Infinity's Shore (4 page)

Alvin

I
HAD NO WAY TO MARK THE PASSAGE OF TIME, LYING dazed and half-paralyzed in a metal cell, listening to the engine hum of a mechanical sea dragon that was hauling me and my friends to parts unknown.

I guess a couple of days must have passed since the shattering of our makeshift submarine, our beautiful
Wuphon's Dream
, before I roused enough to wonder, What next?

Dimly, I recall the sea monster's face as we first saw it through our crude glass viewing port, lit by the
Dream's
homemade searchlight. That glimpse lasted but a moment as the huge metal thing loomed toward us out of black, icy depths. The four of us—Huck, Pincer, Ur-ronn, and me—had already resigned ourselves to death … doomed to crushed oblivion at the bottom of the sea. Our expedition a failure, we didn't feel like daring subsea adventurers anymore, but like scared kids, voiding our bowels in terror as we waited for the cruel abyss to squeeze our hollowed-out tree trunk into a zillion soggy splinters.

Suddenly this enormous shape erupted toward us,
spreading jaws wide enough to snatch
Wuphon's Dream
whole.

Well,
almost
whole. Passing through that maw, we struck a glancing blow.

The collision shattered our tiny capsule.

What followed still remains a painful blur.

I guess anything beats death, but there have been moments since that impact when my back hurt so much that I just wanted to rumble one last umble through my battered throat sac and say
farewell
to young Alvin Hph-wayuo—junior linguist, humicking writer, uttergloss daredevil, and neglectful son of Mu-phauwq and Yowg-wayuo of Wuphon Port, the Slope, Jijo, Galaxy Four, the Universe.

But I stayed alive.

I guess it just didn't seem
hoonish
to give up, after everything my pals and I went through to get here. What if I was sole survivor? I owed it to Huck and the others to carry on.

My cell—a prison? hospital room?—measures just two meters, by two, by three. Pretty skimpy for a hoon, even one not quite fully grown. It gets even more cramped whenever some six-legged, metal-sheathed demon tries to squeeze inside to tend my injured spine, poking with what I assume (hope!) to be clumsy kindness. Despite their efforts, misery comes in awful waves, making me wish desperately for the pain remedies cooked up by Old Stinky—our traeki pharmacist back home.

It occurred to me that I might never walk again … or see my family, or watch seabirds swoop over the dross ships, anchored beneath Wuphon's domelike shelter trees.

I tried talking to the insecty giants trooping in and out of my cell. Though each had a torso longer than my dad is tall—with a flared back end, and a tubelike shell as hard as Buyur steel—I couldn't help picturing them as enormous
phuvnthus
, those six-legged vermin that gnaw the walls of wooden houses, giving off a sweet-tangy stench.

These
things smell like overworked machinery. Despite my efforts in a dozen Earthling and Galactic languages, they seemed even less talkative than the
phuvnthus
Huck
and I used to catch when we were little, and train to perform in a miniature circus.

I missed Huck during that dark time. I missed her quick g'Kek mind and sarcastic wit. I even missed the way she'd snag my leg fur in her wheels to get my attention, if I stared too long at the horizon in a hoonish sailor's trance. I last glimpsed those wheels spinning uselessly in the sea dragon's mouth, just after those giant jaws smashed our precious
Dream
and we spilled across the slivers of our amateur diving craft.

Why didn't I rush to my friend, during those bleak moments after we crashed? Much as I yearned to, it was hard to see or hear much while a screaming wind shoved its way into the chamber, pushing out the bitter sea. At first, I had to fight just to breathe again. Then, when I tried to move, my back would not respond.

In those blurry instants, I also recall catching sight of
Ur-ronn
, whipping her long neck about and screaming as she thrashed all four legs and both slim arms, horrified at being drenched in vile water. Ur-ronn bled where her suede-colored hide was pierced by jagged shards—remnants of the glass porthole she had proudly forged in the volcano workshops of Uriel the Smith.

Pincer-Tip
was there, too, best equipped among our gang to survive underwater. As a red qheuen, Pincer was used to scampering on five chitin-armored claws across salty shallows—though our chance tumble into the bottomless void was more than even he had bargained for. In dim recollection, I
think
Pincer seemed alive … or does wishful thinking deceive me?

My last hazy memories of our “rescue” swarm with violent images until I blacked out … to wake in this cell, delirious and alone.

Sometimes the phuvnthus do something “helpful” to my spine, and it hurts so much that I'd willingly spill every secret I know. That is, if the phuvnthus ever asked questions, which they never do.

