Free Infinity's Shore by David Brin Page B

memory.
    Some names come easy, since he learned them
after
waking on Jijo, delirious in a treetop hut.
    â€”
Prity
, the little chimp who teaches him by example. Though mute, she shows flair for both math and sardonic hand speech.
    â€”
Jomah
and
Kurt
 … sounds linked to younger and older versions of the same narrow face. Apprentice and master at a unique art, meant to erase all the dams, towns, and houses that unlawful settlers had built on a proscribed world. Emerson recalls
Biblos
, an archive of paper books, where Kurt showed his nephew well-placed explosive charges that might bring the cave down, smashing the library to dust. If the order ever came.
    â€”The captive fanatic,
Dedinger
, rides behind the explosers, deeply tanned with craggy features. Leader of human rebels with beliefs Emerson can’t grasp, except they preach no love of visitors from the sky. While the party hurries on, Dedinger’s gray eyes rove, calculating his next move.
    Some names and a few places—these utterances have meaning now. It is progress, but Emerson is no fool. He figures he must have known
hundreds
of words before he fell, broken, to this world. Now and again he makes out snatches of half meaning from the “
wah-wah
” gabble as his companions address each other. Snippets that tantalize, without satisfying.
    Sometimes the torrent grows tiresome, and he wonders—might people be less inclined to fight if they talked less? If they spent more time watching and listening?
    Fortunately, words aren’t his sole project. There is the haunting familiarity of music, and during rest stops he plays math games with Prity and Sara, drawing shapes in the sand. They are his friends and he takes joy from their laughter.
    He has one more window to the world.
    As often as he can stand it, Emerson slips the
rewq
over his eyes … a masklike film that transforms the worldinto splashes of slanted color. In all his prior travels he never encountered such a creature—a species used by all six races to grasp each other’s moods. If left on too long, it gives him headaches. Still he finds fascinating the auras surrounding Sara, Dedinger, and others. Sometimes it seems the colors carry more than just emotion … though he cannot pin it down. Not yet.
    One truth Emerson recalls. Advice drawn from the murky well of his past, putting him on guard.
    Life can be full of illusions.

PART TWO
    LEGENDS TELL OF MANY PRECIOUS TEXTS that were lost one bitter evening, during an unmatched disaster some call the Night of the Ghosts, when a quarter of the Biblos Archive burned. Among the priceless volumes that vanished by that cruel winter’s twilight, one tome reportedly showed pictures of Buyur—the mighty race whose lease on Jijo expired five thousand centuries ago.
    Scant diary accounts survive from witnesses to the calamity, but according to some who browsed the Xenoscience Collection before it burned, the Buyur were squat beings, vaguely resembling the
bullfrogs
shown on page ninety-six of
Clear’s Guide to Terrestrial Life-Forms
, though with elephantine legs and sharp, forward-looking eyes. They were said to be master shapers of useful organisms, and had a reputation for prodigious wit.
    But other sooner races already knew that much about the Buyur, both from oral traditions and the many clever servant organisms that flit about Jijo’s forests, perhaps still looking for departed masters. Beyond these few scraps, we have very little about the race whose mighty civilization thronged this world for more than a million years.
    HOW could so much knowledge be lost in a single night? Today it seems odd. Why weren’t
copies
of such valuable texts printed by those first-wave human colonists, before they sent their sneakship tumbling to ocean depths? Why not place duplicates all over the Slope, safeguarding the learning against all peril?
    In our ancestors’ defense, recall what tense times