took turns sifting the marsh for Buyur relics missed by the patient mulc beast. Now, with rainstorms due any day, conditions were miserable for exploring. The muddy channels were shallow, yet the danger of a flash flood was very real.
Nelo faced the elderly woman who sat in a wheelchair near the bow, peering past obscuring trees with a rewq over her eyes.
“The crew ain’t happy, Sage Foo,” he told her. “They’d rather we waited till it’s safe.”
Ariana Foo answered without turning from her search. “Oh, what a great idea. Four months or more we’d sit around while the swamp fills, channels shift, and the thing we seek gets buried in muck. Of course, by then the information would be too late to do any good.”
Nelo shrugged. The woman was retired now. She had no official powers. But as former High Sage for all humans on Jijo, Ariana had moral authority to ask anything she wanted — including having Nelo leave his beloved paper mill next to broad Dolo Dam, accompanying her on this absurd search.
Not that there was much to do at the mill, he knew. With commerce spoiled by panic over those wretched starships, no one seems interested in buying large orders.
“Now is the best time,” Ariana went on. “Late in dry season, with water levels low, and the foliage drooping, we get maximum visibility.”
Nelo took her word. With most young men and women away on militia duties, it was mostly adolescents and old-timers who got drafted into the search party. Anyway, Nelo’s daughter had been among the first to find the Stranger from Space in this very region several months ago, during a routine gleaning trip. And he owed Ariana for bringing word about Sara and the boys — that they were all right, when last she heard. Sage Foo had spent time with Nelo’s daughter, accompanying Sara from Tarek Town to the Biblos Archive.
He felt another droplet strike his cheek … the tenth since they left the river, plunging into this endless slough. He held his hand under a murky sky and prayed the real downpours would hold off for a few more days.
Then let it come down! The lake is low. We need water pressure for the wheel, or else I’ll have to shut down the mill for lack of power.
His thoughts turned to business — the buying and gathering of recycled cloth from all six races. The pulping and sifting. The pressing, drying, and selling of fine sheets that his family had been known for ever since humans brought the blessing of paper to Jijo.
A blessing that some called a curse. That radical view now claimed support from simple villagers, panicked by the looming end of days—
A shout boomed from above.
“There!” A wiry young hoon perched high on the mast, pointing. “Hr-r … It must be the Stranger’s ship. I told you this had to be the place!”
Wyhuph-eihugo had accompanied Sara on that fateful gleaning trip — a duty required of all citizens. Lacking a male’s throat sac, she nevertheless umbled with some verve, proud of her navigation.
At last! Nelo thought. Now Ariana can make her sketches, and we can leave this awful place. The crisscrossing mulc cables made him nervous. Their boat’s obsidiantipped prow had no trouble slicing through the desiccated vines. Still it felt as if they were worming deeper into some fiendish trap.
Ariana muttered something. Nelo turned, blinking.
“What did you say?”
The old woman pointed ahead, her eyes glittering with curiosity.
“I don’t see any soot!”
“So?”
“The Stranger was burned. His clothes were ashen tatters. We thought his ship must have come down in flames — perhaps after battling other aliens high over Jijo. But look. Do you see any trace of conflagration?”
The boat worked around a final voow grove, revealing a rounded metal capsule on the other side, gleaming amid a nest of shattered branches. The sole opening resembled the splayed petals of a flower, rather than a door or hatch. The arrival of this intruder had cut a swathe of devastation stretching to the northwest. Several swamp hummocks were split by the straight gouge, only partly softened by regrown vegetation.
Nelo had some experience as a surveyor, so he helped take sightings to get the ship’s overall dimensions. It was small — no larger than this hoonish boat, in fact — certainly no majestic cruiser like the one that clove the sky over Dolo Town, sending its citizens into hysteria. The rounded flanks reminded Nelo of a natural teardrop, more than anything sapient-made.
Two pinpoints of moisture dotted his cheek and forehead. Another struck the back of his hand. In the distance, Nelo heard a sharp rumble of thunder.
“Hurry closer!” Ariana urged, flipping open her sketchpad.
Murmuring unhappily, the hoons leaned on their poles and oars to comply.
Nelo stared at the alien craft, but all he could think was dross. When Sixers went gleaning through Buyur sites, one aim was to seek items that might be useful for a time, in a home or workshop. But useful or not, everything eventually went into ribboned caskets to be sent on to the Great Midden. Thus colonists imagined they were helping cleanse Jijo — perhaps doing more good than harm to their adopted world.
“Ifni!” Nelo sighed under his breath, staring at the vehicle that brought the Stranger hurtling out of space. It might be tiny for a starship, but it looked hard as blazes to move by hand.
“We’ll be in for a hell of a job draggin’ this thing out of here, let alone gettin’ it down to sea.”
Again, off to the south, the sound of thunder boomed.
Ewasx
WE JOPHUR ARE TAUGHT THAT IT IS TERRIBLE TO BE traeki — a stack lacking any central self. Doomed to a splintered life of vagueness and blurry placidity.
ALL SING PRAISES to the mighty Oailie, who took over from the too-timid Poa, completing the final stages of our Uplift.
Those same Oailie who designed new master rings to focus and bind our natures.
Without rings like Me, how could our race ever have become great and feared among the Five Galaxies?
AND YET, even as I learn to integrate your many little selves into our new whole, I am struck by how vivid are these older drippings that I find lining our inner core! Drippings that date from before My fusion with your aged pile of rings. How lustrous clear these memories seem, despite their counterpointing harmonies. I confess, existence had intensity and verve when you/we were merely Asx.
PERHAPS this surprise comes because I/Myself am so young, only recently drawn from the side of our Ship Commander — from that great one’s very own ring-of-embryos.
Yes, that is a high heritage. So imagine the surprise of finding Myself in this situation! Designed for duties in the dominion caste, I am wedded, for pragmatic reasons, to a haphazard heap of rustic toruses, ill educated and filled with bizarre, primitive notions. I have been charged to make the best of things until some later time, when surgery-of-reconfiguration can be performed—
AH. THAT DRAWS A REACTION FROM SOME OF YOU? Our second ring of cognition, in particular, finds this notion disturbing.
Fear not, My rings! Accept these jolts of painful love soothing, to remind you of your place — which is not to question, only to serve. Be assured that the procedure I refer to is now quite advanced among the mighty Jophur. When a ring is removed for reassembly in a new stack, often as many as half of the other leftover components can be recovered and reused as well! Of course, most of you are elderly, and the priests may decide you carry other- race contaminations, preventing incorporation into new mounds. But accept this pledge. When the time comes, I, your beloved master ring, shall very likely make the transition in good health, and take fond memories of our association to My glorious new stack.
I know this fact will bring you all great satisfaction, contemplating it within our common core.
Lark
CATHEDRAL–LIKE STILLNESS FILLED THE BOO FOREST — a dense expanse of gray-green columns, towering to support the sky. Each majestic trunk had a girth like the carapace of a five-clawed qheuen. Some
