Infinity's Shore

PART ONE

EACH OF THE SOONER RACES making up the Commons of Jijo tells its own unique story, passed down from generation to generation, explaining why their ancestors surrendered godlike powers and risked terrible penalties to reach this far place — skulking in sneakships past Institute patrols, robot guardians, and Zang globules. Seven waves of sinners, each coming to plant their outlaw seed on a world that had been declared off-limits to settlement. A world set aside to rest and recover in peace, but for the likes of us.

THE g’Kek arrived first on this land we call the Slope, between misty mountains and the sacred sea — half a million years after the last legal tenants — the Buyur — departed Jijo.

Why did those g’Kek founders willingly give up their former lives as star-traveling gods and citizens of the Five Galaxies? Why choose instead to dwell as fallen primitives, lacking the comforts of technology, or any moral solace but for a few engraved platinum scrolls?

Legend has it that our g’Kek cousins fled threatened extinction, a dire punishment for devastating gambling losses. But we cannot be sure. Writing was a lost art until humans came, so those accounts may be warped by passing time.

What we do know is that it could not have been a petty threat that drove them to abandon the spacefaring life they loved, seeking refuge on heavy Jijo, where their wheels have such a hard time on the rocky ground. With four keen eyes, peering in all directions at the end of graceful stalks, did the g’Kek ancestors see a dark destiny painted on galactic winds? Did that first generation see no other choice? Perhaps they only cursed their descendants to this savage life as a last resort.

NOT long after the g’Kek, roughly two thousand years ago, a party of traeki dropped hurriedly from the sky, as if fearing pursuit by some dreaded foe. Wasting no time, they sank their sneakship in the deepest hollow of the sea, then settled down to be our gentlest tribe.

What nemesis drove them from the spiral lanes?

Any native Jijoan glancing at those familiar stacks of fatty toruses, venting fragrant steam and placid wisdom in each village of the Slope, must find it hard to imagine the traeki having enemies.

In time, they confided their story. The foe they fled was not some other race, nor was there a deadly vendetta among the star gods of the Five Galaxies. Rather, it was an aspect of their own selves. Certain rings — components of their physical bodies — had lately been modified in ways that turned their kind into formidable beings. Into Jophur, mighty and feared among the noble Galactic clans.

It was a fate those traeki founders deemed unbearable. So they chose to become lawless refugees — sooners on a taboo world — in order to shun a horrid destiny.

The obligation to be great.

IT is said that glavers came to Jijo not out of fear, but seeking the Path of Redemption — the kind of innocent oblivion that wipes all slates clean. In this goal they have succeeded far better than anyone else, showing the rest of us the way, if we dare follow their example.

Whether or not that sacred track will also be ours, we must respect their accomplishment — transforming themselves from cursed fugitives into a race of blessed simpletons. As starfaring immortals, they could be held accountable for their crimes, including the felony of invading Jijo. But now they have reached a refuge, the purity of ignorance, free to start again.

Indulgently, we let glavers root through our kitchen middens, poking under logs for insects. Once mighty intellects, they are not counted among the sooner races of Jijo anymore. They are no longer stained with the sins of their forebears.

QHEUENS were the first to arrive filled with wary ambition.

Led by fanatical, crablike gray matrons, their first-generation colonists snapped all five pincers derisively at any thought of union with Jijo’s other exile races. Instead, they sought dominion.

That plan collapsed in time, when blue and red qheuens abandoned historic roles of servitude, drifting off to seek their own ways, leaving their frustrated gray empresses helpless to enforce old feudal loyalties.

OUR tall hoonish brethren inhale deeply, whenever the question arises—“Why are you here?” They fill their prodigious throat sacs with low meditation umbles. In rolling tones, hoon elders relate that their ancestors fled no great danger, no oppression or unwanted obligations.

Then why did they come, risking frightful punishment if their descendants are ever caught living illegally on Jijo?

The oldest hoons on Jijo merely shrug with frustrating cheerfulness, as if they do not know the reason, and could not be bothered to care.

Some do refer to a legend, though. According to that slim tale, a Galactic oracle once offered a starfaring hoonish clan a unique opportunity, if they dared take it. An opportunity to claim something that had been robbed from them, although they, never knew it was lost. A precious birthright that might be discovered on a forbidden world.

But for the most part, whenever one of the tall ones puffs his throat sac to sing about past times, he rumbles a deep, joyful ballad about the crude rafts, boats, and seagoing ships that hoons invented from scratch, soon after landing on Jijo. Things their humorless star cousins would never have bothered looking up in the all-knowing Galactic Library, let alone have deigned to build.

LEGENDS told by the fleet-footed urrish clan imply that their foremothers were rogues, coming to Jijo in order to breed—escaping limits imposed in civilized parts of the Five Galaxies. With their short lives, hot tempers, and prolific sexual style, the urs founders might have gone on to fill Jijo with their kind … or else met extinction by now, like the mythical centaurs they vaguely resemble.

But they escaped both of those traps. Instead, after many hard struggles, at the forge and on the battlefield, they assumed an honored place in the Commons of Six Races. With their thundering herds, and mastery of steel, they live hot and hard, making up for their brief seasons in our midst.

FINALLY, two centuries ago, Earthlings came, bringing chimpanzees and other treasures. But humans’ greatest gift was paper. In creating the printed trove of Biblos, they became lore masters to our piteous commonwealth of exiles. Printing and education changed life on the Slope, spurring a new tradition of scholarship, so that later generations of castaways dared to study their adopted world, their hybrid civilization, and even their own selves.

As for why humans came all this way — breaking Galactic laws and risking everything, just to huddle with other outlaws under a fearsome sky — their tale is among the strangest told by Jijo’s exile clans.

from An Ethnography of the Slope,

by Dorti Chang-Jones and Huph-alch-Huo

Alvin

I HAD NO WAY TO MARK THE PASSAGE OF TIME, LYING dazed and half-paralyzed in a metal cell, listening to the engine hum of a mechanical sea dragon that was hauling me and my friends to parts unknown.

I guess a couple of days must have passed since the shattering of our makeshift submarine, our beautiful Wuphon’s Dream, before I roused enough to wonder, What next?

Dimly, I recall the sea monster’s face as we first saw it through our crude glass viewing port, lit by the Dream’s homemade searchlight. That glimpse lasted but a moment as the huge metal thing loomed toward us out of black, icy depths. The four of us — Huck, Pincer, Ur-ronn, and me — had already resigned ourselves to death … doomed to crushed oblivion at the bottom of the sea. Our expedition a failure, we didn’t feel like daring subsea adventurers anymore, but like scared kids, voiding our bowels in terror as we waited for the cruel abyss to squeeze our hollowed-out tree trunk into a zillion soggy splinters.

Suddenly this enormous shape erupted toward us, spreading jaws wide enough to snatch Wuphon’s Dream whole.

Well, almost whole. Passing through that maw, we struck a glancing blow.

The collision shattered our tiny capsule.

What followed still remains a painful blur.

I guess anything beats death, but there have been moments since that impact when my back hurt so much that I just wanted to rumble one last umble through my battered throat sac and say farewell to young Alvin Hph-wayuo — junior linguist, humicking writer, uttergloss daredevil, and neglectful son of Mu-phauwq and Yowg-wayuo of Wuphon Port, the Slope, Jijo, Galaxy Four, the Universe.

But I stayed alive.

I guess it just didn’t seem hoonish to give up, after everything my pals and I went through to get here. What if I was sole survivor? I owed it to Huck and the others to carry on.

My cell — a prison? hospital room? — measures just two meters, by two, by three. Pretty skimpy for a hoon, even one not quite fully grown. It gets even more cramped whenever some six-legged, metal-sheathed demon tries to squeeze inside to tend my injured spine, poking with what I assume (hope!) to be clumsy kindness. Despite their efforts, misery comes in awful waves, making me wish desperately for the pain remedies cooked up by Old Stinky — our traeki pharmacist back home.

It occurred to me that I might never walk again … or see my family, or watch seabirds swoop over the dross ships, anchored beneath Wuphon’s domelike shelter trees.

I tried talking to the insecty giants trooping in and out of my cell. Though each had a torso longer than my dad is tall — with a flared back end, and a tubelike shell as hard as Buyur steel — I couldn’t help picturing them as enormous phuvnthus, those six-legged vermin that gnaw the walls of wooden houses, giving off a sweet-tangy stench.

These things smell like overworked machinery. Despite my efforts in a dozen Earthling and Galactic languages, they seemed even less talkative than the phuvnthus Huck and I used to catch when we were little, and train to perform in a miniature circus.

I missed Huck during that dark time. I missed her quick g’Kek mind and sarcastic wit. I even missed the way she’d snag my leg fur in her wheels to get my attention, if I stared too long at the horizon in a hoonish sailor’s trance. I last glimpsed those wheels spinning uselessly in the sea dragon’s mouth, just after those giant jaws smashed our precious Dream and we spilled across the slivers of our amateur diving craft.

Why didn’t I rush to my friend, during those bleak moments after we crashed? Much as I yearned to, it was hard to see or hear much while a screaming wind shoved its way into the chamber, pushing out the bitter sea. At first, I had to fight just to breathe again. Then, when I tried to move, my back would not respond.

