Infinity's Shore

by David Brin

  "I'm afraid I don't look much like my mother. Nor do I play half as well."

  The old woman smiled. "A good parent wants her offspring to excel-to do what she could not. But a wise parent lets the child select which excellence. You chose realms of deep thought. I know she was very proud."

  Sara acknowledged the kindness with a nod, but took small comfort from aphorisms. If the choice really were mine, don't you think I'd have been beautiful, like Melina? A dark woman of mystery, who amazed people with many graceful talents?

  Mathematics chose me . . . it seized me with cool infinities and hints at universal truth. Yet whom do I touch with my equations? Who looks at my face and form with unreserved delight?

  Melina died young, but surrounded by those who loved her. Who will weep over me, when I am gone?

  The Illias leader must have misunderstood Sara's frown.

  "Do my words disturb you?" Foruni asked. "Do I sound like a heretic, for believing that generations can improve?

  Does it seem an odd belief for a secret tribe that hides itself even from a civilization of exiled refugees?"

  Sara found it hard to answer.

  Why were Melina's children so odd, byJijoan standards? Although Lark's heresy seems opposite to mine, we share one thread-rejecting the Path of Redemption.

  The books Mother read to us often spoke of hope, drawn from some act of rebellion.

  To the Illias leader, she replied, "You and your urrish friends rescued horses, back when they seemed doomed. Your alliance foreshadowed that of Drake and Ur-Chown. You are a society of dedicated women, who carefully choose your male companions from the best Jijo has to offer. Living in splendid isolation, you see humanity at its best-seldom its more nasty side.

  "No, it does not surprise me that the Illias are optimists at heart."

  Foruni nodded. "I am told that you, in your investigations of language theory, reached similar conclusions."

  Sara shrugged. "I'm no optimist. Noj; personally. But for a while, it seemed that I could see a pattern in the evolution of Jijo's dialects, and in all the new literary activity taking place across the Slope. Not that it matters anymore, now that aliens have come to-"

  The old woman cut in. "You don't think we are destined to be like glavers, winning our second chance by passing through oblivion?"

  "You mean what might have happened, if starships never came? I argued with Dedinger about this. If Jijo had been left alone, I felt there was the possibility of . . ."

  Sara shook her head and changed the subject.

  "Speaking of Dedinger, have you had any luck finding him?"

  Foruni winced unhappily. "It's been just a short while since he broke out of the pen where he was kept. We never imagined he would prove so resourceful, knowing how to saddle and steal a horse."

  "He had time to learn by observing."

  "I see that we were naive. It's a long time since we kept prisoners in XL

  "Unfortunately, the tracks do not lead back to the tunnel, where we might have trapped him in the narrow darkness. Instead, the wily ligger spawn struck out across the Spectral Flow."

  Sara tried picturing a man alone on horseback, crossing a vast desert of poison stone and cutting light. "Do you think he can make it?"

  "You mean can we catch him before he dies out there?" It was Foruni's turn to shrug. "Fallen is not as spry as he was, but he departed a midura ago with some of our most able young riders. The fanatic should be back in care soon, and we'll watch him more closely-"

  Foruni stopped, midsentence, glancing down at her hand. An insect had landed, and was sniffing at a vein. Sara recognized a skeeter-a blood-sucking irritant familiar across the Slope. Skeeters were slow and easily smacked, but for some reason Foruni refrained. Instead, she let the vampire wasp leisurely insert a narrow tube and take its meal. When finished, it proceeded to perform a little dance, one filled with jerky, beckoning motions.

  Sara stared, fascinated. Skeeters seldom survived landing on a human long enough to do this.

  Come with me, it seemed to say with each swing of its tiny abdomen and tail. Come with me now.

  Sara realized, it must be another remnant servant beast of the vanished Buyur. A useful messenger, if you knew how to use it.

  Foruni sighed. "Alas, dear cousin, it's time for you to go. You and Kurt and the others must hurry to where you're needed most."

  Needed? Suessi wondered. In times like these, what could a person like me possibly be needed for?

  The journey south resumed, this time on horseback. They used the ancient Buyur transit tunnel at first, where the failed deconstructor left its demolition unfinished. But soon it lay cracked open for stretches, like the spent larval casing of a newly fledged qheuen, leaving a dusty cavity or else a pit filled with water. Thereafter they had to ride in the open, awash in the luminous tides of the Spectral Flow. The Illias provided hooded cloaks. Still, it felt as if the colors were probing the reflective garments for some gap to worm their way inside.

  Kurt and Jomah rode ahead with Kepha, their guide. The elderly exploser leaned forward in his saddle, as if that might get them to their goal quicker. Then came Prity, on a donkey more suited for her small form.

  Emerson seemed strangely subdued, though he smiled at Sara from time to time. He wore the rewq constantly, though from his ever-turning head, Sara gathered the filmy symbiont was doing more than just softening the colors. It must be adjusting, translating them. Sometimes, the starman stiffened in the saddle . . . though whether from pain, surprise, or exaltation, Sara could never be quite sure.

