Infinity's Shore Read online

  {tarantara!]

  {tarantara, tarantara]

  {tarantara!]"

  While his steed bounds ahead, new aches join the background music of his life-raw, chafed thighs and a bruised spine that jars with each pounding hoofbeat.

  taranta, taranta, taranta-tara

  taranta, taranta, taranta-tara

  Guilt nags him with a sense of duties unfulfilled, and he grieves over the likely fate of his new friends on Jijo, now that their hidden colony has been discovered. And yet . . .

  {tarantara, tarantara]

  {tarantara!]

  His friends grin-this has happened before.

  "Yet, when the danger's near,

  We manage to appear,

  As insensible to fear,

  As anybody here,

  As an-y-bo-dy here!"

  Sara laughs, joining the refrain, and even the dour urrish escorts stretch their long necks to lisp along.

  "Yet, when the danger's near,

  We manage to appear,

  As insensible to fear,

  As anybody here,

  As anybody here!"

  {tarantara, tarantara)

  {tarantara!}"

  PART ONE

  EACH OF THE SOONER RACES making up the Commons of Jijo tells its own unique story, passed down from generation to generation, explaining why their ancestors surrendered godlike powers and risked terrible penalties to reach this far place--skulking in sneakships past Institute patrols, robot guardians, and Zang globules. Seven waves of sinners, each coming to plant their outlaw seed on a world that had been declared off limits to settlement. A world set aside to rest and recover in peace, but for the likes of us.

  The g'Kek arrived first on this land we call the Slope between misty mountains and the sacred sea-hall a million years alter the last legal tenants--the Buyur--departed Jijo.

  Why did those g'Kek founders willingly give up their former lives as star-traveling gods and citizens of the Five Galaxies? Why choose Instead to dwell as fallen primitives, lacking the comforts of technology, or any moral solace but for a few engraved platinum scrolls?

  Legend has it that our g'Kek cousins fled threatened extinction, a dire punishment for devastating gambling losses. But we cannot be sure. Writing was a lost art until humans came, so those accounts may be warped by passing time.

  What we do know is that it could not have been a petty threat that drove them to abandon the spacefaring life they loved, seeking refuge on heavy Jijo, where their wheels have such a hard time on the rocky ground. With four keen eyes, peering in all directions at the end of graceful stalks, did the g'Kek ancestors see a dark destiny painted on galactic winds? Did that first generation see no other choice? perhaps they only cursed their descendants to this savage life as a last resort.

  NOT long after the g'Kek, roughly two thousand years ago, a party of traeki dropped hurriedly from the sky, as if tearing pursuit by some dreaded foe. wasting no time, they sank their sneakship in the deepest hollow of the sea, then settled down to be our gentlest tribe.

  What nemesis drove them from the spiral lanes?

  Any native Jijoan glancing at those familiar stacks of tatty toruses, venting fragrant steam and placid wisdom in each village or the Slope, must find it hard to imagine the traeki having enemies.

  In time, they confided their story. The foe they fled was not some other race, nor was there a deadly vendetta among the star gods of the Five Galaxies. Rather, it was an aspect of their own selves. Certain rings--components of their physical bodies- had lately been modified in ways that turned their kind into formidable beings. Into Jophur, mighty and feared among the noble Galactic clans.

  It was a fate those traeki founders deemed unbearable. SO they chose to become lawless refugees--sooners on a taboo world--in order to shun a horrid destiny.

  The obligation to be great.

  It is said that glavers came to Jijo not out of fear, but seeking the Path of Redemption--the kind of innocent oblivion that wipes all slates clean. In this goal they have succeeded far better than anyone else, showing the rest of us the way, if we dare follow their example.

  Whether or not that sacred track will also be ours, we must respect their accomplishment--transforming themselves from cursed fugitives into a race of blessed simpletons. As starfaring immortals, they could be held accountable for their crimes, including the felony of invading Jijo. But now they have reached a refuge, the purity of ignorance, Free to start again.

  Indulgently, we let glavers root through our kitchen middens, poking under logs for insects. Once mighty intellects, they are not counted among the sooner races of Jijo anymore. They are no longer stained with the sins of their forebears.

  QHEUENS were the first to arrive filled with wary ambition.

  Led by fanatical, crablike gray matrons, their first-generation colonists snapped all five pincers derisively at any thought of union with Jijo's other exile races. Instead, they sought dominion.

  That plan collapsed in time, when blue and red qheuens abandoned historic roles of servitude, drifting off to seek their own ways, leaving their frustrated gray empresses helpless to enforce old feudal loyalties.

  Our tall hoonish brethren inhale deeply, whenever the question arises-"Why are you here?" They fill their prodigious throat sacs with low meditation umbles. In rolling tones, hoon elders relate that their ancestors fled no great danger, no oppression or unwanted obligations.

  When why did they come, risking frightful punishment if their descendants are ever caught living illegally on Jijo?

  The oldest hoons on Jijo merely shrug with frustrating cheerfulness, as if they do not know the reason, and could not bothered to care.

