Infinity's Shore

The newest sage of the Commons of Jijo plucked yellow moss from a decaying cable, one of a myriad of strands that once made up the body of a half-million-year-old creature, the mulc spider responsible for demolishing this ancient Buyur site, gradually returning it to nature. Lark had last seen this place in late winter — searching alone through snow flurries for the footprints of Dwer and Rety, refugees from this same spider’s death fury. Things had changed here since that frantic deliverance. Large swathes of mulc cable were simply gone, harvested in some recent effort that no one had bothered explaining when Lark was assigned here. Much of what remained was coated with this clinging moss.

“Spirolegita cariola.” He muttered the species name, rubbing a sample between two fingers. It was a twisted, deviant cariola variety. Mutation seemed a specialty of this weird, astringent site.

I wonder what the place will do to me — to all of us — if we stay here long.

He had not asked for this chore. To be a jailor. Just wearing the title made him feel less clean.

A chain of nonsense syllables made him turn back toward a blur-cloth canopy, spanning the space between slablike boulders.

“It’s a clensionating sievelator for refindulating excess torg.…”

The voice came from deep shade within — a strong feminine alto, though somewhat listless now, tinged with resignation. Soft clinking sounds followed as one object was tossed onto a pile and another picked up for examination.

“At a guess, I’d say this was once a glannis truncator, probably used in rituals of a chihanic sect … that is, unless it’s just another Buyur joke-novelty device.”

Lark shaded his eyes to regard Ling, the young sky-born scientist and servant of star-god Rothen, in whose employ he had worked as a “native guide” for many weeks … until the Battle of the Glade reversed their standing in a matter of heartbeats. Since that unexpected victory, the High Sages had assigned her care and custody to him, a duty he never asked for, even if it meant exalted promotion.

Now I’m quite a high-ranking witch doctor among savages, he thought with some tartness. Lord High Keeper of Alien Prisoners.

And maybe executioner. His mind shied from that possibility. Much more likely, Ling would be traded to her Danik-Rothen comrades in some deal worked out by the sages. Or else she might be rescued at any moment by hordes of unstoppable robots, overpowering Lark’s small detachment of sword-bearing escorts like a pack of santi bears brushing aside the helpless buzzing defenders of a zil-honey tree.

Either way, she’ll go free. Ling may live another three hundred years on her homeworld, back in the Five Galaxies, telling embroidered tales about her adventure among the feral barbarians of a shabby, illicit colony. Meanwhile, the best we fallen ones can hope for is bare survival. To keep scratching a living from poor tired Jijo, calling it lucky if some of the Six eventually join glavers down the Path of Redemption. The trail to blissful oblivion.

Lark would rather end it all in some noble and heroic way. Let Jijo’s Six go down defending this fragile world, so she might go back to her interrupted rest.

That was his particular heresy, of course. Orthodox belief held that the Six Races were sinners, but they might mitigate their offense by living at peace on Jijo. But Lark saw that as hypocrisy. The settlers should end their crime, gently and voluntarily, as soon as possible.

He had made no secret of his radicalism … which made it all the more confusing that the High Sages now trusted him with substantial authority.

The alien woman no longer wore the shimmering garb of her Danik star clan — the secretive band of humans who worshiped Rothen lords. Instead she was outfitted in an ill-fitting blouse and kilt of Jijoan homespun. Still, Lark found it hard to look away from her angular beauty. It was said that sky humans could buy a new face with hardly a thought. Ling claimed not to care about such things, but no woman on the Slope could match her.

Under the wary gaze of two militia corporals, Ling sat cross-legged, examining relics left behind by the dead mulc spider — strange metallic shapes embedded in semi-transparent gold cocoons, like archaic insects trapped in amber. Remnants of the Buyur, this world’s last legal tenants, who departed half a million years ago when Jijo went fallow. A throng of egglike preservation beads lay scattered round the ashen lakeshore. Instead of dissolving all signs of past habitation, the local mulc spider had apparently chosen relics to seal away. Collecting them, if Lark believed the incredible story told by his half brother, Dwer.