Infinity's Shore

At dawn, brave observers peered from nearby peaks to see a swathe of shattered ground strewn with oily smudges and bloody debris. A defensive perimeter, stunned observers suggested, though such prudence seemed excessive for omnipotent star gods.

“What casualties?” asked Jeni Shen, sergeant of Lark’s militia contingent, a short, well-muscled woman and a friend of his brother, Dwer. They had all seen flickering lights in the distance, and heard sounds like thunder, but imagined nothing as horrible as the messenger related.

The urs told of hundreds dead … and that a High Sage of the Commons was among those slaughtered. Asx had been standing near a group of curious spectators and confused alien lovers, waiting to parley with the visitors. After the dust and flames settled, the traeki was nowhere to be seen.

The g’Kek doctor tending Uthen expressed the grief they all felt, rolling all four tentacle-like eyes and flailing the ground with his pusher leg. This personified the horror. Asx had been a popular sage, ready to mull over problems posed by any of the Six Races, from marriage counseling to dividing the assets of a bisected qheuen hive. Asx might “mull” for days, weeks, or a year before giving an answer — or several answers, laying out a range of options.

Before the courier departed, Lark’s status as a junior sage won him a brief look at the drawings in her dispatch pouch. He showed Ling a sketch of a massive oval ship of space, dwarfing the one that brought her to this world. Her face clouded. The mighty shape was unfamiliar and frightening.

Lark’s own messenger — a two-legged human — had plunged into the ranks of towering boo at daybreak, carrying a plea for Lester Cambel to send up Ling’s personal Library unit, so she might read the memory bars he and Uthen had found in the wrecked station.

Her offer, made the evening before, was limited to seeking data about plagues, especially the one now sweeping the qheuen community.

“If Ro-kenn truly was preparing genocide agents, he is a criminal by our own law.”

“Even a Rothen master?” Lark had asked skeptically.

“Even so. It is not disloyal for me to find out, or else prove it was not so.

“However,” she had added, “don’t expect me to help you make war against my crew mates or my patrons. Not that you could do much, now that their guard is raised. You surprised us once with tunnels and gunpowder, destroying a little research base. But you’ll find that harming a starship is beyond even your best-equipped zealots.”

That exchange took place before they learned about the second vessel. Before word came that the mighty Rothen cruiser was reduced to a captive toy next to a true colossus from space.

While they awaited Cambel’s answer, Lark sent his troopers sifting through the burned lakeshore thicket, gathering golden preservation beads. Galactic technology had been standardized for millions of years. So there just might be a workable reading unit amid all the pretty junk the magpie spider had collected. Anyway, it seemed worth a try.

While sorting through a pile of amber cocoons, he and Ling resumed their game of cautious question-and-evasion. Circumstances had changed — Lark no longer felt as stupid in her presence — still, it was the same old dance.

Starting off, Ling quizzed him about the Great Printing, the event that transformed Jijo’s squabbling coalition of sooner races, even more than the arrival of the Holy Egg. Lark answered truthfully without once mentioning the Biblos Archive. Instead he described the guilds of printing, photocopying, and especially papermaking, with its pounding pulp hammers and pungent drying screens, turning out fine pages under the sharp gaze of his father, the famed Nelo.

“A nonvolatile, randomly accessed, analog memory store that is completely invisible from space. No electricity or digital cognizance to detect from orbit.” She marveled. “Even when we saw books, we assumed they were hand-copied — hardly a culture-augmenting process. Imagine, a wolfling technology proved so effective … under special circumstances.”

Despite that admission, Lark wondered about the Danik attitude, which seemed all too ready to dismiss the accomplishments of their own human ancestors — except when an achievement could be attributed to Rothen intervention.

It was Lark’s turn to ask a question, and he chose to veer onto another track.

“You seemed as surprised as anybody, when the disguise creature crawled off of Ro-pol’s face.”

He referred to events just before the Battle of the Glade, when a dead Rothen was seen stripped of its charismatic, symbiotic mask. Ro-pol’s eyes, once warm and expressive, had bulged lifeless from a revealed visage that was sharply slanted, almost predatory, and distinctly less humanoid.

Ling had never seen a master so exposed. She reacted to Lark’s question cautiously.

“I am not of the Inner Circle.”

“What’s that?”