Sapient beings are frequently tempted to believe in purpose.

That they exist in the universe for a reason.

To serve something greater- a race or clan patrons or G.o.ds or an esthetic aim.

Or else to seek individual goals- wealth and power, reproduction, or enhancement of a personal soul.

Deep Philosophers call this search for purpose nothing more than vanity, a frantic need to justify an inherited drive to exist.

But why would our ancestors have brought us here so far from race, clan, patrons, G.o.ds, or wealth or power, if not to serve a purpose higher than all those things?

The Scroll of Contemplation Alvin's Tale I ALWAYS THOUGHT MYSELF A CITY BOY. AFTER ALL, Wuphon is the biggest port in the south, with almost a thousand souls, if you include nearby farmers and gleaners. I grew up around docks, warehouses, and cargo hoists.

Still, the Deploying Derrick is really something. A long, graceful shape made of hundreds of tubes of reamed and cured boo, it was pieced together in a matter of days, crisscrossed and joined by a team of qheuen carpenters, who listened politely each time Urdonnol berated them for straying from the design ill.u.s.trated on page five hundred and twelve of her precious text, Pre-Contact Terran Machinery, Part VIII: Heavy Lifting Without Gravitics. Then, with a respectful spin of their cupolas, the qheuens went back to lacing and gluing the crane in their own way, applying lessons learned in real life.

Urdonnol should be more flexible, I thought, watching Uriel's humorless a.s.sistant grow ever more frustrated. True, the books hold great wisdom. But these guys aren't exactly working with t.i.tanium here. We're castaways who must adapt to the times.

I was glad to see that our pal, Ur-ronn, seemed satisfied with the work so far, after peering and sniffing at every brace, strut, and pulley. Still, I'd rather Uriel were here, supervising as she had for the first two days, when our group set up camp under the stark shadow of Terminus Rock. The master smith was a persnickety, demanding taskmistress, often insisting a job be done over, and over again, till it was d.a.m.n well perfect.

I guess we four might resent the bossy way she took over what used to be our own private project. But we didn't. Or not much. Her attention to detail was nerve-wracking, but each time Uriel finally admitted something was done right, my confidence rose a notch that we might actually come back alive. It came as a blow when she went away.

An urrish courier had raced into camp-breathless, exhausted, even thirsty, for Ifni's sake-holding an envelope for Uriel to s.n.a.t.c.h and tear open. On reading the message, she drew aside Tyug, the traeki, and whispered urgently. Then she galloped off, hurrying back toward her precious forge.

Since then, things didn't exactly fall apart. The plan moves ahead step by step. But I can't say our mood's quite the same. Especially after our first test dive near-to drowned the pa.s.senger.

By then the crane was a beautiful thing, a vaulting arm so graceful, you'd never guess sixteen steel bolts thick as my wrist anch.o.r.ed it to the ledge, hanging far over the deep blue waters of the Rift. A big drum carried more than thirty cables of Uriel's best hawser, all of it ending at our gray-brown vessel, which we named Wupbon's Dream, in hope of placating our parents-and those in the local community who think we're doing blasphemy.

Another derrick stands alongside the first, linked to an even bigger drum. This one doesn't have to carry the bathy's weight, but its job is just as vital-keeping a tangle-free length of double hose attached to our little craft, so that clean air goes in and bad air goes out. I never got a chance to ask what the hoses are made of, but it's much stronger than the st.i.tched skink bladders we four had planned using, back when we started thinking about this adventure.

Uriel had made other changes-a big pressure regulator, high strain gaskets, and a pair of eik lights to cast bright beams down where sunshine never reaches.

Again, I wondered-where did all this stuff come from?

It surprised us that Uriel never messed much with the bathy itself-carved from a single hollowed-out garu trunk, with Ur-ronn's beautiful window sealed at one end. In front, we installed two hinged grabber arms that Ur-ronn copied out of a book. Our little craft also bore wheels, four in all, mounted so Wuphon's Dream might roll along the muddy sea bottom.

Even after being fitted with superwide treads, the wheels looked familiar. Especially to Huck. She had kept them as private mementos out of the wreckage of her home, back when her real g'Kek parents were killed in that awful avalanche. With typical grim humor, Huck named them Auntie Rooben, Uncle Jovoon Left, and Uncle Jovoon Right. The fourth one was simply Dad-till I made her stop the grisly joke and call them One through Four instead.

