Brightness Reef

Asx

Either the invaders are trying to confuse us, or else there is something strange about them.

At first, their powers and knowledge appeared as one might expect — so far above us that we seem as brutish beasts. Dared we contrast our own meager wisdom, our simple ways, against their magnificent, unstoppable machines, their healing arts, and especially the erudition of their piercing questions about Jijoan life? Erudition showing the vast sweep and depth of records at their command, surely copied from the final survey of this world, a million years ago. Yet…

They seem to know nothing about lorniks or zookirs.

They cannot hide their excitement, upon measuring specimen glavers, as if they have made a great discovery.

They make puzzling, nonsensical remarks concerning chimpanzees.

And now they want to know everything about mulc-spiders, asking naive questions that even this inexpert stack of manicolored rings could answer. Even if all of our/my toruses of sapiency were vlenned away, leaving nothing but instinct, memory, and momentum.

The sigil of the Great Library was missing from the bow of the great vessel that left their station here. We thought its absence a mere emblem of criminality. A negative symbol, denoting a kind of skulking shame.

Can it mean more than that? Much more?

Sara

Orom Engril’s shop on Pimmin Canal, it was but a short walk to the clinic where Pzora had taken the Stranger yesterday. Engril agreed to meet Sara there with Bloor the Portraitist. Time was short. Perhaps Sara’s idea was foolish or impractical, but there would be no better moment to broach it, and no better person to present it to than Ariana Foo.

A decision had to be made. So far, the omens weren’t good.

The emissaries from Dolo Village had gathered last night, in a tavern near the Urrish Quarter, to discuss what each of them had learned since the Hauph-woa docked. Sara showed a copy of the sages’ report, fresh from Engril’s copy shop, expecting it to shock the others. But by that evening even Pzora knew most of the story.

“I see three possibilities,” the stern-browed farmer Jop had said, nursing a mug of sour buttermilk. “First — the story’s an Egg-cursed lie. The ship really is from the great Institutes, we’re about to be judged as the Scrolls say, but the sages are spreading a pebble-in-my-hoof fable about bandits to justify musterin’ the militia, preparin’ for a fight.”

“That’s absurd!” Sara had complained.

“Oh yeah? Then why’ve all the units been called up? Humans drilling in every village. Urrish cavalry wheelin’ in all directions, and the hoons oilin’ their old catapults, as if they could shoot down.a starship by hurlin’ rocks.” He shook his head. “What if the sages’ve got some fantasy about resisting? It wouldn’t be the first time leaders were driven mad by an approaching end to their days of petty power.”

“But what of these sketches?” asked the scriven-dancer, Fakoon. The g’Kek touched one of Engril’s reproductions, portraying a pair of humans dressed in one-piece suits, staring brazenly at sights both new to them and yet somehow pathetic in their eyes.

Jop shrugged. “Ridiculous on the face of it. What would humans be doin’ out here? When our ancestors left Earth on an aged thirdhand tub, not a single human scientist understood its workings. The folks back home couldn’t have caught up with galactic standard tech for another ten thousand years.”

Sara watched Blade and the hoon captain react with surprise. It was no secret, what Jop had said about human technology at the time of exile, but they must find it hard to picture. On Jijo, Earthlings were the engineers, the ones most often with answers.

“And who would want to ferfetrate such a hoax?” Ulgor asked, lowering her conical head. Sara read tension in the urs’s body stance. Uh-oh, she thought.

Jop smiled. “Why, maybe some bunch that sees opportunity, amid the chaos, to besmirch our honor and have one last chance at revenge before Judgment Day.”

Human and urs faced each other, each grinning a bright display of teeth — which could be taken equivocally as either friendly or threatening. For once, Sara blessed the sickness that had caused nearly everyone’s rewq to curl up and hibernate. There would have been no ambiguity with symbionts to translate he meaning in Jop’s and Ulgor’s hearts.

At that moment, a squirt of pinkish steam jetted between the two — a swirling fume of cloying sweetness. Jop and Ulgor retreated from the cloud in opposite directions, covering their noses.

“Oops, i express repentance on our/my behalf. This pile’s digestive torus still retains, processes, deletes the richness of esteemed hoonish shipboard fare.”

