Infinity's Shore

by David Brin

  EVERYBODY DON'T LOOK!

  Ling nodded vigorously. When earlier experiments were performed at the devastated g'Kek settlement, there had not been observers on the inside. No living ones, that is. Here, the scene was being watched, in a weird alternating manner, by people on both sides of the enclosure. Perhaps the unsymmetrical quantum effects meant that nothing would happen while people observed.

  It took a while to make those within the ship understand that they should turn around, as well. But soon all the Rothen and humans on both sides swiveled away. Young qheuens pushed blindly, with vision cupolas drawn inside their horny shells. This has got to be the strangest way to get anything done, Lark thought, staring across a suffocated landscape, once the Festival Glade of the Commons of Six Races. All his life, teachers and leaders said if you want a job to go well, pay attention to what you are doing. But this reversed way of acting-where inattention was a virtue- reminded him how some Nihanese mystics in the Vale practiced "Zen arts" such as archery while blindfolded, cultivating detachment and readiness for the Path of Redemption.

  Again he glanced at Ling, the star-voyaging biologist. Her aura still seethed, though now in cooler shades. She's declared an end to her old allegiance. Does she have a new one yet? Other than revenge, that is? He wished they could go somewhere private-and dry-to talk, without the guarded gamesmanship of their earlier conversations. But Lark wasn't sure she'd want the same thing. Just because his allegations had proved right, that did not mean she should bless him for smashing her childhood idols.

  After counting a long interval. Ling nodded and they turned around again.

  Rann grunted satisfaction, and Lark felt his heart race.

  The beads had penetrated most of the way into the glowing cage! Hardworking blues bubbled satisfaction, then hurried toward the boo grove, fetching air from their makeshift snorkel.

  Lark wrote a message to those inside the Rothen airlock.

  EVERYBODY CLEAR OUT BUT 2 SMALL HUMANS. WEAR AIR SUPPLY. BRING CURES!

  When next he and his companions turned back toward the lock, it was nearly empty. Two women stood on the other side. Petite, though even through their swimcoverings he saw well-developed figures-buxom and wasp-waisted. Clearly, they must have taken advantage of the same cosmetic biosculpting that had made Ling, and the late Besh, so striking. It's a different universe out there, where you can design yourself like a god.

  Lark swam to where the tip of a mule capsule protruded from the Jophur barrier. Most of the bead lay deep inside. At its far end the makeshift bottle's hole was plugged by a thick wax seal.

  From his thigh pouch Lark drew a tool provided by one of Lester Cambel's techie assistants. A can opener the fellow called it.

  "Our problem is to deliver dissolving fluid into contact with the barrier, but not lake water," the tech had explained. "Our answer is to use the new traeki fluid to hollow out some mule beads. Then we coat these cavities with neutral wax, and refill them with more of the antidote fluid. The hole is plugged, so we have a sealed vessel-"

  "I see you left an old Buyur machine inside," Lark had observed.

  "The fluid won't affect it, and we need the machine inside. It doesn't matter what it did in Buyur days, so long as we can signal-activate it to move again, pulling a string attached to the plug. When the plug goes pop!-the contents pour into contact with the Jophur wall.' It's foolproof."

  Lark wasn't so sure. There was no telling if clever, homemade electrical devices would work underwater, surrounded by time-warped fields. Here goes everything, he thought, squeezing the activator.

  To his relief, the Buyur device began moving right away

  . . . unfolding an appendage, all coiled and springy like a shambler's tail.

  I wonder what you used to do. he pondered, watching the machine writhe and gyre. Arc you aware enough to puzzle over where you are? Where your masters have gone? Do you have an internal clock, to know half a million years have passed? Or did time stop for you inside the bead?

  The coiled arm flailed as the machine sought to right itself, yanking a cord attached to the stopper at the far end. The plug slipped, caught, then slipped some more.

  It was hard to follow events in the region of "quantum separated time." Things seemed to happen in fits and starts. Sometimes effect seemed to precede cause, or he saw the far side of a rotating object while closer parts remained somehow obscured. It was a strange, sideways manner of seeing that reminded Lark of "Cubist" artworks, depicted in an ancient book his mother loved borrowing from the Biblos Archive.

  Finally, the stopper slid free. At once reddish foam spread from the nozzle of the makeshift bottle, where its contents met the golden wall. Lark's heart pounded, and he felt his amulet, the fragment of the Holy Egg, react with growing heat. His left hand clawed at the skink-skin wrappers, but could not gain entry to grab the vibrating stone. So, like an itch that could not be scratched, he endured the palpitation as his breastbone was rubbed from both sides.

  Grunts of satisfaction escaped Rann as the foamy stain spread, eroding the Jophur barrier from within. The widening hole soon met a neighboring "bottle," embedded in the wall near the first. In moments, fresh supplies of dissolving fluid gushed. The material of the barrier seemed to shiver, as if it were alive. As though in pain. Waves of color rippled around the growing cavity, as his rewq tried reading strange emotions.

