Somehow, this seems a more fitting way to go — by drowning.
I. THE BOOK OF THE SEA
You who chose this way of life — to live and breed and die in secret on this wounded world, cowering from star-lanes you once roamed, hiding with other exiles in a place forbidden by law — what justice have you any right to claim?
The universe is hard. Its laws are unforgiving. Even the successful and glorious are punished by the grinding executioner called Time. All the worse for you who are accursed, frightened of the sky.
And yet there are paths that climb, even out of despair’s sorrow.
Hide, children of exile! Cower from the stars! But watch, heed and listen — for the coming of a path.
Alvin’s Tale
On the day i grew up enough for my hair to start turning white, my parents summoned all the members of our thronging cluster to the family khuta, for a ceremony giving me my proper name — Hph-wayuo.
I guess it’s all right, for a hoonish tag. It rolls out from my throat sac easy enough, even if I get embarrassed hearing it sometimes. The handle’s supposed to have been in the lineage ever since our sneakship brought the first hoon to Jijo.
The sneakship was utterly gloss! Our ancestors may have been sinners, in coming to breed on this taboo planet, but they flew a mighty star-cruiser, dodging Institute patrols and dangerous Zang and Izmunuti’s carbon storms to get here. Sinners or not, they must have been awfully brave and skilled to do all that.
I’ve read everything I can find about those days, even though it happened hundreds of years before there was paper on Jijo, so all we really have to go on are a few legends about those hoon pioneers, who dropped from the sky to find g’Keks, glavers, and traeki already hiding here on the Slope. Stories that tell how those first hoon sank their sneakship in the deep Midden, so it couldn’t be traced, then settled down to build crude wooden rafts, the first to sail Jijo’s rivers and seas since the Great Buyur went away.