Infinity's Shore

Much later, teams of miners from some of the Six Races must have labored to clear a narrow path through the belly of the dead machine, chiseling out the last stretch separating the tunnel from the surface. Sara saw marks of crude pickaxes. And explosives must have been used, as well. That could explain the guild’s knowledge of this place.

Sara wanted to gauge Kurt’s reaction, but just then the glare brightened as the team rounded a final sharp bend, climbing a steep ramp toward a maelstrom of light.

Sara fumbled for her glasses as the world exploded with color.

Swirling colors that stabbed.

Colors that shrieked.

Colors that sang with melodies so forceful that her ears throbbed.

Colors that made her nose twitch and skin prickle with sensations just short of pain. A gasping moan lifted in unison from the passengers, as the wagon crested a short rise to reveal surroundings more foreign than the landscape of a dream.

Even with the dark glasses in place, each peak and valley shimmered more pigments than Sara could name.

In a daze, she sorted her impressions. To one side protruded the mammoth deconstructor, a snarl of slumped metal, drowned in ripples of frozen magma. Ripples that extended to the far horizon — layer after layer of radiant stone.

At last she knew the answer to her question.

Where on the Slope could a big secret remain hidden for a century or more?

Even Dedinger, prophet of the sharp-sand desert, moaned aloud at how obvious it was.

They were in the last place on Jijo anyone would go looking for people.

The very center of the Spectral Flow.

PART FOUR

FROM THE NOTES OF GILLIAN BASKIN

I WISH I COULD introduce myself to Alvin. I feel I already know the lad, from reading his journal and eavesdropping on conversations among his friends.

Their grasp of twenty-third-century Anglic idiom is so perfect, and their eager enthusiasm so different from the hoons and urs I met before coming to Jijo, that half the time I almost forget I’m listening to aliens. That is, if I ignore the weird speech tones and inflections they take for granted.

Then one of them comes up with a burst of eerily skewed logic that reminds me these arent just human kids after all, dressed up in Halloween suits to look like a crab, a centaur, and a squid in a wheelchair.

Passing the time, they wondered (and I could not blame them) whether they were prisoners or guests in this underwater refuge. Speculation led to a wide-ranging discussion, comparing various famous captives of literature. Among their intriguing perceptions — Ur-ronn sees Richard II as the story of a legitimate business takeover, with Bolingbroke as the king’s authentic apprentice.

The red qheuen, Pincer-Tip, maintains that the hero of the Feng Ho chronicles was kept in the emperor’s harem against his will, even though he had access to the Eight Hundred Beauties and could leave at any time.

Finally, Huck declared it frustrating that Shakespeare spent so little time dealing with Macbeth’s evil wife, especially her attempt to escape sin by finding redemption in a presapient state. Huck has ideas for a sequel, describing the lady’s “reuplift from the fallow condition.” Her ambitious work would be no less than a morality tale about betrayal and destiny in the Five Galaxies!

Beyond these singular insights, I am struck that here on Jijo an illiterate community of castaways was suddenly flooded with written lore provided by human settlers. What an ironic reversal of Earth’s situation, with our own native culture nearly over-whelmed by exposure to the Great Galactic Library. Astonishingly, the Six Races seem to have adapted with vitality and confidence, if Huck and Alvin are at all representative.

I wish their experiment well.

Admittedly, I still have trouble understanding their religion. The concept of redemption through devolution is one they seem to take for granted, yet its attraction eludes me.

To my surprise, our ship’s doctor said she understands the concept, quite well.

“Every dolphin grows up feeling the call,” Makanee told me. “In sleep, our minds still roam the vast songscape of the Whale Dream. It beckons us to return to our basic nature, whenever the stress of sapiency becomes too great.”

This dolphin crew has been under pressure for three long years. Makanee’s staff must care for over two dozen patients who are already “redeemed,” as a Jijoan would put it. These dolphins have “reclaimed their basic nature” all right. In other words, we have lost them as comrades and skilled colleagues, as surely as if they died.

Makanee fights regression wherever she finds symptoms, and yet she remains philosophical. She even offers a theory to explain why the idea revolts me so.

She put it something like so—

“PERHAPS you humans dread this life avenue because your race had to work for sapiency, earning it for yourself the hard way, across thousands of bleak generations.