Brightness Reef

Dwer

It was a midura past nightfall when the ember crossed the sky, a flicker that grew briefly as it streaked by, crossing the heavens to descend southeast. Dwer knew it was no meteor, because the spark traveled below the clouds.

Only after it was gone, dropping beyond the next rank of forested knolls, did he hear a low, muttering purr, barely above the rustling of the tree branches.

Dwer might never have noticed if his dinner had agreed with him. But his bowels had been shaky ever since the four humans began supplementing their meager supplies with foraged foods. So he sat at the makeshift latrine, in a cleft between two hills, waiting for his innards to decide whether to accept or reject his hard-won evening meal.

The others were no better off. Danel and Jenin never complained, but Lena blamed Dwer while her intestines growled.

“Some mighty hunter. You’ve been over the pass dozens of times and can’t tell what’s poison from what’s not?”

“Please, Lena,” Jenin had asked. “You know Dwer never crossed the Venom Plain. All he can do is look for stuff that’s like what he knows.”

Danel tried his hand at peacemaking. “Normally, we’d eat the donkeys as their packs lightened. But they’re weak after recent stream-crossings, and we can’t spare any from carrying our extra gear.”

He referred to the weight of books, tools, and special packages that were meant to make human life beyond the Rimmers somewhat more than purely savage. If it was finally decided to stay here forever. Dwer still hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“One thing we do know,” Danel went on. “Humans can survive here in the Gray Hills, and without all the vat processes we’re used to back home. Right now we’re adjusting to some local microbes, I’m sure. If the sooner band got used to them, so can we.”

Yes, Dwer had thought, but survival doesn’t mean comfort. If Rety’s any indication, these sooners are a grumpy lot. Maybe we’re getting a taste of how they got that way.

Things might improve once Danel set up vats of his own, growing some of the yeasty cultures that made many Jijoan foods palatable to humans, but there would be no substitutes for the traeki-refined enzymes that turned bitter ping fruit and bly-yoghurt into succulent treats. Above all, Dwer and the other newcomers would count on the sooners to explain which local foods to avoid.

Assuming they cooperate. Rety’s relatives might not appreciate having the new order-of-life explained to them. I wouldn’t either, in their position. While Danel was skilled at negotiation and persuasion, Dwer’s role would be to back up the sage’s words, giving them force of law.

From Rety’s testimony, her tribe likely totaled no more than forty adults. The social structure sounded like a typical macho-stratified hunting band — a standard human devolution pattern that old Fallon long ago taught Dwer to recognize — with a fluid male-ranking order enforced by bluster, personal intimidation, and violence.

The preferred approach to ingathering such a group, worked out by Dwer’s predecessors, was to make contact swiftly and dazzle the sooners with gifts before shock could turn into hostility, buying time to map the web .of alliances and enmities within the band. After that, the procedure was to choose some promising middle-ranked males and help those candidates perform a coup, ousting the formerly dominant group of bully boys, whose interest lay in keeping things as they were. The new leaders were then easy to persuade to “come home.”

It was a time-tested technique, used successfully by others faced with the task of retrieving wayward human clans. Ideally, it shouldn’t prove necessary to kill anybody.

Ideally.

In truth, Dwer hated this part of his job.

You knew it might come to this. Now you pay for all the freedom you’ve had.

If gentle suasion didn’t work, the next step was to call in militia and hunt down every stray. The same hard price had been agreed to by every sept in the Commons, as an alternative to war and damnation.

But this time things are different.

This time we don’t have any law on our side — except the law of survival.

Instead of bringing illegal settlers back to the Slope, Ozawa planned to take over Rety’s band. Guiding them toward a different way of life, but one still hidden from sight.

Only if the worst happens. If we’re the last humans alive on Jijo.

Dwer’s mind reeled away from that awful notion, as his innards wrestled with the remnants of his meal. If this keeps on, I’ll be too weak to win a wrestling match, or however else Jass and Bom settle.their tribal ranking. It may come down to Lena and her tools, after all.

