The Uplift War u-3 Read online

  “Ecological disasters aren’t as uncommon as the Institutes would have it seem, but this one was a major scandal. There was galaxy-wide revulsion. Battle fleets were sent by many of the major clans and put under unified, command. Soon the Bururalli were no more.”

  Athaclena nodded. “I assume their patrons, the Nahalli, were punished as well.”

  “Right. They lost status and are somebody’s clients now, the price of negligence. We’re taught the story in school. Several times.”

  When Robert offered the salami again, Athaclena shook her head. Her appetite had vanished. “So you humans inherited another reclamation world.”

  Robert put away their lunch. “Yeah. Since we’re two-client patrons, we had to be allowed colonies, but the Institutes have mostly handed us the leavings of other peoples’ disasters. We have to work hard helping this world’s ecosystem straighten itself out, but actually, Garth is really nice compared with some of the others. You ought to see Deemi and Horst, out in the Canaan Cluster.”

  “I have heard of them.” Athaclena shuddered. “I do not think I ever want to see—”

  She stopped mid-sentence. “I do not …” Her eyelids fluttered as she looked around, suddenly confused. “Thu’un dun!” Her ruff puffed outward. Athaclena stood quickly and walked — half in a trance — to where the towering spine-stones overlooked the misty tops of the cloud forest.

  Robert approached from behind. “What is it?”

  She spoke softly. “I sense something.”

  “Hmmph. That doesn’t surprise me, with that Tymbrimi nervous system of yours, especially the way you’ve been altering your body form just to please me. It’s no wonder you’re picking up static.”

  Athaclena shook her head impatiently. “I have not been doing it just to please you, you arrogant human male! And I’ve asked you before kindly to be more careful with your horrible metaphors. A Tymbrimi corona is not a radio!” She gestured with her hand. “Now please be quiet for a moment.”

  Robert fell silent. Athaclena concentrated, trying to kenn again…

  A corona might not pick up static like a radio, but it could suffer interference. She sought after the faint aura she had felt so very briefly, but it was impossible. Robert’s clumsy, eager empathy flux crowded it out completely.

  “What was it, Clennie?” he asked softly.

  “I do not know. Something not very far away, off toward the southeast. It felt like people — men and neo-chimpanzees mostly — but there was something else as well.”

  Robert frowned. “Well, I guess it might have been one of the ecological management stations. Also, there are isolated freeholds all through this area, mostly higher up, where the seisin grows.”

  She turned swiftly. “Robert, I felt Potential! For the briefest moment of clarity, I touched the emotions of a pre-sentient being!”

  Robert’s feelings were suddenly cloudy and turbulent, his face impassive. “What do you mean?”

  “My father told me about something, before you and I left for the mountains. At the time I paid little attention. It seemed impossible, like those fairy tales your human authors create to give us Tymbrimi strange dreams.”

  “Your people buy them by the shipload,” Robert interjected. “Novels, old movies, threevee, poems …”

  Athaclena ignored his aside. “Uthacalthing mentioned stories of a creature of this planet, a native being of high Potential… one who is supposed to have actually survived the Bururalli Holocaust.” Athaclena’s corona foamed forth a glyph rare to her… syullf-tha, the joy of a puzzle to be solved. “I wonder. Could the legends possibly be true?”

  Did Robert’s mood flicker with a note of relief? Athaclena felt his crude but effective ejnotional guard go opaque.

  “Hmmm. Well, there is a legend,” he said. “A simple story told by wolflings. It could hardly be of interest to a sophisticated Galactic, I suppose.”

  Athaclena eyed him carefully and touched his arm, stroking it gently. “Are you going to make me wait while you draw out this mystery with dramatic pauses? Or will you save yourself bruises and tell me what you know at once?”

  Robert laughed. “Well, since you re so persuasive. You just might have picked up the empathy output of a Garthling.”

  Athaclena’s broad, gold-flecked eyes blinked. “That is the name my father used!”

