Infinity's Shore (9 page)

“Unlikely,” Ur-ronn answered, this time in lisping Anglic. “Don't forget, we're in the
Rift.
This is nothing vut an
offshoot
canyon of the Nidden. Our ancestors likely discarded their shifs in the nain trench, where the greatest share of Vuyur trash went.”

I blinked at that thought.
This, an offshoot? A minor side area of the Midden?

Of course she was right! But it presented a boggling image. What staggering amounts of stuff must have been dumped in the main trench, over the ages! Enough to tax even the recycling power of Jijo's grinding plates. No wonder the Noble Galactics set worlds aside for ten million years or more. It must take that long for a planet to digest each meal of sapient-made things, melting them back into the raw stuff of nature.

I thought of my father's dross ship, driven by creaking masts, its hold filled with crates of whatever we exiles can't recycle. After two thousand years, all the offal we sooners sent to the Midden would not even show against this single mound of discarded starships.

How rich the Buyur and their fellow gods must have been to cast off so much wealth! Some of the abandoned vessels looked immense enough to swallow every house, khuta, or hovel built by the Six Races. We glimpsed dark portals, turrets, and a hundred other details, growing painfully aware of one fact—those shadowy behemoths had been sent down here to rest in peace. Their sleep was never meant to be invaded by the likes of us.

Our plummet toward the reef of dead ships grew alarming. Did any of the others feel we were heading in awful
fast?

“Maybe this is their home,” Pincer speculated as we plunged toward one twisted, oval ruin, half the size of Wuphon Port.

“Maybe the phuvnthus are made of, like,
parts
of old machines that got dumped here,” Huck mused. “And they kind of put themselves together from whatever's lying around? Like this
boat
we're on is made of all sorts of junk—”

“Ferhafs they were servants of the Vuyur—” Ur-ronn interrupted. “Or a race that lived here even vefore. Or a strain of nutants, like in that story vy—”

I cut in. “Have any of you considered the simplest idea? That maybe they're just like us?”

When my friends turned to look at me, I shrugged, human style.

“Maybe the phuvnthus are sooners, too. Ever stop to think of that?”

Their blank faces answered me. I might as well have suggested that our hosts were
noor
beasts, for all the sense my idea made.

Well, I never claimed to be quick-witted, especially when racked with agony.

We lacked any sense of perspective, no way to tell how close we were, or how fast we were going. Huck and Pincer murmured nervously as our vessel plunged toward the
mountain-of-ships at a rapid clip, engines running hard in reverse.

I think we all jumped a bit when a huge slab of corroded metal moved aside, just duras before we might have collided. Our vessel slid into a gaping hole in the mountain of dross, cruising along a corridor composed of spaceship hulls, piercing a fantastic pile of interstellar junk.

Asx

R
EAD THE NEWLY CONGEALED WAX, MY RINGS.

See how folk of the Six Races dispersed, tearing down festival pavilions and bearing away the injured, fleeing before the Rothen starship's expected arrival.

Our senior sage, Vubben of the g'Kek, recited from the Scroll of Portents a passage warning against disunity. Truly, the Six Races must strive harder than ever to look past our differences of shape and shell. Of flesh, hide, and torg.

“Go home,” we sages told the tribes. “See to your lattice screens. Your blur-cloth webs. Live near the ground in Jijo's sheltered places. Be ready to fight if you can. To die if you must.”

The
zealots
, who originally provoked this crisis, suggested the Rothen starship might have means to track Ro-kenn and his lackeys, perhaps by sniffing our prisoners' brain waves or body implants. “For safety, let's sift their bones into lava pools!”

An opposing faction called
Friends of the Rothen
demanded Ro-kenn's release and obeisance to his godlike will. These were not only humans, but some qheuens, g'Keks, hoons, and even a few urs, grateful for cures or treatments received in the aliens' clinic. Some think redemption can be won in this lifetime, without first treading the long road blazed by glavers.

Finally, others see this chaos as a chance to settle old grudges. Rumors tell of anarchy elsewhere on the Slope. Of many fine things toppled or burned.

Such diversity! The same freedom that fosters a vivid
people also makes it hard to maintain a united front. Would things be better if we had disciplined order, like the feudal state sought by Gray Queens of old?

It is too late for regrets. Time remains only for
improvisation
—an art not well approved in the Five Galaxies, we are told.

Among poor savages, it may be our only hope.

Yes, my rings. We can now remember all of that.

