Brin, David - Uplift 4 - Brightness Reef

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BRIGHTNESS REEF
Book One of a New Uplift Trilogy
David Brin
BANTAM BOOKS
New York Toronto London
Sydney Auckland
to Herbert H. Brin
Poet/ journalist/ and
Melons champion of justice
BRIGHTNESS REEF
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition / October 1995
Bantam mass market edition / November 1996
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed "s" are trademarks of Bantam Books,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1995 by David Brin.
Cover illustration copyright © 1995 by Michael Whelan.
Cover design by Jamie S. Warren-Youll.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-17601.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book
is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher
and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this
"stripped book."
ISBN 0-553-57330-6 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a
rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other
countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York
10036.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
OPM 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Asx
i must ask your permission. You, my rings, my diverse selves.
Vote now! Shall i speak for all of us to the outer world? Shall we join, once
more, to become Asx?
That is the name used by humans, qheuens, and other beings, when they address
this stack of circles. By that name, this coalition of plump, traeki rings was
elected a sage of the Commons, respected and revered, sitting in judgment on
members of all six exile races.
By that name--Asx--we are called upon to tell tales. Is it agreed?
Then Asx now bears witness . . . to events we endured, and those relayed by
others. "I" will tell it, as if this stack were mad enough to face the world
with but a single mind.
Asx brews this tale. Stroke its waxy trails. Feel the story-scent swirl.
There is no better one i have to tell.
Prelude
PAIN IS THE STITCHING HOLDING HIM together ... or else, like a chewed-up doll
or a broken toy, he would have unraveled by now, lain his splintered joins
amid the mucky reeds, and vanished into time.
Mud covers him from head to toe, turning pale where sunlight dries a jigsaw of
crumbly plates, lighter than his dusky skin. These dress his nakedness more
loyally than the charred garments that fell away like soot after his panicky
escape from fire. The coating slakes his scalding agony, so the muted torment
grows almost companionable, like a garrulous rider that his body hauls through
an endless, sucking marsh.
A kind of music seems to surround him, a troubling ballad of scrapes and
burns. An opus of trauma and shock.
Striking a woeful cadenza is the hole in the side of his head.
Just once, he put a hand to the gaping wound. Fingertips, expecting, to be
stopped by skin and bone, kept going horribly inward, until some faraway
instinct made him shudder and withdraw. It was too much to fathom, a loss he
could not comprehend.
Loss of ability to comprehend ...
The mud slurps greedily, dragging at every footstep. He has to bend and
clamber to get through another blockade of crisscrossing branches, webbed with
red or yellow throbbing veins. Caught amid them are bits of glassy brick or
pitted metal, stained by age and acid juices. He avoids these spots, recalling
dimly that once he had known good reasons to keep away.
Once, he had known lots of things.
Under the oily water, a hidden vine snags his foot, tripping him into the
mire. Floundering, he barely manages to keep his head up, coughing and
gagging. His body quivers as he struggles back to his feet, then starts
slogging forward again, completely drained.
Another fall could mean the end.
While his legs move on by obstinate habit, the accompanying pain recites a
many-part fugue, raw and grating, cruel without words. The sole sense that
seems intact, after the abuse of plummet, crash, and fire, is smell. He has no
direction or goal, but the combined stench of boiling fuel and his own singed
flesh help drive him on, shambling, stooping, clambering and stumbling forward
until the thorn-brake finally thins.
Suddenly, the vines are gone. Instead a swamp sprawls ahead-dotted by strange
trees with arching, spiral roots. Dismay clouds his mind as he notes-the water
is growing deeper. Soon the endless morass will reach to his armpits, then
higher.
Soon he will die.
Even the pain seems to agree. It eases, as if sensing the futility of
haranguing a dead man. He straightens from a buckled crouch for the first time
since tumbling from the wreckage, writhing and on fire. Shuffling on the
slippery muck, he turns a slow circle . . .
. . . and suddenly confronts a pair of eyes, watching him from the branches of
the nearest tree. Eyes set above a stubby jaw with needle teeth. Like a tiny
dolphin, he thinks-a furry dolphin, with short, wiry legs . . . and forward-
looking eyes . . . and ears. . . .
