Infinity's Shore (8 page)

Frail Joshu, Sara's lover in Biblos, whose touch made her forget even the overhanging Fist of Stone. A comely rogue whose death sent her spinning.

Dwer and Lark, her brothers, setting out to attend festival in the high Rimmer glades … where starships were later seen descending.

Sara's mind roiled as she tossed and turned.

Last of all, she pictured Blade, whose qheuen hive farmed crayfish behind Dolo Dam. Good old Blade, who saved Sara and Emerson from disaster at the Urunthai camp.

“
Seems I'm always late catching up
,” her qheuen friend whistled from three leg vents. “
But don't worry, I'll be along. Too much is happening to miss
.”

Blade's armor-clad dependability had been like a rock to Sara. In her dream, she answered.

“
I'll stall the universe … keep it from doing anything interesting until you show up
.”

Imagined or not, the blue qheuen's calliope laughter warmed Sara, and her troubled slumber fell into gentler rhythms.

The sun was half-high when someone shook Sara back to the world—one of the taciturn female riders, using the archaic word
brekkers
to announce the morning meal. Sara got up gingerly as waves of achy soreness coursed her body.

She gulped down a bowl of grain porridge, spiced with unfamiliar traeki seasonings, while horsewomen saddled mounts or watched Emerson play his beloved dulcimer, filling the pocket valley with a sprightly melody, suited for travel. Despite her morning irritability, Sara knew the starman was just making the best of the situation. Bursts of song were a way to overcome his handicap of muteness.

Sara found Kurt tying up his bedroll.

“Look,” she told the elderly exploser, “I'm not ungrateful to your friends. I appreciate the rescue and all. But you can't seriously hope to ride horses all the way to … 
Mount Guenn
.” Her tone made it sound like one of Jijo's moons.

Kurt's stony face flickered a rare smile. “Any better suggestions? Sure, you planned taking the Stranger to the High Sages, but that way is blocked by angry Urunthai. And recall, we saw
two
starships last night, one after the other, headed straight for Festival Glade. The Sages must have their hands and tendrils full by now.”

“How could I forget?” she murmured. Those titans, growling as they crossed the sky, had seared their image in her mind.

“You
could
hole up in one of the villages we'll pass soon, but won't Emerson need a first-rate pharmacist when he runs out of Pzora's medicine?”

“If we keep heading south we'll reach the Gentt. From there a riverboat can take us to Ovoom Town.”

“Assuming boats are running … and Ovoom still exists. Even so,
should
you hide your alien friend, with great events taking place? What if he has a role to play? Some way to help sages and Commons? Might you spoil his one chance of goin' home?”

Sara saw Kurt's implication—that she was holding Emerson back, like a child refusing to release some healed forest creature into the wild.

A swarm of sweetbec flies drifted close to the starman, hovering and throbbing to the tempo of his music, a strange melody. Where did he learn it? On Earth? Near some alien star?

“Anyway,” Kurt went on, “if you can stand riding these huge beasts awhile longer, we may reach Mount Guenn sooner than Ovoom.”

“That's crazy! You must pass
through
Ovoom if you go by sea. And the other way around is worse—through the funnel canyons and the Vale.”

Kurt's eyes flickered. “I'm told there's a … more direct route.”

“Direct? You mean due
south?
Past the Gentt lies the Plain of Sharp Sand, a desperate crossing under good conditions—which these
aren't.
Have you forgotten that's where Dedinger has followers?”

“No, I haven't forgotten.”

“Then, assuming we get past the sandmen and flame dunes, there comes the
Spectral Flow
, making any normal desert seem like a meadow!”

Kurt only shrugged, but clearly he wanted her to accompany him toward a distant simmering mountain, far from where Sara had sworn to take Emerson. Away from Lark and Dwer, and the terrible attraction of those fierce starships. Toward a starkly sacred part of Jijo, renowned for one thing above all—the way the planet renewed itself with flaming lava heat.

Alvin

M
AYBE IT WAS THE COMPRESSED ATMOSPHERE WE breathed, or the ceaseless drone of reverberating engines. Or it could have been the perfect darkness outside that fostered an impression of incredible depth, even greater than when our poor little
Wuphon's Dream
fell into the maw of this giant metal sea beast. A single beam—immeasurably brighter than the handmade eik light of our old minisub—speared out to split the black, scanning territory beyond my wildest nightmares. Even the vivid imagery of Verne or Pukino or Melville offered no preparation for what was revealed by that roving circle as we cruised along a subsea canyon strewn with all manner of ancient dross. In rapid glimpses we saw so many titanic things, all jumbled together, that—

Here I admit I'm stumped. According to the texts that teach Anglic literature, there are two basic ways for a writer to describe unfamiliar objects. First is to catalog sights and sounds, measurements, proportions, colors—saying
this
object is made up of clusters of colossal
cubes
connected by translucent rods, or
that
one resembles a tremendous sphere caved in along one side, trailing from its crushed innards a glistening streamer, a liquidlike banner that somehow defies the tug of time and tide.

Oh, I can put words together and come up with pretty pictures, but that method ultimately fails because at the time I
couldn't tell how far away anything was
! The eye sought clues in vain. Some objects—piled across the muddy panorama—seemed so vast that the huge vessel around us was dwarfed, like a minnow in a herd of
behmo
serpents. As for colors, even in the spotlight beam, the water drank all shades but deathly blue gray. A good hue for a shroud in this place of icy-cold death.

