Infinity's Shore

That doesn’t mean she’ll be abandoned. Friends will win her freedom, someday. This I vow.

But our pilot won’t be one of them.

Alas, I fear Kaa will never see her again.

MAKANEE finished her autopsies of Kunn and Jass. The prisoners apparently took poison rather than answer our questions. Tsh’t blames herself for not searching the Danik agent more carefully, but who would have figured Kunn would be so worried about our amateur grilling?

And did he really have to take the hapless native boy with him? Rety’s cousin could hardly know secrets worth dying for.

Rety herself can shed no light on the matter. Without anyone to interrogate, she volunteered to help Suessi, who can certainly use a hand. Makanee recommends work as good therapy for the poor kid, who had to see those gruesome bodies firsthand.

I wonder. What secret was Kunn trying to protect? Normally, I’d drop everything to puzzle it out. But too much is going on as we prepare to make our move.

Anyway, from the Jophur prisoners we know the Rothen ship is irrelevant. We have more immediate concerns.

THE Library cube reports no progress on that symbol — the one with nine spirals and eight ovals. The unit is now sifting its older files, a job that gets harder the further back it goes.

In compensation, the cube has flooded me with records of other recent “sooner outbreaks”—secret colonies established on fallow worlds.

It turns out that most are quickly discovered by guardian patrols of the Institute of Migration. Jijo is a special case, with limited access and the nearby shrouding of Izmunuti. Also, this time an entire galaxy was declared fallow, making inspection a monumental task.

I wondered — why set aside a whole galaxy, when the basic unit of ecological recovery is a planet, or at most a solar system?

The cube explained that much larger areas of space are usually quarantined, all at once. Oxygen-breathing civilization evacuates an entire sector or spiral arm, ceding it to the parallel culture of hydrogen breathers — those mysterious creatures sometimes generically called Zang. This helps keep both societies separated in physical space, reducing the chance of friction.

It also helps the quarantine. The Zang are unpredictable, and often ignore minor incursions, but they can be fierce if large numbers of oxy-sapients appear where they don’t belong.

We detected what must have been Zang ships, before diving past Izmunuti. I guess they took us for a “minor incursion,” since they left us alone.

The wholesale trading of sectors and zones makes more sense now. Still, I pressed the Library cube.

Has an entire galaxy ever been declared off-limits before?

The answer surprised me.

Not for a very long time … at least one hundred and fifty million years.

Now, where have I heard that number before?

WE’RE told there are eight orders of sapience and quasisapience. Oxy-life is the most vigorous and blatant — or as Tom put it, “strutting around, acting like we own the place.” In fact, though, I was surprised to learn that hydrogen breathers far outnumber oxygen breathers. But Zang and their relatives spend most of their time down in the turbid layers of Jovian-type worlds.

Some say this is because they fear contact with oxy-types.

Others say they could crush us anytime, but have never gotten around to it. Perhaps they will, sometime in the next billion years.

The other orders are Machine, Memetic, Quantum, Hypothetical, Retired, and Transcendent.

Why am I pondering this now?

Well, our plans are in motion, and soon Streaker will be, too. It’s likely that in a few days we’ll be dead, or else taken captive. With luck, we may buy something worthwhile with our lives. But our chances of actually getting away seem vanishingly small.

And yet … what if we do manage it? After all, the Jophur may get engine trouble at just the right moment. They might decide we’re not worth the effort.

The sun might go nova.

In that case, where can Streaker go next?

We’ve tried seeking justice from our own oxy-culture — the Civilization of the Five Galaxies — but the Institutes proved untrustworthy. We tried the Old Ones, but those members of the Retired Order proved less impartial than we hoped.

In a universe filled with possibilities, there remain half a dozen other “quasisapient” orders out there. Alien in both thought and substance. Rumored to be dangerous.

What have we got to lose?

Streakers

Kaa

GLEAMING MISSILES STRUCK THE WATER WHENEVER he surfaced to breathe. The spears were crude weapons — hollow wooden shafts tipped with slivers of vol-canic glass — but when a keen-edged harpoon grazed his flank, Kaa lost half his air in a reflexive cry. The harbor — now a cramped, exitless trap — reverberated with his agonized moan.