For the first time since they met, Ling’s eyes seemed to concede that she was dealing with an equal.
Asx
CALM DOWN, MY RINGS. NO ONE CAN FORCE YOU to stroke wax against your will.
As traeki we are each of us sovereign, free not to recall intolerable memories before we are ready.
Let the wax cool a little longer—a majority of rings demands—before we dare look again.
Let the most recent terror wait.
But our second cognition ring demurs. It insists — we/i should delay no longer confronting the dread news about Jophur, our terrible cousins, arriving on Jijo.
Our second ring of cognition reminds us of the Quandary of Solipsism — the riddle that provoked our traeki founders to flee the Five Galaxies.
Solipsism. The myth of the all-important self.
Most mortal sapient beings hold this conceit, at one level or another. An individual can perceive others by sight, touch, and empathy, yet still reckon them as mere figments or automatons. Caricatures, of little importance.
Under solipsism, the world exists for each solitary individualist.
Examined dispassionately, it seems an insane concept. Especially to a traeki, since none of us can thrive or think alone. Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success.
Madness seems essential in order to be “great.”
Terran sages knew this paradox from their long isolation. Ignorant and lonely, humans wallowed in one bizarre superstition after another, frantically trying concepts that no uplifted species would consider for even a dura. According to wolfling tales, humans wrestled endlessly with their own overpowering egos.
Some tried suppressing selfness, seeking detachment. Others subsumed personal ambition in favor of a greater whole — family, religion, or a leader.
Later they passed through a phase in which individualism was extolled as the highest virtue, teaching their young to inflate the ego beyond all natural limits or restraint. Works from this mad era of the self are found in the Biblos Archive, with righteous, preening rage flowing across every page.
Finally, Just before contact, there emerged another approach.
Some of their texts use the word maturity.
We traeki — newly uplifted from the pensive swamps of our homeworld — seemed safe from achieving greatness, no matter how many skills our patrons, the blessed Poa, inserted in our rings. Oh, we found it pleasant to merge in tall, wise stacks. To gather learned wax and travel the stars. But to our patrons’ frustration, we never found appealing the fractious rivalries that churn the Five Galaxies. Frantic aspiration and zeal always seemed pointless to our kind.
Then the Poa brought in experts. The Oailie.
The Oailie pitied our handicap. With great skill, they gave us tools for achievement. For greatness.
The Oailie gave us new rings—
Rings of power.
Rings of self-centered glory.
Rings that turned mere traeki into Jophur.
Too late, we and the Poa learned a lesson — that ambition comes at a cost.
We fled, did we not, my rings?
By a fluke, some traeki managed to shuck these Oailie “gifts,” and escape.
Only a few wax-crystal remembrance cells survive from those days. Memories laced with dread of what we were becoming.
At the time, our ancestors saw no choice but flight.
And yet … a pang of conscience trickles through our inner core.
Might there have been another way?
Might we have stayed and fought somehow to tame those awesome new rings? Futile as our forebears’ exodus now seems … was it also wrong?
Since joining the High Sages, this traeki Asx has pored over Terran books, studying their lonely, epochal struggle — a poignant campaign to control their own deeply solipsistic natures. A labor still under way when they emerged from Earth’s cradle to make contact with Galactic civilization.
The results of that Asx investigation remain inconclusive, yet i/we found tantalizing clues.
The fundamental ingredient, it seems, is courage.
Yes, my rings?
Very well then. A majority has been persuaded by the second ring of cognition.
We/i shall once again turn to the hot-new-dreadful waxy trail of recent memory.
Glistening cones stared down at the confused onlookers who remained, milling on the despoiled glade. From a balcony high a-flank the mountain ship, polished stacks of fatty rings dripped luxuriously as they regarded teeming savages below — we enthralled members of six exile races.
Shifting colors play across their plump toruses — shades of rapid disputation. Even at a great distance, i/we sense controversy raging among the mighty Jophur, as they quarrel among themselves. Debating our fate.
Events interrupt, even as our dribbling thought-streams converge.
Near.
At last we have come very near the recent. The present.
Can you sense it, my rings? The moment when our dreadful cousins finished arguing what to do about us? Amid the flashing rancor of their debate, there suddenly appeared forceful decisiveness. Those in command — powerful ring stacks whose authority is paramount — made their decree with stunning confidence.
Such assuredness! Such certainty! It washed over us, even from six arrowflights away.
Then something else poured from the mighty dreadnought.
Hatchet blades of infernal light.
Emerson
HE HAS NEVER BEEN ESPECIALLY FOND OF HOLES. This one both frightens and intrigues Emerson.
It is a strange journey, riding a wooden wagon behind a four-horse team, creaking along a conduit with dimpled walls, like some endless stretched intestine. The only illumination — a faintly glowing stripe — points straight ahead and behind, toward opposite horizons.
The duality feels like a sermon. After departing the hidden forest entrance, time became vague — the past blurry and the future obscure. Much like his life has been ever since regaining consciousness on this savage world, with a cavity in his head and a million dark spaces where memory should be.
Emerson can feel this place tugging associations deep within his battered skull. Correlations that scratch and howl beyond the barriers of his amnesia. Dire recollections lurk just out of reach. Alarming memories of abject, gibbering terror, that snap and sting whenever he seeks to retrieve them.
Almost as if, somehow, they were being guarded.
Strangely, this does not deter him from prodding at the barricades. He has spent much too long in the company of pain to hold it in awe any longer. Familiar with its quirks and ways, Emerson figures he now knows pain as well as he knows himself.
Better, in fact.
Like a quarry who turns at bay after growing bored with running — and then begins hunting its pursuer —
