Brightness Reef

  But psi channels are fey, nonlinear. Or so say books printed by the humans, who admit that their kind knew little about the subject when their ancestors fled this way.

  When the Holy Egg first gave us rewq, some among the Six feared the symbionts worked by psi, which might make our fugitive enclave more detectable. Despite satisfying proof it is not so, that old slander has now returned, once more stirring friction among us.

  Some even contend that the Holy Egg itself may have attracted our ruin! After all, why do pirates come now, a mere century after the blessed day the Egg emerged? Others point out that we might by now know much more about our invaders, if only we had bred adepts of our own, instead of the few sensitives and truth-scryers we have today.

  Regret is a silly, useless thing, i might as well pine for the rings our ancestors were said to have abandoned, simply because those toroids were tainted with sin.

  Oh, how many things the legends say those rings once let us do! To run before the wind, as fleet as any urs. To swim like qheuens and walk beneath the sea. To touch and handle the world at all levels of its grainy texture. Above all, to face this dire, dread-filled universe with a self-centered confidence that was utterly, biologically serene. No uncertainty to plague our complex community of selves. Only the towering egotism of a central, confident "I."

  Dwer

  THE BLUE QHEUENS OF THE MOUNTAINS HAD different traditions than their cousins who lived behind I mighty Dolo Dam. Molting rituals back home always seemed informal. Human youngsters from the nearby village ran free with their chitinous friends, while grown-ups shared nectar-beer and celebrated the coming-of-age of a new generation.

  In this alpine sanctuary, the chants and hissing rituals felt more solemn. Guests included the local g'Kek doctor, some traeki gleaners, and a dozen human neighbors, who took turns at a warped window pane, to view events in the larva creche next door. The hoons who fished the lake behind the dam had sent the usual regrets. Most hoon felt incurably squeamish toward the qheuen way of reproduction.

  Dwer was here out of gratitude. If not for this kindly hive, he might be flexing stumps instead of a nearly full set of fingers and toes, still tender but recovering. The occasion also came as a break from tense preparations with Danel Ozawa. When beckoned to the window by Carving Tongue, the local matriarch, Dwer and Danel bowed to the matriarch, and to the human tutor, Mister Shed.

  "Congratulations to you both," Ozawa said. "May you have a fine clutch of graduates."

  "Thank you, honored sage." Carving Tongue's breathy sigh seemed edgy. As head female, she laid more than half the eggs. Many of the throbbing shapes next door would be her offspring, preparing to emerge at last. After waiting twenty years or more, some strain was expected.

  Mister Shed had no genetic investment in the young qheuens transforming next door, but anxiety wrote across the instructor's gaunt face.

  "Yes, a fine clutch. Several will make excellent senior students, when their shells harden and they take names."

  Carving Tongue added-"Two are already precocious chewers of wood-though I believe our tutor refers to other talents."

  Mister Shed nodded. "There is a school downslope, where local tribes send their brightest kids. Elmira should qualify, if she makes it through-"

  The matriarch erupted a warning hiss. "Tutor! Keep your private nicknames to yourself. Do not jinx the larvae on this sacred day!"

  Mister Shed swallowed nervously. "Sorry, matron." He rocked side to side, in the manner of a qheuen boy, caught stealing a crayfish from the hatchery ponds.

  Fortunately, a traeki caterer arrived then with a cauldron of vel nectar. Humans and qheuens crowded the table. But Dwer saw that Ozawa felt as he did. Neither of them had time for a euphoric high. Not while preparing for a deadly serious mission.

  Too bad, though, Dwer thought, noting how the traeki spiked each goblet with a race-specific spray from its chem-synth ring. Soon the mood in the chamber lightened as intoxicants flowed. Carving Tongue joined the throng at the cauldron, leaving the three humans alone by the window.

  "That's it, my beauties. Do it gently," murmured the scholar contracted to teach qheuen children reading and math-a long patient task, given the decades larvae spent in one muddy suite, devouring wrigglers and slowly absorbing the mental habits of sapient beings. To Dwer's surprise, Mister Shed slipped a functioning rewq over his face. Lately, most of the symbionts had gone dormant, or even died.