  Taking up the rear was Uigor, the urrish traitor. Wisely, she had not tried to break across the poison plain with her erstwhile ally, Dedinger. Guarded by two of her own kind from the Xi colony, Uigor swung her head in growing eagerness as the party neared Mount Guenn. Urrish nostrils flared at scents of smoke and molten rock, as the volcano loomed to fill the southern sky.

  Sara felt surprisingly good. The saddle was a tool her body had mastered. When the going grew steep and riders dismounted to lead the horses by hand, her legs were suffused with waves of comfortable warmth, with strength still in reserve.

  So, a hermit math potato can manage to keep up, after all. Or is this euphoria an early sign of altitude sickness?

  They were mounting one of countless knee hills along the sloping volcano, when suddenly all three urs bolted forward, hissing excitement and trailing clouds of pumice, forgetting their separate roles as they jostled toward the next outlook. Outlined against the sky, their long heads swept in unison, from left to right and back again.

  Finally, winded from the climb, she and Emerson arrived to find a mighty caldera spread before them . . . one of many studding the immense volcano, which kept rising to the southeast for many more leagues.

  Yet this crater had the urs transfixed. Steamy exhalations rose from vents that rimmed the craggy circle. Cautiously, Sara removed her sunglasses. The basalt here was of a coarser, less gemlike variety. They had entered a different

  realm.

  "This was the site of the first forge," Uigor announced, her voice tinged with awe. She tilted her muzzle to the right, and Sara made out a tumble of stone blocks, too poorly shaped to have been laser-cut by the Buyur, and now long-abandoned. Such tumbled shelters were handhewn by the earliest urrish seeker smiths who dared to leave the plains pursuing lava-borne heat, hoping to learn how to cast the fiery substance of Jijoan bronze and steel. In its day, the venture was fiercely opposed by the Gray Queens, who portrayed it as sacrilege-as when humans much later performed the Great Printing.

  In time, what had been profane became tradition.

  "They must've found conditions better, on high," Jomah commented, for the' trail continued steadily upslope. An urrish guard nodded. "Vut it was fron this flace that early urs exflorers discovered the secret way across the Sfectral Flow. The Secret of Xi."

  Sara nodded. That explained why one group of urs conspired to thwart another-the powerful Urunthai-in their plan t
o make horses extinct when humanity was new on Jijo. The smiths of those days cared little for power games played by high aunties of the plains tribes. It did not matter to them how Earthlings smelled, or what beasts they rode, only that they possessed a treasure.

  Those books the Earthlings printed. They have secrets of metallurgy. We must share, or be left behind.

  So it was not a purely idealistic move-to establish a secret herd in Xi. There had been a price. Humans may be Jijo's master engineers, but we stayed out ofsmithing, and now I know why.

  Even after growing up among them, Sara still found it fascinating how varied urs could be. Their range of personalities and motives-from fanatics to pragmatic smiths- was as broad as you'd find among human beings. One more reason why stereotypes aren't just evil, but stupid.

  Soon after they remounted, the trail followed a ridgeline offering spectacular views. The Spectral Flow lay to their left, an eerie realm, even dimmed to -sepia shades by distance and dark glasses. The maze of speckled canyons spanned all the way to a band of blazing white-the Plain of Sharp Sand. Dedinger's home, where the would-be prophet was forging a nation of die-hard zealots out of coarse desert folk. Sandmen who saw themselves as humanity's vanguard on the Path of Redemption.

  In the opposite direction, southwest through gaps in the many-times-folded mountain, Sara glimpsed another wonder. The vast ocean, where Jijo's promised life renewal was fulfilled. Where Melina's ashes went after mulching. And Joshu's. Where the planet erased sin by absorbing and melting anything the universe sent it.

  The Slope is so narrow, andJijo is so large. Will star gods judge us harshly,or living quiet careful lives in one corner of a forbidden world?

  There was always hope the aliens might just finish their business and go away, leaving the Six Races to proceed along whatever path destiny laid out for them.

  Yeah, she concluded. There are two chances that will happen-fat and slim.

  The trek continued, more often dismounted than not, and the view grew more spectacular as they moved east, encompassing the southern Rimmer Range. Again, Sara noted skittishness among the urs. In spots the ground vented steaming vapors, making the horses dance and snort. Then she glimpsed a red glimmer, some distance below the trail-a meandering stream of lava, flowing several arrowflights downslope.

  Perhaps it was fatigue, thin air, or the tricky terrain, but as Sara looked away from the fiery trail, her unshielded eyes crossed the mountains and were caught unready by a stray flash of light. Sensitized by her time in Xi, the sharp gleam made her cringe.

  What is that?

  The flash repeated at uneven intervals, almost as if the distant mountaintop were speaking to her.

  Then Sara caught another, quite different flicker of motion.

  Now that must'be an illusion, she thought. It has to be . . . yet it's so far from the Spectral Flow!

  It seemed . . . she could almost swear . . . that she saw the widespread wings of some titanic bird, or dragon, wafting between-

  It had been too long since she checked her footing. A stone unexpectedly turned and Sara tripped. Throwing her weight desperately the other way, she overcompensated, losing her balance completely.

  Uttering a cry, Sara fell.

