Forever separating them from the only home they ever have known.
Extinguishing their race.
The prior day’s image of the great white wall of cloud anchored to the ocean surface is seared in their thoughts. The last vestige of their lost world.
Mei-o-Peia is first to break the spell, shrugging off feelings of loss as she turns to practical matters.
Clapping loudly, she addresses her sisters:
“We need food and drink, and we will not find them in our thoughts. It is time to act!
“As second daughter, Lin-o, you will lead us in securing food.
“As third, Em-o, water will be your responsibility.
“And your job, An-o, as next, will be to organize and manage it all.”
Pairing the remaining sisters, including herself, with the three leaders, Mei-o-Peia grabs four lances for Lin-o-Peia to distribute. While Em-o-Peia takes water gourds and strips of thin vine for herself and the two who will assist her. And An-o-Peia begins allocating spaces for occupants and provisions alike.
Lin-o-Peia’s team station themselves along the gunwales and begin spearing the small silver fish that travel in schools alongside the craft. Soon, they have enough and turn to filleting and sorting. Apportioning the flesh among seven broad, leathery leaves. Discarding scales, bones and ribbons of stringy entrails into the sea.
When the hunters store their lances and grasp the keen-edged stone shards used for filleting, Em-o-Peia’s team emerge through the hatches, fore and aft, and string the water gourds along the outside of the craft’s mesh bulwarks. No sooner do they secure the gourds than it rains. Filling every gourd with fresh sweet water.
At An-o-Peia’s direction, the fish are cleaned and wrapped and placed in storage alongside the sealed gourds of water.
Grateful for the bounty of sea and sky, the seven sisters feast this second day on the wide, vacant ocean.
But neither food nor drink, nor the companionship they share, can fill the hollow emptiness and the tragic loss they feel.
It is a despondent, disconsolate sisterhood that crews the craft this day.
Each is lost in her own thoughts as they gaze through the fabric of their wicker craft upon the counterpane of restless sea. Whose constant surface motion weaves a fabric of its own.
Chapter 60. The Seven Deadly Perils
Soon, the soporific cadence of the sea-swells rocks the sisters to sleep. Each drifting in her own dreams of an uncharted future.
It is midnight when a ghostly presence invades their thoughts.
It is a silver maiden, dressed in the starlight of which she is made.
Flowing into the tiny craft in streams that pour through its wicker skin, the silver image materializes into a glowing figure whose features are not unlike those of the sisters she visits this night.
I am the Earth Spirit, she announces, keeper of this planet-world whose wonders you cannot guess. I will be your keeper through perils you cannot know.
For you are the Brave Ones.
You are the future of this new world. And you are precious to me.
Hear me now, and heed me well!
With this introduction, the silver maiden serenades the seven sisters with lyrics pregnant with meaning for them and import for the wide world beyond:
Fear not, Brave Ones,
For I, too, sail with thee,
Swaddled in a textured craft
Upon a textured sea.
Swept by currents fore and aft
Across an endless ocean,
Through storms and blows and winds that waft
The craft in endless motion.
An ocean rife with many threats
To bar the course you bear
With jaw and fin to grip you in
With paralyzing fear.
Creatures deep will upward creep
To take you in your sleep,
While waterspouts will push you out
To deeper places still
Where monsters dwell and hunt as well
To crush and maim and kill:
Stealthy skates and squids and rays,
Leviathans that stalk the waves
That bear you through their realm.
And worse things yet the sea will bring
To drown you in its swell:
Tidal waves and hurricanes
and maelstroms reaching hell
To Hecate beneath the sea,
Her demon horde as well.
When all is lost or seems just so,
The sea will glow and you will know
You travel not alone.
For then shall I be by your side
To comfort and preserve
The Brave Ones who shall serve
A purpose so sublime
The world will be remade again,
A new race reach its time.
Fear not, Brave Ones
For I, too, sail with thee,
Swaddled in a textured craft
Upon a textured sea.
And I will guide you fore and aft
To meet your destiny.
The specter pauses.
But she is not done yet.
Her message is not complete.
There is more the sisters must know.
Raising both arms, the Earth Spirit sweeps her palms in a wide arc encompassing the sleeping sisters on both sides of the wicker craft.
While their bodies remain at rest, the sisters’ eyelids flutter with every syllable of the silver maiden’s canorous, lilting lyrics.
Seven are chosen
From this wide world
To cross the ocean
And then fulfill
A destiny foretold.
But first things first,
For you must know
The truth about the way you go.
For you, whose future is
To inherit this earth,
Must first face risks
To prove your worth.
Seven perils you will meet,
Each more deadly than the last.
Seven foes you must beat
Just to make it past
The trials of the sea.
Think well, o’ eldest one,
In choosing who shall be
The sister that confronts
Each peril as may be.
For all to prove their worth,
Each must valor show,
As each choice is spent,
You cannot relent.
