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  “Not at this time. Not without putting your people in more danger than they already are.”

  I recall wondering — what could be more dangerous than the genocide Uriel had spoken of, as one likely outcome of contact with gene raiders?

  “Nevertheless,” the voice continued, “it may prove possible to improve our level of mutual confidence. Or even help each other in significant ways.”

  Sara

  SUPPOSE THE WORLD’S TWO MOST CAREFUL OBSERVERS witnessed the same event. They would never agree precisely on what had happened. Nor could they go back and check. Events may be recorded, but the past can’t be replayed.

  And the future is even more nebulous — a territory we make up stories about, mapping strategies that never go as planned.

  Sara’s beloved equations, derived from pre-contact works of ancient Earth, depicted time as a dimension, akin to the several axes of space. Galactic experts ridiculed this notion, calling the relativistic models of Einstein and others “naive.” Yet Sara knew the expressions contained truth. They had to. They were too beautiful not to be part of universal design.

  That contradiction drew her from mathematics to questions of language — how speech constrains the mind, so that some ideas come easily, while others can’t even be expressed. Earthling tongues — Anglic, Rossic, and Nihanic — seemed especially prone to paradoxes, tautologies, and “proofs” that sound convincing but run counter to the real world.

  But chaos had also crept into the Galactic dialects used by Jijo’s other exile races, even before Terran settlers came. To some Biblos linguists, this was evidence of devolution, starfaring sophistication giving way to savagery, and eventually to proto-sapient grunts. But last year another explanation occurred to Sara, based on pre-contact information theory. An insight so intriguing that she left Biblos to work on it.

  Or was I just looking for an excuse to stay away?

  After Joshu died of the pox — and her mother of a stroke — research in an obscure field seemed the perfect refuge. Perched in a lonely tree house, with just Prity and her books for company, Sara thought herself sealed off from the world’s intrusions.

  But the universe has a way of crashing through walls.

  Sara glanced at Emerson’s glistening dark skin and robust smile, warmed by feelings of affection and accomplishment. Aside from his muteness, the starman scarcely resembled the shattered wreck she had found in the mulc swamp near Dolo and nursed back from near death.

  Maybe I should quit my intellectual pretensions and stick with what I’m good at. If the Six Races fell to fighting among themselves, there would be more need of nurses than theoreticians.

  So her thoughts spun on, chaotically orbiting the thin glowing line down the center of the tunnel. A line that never altered as they trudged on. Its changelessness rebuked Sara for her private heresy, the strange, blasphemous belief that she held, perhaps alone among all Jijoans.

  The quaint notion of progress.

  Out of breath after another run, she climbed back aboard the wagon to find Prity chuffing nervously. Sara reached over to check the little chimp’s wound, but Prity wriggled free, clambering atop the bench seat, hissing through bared teeth as she peered ahead.

  The drivers were in commotion, too. Kepha and Nuli inhaled with audible sighs. Sara took a deep breath and found her head awash with contrasts. The bucolic smell of meadows mixed with a sharp metallic tang … something utterly alien. She stood up with the backs of her knees braced against the seat.

  Was that a hint of light, where the center stripe met its vanishing point?

  Soon a pale glow was evident. Emerson flipped his rewq over his eyes, then off again.

  “Uncle, wake up!” Jomah shook Kurt’s shoulder. “I think we’re there!”

  But the glow remained vague for a long time. Dedinger muttered impatiently, and for once Sara agreed with him. Expectation of journey’s end made the tunnel’s remnant almost unendurable.

  The horses sped without urging, as Kepha and Nuli rummaged beneath their seats and began passing out dark glasses. Only Emerson was exempted, since his rewq made artificial protection unnecessary. Sara turned the urrishmade spectacles in her hand.

  I guess daylight will seem unbearably bright for a time, after we leave this hole. Still, any discomfort would be brief until their eyes readapted to the upper world. The precaution seemed excessive.

