David Brin - Brightness Reef

“Has anything been learned about the Stranger’s identity?” Lorrek asked while waiting.

“Not that I heard. Though I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.”

So far, even merchant traders had failed to recognize the unconscious man, implying he came quite a distance, perhaps from the coast settlements or even The Vale. No one in Dolo knew Melina, either, when she arrived long ago, with a letter of introduction and a baby on her hip. The Slope is a bigger place than we’re used to thinking.

The g’Kek sighed. “We must resolve soon whether it will better serve the patient to send him on, now that he’s stabilized, to be examined in—”

The cage shuddered, then dropped swiftly, cutting Lorrek off midsentence.

Ah well , Nelo thought, watching the car vanish steadily below moss-heavy branches. That’d explain the shouting. Sara wouldn’t want her pet sent to specialists in Tarek Town — even if she does complain about disrupted work.

Would she ever learn? The last time Sara’s nurturing instincts took over-succoring a convalescing bookbinder, in Biblos — it led to a love affair that ended in tragedy, scandal, and alienation from her guild. Nelo hoped the cycle wasn’t repeating.

Even now she could win it all back — both her position and marriage to a respected sage. True, I never liked that sour-pussed Taine, but he offers a more secure life than she’d have had with that frail lover of hers.

Anyway, she can still do math while making me some grandkids.

The little chimp plunged into the house first. Sara’s voice called from shadows, “Is that you, Prity? It’s been nothing but interruptions, but I think I finally whipped that integral. Why don’t you look it ov—”

There was a flat sound. A large bundle, landing on a table.

“Ah, the paper. Wonderful. Let’s see what the old man sent us this time.”

“Whatever the old man sends is good enough for one who don’t pay for it,” Nelo groused, shuffling while his eyes adapted. Through the gloom, he saw his daughter rise from a desk covered with notebooks and obscure symbols. Sara’s round face spread with a smile he always thought beautiful, though it might have helped if she’d taken more after her mother.

My looks and Melina’s wild brains. Not a blend I’d wish on a sweet lass.

“Father!” She hurried over to embrace him. “You gave me a start.”

Her black hair, cut like a boy’s, smelled of pencil dust and Pzora’s unguents.

“No doubt.” He frowned at the shambles of her quarters, worse now with a mattress by her desk. A jumble of texts, some bearing emblems of the great Biblos trove, lay amid notes on the “new direction” her research had taken, combining mathematics and linguistics, of all things.

Prity took one of Sara’s papers and perched on a stool. The chimp worked her lower lip, scanning one line of symbols at a time, silent collaborator in an arcane art Nelo would never understand.

He glanced toward the sleeping porch, where sunlight spread across a blanket, outlining two large feet.

“With both of the lads gone, I thought I’d come see how you’re doing.”

“Well, I’m all right, as you can see.” She gestured, as if the firetrap of a treehouse were a model of home-tending. “And I have Prity to take care of me. Why, I even recall to eat, most days!”

“Well…” he muttered. But Sara had taken his arm and was gently maneuvering him toward the door. “I’ll come visit tomorrow,” she vowed, “when Lorrek and old Stinky want me out of the way. We’ll go to Belonna’s for a nice meal, hm? I’ll even wear a clean gown.”

“Well-that’d be fine.” He paused. “Just remember, the elders will assign you help, if all this gets to be too much fuss and work.”

She nodded. “I know how this looks to you, Father. ‘Sara’s gone obsessive again,’ right? Well don’t worry. It’s not like that, this time. I just think this place is ideal for preventing infection of those horrid wounds—”

A low moan floated from the back of the house. Sara hesitated, then held up a hand. “I’ll be a moment.”

Nelo watched her hasten toward the shuttered porch, then he followed, drawn by curiosity.

Prity was wiping the injured stranger’s brow, while his dark hands trembled outward, as if warding off something deadly. Livid scars laced the man’s arms, and yellow fluid leaked through a gauze dressing near his left ear. The last time Nelo had seen the man, his skin was ashen with a pallor of approaching death. Now the eyes, with near-black irises, seemed to flame with awful passion.

Sara took the wounded man’s hands, speaking insistently, trying to soothe the abrupt fit. But the outsider clutched her wrists, clamping down so hard that Sara cried out. Nelo rushed to her side, plucking vainly at the strong fingers gripping his daughter.

“Ge— ge— ge— dow !” the stranger stammered, yanking Sara toward the floor.

At that moment, the sky cracked open.

A savage roar blew in the shutters, knocking pottery off kitchen shelves. The entire garu tree leaned , as if a great hand shoved it, knocking Nelo off his feet. With ringing ears, father and daughter clutched floor planks as the tree swung over so far, Nelo glimpsed the ground through a gaping window. More crockery spilled. Furniture slid toward the open door. Amid a storm of swirling paper, Prity shrieked, and the wide-eyed stranger howled in harmony.

Nelo managed one dumbfounded thought. Could it be another quake?

The garu whipped them back and forth like beads in a rattle, for a terrifying interval that felt like eternity-and must have lasted all of a minute.

Amazingly, the house clung to its cleft between two branches. Vibrations thrummed along the tree’s abused spine as the wail in Nelo’s skull abated at last, trailing to numbed silence. Reluctantly, he let Sara help him rise. Together, they joined the Stranger, who now clutched the windowsill with bone-white knuckles.

The forest was a maelstrom of dust and fluttering leaves. No trees had toppled, much to Nelo’s surprise. He sought the great dam. and found that it held, thank God. The paper mill appeared intact.

“Look!” Sara gasped, pointing above the forest toward the southeast sky.

A thin white trail showed where, high overhead, the air had been riven by something titanic and fast-something that still sparkled in the distance as they glimpsed it streak past the valley’s edge, toward the white-tipped peaks of the Rimmer Range. So high and so fleet it seemed — so arrogantly untimid — Nelo did not have to speak his dread aloud. The same fear lay in his daughter’s eyes.

The Stranger, still tracking the distant, dwindling glitter, let out a foreboding sigh. He seemed to share their anxiety, but in his weary face there was no hint of surprise.

Do you recall, my rings, how the Rothen ship circled thrice over the Glade of Gathering, blazing from its hot descent, chased by the roaring protest of a cloven sky? Stroke the wax-of-memory, and recollect how mighty the vessel seemed, halting dramatically, almost overhead.

Even the human tribe — our finest tech-crafters — stared in the round-eyed manner of their kind, as the great cylinder, vast as a glacier, settled down just ninety arrowflights away from the secret sacred hollow of the Holy Egg.

The people of the Six Races came before us, moaning dread.

“Oh, sages, shall we flee? Shall we hide, as the law demands?”

Indeed, the Scrolls so command us.

Conceal your tents, your fields, your works and very selves. For from the sky shall come your judgment and your scourge.