A Door Into Ocean

by Joan Slonczewski

  In that case, Spinel thought, they were grandfathers as well as grandmothers. But it was useless to point this out.

  “Along the equator,” Lystra said, “the globe is wide and the crest spreads thin.”

  “And we stay here, thanks to starworms.” Spinel knew she would appreciate that.

  “And thanks to shockwraiths. Say, look there—beyond the branches.”

  He started; the whirlpool was so big and close he had not noticed it.

  “Looks like it’s stalling.”

  Spinel stared as if mesmerized. Would it engulf the vary raft?

  A fountain rose at the spot, so tall that it brushed the clouds. Its foam fell slowly in the distance and turned to vapor before it rejoined the sea. For several minutes it stood, a white pillar erected by some mythic race to hold up the sky.

  “That one got a mouthful of fleshborers,” Lystra noted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you swallowed a school of fleshborers, you’d spit up, too. And that would be your last meal.”

  Spinel sickened at the thought. He wondered how long the fleshborers would last, to keep the swallowers away.

  Lystra lowered her binoculars. “The offshoot rafts. They might break off.” She meant Rilwen, he knew.

  “Usha will bring her in, like before, for health’s sake.” Far off, another white column sprouted, in the vicinity of Umesh-el, Spinel guessed.

  Lystra climbed down to the raft, and Spinel swung down after. A few sisters were still working on an emergency escape vessel, a long canoe with ten pairs of oars to speed off, in the event that the raft core broke up among the whirlpools. No glider squid could be controlled with swallowers about, but this vessel could probably make it to the nearest neighboring raft. Already the children from three families were settled in the boat, for the dozen hours or so that the crest would last. To the side, a score of airblossoms were tethered, drenched in orange photophores. These would be released like balloons as a signal to other rafts, if the time came.

  It was all for nothing, most likely, Spinel tried to tell himself. The raft of Raia-el was over a hundred years old, and each year the sea had swallowed twice, once from the north and back again from the south. But the wailing of children and the feverish activity of their mothers little helped to calm him.

  Nisi and Perlianir were carving an extra oar; raftwood shavings scattered everywhere. At the sight of Nisi, Spinel remembered something. “Lady Nisi, what’s the news of my folks? You did ask, didn’t you?”

  Nisi frowned and wrung her sore fingers. “He could not get through. Spinel, you belong on the boat.”

  “What, with a bunch of babies?”

  “You haven’t a selfname,” said Perlianir.

  Spinel kicked the side of the boat, disgusted. It was bad enough to have been drummed out of one world for lack of a stonesign. He’d be a troll’s cousin if he’d let them nag at him for a ‘selfname.’

  Behind him came the voice of Usha. “The Unspoken One refused to come in.”

  Spinel turned. Usha was facing Lystra, who stood as if she were ready for a fight. “She would not come, that’s all,” Usha repeated.

  “Nonsense, mothersister. That branch may not last.”

  “She Unspeaks us. It is her right.”

  “Her right to die?”

  “Even so.”

  The two faced each other in a way that on Valedon would surely have ended in a fistfight or hair-pulling, but Lystra broke away and ran, down one of the long twisting branches.

  Spinel’s heart beat very fast. Something had to come of that exchange, maybe not like on Valedon, but something just as crazy. He raced to catch up with Lystra. He found her shoving her rowboat into the channel. “Hey, you won’t make it back,” he called.

  “Should I let her die?” Lystra’s face was haggard.

  “I’ll call Merwen.”

  “Call on Shora herself! I’m my own selfnamer, now.”

  “Wait.” He sprang from the branch and landed in the boat, which rocked and nearly capsized. He sat up and rubbed a sore elbow.

  Lystra stared at him in amazement. “You ‘trollhead,’ what will Merwen say if I get you killed?”

  “You’re the selfnamer, Intemperate One.”

  She wrinkled her nose but said nothing more. They rowed out beyond the channels, passing clumps of fleshborers that tore at each other, maddened by the great deathfeast that tinted the waves a dull cinnabar. Lystra followed the line of the submerged branch that led out to Rilwen’s offshoot. The sea was a confusion of eddies and sharp currents, but together the two rowers managed to make headway. The speck of raft appeared at last, a green leaf upon an unquiet sea.