Unperturbed, the captain of the Hauph-woa said — “How fortunate for you, Pzora. As to the subject at hand, we must still decide what advice to send back to Dolo Village and the settlements of the Upper Roney. So let me ask Jop… Hrrrm — what if we consider a simpler theory — there is no hoax by the honored sages, hrr?”

Jop still waved the air in front of his face, coughing. “That brings us to possibility number two-that we are being tested. The Day has come at last, but the noble Galactics are undecided what to do with us. Maybe the great Institutes hired human actors to play this role, offering us a chance to tip the scales one way through right action, or the other by choosing incorrectly. As for what advice we send upriver, I say we counsel that demolition should proceed according to the ancient plan!”

Blade, the young qheuen delegate, reared back on three legs, lifting his blue carapace, stammering and hissing so that his initial attempts at Anglic came out garbled. He switched to Galactic Two.

“Madness you betray! This (lunatic) thing, how can you say? Our mighty dam (glorious to see and smell) must fall? For what reason, if our (illicit) existence on Jijo he already known?”

Jop explained, “True, we can’t hide our crime of colonization. But we can start the process of removing our works from this scarred world. By showing our good intentions, we’ll prove we merit leniency.

“What we must not do — and I fear our sages may be fooled — is offer any cooperation to these humans who pretend to be gene raiders. No bribes or service, since that, too, must be part of the test.”

Ulgor snorted doubt. “And fossivility three? What if they turn out to ve felons, after all?”

Jop had shrugged. “Then the same answer holds. Passive resistance. Fade into the countryside. Tear down our cities—”

“Burn the libraries,” Sara cut in, and Jop glanced her way, then nodded, curtly.

“Above all else. They are the roots of conceit. Our outrageous pretense at remaining civilized.” He waved around him at the old Buyur chamber that had been converted to a tavern, the soot-stained walls adorned with spears, shields, and other souvenirs of the bloody siege of Tarek Town. “Civilized!” Jop laughed again. “We’re like parrot-ticks, reciting verses we do not understand, pathetically miming the ways of the mighty. If pirates have indeed come, such vanities can only lessen our skill at burrowing down. Our only chance of survival will be to blend in with Jijo’s animals. To become the innocents that glavers are, in their blessed salvation. A salvation we might have achieved by now, had humans not foiled nature with our so-called Great Printing.

“So you see it does not matter,” he concluded with a shrug of finality. “Whether the visitors from space are noble chancellors from the Institute of Migration or the foulest criminals to prowl space. Either way, they are our judgment, come at last. Our sole option remains the same.”

Shaking her head in bemusement, Sara had commented, “You’re starting to sound like Lark.”

But Jop saw nothing ironic in that. His radicalization had intensified each day since the deafening, terrifying specter shook the tree farms, leaving trails of noise and heat that seared the sky.

“This is a bad thing,” Blade had said to Sara, later that evening, after Jop left to meet friends and fellow believers. “He seems sure of his reasoning and virtue — like a gray queen, unshakably convinced of her righteousness.”

“Self-righteousness is a plague that afflicts all races, except the traeki,” answered Fakoon, bowing two stalks toward Pzora. “Your folk are lucky to be spared the curse of egotism.”

The Dolo Village pharmacist had vented a soft sigh. “i/we urge you to make no simple assumptions, dear comrades. It is said that we, too, once possessed that talent, whose partner is the gift/curse of ambition. To excise it from our natures meant leaving behind some of our greatest treasures, our finest rings. It must not have been an easy thing to do.

“One of the things we/i fear most about restored contact with Galactics is something you other species and beings may. not understand-we fear temptation by an enticing offer.

“We fear an offer to be made whole.”

The clinic was a place of wheels — of g’Kek surgeons and patients on push-chairs. Many of the traeki pharmacists used skooter-wagons, pushing along faster than most could walk alone. No wonder the smooth planarity of city life appealed to two of the Six.

The Stranger’s room was on the fifth floor, looking out across the confluence of the rivers Roney and Bibur. Both steam ferries could be seen moored under screening arbors, now operating only at night, since vigilante groups had threatened to burn them if they budged by day. And this morning confirming word came down from the Glade. The High Sages, too, wanted no unnecessary signs of technology revealed by the Six. Destroy nothing. Conceal everything.

