Oh, some objects leaped at us with sudden familiarity — like when the searchlight swept over rows of blank-eyed windows, breached floors, and sundered walls. Pushed in a tumbled mound, many of the sunken towers lay upside down or even speared through each other. Together they composed a city greater than any I ever heard of, even from readings of olden times. Yet someone once scraped the entire metropolis from its foundations, picked it up, and dumped it here, sending all the buildings tumbling down to be reclaimed the only way such things can be reclaimed — in Mother Jijo’s fiery bowels.
I recalled some books I’d read, dating from Earth’s Era of Resolution, when pre-contact humans were deciding on their own how to grow up and save their homeworld after centuries spent using it as a cesspit. In Alice Hammett’s mystery The Case of a Half-Eaten Clone, the killer escapes a murder charge, only to get ten years for disposing of the evidence at sea! In those days, humans made no distinction between midden trenches and ocean floor in general. Dumping was dumping.
It felt strange to see the enormous dross-scape from two viewpoints. By Galactic law, this was a consecrated part of Jijo’s cycle of preservation — a scene of devout caretaking. But having grown up immersed in human books, I could shift perspectives and see defilement, a place of terrible sin.
The “city” fell behind us and we went back to staring at bizarre shapes, unknown majestic objects, the devices of star-god civilization, beyond understanding by mere cursed mortals. On occasion, my eyes glimpsed flickerings in the blackness outside the roving beam — lightninglike glimmers amid the ruins, as if old forces lingered here and there, setting off sparks like fading memories.
We murmured among ourselves, each of us falling back to what we knew best. Ur-ronn speculated on the nature of materials, what things were made of, or what functions they once served. Huck swore she saw uniting each time the light panned over a string of suspicious shadows. Pincer insisted every other object must be a starship.
The Midden took our conjectures the same way it accepts all else, with a patient, deathless silence.
Some enormous objects had already sunk quite far, showing just their tips above the mire. I thought—This is where Jijo’s ocean plate takes a steep dive under the Slope, dragging crust, mud, and anything else lying about, down to magma pools that feed simmering volcanoes. In time, all these mighty things will become lava, or precious ores to be used by some future race of tenants on this world.
It made me ponder my father’s sailing ship, and the risky trips he took, hauling crates of sacred refuse, sent by each tribe of the Six as partial payment for the sin of our ancestors. In yearly rituals, each village sifts part of the land, clearing it of our own pollution and bits the Buyur left behind.
The Five Galaxies may punish us for living here. Yet we lived by a code, faithful to the Scrolls.
Hoonish folk moots chant the tale of Phu-uphyawuo, a dross captain who one day saw a storm coming, and dumped his load before reaching the deep blue of the Midden. Casks and drums rolled overboard far short of the trench of reclamation, strewing instead across shallow sea bottom, marring a site that was changeless, unrenewing. In punishment, Phu-uphyawuo was bound up and taken to the Plain of Sharp Sand, to spend the rest of his days beneath a hollow dune, drinking enough green dew to live, but not sustain his soul. In time, his heart spine was ground to dust and cast across a desert where no water might wash the grains, or make them clean again.
But this is the Midden, I thought, trying to grasp the wonder. We’re the first to see it.
Except for the phuvnthus. And whatever else lives down here.
I found myself tiring. Despite the back brace and crutches, a weight of agony built steadily. Yet I found it hard to tear away from the icy-cold pane.
Following a searchlight through suboceanic blackness, we plunged as if down a mine shaft, aimed toward a heap of jewels — glittering objects shaped like needles, or squat globes, or glossy pancakes, or knobby cylinders. Soon there loomed a vast shimmering pile, wider than Wuphon Bay, bulkier than Guenn Volcano.
“Now, those are definitely ships!” Pincer announced, gesturing with a claw. Pressed against the glass, we stared at mountainlike piles of tubes, spheres, and cylinders, many of them studded with hornlike protrusions, like the quills of an alarmed rock staller.
“Those must be the probability whatchamacallums starships use for going between galaxies,” Huck diagnosed from her avid reading of Tabernacle-era tales.
“Probability flanges,” Ur-ronn corrected, speaking Galactic Six. In matters of technology, she was far ahead of Huck or me. “I think you may be right.”
Our qheuenish friend chuckled happily as the searchlight zeroed in on one tremendous pile of tapered objects. Soon we all recognized the general outlines from ancient texts — freighters and courier ships, packets and cruisers — all abandoned long ago.
The engine noise dropped a notch, plunging us toward that mass of discarded spacecraft. The smallest of those derelicts outmassed the makeshift phuvnthu craft the way a full-grown traeki might tower over a herd-chick turd.
“I wonder if any of the ancestor vessels are in this pile,” Huck contemplated aloud. “You know, the ones that brought our founders here? The Laddu’kek or the Tabernacle.”
“Unlikely,” Ur-ronn answered, this time in lisping Anglic. “Don’t forget, we’re in the Rift. This is nothing vut an offshoot canyon of the Nidden. Our ancestors likely discarded their shifs in the nain trench, where the greatest share of Vuyur trash went.”
I blinked at that thought. This, an offshoot? A minor side area of the Midden?
Of course she was right! But it presented a boggling image. What staggering amounts of stuff must have been dumped in the main trench, over the ages! Enough to tax even the recycling power of Jijo’s grinding plates. No wonder the Noble Galactics set worlds aside for ten million years or more. It must take that long for a planet to digest each meal of sapient-made things, melting them back into the raw stuff of nature.
I thought of my father’s dross ship, driven by creaking masts, its hold filled with crates of whatever we exiles can’t recycle. After two thousand years, all the offal we sooners sent to the Midden would not even show against this single mound of discarded starships.
How rich the Buyur and their fellow gods must have been to cast off so much wealth! Some of the abandoned vessels looked immense enough to swallow every house, khuta, or hovel built by the Six Races. We glimpsed dark portals, turrets, and a hundred other details, growing painfully aware of one fact — those shadowy behemoths had been sent down here to rest in peace. Their sleep was never meant to be invaded by the likes of us.
Our plummet toward the reef of dead ships grew alarming. Did any of the others feel we were heading in awful fast?
“Maybe this is their home,” Pincer speculated as we plunged toward one twisted, oval ruin, half the size of Wuphon Port.
“Maybe the phuvnthus are made of, like, parts of old machines that got dumped here,” Huck mused. “And they kind of put themselves together from whatever’s lying around? Like this boat we’re on is made of all sorts of junk—”
“Ferhafs they were servants of the Vuyur—” Ur-ronn interrupted. “Or a race that lived here even vefore. Or a strain of nutants, like in that story vy—”
I cut in. “Have any of you considered the simplest idea? That maybe they’re just like us?”
When my friends turned to look at me, I shrugged, human style.
“Maybe the phuvnthus are sooners, too. Ever stop to think of that?”
Their blank faces answered me. I might as well have suggested that our hosts were noor beasts, for all the sense my idea made.
Well, I never claimed to be quick-witted, especially when racked with agony.
We lacked any sense of perspective, no way to tell how close we were, or how fast we were going. Huck and Pincer murmured nervously as our vessel plunged toward the mountain-of-ships at a rapid clip, engines running hard in reverse.
I think we all jumped a bit when a huge slab of corroded metal moved aside, just duras before we might have collided. Our vessel slid into a gaping hole in the mountain of dross, cruising along a corridor composed of spaceship hulls, piercing a fantastic pile of interstellar junk.
Asx
