The Waters Rising

by Sheri S. Tepper

  They spread out, working their way upward room by room, floor by floor. They had newly created tools that helped them find hollows, secret rooms, all the places where the books were hidden. They had known there had to be books. He and his fellows scanned them rapidly, looking for particular things, particular subjects. He took those that would be useful, including a few that were extraordinarily interesting. The others he tossed about so that they, too, would be destroyed atom by atom. They were obscene in their love of pain, in their gloating over death.

  In the deepest vault of all they found something stranger than anything they had found before, and they left the ways to it open, so that this, too, would be totally destroyed.

  When they had gathered the things they intended to save, the emissary set the devices carefully, calling his remaining companions to help him from time to time, to double-check, to be quite sure. They few and the rest of the embassy staff, who had already begun the journey to Merhaven, were the only Tingawans left in Norland. They had stayed out of the conflict, for this duty had to be done and they could not risk being killed before it was done. If the monster hadn’t gone away, they would have had to use other devices from outside the Old Dark House, devices that might not have been as effective. The creature had gone, so they could do this part of the job right, do it as they had been trying to do for generations.

  When they had finished, they went swiftly southward along a hilly road, toward the Lake of the Clouds. From a hilltop, they watched the bulbous cloud of fire and smoke that rose on a stem of flame above the heart of Altamont. They had allowed for the light evening breeze, which would spread the dust only so far as the ancient tunnels, the old shafts, the elevators, the towers. The dust would not reach farther than that, but that far it would reach. No one would go there again. He had brought pigeons with him to carry messages to the abbey, warning them away from Altamont, warning the world away from Altamont, warning them about the Old Dark Man, warning the world about the Old Dark Man. Without his coffin, his womb, his preserving container, he would not live long, but the terrible truth was he need not live long to do great damage. One day was too long. A year would be an eternity of destruction.

  In the morning, they began the trek south and east where they planned to meet the other embassy staff on the road. They would all leave Norland together. They would not leave until they had consulted with the clan Do-Lok. There might still be things left to do here in Norland.

  On the ship, life soon settled into a routine. Blue slept at night; the wolves prowled. First thing in the morning all four-legged passengers came out on deck to empty themselves in a designated place and have the resultant mess hosed overboard with the water that was pumped from the bilges. Precious Wind and Abasio then saw to their feeding: oats and hay for Blue, meat—often fish—for the wolves. While he ate, Blue leaned against the rail and thought of the trail he had traveled on the way to Woldsgard, thus keeping his mind off waves, water, and the fact that if he did not think of something else he would be seasick. Meantime, the wolves prowled around the ship if they needed additional exercise, after which they retreated to their den, where they lay about in snoring piles until evening came, when the whole process was repeated. By the tenth day, the sailors—who had very slowly grown accustomed to wolves—commented that there were no more rats on the ship. Precious Wind thought this unfortunate, since hunting rats had given the wolves something to do, and restless wolves would likely be discontented.

  Remembering hiding-and-finding games she had played as a child, she hit upon the idea of hiding bits of dried meat about the ship for the wolves to find at night, and the sailors offered to do the hiding for her, in the holds, mostly. She allowed this, warning them that what a wolf could smell, a wolf would get at, one way or the other, and it would not be a good idea to bury the bait in places they did not want wolves to dig their way to. She also conducted races between various pairs and offered for discussion the idea of giving each member of the pack a name. The resultant discussions passed many hours for both men and wolves as names suggested by wolves were often impossible for humans to replicate; names suggested by humans were often unpleasant to wolven ears.

  “Captain,” she asked when she began to run out of ideas, “is the equipment I left aboard when you brought me here still in the hold?”

  He nodded. “That was a long time ago. It’s there. Do you want it brought up?”

  “I’ll need a place with good light to work in. The devices are solar powered.”

  “Aside from the deck, the best light is in where the horse is. There’s room in there for you to set up a worktable, if you like. If the horse won’t mind.”

  “The horse won’t mind,” she said. “In fact he may be very helpful.”

  Blue was interested. “What are you going to do?” he asked when the men had set up her table and she was busy unpacking the little machines she would work with.

  “I’m taking the first tiny step in attempting to let the wolves learn to talk.”

  He snorted, asked, “How are you going to do that?”

  “Same way they did with you. Or with your father or mother. They discovered or created an equine voice-box cell for horses. They took genetic snips from humans, the parts that give them the parts of the brain associated with language, the vocal cords and throat, and the tongue. Then they took centuries or so to figure out how to meld the two physiologies and how to insert the genetic instructions into the reproductive system of horses.”

  “Centuries?”

  “Well, each new horse baby took almost a year to be born, then it had to be exposed to language, which meant people around it all day talking. Then if it didn’t work—and the first few dozen times it didn’t work—the people doing it had to figure out why it didn’t work, then they had to start over. I say ‘they,’ but of course there was a different ‘they’ every thirty or forty years. There was no way to hurry the reproductive part. It takes patience.”

  “I have noticed my tongue is not like most other horses’ tongues.”

