David Brin - Heaven's Reach

EVER SINCE WE BRAVE VOLUNTEERS JOINED THE Earthlings on their forlorn quest, I’ve compared it to our earlier trip aboard a handmade submarine — a little summer outing that wound up taking four settler kids all the way to the bottom of the sea, and from there to the stars.

Of course our little Wuphon’s Dream was just a hollowed-out log with a glass nose, hardly big enough for an urs, a hoon, a qheuen, and a g’Kek to squeeze inside, providing we took turns breathing. In contrast, Streaker is so roomy you could fit all the khutas of Port Wuphon inside. It has comforts I never imagined, even after a youth spent reading crates of Terran novels about starfaring days.

And yet, the trips have similarities.

In each case we took a willing chance, plunging into a lightless abyss to face unexpected wonders.

On both expeditions, my friends and I had different assigned tasks.

And sure enough, aboard Streaker, just like Wuphon’s Dream, I got the worst job to do.

Keeper of Animals. That’s me.

Ur-ronn gets to follow her passion for machinery, helping Suessi’s gang down in engineering.

Pincer runs errands for the bridge crew. He’s having a grand time dashing amphibiously from dry to watery parts of the ship and back again, with flashing claws and typical qheuen enthusiasm.

Huck spins her wheels happily. She gets to play spy, waving all four eyestalks to taunt the Jophur captives in their cell below, enraging them with the sight of a living g’Kek, provoking them into revealing more information than they would by other means. The nyah-nyah school of interrogation, I call it.

All three of them get to interact with the dolphin crew, helping in ways that matter. Even if we all get blown to bits soon, at least Huck and the others got to do interesting things.

But me? I’m stuck in the hold, keeping herd on twenty bleating glavers and a pair of cranky noors, with the combined conversational abilities of a qheuen larva.

According to the Niss Machine, one of these noors ought to be quite a conversationalist. It’s not a noor, you see, but a tytlal — from a starfaring race that look like noor, smell like noor, and have the same knavish temperament. Somehow they hid among us on Jijo all these years without ever being recognized. A seventh race of sooners — illegal settlers — who benefited from our Commons, but never bothered to formally join.

That’d take some cleverness, I admit. But Mudfoot acts just like my pet noor, Huphu. Lounging around, eating anything that isn’t bolted down, and licking his sleek black pelt all the way to the discolored paws that give him his name. Everyone thinks I’m an expert at coaxing noor, just because hoonish mariners hire some of them to help on our sailing ships, scooting deftly along the spars and rigging, working for umbles and sourballs. But I say that only shows how easy it is to fool a hoon. A thousand years. That’s how long we worked with the nimble creatures, and we never caught on.

Now they’re counting on me to get Mudfoot to speak once more.

Yeah, right. And this journal of mine is going to be published when we reach Earth, and win a Sheldon Award.

• • •

Huphu and Mudfoot still glare at each other, hissing jealously — not unusual for two noor who haven’t worked out their mutual status yet. Meanwhile, I try to keep my other wards comfortable.

We never saw very many glavers in my hometown, down along the Slope’s volcanic coast. They love rooting through garbage piles and rotten logs for tasty bugs, but such things are in short supply aboard Streaker.

Dr. Baskin worked out an exchange with Uriel the Smith, swapping this little herd for several dozen crew members who stayed behind to form a new dolphin colony on Jijo. It hardly seems an even trade. Watching the glavers mewl and jostle in a corner of the hold, I can scarcely picture their ancestors as mighty starfarers. Those bulging, chameleon eyes — swiveling independently, searching the sterile metal hold for crawling things — hold no trace of sapient light. According to Jijo’s Sacred Scrolls, that makes the opal-skinned quadrupeds sacred beings. They’ve attained the highest goal of any sooner race — reaching simplicity by crossing the Path of Redemption.

Renewed, cleansed of ancestral sin, they face the universe with reborn innocence, ready for a fresh start. Or so the sages say.

Forgive me for being unimpressed. You see, I have to clean up after the smelly things. If some patron race ever takes on the honored task of reuplifting glavers, they had better make housebreaking their first priority.

At first sight, you wouldn’t think the filthy things had much in common with fastidious noor. But they both seem to like it when I puff out my throat sac and give a low, booming umble-song. Ever since my adult verte-broids erupted, I’ve acquired a deep resonance that I’m rather proud of. It helps keep the critters calm whenever Streaker makes a sudden maneuver and her gravity fields waver.

I try not to think about where the ship is right now, tearing along at incredible speed, diving through the flames of a giant star.

Fortunately, I can umble while editing and updating my diary on a little teacher-scribe device that Dr. Baskin provided. By now I’m used to working with letters that float before me, instead of lying fixed on an ink-stained page. It’s convenient to be able to reach into my work, shifting and nudging sentences by hand or voice command. Still, I wish the machine would stop trying to fix my grammar and syntax! I may not be human, but I’m one of Jijo’s best experts on the Anglic language, and I don’t need a smart-aleck computer telling me my dialect’s “archaic.” If my journal ever gets published on a civilized world, I’m sure my colonial style will enhance its charm, like the old-time appeal of works by Defoe and Swift.

It grows harder to stave off frustration, knowing my friends are in the thick of things, and me stuck below, staring at blank walls, with just dumb beasts for company. I know, by doing this I freed a member of Streaker’s understaffed crew to do important work. Still, it sometimes feels like the bulkheads are closing in.

“Who do you think you’re looking at?” I snapped, when I caught Mudfoot glancing alternately at me and the floating lines of my journal. “You want to read it?”

I swiveled the autoscribe so hovering words swarmed toward the sleek creature.

“If you tytlal are so brainy, maybe you know where I should take the story next. Hrm?”

Mudfoot peered at the glyph symbols. His expression made my spines frickle. I wondered.

Just how much memory do they retain — this secret clan of supernoor? When did the Tymbrimi plant a clandestine colony of their clients on Jijo? It must have been before we boons came. Perhaps they predate even the g’Kek.

I had heard many legends of the clever Tymbrimi, of course — a spacefaring race widely disliked by conservative Galactics for their scamplike natures. The same trait made them befriend Earthlings, when that naive clan first stumbled onto the star lanes. Ignorance can be fatal in this dangerous universe, and Terra might have quickly suffered the typical Wolflings’ Fate, if not for Tymbrimi sponsorship and advice.

Only now crisis convulses the Five Galaxies. Mighty alliances are wreaking vengeance for past grievances. Earth and her friends may have reached the end of their luck, after all.

Even before meeting humans, the Tymbrimi must have known a day might come when all their enemies would converge against them. They must have been tempted to stash a small population group in some secluded place, before war, accident, or betrayal extinguished their main racial stock.

Did they consider taking the sooners’ path?

I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read, it seems unlikely that their natures would ever let Tymbrimi settle down to quiet pastoral lives on a hick world like Jijo. Humans barely accomplished it, and they are much more down to earth.