An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  “She’s been away.”

  “Oh. Hope she gets back soon. I’d like to meet her.”

  “Then you will take the job?”

  “Yes, I need one just now.”

  He reached into his jacket, withdrew a heavy envelope, passed it to me.

  “There you have copies of everything I have. Needless to say—”

  “Needless to say,” I said. “The life of a mayfly will be as eternity to them.”

  I slipped it into my own jacket and turned away.

  “Be seeing you,” I said.

  “Leaving already?”

  “I’ve a lot to do.”

  “Good luck, then.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went left and he went right, and that was that for then.

  Station One was something of a nerve center for the area. That is, it was larger than the other extraction plants and contained the field office, several laboratories, a library, a museum, a dispensary, living quarters, and a few recreational features. It was an artificial island, a fixed platform about seven hundred feet across, and it monitored and serviced eight other plants within the area. It was within sight of Andros, largest of the Bahama Islands, and if you like plenty of water about you, which I do, you would find the prospect peaceful and more than a little attractive.

  After the tour and introductions that first day, I learned that my duties were about one-third routine and two-thirds response to circumstances. The routine part was inspection and preventive maintenance. The rest was unforeseen repair, retrieval, and replacement work—general underwater handyman stuff whenever the necessity arose.

  It was Dr. Leonard Barthelme, the Area Director, who met me and showed me around. A pleasant little fellow who seemed to enjoy talking about his work, middle-aged, a widower, he had made his home at Station One for almost five years. The first person to whom he introduced me was Frank Cashel, whom we found in the main laboratory, eating a sandwich and waiting for some test to run its course.

  Frank swallowed and smiled, rose, and shook hands with me as Barthelme explained, “This is the new man, James Madison.”

  He was dark, with a touch of gray here and there, a few creases accentuating a ruggedness of jawline and cheekbone, the beginnings of a bulge above his belt.

  “Glad to have you around,” he said. “Keep an eye out for pretty rocks, and bring me a branch of coral every now and then. We’ll get along fine.”

  “Frank’s hobby is collecting minerals,” Barthelme said. “The display in the museum is his. We’ll pass that way in a few minutes and you can see it. Quite interesting.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. I’ll remember. See what I can find you.”

  “Know anything about the subject?” Frank asked me.

  “A little. I used to be something of a rock hound.”

  “Well, I’d appreciate it.”

  As we walked away, Barthelme remarked, “He makes some money on the side selling specimens at gem shows. I would bear that in mind before I gave him too much in the way of my spare time, or samples.”

  “Oh.”

  “What I mean is, if you feel like going in for that sort of thing on a more than occasional basis, you ought to make it clear that you want a percentage.”

  “I see. Thanks.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “He’s a fine fellow. Just a little absentminded.”

  “How long has he been out here?”

  “Around two years. Geophysicist. Very solid.”

  We stopped by the equipment shed then, where I met Andy Deems and Paul Carter: the former, thin and somewhat sinister in appearance because of a scribbling of scars on his left cheek, which a full beard did not completely conceal; the latter, tall, fair, smooth-faced, and somewhere between husky and fat. They were cleaning some tanks when we entered, and wiped their hands, shook mine, and said they were glad to meet me. They both did the same sort of work I would be doing, the normal staffing calling for four of us, working in pairs. The fourth man was Paul Vallons, who was currently out with Ronald Davies, the boatmaster, replacing an instrument package in a sampler buoy. Paul, I learned, had been Mike’s partner, the two of them having been friends since their Navy days. I would be working with him much of the time.

  “You will soon be reduced to this miserable state yourself,” Carter said cheerfully, as we were leaving. “Enjoy your morning. Gather rosebuds.”

  “You are miserable because you sweat most obscenely,” Deems observed.

  “Tell it to my glands.”

  As we crossed the islet, Barthelme observed that Deems was the most capable underwater man he had ever met. He had 84 an exaltation of stars lived in one of the bubble cities for a time, lost his wife and daughter in the Rumoko II disaster, and come topside to stay. Carter had come across from the West Coast about five months ago, immediately following a divorce or separation he did not care to talk about. He had been employed by Beltrane out there and had requested a transfer.

  Barthelme took me through the second lab, which was vacant just then, so that I could admire the large, illuminated map of the seas about Andros, beads of light indicating the disposition and well-being of the devices that maintained the sonic ‘walls’ about the parks and stations. I saw that we were enclosed by a boundary that took in the nearest park also.

  “In which one was the accident?” I asked.

  He turned and studied my face, then pointed, indicating our own.

  “It was farther in, over there,” he said. “Toward the northeast end of the park. What have you heard about it?”

  “Just the news report,” I said. “Has anything new been discovered?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  With my fingertip, I traced the reversed L of lights that outlined the area.

  “No holes in the ‘wall’?” I asked.

  “There haven’t been any equipment failures for a long while.”

  “Do you think it was a dolphin?”