Well, perhaps a dolphin was a bad comparison. He isn't thinking at his best,
right now. Still, surprise jars loose an association. Down some remnant
pathway spills a relic that becomes almost a word.
"Ty ... Ty ..." He tries swallowing. "Ty-Ty- t-t-t- "
The creature tips its head to regard him with interest, edging closer on the
branch as he stumbles toward it, arms outstretched-
Abruptly, its concentration breaks. The beast looks up toward a sound.
A liquid splash . . . followed by another, then more, repeating in a
purposeful tempo, drawing rhythmically nearer. Swish and splash, swish and
splash. The sleek-furred creature squints past him, then grunts a small
disappointed sigh. In a blur, it whirls and vanishes into the queer-shaped
leaves.
He lifts a hand, urging it to stay. But he cannot find the words. No utterance
to proclaim his grief as frail hope crashes into a chasm of abandonment. Once
more, he sobs a forlorn groan.
"Ty . . . ! Ty . . . !"
The splashing draws closer. And now another noise intervenes--a low rumble of
aspirated air.
The rumble is answered by a flurry of alternating clicks and whistled murmurs.
He recognizes the din of speech, the clamor of sapient beings, without
grasping the words. Numb with pain and resignation, he turns--and blinks
uncomprehendingly at a boat, emerging from the grove of swamp trees.
Boat. The word--one of the first he ever knew--comes to mind slickly, easily,
the way countless other words used to do.
A boat. Constructed of many long narrow tubes, cleverly curved and joined.
Propelling it are figures working in unison with poles and oars. Figures he
knows. He has seen their like before. But never so close together.
Never cooperating.
One shape is a cone of stacked rings or toruses, diminishing with height,
girdled by a fringe of lithe tentacles that grasp a long pole, using it to
push tree roots away from the hull. Nearby, a pair of broad-shouldered, green-
cloaked bipeds paddle the water with great scooplike oars, their long scaly
arms gleaming pale in the slanting sunlight. The fourth shape consists of an
armored blue hump of a torso, leather-plated, culminating in a squat dome,
rimmed by a glistening ribbon eye. Five powerful legs aim outward from the
center, as if the creature might at any moment try to run in all directions at
once.
He knows these profiles. Knows and fears them. But true despair floods his
heart only when he spies a final figure, standing at the stern, holding the
boat's tiller, scanning the thicket of vines and corroded stone.
It is a smaller bipedal form, slender, clothed in crude, woven fabric. A
familiar outline, all too similar to his own. A stranger, but one sharing his
own peculiar heritage, beginning near a certain salty sea, many aeons and
galaxies distant from this shoal in space.
It is the last shape he ever wanted to see in such a forlorn place, so far
from home.
Resignation fills him as the armored pentapod raises a clawed leg to point his
way with a shout. Others rush forward to gape, and he stares back, for it is a
sight to behold-all these faces and forms, jabbering to one another in shared
astonishment at the spectacle of him- then rushing about, striving together as
a team, paddling toward him with rescue their clear intent.
He lifts his arms, as if in welcome. Then, on command, both knees fold and
turbid water rushes to embrace him.
Even without words, irony flows during those seconds, as he gives up the
struggle for life. He has come a long way and been through much. Only a short
time ago, flame had seemed his final destiny, his doom.
Somehow, this seems a more fitting way to go--by drowning.
I. THE BOOK OF THE SEA
You who chose this way of life --
to live and breed and die in secret on this wounded world,
cowering from star-lanes you once roamed,
hiding with other exiles in a place forbidden by law--
what justice have you any right to claim?
The universe is hard.
Its laws are unforgiving.
Even the successful and glorious are punished
by the grinding executioner called Time.
All the worse for you who are accursed,
frightened of the sky.
And yet there are paths that climb,
even out of despair's sorrow.
Hide, children of exile!
Cower from the stars!
But watch, heed and listen--
for the coming of a path.
--The Scroll of Exile
Alvin's Tale
ON THE DAY I GREW UP ENOUGH FOR MY HAIR TO start turning white, my parents
summoned all the members of our thronging cluster to the family khuta, for a
ceremony giving me my proper name--Hph-wayuo.
I guess it's all right, for a hoonish tag. It rolls out from my throat sac
easy enough, even if I get embarrassed hearing it sometimes. The handle's
supposed to have been in the lineage ever since our sneakship brought the
first hoon to Jijo.
