Infinity's Shore (48 page)

Then, night before last, an idea came to Lark in the form of a dream.

The hivvern lays its eggs beneath deep snow, which melts in the spring, letting each egg sink in slushy mud, which then hardens all around. Yet the ground softens again, when rainy season comes. Then the hivvern larva emerges, swimming free.

When he wakened, the idea was there, entire.

A spaceship has a sealed metal shell, like the hivvern egg. The Rothen ship may be trapped, but its crew were never touched.

Those within may yet live.

And now proof stood before him. The four in the hatchway were clearly aware of the golden barrier surrounding their ship, examining it with tools at hand.

Just one problem—they did not move. Nor was there any sign they knew they were being observed from just a hoon's length away.

Treading water, Ling scrawled on her wax-covered note board and raised it for Lark to see.

TIME DIFFERENT INSIDE
.

He fumbled with his own board, tethered to his waist.

TIME SLOWER
?

Her answer was confusing.

PERHAPS
.

OR ELSE QUANTIZED
.

FRAME-SHIFTED
.

His perplexed look conveyed more than written words. Ling wiped the board and scratched again.

DO EXACTLY AS I DO
.

He nodded, watching her carefully. Ling swished her arms and legs to turn
away
from the ship. Imitating her, Lark found himself looking across the poor wounded Glade. All the trees had been shattered by ravening beams, left to submerge under the rising lake. Turbid water made everything hazy, but Lark thought he saw
bones
mixed among the splinters. Urrish ribs and hoonish spines, jumbled with grinning human skulls. Not the way bodies ought to be drossed. Not respectful of the dead, or Jijo.

Perhaps the Jophur will let us seed a mulc spider in this new lake
, he mused.
Something ought to be done to clean up the mess.

He was jarred by Ling's nudge.
TURN BACK NOW
, her wax board said. Lark copied her maneuver again … and stared in surprise for a second time.

They had moved!

As before, statues stood in the hatchway. Only now their poses were all changed! One human pointed outward
wearing an amazed look. Another seemed to peer straight at Lark, as if frozen in midrealization.

They did all this while we were turned away?

Time's flow within the golden shell was stranger than he could begin to comprehend.

THIS MAY TAKE SOME DOING
, Ling Wrote.

Lark met her eyes, noting they held tense, hopeful irony.

He nodded.

You could say that again.

Alvin

I
SPENT MOST OF THE RETURN TRIP WITH MY NOSE
buried in my journal, reviewing all the things that I've seen and heard since
Wuphon's Dream
plunged below Terminus Rock. Pincer kindly chewed my pencil to a point for me. Then I lay down and wrote down the section before this one.

What began as a guess grew into reinforced conviction.

Concentration also diverted attention from nervous anticipation and the pain in my slowly healing spine. My friends tried wheedling me, but I lapsed into hoonish stubbornness, refusing to confide in them. After all, the phuvnthus had gone to great lengths to hide their identity.

The spinning voice said it was to protect us. Maybe that was just patronizing glaver dreck. Typical from grown-ups. But what if he told the truth? How can I risk my friends?

When the time comes, I'll confront the voice alone.

Sara

S
HE DRIFTED IN A CLOUD OF MATHEMATICS.

All around her floated arcs and conic sections, glowing, as though made of enduring fire. Meteors streaked past, coruscating along paths smoothly ordained by gravity.

Then more stately shapes joined the frolicking figures and she guessed they might be planets whose routes were elliptical, not parabolic. Each had its own reference frame, around which all other masses seemed to move.

Rising, falling…

Rising, falling…

The dance spoke of a lost science she had studied once, in an obscure text from the Biblos Archive. Its name floated through her delirium—
orbital mechanics
—as if managing the ponderous gyres of suns and moons were no more complex than maintaining a windmill or waterwheel.

Dimly, Sara knew physical pain. But it came to her as if through a swaddling of musty clothes, like something unpleasant tucked in a bottom pantry drawer. The strong scent of traeki unguents filled her nostrils, dulling every agony except one … the uneasy knowledge—
I've been harmed.

Sometimes she roused enough to hear speech … several lisping urrish voices … the gruff terseness of Kurt the Exploser … and one whose stiff, pedantic brilliance she knew from happier days.

Purofsky. Sage of mysteries…

But what is he doing here?

 … and where is here?

At one point she managed to crack her eyelids in hopes of solving the riddle. But Sara quickly decided she must still be dreaming. For no place could exist like the one she witnessed through a blurry haze—a world of spinning glass. A universe of translucent saucers, disks and wheels, tilting and rolling against each other at odd angles, reflecting shafts of light in rhythmic bursts.

It was all too dizzying. She closed her eyes against the maelstrom, yet it continued in her mind, persisting in the form of abstractions.

A sinusoidal wave filled her mental-foreground, but no longer the static shape she knew from inked figures in books. Instead, this one undulated like ripples on a pond, with time the apparent free variable.

Soon the first wave was joined by a second, with twice the frequency, then a third with the peaks and troughs compressed yet again. New cycles merged, one after another,
combining in an endless series—
a transform—
whose sum built toward a new complex figure, an entity with jagged peaks and valleys, like a mountain range.

Out of order … chaos …

Mountains brought to mind the last thing Sara had seen, before spilling off the volcano's narrow path, tumbling over sharp stones toward a river of fire.

Flashes from a distant peak … long-short, short-long, medium-short-short…

Coded speech, conveyed by a language of light, not unlike GalTwo…

Words of urgency, of stealth and battle…

Her mind's fevered random walk was broken now and then by soft contact on her brow—a warm cloth, or else a gentle touch. She recognized the long, slender shape of Prity's fingers, but there was another texture as well, a
man's
contact on her arm, her cheek, or just holding her hand.

When he sang to her, she knew it was the Stranger … 
Emerson
 … by his odd accent and the way the lyrics flowed, smoothly from memory, as a liquid stream, without thought to any particular word or phrase. Yet the song was no oddly syncopated Earthling ballad, but a Jijoan folk ballad, familiar as a lullaby. Sara's mother sang it to her, whenever she was ill—as Sara used to murmur it to the man from space, soon after he crashed on Jijo, barely clinging to life.

Even half-conscious, she knew something important. He could not sing unless the words were stored deep within, beyond the scarred part of his brain. It meant she must have touched him, when their roles were reversed.

Not all the unguents in the world—nor the cool beauty of mathematics—could do as much for Sara. What finally called her back was knowing someone missed her, when she was gone.

Ewasx