Ur-ronn simply grunted, as if she had expected this, vindicating her native urrish cynicism. After all, when things seem unable to get any worse, isn't that when they nearly always do? Ifni has a fertile, if nasty imagination. The G.o.ddess of fate keeps shaving new faces on her infinite-sided dice.

"Well, I guess this means-hrm-m-that we can toss out all those ideas about you phuvnthus being ancient Jijoans, or native creatures of the deep."

"Or remnants of cast-off Buyur machines," Huck went on. "Or sea monsters."

"Yeah," Pincer added, sounding disappointed. "Just another bunch of crazy Galactics-tic-tics."

The swirling patterns seemed confused. "You would prefer sea monsters'"'

"Forget it," Huck said. "You wouldn't understand."

The patterns bent and swayed.

"I am afraid you may be right about that. Your small band of comrades has us terribly perplexed. So much that a few of us posed a sly scenario-that you were planted in our midst to sow confusion."

"How do you mean?"

"Your values, beliefs, and evident mutual affection contribute to undermining a.s.sumptions we regarded as immutably anch.o.r.ed in the nature of reality.

"Mind you, this confusion is not wholly unpleasant. As a thinking ent.i.ty, one of my prime motives might be called a l.u.s.t for surprise. And those I work with are hardly less bemused by the unforeseen marvel of your fellowship."

"Glad you find us entertaining," Huck commented, as dryly sarcastic as the voice had been. "So you guys came here to hide, like our ancestors?"

"There are parallels. But our plan was never to stay. Only to make repairs, gather stores, and wait in concealment for a favorable window at the nearest transfer point."

"So Uriel and the sages may be wrong about the ship that came to the Glade? Being a gang of gene raiders-that could just be a cover story. Are you the real cause of our troubles?"

"Trouble is synonymous with being a metabolizing ent.i.ty. Or else why have you young adventurers sought it so avidly?

"But your complaint has merit. We thought we had eluded all pursuit. The ship that landed in the mountains may be coincidental, or attracted by a confluence of unlucky factors. In any event, had we known of your existence, we would have sought shelter somewhere off-planet instead, perhaps in a dead city on one of your moons, though such places are less convenient for effecting repairs. "

That part I had trouble believing. I'm just an ignorant savage, but from the cla.s.sic scientific romances I grew up reading, I could picture working in some lunar ghost town like my nicknamesake, waking mighty engines that had slept for ages. What kind of starfaring beings would find darkness and salt water more "convenient" than clean vacuum?

We lapsed into moody silence, unable to stay outraged at folks who accept responsibility so readily. Anyway, weren't they fellow refugees from Galactic persecution?

Or from justice, came another, worried thought.

"Can you tell us why everyone's so mad at you?" I asked.

The spinning figure turned into a narrow, whirling funnel whose small end seemed diminished and very far away.

"Like you, we delved and probed into unvisited places, imagining ourselves bold explorers. . . . ," the voice explained in tones of boundless sadness. "Until we bad the misfortune to find the very thing we sought. Unexpected wonders beyond our dreams.

"Breaking no law, we planned only to share what we had found. But those pursuing us abandoned all pretense of legality. Like giants striving over possession of a gnat, they war l.u.s.tily, battling each other for a chance to capture us! Alas, whoever wins our treasure will surely use it against mult.i.tudes."

Again, we stared. Pincer unleashed awed whispers from all vents at once.

"Tr-tr-treasure-ure-ure . . . ?"

Huck wheeled close to the spinning pattern. "Can you prove what you just said?"

"Not at this time. Not without putting your people in more danger than they already are."

I recall wondering-what could be more dangerous than the genocide Uriel had spoken of, as one likely outcome of contact with gene raiders?

"Nevertheless, "the voice continued, "it may prove possible to improve our level of mutual confidence. Or even help each other in significant ways."

Sara SUPPOSE THE WORLD'S TWO MOST CAREFUL OBservers witnessed the same event. They would never agree precisely on what had happened. Nor could they go back and check. Events may be recorded, but the past can't be replayed.

And the future is even more nebulous-a territory we make up stories about, mapping strategies that never go as planned.

Sara's beloved equations, derived from pre-contact works of ancient Earth, depicted time as a dimension, akin to the several axes of s.p.a.ce. Galactic experts ridiculed this notion, calling the relativistic models of Einstein and others "naive." Yet Sara knew the expressions contained truth. They had to. They were too beautiful not to be part of universal design.

That contradiction drew her from mathematics to questions of language-how speech constrains the mind, so that some ideas come easily, while others can't even be expressed. Earthling tongues-Anglic, Rossic, and Nihanic-seemed especially p.r.o.ne to paradoxes, tautologies, and "proofs" that sound convincing but run counter to the real world.

But chaos had also crept into the Galactic dialects used byJijo's other exile races, even before Terran settlers came. To some Biblos linguists, this was evidence of devolution, starfaring sophistication giving way to savagery, and eventually to proto-sapient grunts. But last year another explanation occurred to Sara, based on pre-contact information theory. An insight so intriguing that she left Biblos to work on it.