  “Ah. Then Uthacalthing has been listening to old seisin hunters’ tales… Imagine having such after only a hundred Earth years here… Anyway, it’s said that one large animal did manage to escape the Bururalli, through cunning, ferocity, and a whole lot of Potential. The mountain men and chims tell of sampling traps robbed, laundry stolen from clotheslines, and strange markings scratched on unclimbable cliff faces.

  “Oh, it’s probably all a lot of eyewash.” Robert smiled. “But I did recall those legends when Mother told me I was to come up here. So I figured, so that it wouldn’t be a total loss, I might as well take a Tymbrimi along to see if she could flush out a Garthling with her empathy net.”

  Some metaphors Athaclena understood quite readily. Her fingernails pressed into Robert’s arm. “So?” she asked with a questing lilt. “That is the entire reason I am in this wilderness? I am to be a sniffer-out of smoke and legends for you?”

  “Sure,” Robert teased. “Why else would I come out here, all alone in the mountains with an alien from outer space?”

  Athaclena hissed through her teeth. But within she could not help but feel pleased. This human sardonicism wasn’t unlike reverse-talk among her own people. And when Robert laughed aloud, she found she had to join him. For the moment all worry of war and danger was banished. It was a welcome release for both of them.

  “If such a creature exists, we must find it, you and I,” she said at last.

  “Yeah, Clennie. We’ll find it together.”

  8

  Fiben

  TAASF Scoutship Proconsul hadn’t outlived its pilot after all. It had seen its last mission — the ancient boat was dead in space — but within its bubble canopy life still remained.

  Enough life, at least, to inhale the pungent stench of a six days unwashed ape — and to exhale an apparently unceasing string of imaginative curses.

  Fiben finally ran down when he found he was repeating himself. He had long ago covered every permutation, combination, and juxtaposition of bodily, spiritual, and hereditary attributes — real and imaginary — the enemy could possibly possess. That exercise had carried him all the way through his own brief part in the space battle, while he fired his popgun weaponry and evaded counterblows like a gnat ducking sledgehammers, through the concussions of near-misses and the shriek of tortured metal, and into an aftermath of dazed, confused bemusement that he did not seem to be dead after all. Not yet at least.

  When he was sure the life capsule was still working and not about to sputter out along with the rest of the scoutboat, Fiben finally wriggled out of his suit and sighed at his first opportunity to scratch in days. He dug in with a will, using not only his hands but the lingers and tumb of his left foot, as well. Finally he sagged back, aching from the pounding he had been through.

  His main job had been to pass close enough to collect good data for the rest of the defense force. Fiben guessed that zooming straight down the middle of the invading fleet probably qualified. Heckling the enemy he had thrown in for free.

  It seemed the interlopers failed toxappreciate his running commentary as Proconsul plunged through their midst. He’d lost count of how many times close calls came near to cooking him. By the time he had passed behind and beyond the onrush-ing armada, Proconsul’s entire aft end had been turned into a glazed-over hunk of slag.

  The main propulsion system was gone, of course. There was no way to return and help his comrades in the desperate, futile struggle that followed soon after. Drifting farther and farther from the one-sided battle, Fiben could only listen helplessly.

  It wasn’t even a contest. The fighting lasted little more than a day.

  H
e remembered the last charge of the corvette, Darwin, accompanied by two converted freighters and a small swarm of surviving scoutboats. They streaked down, blasting their way into the flank of the invading host, turning it, throwing one wing of battlecruisers into confusion under clouds of smoke and waves of noisome probability waves.

  Not a single Terran craft came out of that maelstrom. Fiben knew then that TAASF Bonobo, and his friend Simon, were gone.

  Right now, the enemy seemed to be pursuing a few fugitives off toward Ifni knew where. They were taking their time, cleaning up thoroughly before proceeding to supine Garth.

  Now Fiben resumed his cursing along a new tack. All in a spirit of constructive criticism, of course, he dissected the character faults of the species his own race was unfortunate enough to have as patrons.

