Brightness Reef Read online

  Blade's cupola trembled, and the rewq that was wrapped around it quivered. "The people onshore- they seem . . . strange somehow."

  Sara peered through the morning haze. The Bing Villagers were mostly human, but there were also hoon, traeki, and qheuens in the mix. Likes attract, she thought. Orthodox fanaticism crossed racial lines.

  As does heresy, Sara noted, recalling that her own brother was part of a movement no less radical than the folk who had brought down this bridge.

  Several coracles set forth from tree-shrouded shelters, aiming to intercept the riverboat. "Are they coming to pilot us through?" young Jomah asked.

  He got his answer when the first grappling hook whistled, then fell to the deck of the Hauph-woa.

  Others swiftly followed.

  "We mean you no harm.'" shouted a thick-armed man in the nearest skiff. "Come ashore, and we'll take care of you. All we want is your boat."

  That was the wrong thing to say to the proud crew of a river-runner. Every hoon but the helmsman ran to seize and toss overboard the offending hooks. But more grapplers sailed aboard for every one they removed.

  Then Jomah pointed downstream. "Look!"

  If anyone still wondered what the Bing-ites planned for the Hauph-woa, all doubts vanished at the sight of a charred ruin, blackened ribs spearing upward like a huge, halfVburned skeleton. It triggered an umble of dismay from the crew, resonating down Sara's spine and sending the noor beasts into frenzied fits of barking.

  The hoon redoubled their efforts, tearing frantically at the hooks.

  Sara's first instinct was to shield the Stranger. But the wounded man seemed safe, still unconscious under Pzora's protecting bulk.

  "Come on," she told Blade. "We better help."

  Pirates often used to attack ships this way until the Great Peace. Perhaps the attackers' own ancestors used the technique in deadly earnest, during the bad old days. The grapples, made of pointy Buyur metal, dug deep when the cables tautened. Sara realized in dismay that the cords were mule fiber, treated by a traeki process that made them damnably hard to cut. Worse, the lines stretched not just to the coracles but all the way to shore, where locals hauled them taut with blocks and tackle. Hoon strength, helped by Blade's great claws, barely sufficed to wrestle the hooks free. Still, Sara tried to help, and even the g'Kek passenger kept lookout with four keen eyes, shouting to warn when another boat drew near. Only Jop leaned against the mast, watching with clear amusement. Sara had no doubt who the orthodox tree farmer was rooting for.

  The beach loomed ever closer. If the Hauph-woa made it past midpoint, she'd have the river's pull on her side. But even that force might be too little to break the strong cords. When the keel scraped sand, it would spell the end.

  In desperation, the crew hit on a new tactic. Taking up axes, they chopped away at planks and rails, wherever a grapple had dug in, tearing out whole wooden chunks to throw overboard, attacking their own vessel with a fury that was dazzling to behold, given normal hoon placidity.

  Then, all at once, the deck jerked under Sara's feet as the whole boat suddenly shuddered, slewing, as if the center mast were a pivot.

  "They've hooked the rudder!" someone cried.

  Sara looked over the stern and saw a massive metal barb speared through the great hinged paddle the helmsman used to steer the ship. The rudder could not be pulled aboard or chopped loose •without crippling the Hauph-woa, leaving it adrift and helpless.

  Prity bared her teeth and screamed. Though shivering •with fear, the little ape started climbing over the rail, till Sara stopped her with a firm hand.

  "It's my job," she said tersely, and without pause shrugged out of her tunic and kilt. A sailor handed her a hatchet with a strap-thong through the haft.

  Don't everybody speak up all at once to argue me out of doing this, she thought sardonically, knowing no one would.

  Some things were simply obvious.

  The hatchet hung over one shoulder. It wasn't comforting to feel its metal coolness stroke her left breast as she climbed, even though the cutting edge still bore a leather cover.

  Clothes would have been an impediment. Sara needed her toes, especially, to seek footholds on the Hauph-woa's stern. The clinker construction style left overlaps in the boards that helped a bit. Still, she could not prevent shivering, half from the morning chill and partly from stark terror. Sweaty palms made it doubly hard, even though her mouth felt dry as urrish breath.

  I haven't done any climbing in years!

