Infinity's Shore (7 page)

“
You
should talk? With that green eyeball sweat—”

“All right, all right!” I laughed. “Just stopper it long enough for me to look at you, eh?”

Ur-ronn was right. Huck's eyestalks needed grooming and she had good reason to worry about her spokes. Many were broken, with new-spun fibers just starting to lace the rims. She would have to move cautiously for some time.

As for Pincer, he looked happier than ever.

“I guess you were right about there being monsters in the deep,” I told our red-shelled friend. “Even if they hardly look like the ones you descr—”

I yelped when sharp needles seemed to lance into my back, clambering up my neck ridge. I quickly recognized the rolling growl of
Huphu
, our little noor-beast mascot, expressing gladness by demanding a rumble umble from me right away.

Before I could find out if my sore throat sac was up to it, Ur-ronn whistled from the pane of dark glass. “They turned on the searchlight again,” she fluted, with hushed awe in her voice. “Alvin, hurry. You've got to look!”

Awkwardly on crutches, I moved to the place they made for me. Huck stroked my arm. “You always wanted to see this, pal,” she said. “So gaze out there in wonder.

“Welcome to the Great Midden.”

Asx

H
ERE IS ANOTHER MEMORY, MY RINGS. AN EVENT that followed the brief Battle of the Glade, so swiftly that war echoes still abused our battered forest canyons.

Has the wax congealed enough yet? Can you stroke-and-sense the awesome disquiet, the frightening beauty of that evening, as we watched a harsh, untwinkling glow pass overhead?

Trace
the fatty memory of that spark crossing the sky, brightening as it spiraled closer.

No one could doubt its identity.

The Rothen cruiser, returning for its harvest of bioplunder, looted from a fragile world.

Returning for those comrades it had left behind.

Instead of genetic booty, the crew will find their station smashed, their colleagues killed or taken.

Worse, their true faces are known! We castaways might testify against them in Galactic courts. Assuming we survive.

It takes no cognition genius to grasp the trouble we faced. We six fallen races of forlorn Jijo.

As an Earthling writer might put it—we found ourselves in fetid mulch. Very ripe and very deep.

Sara

T
HE JOURNEY PASSED FROM AN ANXIOUS BLUR INTO something exalting … almost transcendent.

But not at the beginning.

When they perched her suddenly atop a galloping creature straight out of mythology, Sara's first reaction was terrified surprise. With snorting nostrils and huge tossing head, the
horse
was more daunting than Tarek Town's stone tribute to a lost species. Its muscular torso flexed with each forward bound, shaking Sara's teeth as it crossed
the foothills of the central Slope by the light of a pale moon.

After two sleepless days and nights, it still seemed dreamlike the way a squadron of the legendary beasts came trotting into the ruined Urunthai campsite, accompanied by armed urrish escorts. Sara and her friends had just escaped captivity—their former kidnappers lay either dead or bound with strips of shredded tent cloth—but she expected reenslavement at any moment. Only then, instead of fresh foes, the darkness brought forth these bewildering saviors.

Bewildering to everyone except Kurt the Exploser, who welcomed the newcomers as expected friends. While Jomah and the Stranger exclaimed wonder at seeing real-life horses, Sara barely had time to blink before she was thrust onto a saddle.

Blade volunteered to stay by the bleak fire and tend the wounded, though envy filled each forlorn spin of his blue cupola. Sara would trade places with her qheuen friend, but his chitin armor was too massive for a horse to carry. There was barely time to give Blade a wave of encouragement before the troop wheeled back the way they came, bearing her into the night.

Pounding hoofbeats soon made Sara's skull ache.

I guess it beats captivity by Dedinger's human chauvinists, and those fanatic Urunthai.
The coalition of zealots, volatile as an exploser's cocktail, had joined forces to snatch the Stranger and sell him to Rothen invaders. But they underestimated the enigmatic voyager. Despite his crippling loss of speech, the starman found a way to incite urs-human suspicion into bloody riot.

Leaving us masters of our own fate, though it couldn't last.

Now here was a
different
coalition of humans and centauroid urs! A more cordial group, but just as adamant about hauling her Ifni-knew-where.

When limnous Torgen rose above the foothills, Sara got to look over the urrish warriors, whose dun flanks were daubed with more subtle war paint than the garish Urunthai. Yet their eyes held the same dark flame that drenched urs' souls when conflict scents fumed. Cantering
in skirmish formation, their slim hands cradled arbalests while long necks coiled, tensely wary. Though much smaller than horses, the urrish fighters conveyed formidable craftiness.