  Why? he asked the universe. Why did humans — those hapless, hairless, wolfling wretches — have the incredibly bad taste to have uplifted neo-chimpanzees into a galaxy so obviously run by idiots?

  Eventually, he slept.

  His dreams were fitful. Fiben kept imagining that he was trying to speak, but his voice would not shape the sentences, a nightmare possibility to one whose great-grandfather spoke only crudely, with the aid of devices, and whose slightly more distant ancestors faced the world without words at all.

  Fiben sweated. No shame was greater than this. In his dream he sought speech as if it were an object, a thing that might be misplaced, somehow.

  On looking down he saw a glittering gem lying on the ground. Perhaps this was the gift of words, Fiben thought, and he bent over to take it. But he was too clumsy! His thumb refused to work with his forefinger, and he wasn’t able to pluck the bauble out of the dust. In fact, all of his efforts seemed only to push it in deeper.

  Despairing finally, he was forced to crouch down and pick it up with his lips.

  It burned! In his dream he cried out as a terrible searing poured down his throat like liquid fire.

  And yet, he recognized that this was one of those strange nightmares — the kind in which one could be both objective and terrified at the same time. As one dreamself writhed in agony, another part of Fiben witnessed it in a state of interested detachment.

  All at once the scene shifted. Fiben found himself standing in the midst of a gathering of bearded men in black coats and floppy hats. They were mostly elderly, and they leafed through dusty texts as they argued with each other. An oldtime Talmudic conclave, he recognized suddenly, like those he had read about in comparative religions class, back at the University. The rabbis sat in a circle, discussing symbolism and biblical interpretation. One lifted an aged hand to point at Fiben.

  “He that lappeth like an animal, Gideon, he shall thou not take …”

  “Is that what it means?” Fiben asked. The pain was gone. Now he was more bemused than fearful. His pal, Simon, had been Jewish. No doubt that explained part of this crazy symbolism. What was going on here was obvious. These learned men, these wise human scholars, were trying to illuminate that frightening first part of his dream for him.

  “No, no,” a second sage countered. “The symbols relate to the trial of the infant Moses! An angel, you’ll recall, guided his hand to the glowing coals, rather than the shining jewels, and his mouth was burned…”

  “But I don’t see what that tells me!” Fiben protested.

  The oldest rabbi raised his hand, and the others all went silent.

  “The dream stands for none of those things. The symbolism should be obvious,” he said.

  “It comes from the oldest book…”

  The sage’s bushy eyebrows knotted with concern.

  “… And Adam, too, ate from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge…”

  “Uh,” Fiben groaned aloud, awakening in a sweat. The gritty, smelly capsule was all around him again, and yet the vividness of the dream lingered, making him wonder for a moment which was real after all. Finally he shrugged it off. “Old Proconsul must have drifted through the wake of some Eatee probability mine while I slept. Yeah. That must be it. I’ll never doubt the stories they tell in a spacer’s bar again.”

  When he checked his battered instruments Fiben found that the battle had moved on around the sun. His own derelict, meanwhile, was on a nearly perfect intersect orbit with a planet.

  “Hmmmph,” he grunted as he worked the computer. What it told him was ironic. It really is Garth.

  He still had a little maneuvering power in the gravity systems. Perhaps enough, just maybe, to get him within escape pod range.

  And wonder of wonders, if his ephemerides were right, he might even be able to reach the Western Sea area … a bit east of Port Helenia. Fiben whistled tunelessly for a few minutes. He wondered what the chances were that this should happen. A million to one? Probably more like a trillion.

  Or was the universe just suckering him with a bit of hope before the next whammy?

  Either way, he decided, there was some solace in thinking that, under all these stars, someone out there was still thinking of him personally.

  He got out his tool kit and set to work making the necessary repairs.

  9

  Uthacalthing

  Uthacalthing knew it was unwise to wait much longer. Still he remained with the Librarians, watching them try to coax forth one more valuable detail before it was time at last to go.

