Brightness Reef

Alvin’s Tale

I don’t wish to dwell too much on my own role in what came next. Let’s just say that as a young male hoon, I seemed best suited to dangle at the end of the redeployed hawser, sitting in a makeshift sling while the crew lowered me toward the dark blue waters of the Rift.

After dropping below the edge, all I could see of the others were a few hoon and urrish faces, plus a pair of g’Kek eyestalks, peering down at me. Then even those blended into the rocks and I was alone, dangling like bait on a hooked line. I tried not to look at the long drop below, but soon a gusting wind set the hawser swaying, reminding me of the slender support overhead.

During the lonely descent I had time to ask myself — “What the heck am I doing here?”

It became a kind of mantra. (If I recall that word right, since it’s not in the dictionary I have with me in this cold, hard place.) Repeated often enough, the phrase soon lost some of its horrid fascination, instead taking on a queerly pleasant cadence. By the halfway point, I was umbling—

“What the heck. I am doing. Here!”

In other words, a deed is being done, and I’m the one doing it, so why not do it right? An Anglic way of phrasing a very hoonish thought.

Anyway, I guess I did a good job of convincing myself, ’cause I didn’t panic when they overshot at the end. My furry legs got well dunked before the brakes firmed and the tether stopped jouncing. It took a moment to gather breath and start umbling at Huphu, calling her to swim over from Wuphon’s Dream, almost an arrowflight away. Haste was vital, since the bathy was slowly drifting out from the placid water under Terminus Rock. Soon she’d hit the Rift Current, and we might never see her again.

This time Huphu didn’t make me wait. She dove in and swam toward me like a little black dartfish, clearly not badly harmed by her plummet off the bluff.

What’s that sick joke they tell about noors? If you ever have to kill one, it will take a quart of traeki poison, a qheuen’s claw, a human’s arrow, and a rack of urrish insults. That assumes a hoon first distracts the beast with a first-class umble, and even so, it’s best to have a g’Kek roll back and forth over the corpse a few times, just to be sure.

All right, it’s juvenile humor, but also respectful in a way. I couldn’t help spine-laughing over it while waiting for our indestructible Huphu. Finally, she clambered up my leg and into my arms, wallowing in my happy umble. I sensed she was still frightened, since for once she made no effort to pretend nonchalance or to hide her happiness to see me.

Still, time was short. Soon as I could, I slipped a harness of tough cord over Huphu’s shoulders and urged her back down to the sea.

Urdonnol’s plan seemed a good one… that is, if Huphu understood my instructions… if the Dream hadn’t already drifted beyond reach… if Huphu managed to hook the cable’s end onto the bathy’s grommet fixture… if the subtraeki, Ziz, could hold on awhile longer in its hugely distended form, bearing up the weight of all that dangling metal… if the re-spliced hawser would bear the burden when the crew above hauled away…

There were so many ifs. Is this why Earthlings chose to call their goddess of luck and chance Ifni? Her capricious whims sure do swing back and forth. As on that day, when she first cursed our enterprise with calamity, then tossed her dice again the other way. Throughout the following tense midura, we all worried and wondered what her next clattering roll would bring-till at last Huphu and I stood atop the cliff together, dripping beside the beautiful flank of Wuphon’s Dream, staring in amazement as Tyug carefully deflated and tended Ziz. Meanwhile, Pincer and Huck rolled round and round the bathy, inspecting nervously for damage, and Ur-ronn supervised the crew hauling in the rest of the dangling cable.

Finally, the two severed ends lay side by side on the stony mesa, burned, frayed, and torn.

“This will not haffen again!” I overheard our urrish friend mutter. It was in that tone of voice an urs uses when she makes a prediction, a vow, and means she’ll rip the neck off anyone who tries to make a liar out of her.

The next day Uriel returned, galloping into camp accompanied by armed assistants and a retinue of pack donkeys. With her came messages that had arrived by semaphore-and-runner relay from the far north, which she read aloud that evening, with the Dandelion Cluster as a shimmering backdrop above the glistening Rift. Wearing the robes of a lesser sage, the smith summarized what had occurred at Gathering — the coming not just of starships but star-criminals. Beings capable of bringing an end to the Great Peace, the Commons, and perhaps every member of the Six.

I couldn’t see Huck’s reaction when Uriel told in passing that the g’Kek race was now extinct among the stars, their last survivors reduced to savages, wheeling primitive tracks in the dust of Jijo. My tunnel of attention was still centered on other startling news.

The forayers were humans!

Everyone knows Earthlings weren’t much more than animals in the eyes of the Galactic god-clans, only three hundred years ago. So what were mere humans doing, trying to pull a complicated theft across such distances?

Then I realized, since Uriel was addressing us in formal GalTwo, I’d been thinking in that tongue, seeing events the way a Galactic would. Things looked quite different when I rephrased the question in Anglic.

Three hundred years? That’s an eternity! In that time humans moved from sailboats to their first starships. By now, who knows? Maybe they own half the universe!

All right, I’ve probably read way too much stuff by Doc Smith and “Star-Smasher” Feng. But while most folks on the bluff that night expressed shock that wise, cultured human beings could ever do such things, I knew an inner truth about them. One that weaves through Earthling literature like a never-absent umble tone.

As long as their race survives, some among them will be wolves.

It amazed us all when Uriel said the project would continue.

Amid talk of militia call-ups, emergency camouflage repairs, and possibly having to fight for our lives against overwhelming power, I expected the smith to order us all back to Wuphon and Mount Guenn at once, putting our backs to labor for the common good. So we stared when instead she acted as if this were important, this silly diving expedition of ours.

I even said so to her face.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked the next day as Uriel oversaw resplicing the hawser and air hose. “Don’t you have urgent things to worry about?”

Her neck stretched upward, lifting the center, pupil-less eye almost even with my own.

“And what would you have us do instead? Turn out weafons? Convert our forge into a factory of death?” Her single nostril flared, revealing the twisty membranes that lock in moisture, making urrish breath as dry as wind off the Plain of Sharp Sand.

“We urs know death well, young Hph-wayuo. It scales our legs and dries our husvand fouches all too soon. Or else we hurry it along with fights and feuds, as if glory could ever requite our haste to die. A great nany urs look fondly on those days when Earthlings were our finest foes, when heroes roared across the frairie, wheeling and charging recklessly.

“I, too, feel that call. And like others, I resist. This is an age for another kind of hero, young fellow. A warrior who thinks.”

Then she turned back to her labors, directing workers with severe attention to detail. Her response left me confused, unsatisfied… but also, in some way I could not quite fathom, just a bit more proud than I had been before.

It took two days to complete the overhaul and triple-check all systems. By that time, the mass of onlookers had changed. Many of the originals had hurried home on hearing Uriel’s news. Some had militia duties, or were eager to perform destructive sacraments prescribed by the oldest scrolls. Others rushed back to save their property against premature dressing by the devout, or simply to be with loved ones during the expected last of days.

Those departing were replaced by others even angrier than the first, or frightened by things they had seen. Only yesterday, observers from Wuphon Port all the way to Finaltown Bay beheld a narrow, winged specter — a pale aircraft — that paused over the useless camouflage lattices, as if to say I see you, before resuming a twisty course along the coast, then out to sea.

No one had to say it. Whatever Uriel wanted to accomplish here, we didn’t have a lot of time.