Infinity's Shore

INFINITY’S SHORE

Kaa

What strange fate brought me,

Fleeing maelstroms of winter,

Past five galaxies?

Only to find refuge,

On a forlorn planet (nude!)

In laminar luxury!

SO HE THOUGHT WHILE PERFORMING SWOOPING rolls, propelling his sleek gray body with exhilarated tail strokes, reveling in the caress of water against naked flesh.

Dappled sunlight threw luminous shafts through crystal shallows, slanting past mats of floating sea florets. Silvery native creatures, resembling flat-jawed fish, moved in and out of the bright zones, enticing his eye. Kaa squelched the instinctive urge to give chase.

Maybe later.

For now, he indulged in the liquid texture of water sliding around him, without the greasiness that used to cling so, back in the oily seas of Oakka, the green-green world, where soaplike bubbles would erupt from his blowhole each time he surfaced to breathe. Not that it was worth the effort to inhale on Oakka. There wasn’t enough good air on that horrid ball to nourish a comatose otter.

This sea also tasted good, not harsh like Kithrup, where each excursion outside the ship would give you a toxic dose of hard metals.

In contrast, the water on Jijo world felt clean, with a salty tang reminding Kaa of the gulf stream flowing past the Florida Academy, during happier days on far-off Earth.

He tried to squint and pretend he was back home, chasing mullet near Key Biscayne, safe from a harsh universe. But the attempt at make-believe failed. One paramount difference reminded him this was an alien world.

Sound.

— a beating of tides rising up the continental shelf — a complex rhythm tugged by three moons, not one.

— an echo of waves, breaking on a shore whose abrasive sand had a strange, sharp texture.

— an occasional distant groaning that seemed to rise out of the ocean floor itself.

— the return vibrations of his own sonar clicks, tracing schools of fishlike creatures, moving their fins in unfamiliar ways.

— above all, the engine hum just behind him … a cadence of machinery that had filled Kaa’s days and nights for five long years.

And now, another clicking, groaning sound. The clipped poetry of duty.

Relent, Kaa, tell us,

In exploratory prose,

Is it safe to come?

The voice chased Kaa like a fluttering, sonic conscience. Reluctantly, he swerved around to face the submarine Hikahi, improvised from ancient parts found strewn across this planet’s deep seafloor — a makeshift contraption that suited a crew of misfit fugitives. Clamshell doors closed ponderously, like the jaws of a huge carnivore, cycling to let others emerge in his wake … if he gave the all clear.

Kaa sent his Trinary reply, amplified by a saser unit plugged into his skull, behind his left eye.

If water were all

We might be in heaven now.

But wait! I’ll check above!

His lungs were already making demands, so he obeyed instinct, flicking an upward spiral toward the glistening surface. Ready or not, Jijo, here I come!

He loved piercing the tense boundary of sky and sea, flying weightless for an instant, then broaching with a splash and spume of exhalation. Still, he hesitated before inhaling. Instruments predicted an Earthlike atmosphere, yet he felt a nervous tremor drawing breath.

If anything, the air tasted better than the water! Kaa whirled, thrashing his tail in exuberance, glad Lieutenant Tsh’t had let him volunteer for this — to be the first dolphin, the first Earthling, ever to swim this sweet, foreign sea.

Then his eye stroked a jagged, gray-brown line, spanning one horizon, very close.

The shore.

Mountains.

He stopped his gyre to stare at the nearby continent — inhabited, they now knew. But by whom?

There was not supposed to be any sapient life on Jijo.

Maybe they’re just hiding here, the way we are, from a hostile cosmos.

That was one theory.

At least they chose a pleasant world, he added, relishing the air, the water, and gorgeous ranks of cumulus hovering over a giant mountain. I wonder if the fish are good to eat.

As we await you,

Chafing in this cramped airlock,

Should we play pinochle?

Kaa winced at the lieutenant’s sarcasm. Hurriedly, he sent back pulsed waves.

Fortune smiles again,

On our weary band of knaves.

Welcome, friends, to Ifni’s Shore.

It might seem presumptuous to invoke the goddess of chance and destiny, capricious Ifni, who always seemed ready to plague Streaker’s company with one more surprise. Another unexpected calamity, or miraculous escape. But Kaa had always felt an affinity with the informal patron deity of spacers. There might be better pilots than himself in the Terragens Survey Service, but none with a deeper respect for fortuity. Hadn’t his own nickname been “Lucky”?

Until recently, that is.

From below, he heard the grumble of clamshell doors reopening. Soon Tsh’t and others would join him in this first examination of Jijo’s surface — a world they heretofore saw only briefly from orbit, then from the deepest, coldest pit in all its seas. Soon, his companions would arrive, but for a few moments more he had it to himself — silken water, tidal rhythms, fragrant air, the sky and clouds. …

His tail swished, lifting him higher as he peered. Those aren’t normal clouds, he realized, staring at a great mountain dominating the eastern horizon, whose peak wore shrouds of billowing white. The lens implanted in his right eye dialed through a spectral scan, sending readings to his optic nerve — revealing steam, carbon oxides, and a flicker of molten heat.