Throughout the journey; the stocky blond woman carefully tended one donkey carrying the gadgets of her personal “hobby” — a human technology passed down since the first ancestors landed on Jijo, one so brutal that it had been seldom used, even during the urrish wars. “My equalizers,” Lena called the wax-sealed wooden crates, meaning their contents made her able to enforce Danel’s verdicts, as thoroughly as Dwer’s muscle and physical skill.

It won’t come to that! he vowed, commanding his body to shape up. Dwer touched several fingertips whose frostbite damage might have been much worse. I’ve always been luckier than I deserved.

According to Sara, who had read extensively about Earth’s past, the same thing could be said about the whole bloody human race.

That was when the glowing ember crossed the sky, streaking overhead while Dwer sat at the makeshift latrine. He would never have noticed the sight had he been facing another way or engaged in an activity more demanding of his attention. As it was, he stared glumly after the falling spark while the rumbling thunder of its passage chased up and down nearby canyons, muttering echoes in the night.

They faced more stream crossings the next day. It was hard country, which must have influenced the sooners’ ancestors to come this way in the first place. Guarded first by the Venom Plain, then ravines and whitewater torrents, the Gray Hills were so forbidding that surveyors checked the region just once per generation. It was easy to imagine how Fallen and the others might overlook one small tribe in the tortured badlands Dwer led the party through — a realm of sulfurous geysers and trees that grew more twisted the deeper they went. Low clouds seemed to glower and sulk, giving way to brief glimpses of sunshine. Green moss beards drooped from rocky crevices, trickling oily water into scummy pools. Animal life kept its skittish distance, leaving only faint spoor traces for Dwer to sniff and puzzle over.

They lost several donkeys crossing the next rushing stream. Even with a rope stretched from bank to bank, and both Lena and Dwer standing waist-deep in the frigid water to help them along, three tired animals lost their footing on slippery stones. One got tangled in the rope, screaming and thrashing, then perished before they could free it. Two others were carried off. It took hours, sloshing through shallows, to retrieve their packs.

Dwer’s fingers and toes seemed to burn the whole time with a queer icy-hot numbness.

Finally, drying off by a fire on the other side, they measured the damage.

“Four books, a hammer, and thirteen packets of powder missing,” Danel said, shaking his head over the loss. “And some others damaged when their waterproofs tore.”

“Not to mention the last fodder for the beasts,” Jenin added. “From now on they forage, like it or not.”

“Well, we’re almost there, ain’t we?” Lena Strong cut in, cheerful for once as she knelt butchering the donkey that had strangled. “On the bright side, we eat better for a while.”

They rested that night, feeling better — if a bit guilty — with the change in diet. The next morning they marched just one arrowflight east to face a mighty ravine, with sheer walls and a raging torrent in its heart.

Dwer headed upstream while Lena struck off to the south, leaving Jenin and Danel to wait with the exhausted donkeys. Two days out and two back, that was the agreed limit. If neither scout found a way by then, they might have to make a raft and try the rapids. Not a prospect Dwer relished.

Didn’t I tell Danel we should wait for Rety? I may be a tracker, but she came out through this desolation all by herself.

More than ever he was impressed by the girl’s un-swayable tenacity.

If there is a second party, and she’s with them, Rety’s probably chortling over me falling into this trap. If she knows some secret shortcut, they may reach the tribe before us. Now won’t that screw up Danel’s plans!

Even moving parallel with the river was awkward and dangerous, a struggle up steep bluffs, then back down the slippery bank of one icy tributary after another. To Dwer’s surprise, Mudfoot came along, forsaking DanePs campfire and Jenin’s pampering attention. The trek was too hard for any of the noor’s standard antics, ambushing Dwer or trying to trip him. After a while, they even began helping each other. He carried the noor across treacherous, foamy creeks. At other times, Mudfoot sped ahead to report with squeals and quivers which of two paths seemed better.

Still, the river and its canyon tormented them, appearing almost to open up, then abruptly closing again, narrower and steeper than before. By noon of the second day, Dwer was muttering sourly over the obstinate nastiness of the terrain. Fallon warned me about the Gray Hills. But I always figured I’d get to go through the old man’s notes and maps. Pick a path based on the trips of earlier hunters.

