Infinity's Shore полностью

Not when they come swooping from space, throwing lightning.

Dwer wished he had listened more closely to holy services as a child, instead of fidgeting when the Sacred Scrolls were read. Some excerpts had been inserted by the ringed ones, when their sneakship came — passages of warning. Not all stacks of fatty rings were friendly, it seemed. What was the name they used? Dwer tried to recall what word stood for a traeki that was no traeki, but he came up blank.

Sometimes he wished he could be more like his brother and sister — able to think deep thoughts, with vast stores of book learning to call upon. Lark or Sara would surely make better use of this time of forced inaction. They would be weighing alternatives, listing possibilities, formulating some plan.

But all I do is doze, thinking about food. Wishing I had some way to scratch.

He wasn’t yet desperate enough to walk toward that silver ship with hands raised. Anyway, the aliens and their helpers were still fussing over the smoke-stained hull, making repairs.

As he nodded in a drowsy torpor, he fought down one itch in particular, a prickly sensation inside his head. The feeling had grown ever since he first gave the Danik robot a “ride” across a river, using his body to anchor its ground-hugging fields. Each time he collapsed on the opposite bank, waking up had felt like rising from a pit. The effect grew stronger with every crossing.

At least I won’t have to do that again. The robot now cowered under a nearby dune, useless and impotent since Kunn’s ship was downed and its master taken.

Dwer’s sleep was uneasy, disturbed first by a litany of aching twinges, and later by disturbing dreams.

He had always dreamed. As a child, Dwer used to jerk upright in the dark, screaming till the entire household roused, from Nelo and Melina down to the lowest chimp and manservant, gathering round to comfort him back to sweet silence. He had no clear memory of what nightmares used to terrify him so, but Dwer still had sleep visions of startling vividness and clarity.

Never worth screaming over, though.

Unless you count One-of-a-Kind.

He recalled the old mulc spider of the acid mountain lake, who spoke words directly in his mind one fateful day, during his first solo scouting trip over the Rimmer Range.

— the mad spider, unlike any other, who tried all kinds of deceit to charm Dwer into its web, there to join its “collection.”

— the same spider who nearly caught Dwer that awful night when Rety and her “bird” were trapped in its maze of bitter vines … before that vine network exploded in a mortal inferno.

Restlessly, he envisioned living cables, the spider’s own body, snaking across a tangled labyrinth, creeping ever nearer, closing an unstoppable snare. From each twisting rope there dripped heavy caustic vapors, or liquors that would freeze your skin numb on contact.

Around Dwer, the sand burrow felt like a ropy spiral of nooses, drawing tight a snug embrace that was both cloying and loving, in a sick-sweet way.

No one else could ever appreciate you as much as I do, crooned the serenely patient call of One-of-a-Kind. We share a destiny, my precious, my treasure.

Dwer felt trapped, more by a languor of sleep than by the enveloping sand. He mumbled.

“Yer just … my …’magination.…”

A crooning, dreamlike laugh, and the mellifluous voice rejoined—

So you always used to claim, though you cautiously evaded my grasp, nonetheless. Until the night I almost had you.

“The night you died!” Dwer answered. The words were a mere rolling of his exhaled breath.

True. But do you honestly think that was an ending?

My kind is very old. I myself had lived half a million years, slowly etching and leaching the hard leavings of the Buyur. Across those ages, thinking long thoughts, would I not learn everything there is to know about mortality?

Dwer realized — all those times he helped the Danik robot cross a stream, conducting its throbbing fields, somehow must have changed him inside. Sensitized him. Or else driven him mad. Either way, it explained this awful dream.

His eyes opened a crack as he tried to waken, but fatigue lay over Dwer like a shroud, and all he managed was to peer through interleaved eyelashes at the swamp below.

Till now, he had always stared at the two alien ships — the larger shaped like a silvery cigar, and the smaller like a bronze arrowhead. But now Dwer regarded the background. The swamp itself, and not the shiny intruders.

They are just dross, my precious. Ignore those passing bits of “made stuff,” the brief fancies of ephemeral beings. The planet will absorb them, with some patient help from my kindred.

Distracted by the ships, he had missed the telltale signs.

A nearby squarish mound whose symmetry was almost hidden by rank vegetation. A series of depressions, like grooves filled with algae scum, always the same distance apart, one after another, extending into the distance.