  Rilwen sat crosslegged between her troll’s hoard of gems and her ragged excuse for a shelter.

  “Rilwen?” Lystra laid a hand upon Rilwen’s sunken shoulder.

  The frail sister would not reply.

  “Rilwen, this branch can’t last.”

  A fountain roared up from the sea, the nearest yet. Waves came crashing onto the bit of raft and left a fleshborer stranded and snapping. The raft itself shuddered and swayed. Spinel lost his footing and caught hold of Rilwen’s shelter.

  Lystra was shaking her like a doll. “Rilwen, you have to come back. It’s our duty; we share your protection.” But already Rilwen was turning white, and that was it, Spinel knew by now.

  “Let’s pick her up.” Spinel reached beneath Rilwen’s arms to carry her, but Lystra pulled him off. “That’s no use,” she said, “her heart will just stop.”

  “What? But why? Of all the—” He let off a string of Valan curses. “Look, we can’t just leave her here.”

  “She seeks her Last Door.”

  “It’s not right, it’s—it’s against the—” He realized that he knew no Sharer word for “law.” His arms fell. Lystra watched Rilwen, and Spinel watched Lystra. From the fountaining seaswallower a mist drifted over.

  “Go on back,” Lystra told him, still staring at Rilwen. “Take the boat, go on.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll swim.”

  “Among the fleshborers?”

  “Rilwen may change her mind, if you leave.”

  Wincing, he turned and walked back toward the boat. Brown water already covered the branch that moored it. His feet stopped. Should he go? Would Rilwen really change her mind? He had to think fast, and that annoyed him; he just wasn’t good at it, that’s why he quit school when the master made him stammer out the square root of…

  A wave lapped at his feet, and panic swept over him. Go now, said the wave; think later, safe on a dry mat in the silkhouse.

  But his right foot carried a wrinkled scar.

  His mind focused and centered on one thing. His face set, and he walked back to Lystra.

  “You’re still here?” Her lips contorted. “Get out!” she screamed.

  “How will I tell Merwen I left you?”

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “What are you trying to do, share death?”

  That cooled her a bit. “Share nothing. If I die for love, what’s it to you?”

  Numbness filled him; he choked on his tongue. He really was a trollhead, not to have understood. He should not have come. But it was too late; his mind had set a course and he had no will left to change it.

  Lystra was determined to change it. Her fingers clenched and straightened, and her will reached out to him, so strong it was almost palpable. But the more she willed him to leave, the more he intended to stay. She could not move him, for all that she was a wormrunner.

  They stayed there, all three, a frozen mosaic, for what felt like hours but could barely have been minutes. Then another swallower fountained. The waves poured over, for a moment drowning the little offshoot raft. Rilwen’s shelter shuddered and collapsed.

  Lystra tore herself away and headed for the boat. Spinel jumped from his trance and joined her, pulling with all his strength at the oars. The core raft lay ahead,
a haven tantalizingly near, but with the shifting currents it took an age to get there.

  Exhausted, Spinel lay back on the dry raft surface to rest, never minding the scratchy vegetation. It was no shore of land, but by Torr it was all he had to count on.

  A deep rumbling began beneath him. Everything vibrated, as if the raft was about to split in two. The escape boat, could he reach it in time?

  The tremor ceased with a sudden snap that flung him sideways. Slowly Spinel raised himself and ventured to look out to sea. A vast whirlpool spanned where Rilwen’s raft had been.

  Though the raft was firm again, Spinel found himself shaking uncontrollably. He had to try twice to get up on his feet. As he turned back, he saw Lystra, several paces upraft, sitting with her legs crossed, facing out. Already she was beyond reach, in whitetrance, to mourn her lost love.

  Merwen came out with Spinel to see how Lystra was, and whether she had set herself safely upraft. She had, of course; Lystra was at heart a very practical young sister. For a moment Merwen regarded her daughter, so still and white. Inwardly she bled for Lystra, and more for Rilwen, and most of all for Yinevra, who would live with this sorrow till her own Last Door. But Merwen tried not to pity her, for of all the well-meant emotions pity is the cruelest to share.