Or was I just looking for an excuse to stay away?

After Joshu died of the pox-and her mother of a stroke-research in an obscure field seemed the perfect refuge. Perched in a lonely tree house, with just Prity and her books for company, Sara thought herself sealed off from the world's intrusions.

But the universe has a way of crashing through walls.

Sara glanced at Emerson's glistening dark skin and robust smile, warmed by feelings of affection and accomplishment. Aside from his muteness, the starman scarcely resembled the shattered wreck she had found in the mule swamp near Dolo and nursed back from near death.

Maybe I should quit my intellectual pretensions and stick with what I'm good at. If the Six Races fell to fighting among themselves, there would be more need of nurses than theoreticians.

So her thoughts spun on, chaotically orbiting the thin glowing line down the center of the tunnel. A line that never altered as they trudged on. Its changelessness rebuked Sara for her private heresy, the strange, blasphemous belief that she held, perhaps alone among all Jijoans.

The quaint notion of progress.

Out of breath after another run, she climbed back aboard the wagon to find Prity chuffing nervously. Sara reached over to check the little chimp's wound, but Prity wriggled free, clambering atop the bench seat, hissing through bared teeth as she peered ahead.

The drivers were in commotion, too. Kepha and Nuli inhaled with audible sighs. Sara took a deep breath and found her head awash with contrasts. The bucolic smell of meadows mixed with a sharp metallic tang . . . something utterly alien. She stood up with the backs of her knees braced against the seat.

Was that a hint of light, where the center stripe met its vanishing point?

Soon a pale glow was evident. Emerson nipped his rewq over his eyes, then off again.

"Uncle, wake up!" Jomah shook Kurt's shoulder. "I think we're there!"

But the glow remained vague for a long time. Dedinger muttered impatiently, and for once Sara agreed with him. Expectation of journey's end made the tunnel's remnant almost unendurable.

The horses sped without urging, as Kepha and Nuli rummaged beneath their seats and began pa.s.sing out dark gla.s.ses. Only Emerson was exempted, since his rewq made artificial protection unnecessary. Sara turned the urrishmade spectacles in her hand.

I guess daylight will seem unbearably bright for a time, after we leave this hole. Still, any discomfort would be brief until their eyes readapted to the upper world. The precaution seemed excessive.

At last we'll find out where the horse clan hid all these years. Eagerness blended with sadness, for no reality-not even some G.o.d wonder of the Galactics-could compare with the fanciful images found in pre-contact tales.

A mystic portal to some parallel reality? A kingdom floating in the clouds?

She sighed. It's probably just some out-of-the-way mountain valley where neighboring villagers are too inbred and ignorant to know the difference between a donkey and a horse.

The ancient transitway began to rise. The stripe grew dim as illumination spread along the walls, like liquid trickling from some reservoir, far ahead. Soon the tunnel began taking on texture. Sara made out shapes. Jagged outlines.

Blinking dismay, she realized they were plunging toward sets of triple jaws, like a giant urrish mouth lined with teeth big enough to spear the wagon whole!

Sara took her cue from the Illias. Kepha and Nuli seemed unruffled by the serrated opening. Still, even when she saw the teeth were metal-corroded with flaking rust-Sara could hardly convince herself it was only a dead machine.

A huge Buyur thing.

She had never seen its like. Nearly all the great buildings and devices of the meticulous Buyur had been hauled to sea during their final years on Jijo, peeling whole cities and seeding mule spiders to eat what remained.

So why didn't the deconstructors carry this thing away?

Behind the ma.s.sive jaws lay disks studded with shiny stones that Sara realized were diamonds as big as her head. The wagon track went from smooth to b.u.mpy as Kepha maneuvered the team along a twisty trail through the great machine's gullet, zigzagging around the huge disks.

At once Sara realized- This is a deconstructor! It must have been demolishing the tunnel when it broke down.

I wonder why no one ever bothered to repair or haul it away.

Then Sara saw the reason.

Lava.

Tongues and streamlets of congealed basalt protruded through a dozen cracks, where they hardened in place half a million years ago. It was caught by an eruption.

Much later, teams of miners from some of the Six Races must have labored to clear a narrow path through the belly of the dead machine, chiseling out the last stretch separating the tunnel from the surface. Sara saw marks of crude pickaxes. And explosives must have been used, as well. That could explain the guild's knowledge of this place.

Sara wanted to gauge Kurt's reaction, but just then the glare brightened as the team rounded a final sharp bend, climbing a steep ramp toward a maelstrom of light.

Sara fumbled for her gla.s.ses as the world exploded with color.

Swirling colors that stabbed. Colors that shrieked.

Colors that sang with melodies so forceful that her ears throbbed.

Colors that made her nose twitch and skin p.r.i.c.kle with sensations just short of pain. A gasping moan lifted in unison from the pa.s.sengers, as the wagon crested a short rise to reveal surroundings more foreign than the landscape of a dream.