The sneakship was utterly gloss! Our ancestors may have been sinners, in
coming to breed on this taboo planet, but they flew a mighty star-cruiser,
dodging Institute patrols and dangerous Zang and Izmunuti's carbon storms to
get here. Sinners or not, they must have been awfully brave and skilled to do
all that.
I've read everything I can find about those days, even though it happened
hundreds of years before there was paper on Jijo, so all we really have to go
on are a few legends about those hoon pioneers, who dropped from the sky to
find g'Keks, glavers, and traeki already hiding here on the Slope. Stories
that tell how those first hoon sank their sneakship in the deep Midden, so it
couldn't be traced, then settled down to build crude wooden rafts, the first
to sail Jijo's rivers and seas since the Great Buyur went away.
Since it has to do with the sneakship, I guess my given name can't be too bad.
Still, I really like to be called Alvin.
Our teacher, Mister Heinz, wants us upper graders to start journals, though
some parents complain paper costs too much here at the southern end of the
Slope. I don't care. I'm going to write about the adventures me and my friends
have, both helping and heckling the good-natured sailors in the harbor, or
exploring twisty lava tubes up near Guenn Volcano, or scouting in our little
boat all the way to the long, hatchet-shadow of Terminus Rock.
Maybe someday I'll turn these notes into a book!
And why not? My Anglic is real good. Even grumpy old Heinz says I'm a whiz at
languages, memorizing the town copy of Roget's by the time I was ten. Anyway,
now that Joe Dolenz, the printer, has come set up shop in Wuphon, why should
we have to count on the traveling librarian's caravan for new things to read?
Maybe Dolenz would even let me set the type myself! That is, if I get around
to it before my fingers grow too big to fit around those little backward
letters.
Mu-phauwq, my mother, calls it a great idea, though I can tell she's partly
humoring a childish obsession, and I wish she wouldn't patronize me that way.
My dad, Yowg-wayuo, acts all grumpy, puffing his throat sac and telling me not
to be such a human-mimicker. But I'm sure he likes the idea, deep down.
Doesn't he keep taking borrowed books on his long voyages to the Midden, even
though you're not supposed to, because what if the ship sank and maybe the
last ancient copy of Moby Dick went down with the crew? Wouldn't that be a
real disaster?
Anyway, didn't he used to read to me almost from the day I was born? Booming
all the great Earthling adventure tales like Treasure Island, Sindbad, and
Ultraviolet Mars? So who's he to call me a humicker!
Nowadays, Dad says I should read the new hoon writers, those trying to go past
imitating old-time Earthers, coming up with literature by and for our own
kind.
I guess maybe there should be more books in languages other than Anglic. But
Galactic Two and Galactic Six seem so darn stiff for storytelling. Anyhow,
I've tried some of those writers. Honestly. And I've got to say that not one
of them can hold a peg to Mark Twain.
Naturally, Huck agrees with me about that!
Huck is my best friend. She picked that name even though I kept telling her
it's not a right one for a girl. She just twists one eyestalk around another
and says she doesn't care, and if I call her "Becky" one more time, she'll
catch my leg-fur in her spokes and spin till I scream.
I guess it doesn't matter, since g'Keks get to change sex after their training
wheels fall off, and if she wants to stay female, that's her business. As an
orphan, Huck's lived with the family next door ever since the Big North-side
Avalanche wiped out the weaver clan that used to squat in Buyur ruins up that
way. You'd expect her to be a bit strange after living through that and then
being raised by hoons. Anyway, she's a great friend and a pretty good sailor,
even if she is a g'Kek, and a girl, and doesn't have legs to speak of.
Most times, Pincer-Tip also comes on our adventures, specially when we're down
by the shore. He didn't need a nickname from some story, since all red qheuens
get one the minute they set five claws outside the brooding pen. Pincer's no
big reader like Huck and me, mostly because few books can stand the salt and
dampness where his clan lives. They're poor, living off wrigglers they find in
the mudflats south of town. Dad says the qheuens with red shells used to be
servants to the grays and blues, before their sneakship brought all three to
hide on Jijo. Even after that, the grays kept bossing the others for a while,
so Dad says the reds aren't used to thinking for themselves.
