Infinity's Shore u-5

by David Brin

  It sounded alluring — a chance to retreat from life.

  But for now, there was simply too much to do.

  The council seldom met anymore.

  Phwhoondau, who had made a lifelong study of the languages and ways of fabled Galactics, had responsibility for negotiating with the Jophur. Unfortunately, there seemed little to haggle about. Just futile pleading for the invaders to change their many-ringed minds. Phwhoondau sent repeated entreaties to the toroidal aliens, protesting that the High Sages knew nothing about the much-sought “dolphin ship.”

  Believe us, O great Jophur lords, the hoonish sage implored. We have no secret channel of communication with your prey. The events you speak of were all unrelated … a series of coincidences.

  But the Jophur were too angry to believe it.

  In attempting to negotiate, Phwhoondau was advised by Chorsh, the new traeki representative. But that replacement for Asx the Wise had few new insights to offer. As a member of the Tarek Town Explosers Guild, Chorsh was a valued technician, not an expert on distant Jophur cousins.

  What Chorsh did have was a particularly useful talent — a summoning torus.

  Shifting summer winds carried the traeki’s scent message all over the Slope — a call from Chorsh to all qualified ring stacks.

  Come … come now to where you/we are needed.…

  Hundreds of them already stood in single file, a chain of fatty heaps that stretched on for nearly a league, winding amid the gently bending trunks of boo. Each volunteer squatted on its own feast of decaying matter that work crews kept stoked, like feeding logs to a steam engine. Chuffing and smoking from exertion, the chem-synth gang dripped glistening fluids into makeshift troughs made of split and hollowed saplings, contributing to a trickle that eventually became a rivulet of foul-smelling liquor.

  Immobile and speechless, they hardly looked like sentient beings. More like tall, greasy beehives, laid one after another along a twisty road. But that image was deceiving. Lester saw swathes of color flash across the body of one nearby traeki — a subtle interplay of shades that rippled first between the stack’s component rings, as if they were holding conversations among themselves. Then the pattern coalesced, creating a unified shape of light and shadows at the points that lay nearest to the traeki’s neighbors, on either side. Those stacks, in turn, responded with changes in their own surfaces.

  Lester recognized the wavelike motif — traeki laughter. The workers were sharing jokes, among their own rings and from stack to stack.

  They are the strangest of the Six, Lester thought. And yet we understand them … and they, us.

  I doubt even the sophisticates of the Five Galaxies can say the same thing about the Jophur. Out there, none of their advanced science could achieve what we have simply by living next to traeki, day in and day out.

  It was pretty crude humor, Lester could tell. Many of these workers were pharmacists, back in their home villages all over the Slope. The one nearest Lester had been speculating about alternative uses of the stuff they were making — perhaps how it might also serve as a cure for the perennial problem of hoonish constipation … especially if accompanied by liberal applications of heat.…

  At least that was how Lester interpreted the language of color. He was far from expert in its nuances. Anyway, these workers were welcome to a bit of rough-edged drollery. Their hard labor lasted day in, day out, and still production lagged behind schedule.

  But more traeki arrived with each passing midura, following the scent trail emitted by their sage.

  Now we have to hope that the Jophur are too advanced and urbane to use the same technique, and trace our location by reading the winds.

  The qheuen sage, Knife-Bright Insight, bore all the duties of civil administration on her broad blue back.

  There were refugees to relocate, food supplies to organize, and militia units to dispatch, quashing outbreaks of civil war among the Six. One clear success came lately in subduing foreign plagues, duplicating the samples Jeni Shen brought from the Glade Lake, then using a new network of glider couriers to distribute vaccines.

  Yet despite such successes, the social fabric of the Commons continued dissolving. News arrived telling of sooner bands departing across the official boundaries of the Slope, seeking to escape the doom threatened for the Six Races. The Warril Plain was aflame with fighting among hot-tempered urrish clans. And more bad news kept rolling in.