  At last we’ll find out where the horse clan hid all these years. Eagerness blended with sadness, for no reality — not even some god wonder of the Galactics — could compare with the fanciful images found in pre-contact tales.

  A mystic portal to some parallel reality? A kingdom floating in the clouds?

  She sighed. It’s probably just some out-of-the-way mountain valley where neighboring villagers are too inbred and ignorant to know the difference between a donkey and a horse.

  The ancient transitway began to rise. The stripe grew dim as illumination spread along the walls, like liquid trickling from some reservoir, far ahead. Soon the tunnel began taking on texture. Sara made out shapes. Jagged outlines.

  Blinking dismay, she realized they were plunging toward sets of triple jaws, like a giant urrish mouth lined with teeth big enough to spear the wagon whole!

  Sara took her cue from the Illias. Kepha and Nuli seemed unruffled by the serrated opening. Still, even when she saw the teeth were metal—corroded with flaking rust — Sara could hardly convince herself it was only a dead machine.

  A huge Buyur thing.

  She had never seen its like. Nearly all the great buildings and devices of the meticulous Buyur had been hauled to sea during their final years on Jijo, peeling whole cities and seeding mulc spiders to eat what remained.

  So why didn’t the deconstructors carry this thing away?

  Behind the massive jaws lay disks studded with shiny stones that Sara realized were diamonds as big as her head. The wagon track went from smooth to bumpy as Kepha maneuvered the team along a twisty trail through the great machine’s gullet, zigzagging around the huge disks.

  At once Sara realized—

  This is a deconstructor! It must have been demolishing the tunnel when it broke down.

  I wonder why no one ever bothered to repair or haul it away.

  Then Sara saw the reason.

  Lava.

  Tongues and streamlets of congealed basalt protruded through a dozen cracks, where they hardened in place half a million years ago. It was caught by an eruption.

  Much later, teams of miners from some of the Six Races must have labored to clear a narrow path through the belly of the dead machine, chiseling out the last stretch separating the tunnel from the surface. Sara saw marks of crude pickaxes. And explosives must have been used, as well. That could explain the guild’s knowledge of this place.

  Sara wanted to gauge Kurt’s reaction, but just then the glare brightened as the team rounded a final sharp bend, climbing a steep ramp toward a maelstrom of light.

  Sara fumbled for her glasses as the world exploded with color.

  Swirling colors that stabbed.

  Colors that shrieked.

  Colors that sang with melodies so forceful that her ears throbbed.

  Colors that made her nose twitch and skin prickle with sensations just short of pain. A gasping moan lifted in unison from the passengers, as the wagon crested a short rise to reveal surroundings more foreign than the landscape of a dream.

  Even with the dark glasses in place, each peak and valley shimmered more pigments than Sara could name.

  In a daze, she sorted her impressions. To one side protruded the mammoth deconstructor, a snarl of slumped metal, drowned in ripples of frozen magma. Ripples that extended to the far horizon — layer after layer of radiant stone.

  At last she knew the answer to her question.

  Where on the Slope could a big secret remain hidden for a century or more?

  Even Dedinger, prophet of the sharp-sand desert, moaned aloud at how obvious it was.

&nbs
p; They were in the last place on Jijo anyone would go looking for people.

  The very center of the Spectral Flow.

  PART FOUR

  FROM THE NOTES OF GILLIAN BASKIN

  I WISH I COULD introduce myself to Alvin. I feel I already know the lad, from reading his journal and eavesdropping on conversations among his friends.

  Their grasp of twenty-third-century Anglic idiom is so perfect, and their eager enthusiasm so different from the hoons and urs I met before coming to Jijo, that half the time I almost forget I’m listening to aliens. That is, if I ignore the weird speech tones and inflections they take for granted.

  Then one of them comes up with a burst of eerily skewed logic that reminds me these arent just human kids after all, dressed up in Halloween suits to look like a crab, a centaur, and a squid in a wheelchair.

