A Darkling Sea

by James Cambias

  While he eats, trying not to gobble the tough fronds too fast, Broadtail asks, “You are a schoolteacher?”

  “Yes. I catch the hardy young of the cold expanses, break them, train them, and give them new lives in the vent towns. A hard life, but a noble one. Besides, my number suits me for it: 12 is 2 times 6, and I carve children like stones. It is also 2 plus 10, and I bind children with cords.”

  Broadtail considers his options. He is far from any civilization, he has lost all the notes for Longpincer, and aside from the food he is devouring he is on the edge of starvation. He cannot bear to go back to Bitterwater alone and with nothing in his net. “Do you need another teacher?”

  “I always need some extra pincers.” He waves his own single limb. “But you must be strong and swift to catch the young and subdue them. Can you do that?”

  “I can.”

  “And you must have knowledge to impart. Do you know anything worth teaching?”

  “I am literate. I know geometry, quadratics, and logarithms. I know the dictionary, and I study ancient remains and writings. I know all the practical arts of the vent farmer. I am a member of the Bitterwater Company of scholars.”

  The schoolmaster isn’t impressed by his affiliation. “How far do you know the dictionary?”

  “Up to 4,000 or so, and a scattering of others.”

  “Ah. Up among the plant names. Beyond that, there is a vast expanse of obscure tools, followed by some less-common stones, and then a series of recondite but intriguing concepts. If you study ancient writings I take it you are a scholar?”

  “Of a sort, yes. I am the author of a book about old inscriptions.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “No. It is back in my old home, if it survives at all.”

  “I see. Still, it is good to encounter an educated adult. A person in my profession does not meet many. Children who can barely speak and farmers who hoard talk like beads. I have a book of my own, if you are interested in looking at it—a new form of dictionary, in fact. I rearrange the words according to a more logical scheme, beginning with important ideas like existence and continuity rather than commonplace things like stone and food and death.”

  Broadtail can feel his strength returning as his stomach fills. “I think I can swim now,” he says.

  “Good. I have a lot of things to carry. I am returning from selling off a batch of apprentices, and I have a load of supplies. I have no helper now—I remember my last assistant leaving because of an argument about how to instruct the youngsters. I hope you are not the sort who thinks education should only cover practical matters. My pupils get the broadest possible training. I cannot teach them everything, of course, but I can at least give them a taste of things like mathematics, geology, navigation, history, and physics.”

  “I am hired, then?”

  “You are. You get food and shelter in my camp—we can take it in turns to go hunting—and a third of the profits from the sale of the pupils you help train. You also get trained yourself, by a master in the art of schoolteaching. But I warn you, this is not a job for the weak or the fearful. A school of hungry youngsters can rip an adult apart if he isn’t careful. We swim far, often on small rations. Sometimes you must fight the bigger children to keep the others obedient. And the waters here are dangerous— tricky currents, hungry hunters, and other things.”

  That brings an echo of memory. “I remember a noise, a tapping or hammering sound.”

  Oneclaw’s answer is hushed. “There are strange things in the waters here. A whole abandoned city lies not far from my camp. Sometimes there are strange sounds and flavors in the water. I have a theory about them, but I wish to wait until we reach the camp to tell you.”

  They swim on, resting every few cables, until the camp is in echo range. Broadtail is a little disappointed at how small and shabby the place seems. Oneclaw has a crude little shelter built of uncut stone and gobs of silt, and there is a very rickety pen of netting and poles to hold the pupils. A couple of ragged catchnets on tall poles flutter empty in the current.

  “Home again!” says Oneclaw. “I am greater than any vent- town landowner; my domains extend for hundreds of cables in every direction. Nobody ever challenges my boundary stones.”

  The memory of Ridgeback keeps Broadtail from going along with the joke. “How many students do you normally keep?”

  “I can manage three or four myself, but with help, possibly as many as ten. It depends on how many we catch, of course. There is a warm current about fifty cables from here where wild children school. I plan going out with you to net as many as we can. Start with twenty or so, since half of them usually die or get eaten by the others.”

