Loptoheen just concentrated on his piloting. “Old and bold…they don’t often go together, in tuk or in anything, Honorable Metah.”
“Be quiet…isn’t that Kekot over there?”
The Ponkti transfer ship that had brought Lektereenah herself to Earth in the original Farpool was made ready for the trip. A dozen technicians and handlers went over the ship carefully, at Loptoheen’s insistence, checking valves, seals, controls, propulsors, accommodations, pulsing systems, everything. Provisions were laid in and while Lektereenah herself was inspecting the work, a prodsman came by with news.
“Affectionate Metah, the eekoti Chase, Kel’metah of Keenomsh’pont, is near…he requests an audience.”
Lektereenah looked up and pulsed the prodsman. No, he was telling the truth…no bubbles or froth hiding anything there. “Chase…he is no longer Kel’metah, I’m told. He’s been changed…no longer em’took. What could he want?” She deliberated only a moment, then, “Escort him here.”
“At once, Affectionate Metah.”
Chase arrived in tow, along with another kelke, both in mobilitor suits. The prodsmen flanked them on both sides, weapons unsheathed and ready. Lektereenah had climbed aboard the transfer ship. Only her beak and face stuck out of the hatch. She regarded Chase and his companion warily.
“Why does an Omtorish stooge visit the Metah of the Ponkti? And who is this with you?” She was momentarily distressed that the mobilitors blocked her pulses. To hide one’s echoes, to conceal feelings like this before the Metah…a serious breach….
Chase grabbed hold of his companion, who seemed to be having trouble staying in position. “This is Angie Gilliam, Affectionate Metah. My friend…I think you say, ke’kel shoo’lee.”
Lektereenah seemed to understand. “Ah, a lover perhaps. How touching…eekoti Chase, why have you lost em’took… you know this is an insult to all of us.”
Chase eyed the prodsmen watching him very carefully. No sudden moves for this old boy, he told himself. “Affectionate Metah, it’s hard to explain. I am Tailless, Uman, it’s what I am and I could never be Seomish. I knew that. I always struggled with that…being not quite Uman, not quite Seomish. I was caught in the middle.”
“Now the kelke don’t pulse a friend. Respect is gone.”
That hurt. Chase said, “Seomish people will always be my friends, you know that. It’s just that—” how do you say this?—“—I can’t really change who I am. I guess…I don’t know…maybe I was trying to run away from who I was. On Seome, with the Seomish, I was somebody. I was important.”
“You became Kel’metah because you were different…you owed allegiance to no kel.”
“Exactly. But it was all a front. I wasn’t happy being Uman. But I couldn’t really be Seomish. My pulses were all mixed up.”
“And now?”
Chase said, painfully aware of the mobilitor suit that made him now so different. I can’t even live with them anymore without this suit, not at this depth. “Now I think I’ve accepted who and what I am. I just have to try and make the best with what I have.”
Lektereenah finished her inspection and emerged from the ship. She tried pulsing Chase deeply. “I see many things, eekoti Chase. I see confusion. I see worry.”
“I am worried, Affectionate Metah. You’re getting ready to enter that new Farpool but it’s dangerous. We don’t know what might happen…look what happened to the Chinese. There should be more tests.”
Lektereenah supervised the final loading of the ship. Stores and provisions were piled up inside, hanging or attached to every surface. Loptoheen climbed aboard and took his position in front.
“We will be the test, eekoti Chase. The Ponkti can no longer stay on Urku. The waters are too different. We long for something more familiar. Now, the m’jeete have given us a way. A path home. To Seome…a Seome of another time, before the great ak’loosh. Before the destruction. We must take this path, or we will die.”
“Affectionate Metah—”
But Lektereenah had made up her mind. “It is done. We’re all here, eekoti Chase, pulse around you. The Ponkti are ready to go. Once Loptoheen and I have prepared the way, others will follow. Once again, Ponkti will rule the seas of Seome, as it was in the long-ago.”
Chase came forward, without the Metah’s bidding. Prodsmen moved to intercept them, but Lektereenah waved them away. “Let him come—”
“I just wanted to see your kip’t. Does Loptoheen understand how to operate in a farpool…all the maneuvers, the orientation, when to accelerate, when not to?”
