For the time being, she must maintain the dignified presence of a Thennanin admiral.
Thennanin did not appreciate irony. And they never laughed.
Ewasx
YOU MIGHT AS WELL GET USED TO IT, MY RINGS.
The piercing sensations you feel are My fibrils of control, creeping down our shared inner core, bypassing the slow, old-fashioned, waxy trails, attaching and penetrating your many toroid bodies, bringing them into new order.
Now begins the lesson, when I teach you to be docile servants of something greater than yourselves. No longer a stack of ill-wed components, always quarreling, paralyzed with indecision. No more endless voting over what beliefs shall be held by a fragile, tentative i.
That was the way of our crude ancestor stacks, meditating loose, confederated thoughts in the odor-rich marshes of Jophekka World. Overlooked by other star clans, we seemed unpromising material for uplift. But the great, sluglike Poa saw potential in our pensive precursors, and began upraising those unlikely mounds.
Alas, after a million years, the Poa grew frustrated with our languid traeki natures.
“Design new rings for our clients,” they beseeched the clever Oailie, “to boost, guide, and drive them onward.”
The Oailie did not fail, so great was their mastery of genetic arts.
WHAT WAS THEIR TRANSFORMING GIFT?
New, ambitious rings.
Master rings.
LIKE ME.
Alvin
THIS IS A TEST. I’M TRYING OUT A BURNISH-NEW WAY of writing.
If you call this “writing”—where I talk out loud and watch sentences appear in midair above a little box I’ve been given.
Oh, it’s uttergloss all right. Last night, Huck used her new autoscribe to fill a room with words and glyphs in Gal-Three, GalEight, and every obscure dialect she knew, ordering translations back and forth until it seemed she was crowded on all sides by glowing symbols.
Our hosts gave us the machines to help tell our life stories, especially how the Six Races live together on the Slope. In return, the spinning voice promised a reward. Later, we’ll get to ask questions of the big chilly box.
Huck went delirious over the offer. Free access to a memory unit of the Great Library of the Five Galaxies! Why, it’s like telling Cortes he could have a map to the Lost Cities of Gold, or when the legendary hoonish hero Yuqwourphmin found a password to control the robot factories of Kurturn. My own nicknamesake couldn’t have felt more awe, not even when the secrets of Vanamonde and the Mad Mind were revealed in all their fearsome glory.
Unlike Huck, though, I view the prospect with dark worry. Like a detective in some old-time Earth storybook, I gotta ask—where’s the catch?
Will they break their promise, once we’ve shared all we know?
Maybe they’ll fake the answers. (How could we tell?)
Or perhaps they’ll let us talk to the cube all we want, because they figure the knowledge won’t do us any good, since we’re never going home again.
On the other hand, let’s say it’s all open and sincere. Say we do get a chance to pose questions to the Library unit, that storehouse of wisdom collected by a billion-year-old civilization.
What on Jijo could we possibly have to say?
I’ve just spent a midura experimenting. Dictating text. Backing up and rewriting. The autoscribe sure is a lot more flexible than scratching away with a pencil and a ball of guarru gum for an eraser! Hand motions move chunks of text like solid objects. I don’t even have to speak aloud, but simply will the words, like that little tickle when you mutter under your breath so’s no one else can hear. I know it’s not true mind reading — the machine must be sensing muscle changes in my throat or something. I read about such things in The Black Jack Era and Luna City Hobo. But it’s unnerving anyway.
Like when I asked to see the little machine’s dictionary of Anglic synonyms! I always figured I had a good vocabulary, from memorizing the town’s copy of Roget’s Thesaurus! But it turns out that volume left out most of the Hindi and Arabic cognate grafts onto the English-Eurasian root-stock. This tiny box holds enough words to keep Huck and me humble … or me, at least.
My pals are in nearby rooms, reciting their own memoirs. I expect Huck will rattle off something fast-paced, lurid, and carelessly brilliant to satisfy our hosts. Ur-ronn will be meticulous and dry, while Pincer will get distracted telling breathless stories about sea monsters. I have a head start because my journal already holds the greater part of our personal story — how we four adventurers got to this place of weirdly curved corridors, far beneath the waves.
So I have time to worry about why the phuvnthus want to know about us.
It could just be curiosity. On the other hand, what if something we say here eventually winds up hurting our kinfolk, back on the Slope? I can hardly picture how. I mean, it’s not like we know any military secrets — except about the urrish cache that Uriel the Smith sent us underwater to retrieve. But the spinning voice already knows about that.
In my cheerier moments I envision the phuvnthus letting us take the treasure back, taking us home to Wuphon in their metal whale, so we seem to rise from the dead like the fabled crew of the Hukuph-tau … much to the surprise of Uriel, Urdonnol, and our parents, who must have given us up for lost.
Optimistic fantasies alternate with other scenes I can’t get out of my head, like something that happened right after the whale sub snatched Wuphon’s Dream out of its death plunge. I have this hazy picture of bug-eyed spiderthings stomping through the wreckage of our handmade vessel, jabbering weird ratchety speech, then jumping back in mortal terror at the sight of Ziz, the harmless little traeki five-stack given us by Tyug the Alchemist.
Streams of fire blasted poor Ziz to bits.
You got to wonder what anyone would go and do a mean thing like that for.
I might as well get to work.
How to begin my story?
Call me Alvin.…
No. Too hackneyed. How about this opening?
Alvin Hph-wayuo woke up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant …
Uh-uh. That’s hitting too close to home.
Maybe I should model my tale after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Here we are, castaways being held as cordial prisoners in an underwater world. Despite being female, Huck would insist she’s the heroic Ned Land character. Urronn would be Professor Aronnax, of course, which leaves either Pincer or me to be the comic fall guy, Conseil.
So when are we going to finally meet Nemo?
Hmm. That’s a disadvantage of this kind of writing, so effortless and easily corrected. It encourages running off at the mouth, when good old pencil and paper meant you had to actually think in advance what you were going to sa—
Wait a minute. What was that?
There it goes again. A faint booming sound … only louder this time. Closer.
I don’t think I like it. Not at all.
…
Ifni! This time it set the floor quivering.
The rumble reminds me of Guenn Volcano back home, belchin’ and groanin’, making everybody in Wuphon
