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  He dreamed about that pilgrimage in its last peaceful moment, before the fellowship was splintered by alien words and fanatical deeds. Especially the smile on her face, when she told him joyous news.

  “Ships are coming, Lark. So many ships!

  “It’s time to bring you all back home.”

  Two words still throbbed like sparks in the night. Rhythmically hotter as he reached for them in his sleep.

  … ships …

  … home …

  … ships …

  … home …

  One word vanished at his dream touch — he could not tell which. The other he clenched hard, its flamelike glow increasing. Strange light, pushing free of containment. It streamed past flesh, past bones. A glow that clarified, offering to show him everything.

  Everything except …

  Except now she was gone. Taken away by the word that vanished.

  Pain wrenched Lark from the lonely night phantasm, tangled in a sweaty blanket. His trembling right hand clenched hard against his chest, erupting with waves of agony.

  Lark exhaled a long sigh as he used his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right, forcing them apart one by one. Something rolled off his open palm—

  It was the stone fragment of the Holy Egg, the one he had hammered from it as a rebellious child, and worn ever since as penance. Even as sleep unraveled, he imagined the rocky talisman throbbing with heat, pulsing in time to the beating of his heart.

  Lark stared at the blur-cloth canopy, with moonlight glimmering beyond.

  I remain in darkness, on Jijo, he thought, yearning to see once more by the radiance that had filled his dream. A light that seemed about to reveal distant vistas.

  Ling spoke to him later that day, when their lunch trays were slipped into the tent by a nervous militiaman.

  “Look, this is stupid,” she said. “Each of us acting like the other is some kind of devil spawn. We don’t have time for grudges, with your people and mine on a tragic collision course.”

  Lark had been thinking much the same thing, though her sullen funk had seemed too wide to broach. Now Ling met his eyes frankly, as if anxious to make up for lost time.

  “I’d say a collision’s already happened,” he commented.

  Her lips pressed a thin line. She nodded.

  “True. But it’s wrong to blame your entire Commons for the deeds of a minority, acting without authority or—”

  He barked a bitter laugh. “Even when you’re trying to be sincere, you still condescend, Ling.”

  She stared for a moment, then nodded. “All right. Your sages effectively sanctioned the zealots’ attack, post facto, by keeping us prisoner and threatening blackmail. It’s fair to say that we’re already—”

  “At war. True, dear ex-employer. But you leave out our own casus belli.” Lark knew the grammar must be wrong, but he liked showing that even a savage could also drop a Latin phrase. “We’re fighting for our lives. And now we know genocide was the Rothen aim from the start.”

  Ling glanced past him to where a g’Kek doctor drew increasing amounts of nauseating fluid from the air vents of a qheuen, squatting unconscious at the back of the shelter. She had worked alongside Uthen for months, evaluating local species for possible uplift. The gray’s illness was no abstraction.

  “Believe me, Lark. I know nothing of this disease. Nor the trick Ro-kenn allegedly pulled, trying to broadcast psiinfluentials via your Egg.”

  “Allegedly? You suggest we might have the technology to pull off something like that, as a frame-up?”

  Ling sighed. “I don’t dismiss the idea entirely. From the start you Jijoans played on our preconceptions. Our willingness to see you as ignorant barbarians. It took weeks to learn that you were still literate! Only lately did we realize you must have hundreds of books, maybe thousands!”

  An ironic smile crossed his face, before Lark realized how much the expression revealed.

  “More than that? A lot more?” Ling stared. “But where? By Von Daniken’s beard — how?”

  Lark put aside his meal, mostly uneaten. He reached over to his backpack and drew forth a thick volume bound in leather. “I can’t count how many times I wanted to show you this. Now I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  In a gesture Lark appreciated, Ling wiped her hands before accepting the book, turning the pages with deliberate care. What seemed reverence at first, Lark soon realized was inexperience. Ling had little practice holding paper books.

  Probably never saw one before, outside a museum.

  Rows of small type were punctuated by lithographed illustrations. Ling exclaimed over the flat, unmoving images. Many of the species shown had passed through the Danik research pavilion during the months she and Lark worked side by side, seeking animals with the special traits her Rothen masters desired.

  “How old is this text? Did you find it here, among all these remnants?” Ling motioned toward a stack of artifacts preserved by the mulc spider, relics of the long-departed Buyur, sealed in amber cocoons.

  Lark groaned. “You’re still doing it, Ling. For Ifni’s sake! The book is written in Anglic.”

  She nodded vigorously. “Of course. You’re right. But then who—”

  Lark reached over and flipped the volume to its title page.

  A PHYLOGENETIC INTERDEPENDENCE PROFILE OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ON THE JIJOAN SLOPE

  “This is part one. Part two is still mostly notes. I doubt we’d have lived long enough to finish volume three, so we left the deserts, seas, and tundras for someone else to take on.”

  Ling gaped at the sheet of linen paper, stroking two lines of smaller print, below the title. She looked at him, then over toward the dying qheuen.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’re living in the same tent with both authors. And since I’m presenting you with this copy, you have a rare opportunity. Care to have both of us autograph it? I expect you’re the last person who’ll get the chance.”