A volcano, Kaa realized, and the reminder sent his ebullience down a notch. This was a busy part of the planet, geologically speaking. The same forces that made it a useful hiding place also kept it dangerous.

That must be where the groaning comes from, he pondered. Seismic activity. An interaction of miniquakes and crustal gas discharges with the thin overlaying film of sea.

Another flicker caught his notice, in roughly the same direction, but much closer — a pale swelling that might also have been a cloud, except for the way it moved, flapping like a bird’s wing, then bulging with eagerness to race the wind.

A sail, he discerned. Kaa watched it jibe across the stiffening breeze — a two-masted schooner, graceful in motion, achingly familiar from the Caribbean seas of home.

Its bow split the water, spreading a wake that any dolphin might love to ride.

The zoom lens clarified, magnified, until he made out fuzzy bipedal forms, hauling ropes and bustling around on deck, like any gang of human sailors.

… Only these weren’t human beings. Kaa glimpsed scaly backs, culminating in a backbone of sharp spines. Swathes of white fur covered the legs, and froglike membranes pulsated below broad chins as the ship’s company sang a low, rumbling work chant that Kaa could dimly make out, even from here.

He felt a chill of unhappy recognition.

Hoons! What in all Five Galaxies are they doing here?

Kaa heard a rustle of fluke strokes — Tsh’t and others rising to join him. Now he must report that enemies of Earth dwelled here.

Kaa realized grimly — this news wasn’t going to help him win back his nickname anytime soon.

She came to mind again, the capricious goddess of uncertain destiny. And Kaa’s own Trinary phrase came back to him, as if reflected and reconverged by the surrounding alien waters.

Welcome …

Welcome …

Welcome to Ifni’s Shore …

The Stranger

EXISTENCE SEEMS LIKE WANDERING THROUGH A vast chaotic house. One that has been torn by quakes and fire, and is now filled with bitter, inexplicable fog. Whenever he manages to pry open a door, exposing some small corner of the past, each revelation comes at the price of sharp waves of agony.

In time, he learns not to be swayed by the pain. Rather, each ache and sting serves as a marker, a signpost, confirming that he must be on the right path.

His arrival on this world — plummeting through a scorched sky — should have ended with merciful blankness. What luck instead hurled his blazing body from the pyre to quench in a fetid swamp?

Peculiar luck.

Since then, he has grown intimate with all kinds of suffering, from crass pangs to subtle stings. In cataloging them, he grows learned in the many ways there are to hurt.

Those earliest agonies, right after the crash, had screeched coarsely from wounds and scalding burns — a gale of such fierce torment that he barely noticed when a motley crew of local savages rowed out to him in a makeshift boat, like sinners dragging a fallen angel out of the boggy fen. Saving him from drowning, only to face more damnations.

Beings who insisted that he fight for his broken life, when it would have been so much easier just to let go.

Later, as his more blatant injuries healed or scarred, other types of anguish took up the symphony of pain.

Afflictions of the mind.

Holes gape across his life, vast blank zones, lightless and empty, where missing memories must once have spanned megaparsecs and life years. Each gap feels chilled beyond numbness — a raw vacancy more frustrating than an itch that can’t be scratched.

Ever since he began wandering this singular world, he has probed the darkness within. Optimistically, he clutches a few small trophies from the struggle.

Jijo is one of them.

He rolls the word in his mind — the name of this planet where six castaway races band together in feral truce, a mixed culture unlike any other beneath the myriad stars.

A second word comes more easily with repeated use—Sara. She who nursed him from near death in her tree house overlooking a rustic water mill … who calmed the fluxing panic when he first woke to see pincers, claws, and mucusy ring stacks — the physiques of hoons, traekis, qheuens, and others sharing this rude outcast existence.

He knows more words, such as Kurt and Prity … friends he now trusts almost as much as Sara. It feels good to think their names, the slick way all words used to come, in the days before his mangling.

One recent prize he is especially proud of.

Emerson …

It is his own name, for so long beyond reach. Violent shocks had jarred it free, less than a day ago — shortly after he provoked a band of human rebels to betray their urrish allies in a slashing knife fight that made a space battle seem antiseptic by comparison. That bloody frenzy ended with an explosive blast, shattering the grubby caravan tent, spearing light past Emerson’s closed lids, overwhelming the guardians of reason.

And then, amid the dazzling rays, he had briefly glimpsed … his captain!

Creideiki …

The blinding glow became a luminous foam, whipped by thrashing flukes. Out of that froth emerged a long gray form whose bottle snout bared glittering teeth. The sleek head grinned, despite bearing an awful wound behind its left eye … much like the hurt that robbed Emerson of speech.

Utterance shapes formed out of scalloped bubbles, in a language like none spoken by Jijo’s natives, or by any great Galactic clan.

In the turning

of the cycloid,

Comes a time

to break for surface.

Time to resume

breathing,

doing.

To rejoin the

great sea’s

dreaming.

