by Paul Preuss
They swam a winding path down through the world-ship’s labyrinth of corridors, reaching the outside sea level, going deeper still. Sparta led the pursuit; they were already far behind the racing alien, but Thowintha’s aroma lingered in the water, a trail she followed easily.
It was a long swim to the nearest lock. When they reached it, its great dome was already opening to the sea outside. Coming upon the scene, the two humans paused, keeping to the shadows, floating motionless a hundred meters behind Thowintha. What they saw amazed them.
Centered in the aperture, the alien was a silhouette framed against green water. Clouds of lesser animals swirled like flashing fireflies around him’er, darting to and fro in nervous formation. Outside the ship, from far above where the surface of the Venusian sea seethed and bubbled, a mottled green light sifted through the clear, cool waters beneath the waves to fall upon a horde of tentacled sea creatures, some smaller than Thowintha, some enormously larger—bigger than the giant squids of Earth, as big as small whales—but all made to the same basic plan: hooded and gilled, bright-eyed, many-armed, streamlined.
Colors ceaselessly swirled across the flesh of their mantles, rich hues of pink and purple, bright with bioluminescence. Patterns formed and dissolved there, teasing the eye to imagine coherent images which were gone too quickly to identify, if in fact they were images at all. Their clumps of tentacles coiled and uncoiled in some enigmatic ballet.
All of them seemed to be sounding off at once. A choir of pipe-organ thunders and sleigh-bell glissandos made the waters ring—so loudly that Sparta could visualize the standing waveforms of the harmonious symphony projected as rippling shadows on the sandy ocean floor below.
“I thought I knew the lingo,” Blake said, expelling bubbles from his chest, “but I’m missing most of this.”
At the sound of his words the alien symphony abruptly ceased. Every slotted yellow eye in the crowd suddenly swiveled in its hooded flesh to peer at Blake and Sparta. Blake’s outburst had revealed their presence to the alien horde.
Mantles darkened from red to deep purple; in one voice they demanded, Who are these?
Thowintha replied. Guests, come to share our counsel.
Instantly the chorus began again, louder, once more incoherent to the “guests.” Sparta, who’d had more practice with the language than Blake, caught a few words in addition to common nouns and standard verb forms (we come, we do, we make, we are), words such as coordinates, alternates, interference, waveform, collapse, frustration, violation, probability…
Blake’s mouth formed a bubble: “Ellen…”
She held a finger to her lips to shush him.
Thowintha again added his’er voice to the chorus; this time sh’he was as incomprehensible as the rest, and as loud as any of them. As harmonious as the racket sounded, a powerful undercurrent of conflict was unmistakable. There was a movement in the horde of swimming creatures, and the flanks of the formation closed in, thickening to form a living pocket in front of the lock. All view of the waters beyond the writhing crowd was cut off.
Blake shot a worried glance at Sparta. They had only a few seconds to wait. Thowintha suddenly turned a startling shade of blue. With a heave of his’er mantle and a spasm of his’er tentacles, sh’he move aside; the tiny squid and shrimp that had been darting frantically about behind him’er in the amphitheatral space swirled away in delicate spirals, like sparks from a burnt-out Catherine wheel.
Outside the lock, the center of the close-packed school of aliens swelled gracefully open, like the diaphragm of a camera lens, into a circle framing the ocean beyond.
Come with us, sang the choir.
Blake glanced questioningly toward Thowintha, uncertain if their alien had joined in the thunderous command. Sensing their concern, Thowintha delicately lifted his’er tentacles. We are in agreement, sh’he said, and like a bass line, a harmonious chord simultaneously sounded from the choir outside.
When shall we return to you? Blake wondered if he sounded as forlorn as he felt.
You are not leaving us, said Thowintha. Again his’er words were reinforced by the chorus outside, in mysterious, instantaneous communication.
The two pale humans, each possessed of only four rather stiffly jointed “tentacles” not ideally suited to swimming, struggled through the water into the midst of the alien host.
Blake allowed himself a nervous inward smile. The scene had suddenly put him in mind of one of those baroque ceiling paintings filled with cherubim and seraphim and ascending saints swaddled in pink and blue satin.
“Blake had no way of knowing that I had dreamed of just such clouds of angelic aliens,” Forster says with a smile. “Neptune’s apotheosis. But of course I had imagined them in quite a different sort of heaven.”
She and he floated together, their hands just touching, as the encircling school of aliens guided them lightly through the clear currents with a thousand strokes of their tentacles—like tiny tongues licking their bare skin. Although they were surrounded by the wriggling creatures, the aliens had thoughtfully left the view ahead unobstructed; Sparta and Blake could see an approaching settlement, which was big enough, perhaps, to be an entire city.
It was a city of coral caves, dark arches in the white carbonate cliffs—deep old coral reefs peppered with caves and garlanded with living stuff. Only here and there did a bit of silvery metal extrude to sway in the currents—a wide parabolic net, perhaps, with the shape of a radio antenna but the apparent mass of a spider’s web, or a set of ribbon-thin spires like corroded stalagmites, reaching for the surface high above. To Blake it resembled nothing so much as a ruined city he’d once seen in an isolated canyon in Greece, a monkish Byzantine city eroded to rows of collapsed vaults in the limestone hillsides, one stratum upon another.
But this was a living settlement, teeming with glowing busy creatures who moved in six directions at once and filled all the space between the coral canyon walls; like Arabs, these seemed not to mind rubbing up against each other, perhaps even found reassurance in doing so. Occasionally a vessel of odd design floated through the living mass—some were small bright spheres like bubbles; others were larger, and could have been mistaken for organisms themselves.