In those blurry instants, I also recall catching sight of Ur-ronn, whipping her long neck about and screaming as she thrashed all four legs and both slim arms, horrified at being drenched in vile water. Ur-ronn bled where her suede-colored hide was pierced by jagged shards — remnants of the glass porthole she had proudly forged in the volcano workshops of Uriel the Smith.

Pincer-Tip was there, too, best equipped among our gang to survive underwater. As a red qheuen, Pincer was used to scampering on five chitin-armored claws across salty shallows — though our chance tumble into the bottomless void was more than even he had bargained for. In dim recollection, I think Pincer seemed alive … or does wishful thinking deceive me?

My last hazy memories of our “rescue” swarm with violent images until I blacked out … to wake in this cell, delirious and alone.

Sometimes the phuvnthus do something “helpful” to my spine, and it hurts so much that I’d willingly spill every secret I know. That is, if the phuvnthus ever asked questions, which they never do.

So I never allude to the mission we four were given by Uriel the Smith — to seek a taboo treasure that her ancestors left on the seafloor, centuries ago. An offshore cache, hidden when urrish settlers first jettisoned their ships and high-tech gadgets to become just one more fallen race. Only some dire emergency would prompt Uriel to violate the Covenant by retrieving such contraband.

I guess “emergency” might cover the arrival of alien robbers, plundering the Gathering Festival of the Six Races and threatening the entire Commons with genocide.

Eventually, the pangs in my spine eased enough for me to rummage through my rucksack and resume writing in this tattered journal, bringing my ill-starred adventure up to date. That raised my spirits a bit. Even if none of us survives, my diary might yet make it home someday.

Growing up in a little hoonish village, devouring human adventure stories by Clarke and Rostand, Conrad and Xu Xiang, I dreamed that people on the Slope would someday say, “Wow, that Alvin Hph-wayuo was some storyteller, as good as any old-time Earther.”

This could be my one and only chance.

So I spent long miduras with a stubby charcoal crayon clutched in my big hoon fist, scribbling the passages that lead up to this one — an account of how I came to find myself in this low, low state.

— How four friends built a makeshift submarine out of skink skins and a carved-out garu log, fancying a treasure hunt to the Great Midden.

— How Uriel the Smith, in her mountain forge, threw her support behind our project, turning it from a half-baked dream into a real expedition.

— How we four snuck up to Uriel’s observatory, and heard a human sage speak of starships in the sky, perhaps bringing foretold judgment on the Six Races.

— And how Wuphon’s Dream soon dangled from a pole near Terminus Rock, where the Midden’s sacred trench passes near land. And Uriel told us, hissing through her cloven upper lip, that a ship had indeed landed up north. But this cruiser did not carry Galactic magistrates. Instead another kind of criminal had come, worse even than our sinner ancestors.

So we sealed the hatch, and the great winch turned. But on reaching the mapped site, we found that Uriel’s cache was already missing! Worse — when we went looking for the damned thing, Wuphon’s Dream got lost and tumbled off the edge of an undersea cliff.

Flipping back some pages, I can tell my account of the journey was written by someone perched on a knife-edge of harrowing pain. Yet, there is a sense of drama I can’t hope to match now. Especially that scene where the bottom vanished beneath our wheels and we felt ourselves fall toward the real Midden.

Toward certain death.

Until the phuvnthus snatched us up.

So, here I am, swallowed by a metal whale, ruled by cryptic silent beings, ignorant whether my friends still live or if I am alone. Merely crippled, or dying.

Do my captors have anything to do with starship landings in the mountains?

Are they a different enigma, rising out of Jijo’s ancient past? Relics of the vanished Buyur perhaps? Or ghosts even older still?

Answers seem scarce, and since I’ve finished recounting the plummet and demise of Wuphon’s Dream, I daren’t waste more precious paper on speculation. I must put my pencil down, even if it robs my last shield against loneliness.

All my life I’ve been inspired by human-style books, picturing myself as hero in some uttergloss tale. Now my sanity depends on learning to savor patience.

To let time pass without concern.

To live and think, at last, just like a hoon.

Asx

YOU MAY CALL ME ASX.

you manicolored rings, piled in a high tapered heap, venting fragrant stinks, sharing the victual sap that climbs our common core, or partaking in memory wax, trickling back down from our sensory peak.

you, the rings who take up diverse roles in this shared body, a pudgy cone nearly as tall as a hoon, as heavy as a blue qheuen, and slow across the ground like an aged g’Kek with a cracked axle.

you, the rings who vote each day whether to renew our coalition.

From you rings i/we now request a ruling. Shall we carry on this fiction? This “Asx”?

Unitary beings — the humans, urs, and other dear partners in exile — stubbornly use that term, Asx, to signify this loosely affiliated pile of fatty toruses, as if we/i truly had a fixed name, not a mere label of convenience.

Of course unitary beings are all quite mad. We traeki long ago resigned ourselves to living in a universe filled with egotism.

What we could not resign ourselves to — and the reason for our exile here on Jijo — was the prospect of becoming the most egotistical of all.

Once, our/my stack of bloated tubes played the role of a modest village pharmacist, serving others with our humble secretions, near the sea bogs of Par Wet Sanctuary. Then others began paying us/me homage, calling us “Asx,” chief sage of the Traeki Sept and member of the Guiding Council of the Six.

Now we stand in a blasted wasteland that was formerly a pleasant festival glade. Our sensor rings and neural tendrils recoil from sights and sounds they cannot bear to perceive. And so we are left virtually blind, our component toruses buffeted by the harsh fields of two nearby starships, as vast as mountains.

Even now, awareness of those starships fades away. …

We are left in blackness.

What has just happened!

Be calm, my rings. This sort of thing has transpired before. Too great a shock can jar a traeki stack out of alignment, causing gaps in short-term memory. But there is another, surer way to find out what has happened. Neural memory is a flimsy thing. How much better off we are, counting on the slow/reliable wax.

Ponder the fresh wax that slithers down our common core, still hot-slick, imprinted with events that took place recently on this ill-fated glade, where once gay pavilions stood, and banners flapped in Jijo’s happy winds. A typical festival, the annual gathering of Six Races to celebrate their hundred-year peace. Until—

Is this the memory we seek?

Behold … a starship comes to Jijo! Not sneaking by night, like our ancestors. Not aloofly, like a mysterious Zang globule. No, this was an arrogant cruiser from the Five Galaxies, commanded by aloof alien beings called Rothen.

Trace this memory of our first sight of Rothen lords, emerging at last from their metal lair, so handsome and noble in their condescension, projecting a majestic charisma that shadowed even their sky-human servants. How glorious to be a star god! Even gods who are “criminals” by Galactic law.

Did they not far outshine us miserable barbarians? As the sun outglows a tallow candle?

But we sages realized a horrifying truth. After hiring us for local expertise, to help them raid this world, the Rothen could not afford to leave witnesses behind.

They would not leave us alive.

No, that is too far back. Try again.

What about these other livid tracks, my rings? A red flaming pillar erupting in the night? An explosion, breaking apart our sacred pilgrimage? Do you recall the sight of the Rothen-Danik station, its girders, twisted and smoking? Its cache of biosamples burned? And most dire — one Rothen and a sky human killed?

By dawn’s light, foul accusations hurled back and forth between Ro-kenn and our own High Sages. Appalling threats were exchanged.

No, that still took place over a day ago. Stroke wax that is more recent than that.

Here we find a broad sheet of terror, shining horribly down our oily core. Its colors/textures blend hot blood with cold fire, exuding a smoky scent of flaming trees and charred bodies.

Do you recall how Ro-kenn, the surviving Rothen master, swore vengeance on the Six Races, ordering his killer robots forward?

“Slay everyone in sight! Death to all who saw our secret revealed!”

But then behold a marvel! Platoons of our own brave militia. They spill from surrounding forest. Jijoan savages, armed only with arrows, pellet rifles, and courage. Do you now recall how they charged the hovering death demons … and prevailed!

The wax does not lie. It happened in mere instants, while these old traeki rings could only stare blankly at the battle’s awful ruin, astonished that we/i were not ignited into a stack of flaming tubes.

Though dead and wounded lay piled around us, victory was clear. Victory for the Six Races! Ro-kenn and his godlike servants were disarmed, wide-eyed in their offended surprise at this turn of Ifni’s ever-tumbling dice.

Yes, my rings, i know this is not the final memory. It took place many miduras in the past. Obviously something must have happened since then. Something dreadful.

Perhaps the Danik scout boat came back from its survey trip, carrying one of the fierce sky-human warriors who worship Rothen patron masters. Or else the main Rothen starship may have returned, expecting a trove of bioplunder, only to find their samples destroyed, their station ruined, and comrades taken hostage.

That might explain the scent of sooty devastation that now fills our core.

But no later memories are yet available. The wax has not congealed.

To a traeki, that means none of it has really happened.

Not yet.

Perhaps things are not as bad as they seem.

It is a gift we traeki reacquired when we came to Jijo. A talent that helps make up for the many things we left behind, when we abandoned the stars.

A gift for wishful thinking.