Yet none of them had ever found any trace of Rety’s band, so maybe they relied too much on each other’s advice, repeatedly taking the same route in and out of these badlands. A route the sooners knew to avoid. Maybe all this horrid inaccessibility meant Danel’s group was getting near the tribe’s home base.

That’s it, boy. Keep thinkin’ that way, if it makes you feel better.

Wouldn’t it be great to struggle all this way, and back, only to learn that Lena had already found a good crossing, just a little ways downstream? That thought tortured Dwer as he shared food with Mudfoot. Going on seemed futile, and he’d have to call the trip a loss in a few hours anyway. Dwer’s fingers and toes ached, along with overstrained tendons across his back and legs. But it was the pounding roar of rushing water that really wore away at him, as if a clock teet had been hammering inside his head for days.

“Do you think we oughta head back?” he asked the noor.

Mudfoot cocked its sleek head, giving Dwer that deceptively intelligent expression, reminding him of legends .that said the beasts could grant wishes — if you wanted something so bad, you didn’t care about the cost. Workmen used the expression “Let’s consult a noor” to mean a problem couldn’t be solved, and it was time to soften frustration with a set of stiff drinks.

“Well,” Dwer sighed, hoisting his pack and bow, “I don’t guess it’d hurt to go on a ways. I’d feel silly if it turned out we missed a good ford just over the next rise.”

Thirty duras later, Dwer crawled up a thorny bank, cursing the brambles and the slippery wetness that soaked his skin, wishing he was on his way back to a hot meal and a dry blanket. Finally, he reached a place to stand, sucking an oozing scratch across the back of his hand.

He turned — and stared through a mist at what lay ahead.

A crashing waterfall, whose roar had been masked by the turbulent river, stretched low and wide from far to the left all the way to the distant right. A wide curtain of spray and foam.

Yet that was not what made Dwer gape.

Just before the roaring plummet, traversing the river from bank to bank, lay a broad expanse of rocky shallows that appeared nowhere more than ankle deep.

“I guess this settles the question of whether or not to pro-ceed” He sighed.

Shortly, he and Mudfoot stood at last on the other shore, having sloshed easily across to prove the ford was safe. From there an obvious game trail zigzagged through the forest, departing the canyon eastward.

On my way back downstream I’ll scout an easier path for Danel and the others to get up here. Success took much of the sting out of his aches and pains. There’s a chance Lena beat me to a way across. Still, I found this place, and maybe I’m the first! If all this stupid alien stuff blows over and we get to go home, I’ll check Fallon’s maps to see if anyone’s named this spot since the Buyur went away.

The broad falls reminded him of the spillway back at Dolo Village, a thought that was sweet, but also a bitter reminder of why he was here, so far from Sara and everyone else he loved.

I’m here to survive. It’s my job to cower and have babies with women I barely know, while those on the Slope suffer and die.

The pleasure of discovery evaporated. Shame he displaced with a wooden determination to do the job he had been commanded to do. Dwer started to head back across the shallows… then paused in his tracks, acutely aware of a tickling sensation in the middle of his back.

Something was wrong.

Frowning, he slipped off the bow and drew the string-tightening lever. With an arrow nocked, he flared his nostrils to suck humid air. It was hard to make out anything in the musty dankness. But judging from Mudfoot’s arched spines, the noor felt it too.

Someone’s here, he thought, moving swiftly inland to get under the first rank of trees. Or was here, recently.

Away from the shore, the place stank with a terrible muddle of scents, which was natural next to the only river crossing for many leagues. Animals would come to drink, then leave territorial markings. But Dwer sensed something else, inserting a wary hint of threat.

Painfully aware that open water lay at his back, he moved deeper into the forest.

I smell… burnt wood — someone had a fire, not too long ago.

He scanned. Sniffing and peering.

It was over… there.

Amid the shadows, half a stone’s throw away, he made out the remnants, set in a modest clearing. A large pit of black ashes.

Some of Rety’s band? He worried. Might Jass and Bom be watching right now, picking their best shot at an intruder from the dreaded west?

