Shoreline of Infinity 25 by Gary Gibson

Author:Gary Gibson [Chidwick, Ed. Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Curiosity Shop

* * *

I was sitting in a rundown bar at the oceanside, drinking a dubious cocktail from a smudged glass. The walls of the bar were hung with amateur dabbles of sunsets and sunrises, all of them for sale. The sparse population of the Archipelago subsisted on fishing and tourism, but the latter was dwindling. In more liberal times, the Archipelago had advertised its legendary indigenous population of upright, two-legged creatures resembling human beings. The official line was that these so-called aborigines were a myth. Patria had no primates, and all of its mammals were, like ghost cats, colonial and symbiotic creatures. But the legend of the aborigines had been the chief draw for mainland tourists. In second-hand stores, you could still buy self-published books, depicting mysterious sightings of humanoid creatures in the wild. But Our Home declared the legend subversive. Patria was for True Men only, not for two-legged animals, perverse caricatures of the human form divine. Once the Archipelago had nothing to sell but bad alcohol and pink sunsets, tourism dried up.

A group of people spilled into the bar, laughing and shouting, bringing the briny smell of sea-life that clung to their clothes. One of them was Lora.

She spotted me instantly. She said something to her companions and walked over to my table.

“Hello, Dana,” she said.

She looked better than during the time of her suburban marriage: sinewy and darkly tanned, with bare muscled arms. Her long crinkly hair was caught in a ponytail; and even the deepened creases on her cheeks added character to what I had always seen as a bland timid face.

“How did you know I would be here?” She smiled, displaying a missing incisor.

“You requested information about your mother. I requested information about my daughter.”

I opened my mouth to counter with the familiar refrain, you are not my mother, and closed it. The wild hair, the long nose, the dark eyes … Why had not I seen it before?

“Yes,” Lora said. “I am your mother.” We hiked for a whole day to get there. The island was rugged and mountainous, with deep gullies cutting through the barren slopes of scree. The long narrow valleys were filled with glass flowers, glinting in the double sunlight. Nobody lived in the interior; the few fishing villages hugged the shore. There were dangerous animals here: night crawlers twice as big as the ones we had on Hearth, and ghost cats that could join together to form a composite big enough to carpet an entire valley. Fortunately, the only things we encountered were red-tails – shy herbivores who lived inside glass-flower blooms, their scarlet appendages poking out of the crystalline cups like wagging tongues.

“Why is it so far from the coast?” I asked.

“We did not want to draw attention to ourselves. The fishing folk knew we were there, of course, but we got along. Until the Purity War started, and the Our Home goons came.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen. The oldest one among the survivors.” “And your … your parents?”

Lora did not respond.

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