David Brin - Infinity's Shore

Others standing nearby — those with sharper eyesight — passed through several reactions. First anxious dread, then puzzlement, and finally a kind of joyful wonder they expressed with shrill laughter or deep, umbling tones.

“What is it?” asked a nearby red qheuen, even more dust-blind than Blade.

“I think—” Blade began to answer. But then a human cut in, shading his eyes with both hands.

“They’re balloons! By Drake and Ur-Chown … they’re hot air balloons!”

A short time later, even the qheuens could make out shapes hung beneath the bulging gasbags. Urrish figures standing in wicker baskets, tending fires that intermittently flared with sudden, near-volcanic heat. Blade then realized who had come, as if out of the orange setting sun.

The smiths of Blaze Mountain must have seen last night’s calamity from their nearby mountain sanctum. The smiths were coming to help succor their neighbors.

It seemed blasphemous, in a strange way. For the Sacred Scrolls had always spoken of doom arriving from the fearsome open sky.

Now it seemed the cloudless heavens could also bring virtue.

Lester Cambel

HE WAS TOO BUSY NOW TO FEEL RACKED WITH conscience pangs. As commotion at the secret base neared a fever pitch, Lester had no time left for wallowing in guilt. There were slurry tubes to inspect — a pipeline threading its meandering way through the boo forest, carrying noxious fluids from the traeki synthesis gang to tall, slender vats where it congealed into a paste of chemically constrained hell.

Lester also had to approve a new machine for winding league after league of strong fiber cord around massive trunks of greatboo, multiplying their strength a thousandfold.

Then there was the matter of kindling beetles. One of his assistants had found a new use for an old pest — a dangerous, Buyur-modified insect that most Sixers grew up loathing, but one that might now solve an irksome technical problem. The idea seemed promising, but needed morc tests before being incorporated in the plan.

Piece by piece, the scheme progressed from Wild-Eyed Fantasy all the way to Desperate Gamble. In fact, a local hoonish bookie was said to be covering bets at only sixty to one against eventual success — the best odds so far.

Of course, each time they overcame a problem, it was replaced by three more. That was expected, and Lester even came to look upon the growing complexity as a blessing. Keeping busy was the only effective way to fight off the same images that haunted his mind, replaying over and over again.

A golden mist, falling on Dooden Mesa. Only immersion in work could drive out the keening cries of g’Kek citizens, trapped by poison rain pouring from a Jophur cruiser.

A cruiser he had carelessly summoned, by giving in to his greatest vice — curiosity.

“Do not blame yourself Lester,” Ur-Jah counseled in a dialect of GalSeven. “The enemy would have found Dooden soon anyway. Meanwhile, your research harvested valuable information. It helped lead to cures for the qheuen and hoonish plagues. Life consists of trade-offs, my friend.”

Perhaps. Lester admitted things might work that way on paper. Especially if you assumed, as many did, that the poor g’Kek were doomed anyway.

That kind of philosophy comes easier to the urrish, who know that only a fraction of their offspring can or should survive. We humans wail for a lifetime if we lose a son or daughter. If we find urs callous, it’s good to recall how absurdly sentimental we seem to them.

Lester tried to think like an urs.

He failed.

Now came news from the commandos who so bravely plumbed the lake covering the Glade of Gathering. Sergeant Jeni Shen reported partial success, freeing some Daniks from their trapped ship … only to lose others to the Jophur, including the young heretic sage, Lark Koolhan. A net loss, as far as Lester was concerned.

What might the aliens be doing to poor Lark right now?

I never should have agreed to his dangerous plan.

Lester realized, he did not have the temperament to be a war leader. He could not spend people, like fuel for a fire, even as a price for victory.

When all this was over, assuming anyone survived, he planned to resign from the Council of Sages and become the most reclusive scholar in Biblos, creeping like a specter past dusty shelves of ancient tomes. Or else he might resume his old practice of meditation in the narrow Canyon of the Blessed, where life’s cares were known to vanish under a sweet ocean of detached oblivion.

It sounded alluring — a chance to retreat from life.

But for now, there was simply too much to do.

The council seldom met anymore.

Phwhoondau, who had made a lifelong study of the languages and ways of fabled Galactics, had responsibility for negotiating with the Jophur. Unfortunately, there seemed little to haggle about. Just futile pleading for the invaders to change their many-ringed minds. Phwhoondau sent repeated entreaties to the toroidal aliens, protesting that the High Sages knew nothing about the much-sought “dolphin ship.”

Believe us, O great Jophur lords, the hoonish sage implored. We have no secret channel of communication with your prey. The events you speak of were all unrelated … a series of coincidences.

But the Jophur were too angry to believe it.

In attempting to negotiate, Phwhoondau was advised by Chorsh, the new traeki representative. But that replacement for Asx the Wise had few new insights to offer. As a member of the Tarek Town Explosers Guild, Chorsh was a valued technician, not an expert on distant Jophur cousins.

What Chorsh did have was a particularly useful talent — a summoning torus.

Shifting summer winds carried the traeki’s scent message all over the Slope — a call from Chorsh to all qualified ring stacks.

Come … come now to where you/we are needed.…

Hundreds of them already stood in single file, a chain of fatty heaps that stretched on for nearly a league, winding amid the gently bending trunks of boo. Each volunteer squatted on its own feast of decaying matter that work crews kept stoked, like feeding logs to a steam engine. Chuffing and smoking from exertion, the chem-synth gang dripped glistening fluids into makeshift troughs made of split and hollowed saplings, contributing to a trickle that eventually became a rivulet of foul-smelling liquor.

Immobile and speechless, they hardly looked like sentient beings. More like tall, greasy beehives, laid one after another along a twisty road. But that image was deceiving. Lester saw swathes of color flash across the body of one nearby traeki — a subtle interplay of shades that rippled first between the stack’s component rings, as if they were holding conversations among themselves. Then the pattern coalesced, creating a unified shape of light and shadows at the points that lay nearest to the traeki’s neighbors, on either side. Those stacks, in turn, responded with changes in their own surfaces.

Lester recognized the wavelike motif — traeki laughter. The workers were sharing jokes, among their own rings and from stack to stack.

They are the strangest of the Six, Lester thought. And yet we understand them … and they, us.

I doubt even the sophisticates of the Five Galaxies can say the same thing about the Jophur. Out there, none of their advanced science could achieve what we have simply by living next to traeki, day in and day out.

It was pretty crude humor, Lester could tell. Many of these workers were pharmacists, back in their home villages all over the Slope. The one nearest Lester had been speculating about alternative uses of the stuff they were making — perhaps how it might also serve as a cure for the perennial problem of hoonish constipation … especially if accompanied by liberal applications of heat.…