Maybe so, but whenever Pincer-Tip comes along, he's usually the one
chattering-with all leg-mouths at once-about sea serpents, or lost Buyur
treasure, or other things he swears he's seen ... or else he heard of somebody
who knows someone else who might've seen something, just over the horizon.
When we get into trouble, it's often on account of something he thought up
inside that hard dome where he keeps his brain. Sometimes I wish I had an
imagination a dozenth as vivid as his.
I should include Ur-ronn in the list, since she comes along sometimes. Ur-
ronn's almost as much of a book maniac as Huck and me. Still, she's urrish,
and there's a limit to how much of a humicker any urs can be, before planting
four feet and saying whoa.
They don't take to nicknames, for instance.
Once, when we were reading a mess of old Greek myths, Huck tried calling Ur-
ronn "Centaur." I guess you could say an urs sort of looks like one of those
fabled creatures-if you'd just been conked on the head by a brick and can't
see or think too well from the pain. But Ur-ronn disliked the comparison and
showed it by swinging her long neck like a whip, nearly taking off one of
Huck's eyestalks with a snap of her three-way mouth.
Huck only said "Centaur" just that once.
Ur-ronn is a niece of Uriel, who runs a forge next to fiery lava pools, high
up on Mount Guenn. She won a scholarship to 'prentice as a smith instead of
staying with the herds and caravans on the grassy plain. Too bad her aunt
keeps Ur-ronn busy most of the time and won't ever let her go off in the boat
with us, on account of urs can't swim.
Ur-ronn used to read a lot, back in that prairie school. Books we never heard
of in this hick corner of the Slope. She tells us the stories she can
recollect, like all about Crazy Horse and Genghis Khan, and urrish hero-
warriors from those big battles they had with the humans, after Earthers came
to Jijo but before the Commons got patched together and they started the Great
Peace.
It'd be uttergloss if our gang could be a complete Six, like when Drake and
Ur-jushen and their comrades went on the Big Quest and were the very first to
set eyes on the Holy Egg. But the only traeki in town is the pharmacist, and
that er is too old to make a new stack of rings we could play with. As for
humans, their nearest village is several days from here. So I guess we're
stuck being just a foursome.
Too bad. Humans are gloss. They brought books to Jijo and speak Anglic better
than anybody, except me and maybe Huck. Also, a human kid's shaped kind of
like a small hoon, so he could go nearly all the same places I can with my two
long legs. Ur-ronn may be able to run fast, but she can't go into water, and
Pincer can't wander too far from it, and poor Huck has to stay where the
ground is level enough for her wheels.
None of them can climb a tree.
Still, they're my pals. Anyway, there are things they can do that I can't, so
I guess it evens out.
It was Huck who said we ought to plan a really burnish adventure for the
summer, since it would likely be our last.
School was out. Mister Heinz was on his yearly trip to the great archive at
Biblos, then to Gathering Festival. As usual, he took along some older hoon
students, including Huck's foster sister, Aph-awn. We envied their long
voyage-first by sea, then riverboat to Ur-Tanj town, and finally by donkey-
caravan all the way up to that mountain valley where they'd attend games and
dramas, visit the Egg, and watch the sages meet in judgment over all six of
Jijo's exile races.
Next year we may get our turn to go, but I don't mind saying the prospect of
waiting another seventeen months wasn't welcome. What if we didn't have a
single thing to do all summer except get caught loafing by our parents, then
sent to help pack dross ships, unload fishing boats, and perform a hundred
other mindless chores? Even more depressing, there wouldn't be any new books
till Mister Heinz got back-that is if he didn't lose the list we gave him!
(One time he returned all excited with a big stack of old Earth poetry but not
a single novel by Conrad, Coope, or Coontz. Worse, some grown-ups even claimed
to like the stuff!)
Anyway, it was Huck who first suggested heading over the Line, and I'm still
not sure whether that's giving a friend due credit or passing on blame.
"I know where there's something to read," she said one day, when summer was
just getting its early start here in the south.
Yowg-wayuo had already caught us, vegetating under the pier, skipping rocks at
dome-bobbers and bored as noors in a cage. Sure enough, he right-prompt sent
us up the long access ramp to repair the village camouflage trellis, a job I
always hate and I'll be glad when I'm too big to be drafted into doing it
anymore. We hoon aren't as fond of heights as those tree-hugging humans and
their chimp pets, so let me tell you it can be dizzifying having to crawl atop
the wooden lattice arching over all the houses and shops of Wuphon, tending a
carpet of greenery that's supposed to hide our town against being seen from
space.
