Sleep came laced with images of people she had left behind.

Nelo, her aged father, working in his beloved paper mill, unaware that some conspired its ruin.

Melina, her mother, dead several years now, who always seemed an outsider since arriving in Dolo long ago, with a baby son in her arms.

Frail Joshu, Sara's lover in Biblos, whose touch made her forget even the overhanging Fist of Stone. A comely rogue whose death sent her spinning.

Dwer and Lark, her brothers, setting out to attend festival in the high Rimmer glades . . . where starships were later seen descending.

Sara's mind roiled as she tossed and turned.

Last of all, she pictured Blade, whose qheuen hive farmed crayfish behind Dolo Dam. Good old Blade, who saved Sara and Emerson from disaster at the Urunthai camp.

"Seems I'm always late catching up," her qheuen friend whistled from three leg vents. "But don't worry, I'll be along,Too much is happening to miss."

Blade's armor-clad dependability had been like a rock to Sara. In her dream, she answered.

"I'll stall the universe . . . keep it from doing anything interesting until you show up."

Imagined or not, the blue qheuen's calliope laughter warmed Sara, and her troubled slumber fell into gentler rhythms.

The sun was half-high when someone shook Sara back to the world-one of the taciturn female riders, using the archaic word brekkers to announce the morning meal. Sara got up gingerly as waves of achy soreness coursed her body.

She gulped down a bowl of grain porridge, spiced with unfamiliar traeki seasonings, while horsewomen saddled mounts or watched Emerson play his beloved dulcimer, filling the pocket valley with a sprightly melody, suited for travel. Despite her morning irritability, Sara knew the starman was just making the best of the situation. Bursts of song were a way to overcome his handicap of muteness.

Sara found Kurt tying up his bedroll.

"Look," she told the elderly exploser, "I'm not ungrateful to your friends. I appreciate the rescue and all. But you can't seriously hope to ride horses all the way to ... Mount Guenn." Her tone made it sound like one of Jijo's moons.

Kurt's stony face flickered a rare smile. "Any better suggestions? Sure, you planned taking the Stranger to the High Sages, but that way is blocked by angry Urunthai. And recall, we saw two starships last night, one after the other, headed straight for Festival Glade. The Sages must have their hands and tendrils full by now."

"How could I forget?" she murmured. Those t.i.tans, growling as they crossed the sky, had seared their image in her mind.

"You could hole up in one of the villages we'll pa.s.s soon, but won't Emerson need a first-rate pharmacist when he runs out of Pzora's medicine?"

"If we keep heading south we'll reach the Gentt. From there a riverboat can take us to Ovoom Town."

"a.s.suming boats are running . . . and Ovoom still exists. Even so, should you hide your alien friend, with great events taking place? What if he has a role to play? Some way to help sages and Commons? Might you spoil his one chance of goin' home?"

Sara saw Kurt's implication-that she was holding Emerson back, like a child refusing to release some healed forest creature into the wild.

A swarm of sweetbec flies drifted close to the starman, hovering and throbbing to the tempo of his music, a strange melody. Where did he learn it? On Earth? Near some alien star?

"Anyway," Kurt went on, "if you can stand riding these huge beasts awhile longer, we may reach Mount Guenn sooner than Ovoom."

"That's crazy! You must pa.s.s through Ovoom if you go by sea. And the other way around is worse-through the runnel canyons and the Vale."

Kurt's eyes flickered. "I'm told there's a ... more direct route."

"Direct? You mean due south? Past the Gentt lies the Plain of Sharp Sand, a desperate crossing under good conditions-which these aren't. Have you forgotten that's where Dedinger has followers?"

"No, I haven't forgotten."

"Then, a.s.suming we get past the sandmen and flame dunes, there comes the Spectral Flow, making any normal desert seem like a meadow!"

Kurt only shrugged, but clearly he wanted her to accompany him toward a distant simmering mountain, far from where Sara had sworn to take Emerson. Away from Lark and Dwer, and the terrible attraction of those fierce starships. Toward a starkly sacred part of Jijo, renowned for one thing above all-the way the planet renewed itself with flaming lava heat.

