Heaven's Reach by David Brin Read Free Book Online Page B

should politely avert your gaze, Scout Harms. The quant is clearly having difficulties. You needn’t add to its troubles by staring.”
    Harry winced at the reminder. “Oh, right. The Uncertainty Principle!” He turned away. His job in E Space was to watch, but you could do harm by watching too closely.
    Anyway, his real task was to look for less exotic interlopers.
    Most of his ship sightings were of hydrogen breathers, easily identified because their balloonlike vessels looked the same in any continuum. For some reason, members of that order liked taking shortcuts through E Space on their way from one Jupiter-type world to another, even though A and B levels were more efficient, and transfer points much faster.
    On those rare occasions when Harry spotted anyone from his own order of oxygen breathers—the great and mighty Civilization of Five Galaxies—none of them approached his sentry position, defending a proscribed route to a forbidden place.
    No wonder they hired a low-class chim for this job. Even criminals, trying to sneak into a fallow zone, would be fools to use allaphor space as a back door.
    As I’m a fool, to be stuck guarding it.
    Still, it beat the dry, windy steppes of Horst.
    Anything was better than Horst.
    He and his parents were the only members of their species on the planet, which meant the long process of learning speech, laborious for young neo-chimps, came doubly hard. With Marko and Felicity distracted by research, Harry had to practice with wild-eyed Probsher kids, who mocked him for his long, furry arms and early stammer. With painted faces and short tempers, they showed none of the dignified patience he’d been taught to expect from the elder race. By the time he learned how different humans were on Horst, it didn’t matter. He vowed to leave, not only Horst, but Terragens society. To seek the strange and unfamiliar.
    Years later, Harry realized a similar ambition must have driven his parents. In youthful anger, he had spurned their pleas for patience, their awkward affections, even their parting blessing.
    Still, regret was just a veneer, forgiveness a civilized abstraction, devoid of pang or poignancy.
    Other memories still had power to make his veins tense with emotion. Growing up listening to botbian night wolves howl across dry lakes under patch-gilt moons. Or holding his knees by firelight while a Probsher shaman chanted eerie tales—fables that Marko and Felicity avidly studied as venerable folk legends, although these tribes had roamed Horst for less than six generations.
    His own sapient race wasn’t much older! Only a few centuries had passed since human beings began genetic meddling in chimpanzee stock.
    Who gave them the right?
    No permission was needed. Galactics had followed the same pattern for aeons—each “generation” of starfarers spawning the next in a rippling bootstrap effect called Uplift.
    On the whole, humans were better masters than most … and he would rather be sapient than not.
    No. What drove him away from Earthclan was not resentment but a kind of detachment. The mayfly yammerings of Probsher mystics mattered no more or less than the desperate moves of the Terragens Council, against the grinding forces of an overwhelming universe. One might as well compare sparks rising from a campfire to the stars wheeling by overhead. They looked similar, at a glance. But what did another incandescent cinder really matter on the grand scale of things?
    Did the cosmos care if humans or chims survived?
    Even at university this notion threaded his thoughts. Harry’s natural links elongated till they parted one by one. All that remained was a nebulous desire to seek out something lasting. Something that deserved to last.
    Joining Wer’Q’quinn and the Navigation Institute, hefound something enduring, a decision he never regretted.
    Still, it puzzled Harry years later that his dreams kept returning to the