  He regarded the human and neo-chimpanzee technicians as they hurried about under the high-domed ceiling of the Planetary Branch Library. They all had jobs to do and concentrated on them intently, efficiently. And yet one could sense a ferment just below the surface, one of oarely suppressed fear.

  Unbidden, rittitees formed in the low sparking of his corona. The glyph was one commonly used by Tymbrimi parents to calm frightened children.

  They can’t detect you, Uthacalthing told rittitees. And yet it obstinately hovered, trying to soothe young ones in distress.

  Anyway, these people aren’t children. Humans have only known of the Great Library for two Earth centuries. But they had thousands of years of their own history before that. They may still lack Galactic polish and sophistication, but that deficit has sometimes been an advantage to them.

  Rarely. Rittitees was dubious.

  Uthacalthing ended the argument by drawing the uncertain glyph back where it belonged, into his own well of being.

  Under the vaulted stone ceiling towered a five-meter gray monolith, embossed with a rayed spiral sigil — symbol of the Great Library for three billion years. Nearby, data loggers filled crystalline memory cubes. Printers hummed and spat bound reports which were quickly annotated and carted away.

  This Library station, a class K outlet, was a small one indeed. It contained only the equivalent of one thousand times all the books humans had written before Contact, a pittance compared with the full Branch Library on Earth, or sector general on Tanith.

  Still, when Garth was taken this room, too, would fall to the invader.

  Traditionally, that should make no difference. The Library was supposed to remain open to all, even parties fighting over the territory it stood upon. In times like these, however, it was unwise to count on such niceties. The colonial resistance forces planned to carry off what they could in hopes of using the information somehow, later.

  A pittance of a pittance. Of course it had been his suggestion that they do this, but Uthacalthing was frankly amazed that the humans had gone along with the idea so vigorously. After all, why bother? What could such a small smattering of information accomplish?

  This raid on the Planetary Library served his purposes, but it also reinforced his opinion of Earth people. They just never gave up. It was yet another reason he found the creatures delightful.

  The hidden reason for this chaos — his own private jest — had called for the dumping and misplacing of a few specific megafiles, easily overlooked in all of this confusion. In fact, nobody appeared to have noticed when he briefly attached his own input-output cube to the massive Library, waited a few seconds,
then pocketed the little sabotage device again.

  Done. Now there was little to do but watch the wolflings while he waited for his car.

  Off in the distance a wailing tone began to rise and fall. It was the keening of the spaceport siren, across the bay, as another crippled refugee from the rout in space came in for an emergency landing. They had heard that sound all too infrequently. Everyone already knew that there had been few survivors.

  Mostly the traffic consisted of departing aircraft. Many mainlanders had already taken flight to the chain of islands in the Western Sea where the vast majority of the Earthling population still made its home. The Government was preparing its own evacuation.

  When the sirens moaned, every man and chim looked up briefly. Momentarily, the workers broadcast a complex fugue of anxiety that Uthacalthing could almost taste with his corona.

  Almost taste?

  Oh, what lovely, surprising things, these metaphors, Uthacalthing thought. Can one taste with one’s corona? Or touch with one’s eyes? Anglic is so silly, yet so delightfully thought provoking.

  And do not dolphins actually see with their ears?

  Zunour’thzun formed above his waving tendrils, resonating with the fear of the men and chims.

  Yes, we all hope to live, for we have so very much left to do or taste or see or kenn…

  Uthacalthing wished diplomacy did not require that Tymbrimi choose their dullest types as envoys. “He had been selected as an ambassador because, among other qualities, he was boring, at least from the point of view of those back home.

  And poor Athaclena seemed to be even worse off, so sober and serious.

  He freely admitted that it was partly his own fault. That was one reason he had brought along his own father’s large collection of pre-Contact Earthling comic recordings. The Three Stooges, especially, inspired him. Alas, as yet Athaclena seemed unable to understand the subtle, ironic brilliance of those ancient Terran comedic geniuses.