Rety

THE FIERCE WIND OF FLIGHT TORE DAMPNESS FROM her streaming eyes, sparing her the shame of tears running down scarred cheeks. Still, Rety could weep with rage, thinking of the hopes she’d lost. Lying prone on a hard metal plate, clutching its edge with hands and feet, she bore the harsh breeze as whipping tree branches smacked her face and caught her hair, sometimes drawing blood.

Mostly, she just held on for dear life.

The alien machine beneath her was supposed to be her loyal servant! But the cursed thing would not slow its panicky retreat, even long after all danger lay far behind. If Rety fell off now, at best it would take her days to limp back to the village of her birth, where less than a midura ago there had been a brief, violent ambush.

Her brain still roiled. In just a few heartbeats her plans had been spoiled, and it was all Diver’s fault!

She heard the young hunter moan, held captive by metal arms below her perch. But as the wounded battle drone fled recklessly onward, Rety turned away from Dwer’s suffering, which he had only brought on himself, trekking all the way to these filthy Gray Hills from his safe home near the sea—the Slope—where six intelligent races lived at a much higher level of ignorant poverty than her own birth clan of wretched savages. Why would slopies hike past two thousand leagues of hell to reach this dreary wasteland?

What did Dwer and his pals hope to accomplish? To conquer Rety’s brutish relatives?

He could have her smelly kinfolk, for all she cared! And the band of urrish sooners Kunn subdued with fire from his screeching scout boat. Dwer was welcome to them all. Only, couldn’t he have waited quietly in the woods till after Rety and Kunn finished their business here and flew off again? Why did he have to rush things and attack the robot with her aboard?

I bet he did it out of spite. Prob’ly can’t stand knowing that I’m the one Jijo native with a chance to get away from this pit hole of a planet.

Inside, Rety knew better. Dwer’s heart didn’t work that way.

But mine does.

When he groaned again, Rety muttered angrily, “I’ll make you even sorrier, Dwer, if I don’t make it off this mudball ’cause of you!”

So much for her glorious homecoming.

At first it had seemed fun to pay a return visit, swooping from a cloud-decked sky in Kunn’s silver dart, emerging proudly to amazed gasps from the shabby cousins, who had bullied her for fourteen awful years. What a fitting climax to her desperate gamble, a few months ago, when she finally found the nerve to flee all the muck and misery, setting forth alone to seek the fabled Slope her great-grandparents had left behind, when they chose the “free” life as wild sooners.

Free of the sages’ prying rules about what beasts you may kill. Free from irky laws about how many babies you can have. Free from having to abide neighbors with four legs, or five, or that rolled on humming wheels.

Rety snorted contempt for the founders of her tribe.

Free from books and medicine. Free to live like animals!

Fed up, Rety had set out to find something better or die trying.

The journey had nearly killed her — crossing icy torrents and parched wastes. Her closest call came traversing a high pass into the Slope, following a mysterious metal bird into a mulc spider’s web. A web that became a terrifying trap when the spider’s tendrils closed around her, oozing golden drops that horribly preserved. …

Memory came unbidden — of Dwer charging through that awful thicket with a gleaming machete, then sheltering her with his body when the web caught fire.

She recalled the bright bird, glittering in flames, treacherously cut down by an attacking robot just like her “servant.” The one now hauling her off to Ifni-knew-where.

Rety’s mind veered as a gut-wrenching swerve nearly spilled her overboard. She screamed at the robot.

“Idiot! No one’s shooting at you anymore! There were just a few slopies, and they were all afoot. Nothing on Jijo could catch you now!”

But the frantic contraption plunged ahead, riding a cushion of incredible god force.

Rety wondered, Could it sense her contempt? Dwer and two or three friends, equipped with crude fire sticks, had taken just a few duras to disable and drive off the so-called war bot, though at some cost to themselves.

Ifni, what a snarl. She pondered the sooty hole where Dwer’s surprise attack had ripped out its antenna. How’m I gonna explain this to Kunn?

Rety’s adopted rank as an honorary star god was already fragile. The angry pilot might simply abandon her in these hills where she had grown up, among savages she loathed.

I won’t go back to the tribe, she vowed. I’d rather join wild glavers, sucking bugs off dead critters on the Poison Plain.

It was all Dwer’s fault, of course. Rety hated listening to the young fool moan.

We’re heading south, where Kunn flew off to. The robot must be rushin’ to report in person, now that it can’t farspeak anymore.

Having witnessed Kunn’s skill at torture, Rety found herself hoping Dwer’s leg wound would reopen. Bleeding to death would be better by far.

The fleeing machine left the Gray Hills, slanting toward a tree-dotted prairie. Streams converged, turning the brook into a river, winding slowly toward the tropics.

The journey grew smoother and Rety risked sitting up again. But the robot did not take the obvious shortcut over water. Instead, it followed each oxbow curve, seldom venturing past the reedy shallows.

The land seemed pleasant. Good for herds or farming, if you knew how, and weren’t afraid of being caught.

It brought to mind all the wonders she had seen on the Slope, after barely escaping the mulc spider. Folk there had all sorts of clever arts Rety’s tribe lacked. Yet, despite their fancy windmills and gardens, their metal tools and paper books, the slopies had seemed dazed and frightened when Rety reached the famous Festival Glade.

What had the Six Races so upset was the recent coming of a starship, ending two thousand years of isolation.

To Rety, the spacers seemed wondrous. A ship owned by unseen Rothen masters, but crewed by humans so handsome and knowing that Rety would give anything to be like them. Not a doomed savage with a scarred face, eking out a life on a taboo world.

A daring ambition roused … and by pluck and guts she had made it happen! Rety got to know those haughty men and women—Ling, Besh, Kunn, and Rann—worming her way into their favor. When asked, she gladly guided fierce Kunn to her tribe’s old camp, retracing her earlier epic journey in a mere quarter day, munching Galactic treats while staring through the scout boat’s window at wastelands below.

Years of abuse were repaid by her filthy cousins’ shocked stares, beholding her transformed from grubby urchin to Rety, the star god.

If only that triumph could have lasted.

She jerked back when Dwer called her name.

Peering over the edge, Rety saw his windburned face, the wild black hair plastered with dried sweat. One buckskin breech leg was stained ocher brown under a makeshift compress, though Rety saw no sign of new wetness. Trapped by the robots unyielding tendrils, Dwer clutched his precious hand-carved bow, as if it were the last thing he would part with before death. Rety could scarcely believe she once thought the crude weapon worth stealing.

“What do you want now?” she demanded.

The young hunter’s eyes met hers. His voice came out as a croak.

“Can I … have some water?”

“Assumin’ I have any,” she muttered, “name one reason I’d share it with you!”

Rustling at her waist. A narrow head and neck snaked out of her belt pouch. Three dark eyes glared — two with lids and one pupilless, faceted like a jewel.

“wife be not liar to this one! wife has water bottle! yee smells its bitterness.”

Rety sighed over this unwelcome interruption by her miniature “husband.”

“There’s just half left. No one tol’ me I was goin’ on a trip!”

The little urrish male hissed disapproval, “wife share with this one, or bad luck come! no hole safe for grubs or larvae!”

Rety almost retorted that her marriage to yee was not real. They would never have “grubs” together. Anyway, yee seemed bent on being her portable conscience, even when it was clearly every creature for herself.

I never should’ve told him how Dwer saved me from the mulc spider. They say male urs are dumb. Ain’t it my luck to marry a genius one?

“Oh … all right!”

The bottle, an alien-made wonder, weighed little more than the liquid it contained. “Don’t drop it,” she warned Dwer, lowering the red cord. He grabbed it eagerly.

“No, fool! The top don’t pull off like a stopper. Turn it till it comes off. That’s right. Jeekee know-nothin’ slopie.”

She didn’t add how the concept of a screw cap had mystified her, too, when Kunn and the others first adopted her as a provisional Danik. Of course that was before she became sophisticated.

Rety watched nervously as he drank.

“Don’t spill it. An’ don’t you dare drink it all! You hear me? That’s enough, Dwer. Stop now. Dwer!”

But he ignored her protests, guzzling while she cursed. When the canteen was drained, Dwer smiled at her through cracked lips.

Too stunned to react, Rety knew — she would have done exactly the same.

Yeah, an inner voice answered. But I didn’t expect it of him.

Her anger spun off when Dwer squirmed, tilting his body toward the robot’s headlong rush. Squinting against the wind, he held the loop cord in one hand and the bottle in the other, as if waiting for something to happen. The flying machine crested a low hill, hopping over some thorny thickets, then plunged down the other side, barely avoiding several tree branches. Rety held tight, keeping yee secure in his pouch. When the worst jouncing ended she peered down again … and rocked back from a pair of black, beady eyes!

It was the damned noor again. The one Dwer called Mudfoot. Several times the dark, lithe creature had tried to clamber up from his niche, between Dwer’s torso and a cleft in the robot’s frame But Rety didn’t like the way he salivated at yee, past needle-sharp teeth. Now Mudfoot stood on Dwer’s rib cage, using his forepaws to probe for another effort.

“Get lost!” She swatted at the narrow, grinning face. “I want to see what Dwer’s doin’.”

