Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  “Of course, of course.” Tseng smiled with genuine emotion this time. Warren could see that he was glad to be dispensing favors and that the act made Tseng sure he had judged the situation and had it right.

  “Sure do appreciate that, Mr. Wong.” he said, getting the right tone into the words so that the man would classify him and file him away and forget him.

  TWO

  He worked for two days on the report. The guard gave him a pad of paper and a short stubby little pen and Tseng told him to write it in English. Warren smiled at that. They thought any seaman had to speak a couple of languages, but he had never had any trouble getting around with one and a few words picked up from others. You learned more from watching people than from listening to all their talk anyway.

  He had never been any good at writing and a lot of the things about the Skimmers he could not get down. He worked on the writing in his cell, listening all the time for the sound of new motors or big things moving. It was hard to tell anything about what the teams were doing. He was glad he could rest in the shadows of the cell and think, eating the food they brought him as quickly as he could while still getting the taste of it.

  The same chinless guard he had from the first came once a day to take him down to the shore. Warren carried the waste bucket. The guard would not let him take the time to bury the waste and instead made him throw it into the surf. The guard stayed back in the sea-grape bushes while Warren went down to the lagoon. The man was probably under orders not to show himself on the beach, Warren guessed. On the windward side of the island there was a lot of dry grass and some gullies. Dried-up stream beds ran down into little half-moon beaches and Warren could see the teams had moored catboats and other small craft there. Some of the troops had pitched tents far back in the gullies but most of them were empty. The guard marched him back that way. On one of the sandy crescents Warren’s raft was beached, dragged up above the tide line but not weighted down or moored.

  Coming back on the second day some sooty terns were hanging in the wind, calling with long low cries. Some were nested in the rocks up at the windward and others in the grass of the lee. The terns would fall off the wind and swoop down over the heads of the men gathering eggs out of the rocky nests. The birds cawed and dipped down through the wind but the men did not look up.

  The next morning the chinless soldier came too soon after the breakfast tin and Warren had to straighten his sleeping pad in a hurry. The guard never came into the shadowy cell because of the smell from the bucket which Warren kept next to the door. The man had discovered that Warren knew no Chinese and so instead of giving orders he shoved Warren in whatever direction he wanted. This time they went north.

  Tseng was surveying a work team at a point halfway up the ridge at the middle of the island. He nodded to Warren and signaled that the guard should remain nearby. “Your report?”

  “Nearly done with it.”

  “Good. I will translate it myself. Be sure it is legible.”

  “I printed it out.”

  “Just as do the Skimmers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We duplicated your methods, you know, and dropped several messages into the lagoon.” He pointed to a spot north of the pass through the reef. From here on the ridge the moving shadows were plain against the sand. The soft green of the lagoon was like a ring and beyond it was the hard blue that went to the horizon. “No reply.”

  “How’d you deliver them?”

  “Three men, two armed for safety. After so many incidents they are afraid to go out unprotected.”

  “They go in that?” Warren pointed to a skiff beached below them.

  “Yes. I’m going to supplement their work with a set of acoustics. They should be—Yes, here we are.” A buzz came from the south and a motorboat came up the lagoon leaving a white wake. It cut in among the shoals and sandbars and a big reel on the back of it was spinning in the sun, throwing quick darts of yellow into Warren’s eyes.

  “We will have a complete acoustic bed. A very promising method.”

  “You make sense out of that?”

  Tseng shaded his eyes against the glare and turned to smile at Warren. “Their high-frequency ‘songs’ are their basic method of communication. We already have much experience with the dolphins. We can converse freely with them. Only on simpleminded subjects, of course. Much of what we know about Swarmers’ and Skimmers’ movements comes from the dolphins.”

  Warren said sharply, “Look, why fool with that stuff. Let me go out and I’ll ask them what you want.”

  Tseng nodded. “Eventually I might. But you must understand that the Skimmers have reasons of their own for not telling you everything that is important.”

  “Such as?”

  “Here.” Tseng snapped his fingers at an aide standing nearby. The soldier brought over a document pouch. Tseng took out a set of photographs and handed them to Warren. The top one was a color shot of a woman’s stomach and breasts. There were small bumps on them, white mounds on the tan skin. One lump was in her swollen left nipple.

  Warren went on to the next, and the next. The lumps got bigger and whiter. “They are quite painful,” Tseng said distantly. “Some kind of larva burrows into a sweat-sore and in a day this begins. The larva is biggest near the skin, armed with sharp yellow spines. The worm turns as it feeds. Spines grate against the nerves. The victim feels sudden, deep pain. Within another day the victim is hysterical and tries to claw the larva out. These are small larvae. There are reports of larger ones.”

  In one photograph the open sores were bleeding and dripping a white pus. “Like a tick,” Warren said. “Burn it out. Use iodine. Or cover it with tape so it can’t get air.”

  Tseng sighed. “Any such attack and the larva releases something, we are unsure what, into the victim’s bloodstream. It paralyzes the victim so he cannot treat himself further.”

