Brightness Reef (33 page)

if not to serve a purpose higher than all

those things?

The Scroll of Contemplation

Alvin’s Tale

I ALWAYS THOUGHT MYSELF A CITY BOY. AFTER ALL, Wuphon is the biggest port in the south, with almost a thousand souls, if you include nearby farmers and gleaners. I grew up around docks, warehouses, and cargo hoists.

Still, the Deploying Derrick is really something. A long, graceful shape made of hundreds of tubes of reamed and cured boo, it was pieced together in a matter of days, crisscrossed and joined by a team of qheuen carpenters, who listened politely each time Urdonnol berated them for straying from the design illustrated on page five hundred and twelve of her precious text, Pre-Contact Terran Machinery, Part VIII: Heavy Lifting Without Gravitics. Then, with a respectful spin of their cupolas, the qheuens went back to lacing and gluing the crane in their own way, applying lessons learned in real life.

Urdonnol should be more flexible, I thought, watching Uriel’s humorless assistant grow ever more frustrated. True, the books hold great wisdom. But these guys aren’t exactly working with titanium here. We’re castaways who must adapt to the times.

I was glad to see that our pal, Ur-ronn, seemed satisfied with the work so far, after peering and sniffing at every brace, strut, and pulley. Still, I’d rather Uriel were here, supervising as she had for the first two days, when our group set up camp under the stark shadow of Terminus Rock. The master smith was a persnickety, demanding taskmistress, often insisting a job be done over, and over again, till it was damn well perfect.

I guess we four might resent the bossy way she took over what used to be our own private project. But we didn’t. Or not much. Her attention to detail was nerve-wracking, but each time Uriel finally admitted something was done right, my confidence rose a notch that we might actually come back alive. It came as a blow when she went away.

An urrish courier had raced into camp-breathless, exhausted, even thirsty, for Ifni’s sake-holding an envelope for Uriel to snatch and tear open. On reading the message, she drew aside Tyug, the traeki, and whispered urgently. Then she galloped off, hurrying back toward her precious forge.

Since then, things didn’t exactly fall apart. The plan moves ahead step by step. But I can’t say our mood’s quite the same. Especially after our first test dive near-to drowned the passenger.

By then the crane was a beautiful thing, a vaulting arm so graceful, you’d never guess sixteen steel bolts thick as my wrist anchored it to the ledge, hanging far over the deep blue waters of the Rift. A big drum carried more than thirty cables of Uriel’s best hawser, all of it ending at our gray-brown vessel, which we named Wupbon’s Dream, in hope of placating our parents-and those in the local community who think we’re doing blasphemy.

Another derrick stands alongside the first, linked to an even bigger drum. This one doesn’t have to carry the bathy’s weight, but its job is just as vital-keeping a tangle-free length of double hose attached to our little craft, so that clean air goes in and bad air goes out. I never got a chance to ask what the hoses are made of, but it’s much stronger than the stitched skink bladders we four had planned using, back when we started thinking about this adventure.

Uriel had made other changes-a big pressure regulator, high strain gaskets, and a pair of eik lights to cast bright beams down where sunshine never reaches.

Again, I wondered-where did all this stuff come from?

It surprised us that Uriel never messed much with the bathy itself-carved from a single hollowed-out garu trunk, with Ur-ronn’s beautiful window sealed at one end. In front, we installed two hinged grabber arms that Ur-ronn copied out of a book. Our little craft also bore wheels, four in all, mounted so Wuphon’s Dream might roll along the muddy sea bottom.

Even after being fitted with superwide treads, the wheels looked familiar. Especially to Huck. She had kept them as private mementos out of the wreckage of her home, back when her real g’Kek parents were killed in that awful avalanche. With typical grim humor, Huck named them Auntie Rooben, Uncle Jovoon Left, and Uncle Jovoon Right. The fourth one was simply Dad-till I made her stop the grisly joke and call them One through Four instead.

Using wheels would normally be impossible without Galactic technology. A turning axle would tear any gasket apart. But Huck’s macabre stash of spare parts offered a solution. Those wondrous g’Kek magnetic hubs and motivator spindles can be placed on either side of the hull, without actually piercing the wood. Huck will steer the forward pair of wheels, while I’ll use a rotary crank to power the driver pair in back.