Sighing, the noor returned to his nest under the robot’s flank.

A flash of blue came into view just as Dwer threw the bottle. It struck watery shallows with a splash, pressing a furrowed wake. The young man had to make several attempts to get the cord twisted so the canteen dragged with its opening forward. The container sloshed when Dwer reeled it back in.

I’d’ve thought of that, too. If I was close enough to try it.

Dwer had lost blood, so it was only fair to let him drink and refill a few more times before passing it back up.

Yeah Only fair. And he’ll do it, too. He’ll give it back full.

Rety faced an uncomfortable thought.

You trust him.

He’s the enemy. He caused you and the Daniks heaps of trouble. But you’d trust Dwer with your life.

She had no similar confidence in Kunn, when it came time to face the Rothen-loving stellar warrior.

Dwer refilled the bottle one last time and held it up toward her. “Thanks, Rety … I owe you.”

Her cheeks flushed, a sensation she disliked. “Forget it. Just toss the cord.”

He tried. Rety felt it brush her fingertips, but after half a dozen efforts she could never quite hook the loop. What happens if I don’t get it back!

The noor beast emerged from his narrow niche and took the cord in his teeth. Clambering over Dwer’s chest, then using the robot’s shattered laser tube as a support, Mudfoot slithered closer to Rety’s hand. Well, she thought. If it’s gonna be helpful …

As she reached for the loop, the noor sprang, using his claws as if her arm were a handy climbing vine. Rety howled, but before she could react, Mudfoot was already up on top, grinning smugly.

Little yee let out a yelp. The urrish male pulled his head inside her pouch and drew the zipper shut.

Rety saw blood spots well along her sleeve and lashed in anger, trying to kick the crazy noor off. But Mudfoot dodged easily, inching close, grinning appealingly and rumbling a low sound, presenting the water bottle with two agile forepaws.

Sighing heavily, Rety accepted it and let the noor settle down nearby — on the opposite side from yee.

“I can’t seem to shake myself loose of any of you guys, can I?” she asked aloud.

Mudfoot chittered. And from below, Dwer uttered a short laugh — ironic and tired.

Alvin

IT WAS A LONELY TIME, CONFINED IN GNAWING PAIN to a cramped metal cell. The distant, humming engine reminded me of umble lullabies my father used to sing, when I came down with toe pox or itchysac. Sometimes the noise changed pitch and made my scales frickle, sounding like the moan of a doomed wooden ship when it runs aground.

Finally I slept …

… then wakened in terror to find that a pair of metalclad, six-legged monsters were tying me into a contraption of steel tubes and straps! At first, it looked like a pre-contact torture device I once saw in the Doré-illustrated edition of Don Quixote. Thrashing and resisting accomplished nothing, but hurt like bloody blue blazes.

Finally, with some embarrassment, I realized. It was no instrument of torment but a makeshift back brace, shaped to fit my form and take weight off my injured spine. I fought to suppress panic at the tight metal touch, as they set me on my feet. Swaying with surprise and relief, I found I could walk a little, though wincing with each step.

“Well thanks, you big ugly bugs,” I told the nearest of the giant phuvnthus. “But you might’ve warned me first.”

I expected no answer, but one of them turned its armored torso — with a humped back and wide flare at the rear — and tilted toward me. I took the gesture as a polite bow, though perhaps it meant something different to them.

They left the door open when they exited this time. Slowly, cringing at the effort, I stepped out for the first time from my steel coffin, following as the massive creatures stomped down a narrow corridor.

I already figured I was aboard a submarine of some sort, big enough to carry in its hold the greatest hoonish craft sailing Jijo’s seas.

Despite that, it was a hodgepodge. I thought of Frankenstein’s monster, pieced together from the parts of many corpses. So seemed the monstrous vessel hauling me to who-knows-where. Each time we crossed a hatch, it seemed as if we’d pass into a distinct ship, made by different artisans … by a whole different civilization. In one section, the decks and bulkheads were made of riveted steel sheets. Another zone was fashioned from some fibrous substance — flexible but strong. The corridors changed proportions — from wide to painfully narrow. Half the time I had to stoop under low ceilings … not a lot of fun in the state my back was in.

Finally, a sliding door hissed open. A phuvnthu motioned me ahead with a crooked mandible and I entered a dim chamber much larger than my former cell.

My hearts surged with joy. Before me stood my friends! All of them — alive!

They were gathered round a circular viewing port, staring at inky ocean depths. I might’ve tried sneaking in to surprise them, but qheuens and g’Keks literally have “eyes in the back of their heads,” making it a challenge to startle Huck and Pincer.

(I have managed it, a couple of times.)

When they shouted my name, Ur-ronn whirled her long neck and outraced them on four clattering hooves. We plunged into a multispecies embrace.

Huck was first to bring things back to normal, snapping at Pincer.

“Watch the claws, Crab Face! You’ll snap a spoke! Back off, all of you. Can’t you see Alvin’s hurt? Give him room!”

“Look who talks,” Ur-ronn replied. “Your left wheel just squished his toes, Octofus Head!”

I hadn’t noticed till she pointed it out, so happy was I to hear their testy, adolescent whining once more.

“Hr-rm. Let me look at you all. Ur-ronn, you seem so much … drier than I saw you last.”

Our urrish buddy blew a rueful laugh through her nostril fringe. Her pelt showed large bare patches where fur had sloughed after her dousing. “It took our hosts a while to adjust the hunidity of ny guest suite, vut they finally got it right,” she said. Her torso showed tracks of hasty needle-work — the phuvnthus’ rough stitching to close Ur-ronn’s gashes after she smashed through the glass port of Wuphon’s Dream. Fortunately, her folk don’t play the same mating games as some races. To urs, what matters is not appearance, but status. A visible dent or two will help Ur-ronn show the other smiths she’s been around.

“Yeah. And now we know what an urs smells like after actually taking a bath,” Huck added. “They oughta try it more often.”

“You should talk? With that green eyeball sweat—”

“All right, all right!” I laughed. “Just stopper it long enough for me to look at you, eh?”

Ur-ronn was right. Huck’s eyestalks needed grooming and she had good reason to worry about her spokes. Many were broken, with new-spun fibers just starting to lace the rims. She would have to move cautiously for some time.

As for Pincer, he looked happier than ever.

“I guess you were right about there being monsters in the deep,” I told our red-shelled friend. “Even if they hardly look like the ones you descr—”

I yelped when sharp needles seemed to lance into my back, clambering up my neck ridge. I quickly recognized the rolling growl of Huphu, our little noor-beast mascot, expressing gladness by demanding a rumble umble from me right away.

Before I could find out if my sore throat sac was up to it, Ur-ronn whistled from the pane of dark glass. “They turned on the searchlight again,” she fluted, with hushed awe in her voice. “Alvin, hurry. You’ve got to look!”

Awkwardly on crutches, I moved to the place they made for me. Huck stroked my arm. “You always wanted to see this, pal,” she said. “So gaze out there in wonder.

“Welcome to the Great Midden.”

Asx

HERE IS ANOTHER MEMORY, MY RINGS. AN EVENT that followed the brief Battle of the Glade, so swiftly that war echoes still abused our battered forest canyons.

Has the wax congealed enough yet? Can you stroke-and-sense the awesome disquiet, the frightening beauty of that evening, as we watched a harsh, untwinkling glow pass overhead?

Trace the fatty memory of that spark crossing the sky, brightening as it spiraled closer.

No one could doubt its identity.

The Rothen cruiser, returning for its harvest of bioplunder, looted from a fragile world.

Returning for those comrades it had left behind.

Instead of genetic booty, the crew will find their station smashed, their colleagues killed or taken.

Worse, their true faces are known! We castaways might testify against them in Galactic courts. Assuming we survive.

It takes no cognition genius to grasp the trouble we faced. We six fallen races of forlorn Jijo.

As an Earthling writer might put it — we found ourselves in fetid mulch. Very ripe and very deep.

Sara

THE JOURNEY PASSED FROM AN ANXIOUS BLUR INTO something exalting … almost transcendent.

But not at the beginning.

When they perched her suddenly atop a galloping creature straight out of mythology, Sara’s first reaction was terrified surprise. With snorting nostrils and huge tossing head, the horse was more daunting than Tarek Town’s stone tribute to a lost species. Its muscular torso flexed with each forward bound, shaking Sara’s teeth as it crossed the foothills of the central Slope by the light of a pale moon.

After two sleepless days and nights, it still seemed dreamlike the way a squadron of the legendary beasts came trotting into the ruined Urunthai campsite, accompanied by armed urrish escorts. Sara and her friends had just escaped captivity — their former kidnappers lay either dead or bound with strips of shredded tent cloth — but she expected reenslavement at any moment. Only then, instead of fresh foes, the darkness brought forth these bewildering saviors.

Bewildering to everyone except Kurt the Exploser, who welcomed the newcomers as expected friends. While Jomah and the Stranger exclaimed wonder at seeing real-life horses, Sara barely had time to blink before she was thrust onto a saddle.

Blade volunteered to stay by the bleak fire and tend the wounded, though envy filled each forlorn spin of his blue cupola. Sara would trade places with her qheuen friend, but his chitin armor was too massive for a horse to carry. There was barely time to give Blade a wave of encouragement before the troop wheeled back the way they came, bearing her into the night.

