David Brin - Heaven's Reach

For the record, I don’t think we live in a place like the wild, extravagant Uplift Universe. But it’s a fun realm to play in, between more serious stuff.

Pile on those marvels!

Hang on. There’s more to come.

I want to thank my insightful and outspoken prereaders, who scanned portions of this work in manuscript form — especially Stefan Jones, Steinn Sigurdsson, Ruben Krasnopolsky, Damien Sullivan, and Erich R. Schneider. Also helpful were Kevin Lenagh, Xavier Fan, Ray Reynolds, Ed Allen, Larry Fredrickson, Martyn Fogg, Doug McElwain, Joseph Trela, David and Joy Crisp, Carlo Gioja, Brad De Long, Lesley Mathieson, Sarah Milkovich, Gerrit Kirkwood, Anne Kelly, Anita Gould, Duncan Odom, Jim Panetta, Nancy Hayes, Robert Bolender, Kathleen Holland, Marcus Sarofim, Michael Tice, Pat Mannion, Greg Smith, Matthew Johnson, Kevin Conod, Paul Rothemund, Richard Mason, Will Smit, Grant Swenson, Roian Egnor, Jason M. Robertson, Micah Altman, Robert Hurt, Manoj Kasichainula, Andy Ashcroft, Scott Martin, and Jeffrey Slostad. Professors Joseph Miller and Gregory Benford made useful observations. Robert Qualkinbush collated the glossaries. The novel profited from insights and assistance from my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, along with Pat LoBrutto and Tom Dupree of Bantam Books.

Emerson’s last song comes from the finale of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Falstaff.

Some of the spectacles contained herein did not start in my own twisted imagination. The Fractal World, that tremendous structure made of huge fluffy spikes, presenting far more surface area (for windows) than any Dyson sphere, was described by Dr. David Criswell in a farseeing paper that can be found in Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, edited by Ben Finney and Erik Jones (University of California Press).

As usual, this tale would have been a far poorer thing without the wise and very human input of my wife, Dr. Cheryl Brigham.

And now … a lagniappe!

I did it once before, following the afterword to Earth. A little denouement — a story-after-the-story — for those of you who hung around all the way through my final remarks. It visits one of our characters a year or so after the Great Rupture, and attempts to tie off just a few (of many) loose ends.

Enjoy.

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.