Which covers all our jobs during a dive, except “Captain” Pincer-Tip, whose world of bright blue water we’ll pass through on our way to depths no qheuen has seen since their sneakship sank, a thousand years ago. His place is right in the bubble nose, controlling the eik-lamps and shouting instructions how the rest of us are to steer and push or grab samples.

Why does he get to be in charge? Pincer surely never impressed anyone as the brightest member of our gang.

First, all this was his idea from the start. He hand-or rather mouth-carved most of the Dream all by himself, during scarce free time between school and day-work in the crustacean pens.

More important, if that beautiful window ever starts to fail-or any of the other gaskets-he’s the one least likely to panic when salt water starts spraying about the cabin. If that ever happens, it’ll be up to Pincer to get the rest of us out somehow. We’ve all read enough sea and space tales to know that’s a pretty good definition of a captain-the one you all better listen to when seconds count the difference ‘tween life and death.

He’d have to wait awhile, though, before taking command. Our first test dive would have just one passenger, a volunteer who was literally “born” for the job.

That morning, Tyug, the traeki, laid a trail of scentomones to draw the little partial stack, Ziz, from its pen to where Wuphon’s Dream waited, gleaming in the sunshine. Our good ship’s hull of polished garuwood was so bright and lovely-too bad the open blue sky is normally taken as a bad omen.

So it seemed to the onlookers watching our crew from a nearby bluff. There were hoon from Wuphon Port, plus some local reds, and urs with caravan dust on their flanks, as well as three humans who must have come a hard three-day trek from The Vale-all of them with nothing better to do than trade hearsay about the star-ship, or ships, said to have landed up north. One rumor said everyone at the Glade was already dead, executed on the spot by vengeful Galactic judges. Another claimed the Holy Egg had wakened fully at last, and the lights some saw in the sky were the souls of those lucky enough to be at Gathering when the righteous of the Six were transformed and sent back as spirits to their ancient homes among the stars.

Shave my legs if some of the stories weren’t beautiful enough to make me wish I’d made ‘em up.

Not all the onlookers were protestors. Some came out of curiosity. Huck and I had some fun with Howerr-phuo, who is second nephew by adoption to the Mayor’s junior half-mother, but who dropped out of school anyway, on account of he claimed not to like the way Mister Heinz smells. But everyone knows Howerr-phuo is lazy, and anyway, he shouldn’t talk about the hygienic habits of others.

At one point Howerr slinked up to ask about the Dream and its mission. Nice polite questions, mind you. But he seemed to barely hear our answers.

Then he sort of eased over to asking questions about traekis, gesturing over at Tyug, who was feeding Ziz in ers pen.

True, we have a pharmacist in Wuphon Town, but still there’s some mystery about the ringed ones. Sure enough, Huck and I soon got the gist of what Howerr-phuo was going on about. He and some of his backwash friends had a wager going, about traeki sex life, and he’d been elected to run the matter past us, as local experts!

Sharing a wink, Huck and I quickly emptied his head of all the nonsense it had been stuffed with-then proceeded to fill it back up with our own imaginative version. Howerr soon looked like a sailor who just had a loose tackle-pulley carom off his skull. Glancing furtively at his feet, he hurried off-no doubt to check for “ring spores,” lest he start growing little traekis in places where he’d been neglectful about washing.

I don’t feel much guilt over it. Anyone standing downwind from Howerr-phuo, from now on, oughta thank us.

I was going to ask Huck if we were ever that dumb- then I recalled. Didn’t she once convince me that a g’Kek can manage to be her own mother and father? I swear, she had made it sound plausible at the time, though for the life of me, I still can’t figure out how.

For the first couple of days, the spectators mostly lurked beyond a line in the sand, drawn by Uriel with her sage’s baton. No one said much while the master smith was around. But after she left, some took to yelling slogans, mostly objecting that the Midden is sacred, not a place for conceited gloss-addicts to go sight-seeing. Once the Vale humans arrived, the protests got better organized, with banners and slogans chanted in unison.

