A Darkling Sea

by James Cambias

  “Tell us what you hope to gain.”

  “Gain? Why, I want to get one of those huge salaries routinely paid to linguists, of course. Some of them even make enough to purchase food, or so I’m told.”

  “We want to know if your studies could be continued by other means,” said Gishora.

  “Sure! You could build a probe to not listen to Ilmatarans the same way I do. Better yet, don’t build it. Much cheaper.”

  “Tell us what observations of the native beings you have made,” said Tizhos.

  “I’ve planted a net of hydrophones to pick up their communications. It would be easier if I could put the ’phones near their permanent settlements, but someone objected to that, so instead I put them out away from the vents, along routes they often travel. In the two years I’ve been here I’ve managed to accumulate about thirty- six hours of usable data. The other ninety-nine point five percent of my recordings are either silence or animal sounds.”

  “Tell us how you analyze them.”

  “With great difficulty. Normally, linguists have the advantage of being able to ask their subjects what things mean. Since that’s not allowed, I have to proceed by induction, comparing what’s said with what’s going on. Now as it happens, I have been able to make some significant progress, but I expect it would have taken me about two weeks rather than two years without you lot interfering.”

  “Explain what you have learned,” said Gishora.

  “As I said, rather a lot. We know their language is based on what I’ve named eidophones, or sounds mimicking the sonar echoes of particular objects. By comparing eidophones with actual echoes I’ve built up a little Ilmataran vocabulary, and—” Tizhos interrupted. “Tell me what value you find in this.”

  “Is this the old ’why are we doing this’ question? I thought we laid that particular specter when we met you people. All right, I’ll play: there are lots of things we can learn from the Ilmatarans. It appears they have a very long history; they may have developed social structures and philosophies we haven’t considered. The biology people have already learned a great deal which may be applicable in medicine or biotech back home. The place is a gold mine—” Graves stopped.

  “Continue describing the benefits you can gain here,” said Tizhos.

  “Oh, no. I see your game. Your people have been trying to paint us as wicked old colonialists ever since Castaverde first set foot on Ilmatar. If we benefit from being here, it makes us look like so many conquistadors out for loot. But if I say there’s nothing here of value to anyone, you can pass that along to UNICA with a word about closing down this useless project. Well, I decline.” He turned to face directly into one of Rob’s cameras. “Hear that? I refuse to answer any more questions because these two are trying to twist my words and manipulate my responses.”

  “Richard Graves, I ask you to make yourself calm,” said Gishora. “We only seek to learn the truth.”

  “The truth? The truth is that poor old Henri got fed up with your stupid contact rules and went out to have a good look at the locals, but he cocked it up and got killed. Maybe if you Sholen weren’t trying to tell us what we can and can’t do here, he’d have been properly prepared and it wouldn’t have ended so badly. Have you thought of that?”

  “You cannot blame us for the actions of humans.”

  “Oh? Why not? You’re trying to blame the rest of us for what happened to Henri, why not spread it around? Seems to me your hands, or paws, are just as bloody as ours. If you want to be the grand panjandrums of alien contact, then you’ve got to accept the responsibility for when things go wrong!”

  “If Henri Kerlerec had obeyed the rules I do not think he would have died,” said Tizhos.

  “Oh, so they’re for our protection, are they? Thank you, Mummy, for telling us we mustn’t go down to the park without Nanny.”

  Gishora interrupted. “I feel that we should stop now and meet with Richard Graves at a future time, when all may be more calm.”

  As Graves left the room he muttered to Rob, “Self-righteous pricks.”

  WHEN Gishora and Tizhos finished their interviews, they dined privately in their room. The food was delicious, and Gishora had misted the room with psychoactives to relax them both and put them in the mood for some erotic play. Despite that, both Sholen were quiet and sad during the meal.

  “It seems clear to me that nothing happened here except a stupid act by a human who died as a result,” said Gishora.

  “The humans have said that from the beginning,” said Tizhos.