Pounding hoofbeats soon made Sara’s skull ache.

I guess it beats captivity by Dedinger’s human chauvinists, and those fanatic Urunthai. The coalition of zealots, volatile as an exploser’s cocktail, had joined forces to snatch the Stranger and sell him to Rothen invaders. But they underestimated the enigmatic voyager. Despite his crippling loss of speech, the starman found a way to incite urs-human suspicion into bloody riot.

Leaving us masters of our own fate, though it couldn’t last.

Now here was a different coalition of humans and centauroid urs! A more cordial group, but just as adamant about hauling her Ifni-knew-where.

When limnous Torgen rose above the foothills, Sara got to look over the urrish warriors, whose dun flanks were daubed with more subtle war paint than the garish Urunthai. Yet their eyes held the same dark flame that drenched urs’ souls when conflict scents fumed. Cantering in skirmish formation, their slim hands cradled arbalests while long necks coiled, tensely wary. Though much smaller than horses, the urrish fighters conveyed formidable craftiness.

The human rescuers were even more striking. Six women who came north with nine saddled horses, as if they expected to retrieve just two or three others for a return trip.

But there’s six of us. Kurt and Jomah. Prity and me. The Stranger and Dedinger.

No matter. The stern riders seemed indifferent about doubling up, two to a saddle.

Is that why they’re all female? To keep the weight down?

While deft astride their great mounts, the women seemed uneasy with the hilly terrain of gullies and rocky spires. Sara gathered they disliked rushing about strange trails at night. She could hardly blame them.

Not one had a familiar face. That might have surprised Sara a month ago, given Jijo’s small human population. The Slope must be bigger than she thought.

Dwer would tell stories about his travels, scouting for the sages. He claimed he’d been everywhere within a thousand leagues.

Her brother never mentioned horse-riding amazons.

Sara briefly wondered if they came from off-Jijo, since this seemed the year for spaceships. But no. Despite some odd slang, their terse speech was related to Jijoan dialects she knew from her research. And while the riders seemed unfamiliar with this region, they knew to lean away from a migurv tree when the trail passed near its sticky fronds. The Stranger, though warned with gestures not to touch its seed pods, reached for one curiously and learned the hard way.

She glanced at Kurt. The exploser’s gaunt face showed satisfaction with each league they sped southward. The existence of horses was no surprise to him.

We’re told our society is open. But clearly there are secrets known to a few.

Not all explosers shared it. Kurt’s nephew chattered happy amazement while exchanging broad grins with the Stranger …

Sara corrected herself.

With Emerson.…

She peered at the dark man who came plummeting from the sky months ago, dousing his burns in a dismal swamp near Dolo Village. No longer the near corpse she had nursed in her tree house, the star voyager was proving a resourceful adventurer. Though still largely mute, he had passed a milestone a few miduras ago when he began thumping his chest, repeating that word—Emerson—over and over, beaming pride over a feat that undamaged folk took for granted. Uttering one’s own name.

Emerson seemed at home on his mount. Did that mean horses were still used among the god worlds of the Five Galaxies? If so, what purpose might they serve, where miraculous machines did your bidding at a nod and wink?

Sara checked on her chimp assistant, in case the jouncing ride reopened Prity’s bullet wound. Riding with both arms clenched round the waist of a horsewoman, Prity kept her eyes closed the whole time, no doubt immersed in her beloved universe of abstract shapes and forms — a better world than this one of sorrow and messy non-linearity.

That left Dedinger, the rebel leader, riding along with both hands tied. Sara wasted no pity on the scholar-turned-prophet. After years preaching militant orthodoxy, urging his desert followers toward the Path of Redemption, the ex-sage clearly knew patience. Dedinger’s hawklike face bore an expression Sara found unnerving.

Serene calculation.

The tooth-jarring pace swelled when the hilly track met open ground. Soon Ulashtu’s detachment of urrish warriors fell behind, unable to keep up.

No wonder some urs clans resented horses, when humans first settled Jijo. The beasts gave us mobility, the trait most loved by urrish captains.

Two centuries ago, after trouncing the human newcomers in battle, the original Urunthai faction claimed Earthlings’ beloved mounts as war booty, and slaughtered every one.

They figured we’d be no more trouble, left to walk and fight on foot. A mistake that proved fatal when Drake the Elder forged a coalition to hunt the Urunthai, and drowned the cult’s leadership at Soggy Hoof Falls.

Only, it seems horses weren’t extinct, after all. How could a clan of horse-riding folk remain hidden all this time?

And as puzzling—Why emerge now, risking exposure by rushing to meet Kurt?

It must be the crisis of the starships, ending Jijo’s blessed/cursed isolation. What point in keeping secrets, if Judgment Day is at hand?

Sara was exhausted and numb by the time morning pushed through an overcast sky. An expanse of undulating hills stretched ahead to a dark green marsh.

The party dismounted at last by a shaded creek. Hands aimed her toward a blanket, where she collapsed with a shuddering sigh.

Sleep came laced with images of people she had left behind.

Nelo, her aged father, working in his beloved paper mill, unaware that some conspired its ruin.

Melina, her mother, dead several years now, who always seemed an outsider since arriving in Dolo long ago, with a baby son in her arms.

Frail Joshu, Sara’s lover in Biblos, whose touch made her forget even the overhanging Fist of Stone. A comely rogue whose death sent her spinning.

Dwer and Lark, her brothers, setting out to attend festival in the high Rimmer glades … where starships were later seen descending.

Sara’s mind roiled as she tossed and turned.

Last of all, she pictured Blade, whose qheuen hive farmed crayfish behind Dolo Dam. Good old Blade, who saved Sara and Emerson from disaster at the Urunthai camp.

“Seems I’m always late catching up,” her qheuen friend whistled from three leg vents. “But don’t worry, I’ll be along. Too much is happening to miss.”

Blade’s armor-clad dependability had been like a rock to Sara. In her dream, she answered.

“I’ll stall the universe … keep it from doing anything interesting until you show up.”

Imagined or not, the blue qheuen’s calliope laughter warmed Sara, and her troubled slumber fell into gentler rhythms.

The sun was half-high when someone shook Sara back to the world — one of the taciturn female riders, using the archaic word brekkers to announce the morning meal. Sara got up gingerly as waves of achy soreness coursed her body.

She gulped down a bowl of grain porridge, spiced with unfamiliar traeki seasonings, while horsewomen saddled mounts or watched Emerson play his beloved dulcimer, filling the pocket valley with a sprightly melody, suited for travel. Despite her morning irritability, Sara knew the starman was just making the best of the situation. Bursts of song were a way to overcome his handicap of muteness.

Sara found Kurt tying up his bedroll.

“Look,” she told the elderly exploser, “I’m not ungrateful to your friends. I appreciate the rescue and all. But you can’t seriously hope to ride horses all the way to … Mount Guenn.” Her tone made it sound like one of Jijo’s moons.

Kurt’s stony face flickered a rare smile. “Any better suggestions? Sure, you planned taking the Stranger to the High Sages, but that way is blocked by angry Urunthai. And recall, we saw two starships last night, one after the other, headed straight for Festival Glade. The Sages must have their hands and tendrils full by now.”

“How could I forget?” she murmured. Those titans, growling as they crossed the sky, had seared their image in her mind.

“You could hole up in one of the villages we’ll pass soon, but won’t Emerson need a first-rate pharmacist when he runs out of Pzora’s medicine?”

“If we keep heading south we’ll reach the Gentt. From there a riverboat can take us to Ovoom Town.”

“Assuming boats are running … and Ovoom still exists. Even so, should you hide your alien friend, with great events taking place? What if he has a role to play? Some way to help sages and Commons? Might you spoil his one chance of goin’ home?”

Sara saw Kurt’s implication — that she was holding Emerson back, like a child refusing to release some healed forest creature into the wild.

A swarm of sweetbec flies drifted close to the starman, hovering and throbbing to the tempo of his music, a strange melody. Where did he learn it? On Earth? Near some alien star?

“Anyway,” Kurt went on, “if you can stand riding these huge beasts awhile longer, we may reach Mount Guenn sooner than Ovoom.”

“That’s crazy! You must pass through Ovoom if you go by sea. And the other way around is worse — through the funnel canyons and the Vale.”

Kurt’s eyes flickered. “I’m told there’s a … more direct route.”

“Direct? You mean due south? Past the Gentt lies the Plain of Sharp Sand, a desperate crossing under good conditions — which these aren’t. Have you forgotten that’s where Dedinger has followers?”

“No, I haven’t forgotten.”

“Then, assuming we get past the sandmen and flame dunes, there comes the Spectral Flow, making any normal desert seem like a meadow!”

Kurt only shrugged, but clearly he wanted her to accompany him toward a distant simmering mountain, far from where Sara had sworn to take Emerson. Away from Lark and Dwer, and the terrible attraction of those fierce starships. Toward a starkly sacred part of Jijo, renowned for one thing above all — the way the planet renewed itself with flaming lava heat.

