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
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.
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.