Infinity's Shore u-5 Page 7

  Scant diary accounts survive from witnesses to the calamity, but according to some who browsed the Xenoscience Collection before it burned, the Buyur were squat beings, vaguely resembling the bullfrogs shown on page ninety-six of Clear’s Guide to Terrestrial Life-Forms, though with elephantine legs and sharp, forward-looking eyes. They were said to be master shapers of useful organisms, and had a reputation for prodigious wit.

  But other sooner races already knew that much about the Buyur, both from oral traditions and the many clever servant organisms that flit about Jijo’s forests, perhaps still looking for departed masters. Beyond these few scraps, we have very little about the race whose mighty civilization thronged this world for more than a million years.

  HOW could so much knowledge be lost in a single night? Today it seems odd. Why weren’t copies of such valuable texts printed by those first-wave human colonists, before they sent their sneakship tumbling to ocean depths? Why not place duplicates all over the Slope, safeguarding the learning against all peril?

  In our ancestors’ defense, recall what tense times those were, before the Great Peace or the coming of the Egg. The five sapient races already present on Jijo (excluding glavers) had reached an edgy balance by the time starship Tabernacle slinked past Izmunuti’s dusty glare to plant Earthlings illicitly, the latest wave of criminal colonists to plague a troubled world. In those days, combat was frequent between urrish clans and haughty qheuen empresses, while hoonish tribes skirmished among themselves in their ongoing ethical struggle over traeki civil rights. The High Sages had little influence beyond reading and interpreting the Speaking Scrolls, the only documents existing at the time.

  Into this tense climate dropped the latest invasion of sooner refugees, who found an unused eco-niche awaiting them. But human colonists were not content simply to take up tree farming as another clan of illiterates. Instead, they used the Tabernacle’s engines one last time before sinking her. With those godlike forces they carved Biblos Fortress, then toppled a thousand trees, converting their pulp into freshly printed books.

  The act so astonished the Other Five, it nearly cost human settlers their lives. Outraged, the queens of Tarek Town laid siege to the vastly outnumbered Earthlings. Others, equally offended by what seemed heresy against the Scrolls, held back only because the priest sages refused sanctioning holy war. That narrow vote gave human leaders time to bargain, to cajole the different tribes and septs with practical advice from books, bribing them with useful things. Spoke cleats for g’Kek wheels. Better sails for hoonish captains. And, for urrish smiths, the long-sought knack of brewing clear glass.

  How things had changed just a few generations later, when the new breed of scholar sages gathered to affirm the Great Peace, scribing their names on fresh paper and sending copies to each hamlet on the Slope. Reading became a common habit, and even writing is no longer viewed as sin.

  An orthodox minority still objects to the clatter of printing presses. They piously insist that literacy fosters memory, and thus attachment to the same conceits that got our spacefaring ancestors in trouble. Surely, they claim, we must cultivate detachment and forgetfulness in order to tread the Path of Redemption.

  Perhaps they are right. But few these days seem in a hurry to follow glavers down that blessed trail. Not yet. First, we must prepare our souls.

  And wisdom, the New Sages declare, can be nurtured from the pages of a book.

  from Forging the Peace, a Historical Meditation-Umble,

  by Homer Auph-puthtwaoy

  Streakers

  Kaa

  STRANDED, BY UNYIELDING FATE, ON IFNI’S SHORE.

  Stranded, like a beached whale, barred from ever going home.

  Five ways stranded—

  First, cut off from Earth by hostile aliens bearing a death grudge toward Terrans in general, and the Streaker crew in particular, though Kaa never quite understood why.

  Second, banished from Earth’s home galaxy, blown off course, and off-limits, by a caprice of hyperspace — though many on the crew still blamed Kaa, calling it “pilot’s error.” Third, starship Streaker taking refuge on a taboo world, one scheduled to have a respite from sapient minds. An ideal haven, according to some. A trap, said others.

  Fourth, when the vessel’s weary engines finally ceased their labors, depositing the Streaker in a realm of ghosts, deep in this planet’s darkest corner, far from air or light.

  And now, this, Kaa thought. Abandoned, even by a crew of castaways!

  Of course Lieutenant Tsh’t didn’t put it that way, when she asked him to stay behind in a tiny outpost with three other volunteers for company.

