Infinity's Shore

MAYBE IT WAS THE COMPRESSED ATMOSPHERE WE breathed, or the ceaseless drone of reverberating engines. Or it could have been the perfect darkness outside that fostered an impression of incredible depth, even greater than when our poor little Wuphon’s Dream fell into the maw of this giant metal sea beast. A single beam — immeasurably brighter than the handmade eik light of our old minisub — speared out to split the black, scanning territory beyond my wildest nightmares. Even the vivid imagery of Verne or Pukino or Melville offered no preparation for what was revealed by that roving circle as we cruised along a subsea canyon strewn with all manner of ancient dross. In rapid glimpses we saw so many titanic things, all jumbled together, that—

Here I admit I’m stumped. According to the texts that teach Anglic literature, there are two basic ways for a writer to describe unfamiliar objects. First is to catalog sights and sounds, measurements, proportions, colors — saying this object is made up of clusters of colossal cubes connected by translucent rods, or that one resembles a tremendous sphere caved in along one side, trailing from its crushed innards a glistening streamer, a liquidlike banner that somehow defies the tug of time and tide.

Oh, I can put words together and come up with pretty pictures, but that method ultimately fails because at the time I couldn’t tell how far away anything was! The eye sought clues in vain. Some objects — piled across the muddy panorama — seemed so vast that the huge vessel around us was dwarfed, like a minnow in a herd of behmo serpents. As for colors, even in the spotlight beam, the water drank all shades but deathly blue gray. A good hue for a shroud in this place of icy-cold death.

Another way to describe the unknown is to compare it to things you already recognize … only that method proved worse! Even Huck, who sees likenesses in things I can’t begin to fathom, was reduced to staring toward great heaps of ancient debris with all four eyestalks, at an utter loss.

Oh, some objects leaped at us with sudden familiarity — like when the searchlight swept over rows of blank-eyed windows, breached floors, and sundered walls. Pushed in a tumbled mound, many of the sunken towers lay upside down or even speared through each other. Together they composed a city greater than any I ever heard of, even from readings of olden times. Yet someone once scraped the entire metropolis from its foundations, picked it up, and dumped it here, sending all the buildings tumbling down to be reclaimed the only way such things can be reclaimed — in Mother Jijo’s fiery bowels.

I recalled some books I’d read, dating from Earth’s Era of Resolution, when pre-contact humans were deciding on their own how to grow up and save their homeworld after centuries spent using it as a cesspit. In Alice Hammett’s mystery The Case of a Half-Eaten Clone, the killer escapes a murder charge, only to get ten years for disposing of the evidence at sea! In those days, humans made no distinction between midden trenches and ocean floor in general. Dumping was dumping.

It felt strange to see the enormous dross-scape from two viewpoints. By Galactic law, this was a consecrated part of Jijo’s cycle of preservation — a scene of devout caretaking. But having grown up immersed in human books, I could shift perspectives and see defilement, a place of terrible sin.

The “city” fell behind us and we went back to staring at bizarre shapes, unknown majestic objects, the devices of star-god civilization, beyond understanding by mere cursed mortals. On occasion, my eyes glimpsed flickerings in the blackness outside the roving beam — lightninglike glimmers amid the ruins, as if old forces lingered here and there, setting off sparks like fading memories.

We murmured among ourselves, each of us falling back to what we knew best. Ur-ronn speculated on the nature of materials, what things were made of, or what functions they once served. Huck swore she saw uniting each time the light panned over a string of suspicious shadows. Pincer insisted every other object must be a starship.

The Midden took our conjectures the same way it accepts all else, with a patient, deathless silence.

Some enormous objects had already sunk quite far, showing just their tips above the mire. I thought—This is where Jijo’s ocean plate takes a steep dive under the Slope, dragging crust, mud, and anything else lying about, down to magma pools that feed simmering volcanoes. In time, all these mighty things will become lava, or precious ores to be used by some future race of tenants on this world.

It made me ponder my father’s sailing ship, and the risky trips he took, hauling crates of sacred refuse, sent by each tribe of the Six as partial payment for the sin of our ancestors. In yearly rituals, each village sifts part of the land, clearing it of our own pollution and bits the Buyur left behind.