Infinity's Shore

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.

Streakers

Hannes

AT TIMES HANNES SUESSI ACUTELY MISSED HIS young friend Emerson, whose uncanny skills helped make Streaker purr like a compact leopard, prowling the trails of space.

Of course Hannes admired the able fins of his engineroom gang — amiable, hardworking crew mates without a hint of regression in the bunch. But dolphins tend to visualize objects as sonic shapes, and often set their calibrations intuitively, based on the way motor vibrations sounded. A helpful technique, but not always reliable.

Emerson D’Anite, on the other hand—

Hannes never knew anyone with a better gut understanding of quantum probability shunts. Not the arcane hyperdimensional theory, but the practical nuts and bolts of wresting movement from contortions of wrinkled spacetime. Emerson was also fluent in Tursiops Trinary … better than Hannes at conveying complex ideas in neodolphins’ own hybrid language. A useful knack on this tub.

Alas, just one human now remained belowdecks, to help tend abused motors long past due for overhaul.

That is — if one could even call Hannes Suessi human anymore.

Am I more than I was? Or less?

He now had “eyes” all over the engine room — remote pickups linked directly to his ceramic-encased brain. Using portable drones, Hannes could supervise Karkaett and Chuchki far across the wide chamber … or even small crews working on alien vessels elsewhere in the great underwater scrap yard. In this way he could offer advice and comfort when they grew nervous, or when their bodies screamed with cetacean claustrophobia.

Unfortunately, cyborg abilities did nothing to prevent loneliness.

You should never have left me here alone, Hannes chided Emerson’s absent spirit. You were an engineer, not a secret agent or star pilot! You had no business traipsing off, doing heroic deeds.

There were specialists for such tasks. Streaker had been assigned several “heroes” when she first set out — individuals with the right training and personalities, equipping them to face dangerous challenges and improvise their way through any situation.

Unfortunately, those qualified ones were gone — Captain Creideiki, Tom Orley, Lieutenant Hikahi, and even the young midshipman Toshio — all used up in that costly escape from Kithrup.

I guess someone had to fill in after that, Hannes conceded.

In fact, Emerson pulled off one daring coup on Oakka, the green world, when the Obeyer Alliance sprang a trap while Gillian tried to negotiate a peaceful surrender to officials of the Navigation Institute.

Not even the suspicious Niss Machine reckoned that neutral Galactic bureaucrats might betray their oaths and violate Streaker’s truce pennant. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. If not for Emerson’s daring trek across Oakka’s jungle, taking out a Jophur field-emitter station, Streaker would have fallen into the clutches of a single fanatic clan — the one thing the Terragens Council said must not occur, at any cost.

But you let one success go to your head, eh? What were you thinking? That you were another Tom Orley?

A few months later you pulled that crazy stunt, veering a jury-rigged Thennanin fighter through the Fractal System, firing recklessly to “cover” our escape. What did that accomplish, except getting yourself killed?