Infinity's Shore

The luminous coatings made him nervous. The same substance, secreted from the spider’s porous conduits, had nearly smothered Dwer and Rety, the wild sooner girl, the same night two alien robots quarreled, igniting a living morass of corrosive vines, ending the spiders long, mad life. The gold stuff felt queer to touch, as if a strange, slow liquid sloshed under sheaths of solid crystal.

“Toporgic,” Ling had called the slick material during one of her civil moments. “It’s very rare, but I hear stories. It’s said to be a pseudo-matter substrate made of organically folded time.”

Whatever that meant. It sounded like the sort of thing Sara might say, trying to explain her beloved world of mathematics. As a biologist, he found it bizarre for a living thing to send “folded time” oozing from its far-flung tendrils, as the mulc spider apparently had done.

Whenever Ling finished examining a relic, she bent over a sheaf of Lark’s best paper to make careful notes, concentrating as if each childlike block letter were a work of art. As if she never held a pencil before, but had vowed to master the new skill. As a galactic voyager, she used to handle floods of information, manipulating multidimensional displays, sieving data on this world’s complex ecosystem, searching on behalf of her Rothen masters for some biotreasure worth stealing. Toiling over handwritten notes must seem like shifting from starship speeds to a traeki’s wooden scooter.

It’s a steep fall — one moment a demigoddess, the next a hostage of uncouth sooners.

All this diligent note taking must help take her mind off recent events — that traumatic day, just two leagues below the nest of the Holy Egg, when her home base exploded and Jijo’s masses violently rebelled. But Lark sensed something more than deliberate distraction. In scribing words on paper, Ling drew the same focused satisfaction he had seen her take from performing any simple act well. Despite his persistent seething anger, Lark found this worthy of respect.

There were folk legends about mulc spiders. Some were said to acquire odd obsessions during their stagnant eons spent chewing metal and stone monuments of the past. Lark once dismissed such fables as superstition, but Dwer had proved right about this one. Evidence for the mulc beast’s collecting fetish lay in countless capsules studding the charred thicket, the biggest hoard of Galactic junk anywhere on the Slope. It made the noxious lakeshore an ideal site to conceal a captured alien, in case the returning starship had instruments sifting Jijo for missing crew mates. Though Ling had been thoroughly searched, and all possessions seized, she might carry in her body some detectable trace element — acquired growing up on a far Galactic world. If so, all the Buyur stuff lying around here might mask her presence.

There were other ideas.

Ship sensors may not penetrate far underground, one human techie proposed.

Or else, suggested an urrish smith, a nearby lava flow may foil alien eyes.

The other hostages — Ro-kenn and Rann — had been taken to such places, in hopes of holding on to at least one prisoner. With the lives of every child and grub of the Six at stake, anything seemed worth trying. The job Lark had been given was important. Yet he chafed, wishing for more to do than waiting for the world to end. Rumors told that others were preparing to fight the star criminals. Lark knew little about weapons — his expertise was the natural flux of living species. Still, he envied them.

A burbling, wheezing sound called him rushing to the far end of the tent, where his friend Uthen squatted like an ash-colored chitin mound. Lark took up a makeshift aspirator he had fashioned out of boo stems, a cleft pig’s bladder, and congealed mulc sap. He pushed the nozzle into one of the big qheuen’s leg apertures and pumped away, siphoning phlegmy fluid that threatened Uthen’s ventilation tubes. He repeated the process with all five legs, till his partner and fellow biologist breathed easier. The qheuen’s central cupola lifted and Uthen’s seeing stripe brightened.

“Th-thank you, L–Lark-ark … I am — I am sorry to be so — be so — to be a burden-en-en. …”

Emerging uncoordinated, the separate leg voices sounded like five miniature qheuens, getting in each other’s way. Or like a traeki whose carelessly stacked oration rings all had minds of their own. Uthen’s fevered weakness filled Lark’s chest with a burning ache. A choking throat made it hard to respond with cheerful-sounding lies.

“You just rest up, claw brother. Soon we’ll be back in the field … digging fossils and inventing more theories to turn your mothers blue with embarrassment.”

That brought a faint, gurgling laugh. “S-speaking-king of heresies … it looks as if you and Haru … Haru … Harullen-ullen, will be getting your wish.”

Mention of Lark’s other gray qheuen friend made him wince with doubled grief. Uthen didn’t know about his cousin’s fate, and Lark wasn’t about to tell him.

“How do you mean?”