Infinity's Shore (65 page)

Like most settlements, this one had been mined by a chapter of the Explosers Guild, preparing the city for deliberate razing if ever the long-prophesied Judgment Day arrived. But when it finally came, the manner was not as foreseen by the scrolls. There were no serene, dispassionate officials from the great Institutes, ordaining evacuation and tidy demolition, then weighing the worth of each race by how far it had progressed along the Path of Redemption. Instead there had poured down an abrupt and cruelly impartial cascade of raging flame, efficient only at killing, igniting some of the carefully placed charges that the explosers had reverently tended for generations … and leaving others smoldering like booby traps amid the debris.

When the explosers' local headquarters blew up, a huge fireball had risen so high that it briefly licked the underbelly of the Jophur corvette, forcing a hurried retreat. Even now, several miduras after the attack, delayed blasts still rocked random parts of town, disrupting mercy efforts, setting rubble piles tottering.

Matters improved when urrish volunteers from a nearby caravan galloped into town. With their sensitive nostrils, the urs sniffed for both unexploded charges and living flesh. They proved especially good at finding unconscious or hidden humans, whose scent they found pungent.

Miduras of hard labor merged into a blur. By late afternoon, Blade was still at it, straining on a rope, helping clear the stubborn obstruction over a buried basement. The rescue team's ad hoc leader, a hoonish ship captain, boomed out rhythmic commands.

“Hr-r-rm, now
pull
, friends!…
Again
, it's coming!… And
again!
”

Blade staggered as the stone block finally gave way. A pair of nimble lorniks and a lithe chimpanzee dived through the exposed opening, and soon dragged out a g'Kek with two smashed wheel rims. The braincase was intact, however, and all four eyestalks waved a dance of astounded gratitude. The survivor looked young and
strong. Rims could be repaired, and spokes would reweave all by themselves.

But where will he live until then?
Blade wondered, knowing that g'Keks preferred city life, not the nearby jungle where many of Ovoom's citizens had fled.
Will it be a world worth rolling back to, or one filled with Jophur-de-signed viruses and hunter robots, programmed to satisfy an ancient vendetta?

The work crew was about to resume its unending task when a shrill cry escaped the traeki who had been assigned lookout duty, perched on a nearby rubble pile with its ring-of-sensors staring in all directions at once.

“
Observe! All selves, alertly turn your attentions in the direction indicated!
”

A pair of tentacles aimed roughly south and west. Blade lifted his heavy carapace and tried bringing his cupola to bear, but it was dust-coated and he had no water to clean it.
If only qheuens had been blessed with better eyesight.

By Ifni, right now I'd settle for tear ducts.

An object swam into view, roughly spherical, moving languidly above the forested horizon, as if bobbing like a cloud. Lacking any perspective for such a strange sight, Blade could not tell at first how big it was. Perhaps the titanic Jophur battleship had come, instead of dispatching its little brother! Were the Jophur returning to finish the job? Blade remembered tales of Galactic war weapons far worse than the corvette had used last night. Weapons capable of melting a continent's crust. A mere river would prove no refuge, if the aliens meant to use such tools.

But no. He saw the globelike surface
ripple
in an unsteady breeze. It appeared to be made of fabric, and much smaller than he had thought.

Two more globelike forms followed the leader into view, making a threesome convoy. Blade instinctively switched organic filters in his cupola, observing them in infrared. At once he saw that each flying thing carried a sharp heat glow beneath, suspended by cables from the globe itself.

Others standing nearby—those with sharper eyesight—passed through several reactions. First anxious dread, then
puzzlement, and finally a kind of joyful wonder they expressed with shrill laughter or deep, umbling tones.

“What is it?” asked a nearby red qheuen, even more dust-blind than Blade.

“I think—” Blade began to answer. But then a human cut in, shading his eyes with both hands.

“They're balloons! By Drake and Ur-Chown … they're hot air balloons!”

A short time later, even the qheuens could make out shapes hung beneath the bulging gasbags. Urrish figures standing in wicker baskets, tending fires that intermittently flared with sudden, near-volcanic heat. Blade then realized who had come, as if out of the orange setting sun.

The smiths of Blaze Mountain must have seen last night's calamity from their nearby mountain sanctum. The smiths were coming to help succor their neighbors.

It seemed blasphemous, in a strange way. For the Sacred Scrolls had always spoken of
doom
arriving from the fearsome open sky.

Now it seemed the cloudless heavens could also bring virtue.

Lester Cambel

H
E WAS TOO BUSY NOW TO FEEL RACKED WITH conscience pangs. As commotion at the secret base neared a fever pitch, Lester had no time left for wallowing in guilt. There were slurry tubes to inspect—a pipeline threading its meandering way through the boo forest, carrying noxious fluids from the traeki synthesis gang to tall, slender vats where it congealed into a paste of chemically constrained hell.

Lester also had to approve a new machine for winding league after league of strong fiber cord around massive trunks of greatboo, multiplying their strength a thousandfold.

Then there was the matter of
kindling beetles.
One of his assistants had found a new use for an old pest—a dangerous,
Buyur-modified insect that most Sixers grew up loathing, but one that might now solve an irksome technical problem. The idea seemed promising, but needed
morc
tests before being incorporated in the plan.

