David Brin - Heaven's Reach

It’s a good thing we chims had to give up some of our sense of smell, trading the brain tissue for use in sapience, Harry thought as he sauntered along the Great Way — a mercantile avenue near the surface of Kazzkark, stretching from pole to pole, where bubble domes interrupted the rocky ceiling every few kilometers to show dazzling views of an inner spiral arm of Galaxy Five. This passage had been a ghostly corridor when he first came from training at Navigation Central. Now shops and restaurants filled every niche, casting an organic redolence so thick that any species would surely find something toxic in the air. Most visitors underwent thorough antiallergic treatments to prepare their immune systems before leaving quarantine. And even so, many walked the Great Way wearing respirators.

Harry found the experience heady. Every few meters, fresh aromatics assailed his nostrils and sinuses. Some provoked waves of delight or overpowering hunger. Others brought him to the brink of nausea.

It kind of reminds me of New York, he pondered, recalling that brief time on Earth.

His ears also verged on sensory overload. The dozen or so standard Galactic tongues came in countless dialects, depending on how each race made signals. Sound was the most frequent carrier of negotiation or gossip, and the buzzing, clicking, groaning clamor of several hundred species types made the Great Way seem to throb with physical waves of intrigue. Those preferring visual gestures made things worse by waving, dancing, or flashing message displays that Harry found at once both beautiful and intimidating.

Then there’s psi.

Stern rules limited how adepts might use the “vivid spectrum” indoors. Vigilant detectors caught the most egregious offenders. Still, Harry figured part of his tension came from a general background of psychic noise.

Fortunately, most neo-chims are deaf to psi stuff. Some of the same traits that made a good observer in E Space also kept him semi-immune to the cacophony of mental vibrations filling Kazzkark right now.

Of course many of the “restaurants” were actually shielded sites of rendezvous, where informal meetings could take place, sometimes between star clans registered as enemies under edicts of the Institute for Civilized Warfare. Harry glimpsed a haughty, lizardlike Soro, accompanied by a minimal retinue of Pila and Paha clients, slip into a shrouded establishment whose proprietor at once turned off the flashing “Available” sign … but left the door ajar, as if expecting one more customer.

It might have been interesting to stand around and see who entered next to parley with the Soro matriarch, but Harry spotted at least a dozen loiterers who were already doing that very thing, pretending to read info-plaques or sample wares from street vendors, while always keeping clear line of sight to the dimmed entranceway.

Harry recalled the clumsy effort of the hoon inspector to probe him about E Space. As trust in the Institutes unraveled, everyone seemed eager for supplementary data, perhaps hoping a little extra might make a crucial difference.

He couldn’t afford to be mistaken for another spy. Especially not in uniform. Some of the other great services might be showing signs of strain, losing their trustworthiness and professionalism, but Navigation had an unsullied reputation to uphold.

Passing a busy intersection, Harry glimpsed a pair of racoonish Synthian traders, whose folk had a known affinity for Terran art and culture. They were too far away to make eye contact, but he was distracted by the sight and moments later carelessly bumped into the bristly, crouched form of a Xatinni.

Oh, hell, he thought as the ocelot face whirled toward him with a twist of sour hatred. Wasting no time, Harry ducked his head and crossed both arms before him in the stance of a repentant client, backing away as the creature launched into a tirade, berating him in shrill patronizing tonal clefts of GalFour.

“To explain this insolent interruption! To abase thyself and apologize with groveling sincerity! To mark this affront on the long list of debts accumulated by your clan of worthless—”

Not a great power, the Xatinni routinely picked on Earthlings for the oldest reason of bullies anywhere — because they could.

“To report in three miduras at my apartment for further rebukes, at the following address! Forty-seven by fifty-two Corridor of the—”

Fortunately, at that moment a bulky Vriiilh came gallumping down the avenue, grunting ritual apologies to all who had to scoot aside before the amiable behemoth’s two-meter footsteps. The Xatinni fell back with an angry yowl as the Vriiilh pushed between them.

Harry took advantage of the interruption to escape by melting through the crowd.

So long, pussycat, he thought, briefly wishing he could psi cast an insult as he fled. Instead of shameful abasement, he would much rather have smacked the Xatinni across the kisser — and maybe removed a few excess limbs to improve the eatee’s aerodynamics. I hope we meet again sometime, in a dark alley with no one watching.

Alas, self-control was the first criterion looked for by the Terragens Council, before letting any neo-chim head unsupervised into the cosmos at large. Small and weak, Earthclan could not afford incidents.

Yeah … and a fat lotta good that policy did us in the long run.

They gave dolphins a starship of their own, and look what the clever fishies went and did. They stirred up the worst crisis in Ifni-knows-how-many millions of years.

If the honest truth be told, it made Harry feel just a little jealous.

Beyond those coming to Kazzkark on official business, the streets and warrens supported a drifting population of others — refugees from places disrupted by the growing chaos, plus opportunists, altruists, and mystics.

The lattermost seemed especially plentiful, these days.

On most worlds, matters of philosophy or religion were discussed at a languid pace, with arguments spanning slow generations and even being passed from a patron race to the clients of its clients, over the course of aeons. But here and now, Harry detected something frenetic about the speeches being given by missionaries who had set up shop beneath Dome Sixty-Seven. While clusters and nebulae shimmered overhead, envoys of the best-known denominations offered ancient wisdom from perfumed pavilions — among them the Inheritors, the Awaiters, the Transcenders … and the Abdicators, showing no apparent sign of fragmentation as red-robed acolytes from a dozen species hectored passersby with their orthodox interpretation of the Progenitors’ Will.

Harry knew there were many aspects of Galactic Civilization he would never understand, no matter how long or hard he tried. For instance, how could great alliances of sapient races feud for whole epochs over minute differences in dogma?

He wasn’t alone in this confusion. Many of Earth’s greatest minds stumbled over such issues as whether the fabled First Race began the cycle of Uplift two billion years ago as a manifestation of predetermined physical law — or as an emergent property of self-organizing systems in a pseudovolitionary universe. All Harry ever figured out was that most disputes revolved around how oxy-life became sapient, and what its ultimate destiny might be as the cosmos evolved.

“Not exactly worth killing anybody over,” he snorted. “Or gettin’ killed, for that matter.”

Then again, humans could hardly claim complete innocence. They had slaughtered countless numbers of their own kind over differences even more petty and obscure during Earth’s long dark isolation before Contact. Before bringing light to Harry’s kind.

“Now this is new,” he mused, pausing at the far end of the dome.

Beyond the glossy pavilions of the main sects, an aisle had opened featuring proselytes of a shabbier sort, preaching from curtained alcoves and stony niches, or even wandering the open Way, proclaiming unconventional beliefs.