  “Yes, the tongue has to change some while still not interfering with your normal eating habits. It’s all very complicated. We’ve succeeded with horses and dogs—that’s how I know we’ll be able to do wolves. There are only minor differences in the genetics, but . . .”

  “There was a talking coyote in Artemisia.”

  “So Abasio said, yes. Dogs and coyotes can talk; wolves are next.”

  “Who will teach them to talk when they’re very young? Their parents can’t.”

  “Well, sometimes we’ve been able to change adults. If we can change the pack members, they’d teach the young ones. Otherwise it would be whoever’s around.”

  “And when you have talking wolves, then what? Will that stop the waters rising?”

  She stared at him for a long moment. “Blue, nothing we know of will stop the waters rising.”

  “Then what good is it?”

  She sat down on a hay bale and gazed at him thoughtfully. “If you had the choice to change what you were and go on living—let’s say you could turn into a whale—would you do it?”

  “My other choice being what?”

  “Drowning.”

  “Oh, I’d whale-ize. Sure. At a full gallop. Are you proposing to do that to me? A whale seems a bit large.”

  “No, we’re not proposing to do anything to you, because at the rate the waters are rising, you’ll live out your life on land, and so will the wolves. But you have offspring, colts.”

  “Foals; colts are male, fillies are female. I have offspring, yes, here and there.”

  “You’d like the idea that your descendants could . . . whale-ize, wouldn’t you? If it was that or drowning?”

  “I’d like the idea, I think.”

  “And you’d like them to talk? Can yours talk?”

  “Some of them, but not all. Speaking doesn’t breed true. With some mares yes, with others, no.”

  “Well, if they could, they could tell us what they
prefer. Wouldn’t that be an advantage?”

  “To a whale?”

  “Isn’t it an advantage for a race of creatures to be able to tell us it wants to be saved instead of just having us do it? Isn’t it an advantage to any creature to have a voice, language, and hands to manipulate things?”

  “You mean, considering what mankind has done with all three of those great gifts?” He whinnied laughter.

  She flushed. “Too many of mankind are fools, but not all. The waters rising may be the salvation of mankind, in fact. So we believe.”

  “And you’re going to arrange it so whales would have hands?”

  “A voice, a language, and manipulators of some kind. Whales and dolphins already have their own languages, but no one else can speak it. The easiest way to solve that may be the way we’ve done it already: create simple translators. Anyhow, that’s why I’m trying to give the wolves a language. I like wolves. I admire wolves. And horses.”

  “Horses do not admire wolves.”

  “I know. I realize that herding herbivores cannot admire packs of carnivores. I’m hopeful that the time will come when no creature with a developed brain will ever kill any other creature with a developed brain. We have always had two aims. First: to save humanity and as many other dryland living species as we can. Second: to make every intelligent creature mentally and physically capable of language and capable of talking to every other intelligent creature.”

  “All creatures are intelligent.”

  She threw up her hands, crying, “I know. We know. It’s impossible to save them all, so we started with those that either have a language or that we can give a language.”

  She turned away from him, her shoulders sagging, and he knew this was a grave trouble to her.

  He said, “Well, fish aren’t very intelligent, and we’ll all have to eat something. If the world is underwater, that means either fish or seaweed, and I don’t think I’d do well on fish.”

  She sighed, nodded, conceded. “We’ve been arguing over that for several generations. One group of us has been experimenting with vegetable body parts for humans, hoping we could live on sunlight, soil nutrients, and water . . .”

  Blue turned his head to stare at her, his mouth half-open as he considered Abasio with branches. “What would that look like?”

  “The volunteers looked like themselves with green wings added on. It worked, but the vegetable system is so much slower that the volunteers had to spend most of their time just sitting in the sun. If they were awake, thinking took up most of the energy they were accumulating. Moving was very slow and difficult. Talking was at a rate of about one word a minute. When we took the wings off them and let them go back to eating, they described it as a kind of dream world. Ideas were slow; images were slow; they couldn’t even hear speech—it went by like a burst of sound with no meaning in it. Some of the volunteers came out of the experience convinced that trees think all the time, it’s just so slow that we can’t detect it.

  “We’re still working on the possibility that people could sleep in the daytime while they accumulate energy, then take off the wings and work at night.”

  “So, I’m right. If you don’t turn us into vegetables, carnivores will have to eat fish and herbivores would eat seaweed.”

  Blue stared out through the door while she attached and assembled tiny parts in the light of the window. He was trying to imagine talking with wolves. How does food talk to someone who is hungry? Does a hungry person want to take time to talk to food? If they could talk to one another, could they still eat one another?

  He mused, “So you’ll grow vocal cords in the wolves. Then you’ll teach them to talk. Then you’ll see if they actually can. Then you’ll ask them if they want their young born able to talk?”

  Precious Wind picked up one assembly and attached it firmly to another, setting the linked devices into the sunlight. A tiny wheel began to spin. She said, “That’s the last step in the process, inserting the right sequence into the reproductive organs. Once we find the right sequence.”

  “Keeps you from being bored, I suppose,” said Blue. “Keeps you from feeling seasick. I’d like to make a suggestion.”

  “That being?”