Using wheels would normally be impossible without Galactic technology. A turning axle would tear any gasket apart. But Huck's macabre stash of spare parts offered a solution. Those wondrous g'Kek magnetic hubs and motivator spindles can be placed on either side of the hull, without actually piercing the wood. Huck will steer the forward pair of wheels, while I'll use a rotary crank to power the driver pair in back.

Which covers all our jobs during a dive, except "Captain" Pincer-Tip, whose world of bright blue water we'll pa.s.s through on our way to depths no qheuen has seen since their sneakship sank, a thousand years ago. His place is right in the bubble nose, controlling the eik-lamps and shouting instructions how the rest of us are to steer and push or grab samples.

Why does he get to be in charge? Pincer surely never impressed anyone as the brightest member of our gang.

First, all this was his idea from the start. He hand-or rather mouth-carved most of the Dream all by himself, during scarce free time between school and day-work in the crustacean pens.

More important, if that beautiful window ever starts to fail-or any of the other gaskets-he's the one least likely to panic when salt water starts spraying about the cabin. If that ever happens, it'll be up to Pincer to get the rest of us out somehow. We've all read enough sea and s.p.a.ce tales to know that's a pretty good definition of a captain-the one you all better listen to when seconds count the difference 'tween life and death.

He'd have to wait awhile, though, before taking command. Our first test dive would have just one pa.s.senger, a volunteer who was literally "born" for the job.

That morning, Tyug, the traeki, laid a trail of scentomones to draw the little partial stack, Ziz, from its pen to where Wuphon's Dream waited, gleaming in the sunshine. Our good ship's hull of polished garuwood was so bright and lovely-too bad the open blue sky is normally taken as a bad omen.

So it seemed to the onlookers watching our crew from a nearby bluff. There were hoon from Wuphon Port, plus some local reds, and urs with caravan dust on their flanks, as well as three humans who must have come a hard three-day trek from The Vale-all of them with nothing better to do than trade hearsay about the star-ship, or ships, said to have landed up north. One rumor said everyone at the Glade was already dead, executed on the spot by vengeful Galactic judges. Another claimed the Holy Egg had wakened fully at last, and the lights some saw in the sky were the souls of those lucky enough to be at Gathering when the righteous of the Six were transformed and sent back as spirits to their ancient homes among the stars.

Shave my legs if some of the stories weren't beautiful enough to make me wish I'd made 'em up.

Not all the onlookers were protestors. Some came out of curiosity. Huck and I had some fun with Howerr-phuo, who is second nephew by adoption to the Mayor's junior half-mother, but who dropped out of school anyway, on account of he claimed not to like the way Mister Heinz smells. But everyone knows Howerr-phuo is lazy, and anyway, he shouldn't talk about the hygienic habits of others.

At one point Howerr slinked up to ask about the Dream and its mission. Nice polite questions, mind you. But he seemed to barely hear our answers.

Then he sort of eased over to asking questions about traekis, gesturing over at Tyug, who was feeding Ziz in ers pen.

True, we have a pharmacist in Wuphon Town, but still there's some mystery about the ringed ones. Sure enough, Huck and I soon got the gist of what Howerr-phuo was going on about. He and some of his backwash friends had a wager going, about traeki s.e.x life, and he'd been elected to run the matter past us, as local experts!

Sharing a wink, Huck and I quickly emptied his head of all the nonsense it had been stuffed with-then proceeded to fill it back up with our own imaginative version. Howerr soon looked like a sailor who just had a loose tackle-pulley carom off his skull. Glancing furtively at his feet, he hurried off-no doubt to check for "ring spores," lest he start growing little traekis in places where he'd been neglectful about washing.

I don't feel much guilt over it. Anyone standing downwind from Howerr-phuo, from now on, oughta thank us.

I was going to ask Huck if we were ever that dumb- then I recalled. Didn't she once convince me that a g'Kek can manage to be her own mother and father? I swear, she had made it sound plausible at the time, though for the life of me, I still can't figure out how.

For the first couple of days, the spectators mostly lurked beyond a line in the sand, drawn by Uriel with her sage's baton. No one said much while the master smith was around. But after she left, some took to yelling slogans, mostly objecting that the Midden is sacred, not a place for conceited gloss-addicts to go sight-seeing. Once the Vale humans arrived, the protests got better organized, with banners and slogans chanted in unison.

I found it pretty exciting, like a scene from Summer of Love or Things to Come, all full of righteous dissent for a cause. To a humicker like me, nothing could be more buff than forging ahead with an adventure against popular opinion. Seems nearly all the romantic tales I've read were about intrepid heroes persisting despite the doubts of stick-in-the-mud parents, neighbors, or authority figures. It reminded me of the book my nickname comes from-where the people of Diaspar try to keep Alvin from making contact with their long-lost cousins in faraway Lys. Or when the Lysians don't want him going back home with news of their rediscovered world.