Alvin MAYBE IT WAS THE COMPRESSED ATMOSPHERE WE breathed, or the ceaseless drone of reverberating engines. Or it could have been the perfect darkness outside that fostered an impression of incredible depth, even greater than when our poor little Wuphon's Dream fell into the maw of this giant metal sea beast. A single beam- immeasurably brighter than the handmade eik light of our old minisub-speared out to split the black, scanning territory beyond my wildest nightmares. Even the vivid imagery of Verne or Pukino or Melville offered no preparation for what was revealed by that roving circle as we cruised along a subsea canyon strewn with all manner of ancient dross. In rapid glimpses we saw so many t.i.tanic things, all jumbled together, that- Here I admit I'm stumped. According to the texts that teach Anglic literature, there are two basic ways for a writer to describe unfamiliar objects. First is to catalog sights and sounds, measurements, proportions, colors-saying this object is made up of cl.u.s.ters of colossal cubes connected by translucent rods, or that one resembles a tremendous sphere caved in along one side, trailing from its crushed innards a glistening streamer, a liquidlike banner that somehow defies the tug of time and tide.

Oh, I can put words together and come up with pretty pictures, but that method ultimately fails because at the time I couldn't tell how far away anything was The eye sought clues in vain. Some objects-piled across the muddy panorama-seemed so vast that the huge vessel around us was dwarfed, like a minnow in a herd of behmo serpents. As for colors, even in the spotlight beam, the water drank all shades but deathly blue gray. A good hue for a shroud in this place of icy-cold death.

Another way to describe the unknown is to compare it to things you 'already recognize . . . only that method proved worse! Even Huck, who sees likenesses in things I can't begin to fathom, was reduced to staring toward great heaps of ancient debris with all four eyestalks, at an utter loss.

Oh, some objects leaped at us with sudden familiarity- like when the searchlight swept over rows of blank-eyed windows, breached floors, and sundered walls. Pushed in a tumbled mound, many of the sunken towers lay upside down or even speared through each other. Together they composed a city greater than any I ever heard of, even from readings of olden times. Yet someone once sc.r.a.ped the entire metropolis from its foundations, picked it up, and dumped it here, sending all the buildings tumbling down to be reclaimed the only way such things can be reclaimed-in Mother Jijo's fiery bowels.

I recalled some books I'd read, dating from Earth's Era of Resolution, when pre-contact humans were deciding on their own how to grow up and save their, homeworld after centuries spent using it as a cesspit. In Alice Hammett's mystery The Case of a Half-Eaten Clone, the killer escapes a murder charge, only to get ten years for disposing of the evidence at sea! In those days, humans made no distinction between midden trenches and ocean floor in general. Dumping was dumping.

It felt strange to see the enormous dross-scape from two viewpoints. By Galactic law, this was a consecrated part of Jijo's cycle of preservation-a scene of devout caretaking. But having grown up immersed in human books, I could shift perspectives and see defilement, a place of terrible sin.

The "city" fell behind us and we went back to staring at bizarre shapes, unknown majestic objects, the devices of star-G.o.d civilization, beyond understanding by mere cursed mortals. On occasion, my eyes glimpsed flickerings in the blackness outside the roving beam-lightninglike glimmers amid the ruins, as if old forces lingered here and there, setting off sparks like fading memories.

We murmured among ourselves, each of us falling back to what we knew best. Ur-ronn speculated on the nature of materials, what things were made of, or what functions they once served. Huck swore she saw writing each time the light panned over a string of suspicious shadows. Pincer. insisted every other object must be a starship.

The Midden took our conjectures the same way it accepts all else, with a patient, deathless silence.

Some enormous objects had already sunk quite far, showing just their tips above the mire. I thought-This is where Jijo's ocean plate takes a steep dive under the Slope, dragging crust, mud, and anything else lying about, down to magma pools that feed simmering volcanoes. In time, all these mighty things will become lava, or precious ores to be used by some future race of tenants on this world.