Think well whose turns shall go.
As you choose and the die is cast,
Know that the direst peril is last,
That the first is least and after that
The challenges grow the farther you go.
Know this, too:
When danger stalks and strikes at you,
Do not shrink and do not flee.
Strike boldly back and you shall be
Thus assured of victory.
But if you quail, then shall you fail!
Each of the seven has her strength,
But all must act across the length
Of ocean deep—its monsters’ keep,
From abyssal depths to surface swells,
Where they kill to repel invaders as well.
Creatures above and creatures below
Will stalk and hunt you as you go.
Five of the perils will they pose
Five of you will face-off those.
The sea itself will pose the rest
That rage and roar and crash and crest,
Primal forces both, set free
To scour the sea of all that be
Caught in their angry maw,
Trapped in their lethal craw,
To be swallowed whole
And be no more.
These are the trials ordained for you,
To test your worth to inherit this earth,
For only those whose valor shows
The courage to bring them through,
Only those, and th
ose alone,
Can make the world anew.
At the last vibration of the final syllable of her prophecy, the specter dissolves into tendrils of silver starlight that flow back through the wicker mesh into the obsidian sky. Leaving every sleeping sister to ponder the meaning of her words.
Even as the Earth Spirit abandons them to their somnolent thoughts, a silent killer is making its way inexorably toward them beneath the waves.
Chapter 61. Shadow-Runner
Dark shadow flows away from the imploding cauldron of stone, ash and superheated steam.
It is a shadow cast by no cloud.
It is a shadow deeper than the night overhead.
It is a shadow just beneath the surface of the roiled sea.
Still stunned by the stinging waves of shock radiating through her pelagic realm, the giant skate has risen to the surface, trolling for food.
She is desperate.
No longer does she ride the great streams and currents that bind the vast ocean in a symphonic convection of endless motion.
Streams that race north and south along the littoral shoals of the supercontinent. Currents that sweep east and west, alternately joining with and departing from the streams. Great serpentine jets pumping energy into the restless sea. Giving it vitality as surely as the living creatures it hosts.
Reefs are her favored feeding-grounds and, like pearls in a necklace, they are strung methodically along her migratory path to appear each time she requires food.
Except the latest reef in the circuit did not appear.
In its place was a cauldron of boiling water she could not approach, and her radar reflected floes of solids racing from the surface downward into the bubbling sea.
Turning sharply away from the superheated water, she swam outside the coastal stream. Beyond the guard-rails of her migratory track.
Now she is lost!
Only the irregular, scarred features of the ocean floor answer her frantic pings.
The minute organisms she feeds upon are gone.
The vast blankets of life she harvests are gone.
The lesser creatures that feed on them are gone.
She is alone . . .
In the twilight of a world that is no more.
The ocean she crosses is as lifeless as the giant exoplanet hovering in the night sky overhead. That is because she is no longer in the hospitable current she has followed since birth. She has been driven away by the pyroclastic blast of the island of cone-mountains.
She crosses a dead sea.
The endlessly circulating streams and currents are the lifeblood of this ocean, the plasma that supports all aquatic species. Life occurs nowhere else in its vast, watery expanse.
All the planet’s ocean species have evolved and spend their life cycle solely within its constantly flowing veins and arteries. And all are joined, link-by-link, to complex food chains that sustain them in their unending migration across the planet.
Unlike their terrestrial cousins, the predators of the deep are opportunistic hunters and omnifarious feeders. Because, unlike the dry, elevated surface of a supercontinent scoured in flame, the ocean and its life-forms were spared the Great Extinction.
They did not suffer the collapse of populations, the shrinking food chains, the scarcity that forced land-dwellers to focus their predation on species whose numbers were most robust. Forsaking all others in the exclusive predator-prey calculus that followed the GE event.
Their numbers did not decline, but thrived beneath the surface of the sea, maintaining the great diversity and complex food chains that had evolved over eons in their protected, liquid element. Defying the climatic cataclysm that so decimated life on the solid earth above.
But vast areas of the sea are not host to living things. They are toxic, carbon-rich dead zones. Still waters where no life exists. Where even the simple micro-organisms at the base of the food chain have been unable to gain a foothold. At the margins of the great ocean’s lively streams and currents, home to all marine life across the planet.
Mimicking the singular chemistry that binds the fiery tendrils of magma beneath the earth, the ocean currents flow in seamless ribbons whose invisible, integumentary margins hold life in like the Judas molecules binding the subterranean magma.
Only an event as cataclysmic as volcanic eruption could force life out into the dead, empty ocean beyond.
That is where the titan is now.
She swims on through a still, sterile sea. Searching for her familiar way. Seeking a meal.
In the darkness.
Her hidden shadow is vast. Cast by wide, undulating pectoral fins whose parabolic rhythms flow in perfect synchrony. The fins delineate her large girth on either side.
