Infinity's Shore (51 page)

T
HE OLD MAN DID NOT KNOW WHICH WAS THE SADDEST sight.

At times he wished the boat had capsized during that wretched, pell-mell running of the rapids so he would not have lived to see such things.

It took half a day of hard labor at the oars to climb back upstream to Dolo Village. By the time they reached the timber pile that had been the town dock, all the young rowers were exhausted. Villagers rushed down a muddy
bank to help them drag the boat ashore, and carried Ariana Foo to dry ground. A stout hoon ignored Nelo's protests, picking him up like a baby, until he stood safely by the roots of a mighty garu tree.

Many survivors milled listlessly, though others had formed work gangs whose first task was collecting dross. Especially bodies. Those must be gathered quickly and mulched, as required by sacred law.

Nelo saw corpses gathered in a long row—mostly human, of course. Numbly he noted the master carpenter and Jobee the Plumber. Quite a few craft workers lay muddy and broken along a sodden patch of loam, and many more were missing, carried downstream when the lake came crashing through the millrace and workshops. Tree farmers, in contrast, had suffered hardly a loss. Their life on the branch tops did not expose them when the dam gave way.

No one spoke, though stares followed the papermaker as Nelo moved down the line, allowing a wince or a grunt when he recognized the face of an employee, an apprentice, or a lifelong friend. When he reached the end, he did not turn but kept walking in the same direction, toward what had been the center of his life.

The lake was low. Maybe the flood didn't destroy everything.

Disorientation greeted Nelo, for it seemed at first he was transported far from the village of his birth. Where placid water once glistened, mudflats now stretched for most of a league. A river poured through the near side of his beloved dam.

To local qheuens, dam and home were one and the same. Now the hive lay sliced open, in cross section. The collapse had sheared the larva room in half. Teams of stunned blue adults struggled to move their surviving grubs to safety, out of the harsh sunlight.

With reluctant dread, Nelo dropped his gaze to where the famed paper mill had been, next to a graceful power wheel.

Of his house, his workshops, and pulp vats, nothing more remained than foundation stumps.

The sight tore his heart, but averting his gaze did not help. Just a short distance downstream Nelo saw more blue
qheuens working listlessly by the shore, trying to extricate one of their own from a net of some kind. By their lack of haste, one knew the victim must be dead, perhaps trapped in the shallows and drowned.

Unhappily, he recognized the corpse, an older female—Log Biter herself—by markings on her shell. Another lost friend, and a blow to everyone along the upper Roney who valued her good wisdom.

Then he recognized the trap that had pinned her down long enough to smother even a blue qheuen. It was a tangle of wood and metal wires. Something from Nelo's own home.

Melina's precious piano, that I ordered built at great cost.

A moan escaped his throat, at last. In all the world, he had but one thing left to live for—the hope, frail as it was, that his children were safe somewhere, and would not have to see such things.

But where was somewhere? What place could possibly be safe, when starships could plunge from the sky, blasting five generations' work in a single instant?

Words jarred him from dour thoughts of suicide.

“
I didn't do this, Nelo
.”

He turned to see another human standing nearby. A fellow craftsman, almost his own age. Henrik the Exploser, whose young son had accompanied Sara and the Stranger on their journey to far lands. At first, Henrik's words confused Nelo. He had to swallow before finding the strength to reply.

“Of course you didn't do it. They say a skyship came—”

The exploser shook his head. “Fools or liars. Either they have no sense of timing, or else they were in on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, a ship passed overhead all right, and gave us a look-over. Then it went on its way. 'Twas most of a midura
later
that a gang of 'em came down, farmers mostly. They knocked the seals off some of my charges, under one of the piers of the dam, and laid a torch against it.”

Nelo blinked. “What did you say?” He stared, then blinked again. “But who …?”

Henrik had a one-word answer.

“Jop.”

Lark

T
HE EXPLORERS EMERGED TRIUMPHANT, RESURFACING from the chill lake into the cave, having brought back almost everything they sought. But bad news awaited them.

Fatigue lay heavily on Lark, while helpers stripped the diving gear and toweled him off.

Tense sadness filled the voice of the human corporal, reporting what had happened in Lark's absence.

“It hit our grays all at once—wheezing up lots of bubbly phlegm. Then a couple of young blues got it, too. We sent 'em to a pharmacist topside, but word says the plague is getting worse up there. There may not be much time.”

Attention turned to the Danik women who had just barely escaped from the trapped ship. They still looked woozy from their experience—starting with a blast of highpressure water that had burst into the airlock when the fissure broke through at last. After that came a hurried, nightmarish squeeze through the briefly dilated opening, squirming desperately before the tunnel could close and immure their bodies in liquid time like the poor g'Keks of Dooden Mesa.