It made me ponder my father's sailing ship, and the risky trips he took, hauling crates of sacred refuse, sent by each tribe of the Six as partial payment for the sin of our ancestors. In yearly rituals, each village sifts part of the land, clearing it of our own pollution and bits the Buyur left behind.

The Five Galaxies may punish us for living here. Yet we lived by a code, faithful to the Scrolls.

Hoonish folk moots chant the tale of Phu-uphyawuo, a dross captain who one day saw a storm coming, and dumped his load before reaching the deep blue of the Midden. Casks and drums rolled overboard far short of the trench of reclamation, strewing instead across shallow sea bottom, marring a site that was changeless, unrenewing. In punishment, Phu-uphyawuo was bound up and taken to the Plain of Sharp Sand, to spend the rest of his days beneath a hollow dune, drinking enough green dew to live, I but not sustain his soul. In time, his heart spine was ground to dust and cast across a desert where no water might wash the grains, or make them clean again.

But this is the Midden, I thought, trying to grasp the wonder. We're the first to see it.

Except for the phuvnthus. And whatever else lives down here.

I found myself tiring. Despite the back brace and crutches, a weight of agony built steadily. Yet I found it hard to tear away from the icy-cold pane.

Following a searchlight through suboceanic blackness, we plunged as if down a mine shaft, aimed toward a heap of jewels-glittering objects shaped like needles, or squat globes, or glossy pancakes, or k.n.o.bby cylinders. Soon there loomed a vast shimmering pile, wider than Wuphon Bay, bulkier than Guenn Volcano.

"Now, those are definitely ships!" Pincer announced, gesturing with a claw. Pressed against the gla.s.s, we stared at mountainlike piles of tubes, spheres, and cylinders, many of them studded with hornlike protrusions, like the quills of an alarmed rock staller.

"Those must be the probability whatchamacallums starships use for going between galaxies," Huck diagnosed from her avid reading of Tabernacle-era, tales.

"Probability f.l.a.n.g.es,"Ur-ronn corrected, speaking Galactic Six. In matters of technology, she was far ahead of Huck or me. "I think you may be right."

Our qheuenish friend chuckled happily as the searchlight zeroed in on one tremendous pile of tapered objects.

Soon we all recognized the general outlines from ancient texts-freighters and courier ships, packets and cruisers- all abandoned long ago.

The engine noise dropped a notch, plunging us toward that ma.s.s of discarded s.p.a.cecraft. The smallest of those derelicts outma.s.sed the makeshift phuvnthu craft the way a full-grown traeki might tower over a herd-chick t.u.r.d.

"I wonder if any of the ancestor vessels are in this pile," Huck contemplated aloud. "You know, the ones that brought our founders here? The Laddu 'kek or the Tabernacle"

"Unlikely," Ur-ronn answered, this time in lisping Anglic. "Don't forget, we're in the Rift. This is nothing vut an offshoot canyon of the Nidden. Our ancestors likely discarded their shifs in the nain trench, where the greatest share of Buyur trash went."

I blinked at that thought. This, an offshoot? A minor side area of the Midden?

Of course she was right! But it presented a boggling image. What staggering amounts of stuff must have been dumped in the main trench, over the ages! Enough to tax even the recycling power of Jijo's grinding plates. No wonder the n.o.ble Galactics set worlds aside for ten million years or more. It must take that long for a planet to digest each meal of sapient-made things, melting them back into the raw stuff of nature.

I thought of my father's dross ship, driven by creaking masts, its hold filled with crates of whatever we exiles can't recycle. After two thousand years, all the offal we sooners sent to the Midden would not even show against this single mound of discarded starships.

How rich the Buyur and their fellow G.o.ds must have been to cast off so much wealth! Some of the abandoned vessels looked immense enough to swallow every house, khuta, or hovel built by the Six Races. We glimpsed dark portals, turrets, and a hundred other details, growing painfully aware of one fact-those shadowy behemoths had been sent down here to rest in peace. Their sleep was never meant to be invaded by the likes of us.

