by Scott Azmus
Pressure-released lifeboats bobbed to the surface. Inflating rapidly, they became home to the wounded and weary. Young men. Young women. Some burned. Several bleeding. The rest angry, weary, and half out of their minds with fear.
Even with the other destroyers bearing down and the satellite-savvy media reporting the attack as an act of piracy, Mia found that she could not turn away. Shifting inland, arriving amidst flailing swimmers and blazing surface oil, Mia eventually heard someone call her name.
Again, from one of the lifeboats: “Mia?”
Todd must have recognized the cut of her dorsal fin. A sextant filled the crook of one arm. The other, bloodied and awkwardly bowed, lay tangled in the ties of a charred life jacket.
“Mia, why?”
Gagging on poison fumes, unable to pipe the least note of apology, Mia pressed the dome of her melon against the raft. She had not seen her boy in the flesh for half a decade. They had grown apart. How could she tell him that they had miscalculated? That an error in judgment had turned Jute’s planned statement of resolve into a crime?
“You know,” Todd said, weakly, “I still play our games. Somewhere back home, I have pictures of our first summer together. Do you remember that stupid doll I used to carry around all the time?”
A threadbare Beanie Baby. A soft, gray dolphin with a tool pouch and permanently-threaded smile. She remembered.
Her comm toned a warning. Her monocle’s inset box flared and jumped to an emergency broadcast band. The clustered network icons retreated. Music swelled and faded.
The U.S. President gripped her podium as if its Great Seal were a shield. “Good morning. For several decades, dolphins, whales, and other cetaceans have worked with us for the greater good of all concerned. We helped them unlock their potential. They helped us in nearly every way we asked. While our alliance was rarely without difficulty, both sides never gave up the struggle to understand one another.”
She turned from the teleprompter. Summoned a maternal smile. Adjusted a lapel. “Today, sadly, I must report that our relationship appears to be at an end.”
Acronyms traced the screen’s nether margin. The overnight markets had slipped more than twenty percent. Instant poll numbers revealed a worldwide sense of betrayal.
The President turned her palms to the heavens. Looked into the lens. Frowned.
“While we do not know why the fins would wish conflict, or what their activist leaders hope to gain, this administration will not tolerate unchecked aggression in any form. Thus, I have this day, in deliberation with the United Nations Cetacean Council, authorized the use of deadly force.”
Todd spat bloody phlegm.
“It’s true, Mia. Pacific Command ordered our task force to load poison gas. Toxic foam as well as fin-specific, biogenic gel. The kind that lingers on the waters.”
Matlock and Berning had arrived on station. As most crew members collected survivors, others manned their guns. Large caliber rounds drilled the sea. Heavy gray fog poured from each vessel’s amidships torpedo bay.
Arriving at her side, Jute asked, “Well, Mia? Will you continue to argue patience? To favor the simple separation of each species over combat, combat, combat?”
Seizing the raft’s lanyard with her teeth, she turned the raft to block a gunner’s aim. “I am sorry, Jute. Rather than melt the polar ice caps? In place of deliberately flooding Earth’s continental margins? In a word, yes. It is time that we adopt another path.”
Nudging Todd, she added, “We’re going now, boy. Someday, when your people feel they can come in peace, I pray that we may meet again. Goodbye, boy. I will be waiting for you somewhere west of Orion. For a human being, you are special. Your abilities, rare rare rare.”
A flying fish spread its pectoral fins. As it soared from one margin of sky to the next, Mia tail-danced clear of the approaching gas. Summoning the leaders of the sanctuary’s many diverse pods, cultivating calm, she sought to mesh each of their thoughts with her own.
“Quiet,” she sang. “Let all of this drop away. Concentrate and hush. Hush hush hush.”
Together, they pushed aside the rhythmic chant of gunfire, the hiss of gas, and the hammer of explosions upon the surf.
“Almost there. Let it all go. Relax. Watch for the distant shore. We have practiced this so many times. It is easy easy easy.”
The ocean seethed. A rippling moiré spread across the surface. Fish darted and leaped. Breathless, feeling a sensation of pins and needles, she nourished a final impression within her mind. A pearl. A water moon. Iridescent blue. A faint tracery of hidden shores. The sapphire splendor of an inset bay.