  The gritty trail took much of the initial impact, but then she rolled over the edge, tumbling down a scree of pebbles and jagged basalt flakes. Despite her tough leather garments, each jab lanced her with fierce pain as she desperately covered her face and skull. A wailing sound accompanied her plunge. In a terrified daze Sara realized the screamer was not her, but Prity, shrieking dismay.

  "Sara!" someone yelled. There were scrambling sounds of distant, hopeless pursuit.

  In midtumble, between one jarring collision and the next, she glimpsed something between blood-streaked fingers-a fast-approaching rivulet winding across the shattered landscape. A liquid current that moved languidly, with great viscosity and even greater heat. It was the same color as her blood . . . and approaching fast.

  Nel elo

  HRIANA FOO SPENT THE RETURN BOAT JOURNEY mulling over her sketches of the tiny space pod that had brought the Stranger to Jijo. Meanwhile, Nelo fumed over this foolish diversion. His workmen would surely not have kept to schedule. Some minor foul-up would give those louts an excuse to lie about like hoons at siesta time.

  Commerce had lapsed during the crisis, and the warehouse tree was full, but Nelo was determined to keep producing paper. What would Dolo Village be without the groaning waterwheel, the thump of the pulping hammer, or the sweet aroma that wafted from fresh sheets drying in the sun?

  While the helmsman umbled cheerfully, keeping a steady beat for the crew poling the little boat along, Nelo held out a hand, feeling for rain. There had been drops a little earlier, when disturbing thunder pealed to the south.

  The marsh petered out as streamlets rejoined as a united river once more. Soon the young people would switch to oars and sweep onto the gentle lake behind Dolo Dam.

  The helmsman's umble tapered, slowing to a worried moan. Several of the crew leaned over, peering at the water. A boy shouted as his pole was ripped out of his hands. It does seem a bit fast, Nelo thought, as the last swamp plants fell behind and trees began to pass by rapidly.

  "All hands to oars!" shouted the young hoon in command. Her back spines, still fresh from recent fledging, made uneasy frickles. "Lock them down!"

  Ariana met Nelo's eyes with a question. He answered with a shrug.

  The boat juttered, reminding him of the cataracts that lay many leagues downriver, past Tarek Town, an inconvenience he only had to endure once, accompanying his wife's dross casket to sea.

  But there are no rapids here! They were erased when the lake filled, centuries ago!

  The boat veered, sending him crashing to the bilge. With stinging hands, Nelo climbed back to take a seat next to Ariana. The former High Sage clutched the bench, her precious folio of drawings zipped shut inside her jacket.

  "Hold on!" screamed the young commander. In dazed bewilderment, Nelo clutched the plank as they plunged into a weird domain. A realm that should not be.

  So Nelo thought, over and over, as they sped down a narrow channel. On either side, the normal shoreline was visible-where trees stopped and scummy water plants took over. But the boat was already well below that level, and dropping fast!

  Spume crested the gunnels, drenching passengers and crew. The latter rowed furiously to the hoon lieutenant's shrill commands. Lacking a male's resonating sac, she still made her wishes known.

  "Backwater-left . . . backwater-left, you noor-bitten ragmen! . . . Steady . . . Now all ahead! Pull for it, you spineless croakers! For your lives, pull!"

  Twin walls of stone rushed inward, threatening to crush the boat from both sides. Glistening with oily algae, they loomed like hammer and anvil as the crew rowed frantically for the narrow slot between, marked by a fog of stinging white spray. What lay beyond was a mystery Nelo only prayed he'd live to see.

  Voices of hoons, qheuen, and humans rose in desperation as the boat struck one cliff a glancing blow, echoing like a door knocker on the gateway to hell. Somehow the hull survived to lunge down the funnel, drenched in spray.

  We should be on the lake by now, Nelo complained, hissing through gritted teeth. Where did the lake go!

  They shot like a javelin onto a cascade where water churned in utter confusion over scattered boulders, shifting suddenly as fresh debris barricades built up or gave way. It was an obstacle course to defy the best of pilots, but Nelo had no eyes for the ongoing struggle, which would merely decide whether he lived or died. His numbed gaze lifted beyond, staring past the surrounding mud plain that had been a lake bed, down whose center rushed the River Roney, no longer constrained. A river now free to roll on as it had before Earthlings came.

  The dam . . . The dam . . .

  A moan lifted from the pair of blue qheuens, lent for this journey by the local hive. A hive whose fisheries and murky lobster pens used to stretch luxuriously behi
nd the dam wherein they made a prosperous home. Remnants of the pens and algae farms lay strewn about as the boat swept toward the maelstrom's center.

  Nelo blinked, unable to express his dismay, even with a moan.

  The dam still stood along most of its length. But most wasn't a word of much use to a dam. Nelo's heart almost gave way when he saw the gap ripped at one end . . . the side near his beloved mill.

  "Hold on!" the pilot cried redundantly, as they plunged for the opening. And the waterfall they all heard roaring violently just ahead.

  PART SIX

  FROM THE NOTES OF GILLIAN BASKIN

  MY DECISION may not be wholly rational.