I found it pretty exciting, like a scene from Summer of Love or Things to Come, all full of righteous dissent for a cause. To a humicker like me, nothing could be more buff than forging ahead with an adventure against popular opinion. Seems nearly all the romantic tales I’ve read were about intrepid heroes persisting despite the doubts of stick-in-the-mud parents, neighbors, or authority figures. It reminded me of the book my nickname comes from-where the people of Diaspar try to keep Alvin from making contact with their long-lost cousins in faraway Lys. Or when the Lysians don’t want him going back home with news of their rediscovered world.

Yeah, I know that’s fiction, but the connection stoked my resolve. Huck and Ur-ronn and Pincer-Tip said they all felt the same.

As for the mob, well, I know that folks who’re scared can get unreasonable. I even tried once or twice to see it from their point of view. Really, I did.

Boy, what a bloat-torus of jeekee, Ifni-slucking skirls. Hope they all sit on bad mulch and get spin vapors.

Legends

It is said that humans on Earth spent untold generations Iiving in brute fear, believing a myriad things that no sensible person would ever imagine. Certainly not anyone who had been handed truth on a silver platter—the way it was given to nearly every sapient race in the Five Galaxies.

Earthlings had to figure it all out for themselves. Slowly, agonizingly, humans learned how the universe worked, abandoning most of the fanciful beliefs they carried through their Iong, dark loneliness. This included belief in—

the divine right of egotistical kings,

the mental incapacity of women,

the idea that a wise state knows all,

the idea that the individual is always right,

the sick-sweet addiction that transforms a doctrine from a mere model of the world into something sacred, worth killing for.

These
 
and
 
many other wild
 
concepts eventually joined pixies and ufos in the trunk where humans finally put away such childish things. A very large trunk.

Even so, the newly contacted Galactics saw Earthlings as superstitious primitives, as wolflings, prone to weird enthusiasms and peculiar, unprovable convictions.

How ironic, then, is the role reversal that we see on Jijo, where Earthlings found the other five far regressed down a road humans had traveled before, wallowing in a myriad of fables, fantasies, grudges, and vividly absurd notions. To this maelstrom of superstition, settlers fresh off the Tabernacle contributed more than paper books. They also brought tools of logic and verification—the very things Earthlings had to fight hardest to learn, back home.

Moreover, with their own history in mind, Earthlings became voracious collectors of folklore, fanning out among the other five to copy down every tale, every belief, even those they demonstrated to be false.

Out of their wolfling past came this strange mixture—reasoning skepticism, plus a deep appreciation of the peculiar, the bizarre, the extravagantly vivid.

Amid the darkness, humans know that it is all too easy to lose your way, if you forget how to tell what is true. But it is just as urgent never to let go of the capacity to dream, to weave the illusions that help us all make it through this dark, dark night.

from The Art of Exile,

by Auph-hu-Phwuhbhu

Asx

THE TINY ROBOT WAS A WONDER TO BEHOLD. NO larger than a g’Kek’s eyeball, it lay pinned down to the I ground by a horde of attacking privacy wasps, covered by their crowded fluttering wings.

Lester was the first sage to comment, after the initial surprise.

“Well, now we know why they’re called privacy wasps. Did you see the way they swarmed over that thing? Otherwise, we’d never have known it was there.”

“A device for spying,” surmised Knife-Bright Insight, tipping her carapace to get a closer look at the machine. “Minuscule and mobile, sent to listen in on our council. We would have been helpless, all our plans revealed, if not for the wasps.”

Phwhoon-dau concurred with a deep umble.

“Hr-rm. . . . We are used to seeing the insects as minor irritants, their presence required by tradition for certain ceremonies. But the Buyur must have designed the wasps for just such a purpose. To patrol their cities and homes, thwarting would-be eavesdroppers.”

“Using a (specifically) designed life-form to deal with the (annoying) threat-indeed, that would have been the Buyur way,” added Ur-Jah.

Lester leaned close to peer at the wasps, whose wings rippled in front of the robot’s tiny eyes, beating a maze of colors that reminded me/us of rewq.

“I wonder what the wasps are showing it,” murmured our human sage.

Then Vubben spoke for the first time since the wasps attacked the intruder.

“Probably exactly what it wants to see,” he suggested confidently.