Piece by piece, the scheme progressed from Wild-Eyed Fantasy all the way to Desperate Gamble. In fact, a local hoonish bookie was said to be covering bets at only sixty to one against eventual success—the best odds so far.

Of course, each time they overcame a problem, it was replaced by three more. That was expected, and Lester even came to look upon the growing complexity as a blessing. Keeping busy was the only effective way to fight off the same images that haunted his mind, replaying over and over again.

A golden mist, falling on Dooden Mesa.
Only immersion in work could drive out the keening cries of g'Kek citizens, trapped by poison rain pouring from a Jophur cruiser.

A cruiser
he
had carelessly summoned, by giving in to his greatest vice—curiosity.

“
Do not blame yourself Lester
,” Ur-Jah counseled in a dialect of GalSeven. “
The enemy would have found Dooden soon anyway. Meanwhile, your research harvested valuable information. It helped lead to cures for the qheuen and hoonish plagues. Life consists of trade-offs, my friend
.”

Perhaps. Lester admitted things might work that way on paper. Especially if you assumed, as many did, that the poor g'Kek were doomed anyway.

That kind of philosophy comes easier to the urrish, who know that only a fraction of their offspring can or should survive. We humans wail for a lifetime if we lose a son or daughter. If we find urs callous, it's good to recall how absurdly sentimental we seem to them.

Lester tried to think like an urs.

He failed.

Now came news from the commandos who so bravely plumbed the lake covering the Glade of Gathering. Sergeant Jeni Shen reported partial success, freeing some Daniks from their trapped ship … only to lose others to the Jophur, including the young heretic sage, Lark Koolhan. A net loss, as far as Lester was concerned.

What might the aliens be doing to poor Lark right now?

I never should have agreed to his dangerous plan.

Lester realized, he did not have the temperament to be a war leader. He could not
spend
people, like fuel for a fire, even as a price for victory.

When all this was over, assuming anyone survived, he planned to resign from the Council of Sages and become the most reclusive scholar in Biblos, creeping like a specter past dusty shelves of ancient tomes. Or else he might resume his old practice of meditation in the narrow Canyon of the Blessed, where life's cares were known to vanish under a sweet ocean of detached oblivion.

It sounded alluring—a chance to retreat from life.

But for now, there was simply too much to do.

The council seldom met anymore.

Phwhoon-dau, who had made a lifelong study of the languages and ways of fabled Galactics, had responsibility for negotiating with the Jophur. Unfortunately, there seemed little to haggle about. Just futile pleading for the invaders to change their many-ringed minds. Phwhoondau sent repeated entreaties to the toroidal aliens, protesting that the High Sages knew nothing about the much-sought “dolphin ship.”

Believe us, O great Jophur lords
, the hoonish sage implored.
We have no secret channel of communication with your prey. The events you speak of were all unrelated … a series of coincidences.

But the Jophur were too angry to believe it.

In attempting to negotiate, Phwhoon-dau was advised by Chorsh, the new traeki representative. But that replacement for Asx the Wise had few new insights to offer. As a member of the Tarek Town Explosers Guild, Chorsh was a valued technician, not an expert on distant Jophur cousins.

What Chorsh did have was a particularly useful talent—a
summoning torus.

Shifting summer winds carried the traeki's scent message
all over the Slope—a call from Chorsh to all qualified ring stacks.

Come … come now to where you/we are needed.…

Hundreds of them already stood in single file, a chain of fatty heaps that stretched on for nearly a league, winding amid the gently bending trunks of boo. Each volunteer squatted on its own feast of decaying matter that work crews kept stoked, like feeding logs to a steam engine. Chuffing and smoking from exertion, the chem-synth gang dripped glistening fluids into makeshift troughs made of split and hollowed saplings, contributing to a trickle that eventually became a rivulet of foul-smelling liquor.

Immobile and speechless, they hardly looked like sentient beings. More like tall, greasy beehives, laid one after another along a twisty road. But that image was deceiving. Lester saw swathes of color flash across the body of one nearby traeki—a subtle interplay of shades that rippled first between the stack's component rings, as if they were holding conversations among themselves. Then the pattern coalesced, creating a unified shape of light and shadows at the points that lay nearest to the traeki's neighbors, on either side. Those stacks, in turn, responded with changes in their own surfaces.

Lester recognized the wavelike motif—traeki
laughter.
The workers were sharing jokes, among their own rings and from stack to stack.

They are the strangest of the Six
, Lester thought.
And yet we understand them … and they, us.

I doubt even the sophisticates of the Five Galaxies can say the same thing about the Jophur. Out there, none of their advanced science could achieve what we have simply by living next to traeki, day in and day out.

It was pretty crude humor, Lester could tell. Many of these workers were pharmacists, back in their home villages all over the Slope. The one nearest Lester had been speculating about alternative uses of the stuff they were making—perhaps how it might also serve as a cure for the perennial problem of hoonish constipation … especially if accompanied by liberal applications of heat.…

At least that was how Lester interpreted the language of
color. He was far from expert in its nuances. Anyway, these workers were welcome to a bit of rough-edged drollery. Their hard labor lasted day in, day out, and still production lagged behind schedule.