  So fixed was everyone on the process, for long intervals no one looked beyond, to the airlock and its two inhabitants, until a stray current tugged Lark aside. Lacking outside observers, the Danik women must have experienced time's passage in a somewhat linear fashion. They looked tense, hunching away from the red foam, crouching near the airlock's sealed inner door as the bubble slowly approached. Fear showed through their transparent face masks. No one knew what would happen when the hissing effervescence broke through.

  It was also getting closer to Lark's side of the wall. He backpedaled toward the others . . . only to find they had retreated farther still. Ling grabbed his arm.

  Apparently, if they succeeded in making a tunnel, it would be wide in the middle but awfully narrow at both ends. Also, the wall material wasn't solid, but a very viscous liquid. Fresh toporgic could already be seen slumping toward the wound. Any passage was bound to be temporary.

  If we didn 't estimate right . . . if the two ends open in the wrong order . . . we might have to start all over again. There are more bottles of fluid, back at the cave. But how many times can we try?

  Yet he could not talk himself out of feeling pride.

  We're not helpless. Faced with overwhelming power, we innovate. We persevere.

  The realization was ironic confirmation of the heresy he had maintained all his adult life.

  We aren't meant for the Path of Redemption. No matter how hard we try, we'll never tread its road to innocence.

  That is why our kind should never have come to Jijo.

  We're meant for the stars. We simply don't belong here.

  THE OLD MAN DID NOT KNOW WHICH WAS THE SADdest sight.

  At times he wished the boat had capsized during that wretched, pell-mell running of the rapids so he would not have lived to see such things.

  It took half a day of hard labor at the oars to climb back upstream to Dolo Village. By the time they reached the timber pile that had been the town dock, all the young rowers were exhausted. Villagers rushed down a muddy bank to help them drag the boat ashore, and carried Ariana Foo to dry ground. A stout hoon ignored Nelo's protests, picking him up like a baby, until he stood safely by the roots of a mighty garu tree.

  Many survivors milled listlessly, though others had formed work gangs whose first task was collecting dross. Especially bodies. Those must be gathered quickly and mulched, as required by sacred law.

  Nelo saw corpses gathered in a long row-mostly human, of course. Numbly he noted the master carpenter and Jobee the Plumber. Quite a few craft workers lay muddy and broken along a sodden patch of loam, and many more were missing, carried
downstream when the lake came crashing through the millrace and workshops. Tree farmers, in contrast, had suffered hardly a loss. Their life on the branch tops did not expose them when the dam gave way.

  No one spoke, though stares followed the papermaker as Nelo moved down the line, allowing a wince or a grunt when he recognized the face of an- employee, an apprentice, or a lifelong friend. When he reached the end, he did not turn but kept walking in the same direction, toward what had been the center of his life.

  The lake was low. Maybe the flood didn't destroy everything.

  Disorientation greeted Nelo, for it seemed at first he was transported far from the village of his birth. Where placid water once glistened, mudflats now stretched for most of a league. A river poured through the near side of his beloved dam.

  To local qheuens, dam and home were one and the same. Now the hive lay sliced open, in cross section. The collapse had sheared the larva room in half. Teams of stunned blue adults struggled to move their surviving grubs to safety, out of the harsh sunlight.

  With reluctant dread, Nelo dropped his gaze to where the famed paper mill had been, next to a graceful power wheel.

  Of his house, his workshops, and pulp vats, nothing more remained than foundation stumps.

  The sight tore his heart, but averting his gaze did not help. Just a short distance downstream Nelo saw more blue qheuens working listlessly by the shore, trying to extricate one of their own from a net of some kind. By their lack of haste, one knew the victim must be dead, perhaps trapped in the shallows and drowned.

  Unhappily, he recognized the corpse, an older female- Log Biter herself--by markings on her shell. Another lost friend, and a blow to everyone along the upper Roney who valued her good wisdom.

  Then he recognized the trap that had pinned her down long enough to smother even a blue qheuen. It was a tangle of wood and metal wires. Something from Nelo's own home.

  Melina 's precious piano, that I ordered built at great cost.

  A moan escaped his throat, at last. In all the world, he had but one thing left to live for-the hope, frail as it was, that his children were safe somewhere, and would not have to see such things.

  But where was somewhere? What place could possibly be safe, when starships could plunge from the sky, blasting five generations' work in a single instant?

  Words jarred him from dour thoughts of suicide.

  "I didn't do this, Nelo."

  He turned to see another human standing nearby. A fellow craftsman, almost his own age. Henrik the Exploser, whose young son had accompanied Sara and the Stranger on their journey to far lands. At first, Henrik's words confused Nelo. He had to swallow before finding the strength to reply.

  "Of course you didn't do it. They say a skyship came-"

  The exploser shook his head. "Fools or liars. Either they have no sense of timing, or else they were in on it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Oh, a ship passed overhead all right, and gave us a look-over. Then it went on its way. 'Twas most of a midura later that a gang of 'em came down, farmers mostly. They knocked the seals off some of my charges, under one of the piers of the dam, and laid a torch against it."