It only added to a growing sense of confusion among common folk. Was this Judgment Day or not? Sounds of raucous argument were heard in all parts of town. We need some goal to unite us, Sara thought, or we’ll start coming apart, skin and pelt, shell and spokes.

A traeki attendant motioned Sara through to the private chamber that had been given the Stranger. The dark man looked up when she entered, and smiled with clear delight to see her. He laid aside a pencil and pad of pale paper, on which Sara glimpsed the scene outside the window-one of the steam ferries, outlined with subtle countershading. Pinned to the wall was another sketch depicting the shipboard concert on the fantail of the Hauph-woa, capturing a gentle interlude amid the storm of crisis.

“Thank you for coming,” said an elderly, sallow-faced woman seated by the Stranger’s bedside, looking surprisingly like a g’Kek, in coloration, her startling blue eyes, and also the way a wheelchair framed her blanket-shrouded form. “We have been making progress, but there are some things I wanted to try only after you arrived.”

Sara still wondered why Ariana Foo, of all people, had taken an interest in the wounded man. With Lester Cambel and most other sages away, she was the highest ranking human savant left this side of Biblos. One might expect her to have more urgent things on her mind right now, than focusing her keen intellect on the problem of the Stranger’s origins.

The g’Kek doctor rolled forward, his voice mellow, with a cultured accent.

“First, Sara, please tell us — have you recalled anything further about our patient’s aspect, the day you pulled him from the swamp all burned and torn?”

She shook her head silently.

“His clothing, none was recovered?”

“There were a few scraps, mostly charred. We threw them out while treating his burns.”

“Did those scraps go to dross barrels?” he asked eagerly. “Those very barrels aboard the Hauph-woa right now?”

“There were no ornaments or buttons, if that’s what you’re looking for. The scraps went to recycling, which in the case of old cloth means going straight to my father’s pulping machine. Would they have helped?”

“Perhaps,” answered the old woman, clearly disappointed. “We try to consider all possibilities.”

The Stranger’s hands lay folded on his lap, and his eyes darted back and forth, focusing on faces as if he were fascinated not by words but the sounds themselves.

“Can” — she swallowed — “can you do anything for him?”

“That depends,” the doctor replied. “All burns and contusions are healing well. But our finest unguents are useless against structural damage. Our enigmatic guest has lost part of his left temporal lobe, as though it had been torn out by some horrid predator. I am sure you know this area is where you humans process speech.”

“Is there any chance—”

“Of recovering what he has lost?” A g’Kek shrug, twining two eyestalks, had never became fashionable among the other races. “If he were very young or female, there might be some transfer of speech facility to the right lobe. A few stroke victims do this. But the feat is rare for adult males, whose brain structures are more rigid, alas.”

The light in the dark Stranger’s eyes was deceptive. He smiled amiably, as if they were discussing the weather. His reliable cheerfulness tore at Sara’s heart.

“Nothing can be done?”

“Out in the Galaxy, perhaps.”

It was an old expression, almost habitual, whenever one hit the limits of the crude arts available on the Slope.

“But we can do no more. Not in this place.”

There was something in the doctor’s tone. All four eyes stared inward — as if a human being were studying his fingernails, waiting for someone else to say the unspoken. Sara looked to Ariana Foo, whose face was composed.

Too composed. Sara leaped on the doctor’s hanging implication.

“You can’t be serious.”

The sage briefly closed her eyes. When they reopened, there was a daring glitter.

“Word comes down that our invaders are plying mass opinion, winning converts with drugs, potions, and miracle cures. Already, unsanctioned caravans of the sick and lame have set out from Tarek and other sites, hobbling up the hard trails in desperate search of remedies. I admit, the thought even crossed my mind.” She lifted her stick-thin arms from her fragile body. “Many may die on the trek, but what matters such risk against the lure of hope?”

Sara paused. “Do you think the outsiders can help him?”

Ariana shrugged in the hoonish manner, with a puff of air in her cheeks. “Who can say? Frankly, I doubt even Galactics could repair such damage. But they may have palliatives to improve his lot. Anyway, all bets are off if my suspicion is true.”

“What suspicion?”

“That our Stranger is no poor savage at all.”

Sara stared, then blinked. “Ifni,” she breathed.

“Indeed.” Ariana Foo nodded. “Shall we see if our guest truly was delivered to us by our goddess of luck and change?”