  “This will be your first important command, Kaa. A chance to show what you’re made of.”

  Yeah, he thought. Especially if I’m speared by a hoonish harpoon, dragged onto one of their boats, and slit open.

  That almost happened yesterday. He had been tracking one of the native sailing craft, trying to learn its purpose and destination, when one of his young assistants, Mopol, darted ahead and began surfing the wooden vessel’s rolling bow wake … a favorite pastime on Earth, where dolphins frequently hitched free rides from passing ships. Only here it was so dumb, Kaa hadn’t thought to forbid it in advance.

  Mopol offered that lawyerly excuse later, when they returned to the shelter. “B-besides, I didn’t do any harm.” “No harm? You let them see you!” Kaa berated. “Don’t you know they started throwing spears into the water, just as I got you out of there?” Mopol’s sleek torso and bottle beak held a rebellious stance. “They never saw a dolphin before. Prob’ly thought we were some local kind of fish.” “And it’s gonna stay that way, do you hear?”

  Mopol grunted ambiguous assent, but the episode unnerved Kaa.

  A while later, dwelling on his own shortcomings, he worked amid clouds of swirling bottom mud, splicing optical fiber to a cable the submarine Hikahi had laid, on its return trip to Streaker’s hiding place. Kaa’s newly emplaced camera should let him spy more easily on the hoon colony whose sheltered docks and camouflaged houses lay perched along the nearby bay. Already he could report that hoonish efforts at concealment were aimed upward, at shrouding their settlement against the sky, not the sea. That might prove important information, Kaa hoped.

  Still, he had never trained to be a spy. He was a pilot, dammit!

  Not that he ever used to get much practice during the early days of Streaker’s mission, languishing in the shadow of Chief Pilot Keepiru, who always got the tough, glamorous jobs. When Keepiru vanished on Kithrup, along with the captain and several others, Kaa finally got a chance to practice his skill — for better and worse.

  But now Streaker’s going nowhere. A beached ship needs no pilot, so I guess I’m expendable.

  Kaa finished splicing and was retracting the work arms of his harness when a flash of silver-gray shot by at high speed, undulating madly. Sonar strafed him as waves of liquid recoil shoved his body. Clickety dolphin laughter filled the shallows.

  Admit it, star seeker!

  You did not hear or see me,

  Sprinting from the gloom!

  In fact, Kaa had known the youth was approaching for some time, but he did not want to discourage Zhaki from practicing the arts of stealth.

  “Use Anglic,” he commanded tersely.

  Small conical teeth gleamed in a beam of slanted sunshine as the young Tursiops swung around to face Kaa. “But it’s much easier to speak Trinary! Sometimes Anglic makes my head hurt.” Few humans, listening to this exchange between two neo-dolphins, would have understood the sounds. Like Trinary, this underwater dialect consisted mostly of clipped groans and ratchetings. But the grammar was close to standard Anglic. And grammar guides the way a person thinks — or so Creideiki used to teach, when that master of Keeneenk arts lived among the Streaker crew, guiding them with his wisdom.

  Creideiki has been gone for two years, abandoned with Mr. Orley and others when we fled the battle fleets at Kithrup. Yet every day we miss him — the bes
t our kind produced.

  When Creideiki spoke, you could forget for a while that neo-dolphins were crude, unfinished beings, the newest and shakiest sapient race in the Five Galaxies.

  Kaa tried answering Zhaki as he imagined the captain would.

  “The pain you feel is called concentration. It’s not easy, but it enabled our human patrons to reach the stars, all by themselves.” “Yeah. And look what good it did them,” Zhaki retorted.

  Before Kaa could answer, the youth emitted the need-air signal and shot toward the surface, without even performing a wariness spiral to look out for danger. It violated security, but tight discipline seemed less essential as each Jijoan day passed. This sea was too mellow and friendly to encourage diligence.

  Kaa let it pass, following Zhaki to the surface. They exhaled and drew in sweet air, faintly charged with distant hints of rain. Speaking Anglic with their gene-modified blowholes out of the water called for a different dialect, one that hissed and sputtered, but sounded more like human speech.

  “All right-t,” Kaa said. “Now report.”

