Infinity's Shore Read Online Free PDF

this turn of Ifni’s ever-tumbling dice.
    Yes, my rings, i know this is not the final memory. It took place many miduras in the past. Obviously something must have happened since then. Something dreadful.
    Perhaps the Danik scout boat came back from its survey trip, carrying one of the fierce sky-human warriors who worship Rothen patron masters. Or else the main Rothen starship may have returned, expecting a trove of bio-plunder,only to find their samples destroyed, their station ruined, and comrades taken hostage.
    That might explain the scent of sooty devastation that now fills our core.
    But no later memories are yet available. The wax has not congealed.
    To a traeki, that means none of it has really happened.
    Not yet.
    Perhaps things are not as bad as they seem.
    It is a gift we traeki reacquired when we came to Jijo. A talent that helps make up for the many things we left behind, when we abandoned the stars.
    A gift for wishful thinking.
Rety

    T HE FIERCE WIND OF FLIGHT TORE DAMPNESS FROM her streaming eyes, sparing her the shame of tears running down scarred cheeks. Still, Rety could weep with rage, thinking of the hopes she’d lost. Lying prone on a hard metal plate, clutching its edge with hands and feet, she bore the harsh breeze as whipping tree branches smacked her face and caught her hair, sometimes drawing blood.
    Mostly, she just held on for dear life.
    The alien machine beneath her was supposed to be her loyal servant! But the cursed thing would
not
slow its panicky retreat, even long after all danger lay far behind. If Rety fell off now, at best it would take her days to limp back to the village of her birth, where less than a midura ago there had been a brief, violent ambush.
    Her brain still roiled. In just a few heartbeats her plans had been spoiled, and it was all
Diver’s
fault!
    She heard the young hunter moan, held captive by metal arms below her perch. But as the wounded battle drone fled recklessly onward, Rety turned away from Dwer’s suffering,which he had only brought on himself, trekking all the way to these filthy Gray Hills from his safe home near the sea—
the Slope
—where six intelligent races lived at a much
higher
level of ignorant poverty than her own birth clan of wretched savages. Why would slopies hike past two thousand leagues of hell to reach this dreary wasteland?
    What did Dwer and his pals hope to accomplish? To conquer Rety’s brutish relatives?
    He could
have
her smelly kinfolk, for all she cared!
And
the band of urrish sooners Kunn subdued with fire from his screeching scout boat. Dwer was welcome to them all. Only, couldn’t he have waited quietly in the woods till after Rety and Kunn finished their business here and flew off again? Why did he have to rush things and attack the robot with her aboard?
    I bet he did it out of spite. Prob’ly can’t stand knowing that I’m the one Jijo native with a chance to get away from this pit hole of a planet.
    Inside, Rety knew better. Dwer’s heart didn’t work that way.
    But mine does.
    When he groaned again, Rety muttered angrily, “I’ll make you even sorrier, Dwer, if I don’t make it off this mudball ’cause of you!”
    So much for her
glorious homecoming.
    At first it had seemed fun to pay a return visit, swooping from a cloud-decked sky in Kunn’s silver dart, emerging proudly to amazed gasps from the shabby cousins, who had bullied her for fourteen awful years. What a fitting climax to her desperate gamble, a few months ago, when she finally found the nerve to flee all the muck and misery, setting forth alone to seek the fabled Slope her great-grandparents had left behind, when they chose the “free” life as wild sooners.
    Free of the sages’ prying rules about what beasts you may kill. Free from irky laws about how many babies you can have. Free from having to abide neighbors with four legs, or five, or that rolled on humming wheels.
    Rety