  Recent reports told of several hives of Gray Queens declaring open secession from the Commons, asserting sovereignty over their ancient domains. Spurred by the devastation of Ovoom Town, some rebel princesses even rejected their own official High Sage.

  “We accept no guidance from a mere blue,” came word from one gray hive, snubbing Knife-Bright Insight and resurrecting ancient bigotry.

  “Come give us advice when you have a real name.”

  Of course no red or blue qheuen ever used a name, as such. It was cruel and haughty to mention the handicap, inherited from ancient days and other worlds.

  Worse, rumors claimed that some gray hives had started negotiating with the Jophur on their own.

  • • •

  A crisis can tear us apart, or draw us together.

  Lester checked on the mixed team of qheuens and hoons who were erecting spindly scaffolding around selected spires of greatboo. Only a small fraction of the designated trunks had been trimmed and readied, but the crews were getting better at their unfamiliar task. Some qheuens brought expertise learned from their grandmothers, who in olden times used to maintain fearsome catapults at Tarek Town, dominating two rivers until a great siege toppled that ancient reign.

  So much activity might be detectable by prying sky eyes. But taller trunks surrounded each chosen one, drowning the tumult in a vast sea of Brobdingnagian grass.

  Or so we hope.

  Guiding the work, urrish and human craft workers pored over ancient designs found in a single rare Biblos text, dating from precontact days, dealing with an obscure wolfling technology that no Galactic power had needed or used for a billion years. Side by side, men and women joined their urs colleagues, adapting the book’s peculiar concepts, translating its strange recipes to native materials and their own cottage skills.

  Conditions were spartan. Many volunteers had already suffered privation, hiking great distances along steep mountain trails to reach this tract of tall green columns, stretching like a prairie as far as any eye could see.

  All recruits shared a single motive — finding a way for the Commons of Six Races to fight back.

  Amid the shouting throng, it was Ur-Jah who brought order out of chaos, galloping from one site to the next, making sure the traeki synthesists had food and raw material, and that every filament was wound tight. Of all the High Sages, Ur-Jah was most qualified to share Lester’s job of supervision. Her pelt might be ragged with age and her brood pouches dry, but the mind in that narrow skull was sharp — and more pragmatic than Lester’s had ever been.

  Of the High Sages, that left only Vubben.

  Judicious and knowing. Deep in perception. Leader of a sept that had been marked long ago for destruction by foes who never forgot, and never gave up. Among Jijo’s exile races, Vubben’s folk had been first to brave Izmunuti’s stiffening winds, seeking Jijo’s bright shoal almost two thousand years ago.

  The wheeled g’Kek — both amiable and mysterious.

  Neighborly, if weird.

  Elfin but reliable.

  Faceless, yet as open as a book.

  How lessened the universe would be without them!

  Despite their difficulty on rough trails, some g’Kek had made it to this remote mountain base, laboring to weave fabric, or applying their keen eyes to the problem of making small parts. Yet their own sage was nowhere in sight.

  Vubben had gone south, to a sacred place dangerously near the Jophur ship. There, he was attempting in secret to commune with Jijo’s highest power.

  Lester worried about his wise friend with the squea
ky axles, venturing down there all alone.

  But someone has to do it.

  Soon we’ll know if we have been fools all along … or if we’ve put our faith in something deserving of our love.

  Fallon

  A DOMAIN OF BLINDING WHITENESS MARKED THE border of the Spectral Flow, where that slanting shelf of radiant stone abruptly submerged beneath an ocean of sparkling grains. North of this point commenced a different kind of desert — one that seemed less hard on the brain and eyes, but just as unforgiving. A desert where hardy lifeforms dwelled.

  Dangerous lifeforms.

  The escaped heretic’s footprints transformed as they crossed the boundary. No longer did they glow, each with a unique lambency of oil-slick colors, telling truths and lies. Plunging ahead without pause, the tracks became mere impressions on the Plain of Sharp Sand — indentations that grew blurrier as gusty winds stroked the dunes — revealing only that someone recently came this way, a humanoid biped, favoring his left leg with a limp.

