured toward an opening farther down the hall. When the Stranger looked at Sara questioningly, she gave him an encouraging nod. His trusting smile only made her feel wor.se.

  The observing room was dimly illuminated by light streaming in through two circular windows-exquisite slabs of spun glass, flawless except for the characteristic central stem-which looked into another chamber where the two g'Kek doctors could be seen seating the Stranger before a large box with a crank on one side and a trumpetlike horn rising from the other.

  "Come in, pet. And please close the door."

  It took several duras for Sara's eyes to adapt and see who sat with Ariana. By then it was too late to flee.

  The whole party from Tarek Town was present, along with two humans dressed in scholars' robes. Ulgor and Blade had reason to be here, of course. Blade had helped rescue the Stranger from the swamp, and Ulgor was an honorary delegate from Dolo Village. Even Jop had an official interest. But why were Jomah and Kurt the Exploser in the room? Whatever cryptic guild business brought them from Tarek, the old man and boy now watched the proceedings with the silent intensity that was a trademark of their family and craft.

  The human scholars turned toward her.

  Banner and Taine-the very persons she had hoped to avoid during this visit.

  Both men rose to their feet.

  Sara hesitated, then bowed at the waist. "Masters."

  "Dear Sara." Bonner sighed, leaning on his cane more than she recalled when she had last seen the balding topologist. "How we've missed you in these dusty halls."

  "As I've missed you, master," she replied, surprised how true it was. Perhaps in the numbness after Joshu's passing, she had closed off too many good memories as well as bad. The warmth of the old savant's hand on her arm recalled their many walks, discussing the arcane, endlessly fascinating habits of shapes, the sort that could be described with symbols but never seen by human eyes.

  "Please don't call me master anymore," he asked. "You are an adept now, or should be soon enough. Come, have a seat between us, like old times."

  A bit too much like old times, Sara realized, meeting the eyes of the other mathematician-sage. The tall, silver-haired algebraist seemed unchanged, still distant, enigmatic. Taine nodded and spoke her name, then sat again facing the windows. Typically, he had chosen the position farthest from the nonhumans in the room.

  Sage Taine's discomfort around the other septs was not rare. A minority felt that way in every race, a reaction deep-rooted in ancient drives. What mattered was how you dealt with it, and Taine was unfailingly polite to the urs or g'Kek teachers who came to consult him about the binomial theorem. Given the handicap, it was just as well the tall savant could live a scholar's cloistered life . . . like the one Sara herself had expected-

  --until a visiting bookbinder became an unlikely suitor, filling Sara's heart with unexpected possibilities.

  --until she boldly announced to her confused colleagues a new focus for her studies, language, of all things.

  --until Joshu sickened when pepper pox swept through the Valley of the Bibur, a plague that took its victims with agonizing suddenness, and she had to watch another woman perform the rites of mourning, knowing that everyone was watching, to see how she'd react.

  --until, after the funeral, Sage Taine approached her with stiff formality and renewed hi
s earlier proposal of marriage.

  --until, in a rush, she fled this place of dust and memories, running home to her treehouse overlooking the great dam where she was born.

  Now it all circled around again. Taine had seemed so austerely beautiful when she first came to Biblos in her teens, a towering figure, impressive beyond compare. But things had changed inside her since. Everything had changed.

  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 sherr
y,

  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 Ariana 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,