The human rescuers were even more striking. Six
women
who came north with nine saddled horses, as if they expected to retrieve just two or three others for a return trip.

But there's six of us. Kurt and Jomah. Prity and me. The Stranger and Dedinger.

No matter. The stern riders seemed indifferent about doubling up, two to a saddle.

Is that why they're all female? To keep the weight down?

While deft astride their great mounts, the women seemed uneasy with the hilly terrain of gullies and rocky spires. Sara gathered they disliked rushing about strange trails at night. She could hardly blame them.

Not one had a familiar face. That might have surprised Sara a month ago, given Jijo's small human population. The Slope must be bigger than she thought.

Dwer would tell stories about his travels, scouting for the sages. He claimed he'd been everywhere within a thousand leagues.

Her brother never mentioned horse-riding amazons.

Sara briefly wondered if they came from off-Jijo, since this seemed the year for spaceships. But no. Despite some odd slang, their terse speech was related to Jijoan dialects she knew from her research. And while the riders seemed unfamiliar with this region, they knew to lean away from a migurv tree when the trail passed near its sticky fronds. The Stranger, though warned with gestures not to touch its seed pods, reached for one curiously and learned the hard way.

She glanced at Kurt. The exploser's gaunt face showed satisfaction with each league they sped southward. The existence of horses was no surprise to him.

We're told our society is open. But clearly there are secrets known to a few.

Not
all
explosers shared it. Kurt's nephew chattered happy amazement while exchanging broad grins with the Stranger …

Sara corrected herself.

With
Emerson.
…

She peered at the dark man who came plummeting from the sky months ago, dousing his burns in a dismal swamp near Dolo Village. No longer the near corpse she had nursed in her tree house, the star voyager was proving a resourceful adventurer. Though still largely mute, he had passed a milestone a few miduras ago when he began thumping his chest, repeating that word—
Emerson
—over and over, beaming pride over a feat that undamaged folk took for granted. Uttering one's own name.

Emerson seemed at home on his mount. Did that mean horses were still used among the god worlds of the Five Galaxies? If so, what purpose might they serve, where miraculous machines did your bidding at a nod and wink?

Sara checked on her chimp assistant, in case the jouncing ride reopened Prity's bullet wound. Riding with both arms clenched round the waist of a horsewoman, Prity kept her eyes closed the whole time, no doubt immersed in her beloved universe of abstract shapes and forms—a better world than this one of sorrow and messy non-linearity.

That left
Dedinger
, the rebel leader, riding along with both hands tied. Sara wasted no pity on the scholar-turned-prophet. After years preaching militant orthodoxy, urging his desert followers toward the Path of Redemption, the ex-sage clearly knew patience. Dedinger's hawklike face bore an expression Sara found unnerving.

Serene calculation.

The tooth-jarring pace swelled when the hilly track met open ground. Soon Ulashtu's detachment of urrish warriors fell behind, unable to keep up.

No wonder some urs clans resented horses, when humans first settled Jijo. The beasts gave us mobility, the trait most loved by urrish captains.

Two centuries ago, after trouncing the human newcomers in battle, the original Urunthai faction claimed Earthlings' beloved mounts as war booty, and slaughtered every one.

They figured we'd be no more trouble, left to walk and fight on foot.
A mistake that proved fatal when Drake the Elder forged a coalition to hunt the Urunthai, and drowned the cult's leadership at Soggy Hoof Falls.

Only, it seems horses weren't extinct, after all. How could a clan of horse-riding folk remain hidden all this time?

And as puzzling—
Why emerge now, risking exposure by rushing to meet Kurt?

It must be the crisis of the starships, ending Jijo's blessed/cursed isolation. What point in keeping secrets, if Judgment Day is at hand?

Sara was exhausted and numb by the time morning pushed through an overcast sky. An expanse of undulating hills stretched ahead to a dark green marsh.

The party dismounted at last by a shaded creek. Hands aimed her toward a blanket, where she collapsed with a shuddering sigh.

Sleep came laced with images of people she had left behind.

Nelo, her aged father, working in his beloved paper mill, unaware that some conspired its ruin.

Melina, her mother, dead several years now, who always seemed an outsider since arriving in Dolo long ago, with a baby son in her arms.