Clues lay in the brushing rustle of wind in the branches, the furtive movements of insects and birds. But this terrain and wildlife were strange to him, and the racket from the waterfall would drown out a militia company on maneuvers.

Mudfoot made a low chuffing growl and sniffed close to the ground while Dwer scanned the complex dimness beyond the next rank of trees. “What is it?” he asked, kneeling where Mudfoot scratched a layer of freshly fallen leaves.

A familiar odor struck him fully.

“Donkey shit?”

He risked a quick glance — and didn’t need a second look.

Donkeys? But Rety said the sooners didn’t have any!

With dark-adapting eyes he now picked out traces of pack beasts all over the clearing. Hoofprints and droppings from at least a dozen animals. A stake where a remuda line was tethered. Flattened spots where cargo carriers must have lain.

He lowered the bow. So a second expedition had set out, passing the first by a better route, no doubt led by Rety herself.

Well, at least we won’t be quite so outnumbered by the sooners, even if contact doesn’t happen in the order Danel planned.

An element of relief was more personal, if ungallant. My choice in a future mate might go beyond Jenin, Lena, or some surly cousin of Rety’s.

Something still nagged at Dwer, however, making him reluctant to put down the bow. He was counting wallows — the depressions made by donkeys as they lay — and realized there were just too many. Or rather, there were two different kinds of wallow. Nearer the fire they were smaller, closer…

No. It can’t be.

Anywhere else, scent would have hit him long before this. Now a sharp, familiar pungency smacked Dwer in his sinuses. He bent to pluck a clump of stringy fur, still coated from when the owner rolled, in ash after an unpleasantly wet river crossing.

Glossy strands from an urrish mane.

It had been generations since the last war. Regardless, instinctive fear surged in Dwer’s chest — a heart-pounding wave of angst.

An urrish caravan in these parts could not be up to anything good.

Here in the wilderness, far from the restraint of sages and the Commons, with the Six possibly already extinct back home, all the old rules were clearly moot. As in days before the Great Peace,. Dwer knew how dangerous these beings would be to have as enemies.

Silent as a ghost, he crept away, then crossed the river in a zigzag dash, leaping behind a boulder, then swiveling to cover the opposite bank while Mudfoot came splashing behind, clearly as eager to get out of there as he was.

Dwer kept wary watch for a whole midura, till long after his pounding pulse finally settled.

At last, when it seemed safe, he slung his bow and set off downstream, running when and where he could, hurrying southward with news.

Asx

Can you see the smoke, oh my rings? Spiraling from a fresh cavity in Jijo’s ruptured soil? Two Umoons cast wan beams through that sooty pall, piercing a crater wherein twisty metal shapes flicker and burn.

Distracting thoughts rise from our second torus-of-cognition.

What is that you say, my ring? That this is a very large amount of dross? Dross that will not degrade back to nature on its own?

Indeed it is. Shall we hope that the aliens themselves will clean up the mess? It would take a hundred donkey-caravans to haul so much hard waste down to the sea.

Another ring suggests a stream be diverted, to form a lake. A transplanted mulc-spider might dissolve the sinful wreckage over the course of centuries.

By mass vote, we send these thoughts to waxy storage for later reflection. For now, let us watch events flow in real time.

A roiling mob of onlookers teems the slopes overlooking this savaged vale, held in check by stunned, overworked proctors. Higher on tree-shrouded hills, we glimpse murky ranks of disciplined silhouettes, wheeling and maneuvering — militia units taking up positions. From here we cannot tell the companies’ intent. Are they preparing, counter to all hope, to defend the Commons against overpowering vengeance? Or else have inter-sept grudges finally torn the Great Peace, so that we hasten doomsday tearing each other apart with our own bloody hands?

Perhaps even the commanders of those dark battalions don’t yet know for sure.

Meanwhile, closer to the heat, Ur-Jah and Lester Cambel supervise teams of brave urs, men, hoon, and gray qheuens, •who descend into the pit armed with ropes and tools of Buyur steel.