  His bitter sarcasm was wasted. Clearly she didn’t understand the word autograph. Anyway, Ling the biologist had replaced the patronizing alien invader. Turning pages, she murmured over each chapter she skimmed.

  “This would have been incredibly useful during our survey!”

  “That’s why I never showed it to you.”

  Ling answered with a curt nod. Given their disagreement over the lightness of gene raiding, his attitude was understandable.

  Finally, she closed the volume, stroking the cover. “I am honored by this gift. This accomplishment. I find I cannot grasp what it must have taken to create it, under these conditions, just the two of you.…”

  “With the help of others, and standing on the shoulders of those who came before. It’s how science works. Each generation’s supposed to get better, adding to what earlier ones knew.…”

  His voice trailed off as he realized what he was saying.

  Progress? But that’s Sara’s apostasy, not mine!

  Anyway, why am I so bitter? So what if alien diseases wipe out every sapient being on Jijo? Weren’t you willing to see that as a blessing, a while ago? Didn’t it seem an ideal way to swiftly end our illegal colony? A harmful invasion that should never have existed in the first place?

  Over the course of Uthen’s illness, Lark came to realize something — that death can sometimes seem desirable in abstract, but look quite different when it’s in your path, up close and personal.

  If Harullen the Heretic had lived, that purist might have helped Lark cling to his belief in Galactic law, which for good reason forbade settlements on fallow worlds. It was our goal to atone for our ancestors’ egotistical sin. To help rid Jijo of the infestation.

  But Harullen was gone, sliced to bits by a Rothen robot, and now Lark grappled with doubts.

  I’d rather Sara were right. If only I could see nobility here. Something worth enduring. Worth fighting for.

  I don’t really want to die.

  Ling pored through the guidebook again. Better than most, she
could appreciate the work he and Uthen spent their adult lives creating. Her professional esteem helped bridge the chasm of their personalities.

  “I wish I had something of equal value to give you,” she said, meeting his eyes again.

  Lark pondered.

  “You really mean that?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “All right then, wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  At the rear of the shelter, the g’Kek physician indicated with twined eyestalks that Uthen’s condition was unvaried. Good news, since each change till now had been for the worse. Lark stroked his friend’s chitin carapace, wishing he could impart comfort through the gray’s stupor.

  “Is it my fault you caught this bug, old friend? I made you go with me into the station wreckage, rummaging for alien secrets.” He sighed. “I can’t make up for that. But what’s in your bag may help others.”

  He lifted Uthen’s private satchel and took it back to Ling. Reaching inside, he felt several slablike objects, cool to the touch.

  “Earlier, we found something that you might help me learn to read. If you meant your promise.”

  He put one of the flat lozenges in her hand — pale brown and smooth as glass, with a spiral shape etched on each face.

  Ling stared at it for several duras. When she looked up, there was something new in her countenance. Was it respect for the way he had cornered her? Trapping her with the one other trait they shared — a compelling sense of honor?

  For the first time since they met, Ling’s eyes seemed to concede that she was dealing with an equal.

  Asx

  CALM DOWN, MY RINGS. NO ONE CAN FORCE YOU to stroke wax against your will.

  As traeki we are each of us sovereign, free not to recall intolerable memories before we are ready.

  Let the wax cool a little longer—a majority of rings demands—before we dare look again.

  Let the most recent terror wait.

  But our second cognition ring demurs. It insists — we/i should delay no longer confronting the dread news about Jophur, our terrible cousins, arriving on Jijo.

  Our second ring of cognition reminds us of the Quandary of Solipsism — the riddle that provoked our traeki founders to flee the Five Galaxies.

  Solipsism. The myth of the all-important self.

  Most mortal sapient beings hold this conceit, at one level or another. An individual can perceive others by sight, touch, and empathy, yet still reckon them as mere figments or automatons. Caricatures, of little importance.

  Under solipsism, the world exists for each solitary individualist.

  Examined dispassionately, it seems an insane concept. Especially to a traeki, since none of us can thrive or think alone. Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success.

  Madness seems essential in order to be “great.”

  • • •

  Terran sages knew this paradox from their long isolation. Ignorant and lonely, humans wallowed in one bizarre superstition after another, frantically trying concepts that no uplifted species would consider for even a dura. According to wolfling tales, humans wrestled endlessly with their own overpowering egos.

  Some tried suppressing selfness, seeking detachment. Others subsumed personal ambition in favor of a greater whole — family, religion, or a leader.

  Later they passed through a phase in which individualism was extolled as the highest virtue, teaching their young to inflate the ego beyond all natural limits or restraint. Works from this mad era of the self are found in the Biblos Archive, with righteous, preening rage flowing across every page.

  Finally, Just before contact, there emerged another approach.

  Some of their texts use the word maturity.

  We traeki — newly uplifted from the pensive swamps of our homeworld — seemed safe from achieving greatness, no matter how many skills our patrons, the blessed Poa, inserted in our rings. Oh, we found it pleasant to merge in tall, wise stacks. To gather learned wax and travel the stars. But to our patrons’ frustration, we never found appealing the fractious rivalries that churn the Five Galaxies. Frantic aspiration and zeal always seemed pointless to our kind.