I have doubts it'd really work, if The Day ever comes that everyone frets
about. When sky-gods come to judge us, what good will a canopy of leaves do?
Will it spare us punishment?
But I don't want to be called a heretic. Anyway, this ain't the place to talk
about that.
So there we were, high over Wuphon, all exposed with the bare sun glaring
down, and Huck blurts her remark like a sudden burst of hollow hail.
"I know where there's something to read," she says.
I put down the lath strips I was carrying, laying them across a clump of black
iris vines.-Below, I made out the pharmacist's house, with its chimney
spilling distinct traeki smells. (Do you know that different kinds of plants
grow above a traeki's home? It can be hard working there if the pharmacist
happens to be making medicine while you're overhead!)
"What're you talking about?" I asked, fighting a wave of wooziness. Huck
wheeled over to pick up one of the laths, nimbly bending and slipping it in
where the trellis sagged.
"I'm talking about reading something no one on the Slope has ever seen," she
answered in her crooning way, when she thinks an idea's gloss. Two eyestalks
hovered over her busy hands, while a third twisted to watch me with a glint I
know too well. "I'm talking about something 50 ancient, it makes the oldest
scroll on Jijo look like Joe Dolenz just printed it, with the ink still wet!"
Huck spun along the beams and joists, making me gulp when she popped a wheelie
or swerved past a gaping hole, weaving flexible lath canes like reeds in a
basket. We tend to see g'Keks as frail beings, because they prefer smooth
paths and hate rocky ground. But those axles and rims are nimble, and what a
g'Kek calls a road can be narrow as a plank.
"Don't give me that," I shot back. "Your folk burned and sank their sneakship,
same as every race who skulked down to Jijo. All they had were scrolls-till
humans came."
Huck rocked her torso, imitating a traeki gesture that means, Maybe you're
right, but i/we don't think so.
"Oh, Alvin, you know even the first exiles found things on Jijo to read."
All right, so I wasn't too swift on the grok. I'm plenty smart in my own way-
steady and thorough is the hoonish style-but no one ever accused me of being
quick.
I frowned, mimicking a human "thoughtful" expression I once saw in a book,
even though it makes my forehead hurt. My throat sac throbbed as I
concentrated.
"Hrrrrrm. . . . Now wait just a minute. You don't mean those wall markings
sometimes found-"
"On the walls of old Buyur buildings, yes! The few not smashed or eaten by
mule-spiders when the Buyur left, a million years ago. Those same markings."
"But weren't they mostly just street signs and such?"
"True," she agreed with one dipping eyestalk. "But there were really strange
ones in the ruins where I first lived. Uncle Lorben was translating some into
GalTwo, before the avalanche hit."
I'll never get used to how matter-of-factly she can speak about the disaster
that wiped out her family. If anything like it happened to me, I wouldn't talk
again for years. Maybe ever.
"Uncle swapped letters with a Biblos scholar about the engravings he found. I
was too little to understand much. But clearly there are savants who want to
know about Buyur wall writings."
And others who wouldn't like it, I recall thinking. Despite the Great Peace,
there are still folk in all six races ready to cry heresy and warn of an awful
penance, about to fall from the sky.
"Well, it's too bad all the carvings were destroyed when . . . you know."
"When the mountain killed my folks? Yeah. Too bad. Say, Alvin, will you pass a
couple more strips over to me? I can't quite reach-"
Huck teetered on one wheel, the other spinning madly. I gulped and passed over
the lengths of slivered boo. "Thanks," Huck said, landing back on the beam
with a shuddering bounce, damped by her shocks. "Now where was I? Oh yeah.
Buyur wall writings. I was going to suggest how we can find some engravings no
one's ever seen. At least none of us exile Sixers."
"How could that be?" My throat sac must have fluttered in confusion, making
burbly sounds. "Your people came to Jijo two thousand years ago. Mine almost
as long. Even humans have been here a few hundred. Every inch of the Slope is
explored, and each Buyur site poked into, scores of times!"