Ro-kenn protests at first, does he not, my rings? In hasty GalSeven, the Rothen emissary decries those he calls “wanton looters.” One of the remnant robots rises, unfolding spiky organs of punishment.

Vubben urges that Ro-kenn look again. Can he not recognize sincere efforts at rescue? For two tense duras we poise on a precipice. Then, with a grudging mutter, the Rothen recalls his death machine — for now.

From Ro-kenn’s charismatic, human-handsome face, our steady old rewq translates undertones of grief and rage. True, this race is new to us, and rewq can be fooled. Yet what else should we expect from one whose home/campsite lies in ruins? Whose comrades languish, dead or dying, in the twisted tangle of their buried station?

The male sky-human, Rann, wears torment openly as he rides the other robot, shouting at those working through the rubble, directing their efforts. A tense but encouraging sign of cooperation.

Ling, the other sky-human, appears in shock, leaning against young Lark as he pokes his foot through debris at the crater’s rim. He bends to lift a smoldering plank, sniffing suspiciously. We perceive his head rock back, exclaiming surprise.

Ling draws away, demanding an explanation. Through our rewq, we perceive Lark’s reluctance as he shows her the smoky plank, a strip of burned wood from a Jijoan box or crate.

Ling drops her hand from his arm. She spins about, hurrying toward Rann’s hovering robot steed.

Much closer to this stack of rings, Ro-kenn has become embroiled in argument. A delegation accosts the Rothen emissary, demanding answers.

Why did he earlier claim the right and power to command the Holy Egg, since it is now clear that the sacred stone violently rejects him and his kind?

Furthermore, why did he seek to sow dissension among the Six with his baseless calumny about the human sept? His groundless lie, claiming that our Earthling brethren are not descendants of sinners, just like the other Five.

“You Rothen may or may not be the high patrons of humanity,” the spokesman contends. “But that takes nothing from our ancestors who came here on the Tabernacle. Not from their crime, or their hope, when they set us on the Path of Redemption.”

There is anger in the voice of the human intercessor. But we/i also descry thick brushstrokes of theater. An effort to smother the fire of disharmony that Ro-kenn ignited with his tale. Indeed, urrish voices rise in approval of his anger.

Now our second cognition-torus vents yet another thought-hypothesis.

What is it, my ring? You suggest disharmony was Ro-kenn’s intent, all along? A deliberate scheme to create strife among the Six?

Our fourth ring rebuts — what purpose might such a bizarre plot serve? To have Five gang up on One? To cause vendetta against the very sept these Rothen claim as beloved clients?

Store and wick this weird postulate, oh my rings. Argue it later. For now the Rothen prepares to respond. Drawing himself up, he surveys the crowd with an expression that seems awesome both to humans and to those who know them — to rewq-wearers and those without.

There is kindness in his expressive gaze. Overstrained patience and love.

“Dear, misguided children. This explosive manifestation was not rejection by Jijo, or the Egg. Rather, some malfunction of the mighty forces contained in our station must have released—”

Abruptly, he stops as Rann and Ling approach, each riding a robot. Each wearing looks of dark anger. They murmur into devices, and the Rothen stares back, listening. Again, my rewq reveals dissonance across his features, coalescing at last in raging fury.

Ro-kenn speaks.

“So, now the (dire) truth is known. Learned. Verified!

“No accident, this (slaying) explosion.

“No (unlikely) malfunction — nor any rejection by your (overly-vaunted) Egg.

“Now it is known. Verified. That this was (foul, unprovoked) murder!

“Murder by deceit, by subterfuge.

“By use of subterranean explosives. By sneak attack.

“By you!”

He points, stabbing with a long, graceful finger. The crowd reels back from Ro-kenn’s fierce wrath, and this news.

At once it is clear what the zealots have done. Secretly, taking advantage of natural caverns lacing these hills, they must have laboriously burrowed deep beneath the station to lay chests of eruptive powder — crude but plentiful — which then awaited a signal, the right symbolic moment, to burst forth flame and destruction.

“With scanners tuned for chemical sleuthing, we now perceive the depth of your shared perfidy. How undeserved were the rewards we planned conferring on murderous half-beasts!”