  “Well, if you—”

  “The larva apparently does not breathe. It takes oxygen directly from the host. If anything dislodges the spines, once they are hooked in, the larva releases the paralyzer and something else, something that carries a kind of egg so that other larvae can grow elsewhere. All this in minutes.”

  Warren shook his head. “Never heard of any tick or bug like that.”

  “They come from the Swarmers. When they are ashore.”

  Warren watched the motorboat methodically crisscrossing the lagoon, the reel spinning. He shook his head. “Something to do with their mating? Don’t know. Doesn’t make sense. The Skimmers—”

  “They said nothing about it. Interesting, eh?”

  “Maybe they don’t know.”

  “It seems unlikely.”

  “So you’re listening for what?”

  “Contact between the Skimmers and the Swarmers. Some knowledge of how they interact.”

  “Can’t you treat this bug, get rid of it?”

  “Possibly. The European medical centers are at work now. But there are other diseases. They are spreading rapidly from contact points near Ning-po and Macao.”

  “Maybe you can block them off.”

  “The things are everywhere. They come ashore and the larvae are carried by the birds, by animals—somehow. That is why we burn our reserves of fuel to come this far.”

  “To the islands?”

  “Only in isolation do they make contact. The reported incidents are from the Pacific basin. That is why there are Japanese aircraft near here, Soviet, American—you are an American, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh? Somehow I thought—but never mind. The other powers are desperate. They do not know what is happening and they envy our lead in information. You will notice the installation to the south?”

  Tseng gestured. Warren saw at the rocky tip of the island a fan of slender shapes knifing up at the sky. “Anti-air missiles. We would not want anyone else to exploit this opportunity.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The motorboat droned, working its way up the eastern shore
. Warren studied the island, noticing where the tents were pitched and where the men moved in work teams and where the scrub jungle cut off visibility.

  “If you’re smart you won’t use a motor in the lagoon.”

  “The men will not go out without some way of returning quickly. I understand their fear. I have seen—”

  An aide approached, lugging a case. He spoke quickly in Chinese. As Tseng answered, Warren watched the motorboat cross near the sandbar. Beneath it shadows darted, swift black shapes in the watery green light.

  “The boats found something unusual,” Tseng said, gesturing to the aide to open the case. “They washed up on the reef.”

  Inside, still wet, were three white, rhombohedral blocks. Warren crouched and touched one. It was lightweight and pearly, the corners unevenly turned.

  Packing material, I suppose,” Tseng said.

  “Funny manufacture,” Warren said. “Irregular. No forming creases on them.”

  “From your own shipwreck, perhaps? No matter. I have no more time for you today, Mr. Warren. Or would you prefer being addressed by your military rank?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “So you say.” Tseng nodded to the nearby guard. “Goodbye.”

  That night he felt a dark hammering thing above him that wove and wove, its shadow a rippling of sunlight. The thing swam badly, moving in straight lines without flexing itself, firm and unnatural, and it dropped metal that settled on him, heavy and foul. The steady dead rasp from above cut and burned. A harsh buzzing jarred him, coming into his teeth with a slicing pain, and he turned on his side. Then he rose out and away, somewhere up high above what he now saw was a motor. He sensed the fuel line backfilled and felt the sluggish rumble as they blew the lines out and heard the plugs not running right either.

  Sudden thoughts came—That was it: nothing ran right. Humans were great talkers but down here, lofting in the salty murk, he could see them above, at the shoreline and in the ratcheting boats, working their mouths and yet without effect, stiff and distant, their jaws pointlessly working, humans in uniform—but uniform meant to be the same, and how could anyone want that?—the words falling dead in the void between them. In Tokyo he had never learned a word of Japanese, and here Gijan had played a mute without Warren’s minding, and now the Chinese were trying to talk to Skimmers—who wanted something they couldn’t say, either—and each life-form had its own private language.

  He turned over again and felt his wife sleeping against him, warm and moist, and then on top of him the way she liked. She pressed down too like the falling, spreading metal that the hammering machine laid in the lagoon, leaden, dark and descending. She rolled easily on him, heavy and yet soft, and her hair lay on his face silky and in his eyes. Moving in shadows, her face was intersecting planes, lean and white, and he took her hair in his mouth and tasted it. The salt and musk were like her sex below. He touched the canted planes of her and remembered that she had fallen away from him when more than anything he had wanted her weight. And her hair swinging across his face and the taste of it. Years ago now, she had done away with all that and was now a man. The softness now was slabs of muscle and the organs—squinting at her on the beach in the distance, he had not been able to tell, it was just a dark patch, the organs were in the end a detail, but the act of changing had made the final huge difference. He had wanted her weight. And her hair swinging across him and the taste of it.

  When he woke the pad was damp with sweat. He felt in the blackness for the table turned over on its side to conceal the far wall, and this reassuring flat plane of wood gave him back the present so he did not have to think about the past. But he remembered the rasping from above and the falling cold metal and knew how much they hated what was happening to them out in the lagoon.