Another way to describe the unknown is to
compare
it to things you already recognize … only that method proved worse! Even Huck, who sees likenesses in things I can't begin to fathom, was reduced to staring toward great
heaps of ancient debris with all four eyestalks, at an utter loss.

Oh,
some
objects leaped at us with sudden familiarity—like when the searchlight swept over rows of blank-eyed windows, breached floors, and sundered walls. Pushed in a tumbled mound, many of the sunken towers lay upside down or even speared through each other. Together they composed a city greater than any I ever heard of, even from readings of olden times. Yet someone once scraped the entire metropolis from its foundations, picked it up, and dumped it here, sending all the buildings tumbling down to be reclaimed the only way such things
can
be reclaimed—in Mother Jijo's fiery bowels.

I recalled some books I'd read, dating from Earth's Era of Resolution, when pre-contact humans were deciding on their own how to grow up and save their homeworld after centuries spent using it as a cesspit. In Alice Hammett's mystery
The Case of a Half-Eaten Clone
, the killer escapes a murder charge, only to get ten years for disposing of the evidence at sea! In those days, humans made no distinction between midden trenches and ocean floor in general. Dumping was dumping.

It felt strange to see the enormous dross-scape from two viewpoints. By Galactic law, this was a consecrated part of Jijo's cycle of preservation—a scene of devout caretaking. But having grown up immersed in human books, I could shift perspectives and see
defilement
, a place of terrible sin.

The “city” fell behind us and we went back to staring at bizarre shapes, unknown majestic objects, the devices of star-god civilization, beyond understanding by mere cursed mortals. On occasion, my eyes glimpsed flickerings in the blackness
outside
the roving beam—lightninglike glimmers amid the ruins, as if old forces lingered here and there, setting off sparks like fading memories.

We murmured among ourselves, each of us falling back to what we knew best. Ur-ronn speculated on the nature of materials, what things were made of, or what functions they once served. Huck swore she saw
uniting
each time the light panned over a string of suspicious shadows. Pincer insisted every other object must be a starship.

The Midden took our conjectures the same way it accepts all else, with a patient, deathless silence.

Some enormous objects had already sunk quite far, showing just their tips above the mire. I thought—
This is where Jijo's ocean plate takes a steep dive under the Slope, dragging crust, mud, and anything else lying about, down to magma pools that feed simmering volcanoes. In time, all these mighty things will become lava, or precious ores to be used by some future race of tenants on this world.

It made me ponder my father's sailing ship, and the risky trips he took, hauling crates of sacred refuse, sent by each tribe of the Six as partial payment for the sin of our ancestors. In yearly rituals, each village sifts part of the land, clearing it of our own pollution and bits the Buyur left behind.

The Five Galaxies may punish us for living here. Yet we lived by a code, faithful to the Scrolls.

Hoonish folk moots chant the tale of Phu-uphyawuo, a dross captain who one day saw a storm coming, and dumped his load before reaching the deep blue of the Midden. Casks and drums rolled overboard far short of the trench of reclamation, strewing instead across shallow sea bottom, marring a site that was changeless, unrenewing. In punishment, Phu-uphyawuo was bound up and taken to the Plain of Sharp Sand, to spend the rest of his days beneath a hollow dune, drinking enough green dew to live, but not sustain his soul. In time, his heart spine was ground to dust and cast across a desert where no water might wash the grains, or make them clean again.

But this is the Midden
, I thought, trying to grasp the wonder.
We're the first to see it.

Except for the phuvnthus. And whatever else lives down here.

I found myself tiring. Despite the back brace and crutches, a weight of agony built steadily. Yet I found it hard to tear away from the icy-cold pane.

Following a searchlight through suboceanic blackness, we plunged as if down a mine shaft, aimed toward a heap of jewels—glittering objects shaped like needles, or squat globes, or glossy pancakes, or knobby cylinders. Soon
there loomed a vast shimmering pile, wider than Wuphon Bay, bulkier than Guenn Volcano.

“Now,
those
are definitely ships!” Pincer announced, gesturing with a claw. Pressed against the glass, we stared at mountainlike piles of tubes, spheres, and cylinders, many of them studded with hornlike protrusions, like the quills of an alarmed rock staller.

“Those must be the
probability whatchamacallums
starships use for going between galaxies,” Huck diagnosed from her avid reading of
Tabernacle
-era tales.

“
Probability flanges
,” Ur-ronn corrected, speaking Galactic Six. In matters of technology, she was far ahead of Huck or me. “
I think you may be right
.”

Our qheuenish friend chuckled happily as the searchlight zeroed in on one tremendous pile of tapered objects. Soon we all recognized the general outlines from ancient texts—freighters and courier ships, packets and cruisers—all abandoned long ago.

The engine noise dropped a notch, plunging us toward that mass of discarded spacecraft. The smallest of those derelicts outmassed the makeshift
phuvnthu
craft the way a full-grown traeki might tower over a herd-chick turd.

“I wonder if any of the ancestor vessels are in this pile,” Huck contemplated aloud. “You know, the ones that brought our founders here? The
Laddu'kek
or the
Tabernacle.
”