  Dwer peered through the window, a rippled convex lens with a broken stem in the middle. A greasy pool filled the center of the next room, which dim shapes traversed, casting left and right as if in nervous search.

  Those may have been Mister Shed's beloved pupils a few days ago, and some would be again, after molting into adolescent qheuens. But this play hearkened back millions of years, to a time long before the patrons of the qheuen race meddled and reshaped them into starfarers. It had a bloody logic all its own.

  "That's right, children, do it softly-"

  Shed's hopeful sigh cut off with a yelp as the pond erupted in froth. Wormlike forms flipped out of the water in a thrashing tangle. Dwer glimpsed one shape that was already nearly five-sided, with three legs flailing under a glistening carapace of aquamarine. The new shell bore livid marks of recent raking. Trailing were tatters of white tissue, the larval body mass that must be sloughed.

  Legend said that qheuens who still roamed the stars had ways to ease this transition-machines and artificial environments-but on Jijo, molting was much the same as when qheuens were clever animals, hunting the shallows of the world that gave them birth.

  Dwer recalled running home in tears, the first time he saw a molting, seeking comfort and understanding from his older brother. Even then, Lark had been serious, learned, and a bit pedantic.

  "Sapient races have many reproductive styles. Some focus all their effort on a few offspring, which are cherished from the start. Any good parent will die to save her child. Hoons and g'Keks are like humans in this so-called High-K approach.

  "Urs breed much like fish in the sea-that's Low-K- casting hordes of offspring to live wild in the bush, until the survivors sniff their way back to blood relatives. Early human settlers thought the urrish way heartless, while many urs saw our custom as paranoid and maudlin.

  "Qheuens fall in between. They care about their young but also know that many in each clutch must die, so that others can live. It's a sadness that lends poignancy to qheuen poetry. Truly, I think the wisest of them have a better grasp of life and death than any human ever could."

  Sometimes Lark got carried away. Still, Dwer saw truth in what his brother said. Soon a new generation would shamble out of the humid nursery, to a world that would dry their shells and make them citizens. Or else no survivors would emerge at all. Either way, the bitter-sweetness was so intense, anyone wearing rewq, like Mister Shed, must be crazy or a masochist.

  He felt a touch on his arm. Danel motioned-time to make a polite exit, before the rituals resumed. They had work, provisions and weapons to prepare, as well as the Legacy they were to take over the mountains.

  This morning, Lena Strong had returned from the Glade with another young woman Dwer recognized with a wince--Jenin, one of the big, strapping Worley sisters-along with five donkey-loads of books, seeds, and ominous sealed tubes. He had been expecting Rety as well, but Lena reported that the sages wanted to talk to the sooner girl for a while longer.

  No matter. With or without her as a guide, Dwer was ultimately responsible for getting the small expedition to its goal.

  And once there? Would there be violence? Death? Or a brave beginning?

  Sighing, Dwer turned to follow Ozawa.

  Now we'll never know if Sara would've turned out to be right, or Lark. Whether the Six were bound on the Low Road, or the High.

  From here on, it's all about survival.

  Behind him, Mister Shed pressed both hands against the warped pane, his voice hoarse with anguish over small lives that were not his to adore or right
fully to mourn.

  The Stranger

  He wonders how he knows the thing he knows. It used to be so easy, back when wisdom came in compact packages called words. Each one carried a range of meanings, subtly shaded and complex. Strung together, they conveyed a multitude of concepts, plans, emotions . . .

  And lies.

  He blinks as that one word comes slickly into mind, the way so many used to do. He rolls it around his tongue, recognizing both sound and meaning at the same time, and this brings on a wash of joy mixed with awe. Awe to imagine that he once did the same thing countless times during the span of any breath, knowing and using innumerable words.

  He relishes this one, repeating it over and over.

  Lies . . . lies . . . lies . . .

  And the miracle redoubles as another, related word slips in-

  Liars . . . liars . . .