  “I see no reason to doubt them. If they had planned this, they could have hidden the whole thing and reported the human’s death as an accident.”

  “We still can choose to go home and report that.”

  “I fear we cannot.” Gishora toyed with a food ball, then put the plate aside and flopped back on the cushions. “Irona and the others of his faction have very strong feelings about the humans and this world. If we report that humans have done no harm here, I doubt they will believe us. Instead they can claim we secretly support the humans’ activities—and that we no longer follow the ideals of the Consensus.”

  Tizhos began stroking his belly in a friendly but not passionate way. “I feel trapped. If we report that an accident happened here, then Irona’s faction gains strength and leads us to conflict with the humans. If we report falsely, then we cause that conflict ourselves.”

  “In such a situation, we should make the best of things,” said Gishora. “We must act to preserve our own influence, so that at least we have the chance to guide and limit the conflict.”

  “You plan to accuse the humans of violating the treaty, then?”

  “I do, and it makes me terribly sad. Console me.”

  ARE we the only ones?” asks Shellcrusher. The three of them are sitting at the base of a big chunk of basalt a dozen cables from their old hideout.

  “Likely,” says Strongpincer. “Those militia don’t take prisoners. They take heads.”

  “So what can we do?” asks Weaklegs. “Are they still looking for us?”

  “The militia don’t have any towfins with them, and fighting is hungry work. I expect they are going home, not hunting us. So that’s all right. But the three of us can’t rob convoys by ourselves.”

  “Back to rustling worms?” Shellcrusher sounds disgusted.

  “No,” says Strongpincer. He actually likes that idea, but he knows that he has to propose something bold, to keep Shellcrusher and Weaklegs from drifting away. “Listen to this: we strike out through cold water, leaving the militia behind. On the other side there is a line of vents and towns where nobody knows who we are. We can make a new start there, maybe hire on as convoy guards, or find some landowner who’s looking for workers.”

  “You want us to clean pipes and tend nets? I remember leaving home to get away from that!” Shellcrusher floats up, as if she’s getting ready to swim off—or maybe she wants room to fight.

  “Relax,” says Strongpincer quickly. “Leave that to apprentices too weak for anything else. No, I imagine us striking suddenly when the boss trusts us. Think about it: a whole convoy or a whole farm, split among us three. Sound good?”

  Weaklegs makes an approving click, but Shellcrusher is still floating just out of pincer reach. “Where do you plan to go? Over to Deepest Rift?”

  “No, we need to put more distance between us and anyone who knows us. I think we have to head across the basin.”

  “That’s a long swim.”

  “There are ruins and some old vents along the way,” says Strongpincer. “We can hunt. I think we can make it.”

  Actually, he isn’t certain at all, but Shellcrusher and Weaklegs don’t need to hear that. Strongpincer doesn’t like the idea of starving to death out in the basin, but he hates the thought of losing his followers even more.

  WHEN it came to Alicia’s turn to be interviewed, she insisted on taking the Sholen outside the station and showing them her animal traps, to demonstrate how well the
y were hidden from the Ilmatarans and how minimal their effect on the local environment was. Rob was happy to go along—as he suited up he realized he hadn’t been in the water since his unauthorized mission with Henri.

  Tizhos went alone with Rob and Alicia. The Sholen had their own suits, and Rob watched with interest as Tizhos got into hers. The Sholen suits were a century beyond anything available on Earth, complex hybrids of living systems, smart nanotech materials, and advanced molecules. They could function in any environment from deep ocean to deep space, and were self-regulating and self-repairing. The only external stores the Sholen needed were small oxygen tanks.

  The really cool part was watching the suit tailor itself to its wearer. When Tizhos pulled her suit on it was baggy and bright green in color, but once it was on, the fabric began to tighten and shift, until it fit the Sholen like a coat of paint. The color changed to match her skin—or maybe it just went transparent; Rob wasn’t entirely sure. Except for the helmet, she almost looked naked, even down to the colored skin around her genitals. Apparently the Sholen just couldn’t relate to each other in a nonsexual way. Rob allowed himself a couple of seconds to imagine Alicia in a skintight transparent suit.