  Nelo blinked. "What did you say?" He stared, then blinked again. "But who . . . ?"

  Henrik had a one-word answer.

  "Jop."

  i^arj

  THE EXPLORERS EMERGED TRIUMPHANT, RESURFACing from the chill lake into the cave, having brought back almost everything they sought. But bad news awaited them.

  Fatigue lay heavily on Lark, while helpers stripped the diving gear and toweled him off.

  Tense sadness filled the voice of the human corporal, reporting what had happened in Lark's absence.

  "It hit our grays all at once-wheezing up lots of bubbly phlegm. Then a couple of young blues got it, too. We sent 'em to a pharmacist topside, but word says the plague is getting worse up there. There may not be much time."

  Attention turned to the Danik women who had just barely escaped from the trapped ship. They still looked woozy from their experience-starting with a blast of highpressure water that had burst into the airlock when the fissure broke through at last. After that came a hurried, nightmarish squeeze through the briefly dilated opening, squirming desperately before the tunnel could close and immure their bodies in liquid time like the poor g'Keks of Dooden Mesa.

  Watching quantum-shifted images of that tight passage nearly unnerved Lark. Instead of two human figures, they looked like jumbled body parts, writhing through a tube that kept shifting around them. One woman he briefly saw with her insides on the outside, offering unwanted knowledge about her latest meal.

  Yet here they were, alive in front of him. Overcoming residual nausea, the two escapees kept their side of the bargain, setting to work right away on a small machine they had brought along. In exchange for a cure, Jijoans would help more of their crew mates break out of the trapped ship, then coordinate joint action against the Jophur-no doubt something quite desperate, calling for a pooling of both groups' slim knowledge and resources, plus a generous dollop of Ifni's luck.

  This whole enterprise had been Lark's idea . . . and he gave it the same odds as a ribbit walking unscathed through a ligger's den.

  "Symptoms?" asked the first woman, with hair a shade of red Lark had never seen on any Jijoan.

  "Don't you know already what bug it is?" Jeni Shen demanded.

  "A variety of pathogens were kept in stock aboard the research station," answered the other one, a stately brunette who seemed older than any other Danik Lark had seen. She looked a statuesque forty, and might be two centuries old.

  "If Ro-kenn did release an organism from that supply," she continued, "we must pin down which one."

  Even having stripped off his rewq, he had no trouble reading fatalistic reluctance in her voice. By helping solve the plague, she was in effect confessing that Ro-kenn had attempted genocide . . . and that their ship routinely carried the means for such a crime. Perhaps, like Ling, she had been in the dark about all that till now. Only utter helplessness would have forced the Rothen to reveal so much to their human servants, as well as to the sooners of Jijo.

  From the look on Rann's face, the tall star warrior disagreed with the decision, and Lark knew why.

  It goes beyond mere morality and crimes against Galactic law. Our local qheuens and hoons have relatives out there, among the stars. If word of this gets out, those home populations might declare vendettas against the Rothen. Or else, with this evidence, Earth might file suit to reclaim the Danik population group that the Rothen have kept secreted away for two centuries.

  Of course that assumes Earth still lives. And there's still law in the Five Galaxies.

  Rann clearly felt the risk too great. Ship and crew should have been sacrificed to keep the secret.

  Tough luck, Rann, Lark thought. Apparently your fellow spacers would rather live.

  While Ling described the disease that ravaged Uthen before her eyes, Lark overheard Rann whisper impatiently to

  Toy.; Cho*^

  "If we are to get the others out, it must be a complete job! There are weapons to transfer, and supplies. The traeki formula must be duplicated aboard ship, in order to make a durable passageway-"

  Jeni interrupted sharply.

  "After we verify a cure, starman. Or else your compadres and their master race can sit in their own dung till Jijo grows cold, for all we care."

  Colorful, Lark thought, smiling grimly.

  Soon the machine was programmed with all the relevant facts.

  "Many hoons are showing signs of a new sickness, too," Ling reminded.

  "We'll get to that," said the redhead. "This will take a min or two."

  Lark watched symbols flash across the tiny screen. More computers, he mulled unhappily. Of course it was a much smaller unit than the big processor they used near Dooden Mesa. This "digital cognizance" might be shielded by geologic activity in the area, plus fifty meters of solid rock.

  But c
an we be sure?

  The device issued a high-pitched chime.

  "Synthesis complete," said the older Danik, taking a small, clear vial from its side, containing a greenish fluid. "This is just two or three doses, but that should suffice to test it. We can mass-produce more aboard the ship. Which means we'll need a permanent channel through the barrier, of course."

  Clearly, she felt her side now had a major bargaining chip. Holding up the tube with three fingers, she went on. "Now might be a good time to discuss how each group will help the other, your side with manpower and sheer numbers, and our side providing-"

  Her voice cut off when Ling snatched the capsule from her grasp, swiveling to put it in Jeni Shen's hand.