  On his lap he sees the crumpled sketch, now smoothed almost flat again, a detailed rendition of human figures with expressive faces, staring disdainfully past a multirace crowd of primitive beings. The newcomers wear uniforms with bright emblems he finds somehow familiar.

  He used to know a name for people like this. A name-and reasons to avoid them.

  So why had he been so eager to go see them, just a little while ago? Why so insistent? At the time it seemed as if something welled up from deep inside him. An urgency. A need to travel, whatever the cost, to the far-off mountain glen shown in the drawing. To go confront those depicted on a rumpled sheet of off-white paper. The journey had seemed terribly important, though right now he cannot quite remember why.

  A cloudy haze covers most of his memory. Things that had waxed vivid during his delirium now can barely be glimpsed as fleeting images-

  --like a star that appears dwarfed by a surrounding structure, a made-thing consisting of countless angles and divided ledges, enclosing a reddish sun's brittle heat within a maze of plane surfaces.

  --or a world of water, where metal isles jut like mushrooms and the sea is a slow poison to touch.

  --or one particular shallow place in space, far from the deep oases where life normally gathers. Nothing lives in that shoal, far beyond the shining spiral arm. Yet amid the strange flatness there clusters a vast formation of globelike forms, strangely bright, floating timelessly, resembling a fleet of moons. . . .

  His mind flees from that last impression, reburying it with all the other half-real memories. Losing it along with his past, and almost certainly his future.

  XII. THE BOOK OF THE SEA

  Sapient beings are frequently tempted

  to believe in purpose.

  That they exist in the universe

  for a reason.

  To serve something greater--

  --a race or clan

  --patrons or gods

  --or an esthetic aim.

  Or else to seek individual goals--

  --wealth and power,

  --reproduction,

  --or enhancement of a personal soul.

  Deep Philosophers call this search for purpose

  nothing more than vanity,

  a frantic need to justify

  an inherited drive to exist.

  But why would our ancestors

  have brought us here so far from race, clan,

  patrons, gods, or wealth or power,

  if not to serve a purpose higher than all

  those things?

  --The Scroll of Contemplation

  Alvin's Tale

  I ALWAYS THOUGHT MYSELF A CITY BOY. AFTER ALL, Wuphon is the biggest port in the south, with almost a thousand souls, if you include nearby farmers and gleaners. I grew up around docks, warehouses, and cargo hoists.

  Still, the Deploying Derrick is really something. A long, graceful shape made of hundreds of tubes of reamed and cured boo, it was pieced together in a matter of days, crisscrossed and joined by a team of qheuen carpenters, who listened politely each time Urdonnol berated them for straying from the design illustrated on page five hundred and twelve of her precious text, Pre-Contact Terran Machinery, Part VIII: Heavy Lifting Without Gravitics. Then, with a respectful spin of their cupolas, the qheuens went back to lacing and gluing the crane in their own way, applying lessons learned in real life.

  Urdonnol should be more flexible, I thought, watching Uriel's humorless assistant grow ever more frustrated. True, the books hold great wisdom. But these guys aren't exactly working with titanium here. We're castaways who must adapt to the times.

  I was glad to see that our pal, Ur-ronn, seemed satisfied with the work so far, after peering and sniffing at every brace, strut, and pulley. Still, I'd rather Uriel were here, supervising as she had for the first two days, when our group set up camp under the stark shadow of Terminus Rock. The master smith was a persnickety, demanding taskmistress, often insisting a job be done over, and over again, till it was damn well perfect.

  I guess we four might resent the bossy way she took over what used to be our own private project. But we didn't. Or not much. Her attention to detail was nerve-wracking, but each time Uriel finally admitted something was done right, my confidence rose a notch that we might actually come back alive. It came as a blow when she went away.

  An urrish courier had raced into camp-breathless, exhausted, even thirsty, for Ifni's sake-holding an envelope for Uriel to snatch and tear open. On reading the message, she drew aside Tyug, the traeki, and whispered urgently. Then she galloped off, hurrying back toward her precious forge.

  Since then, things didn't exactly fall apart. The plan moves ahead step by step. But I can't say our mood's quite the same. Especially after our first test dive near-to drowned the passenger.