  The other dolphin tossed his head. “The red crabs suspect nothing. They f-fixate on their crayfish pensss. Only rarely does one look up when we c-come near.” “They aren’t crabs. They’re qheuens. And I gave strict orders. You weren’t to go near enough to be seen!” Hoons were considered more dangerous, so Kaa had kept that part of the spy mission for himself. Still, he counted on Zhaki and Mopol to be discreet while exploring the qheuen settlement at the reef fringe. I guess I was wrong.

  “Mopol wanted to try some of the reds’ delicaciesss, so we p-pulled a diversion. I rounded up a school of those green-finned fishies — the ones that taste like Sargasso eel — and chased ’em right through the q-qheuen colony! And guess what? It turns out the crabs have pop-up nets they use for jussst that kind of luck! As soon as the school was inside their boundary, they whipped those things up-p and snatched the whole swarm!” “You’re lucky they didn’t snag you, too. What was Mopol doing, all this time?”

  “While the reds were busy, Mopol raided the crayfish pens.” Zhaki chortled with delight. “I saved you one, by the way. They’re delisssh.” Zhaki wore a miniharness fastened to his flank, bearing a single manipulator arm that folded back during swimming. At a neural signal, the mechanical hand went to his seamed pouch and drew out a wriggling creature, proffering it to Kaa.

  What should I do? Kaa stared at the squirmy thing. Would accepting it only encourage Zhaki’s lapse of discipline? Or would rejection make Kaa look stodgy and unreasonable?

  “I’ll wait and see if it makes you sick,” he told the youth. They weren’t supposed to experiment on native fauna with their own bodies. Unlike Earth, most planetary ecosystems were mixtures of species from all across the Five Galaxies, introduced by tenant races whose occupancy might last ten million years. So far, many of the local fishoids turned out to be wholesome and tasty, but the very next prey beast might have its revenge by poisoning you.

  “Where is Mopol now?”

  “Back doing what we were told,” Zhaki said. “Watching how the red crabs interact with hoonsss. So far we’ve seen ’em pulling two sledge loads toward the port, filled with harvested ssseaweed. They came back with cargoes of wood. You know. ch-chopped tree trunks.” Kaa nodded. “So they do trade, as we suspected. Hoons and qheuens, living together on a forbidden world. I wonder what it means?” “Who knows? If they weren’t mysterious, they wouldn’t be eateesss. C-can I go back to Mopol now?” Kaa had few illusions about what was going on between the two young spacers. It probably interfered in their work, but if he raised the issue, Zhaki would accuse him of being a prude, or worse, “jealous.” If only I were a real leader, Kaa thought. The lieutenant should never have left me in charge.

  “Yes, go back now,” he said. “But only to fetch Mopol and return to the shelter. It’s getting late.” Zhaki lifted his body high, perched on a thrashing tail.

  Yes, oh exalted!

  Your command shall be obeyed,

  As all tides heed moons.

  With that, the young dolphin did a flip and dived back into the sea. Soon his dorsal fin was all Kaa saw, glinting as it sliced through choppy swell.

  Kaa pondered the ambiguous insolence of Zhaki’s last Trinary burst.

  In human terms — by the cause-and-effect logic the patron race taught its dolphin clients — the ocean bulged and shifted in response to the gravitational pull of sun and moon. But there were more ancient ways of thinking, used by cetacean ancestors long before humans meddled in their genes. In those days, there had never been any question that tides were the most powerful of forces. In the old, primal religion, tides controlled the moon, not vice versa.

  In other words, Zhaki’s Trinary statement was sassy, verging on insubordination.

  Tsh’t made a mistake, Kaa mused bitterly, as he swam toward the shelter. We should never have been left here by ourselves.

  Along the way, he experienced the chief threat to his mission. Not hoonish spears or qheuen claws, or even alien battlecruisers, but Jijo itself.

  One could fall in love with this place.

  The ocean’s flavor called to him, as did the velvety texture of the water. It beckoned in the way fishlike creatures paid him respect by fleeing, but not too quick to catch, if he cared to.

  Most seductive of all, at night throbbing echoes penetrated their outpost walls — distant rhythms, almost too low to hear. Eerie, yet reminiscent of the whale songs of home.

  Unlike Oakka, the green-green world — or terrible Kithrup — this planet appeared to have a reverent sea. One where a dolphin might swim at peace.