  Fallon could tell one more thing — the hiker had been in an awful hurry.

  “We can’t follow anymore,” he told his young companions. “Our mounts are spent, and this is Dedinger’s realm. He knows it better than we do.”

  Reza and Pahna stared at the sandy desert, no less dismayed than he. But the older one dissented — a sturdy redhead with a rifle slung over her shoulder.

  “We must go on. The heretic knows everything. If he reaches his band of ruffians, they’ll soon follow him back to Xi, attacking us in force. Or else he might trade our location to the aliens. The man must be stopped!”

  Despite her vehemence, Fallon could tell Reza’s heart was heavy. For several days they had chased Dedinger across the wasteland they knew — a vast tract of laminated rock so poisonous, a sliver under the skin might send you into thrashing fever. A place almost devoid of life, where daylight raised a spectacle of unlikely marvels before any unprotected eye — waterfalls and fiery pits, golden cities and fairy dust. Even night offered no rest, for moonbeams alone could make an unwary soul shiver as ghost shadows flapped at the edge of sight. Such were the terrible wonders of the Spectral Flow — in most ways a harsher territory than the mundane desert just ahead. So harsh that few Jijoans ever thought to explore its fringes, allowing the secret of Xi to remain safe.

  Reza was right to fear the consequences, should Dedinger make good his escape — especially if the fanatic managed to reforge his alliance with the horse-hating clan of urrish cultists called the Urunthai. The fugitive should have succumbed to the unfamiliar dangers of the Flow by now. The three pursuers had expected to catch up with him yesterday, if not the day before.

  It’s my fault, Fallon thought. I was too complacent. Too deliberate. My old bones can’t take a gallop and I would not let the women speed on without me.

  Who would guess Dedinger could ride so well after so little practice, driving his stolen horse with a mixture of care and utter brutality, so the poor beast expired just two leagues short of this very boundary?

  Even after that, his jogging pace kept the gap between them from closing fast enough. While the Illias preserved their beloved mares, the madman managed to cross ground that should have killed him first.

  We are chasing a strong, resourceful adversary. I’d rather face a hoonish ice hermit, or even a Gray Champion, than risk this fellow with his back cornered against a dune.

  Of course Dedinger must eventually run out of reserves, pushing himself to the limit. Perhaps the man lay beyond the next drift, sprawled in exhausted stupor.

  Well, it did no harm to hope.

  “All right.” Fallon nodded. “We’ll go. But keep a sharp watch. And be ready to move quick if I say so. We’ll follow the trail till nightfall, then head back whether he’s brought down or not.”

  Reza and Pahna agreed, nudging their horses to follow. The animals stepped onto hot sand without enthusiasm, laying their ears back and nickering unhappily. Color-blind and unimaginative, their breed was largely immune to the haunting mirages of the Spectral Flow, but they clearly disliked this realm of glaring brightness. Soon, the three humans removed their rewq symbionts, pulling the living veils from over their eyes, trading them for urrish-made dark glasses with polarized coatings made of stretched fish membranes.

  Ifni, this is a horrid place, Fallon thought, leaning left in his saddle to make out the renegade’s tracks. But Dedinger is at home here.

  In theory, that should not matter. Before ceding the position to his apprentice, Dwer, Fallon had been chief scout for the Council of Sages — an expert who supposedly knew every hectare of the Slope. But that was always an exaggeration. Oh, he had spent some time on this desert, getting to know the rugged, illiterate men who kept homes under certain hollow dunes, making their hard living by spear hunting and sifting for spica granules.

  But I was much younger in those days, long before Dedinger began preaching to the sandmen, flattering and convincing them of their righteous perfection. Their role as leaders, blazing a way for humanity down the Path of Redemption.

  I’d be a fool to think I still qualify as a “scout” in this terrain.

  Sure enough, Fallon was taken by surprise when their trail crossed a stretch of booming sand.