Huck stretched all four eyes toward me.
"Exactly!"
Floating from her cranial tympanum, the Anglic word seemed stressed with soft
accents of excitement. I stared for a long time and finally croaked in
surprise.
"You mean to leave the Slope? To sneak beyond the Rift?"
I should have known better than to ask.
All it would have taken was a shift in the roll of Ifni's dice, and this would
be a very different tale. Things came that close to going the way Huck wanted.
She kept badgering me, for one thing. Even after we finished repairing the
lattice and went back to loitering near the ships moored under huge,
overhanging gingourv trees, she just kept at it with her special combination
of g'Kek wit and hoonlike persistence.
"Come on, Alvin. Haven't we sailed to Terminus Rock dozens of times and dared
each other to keep on going? We even did it, once, and no harm ever came!"
"Just to the middle of the Rift. Then we scurried home again."
"So? Do you want that shame sticking forever? This may be our last chance!"
I rubbed my half-inflated sac, making a hollow, rumbling sound. "Aren't you
forgetting, we already have a project? We're building a bathy, in order to go
diving-"
She cut loose a blat of disgust. "We talked it over last week and you agreed.
The bathy reeks."
"I agreed to think about it. Hrm. After all, Pincer has already built the
hull. Chewed it himself from that big garu log. And what about the work the
rest of us put in, looking up old Earthling designs, making that compressor
pump and cable? Then there are those wheels you salvaged, and Ur-ronn's
porthole-"
"Yeah, yeah." She renounced all our labors with a dismissive twirl of two
stalks. "Sure, it was fun working on that stuff during winter, when we had to
sit indoors anyway. Especially when it looked like it'd never actually happen.
We had a great game of pretend.
"But things are getting serious! Pincer talks about actually making a deep
dive in a month or two. Didn't we agree that's crazy? Didn't we, Alvin?" Huck
rolled closer and did something I've never heard another g'Kek do. She rumbled
an umble at me, mimicking the undertone a young hoon female might use if her
big, handsome male was having trouble seeing things her way.
"Now wouldn't you rather come with me to see some uttergloss writings, so
burnish and ancient they were written with computers and lasers and such? Hr-
rm? Doesn't that beat drowning in a stinky dross coffin, halfway to the bottom
of the sea?"
Time to switch languages. While I normally find Anglic more buff than smug old
star-god tongues, even Mister Heinz agrees that its "human tempos and loose
logical structure tend to favor impetuous enthusiasms."
Right then, I needed the opposite, so I shifted to the whistles and pops of
Galactic Two.
"Consideration of (punishable) criminality--this has not occurred to thee?"
Unfazed, she countered in GalSeven, the formal tongue most favored by humans.
"We are minors, friend. Besides, the border law is meant to thwart illicit
breeding beyond the permitted zone. Our gang has no such intent!"
Then, in a quick flip to Galactic Two--
"--Or hast thee (perverted) designs to attempt (strange, hybrid) procreation
experiments with this (virginal female) self?"
What a thought! Plainly she was trying to keep me off balance. I could feel
control slip away. Soon I'd find myself vowing to set sail for those dark
ruins you can dimly see from Terminus Rock, if you aim an urrish telescope
across the Rift's deep waters.
Just then, my eye caught a familiar disturbance under the placid bay. A ruddy
shape swarmed up the sandy bank until a dappled crimson carapace burst forth,
spraying saltwater. From that compact pentagonal shell, a fleshy dome raised,
girdled by a glossy black ring.
"Pincer!" I cried, glad of a distraction from Huck's hot enthusiasm. "Come
over and help me talk to this silly--"
But the young qheuen burst ahead, cutting me off even before water stopped
burbling from his speech vents.
"M-m-mo-mo-mon--"
Pincer's not as good at Anglic as Huck and me, especially when excited. But he
uses it to prove he's as
humicking modern as anyone. I held up my hands. "Easy, pal! Take a breath.
Take five!"
He exhaled a deep sigh, which emerged as a pair of bubble streams where two
spiky legs were still submerged. "I s-s-seen 'em! This time I really s-seen
'em!"
"Seen what?" Huck asked, rolling across squishy sand.
The vision band rimming Pincer's dome looked in all directions at once. Still,
we could feel our friend's intense regard as he took another deep breath, then
sighed a single word.
