Infinity's Shore (16 page)

The Great Library of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies.

I'm told moments like these can inspire eloquence from great minds.

“J-j-jeez,” commented Pincer.

Ur-ronn was less concise.

“The questions …,” she lisped. “The questions we could ask …”

I nudged Huck.

“Well, you said you wanted to go find something to
read
.”

For the first time in all the years I've known her, our little wheeled friend seemed at a loss for words. Her stalks trembled. The only sound she let out was a gentle keening sigh.

Asx

Lacking those useful skills, the member toruses of our composite stack nearly vote to draw permanently, sealing out the world, negating the objective universe, waiting for the intolerable to go away.

It will not go away.

So reminds our second torus of cognition.

Among the greasy trails of wisdom that coat our aged core, many were laid down after reading learned books, or holding lengthy discussions with other sages. These tracks of philosophical wax agree with our second ring. As difficult as it may be for a traeki to accept, the cosmos does not vanish when we turn within. Logic and science appear to prove otherwise.

The universe goes on. Things that matter keep happening, one after another.

Still, it is
hard
to swivel our trembling sensor rings to face toward the mountain dreadnought that recently lowered itself down from heaven, whose bulk seems to fill both valley and sky.

Harder to gaze through a hatchway in the great ship's
flank—an aperture broad as the largest building in Tarek Town.

Hardest
to regard the worst of all possible sights—those cousins that we traeki fled long ago.

Terrible and strong—the mighty Jophur.

How gorgeous they seem, those glistening sap rings, swaying in their backlit portal, staring without pity at the wounded glade their vessel alters with its crushing weight. A glade thronging with half-animal felons, a miscegenous rabble, the crude descendants of fugitives.

Exiles who futilely thought they might elude the ineludable.

Our fellow Commons citizens mutter fearfully, still awed by the rout of the smaller Rothen ship—that power we had held in dread for months—now pressed down and encased in deadly light.

Yes, my rings, i/we can sense how some nearby Sixers—the quick and prudent—take to their heels, retreating even before the landing tremors fade. Others foolishly mill
toward
the giant vessel, driven by curiosity, or awe. Perhaps they have trouble reconciling the shapes they see with any sense of danger.

As harmless as a traeki
, so the expression goes. After all, what menace can there be in tapered stacks of fatty rings?

Oh, my/our poor innocent neighbors. You are about to find out.

Lark

T
HAT NIGHT HE DREAMED ABOUT THE LAST TIME HE saw Ling smile—before her world and his forever changed.

It seemed long ago, during a moonlit pilgrimage that crept proudly past volcanic vents and sheer cliffs, bearing shared hope and reverence toward the Holy Egg. Twelve twelves of white-clad celebrants made up that procession—qheuens
and g'Keks, traekis and urs, humans and hoons—climbing a hidden trail to their sacred site. And accompanying them for the first time, guests from outer space—a Rothen master, two Danik humans, and their robot guards—attending to witness the unity rites of a quaint savage tribe.

He dreamed about that pilgrimage in its last peaceful moment, before the fellowship was splintered by alien words and fanatical deeds. Especially the smile on her face, when she told him joyous news.

Two words still throbbed like sparks in the night. Rhythmically hotter as he reached for them in his sleep.

 … 
ships
 …

 … 
home
 …

 … 
ships
 …

 … 
home
 …

One word vanished at his dream touch—he could not tell which. The other he clenched hard, its flamelike glow increasing. Strange light, pushing free of containment. It streamed past flesh, past bones. A glow that clarified, offering to show him
everything.

Everything except …

Except now
she
was gone. Taken away by the word that vanished.

Pain wrenched Lark from the lonely night phantasm, tangled in a sweaty blanket. His trembling right hand clenched hard against his chest, erupting with waves of agony.

Lark exhaled a long sigh as he used his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right, forcing them apart one by one. Something rolled off his open palm—

It was the stone fragment of the Holy Egg, the one he had hammered from it as a rebellious child, and worn ever since as penance. Even as sleep unraveled, he imagined
the rocky talisman throbbing with heat, pulsing in time to the beating of his heart.