Yeah, I know that's fiction, but the connection stoked my resolve. Huck and Ur-ronn and Pincer-Tip said they all felt the same.

As for the mob, well, I know that folks who're scared can get unreasonable. I even tried once or twice to see it from their point of view. Really, I did.

Boy, what a bloat-torus of jeekee, Ifni-slucking skirls. Hope they all sit on bad mulch and get spin vapors.

XIV. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE.

Legends It is said that humans on Earth spent untold generations Iiving in brute fear, believing a myriad things that no sensible person would ever imagine. Certainly not anyone who had been handed truth on a silver platter-the way it was given to nearly every sapient race in the Five Galaxies.

Earthlings had to figure it all out for themselves. Slowly, agonizingly, humans learned how the universe worked, abandoning most of the fanciful beliefs they carried through their Iong, dark loneliness. This included belief in- the divine right of egotistical kings, the mental incapacity of women, the idea that a wise state knows all, the idea that the individual is always right, the sick-sweet addiction that transforms a doctrine from a mere model of the world into something sacred, worth killing for.

These and many other wild concepts eventually joined pixies and ufos in the trunk where humans finally put away such childish things. A very large trunk.

Even so, the newly contacted Galactics saw Earthlings as superst.i.tious primitives, as wolflings, p.r.o.ne to weird enthusiasms and peculiar, unprovable convictions.

How ironic, then, is the role reversal that we see on Jijo, where Earthlings found the other five far regressed down a road humans had traveled before, wallowing in a myriad of fables, fantasies, grudges, and vividly absurd notions. To this maelstrom of superst.i.tion, settlers fresh off the Tabernacle contributed more than paper books. They also brought tools of logic and verification-the very things Earthlings had to fight hardest to learn, back home.

Moreover, with their own history in mind, Earthlings became voracious collectors of folklore, fanning out among the other five to copy down every tale, every belief, even those they demonstrated to be false.

Out of their wolfling past came this strange mixture-reasoning skepticism, plus a deep appreciation of the peculiar, the bizarre, the extravagantly vivid.

Amid the darkness, humans know that it is all too easy to lose your way, if you forget how to tell what is true. But it is just as urgent never to let go of the capacity to dream, to weave the illusions that help us all make it through this dark, dark night.

from The Art of Exile, by Auph-hu-Phwuhbhu Asx THE TINY ROBOT WAS A WONDER TO BEHOLD. NO larger than a g'Kek's eyeball, it lay pinned down to the I ground by a horde of attacking privacy wasps, covered by their crowded fluttering wings.

Lester was the first sage to comment, after the initial surprise.

"Well, now we know why they're called privacy wasps. Did you see the way they swarmed over that thing? Otherwise, we'd never have known it was there."

"A device for spying," surmised Knife-Bright Insight, tipping her carapace to get a closer look at the machine. "Minuscule and mobile, sent to listen in on our council. We would have been helpless, all our plans revealed, if not for the wasps."

Phwhoon-dau concurred with a deep umble.

"Hr-rm. . . . We are used to seeing the insects as minor irritants, their presence required by tradition for certain ceremonies. But the Buyur must have designed the wasps for just such a purpose. To patrol their cities and homes, thwarting would-be eavesdroppers."

"Using a (specifically) designed life-form to deal with the (annoying) threat-indeed, that would have been the Buyur way," added Ur-Jah.

Lester leaned close to peer at the wasps, whose wings rippled in front of the robot's tiny eyes, beating a maze of colors that reminded me/us of rewq.

"I wonder what the wasps are showing it," murmured our human sage.

Then Vubben spoke for the first time since the wasps attacked the intruder.

"Probably exactly what it wants to see," he suggested confidently.

Do you recall, my rings, how we all nodded, sighed, or umbled respectful agreement? Vubben spoke the words so well, in such tones of wise credibility. Only later did it occur to we/us to ask ourselves- What?

What in the world could he possibly mean by that?

Lark DURING TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF ILLICIT SETTLEMENT, Lark was hardly the first member of the Six to fly. He wasn't even the first human.

Soon after the sneakship Tabernacle sank forever into the Midden's sucking embrace, men and women used to soar like kites, riding steady offsh.o.r.e winds from the blue ocean all the way to the white peaks of the Rimmer Range. Back in those days, lacy airfoils used to catch sky-currents, lofting brave pilots to survey their new world from above.