  BY the time Rob and the others reached the station and shed their suits, the Sholen coup was complete. Dr. Sen was speaking over the PA system. “In the interest of safety I must ask everyone to cooperate with the Sholen soldiers. Follow all their instructions. They have weapons and we do not. I am as distressed by this as everyone else, but we are in a fragile shelter at the bottom of an alien sea. Fighting would be suicide for all of us.”

  “Cowardly bastard,” said Dickie Graves. “We can take them down right now if we move fast. We’ve got tools, knives—”

  “No, Dickie,” said Josef. “Dr. Sen is correct. It would be madness.”

  Graves looked almost ready to cry, but he nodded. “All right, then. For now.”

  Rob went upstairs to look for Alicia. He found the six Sholen soldiers in the common room with Gishora, Tizhos, and Dr. Sen.

  The troops were still suited up, and their outfits looked different from the other two—thicker and bulkier, with armor plates on vital spots and rigid fishbowl helmets instead of flexible hoods. The six of them didn’t leave much space in the common room for any humans.

  They were definitely armed: all six had funny-looking snub- nosed rifles with three barrels big enough to shoot golf balls slung on their backs, and shovel-handled pistols in chest holsters. Two of them watched Rob as he stopped, hesitated, then hurried out through the doorway into Hab Two.

  Alicia was in her room. “Are you all right?” both of them asked simultaneously when he came through the door. He held her for a long moment, then she helped him get out of his damp suit liner and into a slightly less damp coverall.

  “All comfortable now?” she asked. “Because now I wish to scream at you.”

  “I don’t think they sent in the soldiers just because of a couple of practical jokes.”

  “How do you know? You keep expecting the Sholen to be reasonable! They are alien intelligences, Robert—they do not think as we do.”

  “It seemed like a good idea,” he said, instantly aware of how lame it sounded.

  “It was childish, and it accomplished nothing—except to anger the Sholen.”

  He glared at her. “Well, I guess you’d better start packing, then. They’re going to stuff you into the elevator along with the rest of us. You’ll have to go back to the Marianas Trench now. Have fun.”

  She swore at him in Italian and German as he turned to go. A bundle of his spare clothes hit him in the back of the head.

  STRONGPINCER finishes the last of the towfin meat. He pings the camp. The place is a mess, with shell fragments, empty containers, skins, and heaps of loot from the convoy all scattered about. Most of the containers are empty, but Strongpincer remembers happily all the delicacies inside them.

  His new shell is hard and spiky, and he’s bigger and more fearsome than ever. The other two are still soft, sheltering among the rocks and eating whatever he brings them.

  It is a good time to make plans. The food is running out, but they still have one healthy tame towfin and a load of equipment. Selling everything at one of the vent towns would bring a heap of beads, and the chance to live on public-house food and sleep in a shelter.

  But Strongpincer can imagine the beads used up, and his little band wandering cold water again. He wants more. Strongpincer wants to be a house holder, with his own
ventwater, a shell all overgrown with parasites, and food just for the picking. A towfin and a convoy’s worth of loot aren’t enough to buy even a small house.

  But they are enough to outfit a larger band. All he needs are more people. Other adults are troublesome, though. He remembers disputes over who is leader. Even with his new bulk he imagines conflict. No, no more adults.

  Children are another matter. Get half a dozen youngsters just before their first adult molt, give them food and teach them a few simple words, and Strongpincer has a force that can tackle a medium- sized farm or fishing station.

  He knows where to look for children: out in cold water they live in little schools. Strongpincer imagines leading Shellcrusher and Weaklegs into the cold to round up new followers. He plans how to train the youngsters, and as he drifts off to sleep he thinks happily of conquest.

  TWO days after the Guardians arrived, the first humans left the station. Gishora chose three to ride the elevator: Maria Husquavara, Anand Gupta, and Pedro Souza. He put Tizhos in charge of removing them.

