spanned by countless slender roadways that arched like ribbons of spun sugar. Intelligent paths that would twist, gyre, and reconnect at your command, so the way between any two points could be just as straight or deliciously curved as you liked. To live where a planet’s grip did not press you relentlessly, every dura from birth till death, squashing your rims and wearing away your bearings with harsh grit.
More than any other sooner race, the g’Kek had to work hard in order to love Jijo. Our refuge. Our purgatory.
Vubben’s eyestalks contracted involuntarily as the Egg once again made its presence known. A surge of tywush vibrations seemed to rise from the ground. The sporadic patterning tremors had grown more intense, the nearer he came to the source. Now Vubben shivered as another wave front stroked his tense spokes, making his brain resound in its hard case. Words could not express the sensation, even in Galactic Two or Three. The psi-effect provoked no images or dramatic emotions. Rather, a feeling of expectation seemed to build, slowly but steadily, as if some longawaited plan were coming to fruition at long last.
The episode peaked … then passed quickly away, still lacking the coherence he hoped for.
Then let us begin in earnest, Vubben thought. His motor spindles throbbed, helped along by slender pusher legs, as both wheels turned away from the sunset’s dimming glow, toward mystery.
The Egg loomed above, a rounded shelf of stone that stretched ahead for half an arrowflight before curving out of sight. Although a century of pilgrimages had worn a trail of packed pumice, it still took almost a midura for Vubben to roll his first circuit around the base of the ovoid, whose mass pressed a deep basin in the flank of a dormant volcano. Along the way, he raised slender arms and eyestalks, lofting them in gentle benediction, supplementing his mental entreaty with the language of motion.
Help your people.… Vubben urged, seeking to atune his thoughts, harmonizing them with the cyclical vibrations.
Rise up. Waken. Intervene to save us.…
Normally, an effort at communion involved more than one suppliant. Vubben would have merged his contribution with a hoon’s patience, the tenacity of a qheuen, a traeki’s selfless affinity, plus that voracious will to know that made the best urs and humans seem so much alike. But such a large group might be detected moving about close to the Jophur. Anyway, he could not ask others to risk being caught in the company of a g’Kek.
With each pass around the Egg, he sent one eye wafting up to peer at Mount Ingul, whose spire was visible beyond the crater’s rim. There, Phwhoon-dau had promised to station a semaphore crew to alert Vubben in case of any approaching threat — or if there were changes in the tense standoff with the aliens. So far, no warnings were seen flashing from that western peak.
But he faced other distractions, just as disturbing to his train of thought.
Loocen hovered in the same western quarter of the sky, with a curve of bright pinpoints shining along the moon’s crescent-shaped terminator, dividing sunlit and shadowed faces. Tradition said those lights were domed cities. The departing Buyur left them intact, since Loocen had no native ecosystem to recycle and restore. Time would barely touch them until this fallow galaxy and its myriad star systems were awarded to new legal tenants, and the spiral arms once more teemed with commerce.
How those lunar cities must have tempted the first g’Kek exiles, fleeing here from their abandoned space habitats, just a few sneak jumps ahead of baying lynch mobs. Feeling safe at last, after passing through the storms of Izmunuti, those domes would have enticed them with reminders of home. A promise of low gravity and clean, smooth surfaces.
But such places offered no reliable, long-term shelter against relentless enemies. A planet’s surface was better for fugitives, with a life-support system that needed no computer regulation. A natural world’s complex messiness made it a fine place to hide, if you were willing to live as primitives, scratching a subsistence like animals.
In fact, Vubben had few clues of what passed through the original colonists’ minds. The Sacred Scrolls were the only written records from that time, and they mostly ignored the past, preaching instead how to live in harmony on Jijo, and promising salvation to those following the Path of Redemption.
Vubben was renowned for skill at reciting those hallowed texts. But in truth, we sages stopped relying on the scrolls a century ago.
He resumed the solitary pilgrimage, commencing his fourth circuit just as another tywush wave commenced. Vubben now felt certain the cycles were growing more coherent. Yet there was also a feeling that much more power lay quiescent, far below the surface — power he desperately needed to tap.
Hoon and qheuen grandparents passed on testimony that the patterns were more potent in the last days of Drake the Younger, when the Egg was still warm with birth heat, fresh from Jijo’s womb. Compelling dreams used to flood all six races back then, convincing all but the most conservative that a true revelation had come.
Politics also played a role in the great orb’s acceptance. Drake and Ur-Chown made eager proclamations, interpreting the new omen in ways that helped consolidate the Commons.
“This stone-of-wisdom is Jijo’s gift, a portent, sanctifying the treaties and ratifying the Great Peace,” they declared, with some success. From then on, hope became part of the revised religion. Though in deference to the scrolls, the word itself was seldom used.
Now Vubben sought some of that hope for himself, for his race, and all the Six. He sought it in signs that the great stone might be stirring once again.
I can feel it happening! If only the Egg rouses far enough, soon enough.
But the increasing activity seemed to follow its own pace, with a momentum that made him feel like an insect, dancing next to some titanic being.
Perhaps, Vubben suspected, my presence has nothing to do with these changes.
What happens next may not involve me at all.
Blade
THE WINDS WERE BLOWING HIM THE WRONG WAY.
No real surprise there. Weather patterns on the Slope had been contrary for more than a year. Anyway, metaphorically, the Six Races were being buffeted by gales of change. Still, at the end of a long, eventful day, Blade had more than enough reason to curse the stubbornly perverse breeze.
By late afternoon, slanting sunshine combed the forests and boo groves into a panorama of shadows and light. The Rimmers were a phalanx of giant soldiers, their armored shells blushing before the lowering sun. Below, a vast marsh had given way to prairie, which in turn became forested hills. Few signs of habitation could be seen from his great height, though Blade was handicapped by a basic inability to look directly down. The chitinous bulk of his wide body blocked any direct view of the ground.
How I would love, just once in my life, to see what lies below my own feet!
His five legs weren’t doing much at the moment. The claws dangled over open space, snapping occasionally in reflex spasms, trying futilely to get a grip on the clear air. Even more disconcerting, the sensitive feelers around his mouth had no earth or mud to brush against, probing the many textures of the ground. Instead, they, too, hung uselessly. Blade felt numb and bare in the direction a qheuen least liked being exposed.
That had been the hardest part to get used to, after takeoff. To a qheuen, life’s texture is determined by its medium. Sand and salt water to a red. Freshwater and mud to a blue. A world of stony caverns to imperial grays. Al though their ancestors had starships, Jijo’s qheuens seemed poor candidates for flight.
As open country glided majestically past, Blade pondered being the first of his kind in hundreds of years to soar.
Some adventure! It will be worth telling Log Biter and the other matrons about, when I return to that homey lodge behind Dolo Dam. The grubs, in their murky den, will want to hear the story at least forty or fifty times.
If only this voyage would get a little less adventurous, and more predictable.
I hoped to be communicating with Sara by now, not drifting straight toward the enemy’s toothy maw.
Above Blade’s cupola and vision strip, he heard valves open with a preliminary hiss — followed by a roaring burst of heat. Unable to shift or turn his suspended body, he could only envision the urrish contraptions in a wicker basket overhead, operating independently, using jets of flame to replenish the hot-air bag, keeping his balloon to a steady altitude.
But not a steady heading.