Stroke this wax
, and watch the caravans depart toward plains, forests, and sea. Our hostages are spirited off to sites where even a starship's piercing scrutiny might not find them. The sun flees and stars bridge the vast territory called the Universe. A realm denied us, that our foes roam at will.

Some remain behind, awaiting the ship.

We voted, did we not? We rings who make up Asx? We volunteered to linger. Our cojoined voice would speak to angry aliens for the Commons. Resting our basal torus on hard stone, we passed the time listening to complex patterns from the Holy Egg, vibrating our fatty core with strange shimmering motifs.

Alas, my rings, none of these reclaimed memories explains our current state, that something terrible must have happened?

Here
, what of
this
newly congealed waxy trail?

Can you perceive in it the glimmering outlines of a great vessel of space? Roaring from the same part of the sky lately abandoned by the sun?

Or
is
it the sun, come back again to hover angrily above the valley floor?

The great ship scans our valley with scrutinizing rays, seeking signs of those they left behind.

Yes, my rings. Follow this waxy memory.

Are we about to rediscover the true cause of terror?

Lark

S
UMMER PRESSED HEAVILY ACROSS THE RIMMER Range, consuming the unshaded edges of glaciers far older than six exile races. At intervals, a crackling static charge would blur the alpine slopes as countless grass stems wafted skyward, reaching like desperate tendrils. Intense sunshine was punctuated by bursts of curtain rain—water draperies that undulated uphill, drenching the slopes with continuous liquid sheets, climbing until the mountaintops wore rainbow crowns, studded with flashes of compressed lightning.

Compact reverberations rolled down from the heights, all the way to the shore of a poison lake, where fungus swarmed over a forty-hectare thicket of crumbling vines. Once a mighty outpost of Galactic culture, the place was now a jumble of stone slabs, rubbed featureless by abrading ages. The pocket valley sweltered with acrid aromas, as caustic nectars steamed from the lake, or dripped from countless eroding pores.

The newest sage of the Commons of Jijo plucked yellow moss from a decaying cable, one of a myriad of strands that once made up the body of a half-million-year-old creature, the mulc spider responsible for demolishing this ancient Buyur site, gradually returning it to nature. Lark had last seen this place in late winter—searching alone through snow flurries for the footprints of Dwer and Rety, refugees from this same spider's death fury. Things had changed here since that frantic deliverance. Large swathes of mulc cable were simply gone, harvested in some recent effort that no one had bothered explaining when Lark was assigned here. Much of what remained was coated with this clinging moss.

“
Spirolegita cariola
.” He muttered the species name, rubbing a sample between two fingers. It was a twisted, deviant cariola variety. Mutation seemed a specialty of this weird, astringent site.

I wonder what the place will do to me—to all of us—if we stay here long.

He had not asked for this chore. To be a
jailor.
Just wearing the title made him feel less clean.

A chain of nonsense syllables made him turn back toward a blur-cloth canopy, spanning the space between slablike boulders.

“It's a
clensionating sievelator
for
refindulating
excess torg.…”

The voice came from deep shade within—a strong feminine alto, though somewhat listless now, tinged with resignation. Soft clinking sounds followed as one object was tossed onto a pile and another picked up for examination.

“At a guess, I'd say
this
was once a
glannis truncator
, probably used in rituals of a chihanic sect … that is, unless it's just another Buyur joke-novelty device.”

Lark shaded his eyes to regard Ling, the young sky-born scientist and servant of star-god Rothen, in whose employ he had worked as a “native guide” for many weeks … until the Battle of the Glade reversed their standing in a matter of heartbeats. Since that unexpected victory, the High Sages had assigned her care and custody to him, a duty he never asked for, even if it meant exalted promotion.

Now I'm quite a high-ranking witch doctor among savages
, he thought with some tartness.
Lord High Keeper of Alien Prisoners.

And maybe executioner. His mind shied from that possibility. Much more likely, Ling would be traded to her Danik-Rothen comrades in some deal worked out by the sages. Or else she might be rescued at any moment by hordes of unstoppable robots, overpowering Lark's small detachment of sword-bearing escorts like a pack of
santi
bears brushing aside the helpless buzzing defenders of a zil-honey tree.

Either way, she'll go free. Ling may live another three hundred years on her homeworld, back in the Five Galaxies, telling embroidered tales about her adventure among the feral barbarians of a shabby, illicit colony. Meanwhile, the best we fallen ones can hope for is bare survival. To keep scratching a living from poor tired Jijo, calling it
lucky if some of the Six eventually join glavers down the Path of Redemption. The trail to blissful oblivion.