Jop explained, “True, we can’t hide our crime of colonization. But we can start the process of removing our works from this scarred world. By showing our good intentions, we’ll prove we merit leniency.
“What we must not do — and I fear our sages may be fooled — is offer any cooperation to these humans who pretend to be gene raiders. No bribes or service, since that, too, must be part of the test.”
Ulgor snorted doubt. “And fossivility three? What if they turn out to ve felons, after all?”
Jop had shrugged. “Then the same answer holds. Passive resistance. Fade into the countryside. Tear down our cities—”
“Burn the libraries,” Sara cut in, and Jop glanced her way, then nodded, curtly.
“Above all else. They are the roots of conceit. Our outrageous pretense at remaining civilized.” He waved around him at the old Buyur chamber that had been converted to a tavern, the soot-stained walls adorned with spears, shields, and other souvenirs of the bloody siege of Tarek Town. “Civilized!” Jop laughed again. “We’re like parrot-ticks, reciting verses we do not understand, pathetically miming the ways of the mighty. If pirates have indeed come, such vanities can only lessen our skill at burrowing down. Our only chance of survival will be to blend in with Jijo’s animals. To become the innocents that glavers are, in their blessed salvation. A salvation we might have achieved by now, had humans not foiled nature with our so-called Great Printing.
“So you see it does not matter,” he concluded with a shrug of finality. “Whether the visitors from space are noble chancellors from the Institute of Migration or the foulest criminals to prowl space. Either way, they are our judgment, come at last. Our sole option remains the same.”
Shaking her head in bemusement, Sara had commented, “You’re starting to sound like Lark.”
But Jop saw nothing ironic in that. His radicalization had intensified each day since the deafening, terrifying specter shook the tree farms, leaving trails of noise and heat that seared the sky.
“This is a bad thing,” Blade had said to Sara, later that evening, after Jop left to meet friends and fellow believers. “He seems sure of his reasoning and virtue — like a gray queen, unshakably convinced of her righteousness.”
“Self-righteousness is a plague that afflicts all races, except the traeki,” answered Fakoon, bowing two stalks toward Pzora. “Your folk are lucky to be spared the curse of egotism.”
The Dolo Village pharmacist had vented a soft sigh. “i/we urge you to make no simple assumptions, dear comrades. It is said that we, too, once possessed that talent, whose partner is the gift/curse of ambition. To excise it from our natures meant leaving behind some of our greatest treasures, our finest rings. It must not have been an easy thing to do.
“One of the things we/i fear most about restored contact with Galactics is something you other species and beings may. not understand-we fear temptation by an enticing offer.
“We fear an offer to be made whole.”
The clinic was a place of wheels — of g’Kek surgeons and patients on push-chairs. Many of the traeki pharmacists used skooter-wagons, pushing along faster than most could walk alone. No wonder the smooth planarity of city life appealed to two of the Six.
The Stranger’s room was on the fifth floor, looking out across the confluence of the rivers Roney and Bibur. Both steam ferries could be seen moored under screening arbors, now operating only at night, since vigilante groups had threatened to burn them if they budged by day. And this morning confirming word came down from the Glade. The High Sages, too, wanted no unnecessary signs of technology revealed by the Six. Destroy nothing. Conceal everything.
It only added to a growing sense of confusion among common folk. Was this Judgment Day or not? Sounds of raucous argument were heard in all parts of town. We need some goal to unite us, Sara thought, or we’ll start coming apart, skin and pelt, shell and spokes.
A traeki attendant motioned Sara through to the private chamber that had been given the Stranger. The dark man looked up when she entered, and smiled with clear delight to see her. He laid aside a pencil and pad of pale paper, on which Sara glimpsed the scene outside the window-one of the steam ferries, outlined with subtle countershading. Pinned to the wall was another sketch depicting the shipboard concert on the fantail of the Hauph-woa, capturing a gentle interlude amid the storm of crisis.
“Thank you for coming,” said an elderly, sallow-faced woman seated by the Stranger’s bedside, looking surprisingly like a g’Kek, in coloration, her startling blue eyes, and also the way a wheelchair framed her blanket-shrouded form. “We have been making progress, but there are some things I wanted to try only after you arrived.”
Sara still wondered why Ariana Foo, of all people, had taken an interest in the wounded man. With Lester Cambel and most other sages away, she was the highest ranking human savant left this side of Biblos. One might expect her to have more urgent things on her mind right now, than focusing her keen intellect on the problem of the Stranger’s origins.
The g’Kek doctor rolled forward, his voice mellow, with a cultured accent.
“First, Sara, please tell us — have you recalled anything further about our patient’s aspect, the day you pulled him from the swamp all burned and torn?”
She shook her head silently.
“His clothing, none was recovered?”
“There were a few scraps, mostly charred. We threw them out while treating his burns.”
“Did those scraps go to dross barrels?” he asked eagerly. “Those very barrels aboard the Hauph-woa right now?”
“There were no ornaments or buttons, if that’s what you’re looking for. The scraps went to recycling, which in the case of old cloth means going straight to my father’s pulping machine. Would they have helped?”
“Perhaps,” answered the old woman, clearly disappointed. “We try to consider all possibilities.”
The Stranger’s hands lay folded on his lap, and his eyes darted back and forth, focusing on faces as if he were fascinated not by words but the sounds themselves.
“Can” — she swallowed — “can you do anything for him?”
“That depends,” the doctor replied. “All burns and contusions are healing well. But our finest unguents are useless against structural damage. Our enigmatic guest has lost part of his left temporal lobe, as though it had been torn out by some horrid predator. I am sure you know this area is where you humans process speech.”
“Is there any chance—”
“Of recovering what he has lost?” A g’Kek shrug, twining two eyestalks, had never became fashionable among the other races. “If he were very young or female, there might be some transfer of speech facility to the right lobe. A few stroke victims do this. But the feat is rare for adult males, whose brain structures are more rigid, alas.”
The light in the dark Stranger’s eyes was deceptive. He smiled amiably, as if they were discussing the weather. His reliable cheerfulness tore at Sara’s heart.
“Nothing can be done?”
“Out in the Galaxy, perhaps.”
It was an old expression, almost habitual, whenever one hit the limits of the crude arts available on the Slope.
“But we can do no more. Not in this place.”
There was something in the doctor’s tone. All four eyes stared inward — as if a human being were studying his fingernails, waiting for someone else to say the unspoken. Sara looked to Ariana Foo, whose face was composed.
Too composed. Sara leaped on the doctor’s hanging implication.
“You can’t be serious.”
The sage briefly closed her eyes. When they reopened, there was a daring glitter.