Brightness Reef u-4 Read online

  Sara envied Prity’s escape into abstraction.

  One of the tree farmers rose to speak-a dark man named Jop, whose pale yellow hair curled around his ears. He clenched two large hands, knotty with lifelong calluses.

  “Penny pinching and farsightedness!” Jop dismissed the carpenter’s plea. “What would you preserve? A few workshops and docks? Passing toys like plumbing and paper? Dross! All dross! Some paltry comforts that our sinner ancestors let us poor exiles keep for a while, softening our first steps on the road toward grace. But the Scrolls say none of it will last! It’s all destined for the sea!”

  Jop turned to his partisans, clutching both hands together. “It was planned long ago-what we’re sworn to do when starships come. Or else, why’ve we supported a guild of explosers all this time?”

  Sara glanced again at Henrik and son, seated at the back of the dais. The boy, Jomah, betrayed unease with a slow twisting of his cap between nervous young hands. But his pa might have been a statue. Henrik had remained silent throughout, except to report tersely that his charges were ready.

  Sara always pictured their craft as a frustrating profession, probably unique to Jijo. After so many years of preparation — performing endless tests in a small canyon in the hills — wouldn’t they hanker to see it all finally put to use? I know I would.

  Long ago, she and Lark and little Dwer used to sit in their attic room, watching moonlight spill over the rumbling water wheel and thrilling each other with lurid tales of what they might see if ever the moment came when Henrik lit his fuses. With delicious mock-terror pounding in their chests, they counted down heartbeats until — kablam!

  Dwer loved making sound effects, especially the pretend detonation that finished off the dam, accompanied by waving arms and lots of saliva. Sara’s younger brother then gleefully described the wall of water tossing proud boats like trifles, smashing Nelo’s drying racks, and driving toward their bedroom window like a fist.

  Lark took over then, thrilling and terrifying the younger kids as he portrayed their attic being sheared off by a watery blast, sent careening through the garu forest while farmers stared down in pity. Each pretend near-miss made Sara and Dwer cry out till they leaped on their laughing older brother, pummeling to make him stop.

  And yet — after Dwer and Lark had done their best to scare her, they would toss and turn, while Sara never had nightmares. When she did dream about the dam bursting, she used to picture a great wave simply taking them in the palm of its gentle hand. As froth concealed all of Jijo, it magically transformed into the fluffy, charged substance of a cloud. Always, the fantasy ended with her body lighter than mist, fearless, soaring through a night radiant with stars.

  A roar of approval yanked her back to the present. At first she could not tell if it came from the party wanting quick action, or from those resolved not to wreck nine generations’ work on the mere evidence of their own eyes.

  “We have no idea what it was we saw!” her father declared, combing his beard with gnarled fingers. “Can we be sure it was a spaceship? Perhaps a meteor grazed by. That’d explain all the noise and ruckus.”

  Sneers and foot-stamps greeted this suggestion. Nelo hurried on. “Even if it was a ship, that don’t mean we’ve been discovered! Other vessels have come and gone- Zang globes, for instance, come to siphon water from the sea. Did we wreck everything then? Did the older tribes burn their towns when we humans came? How do we know it wasn’t another sneakship, bringing a seventh exile race to join our Commons?”

  Jop snorted derisively.

  “Let me remind the learned papermaker — sneakships sneak! They come under the shadow of night an’ cloud an’ mountain peak. This new vessel made no such effort. It aimed straight at the Glade of the Egg, at a time when the pavilions of Gathering are there, along with the chief sages of the Six.”

  “Exactly!” Nelo cried. “By now the sages should be well aware of the situation and would have farcast if they felt it necessary to—”

  “Farcasting?” Jop interrupted. “Are you serious? The sages remind us over an’ over again that it can’t be trusted. In a crisis, farcasts may be just the thing to attract attention! Or else” — Jop paused meaningfully — “or else there may have been no calls for a more terrible reason.”

  He. let the implication sink in, amid a scatter of gasps. Almost everyone present had a relative or close friend who had taken pilgrimage this year.