Alvin

MAYBE IT WAS THE COMPRESSED ATMOSPHERE WE breathed, or the ceaseless drone of reverberating engines. Or it could have been the perfect darkness outside that fostered an impression of incredible depth, even greater than when our poor little Wuphon’s Dream fell into the maw of this giant metal sea beast. A single beam — immeasurably brighter than the handmade eik light of our old minisub — speared out to split the black, scanning territory beyond my wildest nightmares. Even the vivid imagery of Verne or Pukino or Melville offered no preparation for what was revealed by that roving circle as we cruised along a subsea canyon strewn with all manner of ancient dross. In rapid glimpses we saw so many titanic things, all jumbled together, that—

Here I admit I’m stumped. According to the texts that teach Anglic literature, there are two basic ways for a writer to describe unfamiliar objects. First is to catalog sights and sounds, measurements, proportions, colors — saying this object is made up of clusters of colossal cubes connected by translucent rods, or that one resembles a tremendous sphere caved in along one side, trailing from its crushed innards a glistening streamer, a liquidlike banner that somehow defies the tug of time and tide.

Oh, I can put words together and come up with pretty pictures, but that method ultimately fails because at the time I couldn’t tell how far away anything was! The eye sought clues in vain. Some objects — piled across the muddy panorama — seemed so vast that the huge vessel around us was dwarfed, like a minnow in a herd of behmo serpents. As for colors, even in the spotlight beam, the water drank all shades but deathly blue gray. A good hue for a shroud in this place of icy-cold death.

Another way to describe the unknown is to compare it to things you already recognize … only that method proved worse! Even Huck, who sees likenesses in things I can’t begin to fathom, was reduced to staring toward great heaps of ancient debris with all four eyestalks, at an utter loss.

Oh, some objects leaped at us with sudden familiarity — like when the searchlight swept over rows of blank-eyed windows, breached floors, and sundered walls. Pushed in a tumbled mound, many of the sunken towers lay upside down or even speared through each other. Together they composed a city greater than any I ever heard of, even from readings of olden times. Yet someone once scraped the entire metropolis from its foundations, picked it up, and dumped it here, sending all the buildings tumbling down to be reclaimed the only way such things can be reclaimed — in Mother Jijo’s fiery bowels.

I recalled some books I’d read, dating from Earth’s Era of Resolution, when pre-contact humans were deciding on their own how to grow up and save their homeworld after centuries spent using it as a cesspit. In Alice Hammett’s mystery The Case of a Half-Eaten Clone, the killer escapes a murder charge, only to get ten years for disposing of the evidence at sea! In those days, humans made no distinction between midden trenches and ocean floor in general. Dumping was dumping.

It felt strange to see the enormous dross-scape from two viewpoints. By Galactic law, this was a consecrated part of Jijo’s cycle of preservation — a scene of devout caretaking. But having grown up immersed in human books, I could shift perspectives and see defilement, a place of terrible sin.

The “city” fell behind us and we went back to staring at bizarre shapes, unknown majestic objects, the devices of star-god civilization, beyond understanding by mere cursed mortals. On occasion, my eyes glimpsed flickerings in the blackness outside the roving beam — lightninglike glimmers amid the ruins, as if old forces lingered here and there, setting off sparks like fading memories.

We murmured among ourselves, each of us falling back to what we knew best. Ur-ronn speculated on the nature of materials, what things were made of, or what functions they once served. Huck swore she saw uniting each time the light panned over a string of suspicious shadows. Pincer insisted every other object must be a starship.

The Midden took our conjectures the same way it accepts all else, with a patient, deathless silence.

Some enormous objects had already sunk quite far, showing just their tips above the mire. I thought—This is where Jijo’s ocean plate takes a steep dive under the Slope, dragging crust, mud, and anything else lying about, down to magma pools that feed simmering volcanoes. In time, all these mighty things will become lava, or precious ores to be used by some future race of tenants on this world.

It made me ponder my father’s sailing ship, and the risky trips he took, hauling crates of sacred refuse, sent by each tribe of the Six as partial payment for the sin of our ancestors. In yearly rituals, each village sifts part of the land, clearing it of our own pollution and bits the Buyur left behind.

The Five Galaxies may punish us for living here. Yet we lived by a code, faithful to the Scrolls.

Hoonish folk moots chant the tale of Phu-uphyawuo, a dross captain who one day saw a storm coming, and dumped his load before reaching the deep blue of the Midden. Casks and drums rolled overboard far short of the trench of reclamation, strewing instead across shallow sea bottom, marring a site that was changeless, unrenewing. In punishment, Phu-uphyawuo was bound up and taken to the Plain of Sharp Sand, to spend the rest of his days beneath a hollow dune, drinking enough green dew to live, but not sustain his soul. In time, his heart spine was ground to dust and cast across a desert where no water might wash the grains, or make them clean again.

But this is the Midden, I thought, trying to grasp the wonder. We’re the first to see it.

Except for the phuvnthus. And whatever else lives down here.

I found myself tiring. Despite the back brace and crutches, a weight of agony built steadily. Yet I found it hard to tear away from the icy-cold pane.

Following a searchlight through suboceanic blackness, we plunged as if down a mine shaft, aimed toward a heap of jewels — glittering objects shaped like needles, or squat globes, or glossy pancakes, or knobby cylinders. Soon there loomed a vast shimmering pile, wider than Wuphon Bay, bulkier than Guenn Volcano.

“Now, those are definitely ships!” Pincer announced, gesturing with a claw. Pressed against the glass, we stared at mountainlike piles of tubes, spheres, and cylinders, many of them studded with hornlike protrusions, like the quills of an alarmed rock staller.

“Those must be the probability whatchamacallums starships use for going between galaxies,” Huck diagnosed from her avid reading of Tabernacle-era tales.

“Probability flanges,” Ur-ronn corrected, speaking Galactic Six. In matters of technology, she was far ahead of Huck or me. “I think you may be right.”

Our qheuenish friend chuckled happily as the searchlight zeroed in on one tremendous pile of tapered objects. Soon we all recognized the general outlines from ancient texts — freighters and courier ships, packets and cruisers — all abandoned long ago.

The engine noise dropped a notch, plunging us toward that mass of discarded spacecraft. The smallest of those derelicts outmassed the makeshift phuvnthu craft the way a full-grown traeki might tower over a herd-chick turd.

“I wonder if any of the ancestor vessels are in this pile,” Huck contemplated aloud. “You know, the ones that brought our founders here? The Laddu’kek or the Tabernacle.”

“Unlikely,” Ur-ronn answered, this time in lisping Anglic. “Don’t forget, we’re in the Rift. This is nothing vut an offshoot canyon of the Nidden. Our ancestors likely discarded their shifs in the nain trench, where the greatest share of Vuyur trash went.”

I blinked at that thought. This, an offshoot? A minor side area of the Midden?

Of course she was right! But it presented a boggling image. What staggering amounts of stuff must have been dumped in the main trench, over the ages! Enough to tax even the recycling power of Jijo’s grinding plates. No wonder the Noble Galactics set worlds aside for ten million years or more. It must take that long for a planet to digest each meal of sapient-made things, melting them back into the raw stuff of nature.

I thought of my father’s dross ship, driven by creaking masts, its hold filled with crates of whatever we exiles can’t recycle. After two thousand years, all the offal we sooners sent to the Midden would not even show against this single mound of discarded starships.

How rich the Buyur and their fellow gods must have been to cast off so much wealth! Some of the abandoned vessels looked immense enough to swallow every house, khuta, or hovel built by the Six Races. We glimpsed dark portals, turrets, and a hundred other details, growing painfully aware of one fact — those shadowy behemoths had been sent down here to rest in peace. Their sleep was never meant to be invaded by the likes of us.

Our plummet toward the reef of dead ships grew alarming. Did any of the others feel we were heading in awful fast?

“Maybe this is their home,” Pincer speculated as we plunged toward one twisted, oval ruin, half the size of Wuphon Port.

“Maybe the phuvnthus are made of, like, parts of old machines that got dumped here,” Huck mused. “And they kind of put themselves together from whatever’s lying around? Like this boat we’re on is made of all sorts of junk—”

“Ferhafs they were servants of the Vuyur—” Ur-ronn interrupted. “Or a race that lived here even vefore. Or a strain of nutants, like in that story vy—”

I cut in. “Have any of you considered the simplest idea? That maybe they’re just like us?”

When my friends turned to look at me, I shrugged, human style.

“Maybe the phuvnthus are sooners, too. Ever stop to think of that?”

Their blank faces answered me. I might as well have suggested that our hosts were noor beasts, for all the sense my idea made.

Well, I never claimed to be quick-witted, especially when racked with agony.

We lacked any sense of perspective, no way to tell how close we were, or how fast we were going. Huck and Pincer murmured nervously as our vessel plunged toward the mountain-of-ships at a rapid clip, engines running hard in reverse.

I think we all jumped a bit when a huge slab of corroded metal moved aside, just duras before we might have collided. Our vessel slid into a gaping hole in the mountain of dross, cruising along a corridor composed of spaceship hulls, piercing a fantastic pile of interstellar junk.

Asx

READ THE NEWLY CONGEALED WAX, MY RINGS.

