True, we have a pharmacist in Wuphon Town, but still there’s some mystery about the ringed ones. Sure enough, Huck and I soon got the gist of what Howerr-phuo was going on about. He and some of his backwash friends had a wager going, about traeki sex life, and he’d been elected to run the matter past us, as local experts!
Sharing a wink, Huck and I quickly emptied his head of all the nonsense it had been stuffed with — then proceeded to fill it back up with our own imaginative version. Howerr soon looked like a sailor who just had a loose tackle-pulley carom off his skull. Glancing furtively at his feet, he hurried off — no doubt to check for “ring spores,” lest he start growing little traekis in places where he’d been neglectful about washing.
I don’t feel much guilt over it. Anyone standing downwind from Howerr-phuo, from now on, oughta thank us.
I was going to ask Huck if we were ever that dumb — then I recalled. Didn’t she once convince me that a g’Kek can manage to be her own mother and father? I swear, she had made it sound plausible at the time, though for the life of me, I still can’t figure out how.
For the first couple of days, the spectators mostly lurked beyond a line in the sand, drawn by Uriel with her sage’s baton. No one said much while the master smith was around. But after she left, some took to yelling slogans, mostly objecting that the Midden is sacred, not a place for conceited gloss-addicts to go sight-seeing. Once the Vale humans arrived, the protests got better organized, with banners and slogans chanted in unison.
I found it pretty exciting, like a scene from Summer of Love or Things to Come, all full of righteous dissent for a cause. To a humicker like me, nothing could be more buff than forging ahead with an adventure against popular opinion. Seems nearly all the romantic tales I’ve read were about intrepid heroes persisting despite the doubts of stick-in-the-mud parents, neighbors, or authority figures. It reminded me of the book my nickname comes from — where the people of Diaspar try to keep Alvin from making contact with their long-lost cousins in faraway Lys. Or when the Lysians don’t want him going back home with news of their rediscovered world.
Yeah, I know that’s fiction, but the connection stoked my resolve. Huck and Ur-ronn and Pincer-Tip said they all felt the same.
As for the mob, well, I know that folks who’re scared can get unreasonable. I even tried once or twice to see it from their point of view. Really, I did.
Boy, what a bloat-torus of jeekee, Ifni-slucking skirls. Hope they all sit on bad mulch and get spin vapors.
XIV. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
It is said that humans on Earth spent untold generations Iiving in brute fear, believing a myriad things that no sensible person would ever imagine. Certainly not anyone who had been handed truth on a silver platter — the way it was given to nearly every sapient race in the Five Galaxies.
Earthlings had to figure it all out for themselves. Slowly, agonizingly, humans learned how the universe worked, abandoning most of the fanciful beliefs they carried through their Iong, dark loneliness. This included belief in —
— the divine right of egotistical kings,
— the mental incapacity of women,
— the idea that a wise state knows all,
— the idea that the individual is always right,
— the sick-sweet addiction that transforms a doctrine from a mere model of the world into something sacred, worth killing for.
These and many other wild concepts eventually joined pixies and ufos in the trunk where humans finally put away such childish things. A very large trunk.
Even so, the newly contacted Galactics saw Earthlings as superstitious primitives, as wolflings, prone to weird enthusiasms and peculiar, unprovable convictions.
How ironic, then, is the role reversal that we see on Jijo, where Earthlings found the other five far regressed down a road humans had traveled before, wallowing in a myriad of fables, fantasies, grudges, and vividly absurd notions. To this maelstrom of superstition, settlers fresh off the Tabernacle contributed more than paper books. They also brought tools of logic and verification — the very things Earthlings had to fight hardest to learn, back home.
Moreover, with their own history in mind, Earthlings became voracious collectors of folklore, fanning out among the other five to copy down every tale, every belief, even those they demonstrated to be false.
Out of their wolfling past came this strange mixture — reasoning skepticism, plus a deep appreciation of the peculiar, the bizarre, the extravagantly vivid.
Amid the darkness, humans know that it is all too easy to lose your way, if you forget how to tell what is true. But it is just as urgent never to let go of the capacity to dream, to weave the illusions that help us all make it through this dark, dark night.
Asx
The tiny robot was a wonder to behold. No larger than a g’Kek’s eyeball, it lay pinned down to the I ground by a horde of attacking privacy wasps, covered by their crowded fluttering wings.
Lester was the first sage to comment, after the initial surprise.
“Well, now we know why they’re called privacy wasps. Did you see the way they swarmed over that thing? Otherwise, we’d never have known it was there.”
“A device for spying,” surmised Knife-Bright Insight, tipping her carapace to get a closer look at the machine. “Minuscule and mobile, sent to listen in on our council. We would have been helpless, all our plans revealed, if not for the wasps.”
Phwhoon-dau concurred with a deep umble.
“Hr-rm… We are used to seeing the insects as minor irritants, their presence required by tradition for certain ceremonies. But the Buyur must have designed the wasps for just such a purpose. To patrol their cities and homes, thwarting would-be eavesdroppers.”
“Using a (specifically) designed life-form to deal with the (annoying) threat-indeed, that would have been the Buyur way,” added Ur-Jah.
Lester leaned close to peer at the wasps, whose wings rippled in front of the robot’s tiny eyes, beating a maze of colors that reminded me/us of rewq.
“I wonder what the wasps are showing it,” murmured our human sage.
Then Vubben spoke for the first time since the wasps attacked the intruder.
“Probably exactly what it wants to see,” he suggested confidently.
Do you recall, my rings, how we all nodded, sighed, or umbled respectful agreement? Vubben spoke the words so well, in such tones of wise credibility. Only later did it occur to we/us to ask ourselves—
What?
What in the world could he possibly mean by that?