  She bent down and lightly kissed Lystra on her scalp.

  Spinel gasped and whispered, “Is that safe, in her trance?”

  “Yes, but do not try to share words.”

  “But she can hear us?”

  “In a distant way, like an embryo in a womb turned inside out to enclose the outer universe.” Spinel would not understand this, not until he learned it himself. “A mental cord still connects her with this life. She hears us, but if our words tried to travel up that cord, it might snap.” Merwen opened a pod of sunscreen and began to smooth it into Lystra’s back, gently, almost reverently. “If she stays here many days, she will need this to keep from burning.”

  “Days, Merwen?”

  “She was very close to Rilwen. Both of them were insatiably curious about the Stone Moon. Once they saved up seasilk together to trade for a—a ‘picture maker,’ that makes ghost pictures of living things. Lystra was determined to find out how it worked. She learned to speak Valan fluently, and she found out a little, about the lenses and the sensing parts that make of such an object a seeing eye. Beyond that, I think, even the traders did not know, and they said ‘magic’ because they knew no better.”

  “Magic is nonsense.”

  “Magic is anything you don’t understand.” Merwen kissed her daughter once more, then turned away. “Lystra will need more lotion, and a shell of water each day she stays.”

  “Oh, I’ll bring that. But what if the raft breaks up?”

  “The crest is passing, and the core raft is out of danger.” Otherwise there would have been signs: great cracks in the soil and flooding of the inner chambers. Silently she walked home with Spinel and wondered yet again how much he understood. He was accepting of everything, even Lystra now, and that was a blessing to see. But was acceptance understanding?

  She remembered that she herself must take time to mourn Rilwen, but she was not yet up to it. At the moment she needed another kind of solace, that which only her lovesharer could bring.

  Merwen found Usha alone in a lifeshaping chamber, busily snaking nutrients into a vat of bacteria. “Will you never stop, dear one?” She kissed the nape of Usha’s neck.

  “Sickness doesn’t wait. Suppose we get a flu epidemic, next?” Usha pointed to the vat. “Those unseen little sisterlings will make us lots of medicine.” But she let herself relax and leaned into a wall curve matted with leaves, her cheek next to Merwen’s. Merwen nestled closer and breathed the scent of Usha, so much sweeter than raft blossoms.

  “Rilwen is beyond hope,” Usha whispered. “Do you worry for Lystra?”

  Merwen shut her eyes and let weariness drain from her. “Lystra worried me from the day she was born. When she wasn’t yelling, she was overturning the pudding bowl on the floor…I think Shora sent her just to test my name.”

  Usha chuckled. “So it is, to have a daughter. Shora has many worse.”

  “But you, Usha the Unconsidered, you never ask anything of anyone. You should worry me most of all!”

  Usha cupped Merwen’s chin in her hands. “I asked for you, once. What else is there?”

  Merwen shuddered, and they kissed searchingly, then long and hard, just as on the first day they had met in this chamber, so many doors of time past.

  4

  IT WAS TWILIGHT when a spot of orange sailed aloft above a neighbor raft, Kiri-el.

  At Raia-el, dozens of sisters crowded to the water’s edge to scan the sea for survivors. Plantlights sprang up, to outline the branch channels, and boats were brought out to pick up swimmers. The first escape ship appeared, also dotted with plantlights, and a cheer went up when the ship made it to a branch. But then twenty-one refugees straggled out, children half dazed and half hysterical, their elders mute and haggard. Two more ships made it, bringing the total near eighty, and several were heard later to have reached other rafts. But three shiploads were never seen again, except for stray oars and one strong swimmer, picked up just off Umesh-el.

