Infinity's Shore (72 page)

T
HEY MADE LOVE IN A HIDDEN CAVE, NESTLED BENEATH seaside cliffs, while tidal currents pounded nearby, shooting spume fountains high enough to rival the craggy promontories.

At last!
Booming echoes seemed to shout each time a wave dashed against the bluffs, as if everything leading up to that moment had been prelude, a mere transport of momentum across the vast ocean, passed from one patch of salt water to the next. As if a wave may only become real by spending itself against stone.

Rolling echoes reverberated in the sheltered cave.
That's me
, Kaa thought, listening to the breakers cry out their brief reification. As a coast fulfills a tide, he now felt completed by contact with another.

Water sloshed through his open mouth, still throbbing with their passion. The secret pool had her flavor.

Peepoe rolled along Kaa's side, stroking with her pectoral fins, making his skin tingle. He responded with a brush of his tail flukes, pleased at how she quivered with unguarded
bliss. This postcoital affection had even deeper meaning than the brief glory dance of mating. It was like the difference between mere need and choice.

His Trinary haiku came out as it should, almost involuntarily, not mulled or rehearsed by the frontal lobes that human gene crafters had so thoroughly palped and reworked during neo-dolphin uplift. The poem's clicks and squeals diffracted through the cave's grottoes at the same moment they first resonated in his skull.

Peepoe's reply emerged the same way, candidly languid, with a natural openness that brooked no lies.

Her message both thrilled and validated, in a way she must have known he'd treasure.
I have my nickname back
, Kaa mused happily.

All would have been perfection then—a flawless moment—except that something else intruded on his pleasure. A tremor, faint and glimmering, like the sound shadow made by a moray eel, passing swiftly in the night, leaving fey shivers in its wake.

Yes, you have won back your name
, whispered a faint voice, as if from a distant seaquake. Or an iceberg, groaning, a thousand miles away.

But to keep it, you will have to earn it.

When Kaa next checked the progress of his spy drone, it had nearly reached the top of the Mount Guenn funicular.

At the beginning, Peepoe's decision to stay with him had been more professional than personal, helping Kaa pilot the special probe up a hollow wooden monorail that climbed the rutted flank of an extinct volcano. While the
bamboolike track was a marvel of aboriginal engineering, Kaa found it no simple matter guiding the little robot past sections filled with dirt or debris. He and Peepoe wound up having to camp in the cave, to monitor it round the clock, instead of returning to Brookida and the others. A fully autonomous unit could have managed the journey on its own, but Gillian Baskin had vetoed sending any machine ashore that might be smart enough to show up on Jophur detectors.

A moment of triumph came as the camera eye finally emerged from the rail, passed through a camouflaged station, then proceeded down halls of chiseled stone, trailing its slender fiber comm line like a hurried spider. Kaa had it crawl along the ceiling—the safest route, offering a good view of the native workshops.

Other observers tuned in at this point. From the
Streaker
, Hannes Suessi and his engineering chiefs remarked on the spacious chambers where urrish and qheuen smiths tapped ominous heat from lava pools, dipping ladles into nearby pits for melting, alloying, and casting. Most questions were answered by Ur-ronn, one of the four young guests whose presence on the
Streaker
posed such quandaries. Ur-ronn explained the forge in thickly accented Anglic, revealing tense reserve. Her service as guide was part of a risky bargain, with the details still being worked out.

“
I do not see Uriel at the hearths.
” Ur-ronn's voice came tinnily from Kaa's receiver. “
Ferhafs she is ufstairs, in her hovvy roon
.”

Uriel's hobby room. From the journal of Alvin Hphwayuo, Kaa envisioned an ornately useless toy gadget of sticks and spinning glass, something to hypnotize away the ennui of existence on a savage world. He found it puzzling that a leader of this menaced society would spare time for the arty Rube Goldberg contraption Alvin had described.

Ur-ronn told Kaa to send the probe down a long hall, past several mazelike turns, then through an open door into a dim chamber … where at last the fabled apparatus came into view.

Peepoe let out an amazed whistle.

Yeah
, Kaa agreed, staring at a vaulted chamber that would have been impressive even on Earth, filled with crisscrossing timbers and sparkling lights. Alvin's account did the place injustice, never conveying the complex
unity
of all the whirling, spinning parts—for even at a glance one could tell that an underlying rhythm controlled it all. Each ripple and turn was linked to an elegant, ever-changing whole.

The scene was splendid, and ultimately baffling. Dim figures could be glimpsed moving about the scaffolding, making adjustments—several small, scurrying shapes and at least one bipedal silhouette that looked tentatively human. But Kaa could not even judge scale properly because most of the machine lay in deep shadows. Moreover, holovision had been designed to benefit creatures with two forward-facing eyes. A panel equipped with sono-parallax emitters would have better suited dolphins.

Even the normally wry Hannes Suessi was struck silent by this florid, twinkling palace of motion.

Finally, Ur-ronn cut in.

“
I see Uriel! She is second fron the right, in that group standing near the chinfanzee
.”

Several four-footed urs nervously watched the machine whirl, next to a chimp with a sketchpad. Random light pulses dappled their flanks, resembling fauns in a forest, but Kaa could tell that gray-snouted Uriel must be older than the rest. As they watched, the chimp showed the smith an array of abstract curves, commenting on the results with hand signs instead of words.