See how folk of the Six Races dispersed, tearing down festival pavilions and bearing away the injured, fleeing before the Rothen starship’s expected arrival.

Our senior sage, Vubben of the g’Kek, recited from the Scroll of Portents a passage warning against disunity. Truly, the Six Races must strive harder than ever to look past our differences of shape and shell. Of flesh, hide, and torg.

“Go home,” we sages told the tribes. “See to your lattice screens. Your blur-cloth webs. Live near the ground in Jijo’s sheltered places. Be ready to fight if you can. To die if you must.”

The zealots, who originally provoked this crisis, suggested the Rothen starship might have means to track Ro-kenn and his lackeys, perhaps by sniffing our prisoners’ brain waves or body implants. “For safety, let’s sift their bones into lava pools!”

An opposing faction called Friends of the Rothen demanded Ro-kenn’s release and obeisance to his godlike will. These were not only humans, but some qheuens, g’Keks, hoons, and even a few urs, grateful for cures or treatments received in the aliens’ clinic. Some think redemption can be won in this lifetime, without first treading the long road blazed by glavers.

Finally, others see this chaos as a chance to settle old grudges. Rumors tell of anarchy elsewhere on the Slope. Of many fine things toppled or burned.

Such diversity! The same freedom that fosters a vivid people also makes it hard to maintain a united front. Would things be better if we had disciplined order, like the feudal state sought by Gray Queens of old?

It is too late for regrets. Time remains only for improvisation—an art not well approved in the Five Galaxies, we are told.

Among poor savages, it may be our only hope.

Yes, my rings. We can now remember all of that.

Stroke this wax, and watch the caravans depart toward plains, forests, and sea. Our hostages are spirited off to sites where even a starship’s piercing scrutiny might not find them. The sun flees and stars bridge the vast territory called the Universe. A realm denied us, that our foes roam at will.

Some remain behind, awaiting the ship.

We voted, did we not? We rings who make up Asx? We volunteered to linger. Our cojoined voice would speak to angry aliens for the Commons. Resting our basal torus on hard stone, we passed the time listening to complex patterns from the Holy Egg, vibrating our fatty core with strange shimmering motifs.

Alas, my rings, none of these reclaimed memories explains our current state, that something terrible must have happened?

Here, what of this newly congealed waxy trail?

Can you perceive in it the glimmering outlines of a great vessel of space? Roaring from the same part of the sky lately abandoned by the sun?

Or is it the sun, come back again to hover angrily above the valley floor?

The great ship scans our valley with scrutinizing rays, seeking signs of those they left behind.

Yes, my rings. Follow this waxy memory.

Are we about to rediscover the true cause of terror?

Lark

SUMMER PRESSED HEAVILY ACROSS THE RIMMER Range, consuming the unshaded edges of glaciers far older than six exile races. At intervals, a crackling static charge would blur the alpine slopes as countless grass stems wafted skyward, reaching like desperate tendrils. Intense sunshine was punctuated by bursts of curtain rain — water draperies that undulated uphill, drenching the slopes with continuous liquid sheets, climbing until the mountaintops wore rainbow crowns, studded with flashes of compressed lightning.

Compact reverberations rolled down from the heights, all the way to the shore of a poison lake, where fungus swarmed over a forty-hectare thicket of crumbling vines. Once a mighty outpost of Galactic culture, the place was now a jumble of stone slabs, rubbed featureless by abrading ages. The pocket valley sweltered with acrid aromas, as caustic nectars steamed from the lake, or dripped from countless eroding pores.

The newest sage of the Commons of Jijo plucked yellow moss from a decaying cable, one of a myriad of strands that once made up the body of a half-million-year-old creature, the mulc spider responsible for demolishing this ancient Buyur site, gradually returning it to nature. Lark had last seen this place in late winter — searching alone through snow flurries for the footprints of Dwer and Rety, refugees from this same spider’s death fury. Things had changed here since that frantic deliverance. Large swathes of mulc cable were simply gone, harvested in some recent effort that no one had bothered explaining when Lark was assigned here. Much of what remained was coated with this clinging moss.

“Spirolegita cariola.” He muttered the species name, rubbing a sample between two fingers. It was a twisted, deviant cariola variety. Mutation seemed a specialty of this weird, astringent site.

I wonder what the place will do to me — to all of us — if we stay here long.

He had not asked for this chore. To be a jailor. Just wearing the title made him feel less clean.

A chain of nonsense syllables made him turn back toward a blur-cloth canopy, spanning the space between slablike boulders.

“It’s a clensionating sievelator for refindulating excess torg.…”

The voice came from deep shade within — a strong feminine alto, though somewhat listless now, tinged with resignation. Soft clinking sounds followed as one object was tossed onto a pile and another picked up for examination.

“At a guess, I’d say this was once a glannis truncator, probably used in rituals of a chihanic sect … that is, unless it’s just another Buyur joke-novelty device.”

Lark shaded his eyes to regard Ling, the young sky-born scientist and servant of star-god Rothen, in whose employ he had worked as a “native guide” for many weeks … until the Battle of the Glade reversed their standing in a matter of heartbeats. Since that unexpected victory, the High Sages had assigned her care and custody to him, a duty he never asked for, even if it meant exalted promotion.

Now I’m quite a high-ranking witch doctor among savages, he thought with some tartness. Lord High Keeper of Alien Prisoners.

And maybe executioner. His mind shied from that possibility. Much more likely, Ling would be traded to her Danik-Rothen comrades in some deal worked out by the sages. Or else she might be rescued at any moment by hordes of unstoppable robots, overpowering Lark’s small detachment of sword-bearing escorts like a pack of santi bears brushing aside the helpless buzzing defenders of a zil-honey tree.

Either way, she’ll go free. Ling may live another three hundred years on her homeworld, back in the Five Galaxies, telling embroidered tales about her adventure among the feral barbarians of a shabby, illicit colony. Meanwhile, the best we fallen ones can hope for is bare survival. To keep scratching a living from poor tired Jijo, calling it lucky if some of the Six eventually join glavers down the Path of Redemption. The trail to blissful oblivion.

Lark would rather end it all in some noble and heroic way. Let Jijo’s Six go down defending this fragile world, so she might go back to her interrupted rest.

That was his particular heresy, of course. Orthodox belief held that the Six Races were sinners, but they might mitigate their offense by living at peace on Jijo. But Lark saw that as hypocrisy. The settlers should end their crime, gently and voluntarily, as soon as possible.

He had made no secret of his radicalism … which made it all the more confusing that the High Sages now trusted him with substantial authority.

The alien woman no longer wore the shimmering garb of her Danik star clan — the secretive band of humans who worshiped Rothen lords. Instead she was outfitted in an ill-fitting blouse and kilt of Jijoan homespun. Still, Lark found it hard to look away from her angular beauty. It was said that sky humans could buy a new face with hardly a thought. Ling claimed not to care about such things, but no woman on the Slope could match her.

Under the wary gaze of two militia corporals, Ling sat cross-legged, examining relics left behind by the dead mulc spider — strange metallic shapes embedded in semi-transparent gold cocoons, like archaic insects trapped in amber. Remnants of the Buyur, this world’s last legal tenants, who departed half a million years ago when Jijo went fallow. A throng of egglike preservation beads lay scattered round the ashen lakeshore. Instead of dissolving all signs of past habitation, the local mulc spider had apparently chosen relics to seal away. Collecting them, if Lark believed the incredible story told by his half brother, Dwer.

The luminous coatings made him nervous. The same substance, secreted from the spider’s porous conduits, had nearly smothered Dwer and Rety, the wild sooner girl, the same night two alien robots quarreled, igniting a living morass of corrosive vines, ending the spiders long, mad life. The gold stuff felt queer to touch, as if a strange, slow liquid sloshed under sheaths of solid crystal.

“Toporgic,” Ling had called the slick material during one of her civil moments. “It’s very rare, but I hear stories. It’s said to be a pseudo-matter substrate made of organically folded time.”

Whatever that meant. It sounded like the sort of thing Sara might say, trying to explain her beloved world of mathematics. As a biologist, he found it bizarre for a living thing to send “folded time” oozing from its far-flung tendrils, as the mulc spider apparently had done.

Whenever Ling finished examining a relic, she bent over a sheaf of Lark’s best paper to make careful notes, concentrating as if each childlike block letter were a work of art. As if she never held a pencil before, but had vowed to master the new skill. As a galactic voyager, she used to handle floods of information, manipulating multidimensional displays, sieving data on this world’s complex ecosystem, searching on behalf of her Rothen masters for some biotreasure worth stealing. Toiling over handwritten notes must seem like shifting from starship speeds to a traeki’s wooden scooter.

It’s a steep fall — one moment a demigoddess, the next a hostage of uncouth sooners.

All this diligent note taking must help take her mind off recent events — that traumatic day, just two leagues below the nest of the Holy Egg, when her home base exploded and Jijo’s masses violently rebelled. But Lark sensed something more than deliberate distraction. In scribing words on paper, Ling drew the same focused satisfaction he had seen her take from performing any simple act well. Despite his persistent seething anger, Lark found this worthy of respect.