He might say more to the cowering throng, adding terrible threats. But at that moment, a new disturbance draws our focus toward the smoldering pit. The crowd parts for a phalanx of soot-stained rescuers, coughing and gasping as they bear pitiable burdens.

Rann cries out, bounding from his mount to inspect a crumpled form, borne upon a litter. It is Besh, the other female sky-human. From her mangled figure, our rewq reads no life flicker.

Again, the crowd divides. This time it is Ro-kenn who exclaims a distinctly unhuman wail. The litter brought before him bears the other of his race, Ro-pol, whom we guessed to be female. (His mate?)

This time, a slim thread of breath swirls in the near infrared, from the victim’s soot-stained but still splendid face. Ro-kenn bends close, as if seeking some private communion.

The poignant scene lasts but a few moments. Then the reed of living tension is no more. A second corpse lies in the hollow, under bitter-bright stars.

The living Rothen stands to his full height, a terrible sight, emoting vast anger.

“Now comes the reward (foul) treachery deserves!” Ro-kenn cries, reaching skyward, his voice reverberating with such wrath that every rewq in the valley trembles. Some humans drop to their knees. Do not even gray queens whistle awe and dismay?

“For so long you have feared (righteous) judgment from above. Now behold its incarnate form!”

Along with the others, we/i look up, our gaze following Ro-kenn’s extended arm.

There, crossing the sky, we perceive a single glaring spark. A pitiless glimmer that ponderously moves, passing from the Spider’s Web into the constellation humans call The Sword.

The great ship is still a distant point, but it does not wink, nor does it twinkle. Rather, it seems to throb with an intensity that hurts those who watch for long.

One can hardly fault the zealots’ timing, suggests our ever-thoughtful second-torus-of-cognition. If their objective was to bring an end to pretense, they could have chosen no better way.

Sara

Sage Taine wanted to speak with her before she left for Kandu Landing. So did Ariana Foo. Both wished she would delay her departure, but Sara was eager to be off.

Yet with just a midura to go before the Gopher set sail, she decided on impulse to visit her old office, high in the cathedral-tower housing the Library of Material Science.

West from the Grand Staircase, her ascent first took her by the vast, rambling stacks of physics and chemistry, where the recent evacuation had taken a visible toll. The maze of shelves showed frequent gaps. Scraps of paper lay in place of absent volumes, to help staff put things back if the present crisis passed. In places, the wood surface looked almost new, implying this was the first time a book had budged since the Great Printing.

Glancing down one crooked aisle, Sara glimpsed young Jomah, teetering under a load of heavy volumes, lumbering gamely behind his uncle to begin the ornate rituals-of-borrowing. None too soon if they hoped to make the Gopher in time. The explosers and quite a few others were bound the same way as Sara, first by boat, then donkey-caravan to the Glade of Gathering.

The winding labyrinth triggered complex emotions. She used to get lost back in the early days, but never cared, so happy had she been to dwell in this splendid place. This temple of wisdom.

Her long year away had hardly changed her little office, with its narrow window overlooking the green-flanked Bibur. Everything seemed much as she had left it, except for the dust. Well, I always figured I’d be back before this. Many competed to be chosen by human sept for this life, subsidized by a race of farmers and gleaners whose one great sinful pride lay in their books.

Tacked to the far wall lay a chart showing the “devolution” of various dialects spoken on the Slope. Like branches splitting off from parent roots, there were multiple downward shoots for each Galactic language in current use. This older depiction showed the bias of scholars over in Linguistics, and was colored by one unassailable fact — the billion-year-old Galactic languages had once been perfect, efficient codes for communication. Deviation was seen as part of a foretold spiral toward the innocence of animal-like grunts — the Path of Redemption already blazed by glavers — a fate variously dreaded or prayed for by folk of the Slope, depending on one’s religious fervor.

Human tongues were also traced backward, not over a billion years but ten thousand. Earthling authorities like Childe, Schrader, and Renfrew had carefully rebuilt ancestral languages and many of those grammars were more primly structured, better at error-correction, than the “bastard” jargons that followed. What better evidence that human devolution began long before the landing on Jijo? Did not all Earth cultures have legends of a lost Golden Age?