Our plummet toward the reef of dead ships grew alarming. Did any of the others feel we were heading in awful fast!

"Maybe this is their home," Pincer speculated as we plunged toward one twisted, oval ruin, half the size of Wuphon Port.

"Maybe the phuvnthus are made of, like, parts of old machines that got dumped here," Huck mused. "And they kind of put themselves together from whatever's lying around? Like this boat we're on is made of all sorts of junk-"

"Perhaps they were servants of the Buyur-" Ur-ronn interrupted. "Or a race that lived here even vefore. Or a strain of nutants, like in that story-"

I cut in. "Have any of you considered the simplest idea? That maybe they're just like us?"

When my friends turned to look at me, I shrugged, human style.

"Maybe the phuvnthus are sooners, too. Ever stop to think of that?"

Their blank faces answered me. I might as well have suggested that our hosts were noor beasts, for all the sense my idea made.

Well, I never claimed to be quick-witted, especially when racked with agony.

We lacked any sense of perspective, no way to tell how close we were, or how fast we were going. Huck and Pincer murmured nervously as our vessel plunged toward the mountain-of-ships at a rapid clip, engines running hard in reverse.

I think we all jumped a bit when a huge slab of corroded metal moved aside, just duras before we might have collided. Our vessel slid into a gaping hole in the mountain of dross, cruising along a corridor composed of s.p.a.ceship hulls, piercing a fantastic pile of interstellar junk.

ASX.

READ THE NEWLY CONGEALED WAX, MY RINGS. See how folk of the Six Races dispersed, tearing down festival pavilions and bearing away the injured, fleeing before the Rothen starship's expected arrival.

Our senior sage, Vubben of the g'Kek, recited from the Scroll of Portents a pa.s.sage warning against disunity. Truly, the Six Races must strive harder than ever to look past our differences of shape and sh.e.l.l. Of flesh, hide, and torg.

"Go home," we sages told the tribes. "See to your lattice screens. Your blur-cloth webs. Live near the ground in Jijo's sheltered places. Be ready to fight if you can. To die if you must."

The zealots,' who originally provoked this crisis, suggested the Rothen starship might have means to track Rokenn and his lackeys, perhaps by sniffing our prisoners' brain waves or body implants. "For safety, let's sift their bones into lava pools!"

An opposing faction called Friends of the Rothen demanded Ro-kenn's release and obeisance to his G.o.dlike will. These were not only humans, but some qheuens, g'Keks, hoons, and even a few urs, grateful for cures or treatments received in the aliens' clinic. Some think redemption can be won in this lifetime, without first treading the long road blazed by glavers.

Finally, others see this chaos as a chance to settle old grudges. Rumors tell of anarchy elsewhere on the Slope. Of many fine things toppled or burned.

Such diversity! The same freedom that fosters a vivid people also makes it hard to maintain a united front. Would things be better if we had disciplined order, like the feudal state sought by Gray Queens of old?

It is too late for regrets. Time remains only for improvisation-an art not well approved in the Five Galaxies, we are told. Among poor savages, it may be our only hope.

Yes, my rings. We can now remember all of that.

Stroke this wax, and watch the caravans depart toward plains, forests, and sea. Our hostages are spirited off to sites where even a starship's piercing scrutiny might not find them. The sun flees and stars bridge the vast territory called the Universe. A realm denied us, that our foes roam at will.

Some remain behind, awaiting the ship.

We voted, did we not? We rings who make up Asx? We volunteered to linger. Our cojoined voice would speak to angry aliens for the Commons. Resting our basal torus on hard stone, we pa.s.sed the time listening to complex patterns from the Holy Egg, vibrating our fatty core with strange shimmering motifs.

Alas, my rings, none of these reclaimed memories explains our current state, that something terrible must have happened?