The last silky glider now lay under gla.s.s in a Biblos museum, a wonder to behold, made of the mystical materials monomolecular carbon and woven stress polymer, which the brightest wizards of the Chemists' Guild could not reproduce today, even if the sages allowed it. Time and mishaps eventually smashed all the others, leaving later human generations to walk the heavy ground like everybody else, and erasing one more cause of jealousy among the Six-though lately, since the Great Peace, groups of ambitious youths had resumed a crude version of the pastime, occasionally risking their lives on spindly frames of hollow boo, covered with hand-woven sheets of wic-cotton. Or else urrish middlings rode bulging balloons, wafting upward on puffs of torrid air. Sometimes success caused a local sensation, but none of the efforts had much lasting effect. Available materials were too heavy, weak, or porous. The wind was much too strong.

Some, with ardent piety, claimed this was a good thing. The sky was not where redemption would be found. Nor in clinging to vanities of the past. Lark normally agreed with the orthodox view, but in this case, he mused- Such a modest dream. To waft a few leagues through the lower air. Is that so much to ask, when once we had the stars?

He was never one to waste time on idle fancies, though. Certainly Lark never expected personally to spy down on Jijo's mountains from a great height.

But look at me now!

Ling had clearly enjoyed watching his expression, when she told him of today's plan.

"We'll be gone most of the day, to pick up some specimens our robots have snared. Later, as the drones roam farther afield, we'll go for trips of several days at a time."

Lark had stared at the alien flying machine, a slender arrow with stubby wings that unfolded after it exited a narrow tunnel from the buried research station. The hatch gaped like a pair of hungry jaws.

How like Ling to spring this on him without warning!

While Besh loaded supplies, the big blond man, Kunn, shouted, "Come on, Ling! We're running late. Coax your pet aboard or get another."

Lark set his jaw, determined to show no emotion as he followed her up a ramp. He expected a cave-like interior, but it turned out to be more brightly lit than any enclosed s.p.a.ce he'd ever seen. There was no need to let his eyes adapt.

Not wanting to gawk like a yokel, he aimed for a padded seat next to a window and dropped his pack nearby. Lark sat down gingerly, finding the voluptuous softness neither comfortable nor comforting. It felt as if he had settled onto the lap of something fleshy and perhaps queerly amorous. Moments later, Ling added to his unease by strapping a belt across his waist. The hissing closure of the metal hatch made his ears feel funny, increasing his disorientation. The moment the engines came on, Lark felt a strange tickling at the base of his neck, as if a small animal were breathing on the hairs back there. He could not help lifting a hand to brush away at the imaginary creature.

Takeoff was surprisingly gentle, a wafting motion, rising and turning, then the sky-boat swept away so quickly that he had no chance to survey the Glade and its surroundings, or to seek the hidden valley of the Egg. By the time he turned around to press close against the window, the continent was already sweeping underneath as they hurtled southward, many times faster than a catapulted stone. Only minutes later, they dropped away from the alpine hills, streaking over a wide-open plain of steppe gra.s.s, which bowed and rippled like the ever-changing surface of a phosph.o.r.escent sea. At one point, Lark spotted a drove of galloping stem-chompers, a genus of native Jijoan ungulates, which trumpeted distress and reared away from the airboat's pa.s.sing shadow. A band of urrish herders stretched their sinuous necks in expressions of curiosity mixed with dread. Near the adults, a group of early middlings gamboled and snapped in mock battle, ignoring their elders' sudden, dark focus on the heavens.

"Your enemies certainly are graceful creatures," Ling commented.

Lark turned and stared at her. What's she going on about now?

Ling must have misinterpreted his look, hurrying as if to placate. "Of course I mean that in a strictly limited sense, the way a horse or other animal can be graceful."

Lark pondered before answering. "Hrm. It's too bad your visit disrupted Gathering. We'd normally be having the Games about now. That's when you'd see real grace in action."

"Games?' Oh, yes. Your version of the fabled Olympics. Lots of running and jumping around, I suppose?"

He nodded guardedly. "There are speed and agility events. Others let our best and bravest test their endurance, courage, adaptability."

"All traits highly prized by those who brought humanity into being," Ling said. Her smile was indulgent, faintly condescending. "I don't imagine any of the six species go up against each other directly in any events, do they? I mean, it's hard to picture a g'Kek outrunning an urs, or a qheuen doing a pole vault!" She laughed.

Lark shrugged. Despite Ling's hint regarding a subject of great moment-the question of human origins-he found himself losing interest in the conversation.

"Yes, I suppose it could be. Hard. To picture."

