XII. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
There is a word we are asked not to say too often. And to whisper, when we do.
The traeki ask this of us, out of courtesy, respect, and superstition.
The word is a name — with just two syllables — one they fear ever to hear again.
A name they once called themselves.
A name presumably still used by their cousins, out on the star-lanes or the Five Galaxies.
Cousins who are mighty, terrifying, resolute, pitiless, and single-minded.
How different that description seems to make our own sept of ringed ones, from those who still roam the cosmos, like gods. Those Jophur.
Of all the races who came to Jijo in sneakships, some, like qheuens and humans, were obscure and almost unknown in the Five Galaxies. Others, like g’Keks and glavers, had reputations of modest extant, among those needing their specialised skills. Hoon and urs had made a moderate impression, so much that Earthlings knew of them before landing, and worried.
But it is said that every oxygen-breathing, starfaring clan is familiar with the shape of stacked rings, piled high, ominous and powerful.
When the traeki sneakship came, the g’Kek took one look at the newcomers and went into hiding for several generations, cowering in fright until, at last, they realised — these were different rings.
When qheuen settlers saw them already here, they very nearly left again, without unloading or even landing their sneakship.
How came our beloved friends to have such a reputation to live down? How came they to be so different from those who still fly in space, using that awful name?
Asx
Either the invaders are trying to confuse us, or else there is something strange about them.
At first, their powers and knowledge appeared as one might expect — so far above us that we seem as brutish beasts. Dared we contrast our own meager wisdom, our simple ways, against their magnificent, unstoppable machines, their healing arts, and especially the erudition of their piercing questions about Jijoan life? Erudition showing the vast sweep and depth of records at their command, surely copied from the final survey of this world, a million years ago. Yet…
They seem to know nothing about lorniks or zookirs.
They cannot hide their excitement, upon measuring specimen glavers, as if they have made a great discovery.
They make puzzling, nonsensical remarks concerning chimpanzees.
And now they want to know everything about mulc-spiders, asking naive questions that even this inexpert stack of manicolored rings could answer. Even if all of our/my toruses of sapiency were vlenned away, leaving nothing but instinct, memory, and momentum.
The sigil of the Great Library was missing from the bow of the great vessel that left their station here. We thought its absence a mere emblem of criminality. A negative symbol, denoting a kind of skulking shame.
Can it mean more than that? Much more?
Sara
Orom Engril’s shop on Pimmin Canal, it was but a short walk to the clinic where Pzora had taken the Stranger yesterday. Engril agreed to meet Sara there with Bloor the Portraitist. Time was short. Perhaps Sara’s idea was foolish or impractical, but there would be no better moment to broach it, and no better person to present it to than Ariana Foo.
A decision had to be made. So far, the omens weren’t good.
The emissaries from Dolo Village had gathered last night, in a tavern near the Urrish Quarter, to discuss what each of them had learned since the Hauph-woa docked. Sara showed a copy of the sages’ report, fresh from Engril’s copy shop, expecting it to shock the others. But by that evening even Pzora knew most of the story.
“I see three possibilities,” the stern-browed farmer Jop had said, nursing a mug of sour buttermilk. “First — the story’s an Egg-cursed lie. The ship really is from the great Institutes, we’re about to be judged as the Scrolls say, but the sages are spreading a pebble-in-my-hoof fable about bandits to justify musterin’ the militia, preparin’ for a fight.”
“That’s absurd!” Sara had complained.
“Oh yeah? Then why’ve all the units been called up? Humans drilling in every village. Urrish cavalry wheelin’ in all directions, and the hoons oilin’ their old catapults, as if they could shoot down.a starship by hurlin’ rocks.” He shook his head. “What if the sages’ve got some fantasy about resisting? It wouldn’t be the first time leaders were driven mad by an approaching end to their days of petty power.”
“But what of these sketches?” asked the scriven-dancer, Fakoon. The g’Kek touched one of Engril’s reproductions, portraying a pair of humans dressed in one-piece suits, staring brazenly at sights both new to them and yet somehow pathetic in their eyes.
Jop shrugged. “Ridiculous on the face of it. What would humans be doin’ out here? When our ancestors left Earth on an aged thirdhand tub, not a single human scientist understood its workings. The folks back home couldn’t have caught up with galactic standard tech for another ten thousand years.”
Sara watched Blade and the hoon captain react with surprise. It was no secret, what Jop had said about human technology at the time of exile, but they must find it hard to picture. On Jijo, Earthlings were the engineers, the ones most often with answers.
“And who would want to ferfetrate such a hoax?” Ulgor asked, lowering her conical head. Sara read tension in the urs’s body stance. Uh-oh, she thought.
Jop smiled. “Why, maybe some bunch that sees opportunity, amid the chaos, to besmirch our honor and have one last chance at revenge before Judgment Day.”
Human and urs faced each other, each grinning a bright display of teeth — which could be taken equivocally as either friendly or threatening. For once, Sara blessed the sickness that had caused nearly everyone’s rewq to curl up and hibernate. There would have been no ambiguity with symbionts to translate he meaning in Jop’s and Ulgor’s hearts.
At that moment, a squirt of pinkish steam jetted between the two — a swirling fume of cloying sweetness. Jop and Ulgor retreated from the cloud in opposite directions, covering their noses.
“Oops, i express repentance on our/my behalf. This pile’s digestive torus still retains, processes, deletes the richness of esteemed hoonish shipboard fare.”
Unperturbed, the captain of the Hauph-woa said — “How fortunate for you, Pzora. As to the subject at hand, we must still decide what advice to send back to Dolo Village and the settlements of the Upper Roney. So let me ask Jop… Hrrrm — what if we consider a simpler theory — there is no hoax by the honored sages, hrr?”
Jop still waved the air in front of his face, coughing. “That brings us to possibility number two-that we are being tested. The Day has come at last, but the noble Galactics are undecided what to do with us. Maybe the great Institutes hired human actors to play this role, offering us a chance to tip the scales one way through right action, or the other by choosing incorrectly. As for what advice we send upriver, I say we counsel that demolition should proceed according to the ancient plan!”
Blade, the young qheuen delegate, reared back on three legs, lifting his blue carapace, stammering and hissing so that his initial attempts at Anglic came out garbled. He switched to Galactic Two.
“Madness you betray! This (lunatic) thing, how can you say? Our mighty dam (glorious to see and smell) must fall? For what reason, if our (illicit) existence on Jijo he already known?”