Infinity's Shore (44 page)

MY DECISION may not be wholly rational.

For all I know, Alvin may be bluffing in order to avoid exile. He may have no idea who we are.

Or perhaps he really has surmised the truth. After all, dolphins are mentioned in many of the Earth books he's read. Even wearing a fully armored, six-legged walker unit, a fin's outline can he recognized if you look in the right way. Once the idea occurred to him, Alvin's fertile imagination would cover the rest.

As a precaution, we could intern the kids much farther south, or in a subsea habitat. That might keep them safe and silent. Tsh't suggested as much, before I ordered the
Hikahi
to turn around and bring them back.

I admit I'm biased. I miss Alvin and his pals. If only the fractious races of the Five Galaxies could have a camaraderie like theirs.

Anyway, they are grown-up enough to choose their own fate.

WE'VE had a report from Makanee's nurse. On her way by sled to check on a sick member of Kaa's team, peepoe spotted two more piles of junked spacecraft, smaller than this one, but suitable should we have to move
Streaker
soon. Hannes dispatched crews to start preparatory work.

Again, we must rely on the same core group of about fifty skilled crewfen. The reliable ones, whose concentration remains unflagged after three stressful years. Those who aren't frightened by superstitious rumors of sea monsters lurking amid the dead Buyur machines.

AS for our pursuers—we ve seen no more gravitic signatures of flying craft, east of the mountains. That may be good news, but the respite makes me nervous. Two small spacecraft can't be the whole story. Sensors detect some great brute of a ship, about five hundred klicks northwest. Is this vast cruiser related to the two vessels that fell near here?

They must surely realize that this region is of interest.

It seems creepy they haven't followed up.

As if they are confident they have all the time in the world.

THE Niss Machine managed to exchange just a few more words with that so-called noor beast that our little drone encountered ashore. But the creature keeps us on tenterhooks, treating the little scout robot like its private toy, or a prey animal to be teased with bites and scratches. Yet it also carries it about in its mouth, careful not to get tangled in the fiber cable, letting us have brief, tantalizing views of the crashed sky boats.

We had assumed that “noor” were simply devolved versions of
tytlal
 … of little interest except as curiosities. But if some retain the power of speech, what else might they be capable of?

At first I thought the Niss Machine would be the one
best qualified to handle this confusing encounter. After all, the noor is its “cousin,” in a manner of speaking.

But family connections can involve sibling rivalry, even contempt. Maybe the Tymbrimi machine is simply the wrong spokesman.

One more reason I'm eager to bring Alvin back.

AMID all this, I had time to do a bit more research on Herbie. I wish there were some way to guess the isotopic input profiles, before he died, but chemical racemization analyses of samples taken from the ancient mummy appear to show considerably less temporal span than was indicated by cosmic-ray track histories of the hull Tom boarded, in the Shallow Cluster.

In other words, Herbie seems younger than the vessel Tom found him on.

That could mean a number of things.

Might Herb simply be the corpse of some
previous
grave robber, who slinked aboard just a few million years ago, instead of one to two billion?

Or could the discrepancy be an effect of those strange fields we found in the Shallow Cluster, surrounding that fleet of ghostly starcraft, rendering them nearly invisible? Perhaps the outer hulls of those huge, silent ships experienced time differently than their contents.

It makes me wonder about poor Lieutenant Yachapa-jean, who was killed by those same fields, and whose body had to be left behind. Might some future expedition someday recover the well-preserved corpse of a dolphin and go rushing around the universe thinking they have the recovered relic of a progenitor?

Mistaking the youngest sapient race for the oldest. What a joke that would be.

A joke on them, and a joke on us.

Herbie never changes. Yet I swear I sometimes catch him grinning.

OUR stolen Galactic Library unit gets queer and opaque at times. If I werent in disguise, the big cube probably wouldn't tell me anything at all. Even decked out as a Thennanin admiral, I find the Library evasive when shown those symbols that Tom copied aboard the derelict ship.

One glyph looks like the emblem worn by every Library unit in known space—a great spiral wheel. Only, instead of five swirling arms rotating around a common center, this one has nine! And eight concentric
ovals
overlie the stylized galactic helix, making it resemble a bull's-eye target.

I never saw anything like it before.

When I press for answers, our purloined archive says the symbol “… is very old …” and that its use is “… memetically discouraged.”

Whatever that means.

At risk of humanizing a machine, the unit seems to get grumpy, as if it dislikes being confused. I've seen this before.

Terragens researchers find that certain subject areas make Libraries touchy, as if they hate having to work hard by digging in older files.… Or maybe that's an excuse to avoid admitting there are things they don't know.

It reminds me of discussions Tom and I used to have with Jake Demwa, when we'd all sit up late trying to make sense of the universe.

Jake had a theory—that Galactic history, which purports to go back more than a billion years, is actually only accurate to about one hundred and fifty million.

“With each eon you go further back than that,” he said, “what we're told has an ever-increasing flavor of a carefully concocted fable.”

Oh, there's evidence that oxygen-breathing starfarers have been around ten times as long. Surely some of the ancient events
recorded in official annals must be authentic. But much has also been painted over.

It's a chilling notion. The great Institutes are supposed to he dedicated to truth and continuity. How, then, can valid information be
memetically discouraged?

Yes, this seems a rather abstract obsession, at a time when
Streaker
—and now Jijo—faces dire and immediate threats. Yet I can't help thinking it all comes together here at the bottom of a planetary graveyard, where tectonic plates melt history into ore.

We are caught in the slowly grinding gears of a machine more vast than we imagined.