Watching quantum-shifted images of that tight passage nearly unnerved Lark. Instead of two human figures, they looked like jumbled body parts, writhing through a tube that kept shifting around them. One woman he briefly saw with her
insides
on the
outside
, offering unwanted knowledge about her latest meal.

Yet here they were, alive in front of him. Overcoming residual nausea, the two escapees kept their side of the bargain, setting to work right away on a small machine they had brought along. In exchange for a cure, Jijoans would help more of their crew mates break out of the trapped ship, then coordinate joint action against the Jophur—no doubt something quite desperate, calling for a pooling of both groups' slim knowledge and resources, plus a generous dollop of Ifni's luck.

This whole enterprise had been Lark's idea … and he gave it the same odds as a ribbit walking unscathed through a ligger's den.

“Symptoms?” asked the first woman, with hair a shade of red Lark had never seen on any Jijoan.

“Don't you know already what bug it is?” Jeni Shen demanded.

“A variety of pathogens were kept in stock aboard the research station,” answered the other one, a stately brunette who seemed older than any other Danik Lark had seen. She looked a statuesque forty, and might be two centuries old.

“If Ro-kenn did release an organism from that supply,” she continued, “we must pin down which one.”

Even having stripped off his rewq, he had no trouble reading fatalistic reluctance in her voice. By helping solve the plague, she was in effect confessing that Ro-kenn had attempted genocide … and that their ship routinely carried the means for such a crime. Perhaps, like Ling, she had been in the dark about all that till now. Only utter helplessness would have forced the Rothen to reveal so much to their human servants, as well as to the sooners of Jijo.

From the look on Rann's face, the tall star warrior disagreed with the decision, and Lark knew why.

It goes beyond mere morality and crimes against Galactic law. Our local qheuens and hoons have relatives out there, among the stars. If word of this gets out, those home populations might declare vendettas against the Rothen. Or else, with this evidence, Earth might file suit to reclaim the Danik population group that the Rothen have kept secreted away for two centuries.

Of course that assumes Earth still lives. And there's still law in the Five Galaxies.

Rann clearly felt the risk too great. Ship and crew should have been sacrificed to keep the secret.

Tough luck, Rann
, Lark thought.
Apparently your fellow spacers would rather live.

While Ling described the disease that ravaged Uthen before her eyes, Lark overheard Rann whisper impatiently to Jeni Shen.

“If we are to get the others out, it must be a complete job! There are weapons to transfer, and supplies. The traeki formula must be duplicated aboard ship, in order to make a durable passageway—”

Jeni interrupted sharply.

“After we verify a cure, starman. Or else your compadres and their master race can sit in their own dung till Jijo grows cold, for all we care.”

Colorful
, Lark thought, smiling grimly.

Soon the machine was programmed with all the relevant facts.

“Many hoons are showing signs of a new sickness, too,” Ling reminded.

“We'll get to that,” said the redhead. “This will take a min or two.”

Lark watched symbols flash across the tiny screen.
More computers
, he mulled unhappily. Of course it was a much smaller unit than the big processor they used near Dooden Mesa. This “digital cognizance” might be shielded by geologic activity in the area, plus fifty meters of solid rock.

But can we be sure?

The device issued a high-pitched chime.

“Synthesis complete,” said the older Danik, taking a small, clear vial from its side, containing a greenish fluid. “This is just two or three doses, but that should suffice to test it. We can mass-produce more aboard the ship. Which means we'll need a permanent channel through the barrier, of course.”

Clearly, she felt her side now had a major bargaining chip. Holding up the tube with three fingers, she went on. “Now might be a good time to discuss how each group will help the other, your side with manpower and sheer numbers, and our side providing—”

Her voice cut off when Ling snatched the capsule from her grasp, swiveling to put it in Jeni Shen's hand.

“
Run
,” was all Ling said.

Jeni took off with a pair of excited noor beasts yapping at her heels.

Any return to the imprisoned ship would have to wait for dawn. Even a well-tuned rewq could not amplify light that was not there.

Ling wanted to keep the two rescued Daniks busy producing antidotes against every pathogen listed in the little Library, in case other plagues were loose that no one knew about, but Lark vetoed the idea. Since the Dooden disaster, all computers made him nervous. He wanted this one turned on as little as possible. Let the Rothen produce extra vaccines inside their vessel and bring them out along with other supplies, he said, if and when a new tunnel was made. Ling seemed about to argue the point, but then her lips pressed hard and she shrugged. Taking one of the lanterns, she retreated to a corner of the cave, far from Rann and her former comrades.

Lark spent some time composing a report to the High Sages, requesting more bottles of the traeki dissolving fluid and describing the preliminary outlines of an alliance between the Six Races and their former enemies. Not that he had much confidence in such a coalition.