Authors: David Brin
Infinity's Shore (3 page)
Jijo
is one of them.
He rolls the word in his mindâthe name of this planet where six castaway races band together in feral truce, a mixed culture unlike any other beneath the myriad stars.
A second word comes more easily with repeated useâ
Sara.
She who nursed him from near death in her tree house overlooking a rustic water mill â¦Â who calmed the fluxing panic when he first woke to see pincers, claws, and mucusy ring stacksâthe physiques of
hoons
,
traekis, qheuens
, and others sharing this rude outcast existence.
He knows more words, such as
Kurt
and
Prity
 â¦Â friends he now trusts almost as much as
Sara.
It feels good to think their names, the slick way all words used to come, in the days before his mangling.
One recent prize he is especially proud of.
Emerson
 â¦
It is his own name, for so long beyond reach. Violent shocks had jarred it free, less than a day agoâshortly after he provoked a band of human rebels to betray their urrish allies in a slashing knife fight that made a space battle seem
antiseptic by comparison. That bloody frenzy ended with an explosive blast, shattering the grubby caravan tent, spearing light past Emerson's closed lids, overwhelming the guardians of reason.
And then, amid the dazzling rays, he had briefly glimpsed â¦Â his captain!
Creideiki
 â¦
The blinding glow became a luminous foam, whipped by thrashing flukes. Out of that froth emerged a long gray form whose bottle snout bared glittering teeth. The sleek head
grinned
, despite bearing an awful wound behind its left eye â¦Â much like the hurt that robbed Emerson of speech.
Utterance shapes formed out of scalloped bubbles, in a language like none spoken by Jijo's natives, or by any great Galactic clan.
*
In the turning
of the cycloid
,
*
Comes a time
to break for surface.
*
Time to resume
breathing,
doing.
*
To rejoin the
great sea's
dreaming.
*
Time has come for
you my old friend.
*
Time to
wake
and
see what's churning.
â¦Â *
Stunned recognition accompanied waves of stinging misery, worse than any fleshy woe or galling numbness.
Shame had nearly overwhelmed him then. For no injury short of death could ever excuse his forgettingâ
Creideiki
 â¦
Terra
 â¦
The dolphins
 â¦
Hannes
 â¦
Gillian
 â¦
How could they have slipped his mind during the months he wandered this barbarian world, by boat, barge, and caravan?
Guilt might have engulfed him during that instant of recollection â¦Â except that his new friends urgently needed him to act, to seize the brief advantage offered by the explosion, to overcome their captors and take them prisoner. As dusk fell across the shredded tent and torn bodies, he had helped Sara and Kurt tie up their surviving foesâboth urrish and humanâalthough Sara seemed to think their reprieve temporary.
More fanatic reinforcements were expected soon.
Emerson knew what the rebels wanted. They wanted
him.
It was no secret that he came from the stars. The rebels would trade him to sky hunters, hoping to exchange his battered carcass for guaranteed survival.
As if anything could save Jijo's castaway races, now that the Five Galaxies had found them.
Huddled round a wan fire, lacking any shelter but tent rags, Sara and the others watched as terrifying portents crossed bitter-cold constellations.
First came a mighty titan of space, growling as it plunged toward nearby mountains, bent on awful vengeance.
Later, following the very same path, there came a
second
behemoth, this one so enormous that Jijo's pull seemed to lighten as it passed overhead, filling everyone with deep foreboding.
Not long after that, golden lightning flickered amid the mountain peaksâa bickering of giants. But Emerson did not care who won. He could tell that neither vessel was
his
ship, the home in space he yearned for â¦Â and prayed he would never see again.
With luck,
Streaker
was far away from this doomed world, bearing in its hold a trove of ancient mysteriesâperhaps the key to a new galactic era.
Had not all his sacrifices been aimed at helping her escape?
After the leviathans passed, there remained only stars and a chill wind, blowing through the dry steppe grass, while Emerson went off searching for the caravan's scattered
pack animals. With donkeys, his friends just might yet escape before more fanatics arrived.â¦
Then came a rumbling noise, jarring the ground beneath his feet. A rhythmic cadence that seemed to goâ
taranta taranta
taranta taranta
The galloping racket could only be urrish hoofbeats, the expected rebel reinforcements, come to make them prisoners once again.
