David Brin - Infinity's Shore

WE’VE had a report from Makanee’s nurse. On her way by sled to check on a sick member of Kaa’s team, peepoe spotted two more piles of junked spacecraft, smaller than this one, but suitable should we have to move Streaker soon. Hannes dispatched crews to start preparatory work.

Again, we must rely on the same core group of about fifty skilled crewfen. The reliable ones, whose concentration remains unflagged after three stressful years. Those who aren’t frightened by superstitious rumors of sea monsters lurking amid the dead Buyur machines.

AS for our pursuers — we ve seen no more gravitic signatures of flying craft, east of the mountains. That may be good news, but the respite makes me nervous. Two small spacecraft can’t be the whole story. Sensors detect some great brute of a ship, about five hundred klicks northwest. Is this vast cruiser related to the two vessels that fell near here?

They must surely realize that this region is of interest.

It seems creepy they haven’t followed up.

As if they are confident they have all the time in the world.

THE Niss Machine managed to exchange just a few more words with that so-called noor beast that our little drone encountered ashore. But the creature keeps us on tenterhooks, treating the little scout robot like its private toy, or a prey animal to be teased with bites and scratches. Yet it also carries it about in its mouth, careful not to get tangled in the fiber cable, letting us have brief, tantalizing views of the crashed sky boats.

We had assumed that “noor” were simply devolved versions of tytlal … of little interest except as curiosities. But if some retain the power of speech, what else might they be capable of?

At first I thought the Niss Machine would be the one best qualified to handle this confusing encounter. After all, the noor is its “cousin,” in a manner of speaking.

But family connections can involve sibling rivalry, even contempt. Maybe the Tymbrimi machine is simply the wrong spokesman.

One more reason I’m eager to bring Alvin back.

AMID all this, I had time to do a bit more research on Herbie. I wish there were some way to guess the isotopic input profiles, before he died, but chemical racemization analyses of samples taken from the ancient mummy appear to show considerably less temporal span than was indicated by cosmic-ray track histories of the hull Tom boarded, in the Shallow Cluster.

In other words, Herbie seems younger than the vessel Tom found him on.

That could mean a number of things.

Might Herb simply be the corpse of some previous grave robber, who slinked aboard just a few million years ago, instead of one to two billion?

Or could the discrepancy be an effect of those strange fields we found in the Shallow Cluster, surrounding that fleet of ghostly starcraft, rendering them nearly invisible? Perhaps the outer hulls of those huge, silent ships experienced time differently than their contents.

It makes me wonder about poor Lieutenant Yachapa-jean, who was killed by those same fields, and whose body had to be left behind. Might some future expedition someday recover the well-preserved corpse of a dolphin and go rushing around the universe thinking they have the recovered relic of a progenitor?

Mistaking the youngest sapient race for the oldest. What a joke that would be.

A joke on them, and a joke on us.

Herbie never changes. Yet I swear I sometimes catch him grinning.

OUR stolen Galactic Library unit gets queer and opaque at times. If I werent in disguise, the big cube probably wouldn’t tell me anything at all. Even decked out as a Thennanin admiral, I find the Library evasive when shown those symbols that Tom copied aboard the derelict ship.

One glyph looks like the emblem worn by every Library unit in known space — a great spiral wheel. Only, instead of five swirling arms rotating around a common center, this one has nine! And eight concentric ovals overlie the stylized galactic helix, making it resemble a bull’s-eye target.

I never saw anything like it before.

When I press for answers, our purloined archive says the symbol “… is very old …” and that its use is “… memetically discouraged.”

Whatever that means.

At risk of humanizing a machine, the unit seems to get grumpy, as if it dislikes being confused. I’ve seen this before.

Terragens researchers find that certain subject areas make Libraries touchy, as if they hate having to work hard by digging in older files.… Or maybe that’s an excuse to avoid admitting there are things they don’t know.

It reminds me of discussions Tom and I used to have with Jake Demwa, when we’d all sit up late trying to make sense of the universe.

Jake had a theory — that Galactic history, which purports to go back more than a billion years, is actually only accurate to about one hundred and fifty million.

“With each eon you go further back than that,” he said, “what we’re told has an ever-increasing flavor of a carefully concocted fable.”

Oh, there’s evidence that oxygen-breathing starfarers have been around ten times as long. Surely some of the ancient events recorded in official annals must be authentic. But much has also been painted over.

It’s a chilling notion. The great Institutes are supposed to he dedicated to truth and continuity. How, then, can valid information be memetically discouraged?

Yes, this seems a rather abstract obsession, at a time when Streaker—and now Jijo — faces dire and immediate threats. Yet I can’t help thinking it all comes together here at the bottom of a planetary graveyard, where tectonic plates melt history into ore.

We are caught in the slowly grinding gears of a machine more vast than we imagined.

Hannes

AT TIMES HANNES SUESSI ACUTELY MISSED HIS young friend Emerson, whose uncanny skills helped make Streaker purr like a compact leopard, prowling the trails of space.

Of course Hannes admired the able fins of his engineroom gang — amiable, hardworking crew mates without a hint of regression in the bunch. But dolphins tend to visualize objects as sonic shapes, and often set their calibrations intuitively, based on the way motor vibrations sounded. A helpful technique, but not always reliable.

Emerson D’Anite, on the other hand—

Hannes never knew anyone with a better gut understanding of quantum probability shunts. Not the arcane hyperdimensional theory, but the practical nuts and bolts of wresting movement from contortions of wrinkled spacetime. Emerson was also fluent in Tursiops Trinary … better than Hannes at conveying complex ideas in neodolphins’ own hybrid language. A useful knack on this tub.

Alas, just one human now remained belowdecks, to help tend abused motors long past due for overhaul.

That is — if one could even call Hannes Suessi human anymore.

Am I more than I was? Or less?

He now had “eyes” all over the engine room — remote pickups linked directly to his ceramic-encased brain. Using portable drones, Hannes could supervise Karkaett and Chuchki far across the wide chamber … or even small crews working on alien vessels elsewhere in the great underwater scrap yard. In this way he could offer advice and comfort when they grew nervous, or when their bodies screamed with cetacean claustrophobia.

Unfortunately, cyborg abilities did nothing to prevent loneliness.

You should never have left me here alone, Hannes chided Emerson’s absent spirit. You were an engineer, not a secret agent or star pilot! You had no business traipsing off, doing heroic deeds.

There were specialists for such tasks. Streaker had been assigned several “heroes” when she first set out — individuals with the right training and personalities, equipping them to face dangerous challenges and improvise their way through any situation.