Infinity's Shore (44 page)
Authors: David Brin
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 visibleâwhere 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 â¦Â
backwater-left
, you noor-bitten
ragmen!⦠Steady â¦Â 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 â¦Â The dam â¦
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 behind 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 â¦Â 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.
FROM THE NOTES OF GILLIAN BASKIN
MY DECISION may not be wholly rational.
For all I know, Alvin may be bluffing in order to avoid exile. He may have no idea who we are.
Or perhaps he really has surmised the truth. After all, dolphins are mentioned in many of the Earth books he's read. Even wearing a fully armored, six-legged walker unit, a fin's outline can he recognized if you look in the right way. Once the idea occurred to him, Alvin's fertile imagination would cover the rest.
As a precaution, we could intern the kids much farther south, or in a subsea habitat. That might keep them safe and silent. Tsh't suggested as much, before I ordered the
Hikahi
to turn around and bring them back.
I admit I'm biased. I miss Alvin and his pals. If only the fractious races of the Five Galaxies could have a camaraderie like theirs.
Anyway, they are grown-up enough to choose their own fate.
WE'VE had a report from Makanee's nurse. On her way by sled to check on a sick member of Kaa's team, peepoe spotted two more piles of junked spacecraft, smaller than this one, but suitable should we have to move
Streaker
soon. Hannes dispatched crews to start preparatory work.
Again, we must rely on the same core group of about fifty skilled crewfen. The reliable ones, whose concentration remains unflagged after three stressful years. Those who aren't frightened by superstitious rumors of sea monsters lurking amid the dead Buyur machines.
AS for our pursuersâwe ve seen no more gravitic signatures of flying craft, east of the mountains. That may be good news, but the respite makes me nervous. Two small spacecraft can't be the whole story. Sensors detect some great brute of a ship, about five hundred klicks northwest. Is this vast cruiser related to the two vessels that fell near here?
They must surely realize that this region is of interest.
It seems creepy they haven't followed up.
As if they are confident they have all the time in the world.
THE Niss Machine managed to exchange just a few more words with that so-called noor beast that our little drone encountered ashore. But the creature keeps us on tenterhooks, treating the little scout robot like its private toy, or a prey animal to be teased with bites and scratches. Yet it also carries it about in its mouth, careful not to get tangled in the fiber cable, letting us have brief, tantalizing views of the crashed sky boats.
We had assumed that “noor” were simply devolved versions of
tytlal
 â¦Â of little interest except as curiosities. But if some retain the power of speech, what else might they be capable of?
At first I thought the Niss Machine would be the one
best qualified to handle this confusing encounter. After all, the noor is its “cousin,” in a manner of speaking.
But family connections can involve sibling rivalry, even contempt. Maybe the Tymbrimi machine is simply the wrong spokesman.
One more reason I'm eager to bring Alvin back.
AMID all this, I had time to do a bit more research on Herbie. I wish there were some way to guess the isotopic input profiles, before he died, but chemical racemization analyses of samples taken from the ancient mummy appear to show considerably less temporal span than was indicated by cosmic-ray track histories of the hull Tom boarded, in the Shallow Cluster.
In other words, Herbie seems younger than the vessel Tom found him on.
That could mean a number of things.
Might Herb simply be the corpse of some
previous
grave robber, who slinked aboard just a few million years ago, instead of one to two billion?
Or could the discrepancy be an effect of those strange fields we found in the Shallow Cluster, surrounding that fleet of ghostly starcraft, rendering them nearly invisible? Perhaps the outer hulls of those huge, silent ships experienced time differently than their contents.
It makes me wonder about poor Lieutenant Yachapa-jean, who was killed by those same fields, and whose body had to be left behind. Might some future expedition someday recover the well-preserved corpse of a dolphin and go rushing around the universe thinking they have the recovered relic of a progenitor?
Mistaking the youngest sapient race for the oldest. What a joke that would be.