One conclusion — the missing Patrons of Earth must have been interrupted in their work, forced to leave humanity half finished. True, the ensuing fall was masked by some flashy tricks of precocious technology. Still, many scholars believed Earthlings had much to gain from any road leading toward re-adoption and a second chance, especially since they appeared to be heading that way anyway.

That’s the orthodox view. My model takes the same data, but projects a different outcome.

Her most recent chart resembled this one — turned upside down, with lightless roots transformed into trees, showing the Six heading in a new direction.

In many directions.

If no one interferes.

Yesterday, she had shown her latest work to Sage Bonner, whose enthusiasm reignited the pleasure of a colleague’s praise.

“Well, my dear,” said Jijo’s oldest mathematician, stroking his bald pate, “you do seem to have a case. So let’s schedule a seminar! Interdisciplinary, of course.”

He punctuated his enthusiasm with a sloppy GalTwo emotion trill of anticipation.

“We’ll invite those stuffy pedants from Linguistics. See if they can bear to hear a bold new idea for a change. Heh. Heh-cubed!”

Bonner probably hadn’t much followed her discussion of “redundancy coding” and chaos in information theory. The elderly topologist just relished the prospect of a brisk debate, one that might knock down some ensconced point of view.

If only you knew how good an example you are of my thesis, she had thought affectionately. Sara hated to disappoint him.

“We can have it when I get back from Gathering, with luck.”

Alas, there might be no return from her coming journey. Or else, it might be to find that the explosers had done their duty at last, bringing down the stony roof, and with it a prophesied age of darkness and purity. She was turning to go, when a low thunk announced a message ball, landing on her desk. Above the in-box, a fleshy tube bounced in recoil, having spit the ball from a maze of pipes lacing the Biblos complex.

Oh no. Sara backed away, hoping to leave before the furry sphere unrolled. If the messenger found no one home, it would simply reenter the tube and report the fact to whoever sent it.

But the ball uncoiled swiftly and a tiny mouselike form scrambled up the box to see her, squeaking delight over achieving the purpose bred into it by the ancient Buyur — to deliver brief messages via a network of cross-linked tunnels and vines. With a sigh, Sara put out her hand, and the courier spat a warm pellet into her palm. The pill squirmed.

Suppressing distaste, she raised the little symbiont — a larger cousin of a parrot tick — and let it writhe inside her ear.

Soon, as she feared, it began speaking with the voice of Sage Taine.

“Sara, if this reaches you, I’d like to talk before you go… It is essential to clear up our misunderstanding.”

There came a long pause, then the voice hurried on.

“I’ve thought about it and have lately come to believe that this situation is largely my fau—”

The message stopped there. The record bug had reached its limit. It began repeating the message over again, from the beginning.

Fault? Was “fault” the word you were about to say?

Sara tipped her head until the bug realized it wasn’t wanted anymore and crawled out of her ear. Taine’s voice grew distant, plaintive, as she tossed the bug back to the furry little messenger, who snatched it, tweaking it between sharp jaws, making the bug receptive for Sara’s reply.

I’m sorry, she almost said aloud. I should have made allowances. You were tactless, but meant well, in your haughty way.

I should have been honored by your proposal, even if you first made it out of a sense of duty.

I reacted badly when you renewed the offer at Joshu’s funeral.

A month ago, I was thinking about finally saying yes. There are worse lives on the Slope than the one you offered.

But now everything had changed. The aliens had seen to that. Dwer had what it would take in the new era to come. He’d thrive and sire generations of fine hunter-gatherers, if an age of innocence really was at hand.

And if it’s death the aliens have in mind for us? Well, Dwer will fool them, too, and survive.

That thought made Sara poignantly glad.

Either way, what use will Jijo have for intellectuals like us, Taine?

The two of them would soon be more equal than ever, alike in useless obsolescence, before the end.

