Heaven's Reach by David Brin Read Free Book Online

EARTH YEARS HAD PASSED ON HIS PER sonal duration clock since he took the irrevocable step, standing amid volunteers from fifty alien races, laboriously mouthing polyglottal words of a memorized oath that had been written ages ago, by some species long extinct. Upon joining the Observer Corps, Harry’s life didn’t simply shift—it leaped from the riverbed of his genetic lineage, transferring loyalty from his birth planet to an austere bureaucracy that was old when his distant ancestors still scurried under Triassic jungle canopies, hiding from dinosaurs.
    Yet, during training he was struck by how often other students sought him out with questions about Earthclan, whose struggles were the latest riveting interstellar penny-drama. Would the newest band of unprotected, sponsorless “wolflings” catch up with starfaring civilization in time to forestall the normal fate of upstarts? Despite Terra’s puny unimportance, this provoked much speculation and wagering.
    What was it like—his fellow acolytes asked—to have patrons like humans, who
taught themselves
such basic arts as speech, spaceflight, and eugenics? As a neochimp, Harry was junior in status to every other client-citizen at the base, yet he was almost a celebrity, getting hostility from some, admiration from others, and curiosity from nearly all.
    In fact, he couldn’t tell his classmates much about Terragens Civilization, having spent just a year among the talky neo-chimpanzees of Earth before dropping out of university to sign on with the Navigation Institute. His life was already one of exile.
    He had been born in space, aboard a Terragens survey vessel. Harry’s vague memories of TSS
Pelenor
wereof a misty paradise lost, filled with high-tech comforts and warm places to play. The crew had seemed like gods—human officers, neochim and neo-dolphin ratings … plus a jolly, treelike Kanten advisor—all moving about their tasks so earnestly, except when he needed to be cuddled or tickled or tossed in the air.
    Then, one awful day, his parents chose to debark and study the strange human tribes on a desolate colony world—Horst. That ended Harry’s part in the epochal voyage of the
Pelenor
, and began his simmering resentment.
    Memories of starscapes and humming engines became muzzy, idealized. Throughout childhood on that dusty world, the notion of space travel grew more magical. By the time Harry finally left Horst, he was shocked by the true sterile bleakness that stretched between rare stellar oases.
    I remember it differently
, he thought, during the voyage to Earth. Of course that memory was a fantasy, formed by an impressionable toddler. At university, instructors taught that subjective impressions are untrustworthy, biased by the mind’s fervent wish to believe.
    Still, the thirst would not be slaked. An ambition to seek paradise in other versions of reality.
    The bananas held him trapped for days.
    If the allaphor had been less personal, Harry might have fought harder. But the image was too explicitly pointed to ignore. After the first debacle, when the station nearly foundered, he decided to wait before challenging the reef again.
    Anyway, this wasn’t a bad site to observe from. In a synergy between this strange continuum and his own mind, the local region manifested itself as a high plateau, overlooking a vast, undulating sea of purple tendrils. Black mountains still bobbed in the distance, though some of the “holes” in the red-blue sky became drooping dimples, as if the celestial dome had decided to melt or slump.
    There were also life-forms—mostly creatures of theMemetic Order. Shapes that fluttered, crawled, or shimmered past Harry’s octagonal platform, grazing and preying on each other, or else merging or undergoing eerie transformations before his eyes. On all other dimensional planes, memes could only exist as parasites, dwelling in the host brains or mental