"Monsters!"
II. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
Legends
The better part of a million years has passed since the Buyur departed Jijo,
obeying Galactic rules of planetary management when their lease on this world
expired, whatever they could not carry off, or store in lunar caches, the
Buyur diligently destroyed, leaving little more than vine-crusted rubble where
their mighty cities once towered, gleaming under the sun.
Yet even now, their shadow hangs over us--we cursed and exiled savages--
reminding us that gods once ruled on Jijo.
Living here as illegal squatters--as sooners who must never dwell beyond this
strip between the mountains and the sea--we of the Six Races can only look
with superstitious awe at eroded Buyur ruins. Even after books and literacy
returned to our Commons, we lacked the tools and skills to analyze the remains
or to learn much about Jijos last lawful tenants. Some recent enthusiasts,
styling themselves archaeologists, have begun borrowing techniques from dusty
Earthling texts, but these devotees cannot even tell us what the Buyur looked
like, let alone their habits, attitudes, or way of life.
Our best evidence comes from folklore.
Though glavers no longer speak--and so are not counted among the Six--we still
have some of the tales they used to tell, passed on by the g'Keks, who knew
glavers best, before they devolved.
Once, before their sneakship came to Jijo, when glavers roamed the stars as
full citizens of the Five Galaxies, it is said that they were on intimate
terms with a race called the Tunnuctyur, a great and noble clan. In their
youth, these Tunnuctyur had been clients of another species--the patron that
uplifted them, giving the Tunnuctyur mastery of speech, tools, and sapiency.
Those patrons were called Buyur, and they came from Galaxy Four--from a world
with a huge carbon star in its sky.
According to legend, these Buyur were known as clever designers of small
living things.
They were also known to possess a rare and dangerous trait--a sense of humor.
--Mystery of the Buyur
by Hau-uphtunda, Guild of Freelance
Scholars, Year-of-Exile 1908.
Asx
HEAR, MY RINGS, THE SONG I SING. LET ITS VAPORS rise amid your cores, and sink
like dripping wax. It comes in many voices, scents, and strengths of time. It
weaves like a g'Kek tapestry, flows like a hoon aria, gallops and swerves in
the manner of urrish legend, and yet turns inexorably, as with the pages of a
human book.
The story begins in peace.
It was springtime, early in the second lunar cycle of the nineteen hundred and
thirtieth year of our exile-and-crime, when the Rothen arrived, manifesting
unwelcome in our sky. Shining sunlike in their mastery of air and aether, they
rent the veil of our concealment at the worst of all possible times-during the
vernal gathering-of-tribes, near the blessed foot of Jijo's Egg.
There we had come, as so often since the Emergence, to hear the great ovoid's
music. To seek guidance patterns. To trade the produce of our varied talents.
To settle disputes, compete in games, and renew the Commons. Above all,
seeking ways to minimize the harm done by our ill-starred presence on this
world.
Gathering-a time of excitement for the young, work for the skilled, and
farewells for those nearing the end of years. Already there had spread rumors-
portents-that this assembly would be momentous. More than a usual quota from
each clan had come. Along with sages and roamers, grafters and techies, many
simple folk of two legs, four and five-and of wheel and ring-followed
drumbeats along still-frosted mountain tracks to reach the sacred glades.
Among each race, manifold had felt the tremors-stronger than any since that
provident year when the Egg burst from Jijo's mother soil, shedding hot birth-
dust, then settling to rule our fractious passions and unite us.
Ah, Gathering.
This latest pilgrimage may not yet have solidified as waxy memory. But try to
recall slowly wending our now-aged pile of rings aboard ship at Far Wet
Sanctuary, to sail past the glistening Spectral Flow and the Plain of Sharp
Sand.
Did not those familiar wonders seem to pale when we reached the Great Marsh
摘要：

BRIGHTNESSREEFBookOneofaNewUpliftTrilogyDavidBrinBANTAMBOOKSNewYorkTorontoLondonSydneyAucklandtoHerbertH.BrinPoet/journalist/andMelonschampionofjusticeBRIGHTNESSREEFABantamSpectraBookPUBLISHINGHISTORYBantamhardcoveredition/October1995Bantammassmarketedition/November1996SPECTRAandtheportrayalofaboxed...

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