Even with the dark gla.s.ses in place, each peak and valley shimmered more pigments than Sara could name. In a daze, she sorted her impressions. To one side protruded the mammoth deconstructor, a snarl of slumped metal, drowned in ripples of frozen magma. Ripples that extended to the far horizon-layer after layer of radiant stone.

At last she knew the answer to her question. Where on the Slope could a big secret remain hidden for a century or more?

Even Dedinger, prophet of the sharp-sand desert, moaned aloud at how obvious it was.

They were in the last place on Jijo anyone would go looking for people.

The very center of the Spectral Flow.

PART FOUR.

FROM THE NOTES OF GILLIAN BASKIN.

I WISH I COULD introduce myself to Alvin. I feel I already know the lad, from reading his Journal and eavesdropping on conversations among his mends.

Their grasp of twenty-third-century Anglic idiom is so perfect, and their eager enthusiasm so dllierent from the hoons and urs I met before coming to Jijo, that half the time I almost forget I'm listening to aliens. that is, it I ignore the weird speech tones and inflecttons they take for granted.

Then one of them comes up with a burst of eerily skewed logic that reminds me these arent just human kids alter all, dressed up in Halloween suits to look like a crab, a centaur, and a squid on a wheelchair. pa.s.sing the time, they wondered vand I could not blame them,, whether they were prisoners or guests in this underwater refuge. Speculation led to a wide-ranging discussion, comparing various tamous captives of literature. Among their intriguing perceptions-Ur-ronn sees Richard II as the story of a legitimate business takeover, with Dolingbroke as the kings authentic apprentice.

The red qheuen, I incerlip, maintains that the hero of the leng Ho chronicles was kept in the emperors harem against his will, even though he had access to the bight Hundred Beauties and could leave at any time. finally, Huck declared It frustrating that Shakespeare spent so little time dealing with Macbeths evil wile, especially her attempt to escape sin by iinding redemption in a presapient state.

[luck has ideas for a sequel, describing the ladys reuplilt from the tallow condition. Iner ambitious work would be no less than a morality tale about betrayal and destiny in the Five Galaxies!

Beyond these singular insights, I am struck that here on Jijo an illiterate community of castaways was suddenly Hooded with written lore provided by human settlers. What an ironic reversal of Larths situation, with our own native culture nearly overwhelmed by exposure to the Great Galactic Library. Astonishingly, the Six Kaces seem to have adapted with vitality and confidence, if tluck and Alvin are at all representative. I wish their experiment well.

Admittedly, I still have trouble understanding their religion. the concept of redemption through devolution is one they seem to take for granted, yet its attraction eludes me. to my surprise, our ships doctor said she understands the concept, quite well.

Every dolphin grows up tee ling the call, Makanee told me. In sleep, our minds still roam the vast songscape of the Whale Dream. It beckons us to return to our basic nature, whenever the stress of sapiency becomes too great.

This dolphin crew has been under pressure for three long years. Makanees tfait must care for over two dozen patients who are already redeemed, as a Jijoan would put it. These dolphins have reclaimed their basic nature all right. In other words, we have lost them as comrades and skilled colleagues, as surely as it they died.

Makanee fights regression wherever she finds symptoms, and yet she remains philosophical. She even otters a theory to explain why the idea revolts me so.

She put it something like so- 1 L,Ktiyl S you humans dread this lite avenue because your race had to work for sapiency, earning it for yourself the hard way across thousands of bleak generations.

We tins-and these urs and qheuens and noons, and every other Galactic clan-all had the gitt handed to us by some race that came before. you can t expect us to hold on to it quite as tenaciously as you, who had to struggle so desperately for the same prize.

The attraction of this so-called Redemption lath may be a bit like ditching school. There s something alluring about the notion of letting go, shucking the discipline and toil of maintaining a rigorous mind. It you slack off, so what' YOM descendants will get another chance. A fresh start on the upward road of uplift, with new patrons to show you the way.

I asked Makanee it she found that part of it especially appealing.

The idea of new patrons. Would dolphins be better off with ditlerent sponsors than h.o.m.o sapiens'

She laughed and expressed her answer in deliclously ambiguous Trinary.

When winter sends ice growling across northern seas Wimps love the gull stream!

Makanees comment made me ponder again the question of human origins.

On Earth, most people seem willing to suspend Judgment on the question of whether our species had help from genetic meddlers, before the age of science and then contact. Stubborn Darwinists still present a strong case, but few have the guts to insist Galactic experts are wrong when they claim, with eons of experience, that the sole route to sapiency is Uplift. Many terran citizens take their word (or it.

So the debate rages-on popular media shows and in private arguments among humans, dolphins, and chims-about who our absent patrons might have been. At last count there were six dozen candidates-from luvalllans and L"ethani all the way to Sun Ghosts and time travelers from some bizarre (Nineteenth Dimension.