David Brin - Infinity's Shore

From his thigh pouch Lark drew a tool provided by one of Lester Cambel’s techie assistants. A can opener the fellow called it.

“Our problem is to deliver dissolving fluid into contact with the barrier, but not lake water,” the tech had explained. “Our answer is to use the new traeki fluid to hollow out some mulc beads. Then we coat these cavities with neutral wax, and refill them with more of the antidote fluid. The hole is plugged, so we have a sealed vessel—”

“I see you left an old Buyur machine inside,” Lark had observed.

“The fluid won’t affect it, and we need the machine inside. It doesn’t matter what it did in Buyur days, so long as we can signal-activate it to move again, pulling a string attached to the plug. When the plug goes pop! — the contents pour into contact with the Jophur wall! It’s foolproof.”

Lark wasn’t so sure. There was no telling if clever, homemade electrical devices would work underwater, surrounded by time-warped fields. Here goes everything, he thought, squeezing the activator.

To his relief, the Buyur device began moving right away … unfolding an appendage, all coiled and springy like a shambler’s tail.

I wonder what you used to do, he pondered, watching the machine writhe and gyre. Are you aware enough to puzzle over where you are? Where your masters have gone? Do you have an internal clock, to know half a million years have passed? Or did time stop for you inside the bead?

The coiled arm flailed as the machine sought to right itself, yanking a cord attached to the stopper at the far end. The plug slipped, caught, then slipped some more.

It was hard to follow events in the region of “quantum separated time.” Things seemed to happen in fits and starts. Sometimes effect seemed to precede cause, or he saw the far side of a rotating object while closer parts remained somehow obscured. It was a strange, sideways manner of seeing that reminded Lark of “Cubist” artworks, depicted in an ancient book his mother loved borrowing from the Biblos Archive.

Finally, the stopper slid free. At once reddish foam spread from the nozzle of the makeshift bottle, where its contents met the golden wall. Lark’s heart pounded, and he felt his amulet, the fragment of the Holy Egg, react with growing heat. His left hand clawed at the skink-skin wrappers, but could not gain entry to grab the vibrating stone. So, like an itch that could not be scratched, he endured the palpitation as his breastbone was rubbed from both sides.

Grunts of satisfaction escaped Rann as the foamy stain spread, eroding the Jophur barrier from within. The widening hole soon met a neighboring “bottle,” embedded in the wall near the first. In moments, fresh supplies of dissolving fluid gushed. The material of the barrier seemed to shiver, as if it were alive. As though in pain. Waves of color rippled around the growing cavity, as his rewq tried reading strange emotions.

So fixed was everyone on the process, for long intervals no one looked beyond, to the airlock and its two inhabitants, until a stray current tugged Lark aside. Lacking outside observers, the Danik women must have experienced time’s passage in a somewhat linear fashion. They looked tense, hunching away from the red foam, crouching near the airlock’s sealed inner door as the bubble slowly approached. Fear showed through their transparent face masks. No one knew what would happen when the hissing effervescence broke through.

It was also getting closer to Lark’s side of the wall. He backpedaled toward the others … only to find they had retreated farther still. Ling grabbed his arm.

Apparently, if they succeeded in making a tunnel, it would be wide in the middle but awfully narrow at both ends. Also, the wall material wasn’t solid, but a very viscous liquid. Fresh toporgic could already be seen slumping toward the wound. Any passage was bound to be temporary.

If we didn’t estimate right … if the two ends open in the wrong order … we might have to start all over again. There are more bottles of fluid, back at the cave. But how many times can we try?

Yet he could not talk himself out of feeling pride.

We’re not helpless. Faced with overwhelming power, we innovate. We persevere.

The realization was ironic confirmation of the heresy he had maintained all his adult life.

We aren’t meant for the Path of Redemption. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never tread its road to innocence.

That is why our kind should never have come to Jijo.

We’re meant for the stars. We simply don’t belong here.

Nelo

THE OLD MAN DID NOT KNOW WHICH WAS THE SADDEST sight.

At times he wished the boat had capsized during that wretched, pell-mell running of the rapids so he would not have lived to see such things.

It took half a day of hard labor at the oars to climb back upstream to Dolo Village. By the time they reached the timber pile that had been the town dock, all the young rowers were exhausted. Villagers rushed down a muddy bank to help them drag the boat ashore, and carried Ariana Foo to dry ground. A stout hoon ignored Nelo’s protests, picking him up like a baby, until he stood safely by the roots of a mighty garu tree.

Many survivors milled listlessly, though others had formed work gangs whose first task was collecting dross. Especially bodies. Those must be gathered quickly and mulched, as required by sacred law.

Nelo saw corpses gathered in a long row — mostly human, of course. Numbly he noted the master carpenter and Jobee the Plumber. Quite a few craft workers lay muddy and broken along a sodden patch of loam, and many more were missing, carried downstream when the lake came crashing through the millrace and workshops. Tree farmers, in contrast, had suffered hardly a loss. Their life on the branch tops did not expose them when the dam gave way.

No one spoke, though stares followed the papermaker as Nelo moved down the line, allowing a wince or a grunt when he recognized the face of an employee, an apprentice, or a lifelong friend. When he reached the end, he did not turn but kept walking in the same direction, toward what had been the center of his life.

The lake was low. Maybe the flood didn’t destroy everything.

Disorientation greeted Nelo, for it seemed at first he was transported far from the village of his birth. Where placid water once glistened, mudflats now stretched for most of a league. A river poured through the near side of his beloved dam.

To local qheuens, dam and home were one and the same. Now the hive lay sliced open, in cross section. The collapse had sheared the larva room in half. Teams of stunned blue adults struggled to move their surviving grubs to safety, out of the harsh sunlight.

With reluctant dread, Nelo dropped his gaze to where the famed paper mill had been, next to a graceful power wheel.

Of his house, his workshops, and pulp vats, nothing more remained than foundation stumps.

The sight tore his heart, but averting his gaze did not help. Just a short distance downstream Nelo saw more blue qheuens working listlessly by the shore, trying to extricate one of their own from a net of some kind. By their lack of haste, one knew the victim must be dead, perhaps trapped in the shallows and drowned.

Unhappily, he recognized the corpse, an older female — Log Biter herself — by markings on her shell. Another lost friend, and a blow to everyone along the upper Roney who valued her good wisdom.

Then he recognized the trap that had pinned her down long enough to smother even a blue qheuen. It was a tangle of wood and metal wires. Something from Nelo’s own home.

Melina’s precious piano, that I ordered built at great cost.

A moan escaped his throat, at last. In all the world, he had but one thing left to live for — the hope, frail as it was, that his children were safe somewhere, and would not have to see such things.