“How we gonna do this,
Streaker
?” Kaa asked. “Just barge in and start t-talking?”

Until lately, it had seemed best for all concerned that
Streaker
keep her troubles separate. But now events made a meeting seem inevitable—even imperative.

“
Let's listen before announcing ourselves
,” Gillian Baskin instructed. “
I'd rather conditions were more private
.”

In other words, she preferred to contact
Uriel
, not a
whole crowd. Kaa sent the robot creeping forward. But before any urrish words became audible, another speaker interrupted from
Streaker
's end.

“
Allow me this indulgence
,” fluted the refined voice of the Niss Machine. “
Kaa, will you again focus the main camera on Uriel's contraption? I wish to pursue a conjecture
.”

When Gillian did not object, Kaa had the probe look at the expanse of scaffolding a second time.

“
Note the stretch of sand below
,” the Niss urged. “
Neat piles accumulate wherever light falls most frequently. These piles correlate with the drawings the chimpanzee just showed Uriel
.…”

Kaa's attention jerked away, caught by a slap of Peepoe's tail.

“Someone's c-coming. Peripheral scanner says approaching life signs are Jophur!”

Despite objections from the Niss, Kaa made the probe swivel around. There, framed in the doorway, they saw a silhouette
Streaker
's crew had come to loathe—like a tapered cone of greasy doughnuts.

Gillian Baskin broke in. “
Calm down, everyone.… I'm sure it's just a traeki
.”

“
Of course it is
,” confirmed Ur-ronn. “
That stack is Tyug
.”

Kaa recalled. This was the “chief alchemist” of Mount Guenn Forge. Uriel's master of chemical synthesis. Kaa brushed reassuringly against Peepoe, and felt her relax a bit. According to Alvin's journal, traeki were docile beings quite unlike their starfaring cousins.

So he was caught completely off guard when Tyug turned a row of jewel-like sensor patches
upward
, toward the tiny spy probe. Thoughtful curls of orange vapor steamed from its central vent. Then the topmost ring bulged outward…

 … and abruptly spewed a jet of flying objects, swarming angrily toward the camera eye! Kaa and the others had time for a brief glimpse of
insects
—or some local equivalent—creating a confusing buzz of light and sound with
their compound eyes and fast-beating wings. A horde of blurry creatures converged, surrounding Kaa's lenses and pickups.

Moments later, all that reached his console was a smear of dizzying static.

Gillian

A
MAGNIFIED IMAGE FLOATED ABOVE THE CONFERENCE table—depicting a small creature, frozen in flight, whose wings were a rainbow-streaked haze, painful to the eye. By contrast, the Niss Machine's compact mesh of spiral lines seemed drab and abstruse. A strain of pique filled its voice.

“
Might any of you local children be able to identify this bothersome thing for us?
”

The words were polite enough, though Gillian winced at its insolent manner.

Fortunately, Alvin Hph-wayuo showed no awareness of being patronized. The young hoon sat near his friends, throbbing his throat sac in the subsonic range for both noor beasts, one lounging on each broad shoulder. To the machine's sardonic question, Alvin nodded amiably, a human gesture that seemed completely unaffected.

“Hrm. That's easy enough. It is a privacy wasp.”

“Gene-altered toys of the Vuyur,” lisped Ur-ronn. “A well-known nuisance.”

Huck's four eyestalks waved, peering at the image. “Now I see how they got their name. They normally move so fast, I never got a good look before. It looks kind of like a tiny rewq, with the membranes turned into wings.”

Hannes Suessi grunted, tapping the tabletop with his prosthetic left arm.

“Whatever the origins of these critters, it seems Uriel was armed against the possibility of being spied upon. Our probe's been rendered useless. Will she now assume that it was sent by the Jophur?”

Ur-ronn shrugged, an uncertain twist of her long neck.
“Who else? How would Uriel have heard of you guys … unless the Jophur thenselves sfoke of you?”

Gillian agreed. “Then she may destroy the drone, unless we make it speak Anglic words right away. Niss, can you and Kaa get a message through?”

“
We are working to accomplish that. Commands rise from the control console, but the bedlam given off by these so-called wasps appears to swamp all bands, thwarting confirmation. The probe may be effectively inoperable
.”

“Damn. It would take days to send another. Days we don't have.” Gillian turned to Ur-ronn. “This might make our promise hard to keep.”

She hated saying it. Part of her had looked forward to meeting the legendary smith of Mount Guenn. By all accounts, Uriel was an individual of shrewdness and insight, whose sway on Jijoan society was notable.

“There is another off-shun,” Ur-ronn suggested. “Fly there in ferson.”

“An option we must set aside for now,” replied Lieutenant Tsh't. “Since any aircraft sent beyond these shielding waters would be detected instantly, by the enemy battle-ship-p.”

The dolphin officer lay on the cushioned pad of a sixlegged walker. Her long, sleek body took up the end of the conference room farthest from the sooner youths, her left eye scanning the members of the ship's council. “Believe it or not-t, and despite our disappointment over the loss of Kaa's probe, there are other agenda items left to cover.”