Infinity's Shore (70 page)

Dwer stared at her, then found himself breaking up, as well. Till that moment, he had not yet decided about the beautiful Earthwoman. But anyone who could set Mudfoot back like that must be all right.

Rety

A
S THE GUARD ESCORTED HER TO THE CAPTIVES' cell, she eyed several air-circulation grates. Schematics showed the system to be equipped with many safety valves, and the ducts were much too small for prisoners to squeeze through.

But not for a little urrish male, armed with borrowed laser cutters.

Rety's plan was chancy, and she hated sending her “husband” into the maze of air pipes. But yee seemed confident that he would not get lost.

“
this maze no worse than stinky passages under the grass plain
,”he had sniffed while examining a holographic chart. “
it easier than dodging through root tunnels where urrish grubs and males must scurry, when we have no sweet wife pouch to lie in
.” yee curled his long neck in a shrug, “
don't you worry, wife! yee take tools to locked-up men. we do this neat!
”

That would be the critical phase. Once Kunn and Jass were beyond the brig airlock, all the other obstacles should quickly fall. Rety felt positive.

Two prison cells had red lights glaring above reinforced
hatches. The far one, she knew, contained Jophur rings that had been captured in the swamp. The little g'Kek named Huck was helping the Niss Machine interrogate those captives. Rety had racked her brain to come up with a way they might fit her plan, but finally deemed it best to leave them where they were.

This
Streaker
ship won't dare chase us, once we get a star boat outside … but the Jophur ship might. Especially if those rings had a way to signal their crew mates.

As the guard approached Kunn's cell, Rety fondled a folded scrap of paper on which she had laboriously printed instructions, sounding out the words letter by letter, stretching her newborn literacy to the limit. She knew it must look wrong, but no one could afford to be picky these days.

KUN I KAN GIT U OT UV HIR WANT TU GO
?

So went the first line of the note she planned slipping him, while pretending to ask questions. If the Danik pilot understood and agreed to the plan, she would depart and set yee loose to worm his small, lithe body through
Streaker
's ducting system. Meanwhile Rety had selected good places to set fires—in a ship lounge and a caigo locker—to distract the
Streaker
crew away from this area while Kunn used smuggled tools to break out. If all went well, they could then dash for the OutLock, steal a star boat, and escape.

There's just one condition, Kunn. You gotta agree that we get away from here. Away from these Earthers, away from Daniks and Rothens and Jophur monsters and all that crap. Away from Jijo.

Rety felt sure he'd accept.
Anyway, if he or Jass give me any trouble, they'll find they're dealin' with a different Rety now.

The guard maneuvered his walker unit carefully in the narrow hallway. The gangly machine had to bend in order for him to bring a key against the door panel. Finally, it slid aside. Rety glimpsed two bunks within, each supporting a blanket-covered human form.

“Hey, Kunn,” she said, crossing the narrow distance and nudging his shoulder. “Wake up! No more delayin' or
foolin' now. These folks want t'know how you followed em.…”

The blanket slipped off, revealing his shock of glossy hair, but there was no tremor of movement.

They must have him doped
, she thought.
I hope he's not too far under. This can't wait!

Rety shook harder, rolling Kunn toward her—

And jumped back with a gasp of surprise.

The Danik's face was purple. His eyes bulged from their sockets, and his tongue had swollen to fill his mouth.

The dolphin guard chattered a dismayed squeal in the instinctive animal language of his kind.

Rety struggled with shock. She had grown up with death, but it took all her force of will to quash the horror rising in her gorge.

Somehow, she made herself turn toward the other bunk.

Sara

Emerson's song resonated through the Hall of Spinning Disks, where dust motes sparkled in narrow shafts of rhythmic light.

Sara winced at the violent lyrics, but the starman clearly enjoyed these outbursts, gushing from unknown recesses of his scarred brain. He laughed, as did a crowd of urrish males who followed him, clambering through the scaffolding of Uriel's fantastic machine, helping him fine-tune each delicate part. The little urs cackled at Emerson's rough humor, and showed their devotion by diving between whirling glass plates to tighten a strap here, or a pulley there, wherever he gestured with quick hand signs.