  By then the crane was a beautiful thing, a vaulting arm so graceful, you'd never guess sixteen steel bolts thick as my wrist anchored it to the ledge, hanging far over the deep blue waters of the Rift. A big drum carried more than thirty cables of Uriel's best hawser, all of it ending at our gray-brown vessel, which we named Wupbon's Dream, in hope of placating our parents-and those in the local community who think we're doing blasphemy.

  Another derrick stands alongside the first, linked to an even bigger drum. This one doesn't have to carry the bathy's weight, but its job is just as vital-keeping a tangle-free length of double hose attached to our little craft, so that clean air goes in and bad air goes out. I never got a chance to ask what the hoses are made of, but it's much stronger than the stitched skink bladders we four had planned using, back when we started thinking about this adventure.

  Uriel had made other changes-a big pressure regulator, high strain gaskets, and a pair of eik lights to cast bright beams down where sunshine never reaches.

  Again, I wondered-where did all this stuff come from?

  It surprised us that Uriel never messed much with the bathy itself-carved from a single hollowed-out garu trunk, with Ur-ronn's beautiful window sealed at one end. In front, we installed two hinged grabber arms that Ur-ronn copied out of a book. Our little craft also bore wheels, four in all, mounted so Wuphon's Dream might roll along the muddy sea bottom.

  Even after being fitted with superwide treads, the wheels looked familiar. Especially to Huck. She had kept them as private mementos out of the wreckage of her home, back when her real g'Kek parents were killed in that awful avalanche. With typical grim humor, Huck named them Auntie Rooben, Uncle Jovoon Left, and Uncle Jovoon Right. The fourth one was simply Dad-till I made her stop the grisly joke and call them One through Four instead.

  Using wheels would normally be impossible without Galactic technology. A turning axle would tear any gasket apart. But Huck's macabre stash of spare parts offered a solution. Those wondrous g'Kek magnetic hubs and motivator spindles can be placed on either side of the hull, without actually piercing the wood. Huck will steer the forward pair of wheels, while I'll use a rotary crank to power the driver pair in back.

  Which covers all our jobs during a dive, except "Captain" Pincer-Tip, whose world of bright blue water we'll pass through on our way to
depths no qheuen has seen since their sneakship sank, a thousand years ago. His place is right in the bubble nose, controlling the eik-lamps and shouting instructions how the rest of us are to steer and push or grab samples.

  Why does he get to be in charge? Pincer surely never impressed anyone as the brightest member of our gang.

  First, all this was his idea from the start. He hand-or rather mouth-carved most of the Dream all by himself, during scarce free time between school and day-work in the crustacean pens.

  More important, if that beautiful window ever starts to fail-or any of the other gaskets-he's the one least likely to panic when salt water starts spraying about the cabin. If that ever happens, it'll be up to Pincer to get the rest of us out somehow. We've all read enough sea and space tales to know that's a pretty good definition of a captain-the one you all better listen to when seconds count the difference 'tween life and death.

  He'd have to wait awhile, though, before taking command. Our first test dive would have just one passenger, a volunteer who was literally "born" for the job.

  That morning, Tyug, the traeki, laid a trail of scentomones to draw the little partial stack, Ziz, from its pen to where Wuphon's Dream waited, gleaming in the sunshine. Our good ship's hull of polished garuwood was so bright and lovely-too bad the open blue sky is normally taken as a bad omen.

  So it seemed to the onlookers watching our crew from a nearby bluff. There were hoon from Wuphon Port, plus some local reds, and urs with caravan dust on their flanks, as well as three humans who must have come a hard three-day trek from The Vale-all of them with nothing better to do than trade hearsay about the star-ship, or ships, said to have landed up north. One rumor said everyone at the Glade was already dead, executed on the spot by vengeful Galactic judges. Another claimed the Holy Egg had wakened fully at last, and the lights some saw in the sky were the souls of those lucky enough to be at Gathering when the righteous of the Six were transformed and sent back as spirits to their ancient homes among the stars.