Only, miraculously, the darkness instead poured forth
allies
âunexpected rescuers, both urrish and humanâwho brought with them astonishing beasts.
Horses.
Saddled horses, clearly as much a surprise to Sara as they were to him. Emerson had thought the creatures were extinct on this world, yet here they were, emerging from the night as if from a dream.
So began the next phase of his odyssey. Riding southward, fleeing the shadow of these vengeful ships, hurrying toward the outline of an uneasy volcano.
Now he wonders within his battered brainâis there a plan? A destination?
Old Kurt apparently has faith in these surprising saviors, but there must be more to it than that.
Emerson is tired of just running away.
He would much rather be running toward.
While his steed bounds ahead, new aches join the background music of his lifeâraw, chafed thighs and a bruised spine that jars with each pounding hoofbeat.
taranta, taranta, taranta-tara
taranta, taranta, taranta-tara
Guilt nags him with a sense of duties unfulfilled, and he grieves over the likely fate of his new friends on
Jijo
, now that their hidden colony has been discovered.
And yet â¦
In time Emerson recalls how to ease along with the sway of the saddle. And as sunrise lifts dew off fan-fringed trees near a riverbank, swarms of bright bugs whir through the slanted light, dancing as they pollinate a field of purple blooms. When Sara glances back from her own steed, sharing a rare smile, his pangs seem to matter less. Even fear of those terrible starships, splitting the sky with their angry engine arrogance, cannot erase a growing elation as the fugitive band gallops on to dangers yet unknown.
Emerson cannot help himself. It is his nature to seize any possible excuse for hope. As the horses pound Jijo's ancient turf, their cadence draws him down a thread of familiarity, recalling rhythmic music quite apart from the persistent dirge of woe.
tarantara, tarantara
tarantara, tarantara
Under insistent stroking by that throbbing sound, something abruptly clicks inside. His body reacts involuntarily as unexpected
words
surge from some dammed-up corner of his brain, attended by a melody that stirs the heart. Lyrics pour reflexively, an undivided stream, through lungs and throat before he even knows that he is singing.
“Though in body and in mind,   {tarantara, tarantara}
We are timidly inclined,   {tarantara!}
And anything but blind,   {tarantara, tarantara}
To the danger that's behindâ   {tarantara!}
His friends grinâthis has happened before.
“Yet, when the danger's near,   {tarantara, tarantara}
We manage to appear,   {tarantara!
}
As insensible to fear
,
  Â
As anybody here
,
  Â
As an-y-bo-dy here!
”
Sara laughs, joining the refrain, and even the dour urrish escorts stretch their long necks to lisp along.
“Yet, when the danger's near,   {tarantara, tarantara}
We manage to appear,   {tarantara!}
”
As insensible to fear
,
  Â
As anybody here
,
  Â
As anybody here!
”
EACH OF THE SOONER RACES making up the Commons of Jijo tells its own unique story, passed down from generation to generation, explaining why their ancestors surrendered godlike powers and risked terrible penalties to reach this far placeâskulking in sneakships past Institute patrols, robot guardians, and Zang globules. Seven waves of sinners, each coming to plant their outlaw seed on a world that had been declared off-limits to settlement. A world set aside to rest and recover in peace, but for the likes of us.
THE g'Kek arrived first on this land we call the Slope, between misty mountains and the sacred seaâhalf a million years after the last legal tenantsâthe Buyurâdeparted Jijo.
Why did those g'Kek founders willingly give up their former lives as star-traveling gods and citizens of the Five Galaxies? Why choose instead to dwell as fallen primitives, lacking the comforts of technology, or any moral solace but for a few engraved platinum scrolls?
Legend has it that our g'Kek cousins
fled threatened extinction, a dire punishment for devastating gambling losses. But we cannot be sure. Writing was a lost art until humans came, so those accounts may be warped by passing time.
What we do know is that it could not have been a petty threat that drove them to abandon the spacefaring life they loved, seeking refuge on heavy Jijo, where their wheels have such a hard time on the rocky ground. With four keen eyes, peering in all directions at the end of graceful stalks, did the g'Kek ancestors see a dark destiny painted on galactic winds? Did that first generation see no other choice? Perhaps they only cursed their descendants to this savage life as a last resort.
NOT long after the g'Kek, roughly two thousand years ago, a party of traeki dropped hurriedly from the sky, as if fearing pursuit by some dreaded foe. Wasting no time, they sank their sneakship in the deepest hollow of the sea, then settled down to be our gentlest tribe.