  The first two went peacefully to the elevator, carrying their own gear. But Souza objected, and sat in his room.

  “Are you going to shoot me, then?” he demanded, gesturing at the Guardians’ holstered handguns.

  Tizhos tried to reason with him. “I see no need for violence. I feel sure you understand that you cannot remain here. We all wish to avoid conflict. Therefore you should come along now.”

  He began singing loudly, ignoring her. Tizhos began to feel frustrated. She made a logical argument, and humans respected logic. For him to refuse made no sense.

  “Your behavior seems irrational. It accomplishes nothing. It only produces conflict, which we all wish to avoid.”

  “Do we? I’m not going without a fight. We shall oooverCOME— some—day!”

  It felt like a failure when Tizhos turned to the Guardians. “Carry him to the elevator. Treat him gently.”

  Rinora, the biggest Guardian, went into the human’s room and grabbed him with arms and midlimbs. Souza continued singing loudly as the Sholen carried him from the room to the elevator. Nearly half the station complement crowded into the common room, with Guardians holding them back from the elevator docking hatch. As Rinora carried Souza through the room, some of the other humans began singing along with him.

  The tension grew almost palpable. Tizhos caught the scents of aggression and fear from the Guardians, and it didn’t take an alien psychology expert to see the humans’ anger. The crowd in the common room pressed against the outstretched midlimbs of the Guardians, but the Sholen held their places and deposited Souza in the elevator. Tizhos herself fastened the hatches and then typed the command to start the elevator on its long slow climb. She had removed the internal controls to prevent the occupants interfering.

  “What if the humans open the hatch?” Gishora had asked.

  “Then they drown,” she said. “We cannot prevent them from behaving stupidly.”

  BROADTAIL sleeps and eats a great deal, then helps Oneclaw put the camp in order. In practice this means Broadtail does the work and the old teacher makes a series of mostly irrelevant suggestions. Broadtail suspects he knows why Oneclaw’s other helpers are gone. However, the work is satisfying; Broadtail realizes he misses having property to tend.

  First he repairs the catch-nets, and rearranges them so that the upstream ones aren’t blocking the others. The waters around here are mostly lifeless, but something might be attracted by the tastes of food and waste in the camp. The fibers of Oneclaw’s nets are full of knots and little side- strands tied on, and Broadtail is a little shocked to realize the nets are made of old books.

  “Don’t worry,” Oneclaw reassures him when he mentions it. “I don’t use my books for net-mending or braiding into rope until they are frayed beyond repair. Often I have my students make new copies before I get rid of the old reels. A school goes through cord almost as fast as it uses food.”

  The shelter is in reasonably good shape, though Broadtail does wish it were bigger. He can’t pull it down and build a bigger one without more help than Oneclaw can provide. But he can clean out some of the accumulated silt and the incredible clutter of Oneclaw’s possessions. The two of them have a fairly fierce argument about getting rid of things, and at last Broadtail consents to simply move all the pieces of broken jars, frayed and tangled books, bits of shell and bone, and other trash to a cache outside the shelter, rather than dumping them in the midden at the edge of the camp.

  Oneclaw sorts through all the rubbish, separating the stuff Broadtail may remove from the things he absolutely cannot part with. Among the treasures Broadtail catches a curious echo, and moves closer to feel the object.

  “What is this?” He feels it carefully with his feeding tendrils. Part of it seems to be an ordinary siphon, but the outflow goes into a stone with several holes bored in it.

  “A noisemaker,” says Oneclaw.

  “A what?”

  Oneclaw takes the device in his good pincer, holds the siphon plunger in his feeding tendrils and pumps it vigorously. The water rushing through the bored stone makes a hideous high-pitched sound and for a moment Broadtail cannot hear anything else. The room is obscured in confusing echoes.

  “Where does this come from?”

  “It is my own creation. There is a passage in Swiftswimmer 11 Stonymound’s On Currents and Vents about a device found among the ruined square shelters in the Long Rift, which makes sounds of different pitch depending on how much flow there is in a pipe. I remember reading the passage and trying to make my own. This is the result.”