  Some do refer to a legend, though. According to that slim tale, a Galactic oracle once offered a starfaring hoonish clan a unique opportunity, if they dared take it. An opportunity to claim something that had been robbed from them, although they never knew it was lost. A precious birthright that might be discovered on a forbidden world.

  But for the most part, whenever one of the tall ones pulls his throat sac to sing about past times, he rumbles a deep, Joyful ballad about the crude rafts, boats, and seagoing ships that hoons invented from scratch, soon alter landing on Jijo. Things their humorless star cousins would never have bothered looking up in the all-knowing Galactic Library, let alone have deigned to build.

  LEGENDS told by the fleet-footed urrish clan imply that their foremothers were rogues, coming to Jijo in order to breed-escaping limits Imposed in civilised parts of the Five Galaxies. With their short lives, hot tempers, and prolific sexual style, the urs founders might have gone on to fill Jijo with their kind . . . or else met extinction by now, like the mythical centaurs they vaguely resemble.

  But they escaped both of those traps. Instead, alter many hard struggles, at the forge and on the battlefield, they assumed an honored place in the commons of Six Races. With their thundering herds, and mastery of steel, they live hot and hard, making up for their brief seasons in our midst.

  Finally two centuries ago, Earthlings came, bringing chimpanzees and other treasures. But humans greatest gift was paper. In creating the printed trove of Biblos, they became lore masters to our piteous commonwealth of exiles. Printing and education changed tile on the Slope, so that later generations of castaways dared to study their adopted world, their hybrid civilisation, and even their own selves.

  As for why humans came all this way--breaking Galactic laws and risking everything, Just to huddle with other outlaws under a fearsome sky--their tale is among the strangest told by Jijo's exile clans.

  -from An Ethnography of the Slope, by Dorti Chang-Jones and Huph-alch-Huo

  Sooners

  Alvin

  I HAD NO WAY TO MARK THE PASSAGE OF TIME, Lying dazed and half-paralyzed in a metal cell, listening to the engine hum of a mechanical sea dragon that was hauling me and my friends to parts unknown.

  I guess a couple of days must have passed since the shattering of our makeshift su
bmarine, our beautiful Wuphon's Dream, before I roused enough to wonder, What next?

  Dimly, I recall the sea monster's face as we first saw it through our crude glass viewing port, lit by the Dream's homemade searchlight. That glimpse lasted but a moment as the huge metal thing loomed toward us out of black, icy depths. The four of us--Huck, Pincer, Ur-ronn, and me--had already resigned ourselves to death . . . doomed to crushed oblivion at the bottom of the sea. Our expedition a failure, we didn't feel like daring subsea adventurers anymore, but like scared kids, voiding our bowels in terror as we waited for the cruel abyss to squeeze our hollowed-out tree trunk into a zillion soggy splinters.

  Suddenly this enormous shape erupted toward us, spreading jaws wide enough to snatch Wuphon's Dream whole.

  Well, almost whole. Passing through that maw, we struck a glancing blow.

  The collision shattered our tiny capsule.

  What followed still remains a painful blur.

  I guess anything beats death, but there have been moments since that impact when my back hurt so much that I just wanted to rumble one last umble through my battered throat sac and say farewell to young Alvin Hph-wayuo- junior linguist, humicking writer, uttergloss daredevil, and neglectful son of Mu-phauwq and Yowg-wayuo of Wuphon Port, the Slope, Jijo, Galaxy Four, the Universe.

  But I stayed alive.

  I guess it just didn't seem hoonish to give up, after every thing my pals and I went through to get here. What if I was sole survivor? I owed it to Huck and the others to carry on,

  My cell--a prison? hospital room?--measures just two meters, by two, by three. Pretty skimpy for a hoon, event one not quite fully grown. It gets even more cramped whenever some six-legged, metal-sheathed demon tries to squeeze inside to tend my injured spine, poking with what, I assume (hope!) to be clumsy kindness. Despite their efforts, misery comes in awful waves, making me wish desperately for the pain remedies cooked up by Old Stinky--our traeki pharmacist back home.

  It occurred to me that I might never walk again . . . or see my family, or watch seabirds swoop over the dross ships, anchored beneath Wuphon's domelike shelter trees. I

  I tried talking to the insecty giants trooping in and out of my cell. Though each had a torso longer than my dad is tall--with a flared back end, and a tubelike shell as hard as Buyur steel--I couldn't help picturing them as enormous phuvnthus, those six-legged vermin that gnaw the walls of wooden houses, giving off a sweet-tangy stench.

  These things smell like overworked machinery. Despite, my efforts in a dozen Earthling and Galactic languages, they seemed even less talkative than the phuvnthus Huck and I used to catch when we were little, and train to perform in a miniature circus.

  I missed Huck during that dark time. I missed her quick g'Kek mind and sarcastic wit. I even missed the way she'd snag my leg fur in her wheels to get my attention, if I stared too long at the horizon in a hoonish sailor's trance. I last glimpsed those wheels spinning uselessly in the sea dragon's mouth, just after those giant jaws smashed our precious Dream and we spilled across the slivers of our amateur diving craft.

