Civilization
[Denouement]
THE SEAS OF HURMUPHTA ARE SALTIER THAN Jijo’s.
The winds don’t blow steady, but in strangely rhythmic bursts, making it awkward and dangerous to sail a close tack.
That is, till you figure out the proper cadence. After that, you get a feel for the rolling tempo, sensing each gusty surge and tapering wane. With a light hand on the tiller, you can really crowd the breeze, filling the mains till you’ve heeled over with spars brushing the wave-tops!
The first time I did that with Dor-hinuf aboard, she hollered as if Death itself had come up from the deep, to personally roar a Chant of Claiming. By the time we got back to the new dock, soaked from head to toe, she was trembling so hard I figured I must have really gone too far.
Boy was I wrong! The moment we stepped through the door of our little seaside khuta, she grabbed me and we made love for three miduras straight! My spines hurt for several days after.
(Soon I realized, civilized hoons seldom experience the stimulated drives that come from exhilaration! Back on Jijo, that was part of daily life, and served to balance a hoon’s instinctive caution. But our starfaring relatives have such sedate lives, except for once-a-year estrus, they hardly ever think of sex! Fortunately, Dor-hinuf has taken to this new approach, the way an urs takes to lava.)
Alas, we seem to have less time for romantic trips together. Business is picking up, as word keeps spreading across the high plateau — where hoonish settlements huddled for a thousand years, confined to prim, orderly city streets, far from any sight of surf or tide. After all that time, I guess there’s a lot of pent-up frustration. Or maybe it has something to do with the way the Five Galaxies have been shaken up lately. Anyway, lots of people — especially the younger generation — seem willing to consider something new for a change. Something our Guthatsa patrons never taught us.
Groups arrive daily, flying down to our lodge on the deserted coast, emerging from hovercars to stare at the glistening lagoon, nervous to approach so much water, clearly mindful of rote lessons they learned when young — that oceans are dangerous.
Of course, any hoonish accountant also knows that risk can be justified, if benefits outweigh the potential cost.
It takes just one trip across the breezy bay to convince most of them.
Some things are worth a little jeopardy.
My father-in-law handles the business details. Twaphu-anuph resigned his position with the Migration Institute to run our little resort, meeting investors, arranging environmental permits, and leasing as much prime coastal land as possible, before other hoons catch on to its real value. He still considers the whole thing kind of crazy, and won’t step onto a sailboat himself. But each time the old fellow goes over the accounts I can hear him umbling happily.
His favorite song nowadays? “What shall we do with a drunken sailor”!
I guess it bothers me a little that neither the haunting images of Melville, nor the Jijoan sea poetry of Phwhoon-dau, have as much effect on Twaphu-anuph as a few bawdy Earthling ditties. The rafters resound when he gets to the crude part about shaving the drunkard’s belly with a rusty razor.
Who can figure?
I’m so busy these days — giving sailing lessons and reinventing nearly everything from scratch — that I have no time for literary pursuits. This journal of mine lies unopened for many jaduras at a stretch. I guess my childhood ambitions to be a famous writer will have to wait. Perhaps for another life.
In fact, I found a better way to change my fellow hoons. To bring them a little happiness. To change their reputation as pinched, dour bookkeepers. And perhaps help make them better neighbors.
Back on Jijo, all the other races liked hoons! I hope to see that come true here, as well. Among the star- lanes of civilization.
Anyway, the literary renaissance is already in good hands. Or rather, good eyestalks.
Huck gave in to half of the role assigned to her.
“Ill have babies,” she announced. “If you guys arrange for hoonish nannies to help raise ’em. After all, I was raised by hoons, and look how I came out!”
I would have answered this with a jibe in the old days. But without Pincer and Ur-ronn around, it just isn’t the same. Anyway, I’m a married man now. Soon to be a father. It’s time I learned some tact.
Huck may be resigned to staying pregnant, since she’s the only one who can bring a g’Kek race back to life in the Four Galaxies. But she absolutely refused the other half of the original plan — to live in secrecy and seclusion, hiding from the ancient enemies of her kind.
“Let ’em come!” she shouts, spinning her wheel rims and waving her eyes, as if ready to take on the whole Jophur Empire, and the others who helped extinguish her folk, all at the same time. I don’t know. Maybe it’s her growing sense of prominence, or the freedom of movement she feels racing along the smooth sidewalks of Hurmuphta City, or the students who attend her salons to study Terran and Jijoan literature. But she hardly ever comes down to the Cove anymore, and when she does, I just wind up listening to her go on for miduras at a stretch, saying little in response.
Maybe she’s right. Perhaps I am turning into just another dull old hoon.
Or else the problem is that g’Keks seldom compromise — least of all Huck. She doesn’t understand you’ve got to meet life halfway. For every change you manage to impose on the universe, you can expect to be transformed in return.
I brought gifts from Jijo to my spacefaring cousins — adventure and childhood. They, in turn, taught me what serenity can be found in home, hearth, and low, melodic rituals inherited from a misty past, before our race ever trod the road of Uplift or cared about distant stars.
Those stars are farther than they used to be. Ever since the Five Galaxies abruptly became four, half the transfer points and interspatial paths went unstable, and may remain so for the rest of our lifespans. Untold numbers of ships were lost, trade patterns disrupted, and worlds forced to rely on their own resources.
I guess this means it’ll be a while before we get a letter from Ur-ronn. I’m sure she’s having the time of her life, somewhere out there, consorting with engineers of all races, up to her long neck in pragmatic problems to solve.
Though urs aren’t a sentimental people, I do hope she remembers us from time to time.
All I can say about poor Pincer is that I miss him terribly.
Sometimes you just have to let go.
Death has always been the one great, hopelessly impassable gulf. Now there is another. When Galaxy Four finally ripped loose, it seems every sapient being felt it happen, at some deep, organic level. Even on a planet’s surface, it staggered many folks. For days, people walked around kind of numb.
Scientists think the recoil effects must’ve been far worse in Galaxy Four itself, but we’ll never know for sure, because now that entire giant wheel of stars lies beyond reach, forevermore. And with it, Jijo. My parents. Home.
There are consolations. It feels nice to imagine dolphins, swimming with abandon through the silky waters off Wuphon, playing tag with my father’s dross ship, then coming near shore each evening to discuss poetry by Loocen’s opal light.
Of course the Commons of Six Races can now tear up the Sacred Scrolls and stop hiding their faces from the sky. For the laws of the Civilization of Five Galaxies don’t apply to them any longer. Perhaps Jijo’s people have already dealt with the Jophur invaders. Or maybe they face even worse crises. Either way, the burden of guilt we
