Brightness Reef

by David Brin

  Our second cognition-torus reminds us that some heretics might prefer that angry fire and plagues rid Jijo of this infestation called the Six. And yes, there is yet another, even smaller heretical fringe. Eccentrics who foresee our destiny lying in a different direction-scarcely hinted by sacred scrolls. Why do you bring this up, my 'ring? What possible relevance can such nonsense have, at this time and place?

  Scribes write down details of the pact. Soon High Sages will be called to witness and assent. (Prepare, my lower rings!) Meanwhile, we ponder again the anomaly brought to our waxy notice by the rewq, which still conveys vexing colors from Ro-kenn. Could they be shades of deceit! Deceit and amusement! Eager gladness to accept our offer, but only in appearance, buying time until-

  Stop it,'we command our second ring, which gets carried away all too easily. It has read too many novels. We do not know the Rothen well enough to read subtle, complex meanings in his alien visage.

  Besides, don't we have Ro-kenn trapped? Has he not reason to fear the images on those plates of hard metal? Logically, he dare not risk them being passed on to incriminate his race, his line.

  Or does he know something we do not?

  Ah-what a silly question to ask, when pondering a star-god!

  While hope courses the crowd, i/we grow more nervous by the dura. What if they care nothing about the photographs? Then Ro-kenn might agree to anything, for it would not matter what vows were signed, once his almighty ship arrives. From that point on, with his personal safety assured . . .

  . . .

  we never get a chance to complete that dripping contemplation. For suddenly, something new happens! Far too quickly for wax to ooze.

  . . .

  It begins with a shrill human cry-

  One of the sycophants, a devoted Rothen-follower, points behind the star-beings, toward the raised bier where their two dead comrades lie-

  Silky cloths had been draped across the two who were slain in the explosion. But now we see those coverings are pulled back, exposing the late Rothen and the late sky-human-

  Do we now perceive Bloorthe Portraitist, poised with his recording device, attempting to photograph the faces of the dead!

  Bloor ignores growls of anger rising from those-who-follow-the-Rothen-as-patrons. Calmly, he-slides out one exposed plate and inserts another. He appears entranced, focused on his art, even as attention turns his way from Rann, then an outraged Ro-kenn, who screams in terse Galactic Six-

  Bloor glimpses the swooping robot and has time to perform one last act of professionalism. With his fragile body, the portraitist shields his precious camera and dies.

  Have patience, you lesser rings that lie farthest from the senses. You must wait to caress these memories with our inner breath. For those who squat higher up our tapered cone, events come as a flurry of muddled images.

  Behold--the livid anger of the star-gods, apoplectic with affronted rage!

  Observe--the futile cries of Lester, Vubben, and Phwhoon-dau, beseeching restraint!

  Witness--Bloor's crumpled ruin, a smoldering heap!

  Note--how the crowd backs away from the violence, even as other dark-clad figures rush inward from the forest rim!

  Quail--from the roaring robots, charging up to strike, ready to slay at command!

  Above all, stare--at the scene right before us, the one Bloor was photographing when he died. . . .

  An image to preserve as long as this tower of rings stands.

  Two beings lie side by side.

  One, a human female, seems composed in death, her newly washed face serene, apparently at peace.

  The other figure had seemed equally tranquil when we saw it last, before dawn. Ro-poPs visage was like an idealized human, impressive in height and breadth of brow, in strong cheekbones and the set of her womanlike chin, which in life had sustained a winning smile.

  That is not what we see now!

  Rather, a quivering thing, suffering its own death tremors, creeps off of Ro-pol's face . . . taking much of that face with it! The very same brow and cheek and chin we had been pondering-these make up the body of the creature, which must have ridden the Rothen as a rewq rides one of the Six, nestled so smoothly in place that no join or seam was visible before.

  Does this explain the dissonance? The clashing colors conveyed by our veteran rewq? When some parts of Ro-kenn's face relayed tart emotions, others always seemed cool, unperturbed, and friendly.