  Lark and Dwer — are you safe? Sara pondered anxiously. Will I ever see you again?

  “Tradition leaves it up to each community. Shall we shirk, when our loved ones may’ve already paid a dearer price than some buildings and a stinkin’ dam?”

  Cries of outrage from the craft workers were drowned out by support from Jop’s followers. “Order!” Fru Nestor squeaked, but her plaint was lost in the chaos. Jop and his allies shouted for a vote.

  “Choose the Law! Choose the Law!”

  Nestor appealed for order with upraised hands, clearly dreading the dismemberment of her town-its reduction to a mere farming hamlet, rich in reverence but little else. “Does anyone else have something to say?”

  Nelo stepped up to try again but wilted under a stream of catcalls. Who had ever seen a papermaker treated thus? Sara felt his shame and dishonor, but it would be far worse when his beloved factory was blown to oblivion before an all-destroying flood.

  Sara had a strange thought — should she sneak up to her old attic room and wait for the wave? Who had prophesied right? Dwer and Lark? Or those images she had foreseen in dreams? It would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to find out.

  Resumed chanting tapered off as someone new moved forward from behind the crowd of pale hoon sailors. It was a centauroid figure with a long sinuous body of mottled suede that branched into a pair of stubby shoulderless arms and a powerful snakelike neck. The narrow-pointed head contained three black eyes, one of them lidless and faceted, all set around a triangular mouth. It was an urrish tinker Sara recognized from past visits to Dolo, buying scraps of glass and metal, selling simple Buyur tools reclaimed from some ruin. The urs stepped daintily, as if worried her hooves might catch in the rough floorboards. She had one arm raised, exposing a glimpse of the bluish brooding pouch underneath, an act that might have different connotations in a meeting of her own kind, but Fru Nestor took it as a request to speak, which she granted with a bow.

  Sara heard a human mutter — “hinney!” — a rude callback to days when newcomer Earthlings fought ur-rish tribes over land and honor. If the tinker heard the insult, she ignored it, carrying herself well for a youngish urs with just one husband pouch tenanted by a squirming bulge. Among so many humans, the urs could not use a plains dialect of Galactic Two but made do with Anglic, despite the handicap of a cloven upper lip.

  “I can ve called Ulgor. I thank you for your courtesy, which is vlessed among the Six. I wish only to ask questions concerning the issues discussed tonight. Ny first question follows-

  “Is this not a natter vest decided vy our sages? Why not let those wise ones rule whether the great tine of judgnent has arrived?”

  With an exaggerated show of mannerly patience, Jop replied, “Learned neighbor, the Scrolls call on all villages to act independently, to erase all signs that might be seen from the sky! The order’s simple. No complicated judgment is needed.

  “Besides,” he concluded. “There’s no time to hear from the sages. They’re all far away, at Gathering.”

  “Forgive,” Ulgor bowed her forelegs. “Not all. A few linger in residence at the Hall o’ Vooks, in Vivlos, do they not?”

  There was confusion as people looked at one another, then Fru Nestor cried out, “The Hall of Books, in Biblos! Yes, that’s true. But Biblos is still many days away, by boat.”

  Again Ulgor bent her neck before dissenting. “Yet I have heard that, fron the highest tree in Dolo, one can see across the quicksand narsh to the glass cliffs overlooking Vivlos.”

  “With a good telescope,” Jop acknowledged, wa
ry that this was sapping the crowd’s passionate momentum. “I still don’t see how it helps—”

  “Fire!”

  Faces turned toward Sara, who had shouted while the thought was still half formed.

  “We’d see flames as the library burned!”

  Muttering, the crowd stared at her, till she explained. “You all know I used to work at Biblos. They have a contingency plan like everyone else. If the sages command it, the librarians are to carry off what volumes they can, then ignite the rest.”

  This brought on a somber hush. Wrecking Dole’s dam was one thing, but loss of Biblos would truly signal an ending. No place was more central to human life on Jijo.