  He shrugged. Then, “I’m a chemist,” he said, “not a dolphin specialist. But it strikes me, from everything I’ve read, that there are dolphins and there are dolphins. The average dolphin seems to be quite pacific, with an intelligence possibly equivalent to our own. Also, they should follow the same old normal distribution curve—the bulk of them in the middle, a few morons on one end, a few geniuses on the other. Perhaps a feebleminded dolphin who was not responsible for his actions did it. Or a Raskolnikov dolphin. Most of what is known about them comes from a study of average specimens. Statistically, in the relatively brief while such investigations have been going on, this has to be so. What do we know of their psychiatric abnormalities? Nothing, really.” He shrugged again. “So yes, I think it is possible,” he finished.

  I was thinking then of a bubble city and some people I had never met, and I wondered whether dolphins ever felt rotten, guilty, and miserable as hell over anything they had done. I sent that thought back where it had come from, just as he said, “I hope you are not worried…?”

  “Curious,” I said. “But concerned, too. Naturally.”

  He turned and, as I followed him to the door, said, “Well, you have to remember first that it was a good distance to the northeast, in the park proper. We have nothing operating over there, so your duties should not take you anywhere near the place where it occurred. Second, a team from the Institute of Delphinological Studies is searching the entire area, including our annex here, with underwater detection equipment. Third, until further notice there will be a continuing sonar scan about any area where one of our people has to submerge himself—and a shark cage and submersible decompression chamber will go along on all deep dives, just in case. The locks have all been closed until this is settled. And you will be given a weapon—a long metal tube carrying a charge and a shell—that should be capable of dispatching an angry dolphin or a shark.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” I said, as we headed toward the next cluster of buildings. “That makes me feel a lot be
tter.”

  “I was going to get around to that in a little while anyway,” he said. “I was looking for the best way to get into it, though…I feel better too…This part is offices. Should be empty now.”

  He pulled open the door and I followed him through: desks, partitions, filing cabinets, office machines, water cooler—nothing unusual—and, as he had said, quite deserted. We passed along its center aisle and out the door at its far end, where we crossed the narrow breezeway that separated it from the adjacent building. We entered there.

  “This is our museum,” he said. “Sam Beltrane thought it would be nice to have a small one to show visitors. Full of sea things as well as a few models of our equipment.”

  Nodding, I looked about. At least the model equipment did not dominate, as I would have expected. The floor was covered with green indoor-outdoor carpeting, and a miniature version of the station itself occupied a tablelike frame near the front door, all of its underside equipment exposed. Shelves on the wall behind it held larger-scale versions of some of the more important components, placarded with a paragraph or two of explanation and history. There were an antique cannon, two lantern frames, several belt buckles, a few coins, and some corroded utensils displayed nearby, salvaged from a centuries-old vessel that still lay on the bottom not very far from the station, according to the plaque. On the opposite wall, with several of the larger ones set up on frames before it, was a display of marine skeletons accompanied by colored sketches of the fully fleshed and finned versions, ranging from tiny spinefish to a dolphin, along with a full-sized mock-up of a shark, which I determined to come back and compare a little more carefully on my own time. There was a large section containing Frank Cashel’s mineral display, neatly mounted and labeled, separated from the fish by a window and overlooked by a slightly awkward but still attractive watercolor titled Miami Skyline, with the name “Cashel” scrawled in its lower corner.

  “Oh, Frank paints,” I said. “Not bad.”

  “No, that’s his wife, Linda’s,” he replied. “You will meet her in just a minute. She should be next door. She runs the library and takes care of all our clerical work.”

  So we passed through the door that led to the library and I saw Linda Cashel. She was seated at a desk, writing, and she looked up as we entered. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties. Her hair was long, sun-bleached, pulled back, held with a jeweled clip. Blue eyes, in a longish face with a cleft chin, a slightly upturned nose, a sprinkling of freckles, and some very even, very white teeth were displayed as Barthelme greeted her and introduced us.

  “…Anytime you want a book,” she said.

  I looked around at the shelves, the cases, the machines.

  “We keep good copies of the standard reference works we use a lot,” she said. “I can get facsimile copies of anything else on a day’s notice. There are some shelves of general fiction and light stuff over there.” She indicated a rack beside the front window. “Then there are those banks of cassettes to your right, mostly undersea noises—fish sounds and such, for part of a continuing study we do for the National Science Foundation—and the last bank is music, for our own enjoyment. Everything is catalogued here.” She rose and slapped a file unit, indicated an index key taped to its side. “If you want to take something out and nobody’s around, I would appreciate it if you would record its number, your name, and the date in this book.” She glanced at a ledger on the corner of her desk. “And if you want to keep anything longer than a week, please mention it to me. There is also a tool chest in the bottom drawer, in case you ever need a pair of pliers. Remember to put them back. That covers everything I can think of,” she said. “Any questions?”

  “Doing much painting these days?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, reseating herself, “you saw my skyline. I’m afraid next door is the only museum I’ll ever get into. I’ve pretty much quit. I know I’m not that good.”

  “I rather liked it.”

  She twisted her mouth.

  “When I’m older and wiser and somewhere else, maybe I’ll try again. I’ve done everything I care to with water and shorelines.”