“I know enough, Tailless,” the tukmaster growled from the cockpit. “We Ponkti managed to make it through the Farpool before, didn’t we?”
“Loptoheen, nobody knows if this one works the same way. Let me—”
But Lektereenah intervened. “Enough! We are ready to go.” With that, the Metah took a quick pulse around. The kip’t rested on a low sandy rise in the seabed, surrounded by hundreds of clicking, squawking, grunting Ponkti, all roaming anxiously around the setting. Lektereenah sang a song from the past and her people replied, overlaying her words with mournful harmonies of their own. To Chase, the gathering sounded like a church choir, hypnotic and majestic at the same time. When the song was over, a great bleating cry came from the Ponkti around them and with that, Lektereenah disappeared into the kip’t and the hatch was sealed.
Moments later, the ship lifted away from the sand pile and motored off toward the outer vortex fields.
Inside, Loptoheen wrestled with the controls. “Tricky currents, here, Metah. I’m having trouble staying on course…the currents keep pushing us away.”
“Increase speed, then. Don’t fight it. The Omtorish always say let opuh’te do as it will.”
Loptoheen had already done that and the kip’t careened and corkscrewed through the turbulence as they homed on the main whirlpool, the deepest vortex that defined the Farpool itself. Presently, Loptoheen could feel the bow of the kip’t straighten out. The monster ahead had grabbed them and was pulling them inexorably in.
“We’re in the approach corridor now, Metah. Controls are sluggish. I pulse chaos ahead, turbulence, clashing currents. It must be the core of the Farpool. Hold on—”
Lektereenah was growing nauseated by the sudden wrenching, punishing shifts in position. First, they were upright, then sideways, battling the currents, then upside down and right side up, like a particle caught in a tidal wave. The Farpool pulled them ever closer, ever faster, down a narrowing tunnel of crashing, foaming water, and they began gyrating like a top at the end of a long string.
The force began to increase, a centrifugal force that soon shoved them to one side of the compartment and pressed them hard against the walls. Worse, the compartment began a slow roll, a roll that picked up at a steady clip.
Soon, they were spinning enough to become disoriented and dizzy.
“Loptoheen…this is bad…I become sick—“
The Metah’s words were suddenly lost in a bright flash of light, a searing, painfully white strobing light that flooded the compartment and blinded both of them.
“Metah…I can’t see—“
The spin kept accelerating and moments later, the two of them passed out.
The Ponkti ship jetted out of the Farpool in a blinding light, a roaring rush of deceleration, throwing Lektereenah and Loptoheen hard against the cockpit windows. Caught in the whirlpool, Loptoheen rammed the ship’s rudder hard over, while firing her jets to counteract the centrifugal force of the spin. For a few moments, they were both pinned sideways against the cockpit, until the force of the jets shoved them through the core of the whirlpool and out into calmer waters.
Lektereenah breathed hard, wiping her beak with her hands. She checked the instruments.
“Sounding meetor’kel water, Loptoheen…rough water but visibility improving. I can pulse ahead…looks like we’re home.”
Loptoheen fought the lifeship controls to bring them into a stable attitude. “Thank Sho
oki we came through that one…a rough ride. I’m not sure where…or when we are.”
The lifeship slowed down poking through the murky waters of the upper P’onkel Sea, riding faint currents for a few moments.
“Can you locate us, Loptoheen?” Lektereenah asked uneasily. “The waters seem familiar but—”
“I’m trying. Pulsing all around…this sounds like P’onkel Sea waters. The echoes are similar, but there are differences. If I’m right, we landed in or near the P’omtor Current.”
Lektereenah looked around, seeing little, but noting welcome flashes of light nearby. “Mah’jeet, Loptoheen…mah’jeet! We are home…”
“Must be a bloom…we’ll give them a wide berth. But that’s a good sign. I’m pulsing a great mass ahead, perhaps a mountain or an island. We should go up and establish our position.”
