Infinity's Shore (106 page)

DAVID BRIN is the author of eleven novels,
Sundiver, The Uplift War Startide Rising, The Practice Effect The Postman, Heart of the Comet
(with Gregory Benford),
Earth, Glory Season, Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore
and
Heaven's Reach
, as well as
Contacting Aliens: An Illustrated Guide to the Uplift Universe
(with Kevin Lenagh) and the short-story collections
The River of Time
and
Otherness.
He has a doctorate in astrophysics and has been a NASA consultant and a physics professor. He lives in southern California, where he is at work on his next novel.

Turn the page for a preview of
Heaven's Reach
, the third and final book of David Brin's highly acclaimed Uplift Storm trilogy.

Sara

There is a word-glyph.

It names a locale where three states of matter coincide—two that are fluid, swirling past a third that is adamant as coral.

A kind of froth can form in such a place. Dangerous, deceptive foam, beaten to a head by fate-filled tides. No one enters such a turmoil voluntarily.

But sometimes a force called desperation drives prudent sailors to set course for ripping shoals.

A slender shape plummets through the outer fringes of a mammoth star. Caterpillar-ribbed, with rows of talonlike protrusions that bite into spacetime, the vessel claws its way urgently against a bitter gale.

Diffuse flames lick the scarared hull of ancient cerametal, adding new layers to a strange soot coating. Tendrils of plasma fire seek entry, thwarted (so far) by wavering fields.

In time, the heat will find its way through.

Midway along the vessels girth, a narrow wheel turns, like a wedding band that twists around a nervous finger.
Rows of windows pass by as the slim ring rotates. Unlit from within, most of the dim panes only reflect stellar fire.

Then, rolling into view, a single rectangle shines with artificial color.

A pane for viewing in two directions. A universe without, and within.

Contemplating the maelstrom, Sara mused aloud.

“My criminal ancestors took their sneakship through this same inferno on their way to Jijo … covering their tracks under the breath of Great Izmunuti.”

Pondering the forces at work just a hand's breadth away, she brushed her fingertips against the crystal surface that kept actinic heat from crossing the narrow gap. One part of her—book-weaned and tutored in mathematics—could grasp the physics of a star whose radius was bigger than her homeworld's yearly orbit. A red giant, in its turgid final stage, boiling a rich stew of nuclear-cooked atoms toward the black vacuum of space.

Abstract knowledge was fine. But Sara's spine also trembled with a superstitious shiver, spawned by her upbringing as a savage
sooner
on a barbarian world. This Earthship,
Streaker
, might be hapless prey—desperately fleeing a titanic hunter many times its size—but the dolphin-crewed vessel still struck Sara as godlike and awesome, carrying more mass than all the wooden dwellings of the Slope. In her wildest dreams, dwelling in a treehouse next to a groaning water mill, she never imagined that destiny might take her on such a ride, swooping through the fringes of a hellish star.

Especially Izmunuti, whose very name was fearsome. To the Six Races, huddling in secret terror on Jijo, it stood for the downward path. A door that swung just one way, toward exile.

For two thousand years, emigrants had slinked past the giant star to find shelter on Jijo. First the wheeled g'Kek race, frantically evading genocide. Then came traekis—gentle stacks of waxy rings who were fleeing their own tyrannical relations—followed by qheuens, hoons, urs, and humans, all settling in a narrow realm between the Rimmer Mountains and a surf-stained shore. Each wave of new arrivals abandoned their starships, computers, and other
high-tech implements, sending every god-machine down to the sea, tumbling into Jijo's deep midden of forgetfulness. Breaking with their past, all six clans of former skylords settled down to rustic lives, renouncing the sky forever.

Until the Civilization of the Five Galaxies finally stumbled on the commonwealth of outcasts.

The day had to come, sooner or later; the Sacred Scrolls had said so. No band of trespassers could stay hidden perpetually. Not in a cosmos that had been catalogued for over a billion years, where planets such as Jijo were routinely declared fallow, set aside for rest and restoration. Still, the sages of the Commons of Jijo
had
hoped for more time.

Time for the exile races to prepare. To purify themselves. To seek redemption. To forget the galactic terrors that made them outcasts in the first place.

The Scrolls also foresaw that august magistrates from the Galactic Migration Institute would alight to judge the descendants of trespassers. But instead, the starcraft that pierced Jijo's veil this fateful year carried several types of
outlaws.
First gene raiders, then murderous opportunists, and finally a band of Earthling refugees even more ill-fated than Sara's hapless ancestors.

I used to dream of riding a starship
, she thought, pondering the plasma storm outside.
But no fantasy was ever like this—fleeing with dolphins through a fiery night, chased by a battleship full of angry Jophur.