  “There’s a thing called a . . . wampus? A sea thing. It’s about my size, I think. Abasio read me a book about it.”

  “I think you mean walrus,” she replied, starting a new assembly. “But they need dry land to have their babies on. A lot of the creatures that were originally land animals that returned to the sea and evolved further while in the sea still need dry land to bear children on. Walruses. Seals. Sea lions. All those. Whales and dolphins bear their young in the water, but they have to boost the babies up to the surface to breathe until the babies learn to do it themselves.”

  “I’d prefer to think of my foals as turning into something like the wampus, if it came to that.” Blue brooded over this for some time, forgetting completely to be seasick. “Or a very large herbivorous sea otter that could live on seaweed. They make nests in the weeds and lie on their backs in the sun. That looks very pleasant to me. I remember rolling on my back as a colt. It was comfortable.” He went back to his railing, so full of thought about sea creatures and eating seaweed that he forgot to be seasick for the rest of the day.

  Out on the deck, Justinian was continuing his conversation with his daughter while Abasio listened from where he leaned on the rail. He had never really seen the ocean until now, on this ship, and he found it endlessly fascinating. He found equally fascinating the things Justinian was telling Xulai. How he had loved Xu-i-lok. How they had met. How they had been married. How frantic they had been when they found out she had been “cursed,” though they knew it hadn’t been a curse. Whoever had done it had done it badly but repeatedly. If it had been done right, the princess would have died within a season instead of lingering all those years. How they found out it had been Alicia. What they had learned about the Old Dark House.

  “The Old Dark Man sounds like an ogre to me,” Abasio commented. “I met a few, back in the wild lands. At first I thought they might be trolls, but trolls weren’t intelligent. Both were the results of unhindered genetic experimentation, and I’ll bet your Old Dark Man was the same, at least partly. Why does he want to kill Tingawans?”

  Precious Wind, who had finished assembling her devices, emerged from the cabin with Blue behind her. “Now that you’re talking of the Old Dark Man, there’s something I have to tell Xulai. Well, tell all of you, actually. May I interrupt you?”

  Justinian nodded and gestured toward a large, square hatch cover where they could sit near one another. As the others arranged themselves, Precious Wind sat down, her booted feet neatly together. From her pocket she took a red, ovoid object and a sheaf of papers, holding them before her. “I found this where you hid it in the wagon, Abasio. I should have given it to Xulai long ago, but I put it off.”

  “That’s not like you,” said Xulai chidingly. “You don’t put things off.”

  “You had just learned who you were and how old you were, and I thought any additional responsibilities might be crushing. It was to ease your life that your mother left you this,” Precious Wind replied, holding up the red oval she had been holding: “This is ug ul xaolat.”

  “What is it?”

  “In Tingawan the words mean ‘a thing master.’ It has a number of ‘things’ that it can order and direct. You can speak to it or simply press it with your fingers to summon a hunter, or to move very swiftly to a place of safety, or to have something carried to another place. Whatever thing you want, this master summons it. It can move you faster than a slaughterer can move. It is why it was entrusted to your mother, so she could escape, if necessary. Unfortunately, this device could not protect her from the peril that came upon her.”

  “Why has it not been used since?” demanded Xulai, in that voice they had heard only a few times before. “Why has it not rid us of this monster?”

  “It was not designed as a weapon. It
was meant to be used by scouts, by people moving in the wild. It helps in getting across steep canyons, up and down cliffs. It will carry equipment. It will kill prey, but it will not kill anything that looks human.”

  “Unfortunately, our monster does seem to look human,” said Abasio almost angrily. “And we have no immediate need to be transported across a canyon. Was there something else?”

  “Yes, a great deal else.” She sighed. “Be patient,” she said. “It is a long story. I will tell it not as we discovered it, in bits and pieces, but as a whole, as it happened.

  “Late in the Before Time, humans everywhere had divided into tribes, clans, sects that were constantly at war with one another. Each group hated others because of the language they spoke or the god they worshipped or the color of their skin or the food they ate or their personal habits. Few of their hatreds were based on reality; many of them were brought into existence by people who used something called ‘media’ to whip people into frenzies of hatred. All these hatreds resulted in violence and death.

  “One or two tribes among them, we’re not sure which ones or how many, put all their ingenuity to work and developed terrible weapons to kill their enemies. There was nothing new in the killing, only in the weapons themselves. Some of the brilliant technologists did a prideful, stupid thing. They invented killing machines that could . . . smell intelligence.”

  “Smell?” cried Abasio.

  “We call it that. The machines could sense intelligence. These men, whoever they were, sat down together and codified their own beliefs. They wrote them down precisely, defining the words they used, making them explicit. A set of beliefs might go something like, ‘We believe in Oog, the only true god. We believe women were made to be inferior to men and take orders from men. Oog rightfully directs some men, Oog’s high priests; only those men may rightfully direct other men; all men may rightfully direct women and children. Women’s task is to have children and obey men. Oog directs that all Oog-believing men convert or kill all other men who do not believe in Oog or the rightfulness which Oog asserts. Women and children who refuse to believe in Oog must be killed.’