David Brin - Infinity's Shore

Aliens. Who can figure?

He stared as the hoon tied the string of clothes around her left wrist and held the other end to her mouth, calmly exhaling her last air, inflating a balloonlike fold of cloth. It floated upward, no more than two meters, stopping far short of the surface.

She’s not signaling for help, he fathomed as the hoon sat down in the mud, humming a dirge. She’s making sure they can drag the bottom and retrieve her body. Kaa had read Alvin’s account of death rituals the locals took quite seriously.

By now his own lungs burned fiercely. Kaa deeply regretted that the breather unit on his harness had burned out after Zhaki shot him.

He heard the qheuens approaching from behind, clacking their claws, but Kaa sensed a hole in their line, confident he could streak past, just out of reach. He tried to turn … to seize the brief opportunity.

Oh, hell, he sighed, and kicked the other way, aiming for the dying hoon.

It took some time to get her to the surface. When they broke through, her entire body shook with harsh, quivering gasps. Water jetted from nostril orifices at the same time as air poured in through her mouth, a neat trick that Kaa kind of envied.

He pushed her close enough to throw one arm over a drifting oar, then he whirled around to peer across the bay, ready to duck onrushing spears.

None came. In fact, there seemed a curious absence of boats nearby. Kaa dropped his head down to cast suspicious sonar beams through his arched brow — and confirmed that all the coracles had backed off some distance.

A moon had risen. One of the big ones. He could make out silhouettes now … hoons standing in their rowboats, all of them turned to face north … or maybe northwest. The males had their sacs distended, and a steady thrumming filled the air. They seemed oblivious to the sudden reappearance of one of their kind from a brush with drowning.

I’d have thought they’d be all over this area, dropping weighted ropes, trying to rescue her. It was another example of alien thinking, despite all the Terran books these hoons had read. Kaa was left with the task of shoving her with the tip of his rostrum, a creepy feeling coursing his spine as he pushed the bedraggled survivor toward one of the docks.

More villagers stood along the wharf, their torches flickering under gusts of stiffening wind. They seemed to be watching … or listening … to something.

A dolphin can both see and hear things happening above the water’s surface, but not as well as those who live exclusively in that dry realm. With his senses still in an uproar, Kaa could discern little in the direction they faced. Just the hulking outline of a mountain.

The computerized insert in his right eye flexed and turned until Kaa finally made out a flickering star near the mountain’s highest point. A star that throbbed, flashing on and off to a staccato rhythm. He could not make anything of it at first … though the cadence seemed reminiscent of Galactic Two.

“Ex-x-xcuse me …”he began, trying to take advantage of the inactivity. Whatever else was happening, this seemed a good chance to get a word in edgewise. “I’m a dolphin … cousin to humansss … I’ve been sssent with-th a message for Uriel the—”

The crowd suddenly erupted in a moan of emotion that made Kaa’s sound-sensitive jaw throb. He made out snatches of individual speech.

“Rockets!” one onlooker sighed in Anglic. “The sages made rockets!”

Another spoke GalSeven in tones of wonder. “One small enemy spaceship destroyed … and now the big one is targeted!”

Kaa blinked, transfixed by the villagers’ tension.

Rockets? Did I hear right? But—

Another cry escaped the crowd.

“They plummet!” someone cried. “They strike!”

Abruptly, the mountain-perched star paused its twinkling bulletin. All sound seemed to vanish with it. The hoons stood in dead silence. Even the oily water of the bay was hushed, lapping softly against the wharf.

The flashing resumed, and there came from the crowd a moan of shaken disappointment.

“It survives, exists. The mother battleship continues,” went the GalTwo mutter of a traeki, somewhere in the crowd.

“Our best effort has failed.

“And now comes punishment.”

Lark

THE MOMENT LARK PRAYED FOR NEVER CAME. THE walls did not shatter, torn by native-made warheads or screaming splinters of greatboo. Instead, the sound of detonations remained distant, then diminished. The floorthrobbing vibration of Jophur defense guns changed tenor now that the element of surprise was gone, from frantic to complacent, as if the incoming missiles Were mere nuisances.

Then silence fell. It was over.

He let go of the Egg fragment, and released Ling, as well. Lark pulled his knees in, wrapped both an is around them, and rocked miserably. He had never felt sc disappointed to be alive.

“Woorsh, that was close!” Ling exhaled, clearly savoring survival. Not that Lark blamed her. She might still nurse hopes of escape, or of being swapped in some Galactic prisoner exchange. All this might become just another episode in her memoirs. An episode, like me, he thought. The clever jungle boy she once met on Jijo.

His old friend Harullen might have seen a bright side to this failure. Now the angered Jophur might extinguish all sapient life on the planet, not only their g’Kek blood enemies. Wouldn’t that fit in with Lark’s beliefs? His heresy?

The Six Races don’t belong here, but neither do they deserve annihilation. I wanted us to do the right thing peacefully, honorably, and of our own accord. Without violence. All this burning of forests and valleys.

“Look!”

He glanced at Ling, who had stood up and was pointing at Ewasx. The ring stack still quaked, but one torus in the middle was undergoing full-scale convulsions. Throbbing indentations formed on opposite sides, distending its round shape.

Both men joined Ling, staring with unbelieving eyes as the dents deepened and spread into circular bulges, straining outward until a sheer membrane was all that restrained them. The Jophur’s basal legs started pumping and flexing.

The humans jumped back when Ewasx abruptly skittered across the floor, first toward the armored door, then away again, zigging and zagging three times before finally sagging back down, like a heap of flaccid tubes.

The middle ring continued to throb and swell.

“What is it doing?” Ling asked in awe.

Lark had to swallow before answering.

“It’s vlenning. Giving birth, you’d say. Traekis don’t do this often, ’cause it endangers the union of the stack. Mostly they bud embryos and let ’em grow in a mulch pile, on their own.”

Rann gaped. “Giving birth? Here?” Clearly, he knew more about killing Jophur than about the rest of their life cycle.

Lark realized — the catatonia of Ewasx was not caused simply by the surprise rocket attack. That shock had triggered a separate convulsion just waiting to happen.

Membranes started tearing. One of the new rings, almost the size of Lark’s head and colored a deep shade of purple, began writhing through. The other was smaller and crimson, emerging through a mucusy pustule, trailing streamers of rank, oily stuff. Both infant toruses slithered down the flanks of the parent stack, then across the metal floor, seeking shadows.

“Lark, you’d better have a look at this,” Ling said.

He could barely yank his gaze away from the nauseating, bewitching sight of the greasy newborns. Upon stumbling over to join Ling, he found her pointing downward.

“When it ran back and forth, a dura ago … it left this trail on the floor.”

So what? he thought. Lark saw smears, like grease stains on the metal plating. Traeki often do that.