Lark stared at the blur-cloth canopy, with moonlight glimmering beyond.

I remain in darkness, on Jijo
, he thought, yearning to see once more by the radiance that had filled his dream. A light that seemed about to reveal distant vistas.

Ling spoke to him later that day, when their lunch trays were slipped into the tent by a nervous militiaman.

“Look, this is stupid,” she said. “Each of us acting like the other is some kind of devil spawn. We don't have time for grudges, with your people and mine on a tragic collision course.”

Lark had been thinking much the same thing, though her sullen funk had seemed too wide to broach. Now Ling met his eyes frankly, as if anxious to make up for lost time.

“I'd say a collision's already happened,” he commented.

Her lips pressed a thin line. She nodded.

“True. But it's wrong to blame your entire Commons for the deeds of a minority, acting without authority or—”

He barked a bitter laugh. “Even when you're trying to be sincere, you still condescend, Ling.”

She stared for a moment, then nodded. “All right. Your sages effectively sanctioned the zealots' attack,
post facto
, by keeping us prisoner and threatening blackmail. It's fair to say that we're already—”

“At war. True, dear ex-employer. But you leave out our own
casus belli.
” Lark knew the grammar must be wrong, but he liked showing that even a savage could also drop a Latin phrase. “We're fighting for our lives. And now we know genocide was the Rothen aim from the start.”

Ling glanced past him to where a g'Kek doctor drew increasing amounts of nauseating fluid from the air vents of a qheuen, squatting unconscious at the back of the shelter. She had worked alongside Uthen for months, evaluating local species for possible uplift. The gray's illness was no abstraction.

“Believe me, Lark. I know nothing of this disease. Nor
the trick Ro-kenn allegedly pulled, trying to broadcast psiinfluentials via your Egg.”

“Allegedly? You suggest
we
might have the technology to pull off something like that, as a frame-up?”

Ling sighed. “I don't dismiss the idea entirely. From the start you Jijoans played on our preconceptions. Our willingness to see you as ignorant barbarians. It took weeks to learn that you were still literate! Only lately did we realize you must have hundreds of books, maybe thousands!”

An ironic smile crossed his face, before Lark realized how much the expression revealed.

“More than that?
A lot more?
” Ling stared. “But where? By Von Daniken's beard—how?”

Lark put aside his meal, mostly uneaten. He reached over to his backpack and drew forth a thick volume bound in leather. “I can't count how many times I wanted to show you this. Now I guess it doesn't matter anymore.”

In a gesture Lark appreciated, Ling wiped her hands before accepting the book, turning the pages with deliberate care. What seemed reverence at first, Lark soon realized was inexperience. Ling had little practice holding paper books.

Probably never saw one before, outside a museum.

Rows of small type were punctuated by lithographed illustrations. Ling exclaimed over the flat, unmoving images. Many of the species shown had passed through the Danik research pavilion during the months she and Lark worked side by side, seeking animals with the special traits her Rothen masters desired.

“How old is this text? Did you find it here, among all these remnants?” Ling motioned toward a stack of artifacts preserved by the mulc spider, relics of the long-departed Buyur, sealed in amber cocoons.

Lark groaned. “You're still doing it, Ling. For Ifni's sake! The book is written in
Anglic.
”

She nodded vigorously. “Of course. You're right. But then who—”

Lark reached over and flipped the volume to its title page.

A PHYLOGENETIC INTERDEPENDENCE PROFILE OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ON THE JIJOAN SLOPE

“This is part one. Part two is still mostly notes. I doubt we'd have lived long enough to finish volume three, so we left the deserts, seas, and tundras for someone else to take on.”

Ling gaped at the sheet of linen paper, stroking two lines of smaller print, below the title. She looked at him, then over toward the dying qheuen.

“That's right,” he said. “You're living in the same tent with both authors. And since I'm presenting you with this copy, you have a rare opportunity. Care to have both of us autograph it? I expect you're the last person who'll get the chance.”

His bitter sarcasm was wasted. Clearly she didn't understand the word
autograph.
Anyway, Ling the biologist had replaced the patronizing alien invader. Turning pages, she murmured over each chapter she skimmed.