Infinity's Shore

So went the first line of the note she planned slipping him, while pretending to ask questions. If the Danik pilot understood and agreed to the plan, she would depart and set yee loose to worm his small, lithe body through Streaker’s ducting system. Meanwhile Rety had selected good places to set fires — in a ship lounge and a caigo locker — to distract the Streaker crew away from this area while Kunn used smuggled tools to break out. If all went well, they could then dash for the OutLock, steal a star boat, and escape.

There’s just one condition, Kunn. You gotta agree that we get away from here. Away from these Earthers, away from Daniks and Rothens and Jophur monsters and all that crap. Away from Jijo.

Rety felt sure he’d accept. Anyway, if he or Jass give me any trouble, they’ll find they’re dealin’ with a different Rety now.

The guard maneuvered his walker unit carefully in the narrow hallway. The gangly machine had to bend in order for him to bring a key against the door panel. Finally, it slid aside. Rety glimpsed two bunks within, each supporting a blanket-covered human form.

“Hey, Kunn,” she said, crossing the narrow distance and nudging his shoulder. “Wake up! No more delayin’ or foolin’ now. These folks want t’know how you followed em.…”

The blanket slipped off, revealing his shock of glossy hair, but there was no tremor of movement.

They must have him doped, she thought. I hope he’s not too far under. This can’t wait!

Rety shook harder, rolling Kunn toward her—

And jumped back with a gasp of surprise.

The Danik’s face was purple. His eyes bulged from their sockets, and his tongue had swollen to fill his mouth.

The dolphin guard chattered a dismayed squeal in the instinctive animal language of his kind.

Rety struggled with shock. She had grown up with death, but it took all her force of will to quash the horror rising in her gorge.

Somehow, she made herself turn toward the other bunk.

Sara

“Oh, Doctor Faustus was a good man,

He whipped his scholars now and then;

When he whipped them he made them dance,

Out of Scotland into France,

Out of France, and into Spain,

Then he whipped them back again!”

Emerson’s song resonated through the Hall of Spinning Disks, where dust motes sparkled in narrow shafts of rhythmic light.

Sara winced at the violent lyrics, but the starman clearly enjoyed these outbursts, gushing from unknown recesses of his scarred brain. He laughed, as did a crowd of urrish males who followed him, clambering through the scaffolding of Uriel’s fantastic machine, helping him fine-tune each delicate part. The little urs cackled at Emerson’s rough humor, and showed their devotion by diving between whirling glass plates to tighten a strap here, or a pulley there, wherever he gestured with quick hand signs.

Once an engineer, always an engineer, Sara thought. At times, Emerson resembled her own father, who might go silent for days while tending his beloved paper mill, drawing more satisfaction from the poetry of pulping hammers and rollers than the white sheets that made literacy possible on a barbaric world.

A parallel occurred to her.

Paper suited the Six Races, who needed a memory storage system that was invisible from space. But Uriel’s machine has similar traits — an analog computer that no satellite or spaceship can detect, because it uses no electricity and has no digital cognizance. Above all, Galactics would never imagine such an ornate contraption.

And yet it was beautiful in a bizarre way. No wonder she had dreamed shapes and equations when her eyes first glimpsed this marvel through cracks in her delirium. Each time a disk turned against a neighbor’s rim, its own axle rotated at a speed that varied with the radial point of contact. If that radius shifted as an independent variable, the rotation changed in response, describing a nonlinear function. It was a marvelously simple concept … and hellishly hard to put into practice without years of patient trial and error.

Uriel first saw the idea in an old Earth book — a quintessentially wolfling concept, briefly used in an old-time Amero-Eurasian war. Soon after, humans discovered digital computers and abandoned the technique. But here on Mount Guenn, the urrish smith had extended it to levels never seen before. Much of her prodigious wealth and passion went into making the concept work.

And urrish haste. Their lives are so short, Uriel must have feared she’d never finish before she died. In that case, what would her successor do with all this?

An array of pillars, arches, and boo scaffolding held the turning shafts in proper alignment, forming a three-dimensional maze that stretched away from Sara, nearly filling the vast chamber. Long ago, this cavity spilled liquid magma down the mountain’s mighty flanks. Today it throbbed with a different kind of creative force.