A joke on them, and a joke on us.
Herbie never changes. Yet I swear I sometimes catch him grinning.
OUR stolen Galactic Library unit gets queer and opaque at times. If I werent in disguise, the big cube probably wouldn't tell me anything at all. Even decked out as a Thennanin admiral, I find the Library evasive when shown those symbols that Tom copied aboard the derelict ship.
One glyph looks like the emblem worn by every Library unit in known spaceâa great spiral wheel. Only, instead of five swirling arms rotating around a common center, this one has nine! And eight concentric
ovals
overlie the stylized galactic helix, making it resemble a bull's-eye target.
I never saw anything like it before.
When I press for answers, our purloined archive says the symbol “⦠is very old ⦔ and that its use is “⦠memetically discouraged.”
Whatever that means.
At risk of humanizing a machine, the unit seems to get grumpy, as if it dislikes being confused. I've seen this before.
Terragens researchers find that certain subject areas make Libraries touchy, as if they hate having to work hard by digging in older files.⦠Or maybe that's an excuse to avoid admitting there are things they don't know.
It reminds me of discussions Tom and I used to have with Jake Demwa, when we'd all sit up late trying to make sense of the universe.
Jake had a theoryâthat Galactic history, which purports to go back more than a billion years, is actually only accurate to about one hundred and fifty million.
“With each eon you go further back than that,” he said, “what we're told has an ever-increasing flavor of a carefully concocted fable.”
Oh, there's evidence that oxygen-breathing starfarers have been around ten times as long. Surely some of the ancient events
recorded in official annals must be authentic. But much has also been painted over.
It's a chilling notion. The great Institutes are supposed to he dedicated to truth and continuity. How, then, can valid information be
memetically discouraged?
Yes, this seems a rather abstract obsession, at a time when
Streaker
âand now Jijoâfaces dire and immediate threats. Yet I can't help thinking it all comes together here at the bottom of a planetary graveyard, where tectonic plates melt history into ore.
We are caught in the slowly grinding gears of a machine more vast than we imagined.
HannesA
T TIMES HANNES SUESSI ACUTELY MISSED HIS young friend Emerson, whose uncanny skills helped make
Streaker
purr like a compact leopard, prowling the trails of space.
Of course Hannes admired the able fins of his engineroom gangâamiable, hardworking crew mates without a hint of regression in the bunch. But dolphins tend to visualize objects as sonic shapes, and often set their calibrations intuitively, based on the way motor vibrations
sounded.
A helpful technique, but not always reliable.
Emerson D'Anite, on the other handâ
Hannes never knew anyone with a better gut understanding of quantum probability shunts. Not the arcane hyperdimensional theory, but the practical nuts and bolts of wresting movement from contortions of wrinkled spacetime. Emerson was also fluent in Tursiops Trinary â¦Â better than Hannes at conveying complex ideas in neodolphins' own hybrid language. A useful knack on this tub.
Alas, just one human now remained belowdecks, to help tend abused motors long past due for overhaul.
That isâif one could even call Hannes Suessi human anymore.
Am I more than I was? Or less?
He now had “eyes” all over the engine roomâremote pickups linked directly to his ceramic-encased brain. Using portable drones, Hannes could supervise Karkaett and Chuchki far across the wide chamber â¦Â or even small crews working on alien vessels elsewhere in the great underwater scrap yard. In this way he could offer advice and comfort when they grew nervous, or when their bodies screamed with cetacean claustrophobia.
Unfortunately, cyborg abilities did nothing to prevent loneliness.
You should never have left me here alone
, Hannes chided Emerson's absent spirit.
You were an engineer, not a secret agent or star pilot! You had no business traipsing off, doing heroic deeds.
There were specialists for such tasks.
Streaker
had been assigned several “heroes” when she first set outâindividuals with the right training and personalities, equipping them to face dangerous challenges and improvise their way through any situation.