Once an engineer, always an engineer
, Sara thought. At times, Emerson resembled her own father, who might go silent for days while tending his beloved paper mill, drawing more satisfaction from the poetry of pulping hammers and rollers than the white sheets that made literacy possible on a barbaric world.

A parallel occurred to her.

Paper suited the Six Races, who needed a memory storage system that was invisible from space. But Uriel's machine has similar traits—an analog computer that no satellite or spaceship can detect, because it uses no electricity and has no digital cognizance. Above all, Galactics would never imagine such an ornate contraption.

And yet it was beautiful in a bizarre way. No wonder she had dreamed shapes and equations when her eyes first glimpsed this marvel through cracks in her delirium. Each time a disk turned against a neighbor's rim, its own axle rotated at a speed that varied with the radial point of contact. If that radius shifted as an independent variable, the rotation changed in response, describing a nonlinear function. It was a marvelously simple concept … and hellishly hard to put into practice without years of patient trial and error.

Uriel first saw the idea in an old Earth book—a quintessentially wolfling concept, briefly used in an old-time Amero-Eurasian war. Soon after, humans discovered digital computers and abandoned the technique. But here on Mount Guenn, the urrish smith had extended it to levels never seen before. Much of her prodigious wealth and passion went into making the concept work.

And urrish haste. Their lives are so short, Uriel must have feared she'd never finish before she died. In that case, what would her successor do with all this?

An array of pillars, arches, and boo scaffolding held the turning shafts in proper alignment, forming a three-dimensional maze that stretched away from Sara, nearly filling the vast chamber. Long ago, this cavity spilled liquid magma down the mountain's mighty flanks. Today it throbbed with a different kind of creative force.

Light rays played a clever role in the dance of mathematics. Glancing off selected disks, pulselike reflections fell
onto a stretch of black sand that had been raked smooth across the floor. Each flash affected the grains, causing a slight spray or rustle. Hillocks grew wherever glimmers landed most often.

Uriel even found a use for lightning crabs
, Sara marveled.

On Jijo, some shorelines were known to froth during electrical storms, as these tiny creatures kicked up sand in frenzied reaction.
We thought it might be static charges in the air, making them behave so. But clearly it is light. I must tell Lark about this, someday.

And Sara realized something else.

The crabs may be another Buyur gimmick species. Bioengineered servants, reverted to nature, but keeping their special trait, even after the gene meddlers left.

Whatever their original function, the crabs now served Uriel, whose hooves clattered nervously as the sandscape swirled under a cascade of sparkling light. Individual flashes mattered little. It was the summed array over area and time that added up to solving a complex numerical problem. Near Uriel, the little chimp, Prity, perched on a high stool with her drawing pad. Prity's tongue stuck out as she sketched, copying the sand display. Sara had never seen her little assistant happier.

Despite all this impressive ingenuity, the actual equations being solved were not profound. Sara had already worked out rough estimates, within a deviance of ten percent, by using a few simple Delancy approximations. But Lester Cambel needed both precision and accuracy under a wide range of boundary conditions, including atmospheric pressure varying with altitude. For that, machine-derived tables offered advantages.

At least now I understand what it's all for.
In her mind, she pictured bustling activity beneath the towering stems of a boo forest, throngs of workers laboring, the flow of acrid liquids, and discussions in the hushed, archaic dialect of science.

They may be crazy—Lester especially. Probably the effort will backfire and make the aliens more vicious than ever Dedinger would look at this—along with all the semaphores,
gliders, balloons, and other innovations—and call it the futile thrashing of the damned.

Yet the attempt is glorious. If they pull it off I'll know I was right about the Six. Our destiny was not foretold by the scrolls, or Dedinger's orthodoxy … or Lark's, for that matter.

It was unique.

Anyway, if we're to be damned, I'd rather it be for trying.

Just one thing still puzzled her. Sara shook her head and murmured aloud.

“Why me?”

Kurt, the Tarek Town exploser, had acted as if this project desperately needed Sara, for her professional expertise. But Uriel's machine was already nearly functional by the time the party arrived from Xi. Prity and Emerson were helpful at making the analog computer work, and so were books Kurt hand-carried from Biblos. But Sara found herself with little to contribute.