  It crawls aside, and onlookers gasp at what remains- a sharply narrower face, chinless and spiny, with cranial edges totally unlike a human being's.

  Gone is the mirage of heavenly comeliness in Earth-ling terms. Oh, the basic shape remains humanoid, but in a tapered, predatory caricature of our youngest sept.

  "Hr-rm ... I have seen this face before," croons Phwhoon-dau, stroking his white beard. "In my readings at Biblos. An obscure race, with a reputation for--"

  Rann whips the coverings back over the corpses, while Ro-kenn shrilly interrupts, "This is the final out--

  Until now.

  The Rothen points to Rann, commanding--"Break radio silence and recall Kunn, now!"

  "The prey will be warned," Rann objects, clearly shaken. "And the hunters. Dare we risk--"

  "We'll take that chance. Obey now! Recall Kunn, then clear all of these away."

  Ro-kenn motions at the crowd, the sycophants, and all six sages.

  "No one leaves to speak of this."

  The robots start to rise, crackling with dire strength. A moan of dread escapes the crowd.

  Then--as is sometimes said in Earthling tales--All Hell Breaks Loose.

  Our rewq now clearly show Ro-kenn as two beings, one a living mask. Gone is the patient amusement, the pretense at giving in to blackmail. Until now, we had nothing to blackmail with.

  The Stranger

  He strums the dulcimer slowly, plucking one low note at a time, feeling nervous over what he plans to attempt, yet also pleased by how much he is remembering.

  About urs, for instance. Ever since first regaining consciousness aboard the little riverboat, he had tried to pin down why he felt so friendly toward the four-footed beings, despite their prickly, short-tempered natures. Back at the desert oasis, before the bloody ambush, he had listened to the ballad recited by the traitor Ulgor, without understanding more than a few click-phrases, here and there. Yet the rhythmic chant had seemed strangely familiar, tugging at associations within his battered brain.

  Then, all at once, he recalled where he heard the tale before. In a bar, on faraway--

  --on faraway--

  Names are still hard to come by. But now at least he has an image, rescued from imprisoned memory. A scene in a tavern catering to low-class sapient races like his own, frequented by star travelers sharing certain tastes in food, music, and entertainment. Often, songs were accepted as currency in such places. You could buy rounds of drinks with a good one, and he seldom had to pay cash, so desired were the tunes warbled by his talented crewmates.

  . . . crewmates . . .

  Now he confronts another barrier. The tallest, harshest wall across his mind. He tries once more but fails to come up with a melody to break it down.

  Back to the bar, then. With that recollection had come things he once knew about urs. Especially a trick he used to pull on urrish companions when they dozed off, after a hard evening's revelry. Sometimes he would take a peanut, aim carefully, and--

  The Stranger's train of thought breaks as he realizes he is being watched. UrKachu glares at him, clearly irritated by the increasing loudness of the thrumming dulcimer. He quickly mollifies the leader of the urrish ambushers by plucking at the string more softly. Still, he does not quite stop. At a lower, quieter level, the rhythm is mildly hypnotic, just as he intended it to be.

  The other raiders-both urs and men-lie down or snooze through the broiling middle of the day. So does Sara, along with Prity and the other captives. The Stranger knows he should rest, too, but he feels too keyed up.

  He mis
ses Pzora, though it does seem strange to long for the healing touch of a Jophur--

  No, that is the wrong word. Pzora is not one of those fearsome, cruel beings, but a traeki--something quite different. As he grows a little better at names, he is going to have to remember that.

  Anyway, he has work to do. In the time remaining, he must learn to use the rewq that Sara bought for him--a strange creature whose filmy body covers his eyes, causing soft colors to waft around every urs and human, turning the shabby tent into a pavilion of revealing hues. He finds unnerving the way the rewq quivers over his flesh, using a sucker to feed from veins near the gaping wound in his head. Yet he cannot turn down a chance to explore yet another kind of communication. Sometimes the confusing colors coalesce to remind him of the last time he communed with Pzora, back at the oasis. There had been a moment of strange clarity when their cojoined rewqs seemed to help convey exactly what he wanted.