  Then the Poa brought in experts. The Oailie.

  The Oailie pitied our handicap. With great skill, they gave us tools for achievement. For greatness.

  The Oailie gave us new rings—

  Rings of power.

  Rings of self-centered glory.

  Rings that turned mere traeki into Jophur.

  Too late, we and the Poa learned a lesson — that ambition comes at a cost.

  • • •

  We fled, did we not, my rings?

  By a fluke, some traeki managed to shuck these Oailie “gifts,” and escape.

  Only a few wax-crystal remembrance cells survive from those days. Memories laced with dread of what we were becoming.

  At the time, our ancestors saw no choice but flight.

  And yet … a pang of conscience trickles through our inner core.

  Might there have been another way?

  Might we have stayed and fought somehow to tame those awesome new rings? Futile as our forebears’ exodus now seems … was it also wrong?

  Since joining the High Sages, this traeki Asx has pored over Terran books, studying their lonely, epochal struggle — a poignant campaign to control their own deeply solipsistic natures. A labor still under way when they emerged from Earth’s cradle to make contact with Galactic civilization.

  The results of that Asx investigation remain inconclusive, yet i/we found tantalizing clues.

  The fundamental ingredient, it seems, is courage.

  Yes, my rings?

  Very well then. A majority has been persuaded by the second ring of cognition.

  We/i shall once again turn to the hot-new-dreadful waxy trail of recent memory.

  Glistening cones stared down at the confused onlookers who remained, milling on the despoiled glade. From a balcony high a-flank the mountain ship, polished stacks of fatty rings dripped luxuriously as they regarded teeming savages below — we enthralled members of six exile races.

  Shifting colors play across their plump toruses — shades of rapid disputation. Even at a great distance, i/we sense controversy raging among the mighty Jophur, as they quarrel among themselves. Debating our fate.

  • • •

  Events interrupt, even as our dribbling thought-streams converge.

  Near.

  At last we have come very near the recent. The present.

  Can you sense it, my rings? The moment when our dreadful cousins finished arguing what to do about us? Amid the flashing rancor of their debate, there suddenly appeared forceful decisiveness. Those in command — powerful ring stacks whose authority is paramount — made their decree with stunning confidence.

  Such assuredness! Such certainty! It washed over us, even from six arrowflights away.

  Then something else poured from the mighty dreadnought.

  Hatchet blades of infernal light.

  Emerson

  HE HAS NEVER BEEN ESPECIALLY FOND OF HOLES. This one both frightens and intrigues Emerson.

  It is a strange journey, riding a wooden wagon behind a four-horse team, creaking along a conduit with dimpled walls, like some endless stretched intestine. The only illumination — a faintly glowing stripe — points straight ahead and behind, toward opposite horizons.

  The duality feels like a sermon. After departing the hidden forest entrance, time became vague — the past blurry and the future obscure. Much like his life has been ever since regaining consciousness on this savage world, with a cavity in his head and a million dark spaces where memory should be.

  Emerson can feel this place tugging associations deep within his battered skull. Correlations that scratch and howl beyond the barriers of his amnesia. Dire recollections lurk just out of reach. Alarming memories of abject, gibbering terror, that snap and sting whenever he seeks to retrieve them.

&nbs
p; Almost as if, somehow, they were being guarded.

  Strangely, this does not deter him from prodding at the barricades. He has spent much too long in the company of pain to hold it in awe any longer. Familiar with its quirks and ways, Emerson figures he now knows pain as well as he knows himself.

  Better, in fact.

  Like a quarry who turns at bay after growing bored with running — and then begins hunting its pursuer — Emerson eagerly stalks the fear scent, following it to its source.

  The feeling is not shared. Though the draft beasts pant and their hooves clatter, all echoes feel muffled, almost deathlike. His fellow travelers react by hunching nervously on the narrow bench seats, their breath misting the chill air.

  Kurt the Exploser seems a little less surprised by all this than Sara or Dedinger, as if the old man long suspected the existence of a subterranean path. Yet, his white-rimmed eyes keep darting, as if to catch dreaded movement in the surrounding shadows. Even their guides, the taciturn women riders, appear uneasy. They must have come this way before, yet Emerson can tell they dislike the tunnel.

  Tunnel.

  He mouths the word, adding it proudly to his list of recovered nouns.

  Tunnel.

  Once upon a time, the term meant more than a mere hole in the ground, when his job was fine-tuning mighty engines that roamed the speckled black of space. Back then it stood for …

  No more words come to mind. Even images fail him, though oddly enough, equations stream from some portion of his brain less damaged than the speech center. Equations that explain tunnels, in a chaste, sterile way — the sort of multidimensional tubes that thread past treacherous shoals of hyperspace. Alas, to his disappointment, the formulas lack any power to yank memories to life.

  They do not carry the telltale spoor of fear.

  • • •

  Also undamaged is his unfailing sense of direction. Emerson knows when the smooth-walled passage must be passing under the broad river, but no seepage is seen. The tunnel is a solid piece of Galactic workmanship, built to last for centuries or eons — until the assigned time for dismantling.