READ THE NEWLY CONGEALED WAX, MY RINGS.
See how folk of the Six Races dispersed, tearing down festival pavilions and bearing away the injured, fleeing before the Rothen starship’s expected arrival.
Our senior sage, Vubben of the g’Kek, recited from the Scroll of Portents a passage warning against disunity. Truly, the Six Races must strive harder than ever to look past our differences of shape and shell. Of flesh, hide, and torg.
“Go home,” we sages told the tribes. “See to your lattice screens. Your blur-cloth webs. Live near the ground in Jijo’s sheltered places. Be ready to fight if you can. To die if you must.”
The zealots, who originally provoked this crisis, suggested the Rothen starship might have means to track Ro-kenn and his lackeys, perhaps by sniffing our prisoners’ brain waves or body implants. “For safety, let’s sift their bones into lava pools!”
An opposing faction called Friends of the Rothen demanded Ro-kenn’s release and obeisance to his godlike will. These were not only humans, but some qheuens, g’Keks, hoons, and even a few urs, grateful for cures or treatments received in the aliens’ clinic. Some think redemption can be won in this lifetime, without first treading the long road blazed by glavers.
Finally, others see this chaos as a chance to settle old grudges. Rumors tell of anarchy elsewhere on the Slope. Of many fine things toppled or burned.
Such diversity! The same freedom that fosters a vivid people also makes it hard to maintain a united front. Would things be better if we had disciplined order, like the feudal state sought by Gray Queens of old?
It is too late for regrets. Time remains only for improvisation—an art not well approved in the Five Galaxies, we are told.
Among poor savages, it may be our only hope.
Yes, my rings. We can now remember all of that.
Stroke this wax, and watch the caravans depart toward plains, forests, and sea. Our hostages are spirited off to sites where even a starship’s piercing scrutiny might not find them. The sun flees and stars bridge the vast territory called the Universe. A realm denied us, that our foes roam at will.
Some remain behind, awaiting the ship.
We voted, did we not? We rings who make up Asx? We volunteered to linger. Our cojoined voice would speak to angry aliens for the Commons. Resting our basal torus on hard stone, we passed the time listening to complex patterns from the Holy Egg, vibrating our fatty core with strange shimmering motifs.
Alas, my rings, none of these reclaimed memories explains our current state, that something terrible must have happened?
Here, what of this newly congealed waxy trail?
Can you perceive in it the glimmering outlines of a great vessel of space? Roaring from the same part of the sky lately abandoned by the sun?
Or is it the sun, come back again to hover angrily above the valley floor?
The great ship scans our valley with scrutinizing rays, seeking signs of those they left behind.
Yes, my rings. Follow this waxy memory.
Are we about to rediscover the true cause of terror?
Lark
SUMMER PRESSED HEAVILY ACROSS THE RIMMER Range, consuming the unshaded edges of glaciers far older than six exile races. At intervals, a crackling static charge would blur the alpine slopes as countless grass stems wafted skyward, reaching like desperate tendrils. Intense sunshine was punctuated by bursts of curtain rain — water draperies that undulated uphill, drenching the slopes with continuous liquid sheets, climbing until the mountaintops wore rainbow crowns, studded with flashes of compressed lightning.
Compact reverberations rolled down from the heights, all the way to the shore of a poison lake, where fungus swarmed over a forty-hectare thicket of crumbling vines. Once a mighty outpost of Galactic culture, the place was now a jumble of stone slabs, rubbed featureless by abrading ages. The pocket valley sweltered with acrid aromas, as caustic nectars steamed from the lake, or dripped from countless eroding pores.
The newest sage of the Commons of Jijo plucked yellow moss from a decaying cable, one of a myriad of strands that once made up the body of a half-million-year-old creature, the mulc spider responsible for demolishing this ancient Buyur site, gradually returning it to nature. Lark had last seen this place in late winter — searching alone through snow flurries for the footprints of Dwer and Rety, refugees from this same spider’s death fury. Things had changed here since that frantic deliverance. Large swathes of mulc cable were simply gone, harvested in some recent effort that no one had bothered explaining when Lark was assigned here. Much of what remained was coated with this clinging moss.
“Spirolegita cariola.” He muttered the species name, rubbing a sample between two fingers. It was a twisted, deviant cariola variety. Mutation seemed a specialty of this weird, astringent site.
I wonder what the place will do to me — to all of us — if we stay here long.
He had not asked for this chore. To be a jailor. Just wearing the title made him feel less clean.
A chain of nonsense syllables made him turn back toward a blur-cloth canopy, spanning the space between slablike boulders.
“It’s a clensionating sievelator for refindulating excess torg.…”
The voice came from deep shade within — a strong feminine alto, though somewhat listless now, tinged with resignation. Soft clinking sounds followed as one object was tossed onto a pile and another picked up for examination.
“At a guess, I’d say this was once a glannis truncator, probably used in rituals of a chihanic sect … that is, unless it’s just another Buyur joke-novelty device.”
Lark shaded his eyes to regard Ling, the young sky-born scientist and servant of star-god Rothen, in whose employ he had worked as a “native guide” for many weeks … until the Battle of the Glade reversed their standing in a matter of heartbeats. Since that unexpected victory, the High Sages had assigned her care and custody to him, a duty he never asked for, even if it meant exalted promotion.
Now I’m quite a high-ranking witch doctor among savages, he thought with some tartness. Lord High Keeper of Alien Prisoners.
And maybe executioner. His mind shied from that possibility. Much more likely, Ling would be traded to her Danik-Rothen comrades in some deal worked out by the sages. Or else she might be rescued at any moment by hordes of unstoppable robots, overpowering Lark’s small detachment of sword-bearing escorts like a pack of santi bears brushing aside the helpless buzzing defenders of a zil-honey tree.
Either way, she’ll go free. Ling may live another three hundred years on her homeworld, back in the Five Galaxies, telling embroidered tales about her adventure among the feral barbarians of a shabby, illicit colony. Meanwhile, the best we fallen ones can hope for is bare survival. To keep scratching a living from poor tired Jijo, calling it lucky if some of the Six eventually join glavers down the Path of Redemption. The trail to blissful oblivion.
Lark would rather end it all in some noble and heroic way. Let Jijo’s Six go down defending this fragile world, so she might go back to her interrupted rest.
That was his particular heresy, of course. Orthodox belief held that the Six Races were sinners, but they might mitigate their offense by living at peace on Jijo. But Lark saw that as hypocrisy. The settlers should end their crime, gently and voluntarily, as soon as possible.
He had made no secret of his radicalism … which made it all the more confusing that the High Sages now trusted him with substantial authority.
The alien woman no longer wore the shimmering garb of her Danik star clan — the secretive band of humans who worshiped Rothen lords. Instead she was outfitted in an ill-fitting blouse and kilt of Jijoan homespun. Still, Lark found it hard to look away from her angular beauty. It was said that sky humans could buy a new face with hardly a thought. Ling claimed not to care about such things, but no woman on the Slope could match her.
Under the wary gaze of two militia corporals, Ling sat cross-legged, examining relics left behind by the dead mulc spider — strange metallic shapes embedded in semi-transparent gold cocoons, like archaic insects trapped in amber. Remnants of the Buyur, this world’s last legal tenants, who departed half a million years ago when Jijo went