There were folk legends about mulc spiders. Some were said to acquire odd obsessions during their stagnant eons spent chewing metal and stone monuments of the past. Lark once dismissed such fables as superstition, but Dwer had proved right about this one. Evidence for the mulc beast’s collecting fetish lay in countless capsules studding the charred thicket, the biggest hoard of Galactic junk anywhere on the Slope. It made the noxious lakeshore an ideal site to conceal a captured alien, in case the returning starship had instruments sifting Jijo for missing crew mates. Though Ling had been thoroughly searched, and all possessions seized, she might carry in her body some detectable trace element — acquired growing up on a far Galactic world. If so, all the Buyur stuff lying around here might mask her presence.

There were other ideas.

Ship sensors may not penetrate far underground, one human techie proposed.

Or else, suggested an urrish smith, a nearby lava flow may foil alien eyes.

The other hostages — Ro-kenn and Rann — had been taken to such places, in hopes of holding on to at least one prisoner. With the lives of every child and grub of the Six at stake, anything seemed worth trying. The job Lark had been given was important. Yet he chafed, wishing for more to do than waiting for the world to end. Rumors told that others were preparing to fight the star criminals. Lark knew little about weapons — his expertise was the natural flux of living species. Still, he envied them.

A burbling, wheezing sound called him rushing to the far end of the tent, where his friend Uthen squatted like an ash-colored chitin mound. Lark took up a makeshift aspirator he had fashioned out of boo stems, a cleft pig’s bladder, and congealed mulc sap. He pushed the nozzle into one of the big qheuen’s leg apertures and pumped away, siphoning phlegmy fluid that threatened Uthen’s ventilation tubes. He repeated the process with all five legs, till his partner and fellow biologist breathed easier. The qheuen’s central cupola lifted and Uthen’s seeing stripe brightened.

“Th-thank you, L–Lark-ark … I am — I am sorry to be so — be so — to be a burden-en-en. …”

Emerging uncoordinated, the separate leg voices sounded like five miniature qheuens, getting in each other’s way. Or like a traeki whose carelessly stacked oration rings all had minds of their own. Uthen’s fevered weakness filled Lark’s chest with a burning ache. A choking throat made it hard to respond with cheerful-sounding lies.

“You just rest up, claw brother. Soon we’ll be back in the field … digging fossils and inventing more theories to turn your mothers blue with embarrassment.”

That brought a faint, gurgling laugh. “S-speaking-king of heresies … it looks as if you and Haru … Haru … Harullen-ullen, will be getting your wish.”

Mention of Lark’s other gray qheuen friend made him wince with doubled grief. Uthen didn’t know about his cousin’s fate, and Lark wasn’t about to tell him.

“How do you mean?”

“It seems-eems the raiders-raiders found a way to rid Jijo of at least one of the S-S-Six P-p-pests.…”

“Don’t say that,” Lark urged. But Uthen voiced a common thought. His sickness baffled the g’Kek medic resting in the next shelter, all four eyes curled in exhaustion. The malady frightened the militia guards. All knew that Uthen had been with Lark in the ruined Danik station, poking among forbidden things.

“I felt sorrow when-hen zealots-lots blew up the alien base.” Uthen’s carapace shuddered as he fought for breath. “Even when the Rothen tried to misuse our Holy Egg … sending false dreams as wedges-edges … to drive the Six Races apart-part.… Even that did not justify the … inhospitable-able murder of strangers.”

Lark wiped an eye. “You’re more charitable than most.”

“Let me finish-ish. I was-as going to say that now we know what the outsiders were up to all along-long … something worse than dreams. Designing-ing bugs to bring us down-own-own.”

So, Uthen must have overheard the rumors — or else worked it out for himself.

Biological warfare. Genocide.

“Like in War of the Worlds” It was one of Uthen’s favorite old novels. “Only with the roles reversed.”

Lark’s comparison made the gray qheuen laugh — a raspy, uneven whistle.

“I … always-ways did identify … with those … with those poor Martians-ans-ans.…”

The ribbon eye went foggy, losing the light of consciousness as the cupola sank. Lark checked his friend’s breathing, and found it no worse. Uthen was simply tired.

So strong, he thought, stroking the rigid shell.

We picture grays as toughest of the tough. But chitin won’t slow a laser ray.

Harullen found that out. Death came to Uthen’s cousin during the brief Battle of the Glade, when the massed militia of Six Races barely overcame Ro-kenn’s robot assassins. Only the advantage of surprise had carried that day. The aliens never realized that savages might have books showing how to make rifled firearms — crude, but potent at short range.

But victory came late for Harullen. Too dedicated or obstinate to flee, the heretic leader spent his last frenzied moments whistling ornate pleas for calm and reason, crying in five directions at once, beseeching everyone to lay down their arms and talk things over — until Harullen’s massive, crablike body was cleaved in uneven parts by a killer drone, just before the machine was itself blown from the sky.

There will be mourning among the gray matrons of Tarek Town, Lark thought, resting both arms across Uthen’s broad shell, laying his head on the mottled surface, listening to the strained labor of his friend’s phlegmy breathing, wishing with all his heart that there was more he could do.

Irony was but one of many bitter tastes in his mouth.

I always figured, if the end did come, that qheuens would be the last to go.

Emerson

JIJO’S COUNTRYSIDE FLOWS RAPIDLY PAST THEM now, as if the mysterious horsewomen fear any delay might turn faint hope to dust.

Lacking speech, Emerson has no idea where they are riding in such a hurry, or why.

Sara turns in her saddle now and then, to give an encouraging smile. But rewq-painted colors of misgiving surround her face — a nimbus of emotion that he can read the way he used to find meaning in letters on a data display. Perhaps he should find her qualms unnerving, since he depends on her guidance in this strange, perilous world. Yet Emerson cannot bring himself to worry. There are just too many other things to think about.

Humidity closes in as their caravan veers toward a winding river valley. Dank aromas stir memories of the swamp where he first floundered after the crash, a shattered cripple, drenched in agony. But he does not quail. Emerson welcomes any sensation that might trigger random recall — a sound, a chance smell, or else a sight around the next bend.

Some rediscoveries already float across a gulf of time and loss, as if he has missed them for quite a while. Recovered names connect to faces, and even brief snatches of isolated events.

Tom Orley … so strong and clever. Always a sure eye for trouble. He brought some back to the ship, one day. Trouble enough for Five Galaxies.

Hikahi … sweetest dolphin. Kindest friend. Dashing off to rescue her lover and captain … never to be seen again.

Toshio … a boy’s ready laughter. A young man’s steady heart. Where is he now?

Creideiki … captain. Wise dolphin leader. A cripple like himself.

Briefly, Emerson wonders at the similarity between Creideiki’s injury and his own.… But the thought provokes a searing bolt of pain so fierce that the fleeting thought whirls away and is lost.

Tom … Hikahi … Toshio … He repeats the names, each of them once attached to friends he has not seen for … well, a very long time.

Other memories, more recent, seem harder to reach, more agonizing to access.

Suessi … Tsh’t … Gillian …

He mouths each sound repeatedly, despite the tooth-jarring ride and difficulty of coordinating tongue and lips. He does it to keep in practice — or else how will he ever recover the old handiness with language, the skill to roll out words as he used to, back when he was known as such a clever fellow … before horrid holes appeared in both his head and memory.

Some names come easy, since he learned them after waking on Jijo, delirious in a treetop hut.

— Prity, the little chimp who teaches him by example. Though mute, she shows flair for both math and sardonic hand speech.

— Jomah and Kurt … sounds linked to younger and older versions of the same narrow face. Apprentice and master at a unique art, meant to erase all the dams, towns, and houses that unlawful settlers had built on a proscribed world. Emerson recalls Biblos, an archive of paper books, where Kurt showed his nephew well-placed explosive charges that might bring the cave down, smashing the library to dust. If the order ever came.

— The captive fanatic, Dedinger, rides behind the explosers, deeply tanned with craggy features. Leader of human rebels with beliefs Emerson can’t grasp, except they preach no love of visitors from the sky. While the party hurries on, Dedinger’s gray eyes rove, calculating his next move.

Some names and a few places — these utterances have meaning now. It is progress, but Emerson is no fool. He figures he must have known hundreds of words before he fell, broken, to this world. Now and again he makes out snatches of half meaning from the “wah-wah” gabble as his companions address each other. Snippets that tantalize, without satisfying.

Sometimes the torrent grows tiresome, and he wonders — might people be less inclined to fight if they talked less? If they spent more time watching and listening?

Fortunately, words aren’t his sole project. There is the haunting familiarity of music, and during rest stops he plays math games with Prity and Sara, drawing shapes in the sand. They are his friends and he takes joy from their laughter.

He has one more window to the world.

As often as he can stand it, Emerson slips the rewq over his eyes … a masklike film that transforms the world into splashes of slanted color. In all his prior travels he never encountered such a creature — a species used by all six races to grasp each other’s moods. If left on too long, it gives him headaches. Still he finds fascinating the auras surrounding Sara, Dedinger, and others. Sometimes it seems the colors carry more than just emotion … though he cannot pin it down. Not yet.

One truth Emerson recalls. Advice drawn from the murky well of his past, putting him on guard.

Life can be full of illusions.