Asx

My rings, you need not my weakly focused musings to inform you. Surely all of you must feel it, deep within each oily torus core?

The Egg. Slowly, as if rising from a deep torpor, it wakens!

Perhaps now the Commons will be filled once more with comity, with union of spirit, with the meshed resolve that once bound jointly our collective wills.

Oh, let it be so!

We are so fractured, so far from ready. So far from worthy.

Oh, let it be so.

Sara

The stacks were infested with polisher bees, and the music rooms thronged with hungry, biting parrot fleas, but the chimps on the maintenance staff were too busy to fumigate for minor pests.

While taking some air in the west atrium, Sara watched several of the hairy workers help a human librarian pack precious volumes into fleece-lined crates, then seal them with drippings from a big red candle. Gobbets of wax clung to the chimps’ matted fur, and they complained to each other with furtive hand signs.

This is not correct, Sara interpreted one worker’s flurry of gestures and husky grunts. In this intemperate haste, we are making regrettable errors.

The other replied, How true, my associate! This volume of Auden should not go in among Greek classics! We shall never get these books properly restacked when this crisis finally blows over, as surely it must.

Well, perhaps she was generous in her mental translation. Still, the chimps who labored in these hallowed halls were a special breed. Almost as special as Prity.

Overhead towered the atrium of the Hall of Literature, spanned by bridges and ramps that linked reading rooms and galleries, all lined with shelves groaning under the weight of books, absorbing sound while emitting a redolence of ink, paper, wisdom, and dusty time. Weeks of, frantic evacuation, hauling donkey-loads to faraway caves, had not made a dent in the hoard — still crammed with texts of every color and size.

Sage Plovov called this hall — dedicated to legend, magic, and make-believe — the House of Lies. Yet Sara always felt this place less burdened by the supremacy of the past than in those nearby structures dedicated to science. After all, what could Jijo’s savages ever add to the mountain of facts brought here by their godlike ancestors? A mountain said to be like a sand grain next to the Great Galactic Library. But the tales in this hall feared no refutal by ancient authority. Good or bad, great or forgettable, no work of literature was ever provably “false.”

Plovov said — “It’s easy to be original when you don’t have to care whether you’re telling the truth. Magic and an arise from an egomaniac’s insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.”

Of course, Sara agreed. On the other hand, she also thought Plovov was jealous.

When humans came to Jijo, the effect on the other five races must have been like when Earth met Galactic culture. After centuries with just a handful of engraved scrolls, the urs, g’Kek, and others reacted to the flood of paper books with both suspicion and voracious appetite. Between brief, violent struggles, nonhumans devoured Terran fables, dramas, and novels. When they wrote stories of their own, they imitated Earthly forms — like ersatz Elizabethan romances featuring gray-shelled queens, or Native North American legends recast for urrish tribes.

But lately, a flowering of new styles had also started emerging, from heroic adventures to epic poems set in strange meters and rhymes, unraveling the last shreds of order from dialects of GalSeven, and even GalTwo. Printers and binders had as many orders for new titles as reprints. Scholars debated what it all might mean — an outbreak of heresy? Or a freeing of the spirit?

Few dared use the term renaissance.

All of which may end in a matter of days or weeks, Sara pondered glumly. News from the Glade — brought by a kayak pilot braving the Bibur rapids — showed no change in the sages’ grim appraisal of the alien gene-raiders, or their intent.

Well, Bloor should be there by now. Sara’s plan might not dissuade the sky-humans from genocide, but a folk as helpless as the Six must be willing to try anything.

Including Ariana’s crazy notion. Even if it’s cruel.

The voice of the elderly sage carried from the chamber behind Sara.

“There now, dear. You’ve struggled long enough with that one. Let’s see what you can make of this nice book. Have you ever seen symbols and words like these before?”

Sighing, Sara turned around to reenter the Children’s Wing.

The Stranger sat near Ariana Foo’s wheelchair, surrounded by volumes bearing bright colors and simple text, printed in large friendly type. Though his face was haggard, the tall dark man resignedly accepted yet another book and ran his hand over the dots, slashes, and bars of a GalTwo teaching rhyme — a primer meant for young urrish middlings. Sara was unsurprised when his lips pursed and his tongue clicked as he worked across the page, laboriously. His eyes recognized the symbols, but clearly, no sense was being made of the sentence-phrase itself.

It had been the same with books in GalSix, Anglic, and GalSeven, tearing Sara’s heart to see his frustration turn into torment. Perhaps only now was the injured man coming to know fully what had been ripped away from him. What he had forever lost.

Ariana Foo, on the other hand, seemed eminently satisfied. She beamed at Sara. “This is no rube from the outer hamlets,” the old woman ruled. “He was an educated person, familiar with every language currently in use among the Six. If we have time, we must take him to the Linguistics Wing and try some of the forgotten dialects! Galactic Twelve would clinch it. Only three scholars on Jijo know any of it today.”

“What’s the point?” Sara asked. “You’ve made your case. Why not let him be?”

“In a minute, dear. One or two more, then we’ll be off. I’ve saved the best for last.”

Two library staff members watched nervously as Ariana reached over to a stack of books by her side. Some were priceless, with rings set in their spines where chains normally kept them locked to their shelves. The archivists clearly did not like seeing them pawed by a speechless barbarian.

Unwilling to watch, Sara turned away.

The rest of the Children’s Wing was placid — and contained few children. Scholars, teachers, and traveling librarians from all six races came here to study, copy, or select books to borrow, carrying their precious cargo by cart, boat, or pack donkey to settlements throughout the Slope. Sara observed a red qheuen carefully gather some of the heavy, brass-bound albums required by her kind, assisted by two lorniks trained as assistants and page-turners. One lornik swatted at a polisher bee that was working its way across the cover of a book, rubbing its abdomen amorously across the jacket, buffing it to a fine sheen and erasing part of the title. No one knew what function the insectoids once served for the departed Buyur, but they were a damned nuisance nowadays.

Sara saw others from every race, educators who refused to let a mere crisis interfere with the serious task of instructing the next generation. Beyond the qheuen, an elderly traeki selected volumes treated to resist the fluids emitted by new stacks of rings, too clumsy to control their secretions.

A low moan brought Sara back around to see the Stranger holding before him a long, slim book so old, the colors had gone all dingy and gray. The man’s dark features clouded with clashing emotions. Sara had no time to read the title, only to glimpse a skinny black feline figure on the cover, wearing a red-and-white-striped stovepipe hat. Then, to the librarians’ gasping dismay, he clutched the volume tightly to his chest, rocking back and forth with eyes closed.