Now Vubben lies in a heap, aware of two facts.
Any surviving g’Keks would need a new High Sage.
And something else.
The Egg still lives.
He wonders about that. Why didn’t the Jophur finish it off? Surely they had the power.
Perhaps they were distracted.
Perhaps they would be back.
Or else, were they subtly persuaded to go away?
The Egg’s patterning rhythms seem subdued, and yet more clear than ever. He ponders whether it might be an artifact of his approaching death. Or perhaps his frayed spindles — draped across the stony face — are picking up vibrations that normal senses could not.
Crystalline lucidity calls him, but Vubben feels restrained by the tenacious hold of life. That was what always kept sages and mystics from fully communing with the sacred ovoid, he now sees. Mortal beings — even traeki — have to care about continuing, or else the game of existence cannot properly be played. But the caring is also an impediment. It biases the senses. Makes you receptive to noise.
He lets go of the impediment, with a kind of gladness. Surrender clears the way, opening a path that he plunges along, like a youth just released from training wheels, spinning ecstatically down a swooping ramp he never knew before, whose curves change in delightfully ominous ways.
Vubben feels the world grow transparent around him. And with blossoming clarity, he begins to perceive connections.
In legend, and in human lore, gods were depicted speaking to their prophets, and those on the verge of death. But the great stone does not vocalize. No words come to Vubben, or even images. Yet he finds himself able to trace the Egg’s form, its vibrating unity. Like a funnel, it draws him down, toward the bowels of Jijo.
That is the first surprise. From its shape alone, the Six Races assumed the Egg was self-contained, an oval stone birthed out of Jijo’s inner heat, now wholly part of the upper world.
Apparently it still maintains links to the world below.
Vubben’s dazed mind beholds the realm beneath the Slope … not as a picture but in its gestalt, as a vast domain threaded by dendritic patterns of lava heat, like branches of a magma forest, feeding and maintaining a growing mountain range. The forest roots sink into liquefied pools, unimaginably deep and broad — measureless chambers where molten rock strains under the steady grinding of an active planet.
Yet, even here the pattern formations persist. Vubben finds himself amazed by their revealed source.
Dross!
Deep beneath the Slope, there plunges a great sheet of heavier stone … an oceanic plate, shoving hard against the continent and then diving deeper still, dragging eons-old basalt down to rejoin slowly convecting mantle layers. The process is not entirely mysterious to Vubben. He has seen illustrations in Biblos texts. As it scrapes by, the plunging ocean plate leaves behind a scum, a frothy mix of water and light elements …
… and also patterns.
Patterns of dross! Of ancient buildings, implements, machines, all discarded long ago, ages before the Buyur won their leasehold on this world. Before even their predecessors.
The things themselves are long gone, melted, smeared out, their atoms dispersed by pressure and heat. Yet somehow a remnant persists. The magma does not quite forget.
Dross is supposed to be cleansed, Vubben thinks, shocked by the implications. When we dump our bones and tools in the Midden, it should lead to burial and purification by Jijo’s fire. There isn’t supposed to be anything left!
And yet … who is he to question, if Jijo chooses to remember something of each tenant race that abides here for a while, availing itself of her resources, her varied life-forms, then departing according to Galactic law?
Is that what you are? He inquires of the Holy Egg. A distillation of memory? The crystallized essence of species who came before, and are now extinct?
A transcendent thought, yet it makes him sad. Vubben’s own unique race verges on annihilation. He yearns for some kind of preservation, some refuge from oblivion. But in order to leave such a remnant, sophonts must dwell for a long time on a tectonic world.
For most of its sapiency period, his kind had lived in space.
Then you don’t care about us living beings, after all, he accuses the Egg. You are like that crazed mulc spider of the hills, your face turned to the past.
Again, there is no answer in word or image. What Vubben feels instead is a further extension of the sense of connectedness, now sweeping upward, through channels of friction heat, climbing against slow cascades of moist, superheated rock, until his mind emerges in a cool dark kingdom — the sea’s deep, most private place.
The Midden. Vubben feels around him the great dross piles of more recent habitation waves. Even here, amid relics of the Buyur, the Egg seems linked. Vubben senses that the graveyard of ancient instrumentalities has been disturbed. Heaps of archaic refuse still quiver from some late intrusion.
There is no anger over this. Nor anything as overt as interest. But he does sense a reaction, like some prodigious reflex.
The sea is involved. Disturbance in the dross piles has provoked shifts in the formation of waves and tides. Of heat and evaporation. Like a sleeping giant, responding heavily to a tiny itch. A massive storm begins roiling both the surface and the ocean floor, sweeping things back where they belong.
Vubben has no idea what vexed the Midden so. Perhaps the Jophur. Or else the end of dross shipments from the Six Races? Anyway, his thoughts are coming more slowly as death swarms in from the extremities. Worldly concerns matter less with each passing dura.
Still, he can muster a few more cogencies.
Is that all we are to you? he inquires of the planet. An itch?
He realizes now that Drake and Ur-Chown had pulled a fast one when they announced their “revelation,” a century ago. The Egg is no god, no conscious being. Ro-kenn was right, calling it a particle of psi-active stone, more compact and well ordered than the Spectral Flow. A distillation that had proved helpful in uniting the Six Races.
Useful in many ways … but not worthy of prayer.
We sensed what we desperately wanted to sense, because the alternative was unacceptable — to face the fact that we sooners are alone. We always were alone.
That might have been Vubben’s last thought. But at the final moment there comes something else. A glimmer of meaning that merges with his waning neuronic flashes. In that narrow moment, he feels a wave of overwhelming certainty.
More layers lie beneath the sleeping strata. Layers that are aware.
Layers that know.
Despair is not his final companion. Instead, there comes in rapid succession—
expectation …
satisfaction …
awareness of an ancient plan, patiently unfolding.…
Kaa
CAN’T-T YOU USE SOMEBODY ELSE?”
“Who else? There is no one.”
“What about Karkaett-t?”
“Suessi needs him to help nurse the engines. This effort will be hopeless unless they operate above capacity.”
Hopeless, Kaa used to think it such a simple word. But like the concept of infinity, it came freighted with a wide range of meanings. He slashed the water in frustration. Ifni, will you really trap me this way? Dragging me across the universe again, when all I want to do is stay?
Gillian Baskin knelt on the quay nearby, her raincoat glistening. Distant lightning flashes periodically lit up the bay, revealing that the Hikahi had already closed her clamshell doors, preparing to depart.