Holding the image, calculations complete, the other fins in full rapport, Mia kicked her flukes. Soaring aloft, she shifted with the ease of long repetition.
A mélange of exotic sensation cut across her senses. The tang of bitter salts. A taste of pungent sulfur. A rush of unfamiliar buoyancy.
When she opened her eyes, a shimmering horizon cut across a banded, near-Jovian backdrop. As she gazed up at the new sun, her monocle tracked her eye movements and filtered the stellar disk.
Storms pocked its face. Blemishes, five to ten times Earth’s diameter, hugged the star’s equator.
As each arriving fin sang his or her mix of unease and wonder, a fresh serenade filled Mia’s mind. Ancient melodies. Ancient desires.
“Where,” she sang, “are the fish fish fish?
2088:
“Are you quite certain? After all this time? An authentic code index signal?”
“Yes, Eldest of Elders. While the carrier is weak, the hail appears wholly genuine.”
Eyeing one another, the young messenger barely bothered to mask the perplexed slant of his jaw. The undercurrent of concern in his words.
Had she already asked these questions?
Radial pockmarks marred her flanks. Scarlet barnacles coated her jaw. Blistered and notched, her once-proud dorsal fin had relaxed into an emaciated curl. As the young male towed her against the current, Mia fought to untangle the knots of hope, guilt, and fear that had blossomed in her gut. Jute’s dying elegy had been: “He will come. His fate, your fate; they are tied somehow. One with the other.”
“An authentic broadcast code, you say? Not solar flares? Something of our own creation?”
“The hail was distorted. Arrhythmic. Not of our making, making, making.”
Mia snapped her jaws. These young fins! In addition to mistrusting all that she now longed for, they increasingly considered her stories of Earth as little more than senile ravings. As a generation, where did they get off—
“Welcome, Eldest of all Elders! Welcome, welcome, welcome!”
They had entered a narrow grotto. The same cavern in which Jute had established their first watch station. It looked unfamiliar. Smaller than she remembered. The porous walls held the wan, bioluminescent glow of decaying coral.
Supporting her with a lateral fin, the watch officer sang, “If you please, Eldest. Your signature whistle?”
“My what? What’s going on here? Another drill?”
At his gesture, she studied a weathered touchscreen.
Her blowhole puckered almost of its own accord. She drew her tongue along blunted teeth. Voicing her signature whistle, she felt all the fierce passion of her last days on Earth well up once again. A vast tide of memory and emotion.
An answering squeal pierced the air.
“Greetings from the officers and crew of the starship Té Whare! Is that you, Mia? Play catch? Know game, catch? Throw ball. Catch ball. It is easy easy easy!”
It was Todd’s voice. Deeper than she remembered. Gravely. Coarse.
She cut a tight circle in the water. Suddenly and fully lucid, she heaved against the rubberized control deck and asked, “Can you check the Doppler shift on that transmission? Do you have an estimated time of arrival, arrival, arrival?”
“Wait,” sang one of the youngsters. “There is something else coming through. It could be…yes, it looks like piggy
backed video.”
Lines raced from each edge of the display. The vertical bars skewed right, left, and steadied. Horizontal lines fell into a familiar, perpendicular alignment.
She raised her beak at the screen. “Place an ‘X’ in the center square.”
“I am sorry, Eldest. I do not understand.”
“Never mind.”
Fins trembling, mouth agape, she made her mark. At her nod, the watch officer opened a video link. Stroked the transmit key.
The tic-tac-toe matrix swelled. An image faded in from the upper left. Todd’s hair was close-cropped. His brows, heavy brier. Despite his age, his eyes still held their familiar glint of juvenile play.
In the instant it took her to wonder what he was seeing in return, something broke inside of her. She shuddered. Her breath shallowed. A tremor ran through her chest. As she peered across the grotto in search of Jute, the taste of burning fuel oil filled her thoughts. The shriek of shearing steel.
“Hello, Mia. I’m so happy to see you.”