Time has come for

you my old friend.

Time to wake and

see what’s churning.… *

Stunned recognition accompanied waves of stinging misery, worse than any fleshy woe or galling numbness.

Shame had nearly overwhelmed him then. For no injury short of death could ever excuse his forgetting—

Creideiki …

Terra …

The dolphins …

Hannes …

Gillian …

How could they have slipped his mind during the months he wandered this barbarian world, by boat, barge, and caravan?

Guilt might have engulfed him during that instant of recollection … except that his new friends urgently needed him to act, to seize the brief advantage offered by the explosion, to overcome their captors and take them prisoner. As dusk fell across the shredded tent and torn bodies, he had helped Sara and Kurt tie up their surviving foes — both urrish and human — although Sara seemed to think their reprieve temporary.

More fanatic reinforcements were expected soon.

Emerson knew what the rebels wanted. They wanted him. It was no secret that he came from the stars. The rebels would trade him to sky hunters, hoping to exchange his battered carcass for guaranteed survival.

As if anything could save Jijo’s castaway races, now that the Five Galaxies had found them.

Huddled round a wan fire, lacking any shelter but tent rags, Sara and the others watched as terrifying portents crossed bitter-cold constellations.

First came a mighty titan of space, growling as it plunged toward nearby mountains, bent on awful vengeance.

Later, following the very same path, there came a second behemoth, this one so enormous that Jijo’s pull seemed to lighten as it passed overhead, filling everyone with deep foreboding.

Not long after that, golden lightning flickered amid the mountain peaks — a bickering of giants. But Emerson did not care who won. He could tell that neither vessel was his ship, the home in space he yearned for … and prayed he would never see again.

With luck, Streaker was far away from this doomed world, bearing in its hold a trove of ancient mysteries — perhaps the key to a new galactic era.

Had not all his sacrifices been aimed at helping her escape?

After the leviathans passed, there remained only stars and a chill wind, blowing through the dry steppe grass, while Emerson went off searching for the caravan’s scattered pack animals. With donkeys, his friends just might yet escape before more fanatics arrived.…

Then came a rumbling noise, jarring the ground beneath his feet. A rhythmic cadence that seemed to go—

taranta taranta

taranta taranta

The galloping racket could only be urrish hoofbeats, the expected rebel reinforcements, come to make them prisoners once again.

Only, miraculously, the darkness instead poured forth allies — unexpected rescuers, both urrish and human — who brought with them astonishing beasts.

Horses.

Saddled horses, clearly as much a surprise to Sara as they were to him. Emerson had thought the creatures were extinct on this world, yet here they were, emerging from the night as if from a dream.

So began the next phase of his odyssey. Riding southward, fleeing the shadow of these vengeful ships, hurrying toward the outline of an uneasy volcano.

Now he wonders within his battered brain — is there a plan? A destination?

Old Kurt apparently has faith in these surprising saviors, but there must be more to it than that.

Emerson is tired of just running away.

He would much rather be running toward.

While his steed bounds ahead, new aches join the background music of his life — raw, chafed thighs and a bruised spine that jars with each pounding hoofbeat.

taranta, taranta, taranta-tara

taranta, taranta, taranta-tara

Guilt nags him with a sense of duties unfulfilled, and he grieves over the likely fate of his new friends on Jijo, now that their hidden colony has been discovered.

And yet …

In time Emerson recalls how to ease along with the sway of the saddle. And as sunrise lifts dew off fan-fringed trees near a riverbank, swarms of bright bugs whir through the slanted light, dancing as they pollinate a field of purple blooms. When Sara glances back from her own steed, sharing a rare smile, his pangs seem to matter less. Even fear of those terrible starships, splitting the sky with their angry engine arrogance, cannot erase a growing elation as the fugitive band gallops on to dangers yet unknown.

Emerson cannot help himself. It is his nature to seize any possible excuse for hope. As the horses pound Jijo’s ancient turf, their cadence draws him down a thread of familiarity, recalling rhythmic music quite apart from the persistent dirge of woe.

tarantara, tarantara

tarantara, tarantara

Under insistent stroking by that throbbing sound, something abruptly clicks inside. His body reacts involuntarily as unexpected words surge from some dammed-up corner of his brain, attended by a melody that stirs the heart. Lyrics pour reflexively, an undivided stream, through lungs and throat before he even knows that he is singing.

“Though in body and in mind, {tarantara, tarantara}

We are timidly inclined, {tarantara!}

And anything but blind, {tarantara, tarantara}

To the danger that’s behind— {tarantara!}

His friends grin — this has happened before.

“Yet, when the danger’s near, {tarantara, tarantara}

We manage to appear, {tarantara!}

As insensible to fear,

As anybody here,

As an-y-bo-dy here!”

Sara laughs, joining the refrain, and even the dour urrish escorts stretch their long necks to lisp along.

“Yet, when the danger’s near, {tarantara, tarantara}

We manage to appear, {tarantara!}”

As insensible to fear,

As anybody here,

As anybody here!”