  In the next few days, Spinel and everyone else worked hard to cope with the homeless sisters. A family of eight crowded into the silkhouse of Merwen and Usha. Two of them just sat in whitetrance all day, but one, Mithril the Lonely, seemed to crave activity. She helped Spinel clean piles of octopus to feed everyone, while she chatted incessantly over the aborted history of Kiri-el; how her great-grandmothers had founded the raft and tunneled it with wood-enzymes over the years; and how just two years ago they had hosted a Great Gathering with sisters from five of the eight galactics, and it was high time for another one. “But the raft had one flaw of a crack that widened every season,” Mithril told him. “Well, we’ll have to start another one, soon as the water clears. Have you perhaps seen a good strong raftling about? No?”

  Wellen came by, and Spinel handed her a plate full of octopus cleanings for the pudding plant.

  “Usha’s little ones have grown so,” Mithril said. “And isn’t it just like Merwen, to adopt a Valan daughter. I had heard you were a young one, but in fact you look about ready for a selfname and a—”

  Spinel dropped the cleaning knife and left to escape her chatter. Merwen and Nisi were weaving seasilk for an extension to the house. The shuttles slid through their looms so fast that it almost hurt to watch. The two battens banged in time for a while, then shifted off beat.

  “We could have saved them all,” Nisi was insisting. “If only we could share in peace with Valedon…”

  “Share what?” Spinel asked.

  “An airlift could have saved everyone. If each raft had a helicopter—”

  “How much would that cost?” he said in Valan. “A raft’s weight in seasilk?”

  Nisi barely looked up. “A sharp tongue turns on its sharer.”

  Spinel clenched his fists but walked away. Tempers flared easily, as everyone rubbed elbows more than they were used to. The refugees seemed to be recovering, until Mithril unaccountably broke down and wept without stopping.

  Lystra stayed outside in whitetrance the whole time. Spinel took her water, and each day it disappeared. He rubbed her with lotion, and he watched and wondered what in all Torr’s planets was going on within that still head of hers.

  There was so much to be done that a week went by without schooltime in the evening. Someone muttered that all work and no learnsharing turned minds into mud; and besides, everyone could use a break. So a marathon session was called for the entire raft, to last well into the night.

  “This will be a celebration of life,” said Merwen.

  Spinel asked, “Will there be ‘fermented beverages’?”

  Flossa giggled. “You mean rotten food?”

  “Well, it sure beats what your pudding plant spits out.” It was too bad that Sharer stomachs did not tol
erate alcohol. They did not know what they were missing, but Spinel certainly did.

  At any rate, Flossa and others went off to the branch channels to gather delicacies for a feast. By now, the seaswallowers were practically gone; when a stray was sighted, a black airblossom was tethered up on the circular ridge. The water stretched smooth and sparkled, with barely a seedling or a fleshborer in sight. Lystra, though, remained in white. She would miss all the fun. “Send Weia to fetch her,” Usha suggested, but a look from Merwen quieted her.

  Wreaths of scallop shells were hung across the silkhouse, and some sisters piled them around their necks. Poles were planted for clickfly webs, with a plantlight atop each, and something added to the lights brought out rainbow colors. The solar cookers had been going all day, and the smell of boiled seafood clung to everything. Spinel ate and stuffed himself until he could barely move.

  Despite the gaiety, a sadness with no definable source crept over him. Flossa and Wellen bantered with their refugee friends and exchanged ribald jokes, of a kind of women’s talk that shut him out. Shaalrim brought out her shell flute with its plaintive tones, and Mithril produced hers, a pearly tapered corkscrew of a shell, the one bit of her home raft she had managed to save. She played a more fanciful tune, full of trills from her fingerwebs fluttering at the holes. It reminded Spinel of Captain Dak’s bright whistle talk, and of his challenge, “See you then…if you survive.”

  He sat up with a sudden thought: Dak would get him news from home. He would ask Dak to find out if his family was all right.

  The sun was getting low and caught a million ripples in the sea. Rainbow hues from the plantlights mottled the gathered faces. With no apparent sign, there was a hush as sisters turned their heads, and Spinel stretched to see. Grandmother Ama was half sitting up, cradled in Merwen’s arms. Ama began to sing, and a chorus of sisters echoed each line. Spinel had heard the song before, but tonight for the first time he listened closely enough to catch the Sharer words, as far as he could comprehend them.

  Door of ocean, heart of sky,

  Lips that pressed together lie,