“No need. The anchor is restored to its accustomed niche.”
“Then what is that?” Harry asked, pointing to the blue cable, still rising vertically toward the sky.
“The ropelike metaphor has become a semipermanent structure. We can leave it in place, if you wish.”
Harry peered up the stretched cord, rubbing his chin.
“Well, it might offer a way out of here if we have to beat a hasty retreat. Just note this position and let’s get going.”
The scout station set out, striding across the plain of fuzzy tubes. Meanwhile, Harry kept moving from window to window, peering nervously, wondering how this region’s famed lethality would first manifest itself.
Rearing up on all sides, at least a dozen of the slender, immensely tall towers loomed in the background. Some of them seemed to have square cross sections while others were rectangular or oval. He even thought he perceived a rigid formality to their placement, as if each stood positioned on a grid, some fixed distance apart.
Harry soon realized the strange blurriness was not due to any obstructing “haze” but to a flaw in vision itself. Sight appeared to be a short-range sense in this patch of E Space.
Great. All I need is partial blindness in a place where reality literally can sneak up on you and bite.
It should be a short march to where he last saw the Avenue. Awkwardly at first, Harry accelerated his station across the plain of fluffy growths, all bent and twined like tangled grass. These “plants” didn’t wave in a breeze, like the saw-weed of Horst. Still, they reminded him somehow of that endless steppe where dusty skies flared each dawn like a diffuse torch, painful to the eyes. The sort of country his ancestors had sniffed at disdainfully before returning to the trees, ages ago on Earth. Sensibly, they left scorching skies and cutting grass to their idiot cousins — primates who lacked even the good sense to escape the noonday sun, and later went on to become humans.
According to the Great Library, Horst had been a pleasant world once, with a rich, diverse ecosystem. But millennia ago — before Earthlings developed their own starships and stumbled on Galactic culture — something terrible had happened to quite a few planets in Tanith Sector. By the ancient Code of the Progenitors, natural ecosystems were sacrosanct, but the Civilization of Five Galaxies suffered lapses now and then. In the Fututhoon Episode, hundreds of worlds were ravaged by shortsighted colonization, leaving them barren wildernesses.
Predictably, there followed a reactionary swing toward manic zealotry. Different factions cast blame, demanding a return to the true path of the Progenitors.
But which true path? Several billion years would age the best-kept records. Noise crept in over the aeons, until little remained from the near mythical race that started it all. Speculation substituted for fact, dogma for evidence. Moderates struggled to soothe hostility among fanatical alliances whose overreaction to the Fututhoon chaos now promised a different kind of catastrophe.
Into this delicate situation Earthlings appeared, at first offering both distraction and comic relief with their wolfling antics. Ignorant, lacking social graces, humans and their clients irked some great star clans just by existing. Moreover, having uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins before Contact, humans had to be classified as “patrons,” with the right to lease colonies, jumping ahead of many older species.
“Let them prove themselves first on catastrophe planets,” went the consensus. If Earthlings showed competence at reviving sick biospheres, they might win better worlds later. So humans and their clients labored on Atlast, Garth, and even poor Horst, earning grudging respect as planet managers.
But there were costs.
A desert world can change you, Harry thought, recalling Horst and feeling abruptly sad for some reason. He went down to the galley, fixed a meal, and brought it back to the observation deck, eating slowly as the endless expanse of twisted, fuzzy tubes rolled by, still pondering that eerie sense of familiarity.
His thoughts drifted back to Kazzkark, where a tall proselyte accosted him with strange heresies. The weird Skiano with a parrot on its shoulder, who spoke of Earth as a sacred place — whose suffering offered salvation to the universe.
“Don’t you see the parallels? Just as Jesus and Ali and Reverend Feng had to he martyred in order for human souls to he saved, so the sins of all oxygen-breathing life-forms can only be washed clean by sacrificing something precious, innocent, and unique. That would be your own homeworld, my dear chimpanzee brother!”
It seemed a dubious honor, and Harry had said so, while eyeing possible escape routes through the crowd. But the Skiano seemed relentless, pushing its vodor apparatus, so each meaningful flash of its expressive eyes sent a translation booming in Harry’s face.
“For too long sapient beings have been transfixed by the past — by the legend of the Progenitors! — a mythology that offers deliverance to species, but nothing for the individual! Each race measures its progress along the ladder of Uplift — from client to patron, and then through noble retirement into the tender Embrace of Tides. But along the way, how many trillions of lives are sacrificed? Each one unique and precious. Each the temporal manifestation of an immortal soul!”
Harry knew the creature’s eye twinkle was the natural manner of Skiano speech. But it lent eerie passion each time the vodor pealed a ringing phrase.
“Think about your homeworld, oh, noble chimpanzee brother! Humans are wolflings who reached sapience without Uplift. Isn’t that a form of virgin birth? Despite humble origins, did not Earthlings burst on the scene amid blazing excitement and controversy, seeing things that had remained unseen? Saying things that heretofore no one dared say?
“Do you Terrans suffer now for your uniqueness? For the message that streams from that lovely blue world, even as it faces imminent crucifixion? A message of hope for all living things?”
Even as a crowd of onlookers gathered, the Skiano’s arms had raised skyward.
“Fear not for your loved ones, oh, child of Earth.
“True, they face fire and ruin in days to come. But their sacrifice will bring a new dawn to all sapients — yea, even those of other life orders! The false idols that have been raised to honor mythical progenitors will be smashed. The Embrace of Tides will be exposed as a false lure. All hearts will turn at last to a true true faith, where obedience is owed.
“Toward numinous Heaven — abode of the one eternal and all-loving God.”
In response, the bright-feathered parrot flapped its wings and squawked “Amen!”
Many onlookers glowered upon hearing the Progenitors called “mythical.” Harry felt uncomfortable as the visible focus of the proselyte’s attention. If this kept up, there could be martyrs, all right! Only the august reputation of Skianos in general seemed to hold some of the crowd back.
In order to calm the situation, Harry wound up reluctantly accepting a mission from the Skiano, agreeing to be a message bearer … in the unlikely event that his next expedition brought him in contact with an angel of the Lord.
It was about an hour later — subjective ship time — that a blue M popped into place a little to his left.
“Monitor mode engaged, Captain Harms,” the slightly prissy voice announced. “I take pleasure to announce that the Avenue is coming into range. It can be observed through the forward quadrant.”
Harry stood up.
“Where? I don’t …”
Then he saw it, and exhaled a sigh. There, emerging out of the strange haziness, lay a shining ribbon of speckled light. The Avenue twisted across the foreground like a giant serpent, emerging from the murk on his left and vanishing in obscurity to his right. In a way, it reminded Harry of the undulating “sea monster” he had witnessed during his last survey trip, near the banana-peel mesa. Only that had been just a meme creature — little more than an extravagant idea, an embodied notion — while this was something else entirely.
The Avenue did not conform to the allaphorical rules of E Space.
Strictly speaking, it consisted of everything that was not E Space.
Because of that, cameras might perceive it. The tech people at NavInst had loaded his vessel with sensor packages to place at intervals along the shining tube, then retrieve later on his way back to base. Ideally, the data might help Wer’Q’quinn’s people foretell hyperspatial changes during the current crisis.
He pressed a button and felt a small tremor as the first package deployed.
Now, should he turn left, and start laying more instruments in that direction? Or right? There seemed no reason to choose one way over the other.
