Infinity's Shore

Hundreds of them already stood in single file, a chain of fatty heaps that stretched on for nearly a league, winding amid the gently bending trunks of boo. Each volunteer squatted on its own feast of decaying matter that work crews kept stoked, like feeding logs to a steam engine. Chuffing and smoking from exertion, the chem-synth gang dripped glistening fluids into makeshift troughs made of split and hollowed saplings, contributing to a trickle that eventually became a rivulet of foul-smelling liquor.

Immobile and speechless, they hardly looked like sentient beings. More like tall, greasy beehives, laid one after another along a twisty road. But that image was deceiving. Lester saw swathes of color flash across the body of one nearby traeki — a subtle interplay of shades that rippled first between the stack’s component rings, as if they were holding conversations among themselves. Then the pattern coalesced, creating a unified shape of light and shadows at the points that lay nearest to the traeki’s neighbors, on either side. Those stacks, in turn, responded with changes in their own surfaces.

Lester recognized the wavelike motif — traeki laughter. The workers were sharing jokes, among their own rings and from stack to stack.

They are the strangest of the Six, Lester thought. And yet we understand them … and they, us.

I doubt even the sophisticates of the Five Galaxies can say the same thing about the Jophur. Out there, none of their advanced science could achieve what we have simply by living next to traeki, day in and day out.

It was pretty crude humor, Lester could tell. Many of these workers were pharmacists, back in their home villages all over the Slope. The one nearest Lester had been speculating about alternative uses of the stuff they were making — perhaps how it might also serve as a cure for the perennial problem of hoonish constipation … especially if accompanied by liberal applications of heat.…

At least that was how Lester interpreted the language of color. He was far from expert in its nuances. Anyway, these workers were welcome to a bit of rough-edged drollery. Their hard labor lasted day in, day out, and still production lagged behind schedule.

But more traeki arrived with each passing midura, following the scent trail emitted by their sage.

Now we have to hope that the Jophur are too advanced and urbane to use the same technique, and trace our location by reading the winds.

The qheuen sage, Knife-Bright Insight, bore all the duties of civil administration on her broad blue back.

There were refugees to relocate, food supplies to organize, and militia units to dispatch, quashing outbreaks of civil war among the Six. One clear success came lately in subduing foreign plagues, duplicating the samples Jeni Shen brought from the Glade Lake, then using a new network of glider couriers to distribute vaccines.

Yet despite such successes, the social fabric of the Commons continued dissolving. News arrived telling of sooner bands departing across the official boundaries of the Slope, seeking to escape the doom threatened for the Six Races. The Warril Plain was aflame with fighting among hot-tempered urrish clans. And more bad news kept rolling in.

Recent reports told of several hives of Gray Queens declaring open secession from the Commons, asserting sovereignty over their ancient domains. Spurred by the devastation of Ovoom Town, some rebel princesses even rejected their own official High Sage.

“We accept no guidance from a mere blue,” came word from one gray hive, snubbing Knife-Bright Insight and resurrecting ancient bigotry.

“Come give us advice when you have a real name.”

Of course no red or blue qheuen ever used a name, as such. It was cruel and haughty to mention the handicap, inherited from ancient days and other worlds.

Worse, rumors claimed that some gray hives had started negotiating with the Jophur on their own.

• • •

A crisis can tear us apart, or draw us together.

Lester checked on the mixed team of qheuens and hoons who were erecting spindly scaffolding around selected spires of greatboo. Only a small fraction of the designated trunks had been trimmed and readied, but the crews were getting better at their unfamiliar task. Some qheuens brought expertise learned from their grandmothers, who in olden times used to maintain fearsome catapults at Tarek Town, dominating two rivers until a great siege toppled that ancient reign.

So much activity might be detectable by prying sky eyes. But taller trunks surrounded each chosen one, drowning the tumult in a vast sea of Brobdingnagian grass.

Or so we hope.