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 mulc-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.