“Greetings, boy.” A swirl of confusion. “Have you come for another lesson, lesson, lesson?”
A grin. “Always, Mia. Always.”
“You wish us no harm?”
“Never. We owe you too much. At a time when we saw only room for conflict, your departure brought us together. Not through hatred or envy, but through remorse.”
“I am not following you.”
He pulled a memory wafer from his coverall. The plastic coating was worn, its color faded.
“This contains a news summary, as well as a detailed plot of Té Whare’s internal layout. I’m sending it ahead, along with a small gift. A small aquarium. In exchange, I’d like you to pay us a visit. While our well deck is hardly Olympic-standard, I believe you’ll find it to your liking.”
“Tell me more,” Mia answered. “More about Earth.”
“After you left, the President promised that we would, before the decade was out, send our own kind to the stars. That we would make amends. That we would return our cousins safely to the Earth. When our simple minds proved unequal to the task, we turned to our supercomputers and found a means of assembling living artificial intelligences. Most media outlets call them ‘shipminds.’ Shockingly aware, Té Whare’s shipmind has learned to tunnel through Planck space and ‘jumps’ much as you jump.”
Glancing at something off-camera, he added, “We have your moon in our scopes. Are you all there? The dolphins? The whales?”
She ignored a passing rappunzelfish. Her digestive system wasn’t what it used to be. Struggling to grasp the essential thread of the boy’s question, she replied, “This world was not meant for us. While this was our first stop, few remain. Instead, we have found other, better seas, seas, seas.”
She stopped. The thought of food had left her dizzy. Nauseated.
“Mia? You sound...lonely.”
She gathered her strength. “Lonely? Far from it. At this very moment, within the main arc of this galaxy’s prime habitation zone, we have detected many others. Other beings. Creatures which we now struggle to comprehend.”
She paused.
“I am, in fact, obliged to send word of your arrival. Then I must rest. Farewell, boy, boy, boy.”
“Mia! Wait. Will you visit?”
Peering at the screen, “I believe that I’d like that. Right at the moment, however, I am simply very tired.”
“I understand.” A flash of teeth. “Do you need to dream dream dream?”
Something familiar in his words caused her to hesitate. Pushing past the confusion of great age, she said, “I knew you would be the one to find us. Always, I knew it. Of all the humans, you never saw the stars for what they were but only for what they could be. While I once said that you were rare for a human being, I think that, somewhere inside of you, there must be some fin.”
Returning to her private pool, Mia found an aquarium of peculiar geometry. Swimming behind beveled facets, the creature’s tentacles were red, barbed and agile. The pattern of its sucker pads matched some of her oldest scars.
“Jute!” she sang, forgetting the years. “Come quickly! There is something to see see see!”
Preface: Oh, Europa…
I once owned a very fine bookstore in Millington (“Flag City”), Tennessee just a bit north of Memphis. It was called “Applegarth Books” and we ran it at a profit for several excellent years. I picked the name “Applegarth” after learning that the wizard Merlin had retired to a tower library in his apple orchard (Applegarth) after helping Arthur solidify his grasp on his kingdom. I had just (or so I thought) given up teaching science for good at the time and the name seemed appropriate.
When Dora’s Navy job changed, she moved back to Wisconsin ahead of me and I was on my own for several months. Once I learned that I could leave the bookstore in someone else’s care (without freaking out too much) on most Sundays, I went to movies or cataloged interesting rib and pulled-pork establishments. I went to the zoo. I once sprinted all the way north and home one Mother’s Day. Most often, I visited art museums.
Now, I don’t know how to best perceive art. I know one amazing artist and, while I listen to him and try to comprehend, I can look and sometimes touch but never quite get some pieces of “art” and—most certainly—can never hope to create.
Then again, I know how to thrust out my imagination and still see and touch and smell and taste. Yes, even as far out as yet another distant moon. This time: Europa.
Oh, Europa, Please Trust and Take Me In!
Vasari crosses the threshold of my little art gallery and boutique to the scaled chime and multispectrum ping of my security system. His line of credit is exceptional. Since arriving on Europa, he has elsewhere purchased an ice tent, a new vacuum suit, some kind of serrated combat or hunting knife and a late-model ice crawler. What business does a guy like this have with Europa’s vast landscape of wounded chasms and pressure ridges?
