David Brin - Infinity's Shore

Kurt shook his head. “They’re bluffin’. Even Galactics couldn’t find all our wood structures, hidden under blur cloth.”

The courier seemed less sure. “There are fanatics everywhere who think the end is here. Some believe the Jophur are agents of destiny, come to set us back on the Path. All such fools need do is start a fire somewhere near a building and throw some phosphorus on the flame. The Jophur can sniff the signal using their rainbow finder.”

Rainbow finder … Sara pondered. Oh, he means a spectrograph.

Jomah was aghast. “People would do that?”

“It’s already happened in a few places. Some folks have taken their local explosers hostage, forcing them to set off their charges. Elsewhere, the Jophur have established base camps, staffed by a dozen stacks and thirty or so robots, gathering nearby citizens for questioning.” His tone was bleak. “You people don’t know how lucky you have it here.”

Yet Sara wondered. How could the High Sages possibly give in to such demands? The g’Kek weren’t being taken off-planet in order to restore their star-god status. As for the traeki, death might seem pleasant compared with the fate planned for them.

Then there was the “dolphin ship.” Even the learned Uriel could only speculate if the High Sages truly were in contact with a bunch of fugitive Terran clients.

Perhaps it was emotional fatigue, or a lingering effect of Tyug’s drug, but Sara’s attention drifted from the litany of woes recited by the pilot. When he commenced describing the destruction and death at Ovoom, Sara steered her wheelchair to join Emerson, standing near the courier’s glider.

The starman stroked its lacy wings and delicate spars, beaming with appreciation of its ingenious design. At first Sara thought it must be the same little flier she had seen displayed in a Biblos museum case — the last of its kind, left over from those fabled days just after the Tabernacle arrived, when brave aerial scouts helped human colonists survive their early wars. Over time, the art had been lost for lack of high-tech materials.

But this machine is new!

Sara recognized g’Kek weaving patterns in the fine fabric, which felt slick to the touch.

“It is a traeki secretion,” explained Tyug, having also abandoned the crowd surrounding the young messenger. The alchemist shared Emerson’s preference for physical things, not words.

“i/we sample-tasted a thread. The polymer is a clever filamentary structure based on mulc fiber. No doubt it will find other uses in piduras to come, as our varied schemes converge.”

There it was again. Hints of a secret stratagem. A scheme no one had yet explained, though Sara was starting to have suspicions.

“Forgive us/me for interrupting your contemplation, honored Saras and Emersons,” Tyug went on. “But a scent message has just activated receptor sites on my/our fifth sensory torus. The simplified meaning is that Sage Purofsky desires your presences, in proximity to his own.”

Sara translated Tyug’s awkward phrasing.

In other words, no more goofing off. It’s time to get back to work.

Back to Uriel’s den of mysteries.

Sara saw that the Smith had already departed, along with Kurt, leaving Chief Apprentice Urdonnol to finish debriefing the young pilot. Apparently, even such dire news was less urgent than the task at hand.

Calculating problems in orbital mechanics, Sara pondered. I still don’t see how that will help get us out of this fix.

She caught Emerson’s eye, and with some reluctance he turned away from the glider. But when the star voyager bent over Sara to tuck in the corners of her lap blanket, he made eye contact and shared an open smile. Then his strong hands aimed her wheelchair down a ramp into the mountain, toward Uriel’s fantastic Hall of Spinning Disks.

I feel like a g’Kek, rolling along. Perhaps all humans should spend a week confined like this, to get an idea what life is like for others.

It made her wonder how the g’Kek used to move about in their “natural” environment. According to legend, those were artificial colonies floating in space. Strange places, where many of the assumptions of planet-bound existence did not hold.

Emerson skirted ruts countless generations of urrish hooves had worn in the stone floor. He picked up the pace when they passed a vent pouring fumes from the main forge, keeping his body between her and waves of volcanic heat.

In fact, Sara was almost ready to resume walking on her own. But it felt strangely warming to wallow for a time in their reversed roles.

She had to admit, he was good at it. Maybe he had a good teacher.

Normally, Prity would have been the one pushing Sara’s chair. But the little chimp was busy, perched on a high stool in Uriel’s sanctuary with a pencil clutched in one furry hand, drawing arcs across sheets of ruled graph paper. Beyond Prity’s work easel stretched a vast underground chamber filled with tubes, pulleys, and disks, all linked by gears and leather straps — a maze of shapes whirling on a timber frame, reaching all the way up to a vaulted ceiling. In the sharp glare of carboacetylene lanterns, tiny figures could be seen scurrying about the scaffolding, tightening and lubricating — nimble urrish males, among the first ever to find useful employment outside their wives’ pouches, earning a good income by tending the ornate “hobby” of Uriel the Smith.

When Sara first saw the place, squinting through her fever, she had thought it a dream vision of hell. Then a wondrous thing happened. The spinning glass shapes began singing to her.

Not in sound, but light. As they turned, rolling their rims against one another, narrow beams reflected from mirrored surfaces, glittering like winter moonbeams on the countless facets of a frozen waterfall. Only there was more to it than mere gorgeous randomness. Patterns. Rhythms. Some flashes came and went with the perfect precision of a clock, while others performed complex, wavelike cycles, like rolling surf. With the fey sensitivity of a bared subconscious, she had recognized an overlapping harmony of shapes. Ellipses, parabolas, catenaries … a nonlinear serenade of geometry.

It’s a computer, she had realized, even before regaining the full faculties of her searching mind. And for the first time since departing her Dolo Village tree house, she had felt at home.

It is another world.

My world.

Mathematics.

Blade

HE MIGHT HAVE STAYED DOWN LONGER. BUT AFTER three or four miduras, the air in his leg bladders started growing stale. Even a full-size blue qheuen needs to breathe at least a dozen times a day. So by the time filtered sunlight penetrated to his murky refuge, Blade knew he must abandon the cool river bottom that had sheltered him through the night’s long firestorm. He fought the Gentt’s current, digging all five claws into the muddy bank, climbing upward till at last it was possible to raise his vision cupola above the water’s smeary surface.

It felt as if he had arrived at damnation day.

The fabled towers of Ovoom Town had survived the deconstruction age, then half a million years of wind and rain. Vanished were the sophisticated machines that made it a vibrant Galactic outpost. Those had been taken long ago by the departing Buyur, along with nearly every windowpane. Yet, even despite ten thousand gaping openings, the surviving shells had been luxury palaces to the six exile races — providing room for hundreds of apartments and workshops — all linked by shrewd wooden bridges, ramps, and camouflage lattices.

Now only a few jagged stumps protruded through a haze of dust and soot. Sunshine beat down from a glaring sky, showing how futile every cautious effort at concealment had been.

Picking his way along the riverbank, now cluttered with blocks of shattered stone, Blade encountered a more gruesome kind of debris—bodies floating in back eddies of the river, along with varied dismembered parts … biped limbs, g’Kek wheels, and traeki toruses. In the qheuen manner, he did not wince or experience revulsion while claw-stepping past the drifting corpses, but hoped that someone would organize a collection of the remains for proper mulching. Little was gained by maundering over the dead.