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Huck’s rear-facing eye looked disappointed, and she groused — “Lucky guess” — while making space for the rest of us.
I knew this room. Many’s the previous visit I used to stand at the doorway and stare at the goings-on within. The huge chamber held Uriel’s mystery machine-a gimcrackery of gears, cables, and revolving glass that seemed to fill the vaulted cavern with grinding motion like one of those Victorian factories you read about in books by Dickens. Only this device didn’t make a single blessed thing, as far as any of us could ever tell. Only countless glitters of light as whirling crystal disks spun like hundreds of ghostly little g’Keks, rolling against each other madly, futilely, going noplace the faster they spun.
I glimpsed the human visitor, bent over a trestle table with a precious-looking folio spread open before him, pointing at a diagram, while Uriel rocked in a circle, lifting one leg at a time, shaking her pelted head in disagreement. The smith’s gray-fringed nostril blew exasperation.
“With all due resfect, Sage Furofsky, you night have gone to Gathering instead of coning all this way. I ca
The human wore the black cloak of a lesser sage, the kind who dwell in the sacred halls of Biblos with half a million printed tomes for company, tending wisdom handed down for three hundred years. He was hoonish-handsome, which happens when one of their males gets gray head fleece and lets his facial fur grow long, an effect enhanced by a noble long nose. This worthy jabbed again at the ancient page, so hard I feared he’d hurt the priceless text.
“But I tell you this algorithm is exactly what you need! It can be executed in a tenth the space, with far fewer parts, if you’d just consider—”
I can’t write what followed, because it was in that dialect of Anglic called Engineering, and even my hoonish memory won’t help me write words I can’t understand or spell. The sage must have come to help Uriel in her project. Anyone who knew her could predict Uriel’s resistance.
Beyond those two we saw Urdo
The sole other candidate was Ur-ro
Miniature centaur figures moved amid the whirling disks, making delicate adjustments. Urrish males, normally rare to see outside their wives’ pouches, tightened belts and gears under Urdo
I bent and whispered to Huck, “So much for all that talk about — hr-hrrm — starships! If they really saw one, they wouldn’t be fooling with toy gadgets right now!”
Ur-ro
“Enough to know all these whirling glass yo-yos don’t have hair on a qheuen’s backside to do with visiting spaceships!”
Even if we hadn’t been snapping at each other, it wasn’t easy for a gang like ours to peer discreetly into a room, the way you read about humans doing in detective stories. Still, those inside mightn’t have noticed us, if Huphu the noor hadn’t chosen that moment to go bounding in, yipping at those spi
Urdo
“This event signifies? It signifies?” the apprentice demanded with slurred interrogative trills. Her agitation grew as the Master snaked a grizzled snout around to peer at the commotion.
Despite stereotypes, a hoon can act quickly if he sees a clear need. I rushed over to snatch Huphu, rumbling my very best umble, and rejoined the others, girding for a group tongue-lashing.
“Behavior that is (astonishingly, horrifyingly) unacceptable,” declared Urdo
Uriel cut in, breaking Urdo
“That will do, Urdo
“It shall be done,” Urdo
She said it with dripping scorn, which is possible in GalSeven, though not as harsh as Anglic.
“Come swiftly. It’s been decided to take you up on your offer.
“Your grand plan.
“Your one-way expedition to Hell.”
VIII. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
It is said that glavers are an example to us all. Of the seven races to plant exile colonies on the slope, they alone have escaped this prison where their ancestors consigned them. They did this by finding, and traveling, the Path of Redemption.
Now they are i
It is a source of some frustration to Earthlings — the youngest sept to come here — that humans never got to meet glavers as thinking, speaking beings. Even the hoon and urs arrived too late to know them at their prime, when glavers were said to have been mighty intellects, with a talent for deep race memory. Watching their descendants root through our garbage middens, it is hard to picture the race as great starfarers and the patrons of three noble client-lines.
What desperation brought them here, to seek safety in oblivion?
The g’Keks tell us, by oral tradition, that it was the result of financial setbacks.
Once (according to g’Kek lore), glavers were said to be among those rare breeds with a knack for conversing with Zang — the hydrogen-breathing civilization existing aloofly in parallel to the society of races that use oxygen. This aptitude enabled glavers to act as intermediaries, bringing them great wealth and prestige, until a single contractual mistake reversed their fortunes, landing them in terrible debt.
It is said that the great Zang are patient. The debt falls due in several hundred thousand years, yet so deep is the usury that the glaver race, and all its beloved clients, were hopelessly forfeit.
Glavers had but one thing left to trade, a precious thing they might yet sell, providing they could find the right path.
That thing was themselves.