Fishlike cousins of humans, pursued through space by egotistical cousins of traeki.

The coincidence beggared Sara's imagination.

Anglic words broke through her musing, in a voice Sara always found vexingly sardonic.

“
I have finished calculating the hyperspatial tensor, oh Sage.

“
It appears you were right in your earlier estimate. The mysterious beam that emanated from Jijo a while ago did more than cause disruptions in this giant star. It also triggered a state-change in a fossil dimensional-nexus, lying dormant just half a mictaar away
.”

Sara mentally translated into terms she was used to, from the archaic texts that had schooled her.

Half a mictaar. In flat space, that would come to roughly a twientieth of a parsec.

Very close, indeed.

“So, the beam reactivated an old transfer point.” She nodded. “I knew it.”

“
Your foresight would be more impressive if I understood your methods. Humans are noted for making lucky guesses
.”

Sara turned away from the fiery spectacle outside. The office they had given her seemed like a palace, roomier than the reception hall in a qheuen rookery, with lavish fixtures she had only seen described in books two centuries out of date. This suite once belonged to a man named Ignacio Metz—killed during one of
Streaker
's previous dire encounters—an expert in the genetic-uplifting of dolphins. A true scientist, not a primitive with academic pretensions, like Sara.

From the desk-console, a twisted blue blob drifted closer—a languid, undulating shape she found as insolent as the voice it emitted.

“
Your so-called wolfling mathematics hardly seems up to the task of predicting such profound effects on the continuum. Why not just admit that you had a hunch?
”

Sara bit her lip. She would not give the Niss Machine the satisfaction of a hot response.

“Show me the tensor,” she ordered tersely. “And a chart … a
graphic
 … that includes alt three gravity wells.”

The billowing holographic creature managed to imply sarcasm with an obedient bow.

“
As you wish
.”

A cubic display two meters on a side lit up before Sara, far more vivid than the illustrations she had grown up with—flat, unmoving diagrams printed on paper pages.

A glowing mass roiled in the center, representing Izmunuti, a fireball glowing the color of wrath. Tendrils of its engorged corona waved like medusan hair, reaching beyond the limits of any normal solar system. But those lacy filaments were fast being drowned under a new disturbance. During the last few miduras, something had stirred the star to an abnormal fit of rage. Abrupt cyclonic
storms began throwing up gouts of dense plasma, tornadolike funnels, rushing far into space.

And we're going to pass through some of the worst of it, she thought.

How strange that all this violent upheaval might have originated in a boulder of psi-active stone back home on primitive Jijo. Yet she felt sure it was all triggered somehow by the Holy Egg.

Already half-immersed in this commotion, a green pinpoint plunged toward Izmunuti at frantic speed, aimed at a glancing near-passage, its hyperbolic orbit marked by a line that bent sharply around the giant star. In one direction, that slim trace led all the way back to Jijo, where
Streaker
's escape attempt had begun two exhausting days ago, breaking for liberty amid a crowd of ancient derelicts—reactivated from ocean bottom junk piles for one last, glorious, screaming run through space.

One by one, those decoys had failed, or dropped out, or were snared by the enemy's clever capture-boxes, until only
Streaker
remained, plummeting for the brief shelter of stormy Izmunuti.

As for the
forward
direction …

Instrument readings relayed by the bridge crew enabled the Niss Machine to calculate their likely heading. Apparently, Gillian Baskin had ordered a course change, taking advantage of a gravitational slingshot around the star to fling
Streaker
toward galactic north and east.

Sara swallowed hard. The destination had originally been her idea. But as time passed, she grew less certain.

“The new T-point doesn't look very stable,” she commented, following the ship's planned trajectory to the top left corner of the holo unit, where a tight mesh of curling lines funneled through an empty-looking zone of interstellar space. Reacting to her close regard, the display monitor enhanced that section. Rows of symbols glowed, showing details of the local hyperspatial matrix.

She had predicted this wonder—the reawakening of something old. Something marvelous. For a brief while, it had seemed like just the miracle they needed. A gift from the Holy Egg. An escape route from a terrible trap.

But on examining the analytical profiles, Sara concluded that the cosmos was not being all that helpful, after all.

“There
are
connection tubes opening up to other spacetime locales. But they seem rather … scanty.”

“
Well, what can you expect from a nexus that is only a few miduras old? One that was only recently yanked from slumber by a force neither of us can grasp?
”

After a pause, the Niss unit continued. “
Most of the transfer stigmata leading away from this nexus are still on the order of a Planck width. Some promising threads do appear to be coalescing, and may even be safely traversable by a starship, in a matter of weeks. Of course, that will be of little use to us
.”