David Brin - Infinity's Shore

Emerson

HE BLAMES HIMSELF. HIS MIND HAD BEEN ON FARAWAY places and times. Distracted, he was slow reacting when Sara fell.

Till that moment, Emerson was making progress in the struggle to put his past in order, one piece at a time. No easy task with part of his brain missing — the part that once offered words to lubricate any thought or need.

Hard-planted inhibitions fight his effort to remember, punishing every attempt with savagery that makes him grunt and sweat. But the peculiar panoramas help for a while. Ricocheting colors and half-liquid landscapes jar some of the niches where chained memories lie.

One recollection erupts whole. An old one, from childhood. Some neighbors had a big German shepherd who loved to hunt bees.

The dog used to stalk his quarry in a very uncanine manner, crouching and twitching like some ridiculous ungainly cat, pursuing the unsuspecting insect through flower beds and tall grass. Then he pounced, snapping powerful jaws around the outmatched prey.

As a boy, Emerson would stare in amazed delight while outraged buzzing echoed behind the shepherd’s bared teeth, followed by a vivid instant when the bee gave up protesting and lashed with its stinger. The dog would snort, grimace, and sneeze. Yet, brief pain came mixed with evident triumph. Bee hunting gave meaning to his gelded suburban life.

Emerson wonders, why does this metaphor resonate so strongly? Is he the dog, overriding agony to snatch one defiant memory after another?

Or is he the bee?

Emerson recalls just fragments about the haughty entities who reamed his mind, then sent his body plummeting to Jijo in fiery ruin. But he knows how they regarded his kind — like insects.

He pictures himself with a sharp stinger, wishing for a chance to make the Old Ones sneeze. He dreams of teaching them to hate the taste of bees.

Emerson lays hard-won memories in a chain. A necklace with far more gaps than pearls. Easiest come events from childhood, adolescence, and years of training for the Terragens Survey Service.…

Even when the horse caravan departs the land of stabbing colors to climb a steep mountain trail, he has other tools to work with — music, math, and hand signs that he trades with Prity, sharing jokes of ultimate crudity. During rest breaks, his sketchpad helps tap the subconscious, using impatient slashes and curves to draw free-form images from the dark time.

Streaker…

The ship takes form, almost drawing itself — a lovingly rendered cylinder with hornlike flanges arrayed in circuits along its length. He draws her underwater—surrounded by drifting seaweed — abnormal for a vessel of deep space, but it makes sense as other memories fill in.

Kithrup…

That awful world where the Streaker came seeking shelter after barely escaping a surprise ambush, learning that a hundred fleets were at war over the right to capture her.

Kithrup. A planet whose oceans were poison … but a useful place to make repairs, since just half a dozen crew members had legs to stand on. The rest — bright, temperamental dolphins — needed a watery realm to work in. Besides, it seemed a good place to hide after the disaster at …

Morgran …

A transfer point. Safest of the fifteen ways to travel from star to star. Simply dive toward one at the right slope and distance, and you’d exit at some other point, far across the stellar wheel. Even the Earthling slowboat Vesarius had managed it, though quite by accident, before humanity acquired the techniques of Galactic science.

Thinking of Morgran brings Keepiru to mind, the finest pilot Emerson ever knew — the show-off! — steering Streaker out of danger with flamboyance that shocked the ambushers, plunging her back into the maelstrom, away from the brewing space battle…

… like the other battle that developed weeks later, over Kithrup. Fine, glistening fleets, the wealth of noble clans, tearing at each other, destroying in moments the pride of many worlds. Emerson’s hand flies as he draws exploding arcs across a sheet of native paper, ripping it as he jabs, frustrated by inability to render the gorgeous savagery he once witnessed with his own eyes.…

Emerson folds the drawings away when the party remounts, glad that his flowing tears are concealed by the rewq.

Later, when they face a steaming volcano caldera, he abruptly recalls another basin, this one made of folded space … the Shallow Cluster … Streaker’s last survey site before heading for Morgran — a place empty of anything worth noting, said the Galactic Library.

Then what intelligence or premonition provoked Captain Creideiki to head for such an unpromising site?

Surely, in all the eons, someone else must have stumbled on the armada of derelict ships Streaker discovered there — cause of all her troubles. He can envision those silent arks now, vast as moons but almost transparent, as if they could not quite decide to be.

This memory hurts in a different way. Claw marks lie across it, as if some outside force once pored over it in detail — perhaps seeking to read patterns in the background stars. Retracing Streaker’s path to a single point in space.

Emerson figures they probably failed. Constellations were never his specialty.

“Emerson, you don’t have to go.”

His head jerks as those words peel from a memory more recent than Morgran or Kithrup, by many months.

Emerson pans the land of fevered colors, now seen from high above. At last he finds her face in rippling glimmers. A worried face, burdened with a hundred lives and vital secrets to preserve. Again she speaks, and the words come whole, because he never stored them in parts of the brain meant for mundane conversation.

Because everything she said to him had always seemed like music.

“We need you here. Let’s find another way.”

But there was no other way. Not even Gillian’s sarcastic Tymbrimi computer could suggest one before Emerson climbed aboard a salvaged Thennanin fighter, embarking on a desperate gamble.

Looking back in time, he hopes to see in Gillian’s eyes the same expression she used to have when bidding Tom farewell on some perilous venture.

He sees worried concern, even affection. But it’s not the same.

Emerson frees his gaze from the torment-colored desert, turning east toward less disturbing vistas. Far-off mountains offer respite with natural undulating shapes, softened by verdant green forests.

Then, from one tall peak, there comes a glittering flash! Several more gleam in series. A rhythm that seems to speak.…

His intrigued detachment is cut short by a frightened yell. Yet, for an instant Emerson remains too distant, too slow to turn. He does not see Sara tumble off the path. But Prity’s scream tears through him like a torch thrust into cobwebs.

Sara’s name pours from his throat with involuntary clarity. His body finally acts, leaping in pursuit.

Hurtling down the jagged talus slope, he flings eloquent curses at the universe, defying it—daring it—to take another friend.

Lark

THE SERGEANT’S FACE WAS STREAKED WITH CAMOUFLAGE. Her black hair still bore flecks of loam and grass from worming through crevices and peering between brambles. Yet Lark had never seen Jeni Shen look better.

People thrive doing the thing they were bom for. In Jeni’s case, that’s being a warrior. She’d rather have lived when the elder and younger Drakes were fashioning the Great Peace out of blood and fire than during the peace itself.

“So far, so good,” the young militia scout reported. Blur-cloth overalls made it hard to trace her outline amid stark lantern shadows.

“I got close enough to watch the emissaries reenter the valley, bringing the sages’ reply to the Jophur. A couple of guard robots swooped in to look them over, especially poor Vubben, sniffing him from wheel rims to eyestalks. Then all six ambassadors headed down to the Glade, with the bots in escort.” Jeni made slanting downward motions with her hands. “That leaves just one or two drones patrolling this section of perimeter! Seems we couldn’t ask for a better chance to make our move.”