for colorful wolfling invective.
“Laugh while you can, frog face! Take that, you overgrown slimeball! Moldy Jack cheese!” He laughed, half out of relief, and half because Zasusazu’s obsession seemed so silly.
Well, everyone who works for Wer’Q’quinn is more than a little weird, Harry thought, trying to feel charitable. Zasusazu’s not as bad as some. At least he likes a little surprise now and then.
Still, even after he exchanged reports with his replacement, then left Zasusazu in command over the realm of ideas, Harry wondered about his own reaction to being relieved. After all, this had been a wearying mission and he certainly deserved time off. Yet, despite the frustration, danger, and loneliness of E Space, it always came as a bit of a letdown for a mission to end. To head back home.
Home? Maybe the problem lay in that term.
He mused on the word, as if it were a conceptual creature, wandering the purple plain.
It can’t mean Horst, since I hated nearly every minute there. Or Earth, where I spent just a year, lonely and confused.
Can Kazzkark Base be “home,” if it lacks any others of my kind?
Does the Navigation Institute fill that role, now that I’ve given it the same loyalty others devote to kin and country?
Harry realized he didn’t really know how to define the word.
All the superficial landmarks and reference points had changed since he first set out from Kazzkark. Still, there was an underlying familiarity to the main route. He never worried about getting lost.
Harry wasn’t much surprised when the red-blue sky overhead gradually angled downward to meet “ground,” like a vast, descending wall. He took over from the autopilot. Gingerly, maneuvering by hand, he sent the station striding daintily through a convenient perforation in heaven.
Sara
THE HIGH SAGES TELL US THAT A SPECIAL KIND OF peace comes with resignation.
With letting go of life’s struggles.
With releasing hope.
Now, for the first time, Sara understood that ancient teaching as she watched Gillian Baskin decide whether to live or die.
No one doubted that the blond Terragens Agent had the right, duty, and wisdom to make that choice, for herself and everyone aboard. Not the dolphin crew, nor Hannes Suessi, nor the Niss Machine. Sara’s mute friend Emerson seemed to agree — though she wondered how much the crippled former engineer comprehended from those manic lights in the holo display, glimmering frantically near Izmunuti’s roiling flame.
Even the kids from Wuphon Port — Alvin, Huck, Urronn, and Pincer — accepted the commander’s authority. If Gillian thought it best to send Streaker diving toward an unripe t-point — in order to lure the enemy after them in an attempt to save Jijo — few aboard this battered ship would curse the decision. At least it would bring an end to ceaseless troubles.
We were resigned. I was at peace, and so was Dr. Baskin.
Only now things aren’t so simple anymore. She sees a possible alternative … and it’s painful as hell.
Sara found most of the crew’s activities confusing, in both the water-filled bridge and the dry Plotting Room nearby, where dolphins moved about on wheeled or six-legged contraptions.
Of course, Sara’s knowledge about Galactic technology was two centuries out of date, acquired by reading Jijo’s sparse collection of paper books. Despite that, her theoretical underpinnings worked surprisingly well when it came to grasping conditions in local spacetime. But she remained utterly dazed by the way crew members dealt with practical matters — conveying status reports along brain-linked cables, or sending each other info-packets consisting of tiny self-contained gobbets of semi-intelligent light. When dolphins spoke aloud, it was often in a terse argot of clicks and overlapping cries that had nothing in common with any standard Galactic tongue. Still, nothing awed Sara quite as much as when Dr. Baskin invited her along to watch an attempt to pry information from a captured unit of the Galactic Library.
The big cube lay in its own chamber, swaddled by a chill fog, one face emblazoned with a rayed-spiral sign that was notorious even to Jijo’s savage tribes. Within its twelve edges and six boundary planes lay an amassment of knowledge so huge that comparing it to the Biblos archive was like matching the great sea against a single teardrop.
Gillian Baskin approached the Library unit clothed in a ghostlike mantle of illusion, her slim human form cloaked behind the computer-generated image of a monstrous, leathery creature called a “Thennanin.” Observing from nearby shadows, Sara could only blink in apprehensive awe as the older woman used this uncanny ruse, speaking a guttural dialect of Galactic Six, making urgent inquiries about enigmatic creatures known as Zang.
The topic was not well received.
“Beware mixing the orders of life,” droned the cube’s frigid voice, in what Sara took to be a ritualized warning.
“Prudent contact is best achieved in the depths of the Majestic Bowl, where those who were born separated may safely combine.
“In that deep place, differences merge and unity is born.
“But here in black vacuum — where space is flat and light rays cut straight trails — young races should not readily mingle with other orders. In this outer realm, they behave like hostile gases. Fraternization can lead to conflagration.”
Impressed by the archive’s vatic tone, Sara pondered how its parabolic language resembled the Sacred Scrolls that devout folks read aloud on shobb holidays, back home on Jijo. The same obliqueness could be found in many other priestly works she had sampled in the Biblos archive, inherited from Earth’s long night of isolation. Those ancient tomes, differing in many ways, all shared that trait of allegorical obscurity.
In science — real science — there was always a way to improve a good question, making it harder to dismiss with prevarication. Nature might not give explicit answers right away, but you could tell when someone gave you the old runaround. In contrast, mystical ambiguity sounded grand and striking — it could send chills down your spine. But in the end it boiled down to evasion.
Ah, but ancient Earthlings — and early Jijoan sages — had an excuse. Ignorance. Vagueness and parables are only natural among people who know no other way. I just never expected it from the Galactic Library.
From an early age, Sara had dreamed of facing a unit like this one, posing all the riddles that baffled her, diving into clouds of distilled acumen collected by the great thinkers of a million races for over a billion years. Now she felt like Dorothy, betrayed by a charlatan in the chamber of Oz.
Oh, the knowledge must be there, all right — crammed in deep recesses of that chilled cube. But the Library wasn’t sharing readily, even to Dr. Baskin’s feigned persona as a warlord of a noble clan.
“Gr-tuthuph-manikhochesh, zangish torgh mph,” Gillian demanded, wearing the mask of a Thennanin admiral. “Manik-hophtupf, mph!”
A button in Sara’s ear translated the eccentric dialect.
“We understand that Zang, by nature, dislike surprise,” Dr. Baskin inquired. “Tell me how they typically react when one rude shock is followed by several more.”
This time, the Library was only slightly more forthcoming.
“The term Zang refers to just one subset of hydrogen-breathing forms — the variant encountered most often by oxy-life in open-space situations. The vast majority of hydro breathers seldom leave the comfort of dense circulation storms on their heavy worlds. …”
The lecture ran on, relating information Sara would normally find mesmerizing. But time was short. A crucial decision loomed in less than a midura.
Should Streaker continue her headlong drive for the resurrected transfer point? After lying dormant for half a
