Humidity closes in as their caravan veers toward a winding river valley. Dank aromas stir memories of the swamp where he first floundered after the crash, a shattered cripple, drenched in agony. But he does not quail. Emerson welcomes any sensation that might trigger random recall — a sound, a chance smell, or else a sight around the next bend.
Some rediscoveries already float across a gulf of time and loss, as if he has missed them for quite a while. Recovered names connect to faces, and even brief snatches of isolated events.
Tom Orley … so strong and clever. Always a sure eye for trouble. He brought some back to the ship, one day. Trouble enough for Five Galaxies.
Hikahi … sweetest dolphin. Kindest friend. Dashing off to rescue her lover and captain … never to be seen again.
Toshio … a boy’s ready laughter. A young man’s steady heart. Where is he now?
Creideiki … captain. Wise dolphin leader. A cripple like himself.
Briefly, Emerson wonders at the similarity between Creideiki’s injury and his own.… But the thought provokes a searing bolt of pain so fierce that the fleeting thought whirls away and is lost.
Tom … Hikahi … Toshio … He repeats the names, each of them once attached to friends he has not seen for … well, a very long time.
Other memories, more recent, seem harder to reach, more agonizing to access.
Suessi … Tsh’t … Gillian …
He mouths each sound repeatedly, despite the tooth-jarring ride and difficulty of coordinating tongue and lips. He does it to keep in practice — or else how will he ever recover the old handiness with language, the skill to roll out words as he used to, back when he was known as such a clever fellow … before horrid holes appeared in both his head and memory.
Some names come easy, since he learned them after waking on Jijo, delirious in a treetop hut.
— Prity, the little chimp who teaches him by example. Though mute, she shows flair for both math and sardonic hand speech.
— Jomah and Kurt … sounds linked to younger and older versions of the same narrow face. Apprentice and master at a unique art, meant to erase all the dams, towns, and houses that unlawful settlers had built on a proscribed world. Emerson recalls Biblos, an archive of paper books, where Kurt showed his nephew well-placed explosive charges that might bring the cave down, smashing the library to dust. If the order ever came.
— The captive fanatic, Dedinger, rides behind the explosers, deeply tanned with craggy features. Leader of human rebels with beliefs Emerson can’t grasp, except they preach no love of visitors from the sky. While the party hurries on, Dedinger’s gray eyes rove, calculating his next move.
Some names and a few places — these utterances have meaning now. It is progress, but Emerson is no fool. He figures he must have known hundreds of words before he fell, broken, to this world. Now and again he makes out snatches of half meaning from the “wah-wah” gabble as his companions address each other. Snippets that tantalize, without satisfying.
Sometimes the torrent grows tiresome, and he wonders — might people be less inclined to fight if they talked less? If they spent more time watching and listening?
Fortunately, words aren’t his sole project. There is the haunting familiarity of music, and during rest stops he plays math games with Prity and Sara, drawing shapes in the sand. They are his friends and he takes joy from their laughter.
He has one more window to the world.
As often as he can stand it, Emerson slips the rewq over his eyes … a masklike film that transforms the world into splashes of slanted color. In all his prior travels he never encountered such a creature — a species used by all six races to grasp each other’s moods. If left on too long, it gives him headaches. Still he finds fascinating the auras surrounding Sara, Dedinger, and others. Sometimes it seems the colors carry more than just emotion … though he cannot pin it down. Not yet.
One truth Emerson recalls. Advice drawn from the murky well of his past, putting him on guard.
Life can be full of illusions.
PART TWO
LEGENDS TELL OF MANY PRECIOUS TEXTS that were lost one bitter evening, during an unmatched disaster some call the Night of the Ghosts, when a quarter of the Biblos Archive burned. Among the priceless volumes that vanished by that cruel winter’s twilight, one tome reportedly showed pictures of Buyur — the mighty race whose lease on Jijo expired five thousand centuries ago.
Scant diary accounts survive from witnesses to the calamity, but according to some who browsed the Xenoscience Collection before it burned, the Buyur were squat beings, vaguely resembling the bullfrogs shown on page ninety-six of Clear’s Guide to Terrestrial Life-Forms, though with elephantine legs and sharp, forward-looking eyes. They were said to be master shapers of useful organisms, and had a reputation for prodigious wit.
But other sooner races already knew that much about the Buyur, both from oral traditions and the many clever servant organisms that flit about Jijo’s forests, perhaps still looking for departed masters. Beyond these few scraps, we have very little about the race whose mighty civilization thronged this world for more than a million years.
HOW could so much knowledge be lost in a single night? Today it seems odd. Why weren’t copies of such valuable texts printed by those first-wave human colonists, before they sent their sneakship tumbling to ocean depths? Why not place duplicates all over the Slope, safeguarding the learning against all peril?
In our ancestors’ defense, recall what tense times those were, before the Great Peace or the coming of the Egg. The five sapient races already present on Jijo (excluding glavers) had reached an edgy balance by the time starship Tabernacle slinked past Izmunuti’s dusty glare to plant Earthlings illicitly, the latest wave of criminal colonists to plague a troubled world. In those days, combat was frequent between urrish clans and haughty qheuen empresses, while hoonish tribes skirmished among themselves in their ongoing ethical struggle over traeki civil rights. The High Sages had little influence beyond reading and interpreting the Speaking Scrolls, the only documents existing at the time.
Into this tense climate dropped the latest invasion of sooner refugees, who found an unused eco-niche awaiting them. But human colonists were not content simply to take up tree farming as another clan of illiterates. Instead, they used the Tabernacle’s engines one last time before sinking her. With those godlike forces they carved Biblos Fortress, then toppled a thousand trees, converting their pulp into freshly printed books.
The act so astonished the Other Five, it nearly cost human settlers their lives. Outraged, the queens of Tarek Town laid siege to the vastly outnumbered Earthlings. Others, equally offended by what seemed heresy against the Scrolls, held back only because the priest sages refused sanctioning holy war. That narrow vote gave human leaders time to bargain, to cajole the different tribes and septs with practical advice from books, bribing them with useful things. Spoke cleats for g’Kek wheels. Better sails for hoonish captains. And, for urrish smiths, the long-sought knack of brewing clear glass.
How things had changed just a few generations later, when the new breed of scholar sages gathered to affirm the Great Peace, scribing their names on fresh paper and sending copies to each hamlet on the Slope. Reading became a common habit, and even writing is no longer viewed as sin.
An orthodox minority still objects to the clatter of printing presses. They piously insist that literacy fosters memory, and thus attachment to the same conceits that got our spacefaring ancestors in trouble. Surely, they claim, we must cultivate detachment and forgetfulness in order to tread the Path of Redemption.
Perhaps they are right. But few these days seem in a hurry to follow glavers down that blessed trail. Not yet. First, we must prepare our souls.
And wisdom, the New Sages declare, can be nurtured from the pages of a book.
from Forging the Peace, a Historical Meditation-Umble,
by Homer Auph-puthtwaoy