  “I am impressed!” Broadtail feels like an apprentice for a moment, amazed by the knowledge of an adult. But he is also a little bit disappointed—he remembers the faint hope that such a strange object might be the work of the mysterious four- limbed creatures.

  “I remember you saying something about a ruin near here. Do you remember exploring it?”

  “Only once. You wish to go poking about an old city? Remember you are a schoolteacher now! We have work to do, and cannot indulge in scholarship.”

  “Don’t worry. I intend doing all my work. But, yes, I also hope to visit the ruin. I’m interested in strange things.”

  THE day after the first load of prisoners went up in the elevator, Rob was in the workshop, cleaning up. Not packing— despite the presence of the soldiers, the staff of Hitode Station still adamantly refused to cooperate. But there was always mildew and crud to fight, so Rob took up a sponge and some ammonia and scrubbed the walls as though they weren’t going to abandon the station in a month.

  Dr. Sen tapped quietly on the door, then came in and shut it behind him. “Robert, if I remember correctly you cast your vote for the policy of passive resis tance at the meeting.”

  “Uh, yeah. I did.”

  “I confess I am a little bit curious about why you selected that particular option rather than one of the other two possibilities.”

  “Well, they didn’t make much sense. I mean, maybe it would have been cool to grab Tizhos and Gishora and stuff them into the elevator, but what would happen then? They’d come back with more goons and weapons, and we’d be the ones getting roughed up. Kind of like what happened anyway. They’re the giant flaming turtle here, and we’re just little Japanese guys with electric tanks.”

  “I think I understand what you mean. And what are your objections to simply doing what the Sholen have asked us to do?”

  “Oh, I guess I don’t like being bullied. And it all feels like there’s some kind of big symbolic thing going on here, like we’re not really the issue. I get the idea this is all for the benefit of people on Earth and Shalina.”

  “That is a very perceptive thing for you to say. And now I wish to ask you another question, if you don’t mind: do you know that I am aware of your little project with Dr. Graves?”

  Oh, shit, Rob thought. “Uh, no. Look, I’m sorry about that. I guess it was kind of childish, but—”

 
“It was extremely childish, to be accurate. In any other circumstances, I would almost certainly send you directly back to Earth on the next support vehicle. However, given what has happened here in the past few days, I am going to overlook your actions. The fact that you appear to be willing to take some considerable risks in order to defy the Sholen makes you very suitable for another little clandestine project you may wish to put in motion.”

  Rob put down the sponge and wiped his hands. “What kind of project?”

  “The satyagraha project cannot succeed if all of us remain here within the station. I have come to realize that Pierre had a valuable insight when he suggested that we all run away and hide. Consequently, I am pointing out—not suggesting or ordering, mind you—that you could be one of six or eight people to leave the station.”

  “I don’t understand. Run and hide where?”

  “You could deploy the two Coquille modules. Each of them will support a crew of three or four for a considerable length of time. If you were to conceal them several kilometers away, it would be nearly impossible for the Sholen to locate them— especially if they do not have access to the submarine. Again, I am just pointing this out. I am certainly not ordering you to do anything.”

  “I get it—they can’t haul us all away if a bunch of us are hiding out in the ocean somewhere. Cool. But what if they just say screw it, dismantle Hitode, and leave?”

  “Then those who have gone out to the Coquilles will die of starvation,” said Sen quietly. “I hope I did not give you the impression that I think this plan would be completely free of risk. It is very difficult to predict what other humans will do, and considerably more difficult to anticipate the behavior of aliens.”

  “So why do it?”

  “It would buy us some time. The message drone has reached the Solar System by now and transmitted its signal. I do not know what sort of ultimatum the Sholen have delivered to the UN, but either UNICA or one of the national space agencies— or one of the space military forces—will almost certainly launch a mission to assist or recover us. At the very least, they can send a message drone with specific instructions.”