  Pzora's answering gift lies inside the hole in his head--the one place the raiders would never think to search.

  He resists an urge to slip his hand inside, to check if it's still there. All in good time.

  While he sits and strums, the oppressive heat slowly mounts. Urrish and human heads sink lower to the ground, where night's lingering coolness can still be dimly felt. He waits and tries to remember a little more.

  His biggest blank zone-other than the loss of language-covers the recent past. If ten fingers represent the span of his life up to now, most of the final two digits are missing. All he has are the shreds that cling whenever he wakes from a dream. Enough to know he once roamed the linked galaxies and witnessed things none of his kind ever saw before. The seals holding back those memories have resisted everything he's tried so far- drawing sketches, playing math games with Prity, wallowing in Pzora's library of smells. He remains fairly certain the key will be found in music. But what music?

  Sara snores softly nearby, and he feels a swelling of grateful fondness in his heart . . . combined with a nagging sense that there is someone else he should be thinking about. Another who had his devotion before searing fate swatted him out of the sky. A woman's face flickers at a sharp angle to his thoughts, passing too swiftly to recognize-except for the wave of strong feelings it evokes.

  He misses her . . . though he can't imagine that she feels the same, wherever she may be.

  Whoever she may be.

  More than anything else, he wishes he could put his feelings into words, as he never did during all the dangerous times they spent together . . . times when she was pining for another . . . for a better man than he.

  This thought thread is leading somewhere, he realizes, feeling some excitement. Avidly, he follows it. The woman in his dreams . . . she longs for a man . . . a hero who was lost long ago . . . a year or two ago . . . lost along with crewmates . . . and also along with . . .

  . . . along with the Captain . . .

  Yes, of course/ The commander they all missed so terribly, gone ever since a daring escape from that wretched water world. A world of disaster and triumph.

  He tries conjuring an image of the Captain. A face. But all that comes to mind is a gray flash, a whirl of bubbles, and finally a glint of white, needlelike teeth. A smile unlike any other. Wise and serene.

  Not human.

  And then, out of nowhere, a soft warbling emerges. A sound never before heard on the Slope.

  * My good silent friend . . .

  Lost in winter's dread stormcloud . . .

  Lonely . . . just like me . . . *

  The whistles, creaks, and pops roll out of his mouth before he even knows he's speaking them. His head rocks back as a dam seems to shatter in his mind, releasing a flood of memories.

  The music he'd been looking for was of no human making, but the modern tongue of Earth's third sapient race. A language painfully hard for humans to learn, but that rewarded those who tried. Trinary was nothing like Galactic Two or any other speech, except perhaps the groaning ballads sung by great whales who still plumbed the homeworld's timeless depths.

  Trinary.

  He blinks in surprise and even loses his rhythm on the plucked dulcimer. A few urs lift their heads, staring at him blankly till he resumes the steady cadence, continuing reflexively while he ponders his amazing rediscovery. The familiar/uncanny fact that had eluded him till now.

  His crewmates-perhaps they still await him in that dark, dreary place where he left them.

  His crewmates were dolphins.

  XXV.THE BOOK OF THE SEA

  Beware, ye damned who seek redemption.

  Time is your friend, but also your great foe.

  Like the tires of Izmunuti,

  It can fade before you are ready.

  Letting in, once more,

  the things from which you fled.

  --The Scroll of Danger

  Alvin's Tale

  I TRIED READING FINNEGANS WAKE ONCE UPON A time.

  Last year.

  A lifetime ago.

  It's said that no non-Earthling has ever grokked that book. In fact, the few humans who managed the feat spent whole chunks of their lifespans going over Joyce's masterpiece, word by obscure word, with help from texts written by other obsessed scholars. Mister Heinz says no one on the Slope has any hope at all of fathoming it.

  Naturally, I took that as a challenge, and so the next time our schoolteacher headed off to Gathering, I nagged him to bring a copy back with him.