  Passing the time, they wondered (and I could not blame them) whether they were prisoners or guests in this underwater refuge. Speculation led to a wide-ranging discussion, comparing various famous captives of literature. Among their intriguing perceptions — Ur-ronn sees Richard II as the story of a legitimate business takeover, with Bolingbroke as the king’s authentic apprentice.

  The red qheuen, Pincer-Tip, maintains that the hero of the Feng Ho chronicles was kept in the emperor’s harem against his will, even though he had access to the Eight Hundred Beauties and could leave at any time.

  Finally, Huck declared it frustrating that Shakespeare spent so little time dealing with Macbeth’s evil wife, especially her attempt to escape sin by finding redemption in a presapient state. Huck has ideas for a sequel, describing the lady’s “reuplift from the fallow condition.” Her ambitious work would be no less than a morality tale about betrayal and destiny in the Five Galaxies!

  Beyond these singular insights, I am struck that here on Jijo an illiterate community of castaways was suddenly flooded with written lore provided by human settlers. What an ironic reversal of Earth’s situation, with our own native culture nearly over-whelmed by exposure to the Great Galactic Library. Astonishingly, the Six Races seem to have adapted with vitality and confidence, if Huck and Alvin are at all representative.

  I wish their experiment well.

  Admittedly, I still have trouble understanding their religion. The concept of redemption through devolution is one they seem to take for granted, yet its attraction eludes me.

  To my surprise, our ship’s doctor said she understands the concept, quite well.

  “Every dolphin grows up feeling the call,” Makanee told me. “In sleep, our minds still roam the vast songscape of the Whale Dream. It beckons us to return to our basic nature, whenever the stress of sapiency becomes too great.”

  This dolphin crew has been under pressure for three long years. Makanee’s staff must care for over two dozen patients who are already “redeemed,” as a Jijoan would put it. These dolphins have “reclaimed their basic nature” all right. In other words, we have lost them as comrades and skilled colleagues, as surely as if they died.

  Makanee fights regression wherever she finds symptoms, and yet she remains philosophical. She even offers a theory to explain why the idea revolts me so.

  She put it something like so—

  “PERHAPS you humans dread this life avenue because your race had to work for sapiency, earning it for yourself the hard way, across thousands of bleak generations.

  “We fins — and these urs and qheuens and hoons, and every other Galactic clan — all had the gift handed to us by some race that came before. You can’t expect us to hold on to it quite as tenaciously as you, who had to struggle so desperately for the same prize.

  “The attraction of this so-called Redemption Path may be a bit like ditching school. There’s something alluring about the notion of letting go, shucking the discipline and toil of maintaining a rigorous mind. If you slack off, so what? Your descendants will get another chance. A fresh start on the upward road of uplift, with new patrons to show you the way.”

  I asked Makanee if she found that part of it especially appealing. The idea of new patrons. Would dolphins be better off with different sponsors than Homo sapiens?

  She laughed and expressed her answer in deliciously ambiguous Trinary.

  When winter sends ice

  Growling across northern seas

  Wimps love the gulf stream!

  Makanee’s comment made me ponder again the question of human origins.

  On Earth, most people seem willing to suspend judgment on the question of whether our species had help from genetic meddlers, before the age of science and then contact. Stubborn Darwinists still present a strong case, but few have the guts to insist Galactic experts are wrong when they claim, with eons of experience, that the sole route to sapiency is Uplift. Many Terran citizens take their word for it.

  So the debate rages — on popular media shows and in private arguments among humans, dolphins, and chims — about who our absent patrons might have been. At last count there were six dozen candidates — from Tuvallians and Lethani all the way to Sun Ghosts and time travelers from some bizarre Nineteenth Dimension.

  While a few dolphins do believe in missing patrons, a majority are like Makanee. They hold that we humans must have done it ourselves, struggling against darkness without the slightest intervention by outsiders.

  How did Captain Creideiki put it, once? Oh yes.

  “THERE are racial memories, Tom and Jill. Recollections that can be accessed through deep keeneenk meditation. One particular image comes down from our dreamlike legends — of an apelike creature paddling to sea on a tree trunk, proudly proclaiming that he had carved it, all by himself, with a stone ax, and demanding congratulations from an indifferent cosmos.