So I never allude to the mission we four were given by Uriel the Smith—to seek a taboo treasure that her ancestors
left on the seafloor, centuries ago. An offshore cache, hidden when urrish settlers first jettisoned their ships and high-tech gadgets to become just one more fallen race. Only some dire emergency would prompt Uriel to violate the Covenant by retrieving such contraband.

I guess “emergency” might cover the arrival of alien robbers, plundering the Gathering Festival of the Six Races and threatening the entire Commons with genocide.

Eventually, the pangs in my spine eased enough for me to rummage through my rucksack and resume writing in this tattered journal, bringing my ill-starred adventure up to date. That raised my spirits a bit. Even if none of us survives, my diary might yet make it home someday.

Growing up in a little hoonish village, devouring human adventure stories by Clarke and Rostand, Conrad and Xu Xiang, I dreamed that people on the Slope would someday say, “Wow, that Alvin Hph-wayuo was some storyteller, as good as any old-time Earther.”

This could be my one and only chance.

So I spent long miduras with a stubby charcoal crayon clutched in my big hoon fist, scribbling the passages that lead up to this one—an account of how I came to find myself in this low, low state.

—How four friends built a makeshift submarine out of skink skins and a carved-out garu log, fancying a treasure hunt to the Great Midden.

—How Uriel the Smith, in her mountain forge, threw her support behind our project, turning it from a half-baked dream into a real expedition.

—How we four snuck up to Uriel's observatory, and heard a human sage speak of
starships
in the sky, perhaps bringing foretold judgment on the Six Races.

—And how
Wuphon's Dream
soon dangled from a pole near Terminus Rock, where the Midden's sacred trench passes near land. And Uriel told us, hissing through her cloven upper lip, that a ship had indeed landed up north. But this cruiser did not carry Galactic magistrates. Instead another kind of criminal had come, worse even than our sinner ancestors.

So we sealed the hatch, and the great winch turned. But on reaching the mapped site, we found that Uriel's cache was already missing! Worse—when we went looking for the damned thing,
Wuphon's Dream
got lost and tumbled off the edge of an undersea cliff.

Flipping back some pages, I can tell my account of the journey was written by someone perched on a knife-edge of harrowing pain. Yet, there is a sense of
drama
I can't hope to match now. Especially that scene where the bottom vanished beneath our wheels and we felt ourselves fall toward the
real
Midden.

Toward certain death.

Until the phuvnthus snatched us up.

So, here I am, swallowed by a metal whale, ruled by cryptic silent beings, ignorant whether my friends still live or if I am alone. Merely crippled, or dying.

Do my captors have anything to do with starship landings in the mountains?

Are they a different enigma, rising out of Jijo's ancient past? Relics of the vanished Buyur perhaps? Or ghosts even older still?

Answers seem scarce, and since I've finished recounting the plummet and demise of
Wuphon's Dream
, I daren't waste more precious paper on speculation. I must put my pencil down, even if it robs my last shield against loneliness.

All my life I've been inspired by human-style books, picturing myself as hero in some uttergloss tale. Now my sanity depends on learning to savor
patience.

To let time pass without concern.

To live and think, at last, just like a hoon.

Asx

Y
OU MAY CALL ME
ASX
.

you manicolored rings, piled in a high tapered heap, venting fragrant stinks, sharing the victual sap that
climbs our common core, or partaking in memory wax, trickling back down from our sensory peak.

you, the rings who take up diverse roles in this shared body, a pudgy cone nearly as tall as a hoon, as heavy as a blue qheuen, and slow across the ground like an aged g'Kek with a cracked axle.

you, the rings who vote each day whether to renew our coalition.

From you rings i/we now request a ruling. Shall we carry on this fiction? This “Asx”?

Unitary beings—the humans, urs, and other dear partners in exile—stubbornly use that term, Asx, to signify this loosely affiliated pile of fatty toruses, as if we/i truly had a fixed
name
, not a mere label of convenience.

Of course unitary beings are all quite mad. We traeki long ago resigned ourselves to living in a universe filled with egotism.

What we could not resign ourselves to—and the reason for our exile here on Jijo—was the prospect of becoming the most egotistical of all.

Once, our/my stack of bloated tubes played the role of a modest village pharmacist, serving others with our humble secretions, near the sea bogs of Par Wet Sanctuary. Then others began paying us/me homage, calling us “Asx,” chief sage of the Traeki Sept and member of the Guiding Council of the Six.