  “Finally, they are to blow the pillars holding up the roof-of-stone and bring it down on the ashes. Ulgor’s right. We could see any change that big, especially with Loocen rising at this hour.”

  Fru Nestor spoke a terse command. “Send someone aloft to see!”

  Several boys leaped up and vanished through the windows, accompanied by a string of hooting chimpanzees. A nervous murmur ensued while the crowd waited. Sara felt uncomfortable under the regard of so many, and lowered her eyes.

  That was the sort of thing Lark would do. Boldly taking over a meeting at the last minute, compelling others to act. Joshu had that impulsiveness, too — till the sickness took him in those final weeks…

  Gnarled fingers grasped hers, halting the bleak gyre of her thoughts. She looked up and saw that Nelo had aged in the last hour. Now the fate of his beloved mill rested on news from above.

  As the slow duras passed, the full import of her prediction sank in.

  Biblos.

  The Hall of Books.

  Once already, fire had taken a terrible toll there. Even so, the remaining archive was humanity’s greatest contribution to the Commons and a cause of both envy and wonder among the other races.

  What will we become, if it’s gone? True pastoralists? Gleaners, living off remnants swiped from ancient Buyur sites? Farmers all?

  That was how the other five had seemed, when humans first came. Bickering primitives with their barely functioning commons. Humanity introduced new ways, changed the rules, almost as much as the arrival of the Egg several generations later.

  Now shall we slide downslope faster? Losing the few relics that remind us we once roamed galaxies? Shucking our books, tools, clothes, till we’re like glavers? Pure, shriven innocents?

  According to the Scrolls, that was one path to salvation. Many, like Jop, believed in it.

  Sara tried to see hope, even if word came back of flames and dust in the night. At any time, hundreds of books were outside Biblos, on loan to far-flung communities.

  But few texts in Sara’s specialty ever left their dusty shelves. Hilbert. Somerfeld. Witten and Tang. Eliahu — names of great minds she knew intimately across centuries and parsecs. The intimacy of pure, near-perfect thoughts. They’ll burn. The sole copies. Lately her research had swung to other areas — the chaotic ebb and flow of language — but still she called mathematics home. The voices in those books had always seemed soul-alive. Now she feared learning they were gone.

  Then abruptly, another notion occurred to her, completely unexpected, glancing off her grief at a startling angle.

  If Galactics really have come, what do a few thousand paper volumes really matter? Sure, they’ll judge us for our ancestors’ crime. Nothing can prevent that. But meanwhile, aboard their ships…

  It occurred to Sara that she might get a chance to visit a completely different kind of library. One towering over the Biblos cache, the way the noon sun outblazed a candle. What an opportunity! Even if we’re all soon prisoners of the galactic Lords of Migration, destined for some prison world, they can hardly deny us a chance to read!

  In accounts of olden days she had read about “accessing” computer databases, swimming in knowledge like a warm sea, letting it fill your mind, your pores. Swooping through clouds of wisdom.

  I could find out if my work is original! Or if it’s been done ten million times, during a billion years of Galactic culture.

  The thought seemed at once both arrogant and humbling. Her fear of the great starships was undiminished. Her prayer remained that it was all a mistake, or a meteor, or some illusion.

  But a rebel corner of her roiling mind felt something new-a wakened hunger.

  If only…

  Her thought broke against an interruption. Suddenly, high overhead, a boy stuck his head through a slit window. Hanging upside down, he cried — “No fires!”

  He was joined by others, at different openings, all shouting the same thing. Chimps joined in, shrieking excitement across the crowded meeting hall.

  “No fires — and the roof-of-stone still stands!”

  Old Henrik stood, then spoke two words to the elders before departing with his son. Amid the flustered babble of the throng, Sara read the exploser’s expression of resolve and the decisive message of his lips.

  “We wait.”

  Asx

  Our caravan of races marched toward where the alien ship was last seen — a blazing cylinder — descending beyond a low hill. Along the way, Vubben continued chanting from the Scroll of Danger.