Sara said nothing aloud. The messenger ball gave a stymied squeak. It popped the bug into one cheek, then reentered the tube, vanishing into the maze-work of conduits that laced Biblos like a system of arteries and veins.

You’re not the only one. Sara cast a thought after the frustrated creature. There’s more than enough disappointment to go around.

The Gopher was already putting on steam when Sara hurried to the dock. Ariana Foo waited nearby, the twilight shrouding her wheelchair so that she resembled some human–g’Kek hybrid.

“I wish I could have a few more days with him,” she said, taking Sara’s hand.

“You’ve done wonders, but there’s no time to spare.”

“The next kayak pilot may bring vital news—”

“I know. And I’d give anything to hear from Lark. But that reasoning will only take us in circles. If something urgent happens, you can send a galloper after us. Meanwhile I have … a feeling that we’d better hurry.”

“More dreams?”

Sara nodded. For several nights her sleep had been disturbed by ill-defined impressions of alpine fire, then watery suffocation. It might just be a return of the claustrophobia she felt years ago, as a youthful newcomer under the overhanging roof-of-stone. Or else maybe her nightmares echoed something real. An approaching culmination.

Mother believed in dreams, she recalled. Even as she drilled into Lark and me a love of books and science, it was Dwer whom she heeded, whenever he woke with those powerful visions, back when he was little — and then the week before she died.

The steam packet hissed, its boilers straining. Two dozen donkeys thumped and whinnied, tethered at the stern alongside sealed crates of books.

Contrasting strangely, a different sound came from the ship’s bow. Delicate, melodic music consisting of parallel chains of halting notes, somewhat twangy. Sara tilted her head.

“He’s getting better fast.”

“He has motivation,” the sage replied. “I expected him to choose a simpler instrument, like a flute or violus. But he pulled the dulcimer off the museum shelf and seemed to draw some deep satisfaction out of counting its strings. It’s simple to learn, and he can sing along, when a tune spills out of memory. Anyway, he’s fit for a journey, so” — she took a deep breath, looking weary and old — “give Lester and the other High Mucketies my regards, will you? Tell them to behave.”

Sara bent to kiss Ariana’s cheek. “I’ll do that.” The retired sage gripped her arm with unexpected strength. “Safe journey, child. Ifni roll you sixes.”

“Safe house,” Sara returned the blessing. “May she roll you long life.”

Ariana’s chimp aide pushed her upslope, toward the comfort of an evening fire. It was becoming a habit for Sara to doubt she would ever see someone again.

The captain gave the order to cast off, guiding his precious boat gingerly away from the camouflage shelter. Jop and Ulgor joined Sara at the rail, along with several morose-faced librarians, appointed to carry precious volumes to uncertain safety in the wilderness. Soon the churning shove of the paddle wheels settled to a reassuring rhythm, working with the Bibur’s current to turn them downstream.

The spaceman played along with focused monomania. Hunched over a small, wedgelike instrument, he hammered its strings with two small curved mallets, faltering often but radiating passion. The music laced through bittersweet memory as Sara watched the mighty fortress slip by, with its many-windowed halls. The stone canopy seemed to hover like a patient fist of God.

I wonder if I’ll ever be back.

Soon they passed the westernmost edge of laser-cut stone — the mulching grounds. There were no banners today, or mourners, or busy little subtraekis consuming flesh, preparing white bones for the sea. But then, amid the dusky gloom, she did spy a solitary figure overlooking the river. Tall and straight-backed, with a sleek mane of silver-gray, the human leaned slightly on a cane, though he seemed far from frail. Sara’s breath caught as the Gopher swept by.

Sage Taine nodded — a friendly, even ardent display for such a diffident person. Then, to Sara’s surprise, he lifted an arm, in a gesture of unadorned goodwill.

At the last moment she gave in, raising her own hand. Peace, she thought.

Biblos fell behind the chugging steamboat, swallowed by gathering night. Nearby, the Stranger’s voice broke in, singing words to a song about a voyage of no return. And while she knew the lyrics expressed his own sense of loss and poignant transition, they also rubbed, both sweetly and painfully, against conflicts in her own heart.