He resists an urge to slip his hand inside, to check if it’s still there.

All in good time.

While he sits and strums, the oppressive heat slowly mounts. Urrish and human heads sink lower to the ground, where night’s lingering coolness can still be dimly felt. He waits and tries to remember a little more.

His biggest blank zone — other than the loss of language — covers the recent past. If ten fingers represent the span of his life up to now, most of the final two digits are missing. All he has are the shreds that cling whenever he wakes from a dream. Enough to know he once roamed the linked galaxies and witnessed things none of his kind ever saw before. The seals holding back those memories have resisted everything he’s tried so far — drawing sketches, playing math games with Prity, wallowing in Pzora’s library of smells. He remains fairly certain the key will be found in music. But what music?

Sara snores softly nearby, and he feels a swelling of grateful fondness in his heart… combined with a nagging sense that there is someone else he should be thinking about. Another who had his devotion before searing fate swatted him out of the sky. A woman’s face flickers at a sharp angle to his thoughts, passing too swiftly to recognize — except for the wave of strong feelings it evokes.

He misses her… though he can’t imagine that she feels the same, wherever she may be.

Whoever she may be.

More than anything else, he wishes he could put his feelings into words, as he never did during all the dangerous times they spent together… times when she was pining for another… for a better man than he.

This thought thread is leading somewhere, he realizes, feeling some excitement. Avidly, he follows it. The woman in his dreams… she longs for a man… a hero who was lost long ago… a year or two ago… lost along with crewmates… and also along with…

…along with the Captain…

Yes, of course/ The commander they all missed so terribly, gone ever since a daring escape from that wretched water world. A world of disaster and triumph.

He tries conjuring an image of the Captain. A face. But all that comes to mind is a gray flash, a whirl of bubbles, and finally a glint of white, needlelike teeth. A smile unlike any other. Wise and serene.

Not human.

And then, out of nowhere, a soft warbling emerges. A sound never before heard on the Slope.

The whistles, creaks, and pops roll out of his mouth before he even knows he’s speaking them. His head rocks back as a dam seems to shatter in his mind, releasing a flood of memories.

The music he’d been looking for was of no human making, but the modern tongue of Earth’s third sapient race. A language painfully hard for humans to learn, but that rewarded those who tried. Trinary was nothing like Galactic Two or any other speech, except perhaps the groaning ballads sung by great whales who still plumbed the homeworld’s timeless depths.

Trinary.

He blinks in surprise and even loses his rhythm on the plucked dulcimer. A few urs lift their heads, staring at him blankly till he resumes the steady cadence, continuing reflexively while he ponders his amazing rediscovery. The familiar/uncanny fact that had eluded him till now.

His crewmates — perhaps they still await him in that dark, dreary place where he left them.

His crewmates were dolphins.

I tried reading Finnegans Wake once upon a time.

Last year.

A lifetime ago.

It’s said that no non-Earthling has ever grokked that book. In fact, the few humans who managed the feat spent whole chunks of their lifespans going over Joyce’s masterpiece, word by obscure word, with help from texts written by other obsessed scholars. Mister Heinz says no one on the Slope has any hope at all of fathoming it.

Naturally, I took that as a challenge, and so the next time our schoolteacher headed off to Gathering, I nagged him to bring a copy back with him.

No, I’m not about to say I succeeded. Just one page into it, I knew this was a whole different venture from Ulysses. Though it looks like it’s written in prespace English, the Wake uses Joyce’s own language, created for a single work of art. Hoonish patience would not solve this. To even begin to understand, you have to share much of the author’s context.

What hope had I? Not a native speaker of Irish-English. Not a citizen of early twentieth-century Dublin. Not human. I’ve never been inside a “pub” or seen a “quark” close up, so I can only guess what goes on in each.

I recall thinking — maybe a little arrogantly — If I can’t read this thing, I doubt anyone else on Jijo ever will.

The crisp volume didn’t look as if anyone had tried, since the Great Printing. So why did the human founders waste space in Biblos with this bizarre intellectual experiment from a bygone age?

That was when I felt I had a clue to the Tabernacle crew’s purpose, in coming to this world. It couldn’t be for the reasons we’re told on holy days, when sages and priests read from the sacred Scrolls. Not to find a dark corner of the universe to engage in criminally selfish breeding, or to resign from the cosmos, seeking the roads of innocence. In either of those cases, I could see printing how-to manuals, or simple tales to help light the way. In time, the books would turn brittle and go to dust, when humans and the rest of us are ready to give them up. Kind of like the Eloi folk in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

In neither case did it make any sense to print copies of Finnegans Wake.

Realizing this, I picked up the book once more. And while I did not understand the story or allusions any better than before, I was able to enjoy the flow of words, their rhythms and sounds, for their own extravagant sake. It wasn’t important anymore that I be the only person to grok it.

In fact, there came a warm feeling as I turned the pages and thought — someday, someone else is going to get more out of this than I did.

On Jijo, things get stored away that seem dead, but that only sleep.

I’ve been pondering that very thought while lying here in constant pain, trying to bear it stoically whenever strange, silent beings barge into my cell to poke me with heat, cold, and prickly sharpness. I mean, should I feel hope as metal fingers probe my wounds? Or sour gloom that my blank-faced tenders refuse to answer any questions, or even to speak? Shall I dwell on my awful homesickness? Or on the contrary thrill over having discovered something wonderfully strange that no one on the Slope ever suspected, not since the g’Keks first sent their sneakship tumbling into the deep?

Above all, I wondered — am I prisoner, patient, or specimen?

Finally I realized — I just don’t have any framework to decide. Like the phrases in Joyce’s book, these beings seem at once both strangely familiar and completely unfathomable.