  Voices cried out ahead. Crowds jostled along a ridgetop, hissing and murmuring. We must nudge past men and hoon to win our way through.

  Whereupon, did we not gaze across a nest? A new clearing lined with shattered trees, still smoking from whatever ray had cut them down.

  And poised amid this devastation — shimmering from its heat of entry — lay the cause.

  Nearby, human and urrish crafters argued in the strange dialect of the engineering caste, disputing whether this nub or that blister might be weaponry or sensors. But which of us on Jijo has the expertise to guess? Our ships long ago went down to join this planet’s melting crust. Even the most recent arrivals, humans, are many generations removed from starfarers. No living member of the Commons ever saw anything like this.

  It was a ship of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies. That much the techies could tell.

  Yet where was the rayed spiral? The symbol required to be carried on the forward flank of every sanctioned ship of space?

  Our worried lore — masters explain — the spiral is no mere symbol. Silently, it rides. Impartially, it records. Objectively, it bears witness to everything seen and done, wherever the vessel may fly.

  We peered and sought, but in the ordained place there lay only a burnished shine. It had been rubbed away, smoother than a qheuenish larva.

  That was when confusion gave way to understanding. Realization of what this ship represented.

  Not the great Institutes, as we first thought.

  Nor the righteous, mighty, legalistic star-clans — or the mysterious Zang.

  Not even exiles like ourselves.

  None of those, but outlaws. Felons of an order worse than our own ancestors.

  Villains.

  Villains had come to Jijo.

  III. THE BOOK OF THE SEA

  It is a Paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills, to become paradise no more. By what right, then, do we exiles claim a world that was honorably set aside, to nurture frail young-life in peace, and be kept safe from hungry nations?

  Exiles, you should fear the law’s just wrath, to find you here, unsanctioned, not yet redeemed. But when judgment comes, law will also be your shield, tempering righteous wrath with justice.

  There is a deeper terror, prowling the angry sky. It is a different peril. One that stalks in utter absence of the law.

  —The Scroll of Danger

  Alvin’s Tale

  All right, so i’m not as quick as some. I’ll never think as fast as Huck, who can run verbal circles around me.

  It’s just as well, I guess. I could’ve grown up in this little hoon port thinking I was such a clever fellow — as witty and gloss as my literary nicknamesake — just ’cause I can read any Anglic book and fancy m
yself a writer. Good thing I had this little g’Kek genius living in the khuta next door, to remind me that an above-average hoon is still a hoon. Dull as a brick.

  Anyway, there I was, squatting between two of my best friends while they fussed over what we should do with the coming summer, and it never occurred to me that both Huck and Pincer were ring-coring me at more than one level.

  Pincer only spent a few duras trying to tell us about his latest “monsters” — grayish shapes he thought he glimpsed through the murk, while bored, tending his hive’s lobster pens. He’s pulled that one on us so many times, we wouldn’t listen if he brought us a molar from Moby Dick, with a peg leg jammed like a toothpick on one end. Sighing from all five vents at once, he gave up babbling about his latest sighting, and switched over to defending his Project Nautilus.

  Pincer was upset to learn that Huck wanted to abandon the scheme. Legs lifted on opposite sides of his hard shell, hissing like tubes on a calliope.

  “Look, we already agreed-deed. We just gotta finish the bathy, or else what’ve we been working-king on for a year now-ow!”

  “You did most of the carpentry and testing,” I pointed out. “Huck and I mostly drew up plans for—”

  “Exactly!” Huck interrupted, two eyes bobbing for emphasis. “Sure, we helped with designs and small parts. That was fun. But I never signed on to actually ride the dam’ thing to the bottom of the sea.”

  Pincer’s blue cupola lifted all the way up, and his slit-of-eyes seemed to spin. “But you said it was interesting-ing! You called the idea uttergloss-loss!”

  “True,” Huck agreed. “In theory, it’s totally puff. But there’s one problem, friend. It’s also jeekee dangerous.”