“If we came back early enough in time, the Farpool would have been near Kinlok Island,” Lektereenah decided. “Before the Umans, before the Tailless invaders, left. Perhaps this is Kinlok.”
“We’ll pulse to be sure.”
Loptoheen maneuvered closer to the surface, where the waters were rough and treacherous. Cautiously approaching the surface, he nosed the kip’t into crashing waves and blinding foam and spray and bobbed about in the midst of a storm, trying to pulse or listen or see anything that seemed familiar.
Suddenly they breached in an explosion of foam, into a world of gray and gloom, with rising swells and rough choppy surf, bobbing like a paper cup in a hurricane. Above the surface, the ocean was roiling in heavy surf and gale-force winds slammed them up one wave and down another. Loptoheen did the best he could to keep them at the surface.
An island was on the horizon, its cliffs partially obscured in heavy mist. The cliffs seemed to rise out of the water at a vertiginous slope, a rugged shoulder of gray-brown rock, slick with moss.
But it was what lay off to the left of the island cliffs that caught Loptoheen’s attention. He pointed.
What they had first mistaken for a seamother or another island was in fact no such thing. A dark hump emerged from the surface, poking above the waves and arching out of the water at a shallow angle, rising to a low apex some distance away, veiled by the ever-present mist that never seemed to lift. The part of the machine above the surface was a vast, squat cone, patterned with blister-like bumps from the water’s edge to the apex and completely around its circumference. Directly above each bump, the mist swirled in sparkling convolutions, forming spiral rainbows that seemed to expand as they curved overhead and disappeared into the gray of the Notwater.
Lektereenah could hardly breathe. “Loptoheen, we made it! We made it home…it’s the wavemaker!”
A driving wind pelted them, flinging sea spray and rain in sheets against the canopy. Veins of lightning crackled across the sky. For a few minutes, both of them marveled at their good fortune, to have travelled so far from Urku and landed in their home waters and even better, to have come back when the Tailless were still operating the cursed wavemaker.
“The Ponkti will rule the seas again,” Lektereenah decided. “Even if there are scattered pockets of Omtorish or Sk’ort or Orketish, with what we know, with what we can bring back from Urku…all of Seome will be Ponkti waters.”
“Metah…what is that?”
A bright light had just erupted on the horizon, rising like a sunrise over the low rounded humps of an island. They heard the low whine of the Uman jumpship and saw it disappear momentarily in a haze of whirling sand. On the ground, rockets were the rule. Displacement engines tended to drag whole planets into voidtime if they were used too near to them. A parabolic orbit was needed first, to take advantage of Sigma Albeth’s enormous gravity well.
The jumpship rode a spear of flame into the heavens and soon vanished in the clouds. The thunder of her rockets pealed across the sea and echoed off the island’s cliffs, resounding for several minutes afterward. Lektereenah let the image settle in her mind.
The sea was rising in the bay into which the currents were sweeping them and swept over the island beach with scalding, hissing breakers, quickly erasing the last evidence of the Uman camp. Beyond the headlands, heavy swells boiled and dense hot mist soon blanketed everything. Loptoheen found the water too hot to stay any longer and he turned them back out to sea, just skirting a sand bank, itself slowly crumbling under the relentless assault of the surf. A dull red glow glinted off the rock cliffs behind them, diffusing in the mist like a false sunset.
Within the hour, the Coethi starball would reduce the entire planet to molten slag. Already, it outshone the sun; in a quarter of the sky from which Sigma Albeth never gleamed, a broad swath of light burned a blinding radiance. Facing it just before they submerged, Lektereenah felt the heat and radiation immediately.
“What’s happening, Loptoheen…the water is too warm…too rough…skorkel’te. There are no ve’skort here, no volcanoes in these seas.”
“I don’t know, Metah, but we should get out of here. That was a Tailless ship we saw taking off. We must have come back to the time when the Umans fled our world… when their enemy was near and they were about to be overrun—”
The kip’t plunged deeper into the maelstrom and was buffeted and rocked by strong cross-currents. Loptoheen had trouble maintaining control.
“I can’t—”
“Loptoheen, the waters, they’re--!”