  To nonhumans, this must look like another day's work for a tree-hugging Earthling. Kind of like expecting every urs to be a courier runner, or all traekis to make a good martini. In fact, Jop was the logical one for this task, but the captain didn't trust the man, with good reason.

  The crew shouted tense encouragement as she clambered down the stern, holding the rudder with one arm. Meanwhile, derisive scorn came from the coracles and those ashore. Great. More attention than I ever had in my life, and I'm stark naked at the time.

  The mule-cable groaned with tension as villagers strained on pulleys to haul Hauph-woa toward the beach, where several gray qheuens gathered, holding torches that loomed so frighteningly close that Sara imagined she could hear the flames. At last, she reached a place where she could plant her feet and hands- bracing her legs in a way that forever surrendered all illusions of personal modesty. She had to tear the leather cover off the ax with her teeth and got a bitter electrical taste from the reddish metal. It made her shudder-then tense up as she almost lost her grip. The boat's churning wake looked oily and bitter cold.

  Jeers swelled as she hacked at the rudder blade, sending chips flying, trying to cut a crescent around the embedded hook. She soon finished gouging away above the grapple and was starting on the tougher part below, when something smacked the back of her left hand, sending waves of pain throbbing up her arm. She saw blood ooze around a wooden sliver, protruding near the wrist.

  A slingshot pellet lay buried halfway in the plank nearby.

  Another glanced off the rudder, ricocheting from the boat's stern, then skipping across the water.

  Someone was shooting at her!

  Why you jeekee, slucking, devoluted . . .

  Sara found an unknown aptitude for cursing, as she went through a wide vocabulary of oaths from five different languages, hacking away with the hatchet more vehemently than ever. A steady drumbeat of pebbles now clattered against the hull, but she ignored them in a blur of heat and fury.

  "Otszharsiya, perkiye! Syookai dreesoona!"

  She ran out of obscenities in Rossic and was starting to plumb urrish GalTwo when the plank abruptly let out a loud crack.'The attached cable moaned, yanking hard at the grappling hook-

  -and the tortured wood gave way.

  The hook snatched the ax out of her hand as it tore free, glittering in the sunlight. Thrown off balance, Sara struggled to hold on, though her hands were slippery from sweat and blood. With a gasp she felt her grip fail and she dropped, sucking in deeply, but the Roney slammed her like an icy hammer, driving air from her startled lungs.

  Sara floundered, battling first to reach the surface, then to tread water and sputter a few deep breaths, and finally to keep from getting tangled in all the ropes that lay strewn across the water. A shiny hook passed a frightening hand's width from her face. Moments later, she had to dive down to avoid a snarl of cords that might have trapped her.

  The boat's turbulent wake added to her troubles, as the Hauph-woa took advantage of its chance to flee.

  Her chest ached by the time she hit surface again-to come face-to-face with a lanky young man, leaning on the rim of a coracle, clutching a slingshot in one hand. Surprise rocked him back when their eyes met. Then his gaze dropped to notice her bareness.

  He blushed. Hurriedly, the young man put aside his weapon and started shrugging out of his jacket. To give to her, no doubt.

  "Thanks ..." Sara gasped. "But I gotta ... go now."

  Her last glimpse of the young
villager, as she swam away, showed a crestfallen look of disappointment. It's too soon yet for him to be a hardened pirate, Sara thought. This new, hard world hasn't yet rubbed away the last traces of gallantry.

  But give it time.

  Now she had the river's current behind her as she swam, and soon Sara glimpsed the Hauph-woa downstream. The crew had the boat turned and were stroking to stay in place, now that they had reached a safe distance from Bing Village. Still, it was a hard pull to reach the hull at last and start up the rope ladder. She only made it halfway before her muscles started to cramp,

  and the helpful sailors had to haul it in the rest of the way by hand.

  I've got to get stronger, if I'm going to make a habit of having adventures, she thought as someone wrapped a blanket around her.

  Yet, Sara felt strangely fine while Pzora tended her wound and the cook made her some of his special tea. Sara's hand ached, and her body throbbed, yet she felt also something akin to a glow.

  I made decisions, and they were right ones. A year ago, it seemed every choice I made was wrong. Now, maybe things have changed.

