The subterranean switching yard narrows again, walls converging with a rush. Ahead, the glowing line plunges into a resuming tunnel.
Emerson’s voice briefly falters as a flicker of memory intrudes. Suddenly he can recall another abrupt plunge … diving through a portal that opened into jet vacuum blankness … then falling as the universe converged on him from all sides to squeeze.…
And something else.
A row of pale blue eyes.
Old Ones …
But the song has a life of its own. Its momentum pours unstoppably from some cheerful corner of his mind, overcoming those brief, awful images, making him call out the next verse with a vigor of hoarse, throaty defiance.
“Low bridge, everybody down!
Low bridge! ’cause we’re comin’
to a town.
And you’ll always know your neighbor,
Always know your pal,
If you ever navigate along the Erie Canal.”
His companions lean away from the rushing walls. Their shoulders press together as the hole sweeps up to swallow them again.
PART THREE
ONCE A LENGTHY EPISODE of colonization finally comes to an end, subduction recycling is among the more commonly used methods for clearing waste products on a life world. Where natural cycles of plate tectonics provide a powerful indrawing force, the planet’s own hot convection processes can melt and remix elements that had been fashioned into tools and civilized implements. Materials that might otherwise prove poisonous or intrusive to new- rising species are thus removed from the fallow environment, as a world eases into the necessary dormant phase.
What happens to these refined materials, after they have been drawn in, depends on mantle processes peculiar to each planet. Certain convection systems turn the molten substance into high-purity ores. Some become lubricated by water seeps, stimulating the release of great liquid magma spills. Yet another result can be sudden expulsions of volcanic dust, which briefly coat the planet and can later be traced in the refractory-metal enrichment of thin sedimentary layers.
Each of these outcomes can result in perturbations of the local biosphere, and occasional episodes of extinction. However, the resulting enrichment fecundity usually proves beneficial enough to compensate, encouraging development of new presapient species.…
from A Galactographic Tutorial for Ignorant Wolfling Terrans, a special publication of the Library Institute of the Five Galaxies, year 42 EC, in partial satisfaction of the debt obligation of 35 EC
Hannes
SUESSI FELT NOSTALGIC ABOUT BEING HUMAN. NOW and then, he even wished he were still a man.
Not that he was ungrateful for the boon the Old Ones had granted him, in that strange place called the Fractal System, where aloof beings transformed his aged, failing body into something more durable. Without their gift, he would be stone dead — as cold as the giant corpses surrounding him in this dark ossuary of ships.
The ancient vessels seemed peaceful, in dignified repose. It was tempting to contemplate resting, letting eons pass without further care or strife.
But Suessi was much too busy to spare time for being dead.
“Hannes,” a voice crackled directly to his auditory nerve.
“Two minutes, Hannes. then I think-k we’ll be ready to resume cut-t-ting.”
Shafts of brilliant illumination speared through the watery blackness, casting bright ovals toward one curved hull segment of the Terran starship Streaker. Distorted silhouettes crisscrossed the spotlight beams — the long undulating shadows of workers clad in pressurized armor, their movements slow, cautious.
This was a more dangerous realm than hard vacuum.
Suessi did not have a larynx anymore, or lungs to blow air past one if he had. Yet he retained a voice.
“Standing by, Karkaett,” he transmitted, then listened as his words were rendered into groaning saser pulses. “Please keep the alignment steady. Don’t overshoot.”
One shadow among many turned toward him. Though cased in hard sheathing, the dolphin’s tail performed a twist turn with clear body-language meaning.
Trust me … do you have any choice?
Suessi laughed — a shuddering of his titanium rib cage that replaced the old, ape-style method of syncopated gasps. It wasn’t as satisfying, but then, the Old Ones did not seem to have much use for laughter.
Karkaett guided his team through final preparations while Suessi monitored. Unlike some others in Streaker’s crew, the engineering staff had grown more seasoned and confident with each passing year. In time, they might no longer need the encouragement — the supervising crutch — of a member of the patron race. When that day came, Hannes would be content to die.
I’ve seen too much. Lost too many friends. Someday, we’ll be captured by one of the eatee factions pursuing us. Or else, we’ll finally get a chance to turn ourselves in to some great Institute, only to learn Earth was lost while we fled helter-skelter across the universe. Either way, I don’t want to be around to see it.
The Old Ones can keep their Ifni-cursed immortality.
Suessi admired the way his well-trained team worked, setting up a specially designed cutting machine with cautious deliberation. His audio pickups tracked low mutterings—keeneenk chants, designed to help cetacean minds concentrate on explicit thoughts and tasks that their ancestral brains were never meant to take on. Engineering thoughts — the kind that some dolphin philosophers called the most painful price of uplift.
These surroundings did not help — a mountainous graveyard of long-dead starcraft, a ghostly clutter, buried in the kind of ocean chasm that dolphins traditionally associated with their most cryptic cults and mysteries. The dense water seemed to amplify each rattle of a tool. Every whir of a harness arm resonated queerly in the dense liquid environment.
Anglic might be the language of engineers, but dolphins preferred Trinary for punctuation — for moments of resolution and action. Karkaett’s voice conveyed confidence in a burst phrase of cetacean haiku.
The cutting tool lashed out, playing harsh fire toward the vessel that was their home and refuge … that had carried them through terrors unimaginable. Streaker’s hull — purchased by the Terragens Council from a third-hand ship dealer and converted for survey work — had been the pride of impoverished Earthclan, the first craft to set forth with a dolphin captain and mostly cetacean crew, on a mission to check the veracity of the billion-year-old Great Library of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies.
Now the captain was gone, along with a quarter of the crew. Their mission had turned into a calamity for both Earthclan and the Five Galaxies. As for Streaker’s hull — once so shiny, despite her age — it now lay coated by a mantle of material so black the abyssal waters seemed clear by comparison. A substance that drank photons and weighed the ship down.
Oh, the things we’ve put you through, dear thing.
