Infinity's Shore

“That was so weird!” Rety commented. She could not bring herself to say “brave,” or “thrilling” or “insane.”

He winced, as if messages from his bruised body were just now reaching a dazed brain. “Yeah … it was all that. And more.”

The robot chirruped again. Rety guessed that a triple upsweep with a shrill note at the end meant—That’s enough resting. Let’s go!

She helped Dwer onto a makeshift seat the robot made by folding its arms. This time, when it resumed its southward flight, the two humans rode in front with Mudfoot and little yee, sharing body heat against the stiff wind.

Rety had heard of this region from those bragging hunters, Jass and Bom. It was a low country, dotted with soggy marshes and crisscrossed by many more streams ahead.

Alvin

I WOKE FEELING WOOZY, AND HIGH AS A CHIMP that’s been chewing ghigree leaves. But at least the agony was gone.

The soft slab was still under me, though I could tell the awkward brace of straps and metal tubes was gone. Turning my head, I spied a low table nearby. A shallow white bowl held about a dozen familiar-looking shapes, vital to hoon rituals of life and death.

Ifni! I thought. The monsters cut out my spine bones!

Then I reconsidered.

Wait You’re a kid. You’ve got two sets. In fact, isn’t it next year you’re supposed to start losing your first …

I really was that slow to catch on. Pain and drugs can do it to you.

Looking in the bowl again, I saw all my baby vertebrae. Normally, they’d loosen over several months, as the barbed adult spines took over. The accident must have jammed both sets together, pressing the nerves and hurrying nature along. The phuvnthus must have decided to take out my old verts, whether the new ones were ready or not.

Did they guess? Or were they already familiar with hoons?

Take things one at a time, I thought. Can you feel your toe hooks? Can you move them?

I sent signals to retract the claw sheaths, and sensed the table’s fabric resist as my talons dug in. So far so good.

I reached around with my left hand, and found a slick bulge covering my spine, tough and elastic.

Words cut in. An uncannily smooth voice, in accented Galactic Seven.

“The new orthopedic brace will actively help bear the stress of your movements until your next-stage vertebroids solidify. Nevertheless, you would be well advised not to move in too sudden or jerky a manner.”

The fixture wrapped all the way around my torso, feeling snug and comfortable, unlike the makeshift contraption the phuvnthus provided earlier.

“Please accept my thanks,” I responded in formal GalSeven, gingerly shifting onto one elbow, turning my head the other way. “And my apologies for any inconvenience this may have cause—”

I stopped short. Where I had expected to see a phuvnthu, or one of the small amphibians, there stood a whirling shape, ghostly, like the holographic projections we had seen before, but ornately abstract. A spinning mesh of complex lines floated near the bed.

“There was no inconvenience.” The voice seemed to emerge from the gyrating image. “We were curious about matters taking place in the world of air and light. Your swift arrival — plummeting into a sea canyon near our scout vessel — seemed as fortuitous to us as our presence was for you.”

Even in a drugged state, I could savor multilevel irony in the whirling thing’s remarks. While being gracious, it was also reminding me that the survivors of Wuphon’s Dream owed a debt — our very lives.

“True,” I assented. “Though my friends and I might never have fallen into the abyss if someone had not removed the article we were sent to find in more shallow waters. Our search beyond that place led us to stumble over the cliff.”

The pattern of shifting lines took a new slant of bluish, twinkling light.

“You assert ownership over this thing you sought? As your property?”

Now it was my turn to ponder, wary of a trap. By the codes laid down in the Scrolls, the cache Uriel had sent us after should not exist. It bent the spirit and letter of the law, which said that sooner colonists on a forbidden world must ease their crime by abandoning their godlike tools. It made me glad to be speaking a formal dialect, forcing more careful thought than I might have used in our local patois.

“I assert … a right to inspect the item … and reserve an option to make further claims later.”

Purple swirls invaded the spinning pattern, and I could almost swear it seemed amused. Perhaps this strange entity already had pursued the same line of questioning with my pals. I may be articulate — Huck says no one can match me in GalSeven — but I never claimed to be the brightest one in our gang.

“The matter can be discussed another time,” the voice said. “After you tell us of your life, and recent events in the upper world.”

This triggered something in me … call it the latent trading instinct that lurks in any hoon. A keenness for the fine art of dickering. Carefully, tenderly, I sat up, allowing the supple back brace to take most of the strain.