What nemesis drove them from the spiral lanes?
Any native Jijoan glancing at those familiar stacks of fatty toruses, venting fragrant steam and placid wisdom in each village of the Slope, must find it hard to imagine the traeki having enemies.
In time, they confided their story. The foe they fled was not some other race, nor was there a deadly vendetta among the star gods of the Five Galaxies. Rather, it was an aspect of their own selves. Certain ringsâcomponents of their physical bodiesâhad lately been modified in ways that turned their kind into formidable beings. Into
Jophur
, mighty and feared among the noble Galactic clans.
It was a fate those traeki founders deemed unbearable. So they chose to become lawless refugeesâsooners on a taboo worldâin order to shun a horrid destiny.
The obligation to be great.
IT is said that
glavers
came to Jijo not out of fear, but seeking the Path of Redemptionâthe kind of innocent oblivion that wipes all slates clean. In this goal they have succeeded far better than anyone else, showing the rest of us the way, if we dare follow their example.
Whether or not that sacred track will also be ours, we must respect their accomplishmentâtransforming themselves from cursed fugitives into a race of blessed simpletons. As starfaring immortals, they could be held accountable for their crimes, including the felony of invading Jijo. But now they have reached a refuge, the purity of ignorance, free to start again.
Indulgently, we let glavers root through our kitchen middens, poking under logs for insects. Once mighty intellects, they are not counted among the sooner races of Jijo anymore. They are no longer stained with the sins of their forebears.
QHEUENS
were the first to arrive filled with wary ambition.
Led by fanatical, crablike gray matrons, their first-generation colonists snapped all five pincers derisively at any thought of union with Jijo's other exile races. Instead, they sought dominion.
That plan collapsed in time, when
blue
and
red
qheuens abandoned historic roles of servitude, drifting off to seek their own ways, leaving their frustrated gray empresses helpless to enforce old feudal loyalties.
OUR tall
hoonish
brethren inhale deeply, whenever the question arisesâ“Why are you here?” They fill their prodigious throat sacs with low meditation umbles. In rolling tones, hoon elders relate that their ancestors fled no great danger, no oppression or unwanted obligations.
Then why did they come, risking frightful punishment if their descendants are ever caught living illegally on Jijo?
The oldest hoons on Jijo merely shrug with frustrating
cheerfulness, as if they do not know the reason, and could not be bothered to care.
Some do refer to a legend, though. According to that slim tale, a Galactic
oracle
once offered a starfaring hoonish clan a unique opportunity, if they dared take it. An opportunity to claim something that had been robbed from them, although they, never knew it was lost. A precious birthright that might be discovered on a forbidden world.
But for the most part, whenever one of the tall ones puffs his throat sac to sing about past times, he rumbles a deep, joyful ballad about the crude rafts, boats, and seagoing ships that hoons invented from scratch, soon after landing on Jijo. Things their humorless star cousins would never have bothered looking up in the all-knowing Galactic Library, let alone have deigned to build.
LEGENDS told by the fleet-footed
urrish
clan imply that their foremothers were rogues, coming to Jijo in order to
breed
âescaping limits imposed in civilized parts of the Five Galaxies. With their short lives, hot tempers, and prolific sexual style, the urs founders might have gone on to fill Jijo with their kind â¦Â or else met extinction by now, like the mythical centaurs they vaguely resemble.
But they escaped both of those traps. Instead, after many hard struggles, at the forge and on the battlefield, they assumed an honored place in the Commons of Six Races. With their thundering herds, and mastery of steel, they live hot and hard, making up for their brief seasons in our midst.
FINALLY, two centuries ago, Earthlings came, bringing chimpanzees and other treasures. But humans' greatest gift was
paper.
In creating the printed trove of Biblos, they became lore masters to our piteous commonwealth of exiles. Printing and education changed life on the Slope, spurring a new tradition of scholarship,
so that later generations of castaways dared to study their adopted world, their hybrid civilization, and even their own selves.
As for
why
humans came all this wayâbreaking Galactic laws and risking everything, just to huddle with other outlaws under a fearsome skyâtheir tale is among the strangest told by Jijo's exile clans.
from
An Ethnography of the Slope
,
by Dorti Chang-Jones and Huph-alch-Huo