  The fugitive’s footprints climbed up the side of a dune, following an arc that would have stressed the mounts to follow. Fallon decided to cut inside of Dedinger’s track, saving time and energy … but soon the sandy surface ceased cushioning the horse’s hoofbeats. Instead, low groans echoed with each footfall, resonating like the sound of tapping on a drum. Cursing, he reined back. As an apprentice he once took a dare to jump in the center of a booming dune, and was lucky when it did not collapse beneath him. As it was, he spent the next pidura nursing an aching skull that kept on ringing from the reverberations he set off.

  After laborious backtracking, they finally got around the obstacle.

  Now Dedinger knows we’re still after him. Fallon chided himself. Concentrate, dammit! You have experience, use it!

  Fallon glanced back at the young women, whose secret clan of riders chose him to spend pleasant retirement in their midst, one of just four men dwelling in Xi’s glades. Pahna was still a lanky youth, but Reza had already shared Fallon’s bed on three occasions. The last time she had been kind, overlooking when he fell asleep too soon.

  They claim experience and thoughtfulness are preferable traits in male companions — qualities that make up for declining stamina. But I wonder if it’s a wise policy. Wouldn’t they be better off keeping a young stallion like Dwer around, instead?

  Dwer was far better equipped for this kind of mission. The lad would have brought Dedinger back days ago, all tied up in a neat package.

  Well, you don’t always have the ideal man on hand for every job. I just hope old Lester and the sages found a good use for Dwer. His gifts are rare.

  Fallon had never been quite the “natural” that his apprentice was. In times past, he used to make up for it with discipline and attention to detail. He had never been one to let his mind wander during a hunt.

  But times change, and a man loses his edge. These days, he could not help drifting away to the past. Something always reminded him of other days, his past was so filled with riches.

  Oh, the times he used to have, running across the steppe with Ul-ticho, his plains hunting companion whose grand life was heartbreakingly short. Her fellowship meant more to Fallon than any human’s, before or since. No one else understood so well the silences within his restless heart.

  Ul-ticho, be glad you never saw this year when things fell apart. Those times were better, old friend. Jijo was ours, and even the sky held no threat you and I couldn’t handle.

  Dedinger’s tracks still lay in plain sight, turning the rim of a great dune. The marks grew steadily fresher, and his limp grew worse with every step. The fugitive was near collapse. Assuming he kept going, it would be a half midura, at most, before the mounted party caught him.

  And still
some distance short of the first shelter well. Not bad. We may pull this off yet.

  Assumptions are a luxury that civilized folk can afford. But not warriors or people of the land. In those staggered footprints, Fallon read a reassuring story, and so violated a rule that he used to pound into his apprentice.

  They were riding in the same direction as the wind, so no scent warned the animals before they turned, slanting down to the shadowed north side of the dune. Abruptly, a murmur of voices greeted them — shouts, filled with wrath and danger. Before Fallon’s blinking eyes could adjust to the changed light, he and the women found themselves staring down the shafts of a dozen or more cocked arbalests, all aimed their way, held by grizzled men wearing cloaks, turbans, and membrane goggles.

  Now he made out a structure just ahead, shielded from the elements, made of piled stones. Fallon caught a belated sniff of water.

  A new well? Built since I last came here as a young man? Or did I forget this one?

  More likely, the desert men never told the visiting chief scout all their secret sites. Far better, from their point of view, to let the High Sages think their maps complete, while holding something in reserve.

  Lifting his hands slowly and carefully away from the pistol at his belt, Fallon now saw Dedinger, sunburned and shaking as he clutched devoted followers — who tenderly poured water over the prophet’s broken lips.

  We came so close!

  The hands holding Dedinger right now should have been Fallon’s. They would have been, if only things had gone just a little differently.

  I’m sorry, Fallon thought, turning in silent apology to Reza and Pahna. Their faces looked surprised and bleak.

  I’m an old man … and I let you down.

  Nelo

  THE BATTLE FOR DOLO VILLAGE INVOLVED LARGER issues, but the principal thing decided was who would get to sleep indoors that night.

  Most of the combatants were quite young, or very old.