  Alicia was already outside, and when Rob and Tizhos joined her, the three of them began to follow the circuit of traps, which extended in a ragged loop a kilometer or so out from Hitode. Despite their months of experience in Ilmatar’s ocean, the two humans had to work to keep up with Tizhos as they swam. She kept her limbs folded and swished her tail side to side like a fish. Her suit sprouted what looked like shark fins to help.

  The first set of traps were on the rocky ridge to the west of Hitode. Alicia had anchored them where a gentle current funneled through the ridge; the moving water brought a surprising amount of stuff into her nets.

  Tizhos spent a long time looking at the little creatures in the nets and listened closely to Alicia’s explanation of how the mesh was big enough to let hatchlings and nymphs pass through, so that there would be minimal impact on the local ecosystem. Rob thought the alien was more interested in the rocks.

  “These stones look like building stones,” said Tizhos, when Alicia finished explaining about the nets. “Is this a settlement site?”

  “The whole rift is nothing but a long string of ruins. As the hot spots move, the Ilmatarans abandon their old towns and build new ones. Simeon believes they have been doing it for at least a million years.”

  There was a silence for a time as the three of them tried to comprehend a million years of history. Rob just couldn’t. It felt like when he was ten years old and visiting his uncle outside Chicago.

  Uncle Saul lived on Ridgeland Avenue in Berwyn, and young Rob had gone for a little walk around the neighborhood. He’d gone down Ridgeland for block after block, expecting to come at last on some obvious boundary like a river or a highway or the edge of town. But after going the better part of a mile, Rob began to feel the sheer scale of Greater Chicago. The avenue seemed endless in either direction. Each of the cross streets stretched off to the horizon. The houses were closepacked, neat rows of them extending to infinity. Just trying to imagine all those houses, with all those people, all living their lives, had been impossible for young Rob, and he’d gone running back to his uncle’s house in sudden inexplicable panic.

  Now he had the urge to go swimming back to Hitode and not think of Ilmatar’s history again.

  Tizhos broke the silence. “Your civilization claims an age of four or five thousand years. My species has fragmentary records perhaps twelve times as old. Compared to these beings we seem like infants.”

  “If we are the infants, why do you insist on protecting them from us? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” asked Alicia.

  “I leave such matters for Gishora and others. Show me your other trap sites.”

  The next site was the highest point of the ridge. “I picked this location because it gets lots of little transient currents. The main circulation driven by the Maury rift passes to the north of us.”

  “You so easily give these things your own names,” said Tizhos. “Maury, Shackleton, Dampier. They sound alien to this world. Even the name Ilmatar comes from a human legend.”

  “How else can you describe something if you don’t give it a name? We can hardly use the Ilmataran sounds,” said Alicia.

  “I understand,” said Tizhos. “But I also remember history. On my world—and on yours, too—when conquerers come they change all the names.”

  Rob suddenly discovered he had no patience left for Tizhos. “Why are you guys so damn suspicious of us? All our exploration has been perfectly peaceful—our spacecraft don’t even have weapons! Why all the talk about us trying to act like some kind of invading army? If you haven’t noticed there are only thirty of us.”

  Tizhos touched his arm, probably trying to soothe him. “I do not doubt that you mean no harm and wish only to learn. I sympathize. But history shows cultures always struggle, and the strong destroy the weak. We Sholen nearly destroyed ourselves four times, and when we did not fight each other we ravaged our world until it nearly lost the ability to support life.”

  “So? That’s your problem, not ours!”

  “The Consensus has expressed a desire to help other worlds avoid our mistakes. We offer you our wisdom.”

  “Oh, I get it—if you screw up your own planet enough, that gives you the right to go around telling other people how they should live.”

  “It pleases me that you understand.”

  Alicia was touching his other arm. “Robert, let it go.”

  He looked at her, then back at Tizhos. “Right. Sorry. I probably need to get more sleep or something.”