  “Now I ask you, would any decent patron let its client act in such a way? A manner that made you look so ridiculous?

  “No. From the beginning we could tell that you humans were being raised by amateurs. By yourselves.”

  AT least that’s how I remember Creideiki’s remark. Tom found it hilarious, but I recall suspecting that our captain was withholding part of the story. There was more, that he was saving for another time.

  Only another time never came.

  Even as we dined with Creideiki that evening, Streaker was wriggling her way by an obscure back route into the Shallow Cluster.

  A day or two later, everything changed.

  IT’S late and I should finish these notes. Try to catch some sleep.

  Hannes reports mixed results from engineering. He and Karkaett found a way to remove some of the carbon coating from Streaker’s hull, but a more thorough job would only wind up damaging our already weak flanges, so that’s out for now.

  On the other hand, the control parameters I hoaxed out of the Library cube enabled Suessi’s crew to bring a couple of these derelict “dross” starships back to life! They’re still junk, or else the Buyur would have taken them along when they left. But immersion in icy water appears to have made little difference since then. Perhaps some use might be found for one or two of the hulks. Anyway, it gives the engineers something to do.

  We need distraction, now that Streaker seems to be trapped once more. Galactic cruisers have yet again chased us down to a far corner of the universe, coveting our lives and our secrets.

  How?

  I’ve pondered this over and over. How did they follow our trail?

  The course past Izmunuti seemed well hidden. Others made successful escapes this way before. The ancestors of the Six Races, for instance.

  It should have worked.

  ACROSS this narrow room, I stare at a small figure in a centered spotlight. My closest companion since Tom went away.

  Herbie.

  Our prize from the Shallow Cluster.

  Bearer of hopes and evil luck.

  Was there a curse on the vast fleet of translucent vessels we discovered at that strange dip in space? When Tom found a way through their shimmering fields and snatched Herb as a souvenir, did he bring back a jinx tha
t will haunt us until we put the damned corpse back in its billion-year-old tomb?

  I used to find the ancient mummy entrancing. Its hint of a humanoid smile seemed almost whimsical.

  But I’ve grown to hate the thing, and all the space this discovery has sent us fleeing across.

  I’d give it all to have Tom back. To make the last three years go away. To recover those innocent old days, when the Five Galaxies were merely very, very dangerous, and there was still such a thing as home.

  Streakers

  Kaa

  B-BUT YOU SAID HOONS WERE OUR ENEMIESSS!”

  Zhaki’s tone was defiant, though his body posture — head down and flukes raised — betrayed uncertainty. Kaa took advantage, stirring water with his pectoral fins, taking the firm upright stance of an officer in the Terragens Survey Service.

  “Those were different noons,” he answered. “The NuDawn disaster happened a long time ago.”

  Zhaki shook his bottle snout, flicking spray across the humid dome. “Eatees are eateesss. They’ll crush Earthlings any chance they get, just like the Soro and Tandu and all the other muckety Galactics-cs!”

  Kaa winced at the blanket generalization, but after two years on the run, such attitudes were common among the ranks. Kaa also nursed the self-pitying image of Earth against the entire universe. But if that were true, the torment would have ended with annihilation long ago.

  We have allies, a few friends … and the grudging sympathy of neutral clans, who hold meetings debating what to do about a plague of fanaticism sweeping the Five Galaxies. Eventually, the majority may reach a consensus and act to reestablish civilization.

  They may even penalize our murderers … for all the good it will do us.

  “Actually,” said Brookida, turning from his workbench in the far corner of the cramped shelter. “I would not put the hoon in the same category as our other persecutors. They aren’t religious radicals, or power-hungry conquerors. Sourpuss bureaucrats — that’s a better description. Officious sticklers for rules, which is why so many enter service with Galactic Institutes. At NuDawn they were only enforcing the law. When human settlers resisted—”