Free Brightness Reef by David Brin Page A

low hill. Along the way, Vubben continued chanting from the Scroll of Danger. Voices   cried   out   ahead.    Crowds   jostled   along   a ridgetop, hissing and murmuring. We must nudge past men and hoon to win our way through. Whereupon, did we not gaze across a nest? A new clearing lined with shattered trees, still smoking from whatever ray had cut them down.
    And poised amid this devastation-shimmering from its heat of entry-lay the cause.
    Nearby, human and urrish crafters argued in the strange dialect of the engineering caste, disputing whether this nub or that blister might be weaponry or sensors. But which of us on Jijo has the expertise to guess? Our ships long ago went down to join this planet’s melting crust. Even the most recent arrivals, humans, are many generations removed from starfarers. No living member of the Commons ever saw anything like this.
    It was a ship of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies. That much the techies could tell.
    Yet where was the rayed spiral? The symbol required to be carried on the forward flank of every sanctioned ship of space?
    Our worried lore-masters explain-the spiral is no mere symbol. Silently, it rides. Impartially, it records. Objectively, it bears witness to everything seen and done, wherever the vessel may fly.
    We peered and sought, but in the ordained place there lay only a burnished shine. It had been rubbed away, smoother than a qheuenish larva.
    That was when confusion gave way to understanding. Realization of what this ship represented.
    Not the great Institutes, as we first thought.
    Nor the righteous, mighty, legalistic star-clans-or the mysterious Zang.
    Not even exiles like ourselves.
    None of those, but outlaws. Felons of an order worse than our own ancestors.
    Villains.
    Villains had come to Jijo.
     
     

III. THE BOOK OF THE SEA
    It is a Paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement.
    Any paradise of plenty soon fills, to become
    paradise no more.
    By what right, then, do we exiles claim a
    world that was honorably set aside,
    to nurture frail young-life in peace,
    and be kept safe from hungry nations?
     
    Exiles, you should fear the law’s just wrath,
    to find you here, unsanctioned, not yet
    redeemed.
    But when judgment comes, law will also be
    your shield, tempering
    righteous wrath with justice.
     
    There is a deeper terror, prowling the angry
    sky.
    It is a different peril.   One that stalks in
    utter absence of the law.
    The Scroll of Danger
     
     
    Alvin’s Tale
    ALL RIGHT, SO I’M NOT AS QUICK AS SOME. I’LL never think as fast as Huck, who can run verbal circles around me.
    It’s just as well, I guess. I could’ve grown up in this little hoon port thinking I was such a clever fellow—as witty and gloss as my literary nicknamesake-just ‘cause I can read any Anglic book and fancy myself a writer. Good thing I had this little g’Kek genius living in the khuta next door, to remind me that an above-average hoon is still a hoon. Dull as a brick.
    Anyway, there I was, squatting between two of my best friends while they fussed over what we should do with the coming summer, and it never occurred to me that both Huck and Pincer were ring-coring me at more than one level.
    Pincer only spent a few duras trying to tell us about his latest “monsters”-grayish shapes he thought he glimpsed through the murk, while bored, tending his hive’s lobster pens. He’s pulled that one on us so many times, we wouldn’t listen if he brought us a molar from Moby Dick, with a peg leg jammed like a toothpick on one end. Sighing from all five vents at once, he gave up babbling about his latest sighting, and switched over to defending his Project Nautilus.
    Pincer was upset to learn that Huck wanted to abandon the scheme. Legs lifted on opposite sides of his hard shell, hissing like tubes on a calliope.
    “Look, we already agreed-deed. We just gotta finish the bathy, or else what’ve we been working-king on for a year