  There was a slight awkward silence. Then Alicia spoke up. “Tizhos, could I suggest a small change of plan? There’s something else I’d like to show you.”

  “I do not feel fatigue yet.”

  “Good. It’s about half a kilometer to the west. We’ll have the current with us coming back.”

  As they swam, Rob managed to get up next to Alicia. He turned the hydrophone as low as possible for privacy. “What’s all this about?”

  “Something I want Tizhos to see. I was planning to show you, but then they dropped in on us and I never got the chance. Maybe we can come back together.”

  “But what is it?”

  “You’ll see,” was all she would tell him.

  The three of them crossed a section of flat silty bottom, then came to a little hummock of jumbled stones. Rob was no archaeologist, but this looked older than most of the other ruins. The stones were all rounded off, and silt filled in all the crevices.

  “This side,” said Alicia. She led them around to the north side of the hill. “This is an old vent, and the flow is too irregular and cold for the Ilmatarans to use for agriculture. Now, let’s all hold hands, and then everyone turn off all your lights. Even the ones inside your helmets.”

  Rob was in the middle, so he had to use his voice interface to get everything turned off; he didn’t want to risk letting go of Alicia in the darkness. When the lamp on Tizhos’s chest flicked off, the three of them were in complete blackness. For a moment Rob couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open or closed.

  Then he saw something out of the corner of his eyes. A faint shine, like moonlight. As his eyes adjusted, the shine got brighter, and he could see that it was the rocks. There were swirls of pale light on the stones around the vent mouth, extending out across the bottom to where they were standing.

  He began to notice colors. The vent itself was now glowing faintly green, and there were green streaks where the current was strongest. Around the green was a pale halo of orange, and tendrils of blue and yellow followed the paths of eddy currents across the old stones.

  Now he could see more clearly. The swirls were made up of millions of tiny points. It was like looking at a galaxy. He began to lose his sense of scale. Now he could see slow waves of brightening moving across the swirls of color as the water temperat
ure changed. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  Tizhos was the first to turn her lights back on. The dim safety light on her backpack was like an arc lamp after the darkness. Rob reluctantly cued up his own lights and displays, and saw with some surprise that they had been watching the glow for nearly twenty minutes.

  “I certainly did find that phenomenon interesting,” said Tizhos. “Although I expect your eyes could see it better than mine. Have you determined the cause?”

  “Microorganism colonies. I think the colors relate to chemical concentrations in the water. The luminescence is just a byproduct of phosphorus metabolism. That’s not what’s important. Tizhos, nothing on Ilmatar has eyes. You and Rob and I are the only things in the entire universe that have seen this.”

  There was another moment of silence while Rob and Tizhos digested that.

  “Wow,” was all Rob could say.

  “If we weren’t here, studying Ilmatar, nothing would ever have witnessed that. If we don’t make contact with the Ilmatarans, they’ll be like those little colonies, shining in the dark with nobody to see them.”

  BROADTAIL’S expedition is proceeding well. He has a dozen pouches full of interesting finds: some small creatures he doesn’t recognize, a couple of plants new to him, some lovely old stone tools from a ruined settlement, and a piece of shell pierced with regular patterns of holes that he is convinced are old writing. He also has an entire reel of notes, including tentative translations of half a dozen old inscriptions. What he does not have is any trace of the strange creatures he’s looking for.

  The team is camped at a ruin—yet another extinct vent, with the usual jumble of silted-up houses, scattered pipes, and domestic trash. There is a thick coating of silt over everything, and Broadtail is pleased to note that his theory correlating silt depth with the language of inscriptions and the style of artifacts seems to be holding.

  His two helpers are working well. Sharphead is one of Longpincer’s employees, a coldwater hunter with lots of terrifying tales of dangerous creatures and bandits. Shortlegs is a small adult, still growing and barely able to read or tie knots. But she can lead a towfin, moor the beast downcurrent from camp, prepare simple meals for the group, and carry Broadtail’s spare note reels when he goes exploring.