He turned to look back out the window, watching the great plain sweep by-wave after wave of bending gra.s.s, punctuated by stands of dark boo or oases of gently swaying trees. A distance requiring several days to cross by caravan was dismissed in a few brief duras of blithe flight. Then the smoldering mountains of the southern range swarmed into view.

Besh, the forayer pilot, banked the craft to get a closer look at Blaze Mountain, circling at an angle so that Lark's window stared vertiginously on a vast lava ap.r.o.n where past eruption layers spilled across a country that was both ravaged and starkly renewed. For an instant, he glimpsed the smelters that lay cl.u.s.tered halfway up the mighty eminence. Fashioned to resemble native magma tubes and floes, the forge vented steam and smoke no different from that exhaled by nearby wild apertures. Of course, the camouflage was never meant to endure scrutiny as close as this.

Lark saw Besh share a knowing glance with Kunn, who tapped one of his magical viewing screens. Out of several score glowing red lights, outlining the mountain's shape, one was marked by sharp symbols and glowing arrows. Dotted lines traced underground pa.s.sages and workrooms where famed urrish smiths labored to make tools out of those special alloys sanctioned by the sages, second in quality only to those produced farther south, near the peak of towering Mount Guenn.

Incredible, Lark thought, trying to memorize the level of detail shown on Kunn's screen, for his report to Lester Cambel. Clearly that monitor had little to do with the ostensible purpose of this mission-scouting for advanced "candidate" life-forms. From a few brief exchanges, Lark reckoned Kunn was no biologist. Something in the man's stance, his way of moving, reminded one of Dwer stalking through a forest, only more deadly. Even after generations of relative tranquillity, a few men and women on the Slope still carried themselves like that, experts whose chief job was to circulate each summer from village to village, training local human militias.

Just in case.

Each of the other five races had similar specialists. A prudent policy, since even now there were regular minor crises-a criminal act here, a wayward tribe of soon-ers there, and spates of hot-tempered friction between settlements. Enough to make "peacetime warrior" no contradiction in terms.

The same might also be true of Kunn. Looking lethally competent didn't mean he was coiled, preparing to wreak murder.

What's your purpose, Kunn? Lark wondered, watching symbols flash across the screen, crisscrossing reflections of the outlander's face. What, exactly, are you looking for?

Blaze Mountain fell behind them as the little vessel now seemed to leap ahead at a new angle, spearing across a brilliant whiteness known as the Plain of Sharp Sand. For a long time, low dunes swept past, undulating in windswept perfection. Lark saw no caravans laboring across the sparkling desert, carrying mail or trade goods to isolated settlements of The Vale. But then, no one sane ranged those searing wastes by day. There were hidden shelters down there, where travelers awaited nightfall, which even Kunn's rays shouldn't be able to pick out/amid the glaring immensity.

That pale dazzle was nothing compared to the next sudden transition, crossing over from the sand ocean to the Spectral Flow, a blurry expanse of shifting colors that made Lark's eyes sting. Ling and Besh tried to peer at it past their sheltering hands, before finally giving up, while Kunn muttered sourly at the static on his display. Lark struggled against a natural reflex to squint, endeavoring instead to loosen his habitual way of focusing. Dwer had once explained that it was the only way to let oneself see in this realm where exotic crystals cast an ever-changing wildness of luminance.

That had been shortly after Dwer won master hunter status, when he hurried home to join Lark and Sara at their mother's bedside, during the illness that finally took her away, turning Nelo almost overnight into an old man. Melina accepted no food during that final week, and very little drink. Of her two eldest, whose minds she had doted on, day in, day out, ever since arriving in Dolo to be a papermaker's *wife, she now seemed to need nothing. But from her youngest child, she devoured tales of his wanderings, the sights, sounds, and sensations of far corners of the Slope where few ever trod. Lark recalled feeling a jealous pang when he saw the contentment Dwer's stories gave in her last hours, then chiding himself for having such unworthy thoughts.

That memory swept over him starkly, apparently triggered by the stabbing colors.

Some credulous folk among the Six said these layers of poison stone had magical properties, poured into them by aeons of overlapping volcanic effusions. "Mother Jijo's blood," they called it. At that moment, Lark could almost credit the superst.i.tion, so struck was he by uncanny waves of familiarity. As if he had been here before, sometime long ago.

With that thought, his eyes seemed to adjust-to open up, letting the muddle of swirling hues blossom into mirage canyons, figment valleys, ghost cities, and even whole phantom civilizations, vaster than the greatest Buyur sites. . . .