  And possibly forget.

  Brookida was waiting when Kaa cycled through the tiny airlock, barely large enough for one dolphin at a time to pass into the shelter — an inflated bubble, half-filled with water and anchored to the ocean floor. Against one wall, a lab had been set up for the metallurgist geologist, an elderly dolphin whose frailty had grown as Streaker fled ever farther from home.

  Brookida’s samples had been taken when the Hikahi followed a hoonish sailboat beyond the continental shelf, to a plunging abyssal trench, where the ship had proceeded to dump its cargo overboard! As casks, barrels, and chests fell into the murk, a few were snagged by the submarine’s gaping maw, then left here for analysis as the Hikahi returned to base.

  Brookida had already found what he called “anomalies,” but something else now had the aged scientist excited.

  “We got a message while you were out. Tsh’t picked up something amazing on her way to Streaker!” Kaa nodded. “I was here when she reported, remember? They found an ancient cache, left by illegal settlers when—” “That’s nothing.” The old dolphin was more animated than Kaa had seen Brookida in a long time.

  “Tsh’t called again later to say they rescued a bunch of kids who were about to drown.” Kaa blinked.

  “Kids? You don’t mean—”

  “Not human or fin. But wait till you hear who they are … and how they came to be d-down there, under the sea.”

  Sooners

  Alvin

  A FEW SCANT DURAS BEFORE IMPACT, PART OF THE wall of debris ahead of us began to move. A craggy slab, consisting of pitted starship hulls, magically slipped aside, offering the phuvnthu craft a long, narrow cavity.

  Into it we plummeted, jagged walls looming near the glass, passing in a blur, cutting off the searchlight beam and leaving us in shadows. The motors picked up their frantic backward roar … then fell away to silence.

  A series of metallic clangs jarred the hull. Moments later the door to our chamber opened. A clawed arm motioned us outside.

  Several phuvnthus waited — insectoid-looking creatures with long, metal-cased torsos and huge, glassy-black eyes. Our mysterious saviors, benefactors, captors.

  My friends tried to help me, but I begged them off.

  “Come on, guys. It’s hard enough managing these crutches without you all crowding around. Go on. I’ll be right behind.�
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  At the intersection leading back to my old cell, I moved to turn left but our six-legged guides motioned right instead. “I need my stuff,” I told the nearest phuvnthu-thing. But it gestured no with a wave of machinelike claws, barring my path.

  Damn, I thought, recalling the notebook and backpack I had left behind. I figured I’d be coming back.

  A twisty, confused journey took us through all sorts of hatches and down long corridors of metal plating. Ur-ronn commented that some of the weld joins looked “hasty.” I admired the way she held on to her professionalism when faced with awesome technology.

  I can’t say exactly when we left the sea dragon and entered the larger base/camp/city/hive, but there came a time when the big phuvnthus seemed more relaxed in their clanking movements. I even caught a snatch or two of that queer, ratcheting sound that I once took for speech. But there wasn’t time for listening closely. Just moving forward meant battling waves of pain, taking one step at a time.

  At last we spilled into a corridor that had a feel of permanence, with pale, off-white walls and soft lighting that seemed to pour from the whole ceiling. The peculiar passage curved gently upward in both directions, till it climbed out of sight a quarter of an arrowflight to either side. It seemed we were in a huge circle, though what use such a strange hallway might serve, I could not then imagine.

  Even more surprising was the reception committee! At once we faced a pair of creatures who could not look more different from the phuvnthus — except for the quality of having six limbs. They stood upright on their hind pair, dressed in tunics of silvery cloth, spreading four scaly webbed hands in a gesture I hopefully took to mean welcome. They were small, rising just above my upper knees, or the level of Pincer’s red chitin shell. A frothy crown of moist, curly fibers topped their bulb-eyed heads. Squeaking rapidly, they motioned for us to follow, while the big phuvnthus retreated with evident eagerness.

  We four Wuphonites consulted with a shared glance … then a rocking, qheuen-style shrug. We turned to troop silently behind our new guides. I could sense Huphu purring on my shoulder, staring at the little beings, and I vowed to drop my crutches and grab the noor, if she tried to jump one of our hosts. I doubted they were as helpless as they looked.