David Brin - Heaven's Reach

That one over there, prancing like a twelve-legged antelope — was it an abstraction distantly related to freedom? When a jagged-edged flying thing swooped down to chase it, Harry wondered if the hunter might be an intricate version of craving. Or was he typically trying to cram the complex and ineffable into simple niches, to satisfy the pattern-needs of his barely sapient mind?

Well, it is “human nature” to trivialize. To make stereotypes. To pretend you can eff the ineffable.

Local meme organisms were fascinating, but now and then something else appeared beneath his vantage point, demanding closer attention.

He could always tell an interloper. Outsiders moved awkwardly, as if their allaphorical shapes were clumsy costumes. Often, predatory memes would approach, sniffing for a savory conceptual meal, only to retreat quickly from the harsh taste of solid matter. Metal-hulled ships or organic life-forms. Intruders from some other province of reality, not pausing or staring, but hastening past the floating mountains to seek refuge in the Swiss cheese sky.

Harry welcomed these moments when he earned his pay. Speaking clearly, he would describe each newcomer for his partner, the station computer, which lay below his feet, shielded against the hostile effects of E Space. At headquarters, experts would decipher his eyewitness account to determine what kind of vessel had made transit before Harry’s eyes, and where it may have been bound. Meanwhile, he and the computer collaborated to make the best guess they could.

“Onboard memory files are familiar with this pattern,” said the floating M at one point, after Harry described an especially bizarre newcomer, rushing by atop myriad stiff, glimmering stalks, like a striding sunburst. “It appears to be a member of the Quantum Order of Sapiency.”

“Really?” Harry pressed against the glass. The object looked as fragile as a feathery zilm spore, carried on the wind to far corners of Horst. Delicate stems kept breaking off and vaporizing as the thing — (was it a ship? or a single being?) — hurried toward a sky hole that lay near the horizon.

“I’ve never seen a quant anywhere near that big before. What’s it doing here? I thought they didn’t like E Space.”

“Try to imagine how you organics feel about hard vacuum — you shrivel and perish unless surrounded by layers of protective technology. So the fluctuating subjectivities of this domain imperil some other kinds of life. E Space is even more distasteful to quantum beings than it is to members of the Machine Order.”

“Hm. Then why’s it here?”

“I am at a loss to speculate what urgent errand impels it. Most quantum beings reside in the foam interstices of the cosmos, out of sight from other life variants — like bacteria on your homeworld who live in solid rock. Explicit contact with the Quantum Order was only established by experts of the Library Institute less than a hundred million years ago.

“What I can suggest is that you should politely avert your gaze, Scout Harms. The quant is clearly having difficulties. You needn’t add to its troubles by staring.”

Harry winced at the reminder. “Oh, right. The Uncertainty Principle!” He turned away. His job in E Space was to watch, but you could do harm by watching too closely.

Anyway, his real task was to look for less exotic interlopers.

Most of his ship sightings were of hydrogen breathers, easily identified because their balloonlike vessels looked the same in any continuum. For some reason, members of that order liked taking shortcuts through E Space on their way from one Jupiter-type world to another, even though A and B levels were more efficient, and transfer points much faster.

On those rare occasions when Harry spotted anyone from his own order of oxygen breathers — the great and mighty Civilization of Five Galaxies — none of them approached his sentry position, defending a proscribed route to a forbidden place.

No wonder they hired a low-class chim for this job. Even criminals, trying to sneak into a fallow zone, would be fools to use allaphor space as a back door.

As I’m a fool, to be stuck guarding it.

Still, it beat the dry, windy steppes of Horst.

Anything was better than Horst.

He and his parents were the only members of their species on the planet, which meant the long process of learning speech, laborious for young neochimps, came doubly hard. With Marko and Felicity distracted by research, Harry had to practice with wild-eyed Probsher kids, who mocked him for his long, furry arms and early stammer. With painted faces and short tempers, they showed none of the dignified patience he’d been taught to expect from the elder race. By the time he learned how different humans were on Horst, it didn’t matter. He vowed to leave, not only Horst, but Terragens society. To seek the strange and unfamiliar.

Years later, Harry realized a similar ambition must have driven his parents. In youthful anger, he had spurned their pleas for patience, their awkward affections, even their parting blessing.

Still, regret was just a veneer, forgiveness a civilized abstraction, devoid of pang or poignancy.

Other memories still had power to make his veins tense with emotion. Growing up listening to botbian night wolves howl across dry lakes under patch-gilt moons. Or holding his knees by firelight while a Probsher shaman chanted eerie tales — fables that Marko and Felicity avidly studied as venerable folk legends, although these tribes had roamed Horst for less than six generations.

His own sapient race wasn’t much older! Only a few centuries had passed since human beings began genetic meddling in chimpanzee stock.

Who gave them the right?

No permission was needed. Galactics had followed the same pattern for aeons — each “generation” of starfarers spawning the next in a rippling bootstrap effect called Uplift.

On the whole, humans were better masters than most … and he would rather be sapient than not.

No. What drove him away from Earthclan was not resentment but a kind of detachment. The mayfly yammerings of Probsher mystics mattered no more or less than the desperate moves of the Terragens Council, against the grinding forces of an overwhelming universe. One might as well compare sparks rising from a campfire to the stars wheeling by overhead. They looked similar, at a glance. But what did another incandescent cinder really matter on the grand scale of things?

Did the cosmos care if humans or chims survived?

Even at university this notion threaded his thoughts. Harry’s natural links elongated till they parted one by one. All that remained was a nebulous desire to seek out something lasting. Something that deserved to last.

Joining Wer’Q’quinn and the Navigation Institute, he found something enduring, a decision he never regretted.

Still, it puzzled Harry years later that his dreams kept returning to the desolate world of his youth. Horst ribbed his memory. Its wind in the dry grass. Smells that assailed your nose, sinking claws into your sinuses. And images the shaman painted in your mind, like arcs of multicolored sand, falling in place to convey deer, or loper-beast, or spearhunter.

Even as an official of Galactic civilization, representing the oxygen order on a weird plane of reality where allaphors shimmered in each window like reject Dali images, Harry still saw funnels of sparkling heat rising from smoky campfires, vainly seeking union with aloof stars.

NOT THAT WAY!” LING SHOUTED.

Her cry made Lark stumble to a halt, a few meters down a new corridor.

“But I’m sure this is the best route back to our nest.” Lark pointed along a dim, curved aisle, meandering between gray ceramic walls. Strong odors wafted from each twisty, branching passageway aboard the mazelike Jophur ship. This one beckoned with distinct flavors of GREEN and SANCTUARY.