One hundred million miles above and beyond the small island and the churning seas of Seome, the star-sun Sigma Albeth B had breathed her final breath.
The spin kept accelerating and moments later, Lektereenah passed out. Only Loptoheen was left to try and steer the ship as eekoti Chase had once told him…lean this way, roll a little, pull back the stick, not too hard! “By Shooki—” he muttered to himself. “This is like riding across the top of the Serpentines, only worse….”
Had any intelligent eyes been at the surface or perched on the rock cliffs of Kinlok Island, they would have been treated to an incredible sight offshore, just before dawn. Backlit with the strange fiery red-orange glow of sunrise to the east, a thin ropy waterspout formed several beats off what had once been an ice-choked inlet. As the spout danced and skipped across the waves, a bright pulse of light emerged from the sea and vaulted heavenward along the length of the spout, followed by a series of light pulses, as if the spout were sucking buckets of light right out of the ocean.
The light pulses disappeared into low-hanging clouds and vanished, leaving only a faint iridescent flicker, like a silent lightning discharge.
Moments later, the waterspout collapsed into the sea and the ocean returned to its restless heaving.
The heaving lasted exactly ten minutes. At that time, the fiery red-orange glow of the sun Sigma Albeth B, nearly opaque from view by thickening clouds, fog and spray, detonated in the skies over Seome and the supernova process began.
Within the mass of Sigma Albeth B, the onion-layered shells of its elements underwent catastrophic fusion, eventually reaching the Chandrasekhar limit of mass and began to collapse. The inner part of the core was compressed into neutrons, causing the infalling material to bounce and form an outward-propagating shock wave. The shell started to stall in this collapse but was quickly reinvigorated by neutrino interaction across its interior. Then, the surrounding material was blasted away in a titanic rebound explosion, as the collapsing envelope of the star was explosively ejected away, sending material out into space in all directions at speeds in excess of 70,000 kilometers a second.
Every moon and planet in the Sigma Albeth B system (there were twelve in all) was incinerated. Seome itself was quickly incinerated in an expanding shock front from the detonation.
Seome had once been home to some twenty million inhabitants, a marine civilization tens of thousands of years old. Millions were still trapped on their world when the fire from the sky came.
Several hundred thousand kelke managed to survive and made the trip through the Farpool. Urku…Earth…was their destination a
nd their last hope.
But two had come back…Loptoheen, tukmaster of Ponk’t and Lektereenah kim, Metah of the Ponkti. They had come back through a new gateway, formed on a world they knew as Urku, formed by remnants of Coethi that had stowed away on escaping ships in the original kel’vishtu, the original escape from the doomed ocean world of Seome.
They had come back to a time only moments before Coethi starballs had finally destroyed the balance between the fusion fires of Sigma Albeth B and the vast heaving mass of her gaseous envelope.
Loptoheen and Lektereenah and all the surviving twenty million who had not made it into the final landing of the Farpool were obliterated into atoms.
No word ever came back from Seome to the anxious Ponkti who had gathered around Reed Banks. They wondered. They waited, at first patiently, then with growing concern, for a sign, a signal that the gateway was proven, that they should board their tiny ships and fly into the vortex, for it alone would take them home. They waited for news from their beloved Metah and the great tukmaster that the waters of Seome were waiting, welcoming them back to familiar sights and scents and sounds, to the Pom’tor current and the Pillars of Shooki and the T’kel ridge and the seamother herds.
But no word ever came.
Chase and Angie returned in their kip’t to the task force and its surface ship Fuzhou, flagship of the Chinese fleet anchored off Reed Banks. They climbed out of the little kip’t, shed their mobilitors and were grateful to be helped aboard by crewmen along the side rails.
There they found a Ponkti prodsman named Kekot ka, chief of the Metah’s guard. Kekot was clad in a Ponkti mobilitor, along with two other Ponkti, and they all wobbled like drunken sailors down the gangway toward a hatch that led below, to the ship’s wardroom.
“God, it feels so good to breathe real air,” Angie muttered. She flinched and scowled when a sailor tried to help her down the ladder. “I can manage on my own, sailor. Just keep your hands to yourself, okay?”
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