  Clutching her blanket, Sara watched as the Hauph-woa labored back upstream along the west bank, to a point where they could take aboard the stranded caravan, ferrying the urs and their beasts far enough to have no worries about local fanatics. The calm teamwork of passengers and crew was such an encouraging sight, it boosted her morale about "big" issues, almost as much as the brief fight had lifted something else inside her.

  My faith in my own self, she thought. / didn't think I was up to any of this. But maybe Father's right, after all.

  I stayed in that damn treehouse long enough.

  Asx

  SHORTLY AFTER VUBBEN SPOKE, THE PORTAL reopened and there emerged from the ship several more floating machines, growling disconcertingly. Each hesitated on reaching the onlookers lining the valley rim. For several duras, the folk of the Commons held their ground, though trembling in foot, wheel, and ring. Then the robots turned and swept away, toward every point of the compass, leaving cyclones of broken grass in their wake.

  "Survey probes-these shall commence their duties," the first messenger explained, buzzing and clicking primly in a formal version of Galactic Two.

  "(Preliminary) analyses-these surrogates shall provide.

  "Meanwhile, toward a goal of both profit and rescue-let us, face-to-face discussions, commence."

  This caused a stir. Did we understand correctly? Our dialects have drifted since our devolution. Did the phrase "face-to-face" mean what it seemed?

  Below, the ship's doorway began reopening once more.

  "Bad news," Lester Cambel commented gruffly. "If they're willing to let us see them in person, it means-"

  "-that they are not worried anyone will be left after they depart, to tell whose face was seen," finished Knife-Bright Insight.

  Our hoon brother, Phwhoon-dau, shared the gloomy diagnosis. His aged throat sac darkened from somber thought. "Their confidence is blatant, unnerving. Hrrrhrm. As is their haste."

  Vubben turned an eyestalk toward my/our sensor ring and winked the lid-an efficient, human-derived gesture conveying irony. Among the Six, we traeki and g'Keks hobble like cripples on this heavy world, while hoon stride with graceful power. Yet those dour, pale giants claim to find the rest of us equally frantic and wild.

  Something, or rather two somethings, stirred within the shadowy airlock. A pair of bipedal forms stepped forward-walkers-slim, stick-jointed, and somewhat tall. Clothed in loosely draped garments that concealed all but their bare hands and heads, they emerged into the afternoon light to peer upward at us.

  From the Commons there erupted a low collective sigh of shock and recognition.

  Was this a hopeful sign? Out of all the myriad spacefaring races in the Civilization of the Five Galaxies, what impossibly remote chance decreed that our discoverers might turn out to be cousins'? That the crew of this ship should ,be cogenetic with one of our Six? Was this the work of our capricious goddess, whose luck favors the anomalous and strange?

  "Hyoo-mans-s-s . . ." Ur-Jah, our eldest sage, aspirated in Anglic, the native tongue of our youngest sept.

  From Lester Cambel, there escaped a sound i had never heard before, which these rings could not decipher at the time. Only later did we comprehend, and learn its name.

  It was despair.

  Dwer

  RETY LED SINGLE FILE ALONG A TRACK THAT NOW ran atop a broad shelf of bedrock, too hard for great-boo to take root. The slanting, upthrust granite ledge separated two broad fingers of cane forest, which Dwer knew stretched for hundreds of arrowflights in all directions. Although the rocky trail followed a ridgetop, the boo on either side grew so tall that only the highest peaks could be seen above the swaying ocean of giant stems.

  The girl kept peering, left and right, as if in search of something. As if she wanted something, rather urgently, and did not want to walk past it by mistake. But when Dwer tried to inquire, all she gave back was silence.

  You'll have to watch it with this one, he thought. She's been bun all her life, till she's prickly as a dartback bare. People weren't his specialty, but a forester uses empathy to grasp the simple needs and savage thoughts of wild things.

  Wild things can know pain.

  Well, in another day or so she won't be my problem. The sages have experts, healers. If I meddle, I may just make things worse.

  The stone shelf gradually narrowed until the footpath traced a slender aisle between crowded ranks of towering adult boo, each stem now over twenty meters tall i and as thick as several men. The giant green stalks grew so close that even Mudfoot would have trouble getting far into the thicket without squeezing between mighty boles. The strip of sky above pinched gradually tighter becoming a mere ribbon of blue as the trail constricted. At some points, Dwer could spread his arms and touch mighty cylinders on both sides at the same time.