  Why didn't I rush to my friend, during those bleak moments after we crashed? Much as I yearned to, it was hard to see or hear much while a screaming wind shoved its way into the chamber, pushing out the bitter sea. At first, I had to fight just to breathe again. Then, when I tried to move, my back would not respond.

  In those blurry instants, I also recall catching sight of Ur-ronn, whipping her long neck about and screaming as she thrashed all four legs and both slim arms, horrified at being drenched in vile water. Ur-ronn bled where her suede colored hide was pierced by jagged shards-remnants of the glass porthole she had proudly forged in the volcano workshops of Uriel the Smith.

  Pincer-Tip was there, too, best equipped among our gang to survive underwater. As a red qheuen, Pincer was used to scampering on five chitin-armored claws across salty shallows-though our chance tumble into the bottomless void was more than even he had bargained for. In dim recollection, I think Pincer seemed alive ... or does wishful thinking deceive me?

  My last hazy memories of our "rescue" swarm with violent images until I blacked out ... to wake in this cell, delirious and alone.

  Sometimes the phuvnthus do something "helpful" to my spine, and it hurts so much that I'd willingly spill every secret I know. That is, if the phuvnthus ever asked questions, which they never do.

  So I never allude to the mission we four were given by Uriel the Smith-to seek a taboo treasure that her ancestors left on the seafloor, centuries ago. An offshore cache, hidden when urrish settlers first jettisoned their ships and high-tech gadgets to become just one more fallen race. Only some dire emergency would prompt Uriel to violate the Covenant by retrieving such contraband.

  I guess "emergency" might cover the arrival of alien robbers, plundering the Gathering Festival of the Six Races and threatening the entire Commons with genocide,

  Eventually, the pangs in my spine eased enough for me to rummage through my rucksack and resume writing in this tattered journal, bringing my ill-starred adventure up to date. That raised my spirits a bit. Even if none of us survives, my diary might yet make it home someday.

  Growing up in a little hoonish village, devouring human adventure stories by Clarke and Rostand, Conrad and Xu Xiang, I dreamed that people on the Slope would someday say, "Wow, that Alvin Hph-wayuo was some storyteller, as good as any old-time Earther."

  This could be my one and only chance.

  So I spent long miduras with a stubby charcoal crayon clutched in my big hoon fist, scribbling the passages that lead up to this one-an account of how I came to find myself in this low, low state.

  -How four friends built a makeshift submarine out of skink skins and a carved-out garu log, fancying a treasure hunt to the Great Midden.

  -How Uriel the Smith, in her mountain forge, threw her support behind our project, turning it from a half-baked dream into a real expedition.

  -How we four snuck up to Uriel's observatory, and heard a human sage speak of starships in the sky, perhaps bringing foretold judgment on the Six Races.

  -And how Wuphon's Dream soon dangled from a pole near Terminus Rock, where the Midden's sacred trench passes near land. And Uriel told us, hissing through her cloven upper lip, that a ship had indeed landed up north. But this cruiser did not carry Galactic magistrates. Instead another kind of criminal had come, worse even than our sinner ancestors.

  So we sealed the hatch, and the great winch turned. But on reaching the mapped site, we found that Uriel's cache was already missing! Worse-when we went looking for the damned thing, Wuphon's Dream got lost and tumbled off the edge of an undersea cliff.

  Flipping back some pages, I can tell my account of the journey was written by someone perched on a knife-edge of harrowing pain. Yet, there is a sense of drama I can't hope to match now. Especially that scene where the bottom vanished beneath our wheels and we felt ourselves fall toward the real Midden.

  Toward certain death.

  Until the phuvnthus snatched us up.

  So, here I am, swallowed by a metal whale, ruled by cryptic silent beings, ignorant whether my friends still live or if I am alone. Merely crippled, or dying.

  Do my captors have anything to do with starship landings in the mountains?

  Are they a different enigma, rising out of Jijo's ancient past? Relics of the vanished Buy ur perhaps? Or ghosts even older still?

  Answers seem scarce, and since I've finished recounting the plummet and demise of Wuphon's Dream, I daren't waste more precious paper on speculation. I must put my pencil down, even if it robs my last shield against loneliness.

  All my life I've been inspired by human-style books, picturing myself as hero in some uttergloss tale. Now my sanity depends on learning to savor patience.

  To let time pass without concern.

  To live and think, at last, just like a hoon.

  ASX

  YOU MAY CALL ME ASX.

  You, manicolored rings, piled in a hig
h tapered heap, venting fragrant stinks, sharing the victual sap that climbs our common core, or partaking in memory wax, trickling back down from our sensory peak.

  you, the rings who take up diverse roles in this shared body, a pudgy cone nearly as tall as a hoon, as heavy as a blue qheuen, and slow across the ground like an aged g'Kek with a cracked axle.

  you, the rings who vote each day whether to renew our coalition.

  From you rings i/we now request a ruling. Shall we carry on this fiction? This "Asx"?

  Unitary beings-the humans, urs, and other dear partners in exile-stubbornly use that term, Asx, to signify this loosely affiliated pile of fatty toruses, as if we/i truly had a fixed name, not a mere label of convenience.

  Of course unitary beings are all quite mad. We traeki long ago resigned ourselves to living in a universe filled with egotism.