Heaven's Reach

Alvin’s Journal

EVER SINCE WE BRAVE VOLUNTEERS JOINED THE Earthlings on their forlorn quest, I’ve compared it to our earlier trip aboard a handmade submarine — a little summer outing that wound up taking four settler kids all the way to the bottom of the sea, and from there to the stars.

Of course our little Wuphon’s Dream was just a hollowed-out log with a glass nose, hardly big enough for an urs, a hoon, a qheuen, and a g’Kek to squeeze inside, providing we took turns breathing. In contrast, Streaker is so roomy you could fit all the khutas of Port Wuphon inside. It has comforts I never imagined, even after a youth spent reading crates of Terran novels about starfaring days.

And yet, the trips have similarities.

In each case we took a willing chance, plunging into a lightless abyss to face unexpected wonders.

On both expeditions, my friends and I had different assigned tasks.

And sure enough, aboard Streaker, just like Wuphon’s Dream, I got the worst job to do.

Keeper of Animals. That’s me.

Ur-ronn gets to follow her passion for machinery, helping Suessi’s gang down in engineering.

Pincer runs errands for the bridge crew. He’s having a grand time dashing amphibiously from dry to watery parts of the ship and back again, with flashing claws and typical qheuen enthusiasm.

Huck spins her wheels happily. She gets to play spy, waving all four eyestalks to taunt the Jophur captives in their cell below, enraging them with the sight of a living g’Kek, provoking them into revealing more information than they would by other means. The nyah-nyah school of interrogation, I call it.

All three of them get to interact with the dolphin crew, helping in ways that matter. Even if we all get blown to bits soon, at least Huck and the others got to do interesting things.

But me? I’m stuck in the hold, keeping herd on twenty bleating glavers and a pair of cranky noors, with the combined conversational abilities of a qheuen larva.

According to the Niss Machine, one of these noors ought to be quite a conversationalist. It’s not a noor, you see, but a tytlal — from a starfaring race that look like noor, smell like noor, and have the same knavish temperament. Somehow they hid among us on Jijo all these years without ever being recognized. A seventh race of sooners — illegal settlers — who benefited from our Commons, but never bothered to formally join.

That’d take some cleverness, I admit. But Mudfoot acts just like my pet noor, Huphu. Lounging around, eating anything that isn’t bolted down, and licking his sleek black pelt all the way to the discolored paws that give him his name. Everyone thinks I’m an expert at coaxing noor, just because hoonish mariners hire some of them to help on our sailing ships, scooting deftly along the spars and rigging, working for umbles and sourballs. But I say that only shows how easy it is to fool a hoon. A thousand years. That’s how long we worked with the nimble creatures, and we never caught on.

Now they’re counting on me to get Mudfoot to speak once more.

Yeah, right. And this journal of mine is going to be published when we reach Earth, and win a Sheldon Award.

• • •

Huphu and Mudfoot still glare at each other, hissing jealously — not unusual for two noor who haven’t worked out their mutual status yet. Meanwhile, I try to keep my other wards comfortable.

We never saw very many glavers in my hometown, down along the Slope’s volcanic coast. They love rooting through garbage piles and rotten logs for tasty bugs, but such things are in short supply aboard Streaker.

Dr. Baskin worked out an exchange with Uriel the Smith, swapping this little herd for several dozen crew members who stayed behind to form a new dolphin colony on Jijo. It hardly seems an even trade. Watching the glavers mewl and jostle in a corner of the hold, I can scarcely picture their ancestors as mighty starfarers. Those bulging, chameleon eyes — swiveling independently, searching the sterile metal hold for crawling things — hold no trace of sapient light. According to Jijo’s Sacred Scrolls, that makes the opal-skinned quadrupeds sacred beings. They’ve attained the highest goal of any sooner race — reaching simplicity by crossing the Path of Redemption.

Renewed, cleansed of ancestral sin, they face the universe with reborn innocence, ready for a fresh start. Or so the sages say.

Forgive me for being unimpressed. You see, I have to clean up after the smelly things. If some patron race ever takes on the honored task of reuplifting glavers, they had better make housebreaking their first priority.

At first sight, you wouldn’t think the filthy things had much in common with fastidious noor. But they both seem to like it when I puff out my throat sac and give a low, booming umble-song. Ever since my adult verte-broids erupted, I’ve acquired a deep resonance that I’m rather proud of. It helps keep the critters calm whenever Streaker makes a sudden maneuver and her gravity fields waver.

I try not to think about where the ship is right now, tearing along at incredible speed, diving through the flames of a giant star.

Fortunately, I can umble while editing and updating my diary on a little teacher-scribe device that Dr. Baskin provided. By now I’m used to working with letters that float before me, instead of lying fixed on an ink-stained page. It’s convenient to be able to reach into my work, shifting and nudging sentences by hand or voice command. Still, I wish the machine would stop trying to fix my grammar and syntax! I may not be human, but I’m one of Jijo’s best experts on the Anglic language, and I don’t need a smart-aleck computer telling me my dialect’s “archaic.” If my journal ever gets published on a civilized world, I’m sure my colonial style will enhance its charm, like the old-time appeal of works by Defoe and Swift.

It grows harder to stave off frustration, knowing my friends are in the thick of things, and me stuck below, staring at blank walls, with just dumb beasts for company. I know, by doing this I freed a member of Streaker’s understaffed crew to do important work. Still, it sometimes feels like the bulkheads are closing in.

“Who do you think you’re looking at?” I snapped, when I caught Mudfoot glancing alternately at me and the floating lines of my journal. “You want to read it?”

