Brightness Reef by David Brin

of grayish plates that slid like overlapping petals. The birdling’s yellow beak quickly devoured the nut Dwer had cracked.
    Mudfoot sat up, eyes glinting.
    Dwer warned the noor, half-dozing—“You bother it, an’ I’ll have yer hide fer a hat.”
    Mudfoot sniffed and lay down again. Soon there came a rhythmic tapping as the teet started pecking at the next nut. It would take its time, consuming one kernel each midura-roughly seventy minutes-until the last was gone. Then, with a chattering screech, it would fly off. One didn’t need a printout from the Great Library to know what function the -Buyur had designed this creature to fill. The living alarm clock still worked as programmed.
    Lark is wrong about our place on this world, Dwer thought, lulled by the unvaried tapping. We do a service. Jijo would be a sad place without people to use its gifts.
    There were dreams. Dwer always had dreams. Shapeless foes lurked beyond sight as he wandered a land covered with colors, like a rainbow that had melted, flowed across the ground, then frozen in place. The harsh hues hurt his eyes. Moreover, his throat felt parched, and he was unarmed.
    The dream shifted. All of a sudden, .he found himself alone in a forest of trees that seemed to stretch up past the moons. For some reason, the trees were even more threatening than the colored landscape. He fled, but could find no exit from the forest as their trunks glowed, burst into flame, then started to explode.
    The furious intensity of the nightmare yanked him awake, sitting up with a racing heart. Dwer stared wide-eyed, glad to find the realwoods intact, though dark and threaded by a chill breeze. There was no raging firestorm. He had dreamed the whole thing.
    Still, uneasiness gnawed. Something felt wrong.
    He rubbed his eyes. Different constellations swarmed the sky, fading in the east under a wash of predawn gray. The biggest moon, Loocen, hovered over silhouetted peaks, its sunlit face spangled with bright pinpoints-the domes of long-abandoned cities.
    So what’s wrong?
    It wasn’t just intuition. The clock teet had stopped. Something must have disturbed it before the time to chatter its alarm. He checked the area and found the noor snoring on quietly. The glaver tracked Dwer dully with one thoughtless eye, the other still closed.
    All at once, he knew the problem.
    My bow!
    It wasn’t where he’d left it, within arm’s reach. It was gone.
    Stolen!
    Anger flooded the predawn dimness with blinding adrenaline outrage. Dozens had spoken enviously of his bow-a masterpiece of laminated wood and bone, fashioned by the qheuenish craftsmen of Ovoom Town. But who . . . ?
    Calm down. Think.
    Could it be Jeni Shen? She often joked about luring him into a poker game, with the bow at stake. Or might it be—
    Stop!
    He took a deep breath, but it was hard disciplining his young body, so full of need to act.
    Stop and hear what the world has to say. . . .
    First, he must calm the furious spilling of his own unspoken words. Dwer pushed aside all noisy thoughts. Next he made himself ignore the rasping sound of breath and pulse.
    The distant, muttering waterfall was by now familiar, easy to cancel out. The wind’s rustle, less regular, soon went away, too.
    One hovering sound might be the clock teet, cruising in hope of more tobar seeds. Another flutter told of a honey bat-no, a mated pair-which he also disregarded. The noor’s snoring he edited, and the soft grind of glaver-molars as the prisoner rechewed her cud.
    There! Dwer turned his head. Was that a scrape on gravel? Pebbles rattling down a scree, perhaps. Something, or someone-bipedal? Almost man-size, he guessed, and hurrying away.
    Dwer took off after the sound. Gliding ghostlike in his moccasins, he ran some distance before noting that the thief was heading the wrong direction. Away from the coast. Away from the Slope. Higher into the Rimmer Range.
    Toward the Pass.
    Padding up the rocky trail, Dwer’s angry flush gave way to the