  No, I'm not about to say I succeeded. Just one page into it, I knew this was a whole different venture from Ulysses. Though it looks like it's written in prespace English, the Wake uses Joyce's own language, created for a single work of art. Hoonish patience would not solve this. To even begin to understand, you have to share much of the author's context.

  What hope had I? Not a native speaker of Irish-English. Not a citizen of early twentieth-century Dublin. Not human. I've never been inside a "pub" or seen a "quark" close up, so I can only guess what goes on in each.

  I recall thinking--maybe a little arrogantly--If I can't read this thing, I doubt anyone else on Jijo ever will.

  The crisp volume didn't look as if anyone had tried, since the Great Printing. So why did the human founders waste space in Biblos with this bizarre intellectual experiment from a bygone age?

  That was when I felt I had a clue to the Tabernacle crew's purpose, in coming to this world. It couldn't be for the reasons we're told on holy days, when sages and priests read from the sacred Scrolls. Not to find a dark corner of the universe to engage in criminally selfish breeding, or to resign from the cosmos, seeking the roads of innocence. In either of those cases, I could see printing how-to manuals, or simple tales to help light the way. In time, the books would turn brittle and go to dust, when humans and the rest of us are ready to give them up. Kind of like the Eloi folk in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine.

  In neither case did it make any sense to print copies of Finnegans Wake.

  Realizing this, I picked up the book once more. And while I did not understand the story or allusions any better than before, I was able to enjoy the flow of words, their rhythms and sounds, for their own extravagant sake. It wasn't important anymore that I be the only person to grok it.

  In fact, there came a warm feeling as I turned the pages and thought--someday, someone else is going to get more out of this than I did.

  On Jijo, things get stored away that seem dead, but that only sleep.

  I've been pondering that very thought while lying here in constant pain, trying to bear it stoically whenever strange, silent beings barge into my cell to poke me with heat, cold, and prickly sharpness. I mean, should I feel hope as metal fingers probe my wounds? Or sour gloom that my blank-faced tenders refuse to answer any questions, or even to speak? Shall I dwell on my awful homesickness? Or on the contrary thrill over having discovered something wonderfully strange that no one on the Slope ever suspected, not since the g'Keks first sent their sneakship tumbling into the deep?

  Above all, I wonder
ed--am I prisoner, patient, or specimen?

  Finally I realized--I just don't have any framework to decide. Like the phrases in Joyce's book, these beings seem at once both strangely familiar and completely unfathomable.

  Are they machines?

  Are they denizens of some ancient submarine civilization?

  Are they invaders? Do they see us as invaders?

  Are they Buyur?

  I've been avoiding thinking about what's really eating away at me, inside.

  Come on, Alvin. Face up to it.

  I recall those final duras, when our beautiful Wuphon's Dream shattered to bits. When her hull slammed against my spine. When my friends spilled into the metal monster's mouth, immersed in cold, cold, cold, cruel water.

  They were alive then. Injured, dazed, but alive.

  Still alive when a hurricane of air forced out the horrid dark sea, leaving us to flop, wounded and half dead, down to a hard deck. And when sun-bright lights half-blinded us, and creepy spider-things stepped into the chamber to look over their catch.

  But memory blurs at that point, fading into a hazy muddle of images-until I awoke here, alone.

  Alone, and worried about my friends.

  XXVI. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE

  Legends

  We know that in the Five Galaxies, every star-faring race got its start through the process of uplift, receiving a boost to sapience from the patrons that adopted them. And those patrons were bestowed the same boon by earlier patrons, and so on, a chain of beneficence stretching all the way back to misty times wken there were more than five linked galaxies--back to the fabled Progenitors, who began the chain, so very long ago.

  Where did the Progenitors themselves come from?

  To some of the religious alliances that wrangle testily across the space lanes, that very question is anathema, or even likely to provoke a fight.

  Others deal with the issue by claiming that the ancient ones must have come from somewhere else, or that the Progenitors were transcendent beings who descended graciously from a higher plane in order to help sapient life get its start