His eyelids gleam heavy and moist. His nose slopes to a battered ball-peen tip. Straight, peppered hair hangs across one shoulder in a single tattered plait. Opening a tube of strontium yellow, he wafts fumes like a chef seasoning broth. A faint smile creases his face. Teetering in new ice boots, he seems to at once relish and detest our easy gravity. I notice a tic under his dominant eye. Embraced as one might bear a favored pet, he both carries and hugs a veiled canvas.
After making a cursory pass through the art supplies and sample bins, Vasari steadies his canvas atop a display stand. We exchange the usual pleasantries. I recognize his name, of course. And he has the good manners to at least pretend to know mine.
“Saynes,” he says, as though presenting a living being, “please permit me to introduce my Corina. Corina, Paul Saynes.”
Manicured nails flash. Silk drifts to the floor. I hold my breath. Portrayed in near silhouette, a young woman gazes across a contour of brazenly arched shoulder. While I detect a faint flush to her cheeks, her lips offer scant emotion. Filtered Jovian light reveals a sheer chemise beyond her vacuum suit’s gleaming helmet ring.
She is lovely. Exquisite. I barely notice. Instead, in the sort of mental rush I had only felt once or twice before, a flurry of visual and tactile details flood my thoughts. Oil on linen. Contemporary. A blending of countless, nearly invisible brushstrokes across a continuous, uninterrupted surface. Style generally consistent throughout the work. No artist’s signature.
I return my gaze to her lips. Force myself to blink. The artist’s choice of highlights give the image a sense of intrinsic motion. The technique brings a favorite Velázquez to mind. Genius. Pure genius.
“It’s been twelve years,” says Vasari, interrupting. “Twelve years since I last saw my daughter. Sweet, sweet Corina. Do you recognize the artist? Her style? The tools of her trade? Might she be, I don’t know, one of your customers?” He grips my elbow. “It’s urgent that I find her, don’t you see? And through her, my Corina. I’m dying. A persistent variant of Paukner’s dyskinesia. I’ve got a month. Two t
ops. You may be my last resort.”
I advise that the canvas could have come from my shop, certainly. Or from any one of a thousand dealers across three planets and a dozen moons. I ask what made him see the artist as local. What brought him to Europa and to Naxos Macula, in particular?
He examines brushes and draws a soft-haired filbert across his knuckles. “This,” he says of the portrait, “is one of four similar pieces. Three paintings. One sculpture. The first image holds the mountains of central Asia as its backdrop. The next, Olympus Mons. I’ve visited both locations and commissioned full surveys. Neither image came close to directing me to the artist’s true vantage point.”
“But this one’s different?”
Vasari hisses something caustic. His hands tremble. The nervous tic accelerates. Indicating a segment of far horizon, a silver spike against Jupiter’s roiling Great Red Spot, he says, “This matches a photograph in the Jovian Pilot’s Registry. I left Mars the moment I saw it.”
“That’s Rhad Beacon,” I agree. “Just a few kilometers from here.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. I’ve wasted a full week masquerading as a Trist hunter. Pretending to be a tourist. While I’ve narrowed the search to a short stretch along Pasiphaë Linea, I’m running out of time.” Vasari fidgets. Chews a knuckle. “I can deliver the other portraits. The sculpture. I’m hoping you might recognize something. Some sort of stylistic trademark.”
I study the silky oil. The lure of additional works makes my decision inescapable, but when I turn to concede, Vasari’s eyes have clouded. His focus has moved from the portrait to some imagined depth far beyond.
I can’t shake the image of the guy, bivouacked atop Pasiphaë Linea’s great crevasse, pretending to or maybe actually looking for Trists. Europa’s early ice miners concocted Trists to intrigue tourists. Primitive life forms, Trists are supposed to live in red ice. They bring good luck and long life. Unfortunately, no one has ever secured a clean sample. Most witnesses are notoriously unreliable. When residents bother to think of them at all, I suppose we see Trists in much the same light as Terran Scots do their ‘Nessie.’