  The compressed site played tricks with perspective as he pictured two vast walls, primed to press together at any instant, grinding their tiny group like scraps of cloth under Nelo's pulping hammer.

  Funny thing. This stretch of trail hadn't felt nearly so spooky on his way uphill, two days ago. Then, the slender avenue had felt like a funnel, channeling him briskly toward his quarry. Now it was a cramped furrow, a pit. Dwer felt a growing tightness in his chest. What if something's happened up ahead. A landslide blocking the way. Or afire? What a trap this could be!

  He sniffed suspiciously, picking up only a gummy reek of greenness given off by the boo. Of course, anything at all could be going on downwind, and he wouldn't know of it until-

  Stop this! Snap out of it. What's gotten into you?

  It's her, he realized. You're feeling bad because she thinks you 're a bastard.

  Dwer shook his head.

  Well, ain't it so? You let Rety go on thinking she might be hanged, when it would have been easy enough to say-

  To say what? A lie? I can't promise it won't happen. The law is fierce because it has to be. The sages can show mercy. It's allowed. But who am I to promise in their name?

  He recalled his former master describing the last time a large band of sooners was discovered, back when old Fallen had been an apprentice. The transgressors were found living on a distant archipelago, far to the north. One of the hoon boat-wanderers-whose job it was to patrol at sea the same way human hunters roamed the forests and urrish plainsmen ranged the steppes-came upon- a thronging cluster of her kind, dwelling amid ice floes, surviving by seeking the caves of hibernating rouol shamblers and spearing the rotund beasts as they slept. Each summer, the renegade tribe would come ashore and set fires across the tundra plains, panicking herds of shaggy, long-toed gallaiters, sending the frightened ungulates tumbling over cliffs by the hundreds, so that a few might be butchered.

  Ghahen, the boat-wanderer, had been drawn by the smoke of one mass killing and soon began dealing with the crime in the manner of her folk. Patient beyond human fathoming, gentle in a
way that gave Dwer nightmares to hear of it, she had taken an entire year to winnow the band, one by one, painlessly confiscating from each member its precious life bone, until all that remained was a solitary male elder, whom she seized and brought home to testify, ferrying the dejected captive in a boat piled high with the fifth vertebra of all his kin. After reciting his tale-a crooning lament lasting fourteen days-that final seagoing sooner was executed by the hoon themselves, expiating their shame. All the impounded vertebrae were ground to dust and scattered in a desert, far from any standing water.

  The forbidding memory of that story filled Dwer's heart with leaden worry.

  Spare me, please, from being asked to do as Ghahen did. I couldn't. Not if all the sages ordered it. Not if Lark said the fate of all Jijo hung in the balance. There's got to be a better way.

  Just where the rocky shelf seemed about to narrow down to nothing, letting the divided tracts of boo converge and obliterate the trail, a clearing abruptly opened ahead. A bowl-shaped depression, nearly a thousand meters across, with an algae-crusted lake in its center and a narrow outlet at the far end. A fringe of great-boo lined the crater's outer rim, and spindly tufts of the tenacious plant sprouted from crevices between jagged boulders that lay tumbled across the silent mountain vale. The lake's watery shore was outlined by a dense hedge, appearing at a distance like rank moss, from which radiated countless twisted tendrils, many of them broken stumps. Even where Dwer stood, ropy fibers could be seen half-buried in the dust, some as thick as his leg.

  The peaceful quiet was belied by an eerie sense of lifelessness. The dust lay undisturbed by footprints, only the scrape of wind and rain. From prior visits, Dwer knew why prudent creatures avoided this place. Still, after the strangling confinement of that tunnel-trail, it felt good to see sky again. Dwer had never much shared the prevailing dread of crossing open ground, even if it meant walking for a short time under the glaring sun.

  As they picked their way past the first boulders, the glaver began to mew nervously, creeping alongside Rety to keep in her shadow. The girl's eyes roved avidly. She seemed not to notice drifting off the trail, at an angle that would skirt the fringe of the lake.