Infinity's Shore

Light rays played a clever role in the dance of mathematics. Glancing off selected disks, pulselike reflections fell onto a stretch of black sand that had been raked smooth across the floor. Each flash affected the grains, causing a slight spray or rustle. Hillocks grew wherever glimmers landed most often.

Uriel even found a use for lightning crabs, Sara marveled.

On Jijo, some shorelines were known to froth during electrical storms, as these tiny creatures kicked up sand in frenzied reaction. We thought it might be static charges in the air, making them behave so. But clearly it is light. I must tell Lark about this, someday.

And Sara realized something else.

The crabs may be another Buyur gimmick species. Bioengineered servants, reverted to nature, but keeping their special trait, even after the gene meddlers left.

Whatever their original function, the crabs now served Uriel, whose hooves clattered nervously as the sandscape swirled under a cascade of sparkling light. Individual flashes mattered little. It was the summed array over area and time that added up to solving a complex numerical problem. Near Uriel, the little chimp, Prity, perched on a high stool with her drawing pad. Prity’s tongue stuck out as she sketched, copying the sand display. Sara had never seen her little assistant happier.

Despite all this impressive ingenuity, the actual equations being solved were not profound. Sara had already worked out rough estimates, within a deviance of ten percent, by using a few simple Delancy approximations. But Lester Cambel needed both precision and accuracy under a wide range of boundary conditions, including atmospheric pressure varying with altitude. For that, machine-derived tables offered advantages.

At least now I understand what it’s all for. In her mind, she pictured bustling activity beneath the towering stems of a boo forest, throngs of workers laboring, the flow of acrid liquids, and discussions in the hushed, archaic dialect of science.

They may be crazy — Lester especially. Probably the effort will backfire and make the aliens more vicious than ever Dedinger would look at this — along with all the semaphores, gliders, balloons, and other innovations — and call it the futile thrashing of the damned.

Yet the attempt is glorious. If they pull it off I’ll know I was right about the Six. Our destiny was not foretold by the scrolls, or Dedinger’s orthodoxy … or Lark’s, for that matter.

It was unique.

Anyway, if we’re to be damned, I’d rather it be for trying.

Just one thing still puzzled her. Sara shook her head and murmured aloud.

“Why me?”

Kurt, the Tarek Town exploser, had acted as if this project desperately needed Sara, for her professional expertise. But Uriel’s machine was already nearly functional by the time the party arrived from Xi. Prity and Emerson were helpful at making the analog computer work, and so were books Kurt hand-carried from Biblos. But Sara found herself with little to contribute.

“I only wish I knew why Uriel asked for me.”

Her answer came from the entrance to the computer vault.

“Is that truly the only thing you wish to understand? But that one is easy, Sara. Uriel did not ask for you at all!”

The speaker was a man of middling stature with a shock of white hair and a stained beard that stood out as if he were constantly thunderstruck. Kawsh leaves smoldered in his pipe, a habit chiefly indulged in by male hoons, since the vapors were too strong for most humans. Politely, Sage Purofsky stood in the draft of the doorway, and turned away from Sara when exhaling.

She bowed to the senior scholar, known among his peers as the best mind in the Commons.

“Master, if Uriel doesn’t need my help, why was I urged to come? Kurt made it sound vital.”

“Did he? Vital. Well, I suppose it is, Sara. In a different way.”

Purofsky’s eyes tracked the glitter of rays glancing off spinning disks. His gaze showed appreciation of Uriel’s accomplishment. “Math must pay its way with useful things,” the sage once said. “Even though mere computation is like bashing down a door because you cannot find the key.”

Purofsky had spent his life in search of keys.

“It was I who sent for you, my dear,” the aged savant explained after a pause. “And now that you’re recovered from your ill-advised spill down a mountainside, I think it’s high time that I showed you why.”

It was still daytime outside, but a starscape spread before Sara. Clever lenses projected glass photoslides onto a curved wall and ceiling, recreating the night sky in a wondrous planetarium built by Uriel’s predecessor so that even poor urrish eyesight might explore constellations in detail. Sage Purofsky wore stars like ornaments on his face and gown, while his shadow cast a man-shaped nebula across the wall.

“I should start by explaining what I’ve been up to since you left Biblos … has it really been more than a year, Sara?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Hmm. An eventful year. And yet …”

He worked his jaw for a moment, then shook his head.