Here, what of this newly congealed waxy trail? Can you perceive in it the glimmering outlines of a great vessel of s.p.a.ce? Roaring from the same part of the sky lately abandoned by the sun?

Or is it the sun, come back again to hover angrily above the valley floor?

The great ship scans our valley with scrutinizing rays, seeking signs of those they left behind. Yes, my rings. Follow this waxy memory. Are we about to rediscover the true cause of terror?

Lark SUMMER PRESSED HEAVILY ACROSS THE RIMMER Range, consuming the unshaded edges of glaciers far older than six exile races. At intervals, a crackling static charge would blur the alpine slopes as countless gra.s.s stems wafted skyward, reaching like desperate tendrils. Intense sunshine was punctuated by bursts of curtain rain- water draperies that undulated uphill, drenching the slopes with continuous liquid sheets, climbing until the mountaintops wore rainbow crowns, studded with flashes of compressed lightning.

Compact reverberations rolled down from the heights, all -the way to the sh.o.r.e of a poison lake, where fungus swarmed over a forty-hectare thicket of crumbling vines. Once a mighty outpost of Galactic culture, the place was now a jumble of stone slabs, rubbed featureless by abrading ages. The pocket valley sweltered with acrid aromas, as caustic nectars steamed from the lake, or dripped from countless eroding pores.

The newest sage of the Commons of Jijo plucked yellow moss from a decaying cable, one of a myriad of strands that once made up the body of a half-million-year-old creature, the mule spider responsible for demolishing this ancient Buyur site, gradually returning it to nature. Lark had last seen this place in late winter-searching alone through snow flurries for the footprints of Dwer and Rety, refugees from this same spider's death fury. Things had changed here since that frantic deliverance. Large swathes of mule cable were simply gone, harvested in some recent effort that no one had bothered explaining when Lark was a.s.signed here. Much of what remained was coated with this clinging moss.

"Spirolegita cariola." He muttered the species name, rubbing a sample between two fingers. It was a twisted, deviant cariola variety. Mutation seemed a specialty of this weird, astringent site.

I wonder what the place will do to me-to all of us-if we stay here long.

He had not asked for this ch.o.r.e. To be a jailor. Just wearing the t.i.tle made him feel less clean.

A chain of nonsense syllables made him turn back toward a blur-cloth canopy, spanning the s.p.a.ce between slablike boulders.

"It's a clensionating sievelator for refindulating excess torg. . . ."

The voice came from deep shade within-a strong feminine alto, though somewhat listless now, tinged with resignation. Soft clinking sounds followed as one object was tossed onto a pile and another picked up for examination.

"At a guess, I'd say this was once a glannis truncator, probably used in rituals of a chihanic sect . . . that is, unless it's just another Buyur joke-novelty device."

Lark shaded his eyes to regard Ling, the young sky-born scientist and servant of star-G.o.d Rothen, in whose employ he had worked as a "native guide" for many weeks . . . until the Battle of the Glade reversed their standing in a matter of heartbeats. Since that unexpected victory, the High Sages had a.s.signed her care and custody to him, a duty he never asked for, even if it meant exalted promotion.

Now I'm quite a high-ranking witch doctor among savages, he thought with some tartness. Lord High Keeper of Alien Prisoners.

And maybe executioner. His mind shied from that possibility. Much more likely, Ling would be traded to her Danik-Rothen comrades in some deal worked out by the sages. Or else she might be rescued at any moment by hordes of unstoppable robots, overpowering Lark's small detachment of sword-bearing escorts like a pack of santi bears brushing aside the helpless buzzing defenders of a zil-honey tree.

Either way, she'll go free. Ling may live another three hundred years on her homeworld, back in the Five Galaxies, telling embroidered tales about her adventure among the feral barbarians of a shabby, illicit colony. Meanwhile, the best we fallen ones can hope for is bare survival. To keep scratching a living from poor tired Jijo, calling it lucky if some of the Six eventually join glavers down the Path of Redemption. The trail to blissful oblivion.