I swiveled the autoscribe so hovering words swarmed toward the sleek creature.

“If you tytlal are so brainy, maybe you know where I should take the story next. Hrm?”

Mudfoot peered at the glyph symbols. His expression made my spines frickle. I wondered.

Just how much memory do they retain — this secret clan of supernoor? When did the Tymbrimi plant a clandestine colony of their clients on Jijo? It must have been before we boons came. Perhaps they predate even the g’Kek.

I had heard many legends of the clever Tymbrimi, of course — a spacefaring race widely disliked by conservative Galactics for their scamplike natures. The same trait made them befriend Earthlings, when that naive clan first stumbled onto the star lanes. Ignorance can be fatal in this dangerous universe, and Terra might have quickly suffered the typical Wolflings’ Fate, if not for Tymbrimi sponsorship and advice.

Only now crisis convulses the Five Galaxies. Mighty alliances are wreaking vengeance for past grievances. Earth and her friends may have reached the end of their luck, after all.

Even before meeting humans, the Tymbrimi must have known a day might come when all their enemies would converge against them. They must have been tempted to stash a small population group in some secluded place, before war, accident, or betrayal extinguished their main racial stock.

Did they consider taking the sooners’ path?

I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read, it seems unlikely that their natures would ever let Tymbrimi settle down to quiet pastoral lives on a hick world like Jijo. Humans barely accomplished it, and they are much more down to earth.

But if the Tymbrimi couldn’t hide out as sooners, it wasn’t too late for their beloved clients. The tytlal were still largely unknown. Still close to their animal roots. A small gene pool might be partly devolved and safely cached on far-off Jijo. It all made eerie sense. Including the notion of a race within a race — a band of un-devolved noor, hidden among them. Guardians, keeping twin black eyes open for danger … or opportunity.

Watching Mudfoot, I recalled stories told by Dwer Koolhan — during his brief time aboard this ship, when Streaker hid beneath Jijo’s sea — about how this wild animal kept snooping and meddling, following Dwer across half a continent. Ever mysterious, infuriating, and unhelpful. The behavior seemed to combine noorish recklessness with an attention span worthy of a hoon.

Intelligent irony now seemed to dominate Mudfoot’s snub-nosed, carnivorous face while he scanned my most recent lines of prose — the very musings about tytlal nature that lay just above. His black-pelted form coiled tightly, in an expression that I mistook for studious interest. I could almost imagine mute noorish whimsy transforming into eloquent speech — witty commentary perhaps, or else a brutal putdown of my dense composition style.

Then, with an abrupt display of unleashed energy, Mudfoot leaped into the crowd of floating words, flailing left and right with agile forepaws, slashing sentences to ribbons, knocking whole paragraphs awry before Streaker’s artificial g-field yanked him to a crouched landing on the metal deck. At once, he swiveled with a hunter’s delighted yowl and readied another pounce.

“Don’t save those changes!” I shouted at the autoscribe with unaccustomed haste. “Make all text intangible!”

My command made Mudfoot’s second leap less satisfying. Robbed of semisolidity, the words of my journal were now mere visual holograms, unaffected by physical touch. His second assault slashed uselessly while he passed through ghostly symbols, barking with disappointment.

Moments later, though, Mudfoot perched once more on my right shoulder, as Huphu glared at him lazily from the left. Both of them preened for a while, then began rubbing my throat, begging for an umble.

“You don’t fool me for a dura,” I muttered. But there seemed little else to do except repair the damage, finish up this journal entry, and then give them what they wanted.

I was doing that — singing for two noor and a herd of mesmerized glaver — when the Niss Machine barged in with a message.

I still have no idea why the snide robotic mind keeps interrupting this way, without preamble or greeting, despite my complaints that it grates against a hoon’s nature. And the tornado of spinning, twisted lines somehow hurts my eyes. Ifni, it’s hard enough getting used to the idea of talking computers, even though I used to read about them in classics by Nagata and Ecklar. Can it be that the Niss has some sort of family relationship with Mudfoot? A connection via the Tymbrimi, would be my guess. You can tell by their disdain for courtesy and knack for putting people off balance.

“I bring a message from the bridge crew,” announced the whirling shape. “Although I see little good coming out of it, they want to see one or two of your charges up there. You must bring the creatures along at once. A crew member is already coming to replace you here.”

Gently putting Huphu down on the metal deck, I gathered Mudfoot in a carrying hold, comfortably cradling him in the crook of one arm, so he could not writhe free. He seemed content, but I was taking no chances. The last thing I needed was for him to dash off in some random direction on our way to the bridge, wreaking havoc in the galley, or hiding in some storeroom till Streaker was blasted to smithereens.

“Won’t you tell me what it’s all about?” I asked.

The abstract lines appeared to shrug.

“For some reason, Dr. Baskin and Sage Sara Koolhan seem to think the beast may speak up, at an opportune moment, helping us deal with potentially hostile aliens.”

I umbled a deep, rolling laugh.

“Well they got hopes! This Ifni-slucking tytlal is gonna talk when it wants to, and the universe can go to hell till then, for all it cares.”

The lines twisted tighter than ever.

“I am not referring to the tytlal, Alvin. Please put the little rascal down and pay attention.”

“But …” I shook my head, human style, confused. “Then, who …?”

The Niss hologram bent toward the far wall, making an effort to point.

“You are requested to bring up one or two of those.”

I stared at a crowd of goggle-eyed cretins. Mewling, nosing through their own revolting feces … “blessed” with sacred forgetfulness, immune to worry.

So this hurried journal entry ends on a note of blank surprise.

They want me to bring glavers to the bridge.