  She came again and lay on him as he felt the towering weight of water above him, wondered what it was like to live in a layered element with a boundary above you, a place to go and stare out rose up leaping out of the bottom of the World with shapes moving in the thin stuff above the water, clouds, hovering facts that meant there were at least two elements in the world, the first recognition of material you could handle made the tools we knew that in time could be used the clouds open, we can see lights, all the time struggling to reach up onto the land, where things were dry always and more science was possible, made the fire-hardened sand and you looked still upward, saw and studied stars, as we cupped the light and so knew the distant origin of stones falling into the World. They had been scooped up into false World—a ship?—and carried away. To survive a many-year voyage inside an automatic machine required strong social organization, when the animals that are not alive but swallow—some kind of robot hunter?—took them far from their home seas and in the long years began to change them, upsetting their mating and birthing times, sour water, changing the newborn, their song goes away from us, killing many, until finally there were fresh streams and they swam weakly into a new ocean, alien like our World but not out World, their youth spreading out and behaving strangely, attacking ships, when they should be taking part in an ancient genetically ordained hunt of large surface animals. In their home oceans the hunt triggered the going-to-land, but on Earth a grotesque version of it ran on, driving ships from the sea, and the youth now were afflicted with sores, while their elders, the Skimmers, tried to make sense of their chaos and despair. They had cleared the area near this island we drive the youth away, the act chews us but does not finish us but now it was up to humans, not humans in ships we find you in the skins you love we cannot sing to you but on this island and perhaps the Skimmers would speak only with humans who were alone your kind cannot hear unless you are one but the Skimmers were fading, they could not protect the island forever they may be chewed by you but there are many many of them and Warren knew their despair at the motorboats in the lagoon, a sign to the Skimmers that the blind, dumb kind of humans had returned, men who would not know enough, who could not stop the Swarmers from attacking they ache now for the skins-that-sink any more than they had before they are madness they are coming and they chew you others last.

  He rolled over and over, smacking against the wall, and woke up. He reached for his wife but she was gone. He had the new thoughts, he understood more, yes—but in the chill before dawn he drew himself up into a tight little ball, seeking sleep again, for in the dream he had been happier than he could remember ever being.

  Before dawn his cell rattled and a booming rolled down from the sky. He woke and looked out the windows through the heavy wire mesh. High up in the black, luminous things tumbled and exploded into auras of blue and crimson and then gutted into nothing. Distant hollow boomings came long after the lights were gone and then the sounds faded into the crashing on the reef.

  In the morning the chinless soldier came again and took the tin dish that Warren had rubbed clean. The soldier did not like his job and he cuffed Warren twice to show him where to walk. First they went to the beach with the waste bucket, which had more in it now because Warren’s body no longer absorbed almost everything he was fed. From the beach he watched the small motor ketches and cats that stayed near the shore while they laid something into the water, dropping boxes off the stern where they would lie on the bottom and, Warren was sure, report on the passing sounds and movements.

  The guard took him north and inland, just out of view of the reef. Tseng was there with a crowd and they were all watching the green water from far back among the trees.

  “See them?” Tseng said to Warren when he had worked his way through the group of men and women. Warren looked out past the brilliant white sand that stung the eyes and saw silver-blue forms leaping.

  “What’s—Why are they doing that?” he asked.

  “We are returning their acoustic signals to them. As a kind of test.”

  “Not smart.”

  “Oh?” Tseng turned with interest. “Why?”

  “I can’t really tell you but—”

  “It is a technique of progre
ssion. We play their songs back to them, appropriately modulated. We see how they react. The dolphins eventually did well with this approach.”

  “These aren’t dolphins.”

  “So. Yes.” Tseng seemed to lose interest in the splashing forms in the lagoon. He turned, hands placed neatly behind his back, and led Warren through the group of advisers around them. “But you must admit they are giving a kind of response.”

  Warren swore. “Would you talk to somebody if they kept poking you in the eye?”

  “Not a good analogy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Still …” Tseng slowed, peering out through the brush and palm trees at the glistening water. “You are the only one who got the material about how they came here. Getting scooped up and going on a long voyage and then being dumped into the ocean—you got that. I had not heard it before.”

  “Uh. Huh.”

  “It does make a certain kind of sense. Fish like that—they might make printed messages, yes. They have shown they can put together our own wreckage and make a kind of electrostatic printing press—underwater, even. But to build a rocket? A ship that goes between, stars? No.”

  “Somebody brought them.”

  “I am beginning to believe that. But why? To spread these diseases?”

  “I dunno. Let me go out and—”

  “Later, when we are more sure. Yes, then. But tomorrow we have more tests.”

  “Have you counted the number of them out there?”

  “No. They are hard to keep track of. I—”

  “There are a lot less of ’em now. I can see. You know what happens when you drive them away?”

  “Warren, you will get your turn.” Tseng put a restraining hand on his sleeve. “I know you have had a hard time here and on that raft, but believe me, we are able to—”

  Gijan approached, carrying some pieces of paper. He rattled off something in Chinese and Tseng nodded. “I am afraid we are being interrupted once more. Those incidents last night—you saw them?—have involved us, a research party, in—Well, the Americans have been humiliated again. Their missiles we knocked down with ease.”