Atop the forward axis of her great length, twin spiracles accentuate a median row of spinules, the only rimples on an otherwise smooth skin.
There are no eyes, nor need of them. For this eyeless creature is not blind.
She sends out acoustic pings in all directions. Both beneath and along the black surface of the still, silent sea.
They are her eyes.
Penetrating the darkness.
Showing there is nothing to see.
The great beast is solitary and migratory.
She swims alone.
Fatigue heightens her hunger as the sea beyond her familiar ocean current saps her flagging strength.
Never has she ventured outside the ocean streams that have carried her across the vast sea. On wings propelled by the energy of endless forces flowing north and south, east and west.
Never has she so had to tax her pelvic fins, stubby appendages evolved only to help the creature with steerage through a following sea.
Never has she contended with the resistance of the still water through which she labors now. It is not the sea she has known.
She passes this first night beyond her natural element in fruitless pursuit of the minute food-organisms that are not here. For they have been swept away by the stream she abandoned.
Soon after daybreak, the skate swims farther down—beneath the thermocline in the mesopelagic zone—fearful of the growing heat of two suns upon the surface waters. The descent further weakens the already lethargic creature.
She pauses in the motionless depth, retracts her short pelvic fins and floats listlessly.
That is when she receives her first solid hit from a ping echoing back off a nearby object moving across the surface above.
Its shape is not familiar to her, small and condensed, unlike the blankets of food-organisms that are. But it is the only thing in these waters, and she begins pursuit.
Meantime, fathoms above and closing rapidly with the skate, there is pursuit of a different kind.
Flanked by her next-eldest siblings, Mei-o-Peia is seeking consensus on a preparedness plan to cope with the deadly perils foretold by their night visitor.
“Our course is clear,” she begins.
“The spirit warned the danger will be least in the beginning and become progressively greater as we go.
“The spirit also counseled us to confront each challenge, youngest to eldest, so each can be tested in turn.
“We risk failure and death if we spurn the spirit’s words!”
Stepping forward, On-o-Peia, the seventh sister, loudly protests:
“But why do I have to be the one in least danger? I am as brave as any of you. Yet I am treated like the baby! It is not fair.”
Chiming in, the sixth sister, Mat-o-Peia, agrees: “On-o is right! I, too, wish to confront the more demanding challenge. I, too, want to prove I am equal to it.”
Her ultimatum raises a chorus of like objections from the younger sisters. All of whom plead to be assigned to the more rigorous of the trials prophesied by the spirit that invaded their dreams.
“Enough!” commands Lin-o-Peia, the second eldest, silencing the others.
“On-o!
“Mat-o!
“Peia!
“You are not listening,�
� Em-o-Peia, the third sister, interjects. “The perils will be dire enough. We will only make them worse by disregarding the spirit’s counsel.”
Placing her hands on a shoulder of each of the youngest sisters, Mei-o-Peia commends their courage while reasoning:
“This is not just about proving your bravery; it is about each of us doing what is best for all of us to survive.
”We will heed the spirit’s advice and you, On-o-Peia, will perform the first trial, whenever that may be and in whatever form it may come.
“The spirit spoke of seven deadly perils. If we do not overcome the first, the rest will not matter.
“Every trial will be to the death.”
As if on cue, the wicker craft rocks violently against the brush of the colossus that has been pursuing it. Only On-o-Peia remains standing as the others are thrown to the deck.
Grasping her fishing-spear, she rushes to the forward hatch, opens it and peers intently at the swirling current on the starboard side.
There is a dark shadow agitating the surface of the sea and, to her, it seems to stretch outward forever.
While she cannot make out its features, the youngest sister knows this monster is more formidable than the seven puny fishing spears they have to repel it. And she knows their wicker craft cannot long endure the pounding. It is sure to capsize or swamp and drown them all.
Surmising that this menace can be overcome only by a greater menace still, an audacious plan begins to form in On-o-Peia’s mind.
Leaping back from the open hatch, she calls out to her sisters:
“Quick, throw down your spears and grab the oars. We are heading back toward our lost island!”
Taken aback by such a foolhardy suggestion, the other sisters stare at their youngest sibling. Wondering if panic has robbed her of reason. It is Mei-o-Peia who breaks the stunned silence.
“Quick, do as she says!” the eldest sister commands. “The silver maiden’s prophecy demands it. And we do so under her promise of protection.”
With that, the seven sisters grab their oars and paddle furiously back in the direction they have come.
Their course is marked by the sudden appearance of a ribbon of phosphorescence. Rising to the surface of the sea. Creating a distinct lane. Lighting the way toward the island that is no more.
Toward the boiling water and the toxic cloud they cannot yet see.
So weakened is the giant skate the sisters easily free their craft from its tenuous embrace, rolling quickly over its slick skin and back into open water. Turning slowly, the titan resumes the pursuit.
REGENESIS Page 38