  I smiled because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and she did the same. Then we left, and Barthelme gave me the rest of the morning off to get settled in my cottage, which had been Michael Thornley’s quarters. I went and did that.

  After lunch, I went to work with Deems and Carter in the equipment shed. As a result, we finished early. Since it was still too soon to think of dinner, they offered to take me for a swim, to see the sunken ship.

  It was about a quarter mile to the south, outside the “wall,” perhaps twenty fathoms down—what was left of it—and eerie, as such things always are, in the wavering beams we extended. A broken mast, a snapped bowsprit, a section of deck planking and smashed gunwale visible above the mud, an agitated horde of little fish we had disturbed at whatever they were about within and near the hulk, a partial curtain of weeds drawn and redrawn by the currents, and that was all that remained of someone’s hopes for a successful voyage, some shipbuilders’ labors, and possibly a number of people whose last impressions were of storm or sword, and then the gray, blue, green, sudden springs uncoiling, cold.

  Or maybe they made it over to Andros and dinner, as we did later. We ate in a red-and-white-checked-tablecloth sort of place near to the shore, where just about everything man-made clung, the interior of Andros being packed with mangrove swamps, mahogany and pine forests, doves, ducks, quail, pigeons, and chickchamies. The food was good; I was hungry.

  We sat for a time afterward, smoking and talking. I still had not met Paul Vallons, but I was scheduled to work with him the following day. I asked Deems what he was like.

  “Big fellow,” he said, “around your size, only lie’s good-looking. Kind of reserved. Fine diver. He and Mike used to take off every weekend, go helling around the Caribbean. Had a girl on every island, I’ll bet.”

  “I low’s he—taking things?”

  “Pretty well, I guess. Like I said, he’s kind of reserved, doesn’t show his feelings much. He and Mike had been friends for years.”

  “What do you think got Mike?”

  Carter broke in then.

  “One of those damned dolphins,” he said. “We should never have started fooling with them. One of them came up under me once, damn near ruptured me.”

  “They’re playful,” Deems said. “It didn’t mean any harm.”

  “I think it did. And that slick skin of theirs reminds me of a wet balloon. Sickening!”

  “You’re prejudiced. They’re friendly as puppies. It probably goes back to some sexual hangup.”

  “Crap!” Carter said. “They—”

  Since I had gotten it started, I felt obligated to change the subject. So I asked whether it was true that Martha Millay lived nearby.

  “Yes,” Deems said, taking hold of the opportunity. “She has a place about four miles down the coast from here. Very neat, I understand, though I’ve only seen it from the water. Her own little port. She has a hydrofoil, a sailboat, a good-sized cabin cruiser, and a couple little power launches. Lives alone in a long, low building right smack on the water. Not even a road out that way.”

  “I’ve admired her work for a long while. I’d like to meet her sometime.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll bet you never do. She doesn’t like people. Doesn’t have a listed phone.”

  “That’s a pity. Any idea why she’s that way?”

  “Well…”

  “She’s deformed,” Carter said. “I met her once, on the water. She was at anchor and I was going past on my way to one of the stations. That was before I knew about her, so I went near, just to say hello. She was taking pictures through the glass bottom of her boat, and when she saw me she started to scream and holler for me to get away, that I was scaring the fish. And she snatched up a tarp and pulled it over her legs. I got a look, though. She’s a nice, normal-looking woman from the waist up, but he
r hips and legs are all twisted and ugly. I was sorry I’d embarrassed her. I was just as embarrassed myself, and I didn’t know what to say. So I yelled, ‘Sorry’ and waved and kept going.”

  “I heard she can’t walk at all,” Deems said, “though she is supposed to be an excellent swimmer. I’ve never seen her myself.”

  “Was she in some sort of accident, do you know?”

  “Not as I understand it,” he said. “She is half—Japanese, and the story I heard is that her mother was a Hiroshima baby. Some sort of genetic damage.”

  “Pity.”

  “Yes.”

  We settled up and headed back. Later, I lay awake for a long while, thinking of dolphins, sunken ships, drowned people, halfpeople, and the Gulf Stream, which kept talking to me through the window. Finally, I listened to it, and it took hold of me and we drifted away together into the darkness to wherever it finally goes.

  Paul Vallons was, as Andy Deems had said, around my size and good-looking, in a dark, clothing-advertisement sort of way. Another twenty years and he would probably even look distinguished. Some guys win all the way around. Deems had also been right about his reserve. He was not especially talkative, although he managed this without seeming unfriendly. As for his diving prowess, I was unable to confirm it that first day I worked with him, for we pulled shore duty while Deems and Carter got sent over to Station Three. Back to the equipment shed…

  I did not think it a good idea to ask him about his late buddy, or dolphins, which pretty much confined me conversation-wise to the business at hand and a few generalities. Thus was the morning passed.

  After lunch, though, as I began thinking ahead, going over my plans for that evening, I decided he would be as good as anyone when it came to getting directions to the Chickcharny.

  He lowered the valve he had been cleaning and stared at me.

  “What do you want to go to that dive for?” he asked.

  “Heard the place mentioned,” I said. “Like to see it.”