Sara could barely manage a nod. While the old woman rummaged in her valise, Sara pondered. This must be why everyone was in awe of her, when she was chief human sage before Cambel. They say genius is a knack for seeing the obvious. Now I know it’s true.

How could I have been so blind!

Ariana took up several of the sheets recently copied on Engril’s machine. “I thought of asking a Sensitive to sit in, but if I am right, we’ll want this kept quiet. So we’ll make do by watching how he reacts. Note that he is probably the only person in Tarek Town who has not seen these yet. Everybody pay close attention, please.”

She rolled closer to the patient, who watched attentively as Ariana laid a single sheet on the coverlet.

His smile gradually thinned as he picked up the drawing, touching the fine expert lines. Mountains framed a bowllike vale littered with shattered trees — nest lining for a thick javelin, adorned with jutting spines, whose contours Sara had first seen hurtling above her shaken home. Fingertips traced the sloping curves, trembling. The smile was gone, replaced by a look of agonized perplexity. Sara sensed that he was trying to remember something. Clearly there was familiarity here, and more, much more.

The Stranger looked up at Ariana Foo, eyes filled with pain and questions he could not pose.

“What can this prove?” Sara asked, writhing inside.

“He finds the image of the ship troubling,” Ariana answered.

“As it would any thoughtful member of the Six,” Sara pointed out.

The older woman nodded. “I had expected a happier response.”

“You think he’s one of them, don’t you?” Sara asked. “You think he crashed into the swamp east of Dolo, aboard some kind of flying machine. He’s a Galactic. A criminal.”

“It seemed the simplest hypothesis, given the coincidence in timing — a total stranger, burned amid a humid swamp, appearing with injuries unlike anything our doctors have seen. Let’s try another one.”

The next sketch showed the same little valley, but with the starship replaced by what the sages called a “research station,” assigned the task of analyzing Jijoan life. The Stranger peered at the black cube, intrigued and perhaps a little frightened.

Finally, Ariana presented a drawing showing two figures with strong, confident faces. A pair who had come a hundred thousand light-years to plunder.

This time a sharp gasp escaped him. The Stranger stared at the human forms, touching the symbol-patches on their one-piece exploration suits. It did not require fey sensitivity to read despair in his eyes. With an incoherent cry, he crumpled the sketch and flung it across the room, then covered his eyes with an arm.

“Interesting. Very interesting,” Ariana murmured.

“I fail to understand,” the doctor sighed. “Does this mean he is from off-Jijo or not?”

“It is too soon to tell, I fear.” She shook her head. “But let’s say it turns out he is from the Five Galaxies? If the forayers are seeking a mislaid confederate, and we have him in hand to offer in trade, it might work to our advantage.”

“Now just a darn—” Sara began, but the older human only continued, thinking aloud.

“Alas, his reaction isn’t one I’d call eager to be reunited with lost comrades. Do you think he might be an escaped foe? That somehow he survived imprisonment, even attempted murder, just a day or so before the foray ship came down to land? If so, how ironic his particular injury, which prevents him from telling so much! I wonder if they did it to him… the way barbaric kings of old Earth used to rip out an enemy’s tongue. How horrible, if true!”

The range of possibilities rattled off by the sage left Sara momentarily stunned. There was a long stretch of silence, until the doctor spoke once more.

“Your speculations intrigue and terrify me, old friend.

Yet now I must ask that you not agitate my patient further.”

But Ariana Foo only shook her head in somber pondering. “I had thought to send him up to the Glade right away. Let Vubben and the others decide for themselves what to do next.”

“Indeed? I could never allow you to move one so seriously—”

“Of course an opportunity to offer him Galactic-level treatment of his injuries would make a fine synergy, combining pragmatism with kindness.”

The g’Kek medic’s oral flap opened and shut soundlessly, as he worked to find a way past Ariana’s logic. Finally, his stalks contracted unhappily.

The retired sage sighed. “Alas, the point seems moot. From what we’ve seen, I doubt very much that our guest here will be willing to go.”

Sara was about to tell the old woman where she could go, with her intent to meddle in a man’s life. But just then the subject of their deliberations lowered his arm. He looked at Ariana and Sara. Then he picked up one of the sketches.

“G-guh…?” He swallowed, and his brow furrowed with intense concentration.

All eyes stared back at him. The man lifted one of the drawings, showing the starship nestled in a bower of shattered trees. He stabbed the scene with his index finger.

“G-g-g-oh!”

Then he looked into Sara’s eyes, pleadingly. His voice dropped to a whisper. .

“Go.”

After that, discussion of Sara’s plan seemed almost anticlimactic. I won’t be going back to Dolo on the next boat, after all. I’m on my way to see the aliens.

Poor Father. All he ever wanted was to raise a gaggle of safe little paper makers. Now every heir goes rushing into danger’s pincers, just as fast as our legs can carry us!

Engril and Bloor, the portraitist, arrived, bearing portable tools of their trades.

Bloor was a short, fair-skinned man with ringlets of yellow hair showering over his shoulders. His hands were stained blotchy from years creating the delicate emulsions required by his art. He held up a plate of metal, as wide as his palm, which shimmered with finely etched lines and depressions. From certain angles, those acid-cut shapes coalesced to form sharp profiles of shadow and light.

“It’s called the Daguerre process,” he explained. “Actually, it is quite a simple technique for creating permanent images. One of the first methods of photography ever invented by wolfling humans, back on Old Earth. Or so say our reference books. We don’t employ the procedure for portraits nowadays, as paper is faster and safer.”

“And paper decays,” Ariana Foo added, turning the plate over in her hands. Depicted on the etched metal was an urrish warrior of high rank, with both husbands perched on her back in a formal pose. The female’s sinuous neck was painted with garish, zigzag stripes, and she held a large crossbow, as if cradling a beloved scent-daughter.

“Indeed.” The portraitist conceded. “The fine papers produced by Sara’s father are guaranteed to corrupt in less than a century, leaving no traces to betray our descendants. This sample daguerreotype is one of only a few not sent to the dross middens since our strengthened Commons started promoting wider respect for the Law. I have special permission to hold on to this excellent example. See the fine detail? It dates from before the third urrish-human war. The subject is a chieftain of the Sool tribes, I believe. Note the tattoo scars. Marvelous. As crisp and clear as the day it was taken.”

Sara leaned forward as Ariana passed the slim plate over. “Has anyone used this process on Jijo since then?”

Bloor nodded. “All members of my guild create one daguerreotype, as part of our master work. Nearly all are then sent to the Midden, or given to smiths for remelting, but the capability remains.” He lifted a satchel, causing a faint clinking of bottles. “There’s enough acid and fixative here to treat and develop several dozen plates-but I have only about twenty of the plates themselves. If we want more, they must be ordered from Ovoom Town, or one of the volcano smithies.”

Sara felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see the Stranger holding out his hand. She gave him the small photograph, and he traced the finely etched grooves with his fingertips.

Now that her mind had shifted to encompass Ariana’s theory, everything the wounded man did seemed to refract differently. Was he smiling now over the crudeness of this photographic technology, or expressing enchantment at its cleverness? Or was the sparkling delight in his eyes a reaction to the depicted image of a savage warrior, whose bow and lance had been such a scourge during that age of heroic struggle, ten generations ago?

Ariana Foo rubbed her chin. “Twenty plates. Let’s say you get good pictures with just half—”

“A generous estimate, my sage, since the technique requires long exposure times.”

Ariana grunted. “A half-dozen successes, then. And several must be handed over to the forayers, in order for a threat to be believable.”

“Copies can be made,” Engril put in.

“We won’t need copies,” Sara said. “They’ll have to assume we have plenty of others. The crucial point is, can these pictures last a million years?”

The portraitist blew at a strand of yellow hair. From his throat, there emerged a soft strangling sound, like a qheuen sigh. “Given the right storage conditions, this metal oxidizes a nice protective layer…” He laughed nervously, looking from Sara to Ariana. “You aren’t serious, are you? A bluff is one thing. We’re desperate enough to clutch at straws, but do you really imagine you can store evidence somewhere until the next Galactic survey?”

The g’Kek doctor twisted two eyestalks to stare in opposite directions. “It appears we have entered into entirely new realms of heresy.”

Asx

It may have been a mistake to have striven so hard to suppress psi powers among the Six. For most of the long millennia of our exile, it seemed the wisest move. Was not our greatest goal to remain hidden? We had only to build modestly, in harmony with nature, and let the inverse square law do the rest.

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 rightfully 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.