“Is this what you expected from Neptune’s palace?” Sparta’s words were bells in the water.
“Nope. No mermaids about.” Blake eyed her mischievously. “Present company excepted.”
Her laugh was a strand of purling bubbles.
Sparta and Blake came as ambassadors from a foreign land, grandly escorted. Or so they imagined. Except for their escorts, however, none in the crowd of sea creatures took notice of them.
“They don’t seem very surprised to see us,” Blake said.
“It’s almost as if we’d been expected all along.”
“They may think we understand more than we do.” She filled her lungs with borrowed air. Tell us what we are seeing, she bellowed, addressing no one in particular. Describe the purposes of these structures, these machines.
There was momentary silence, as if the aliens were again surprised to hear the humans speak. Then in one voice they said, What you sense is real.
Blake and Sparta waited, but that was all the aliens had to say before again taking up their worldless chant. Clearly they had not understood Sparta’s question, or not as she had intended.
Or perhaps they did not want to be bothered answering. For instead of leading the humans to some grand hall or chamber, they swam right through and over the alien “city” and on into the empty waters beyond. What Sparta and Blake had taken for a center of civilization was merely an outpost en route to their destination.
The sea bottom dropped away; what had been a rippling sandy floor changed to a featureless slope of rocks and black mud that fell off steeply into opaque depths. The waters grew cool and dark and empty, but for strange winged fish that now and again slipped by on solitary errands of their own. Sparta and Blake, despite continual boosts from helping tentacles, had to
make increasing efforts to keep up with the alien convoy; their chests heaved with the strain.
The group around them had grown silent except for a sort of low-toned, wordless chant, but there was a sound in the water that gradually resolved into a rich symphonic chorus, prodigious in its range of frequencies, from throbbing bass to shimmering treble. The sound ebbed and flowed, trailing long strands of melody; whether the dynamic was internal or due merely to the shift of the currents, it was impossible to tell. Not knowing its source, the humans had no way of knowing if it came from just beyond their vision or from far on the other side of the planet, a distant sound carried like the songs of Earth’s great whales through thousands of leagues of ocean.
Sparta looked at Blake, who was rapidly growing too tired to speak. There were words in the chorus, most of them incomprehensible, but recognizable as sentences nevertheless. More than one song was being sung; there seemed to be several melodic lines antiphonally intertwined.
Blake was exhausted and on the point of calling for rest when she touched his shoulder and pointed. There was movement in the waters ahead—a writhing, coruscating mass, a sphere of struggling life as dense and bright as sardines in a net. Each “sardine” was a colorful, tentacled alien.
The strange apparition was vast in size—a life-sphere like a human egg cell coated with a million glittering sperm. And their convoy was like a spaceship of flesh—about to land on a planet of flesh.
Just before they struck it, the “planet” split open beneath them. They were inside an immense sphere of water, its shell a mass of pulsing life, ringing with song as loudly as the inside of a bronze bell.
7
For so many hours that Blake and Sparta had lost track of time, they had been captives inside the sphere of choiring aliens. In all likelihood the aliens were themselves unaware of their guests’ discomfort; it was certain that their sense of time was very different from that of the humans.
Very little seemed to have happened, despite the constant writhing of bodies and the ceaseless, ever modulating song. There had, for a time, been a display of imagery in the center of the watery sphere: veils of color and moving strings of colored lights racing hither and yon and formations of tiny colorful polyps dancing in precise but, to the human observers, wholly meaningless geometric arrangements. All this could have been the alien equivalent of a water ballet or a viddie comedy or visual aids for a sales pitch. As much as they tried to pay attention, Blake and Sparta could understand no more than scattered words and phrases of the conference that went on all around them. This was not the vocabulary of Culture X as they had learned it, and even the words and phrases they recognized sounded strange in their ears.
Finally Sparta stopped struggling to understand; she lapsed into a dreaming trance…
In trance, the few words she had understood were added to every other environmental clue that had impinged upon her consciousness. She did not hurry this trance; this was not a computation—not merely a computation—but a search for a deeper understanding…
She awoke.
She waited for a moment’s pause in the ebb and flow of sound that vibrated the waters all around them. Then, pushing the sounds out of herself with all the energy she could muster, she said. Forgive us and hear us.
Blake watched her, mystified.
The aliens fell silent. Then, in a single voice together they sang. We hear the guests.
Honored hosts, we are your future, against which you must test all that you do and decide here, Sparta said. We do not, we cannot, threaten you. But you must help us to understand. Only in that way can we help you to understand.
As if something like this had been expected, her words—to them, they must have been very quiet words, although she was exerting herself to the limit of her strength—were quickly taken up by the swimming creatures and repeated and amplified.
There followed another momentary hesitation, while her paraphrased remarks echoed and faded away.
Blake watched her curiously, wondering what she had thought would happen. He did not interrupt; she would explain when she was ready. Long ago he had resigned himself to trust her actions, even when he found them incomprehensible.
Chords crashed around them: How shall we help you understand?
Show us your great work, Sparta said immediately. Tell us your story.
Wait, came the ponderous reply, and a great echoing call went up, like the moan of a conch-shell trumpet.
Sparta turned to face Blake. “What we’re listening to may sound like the Hallelujah Chorus, but it’s a fight. And it’s been going on for a long time.”
“What’s it all about?” Blake asked.
“I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it has something to do with us.”
A section of the living sphere bulged inward and opened in an eruption of squidlike bodies. Into the opening a shining shape intruded, as big as a zeppelin. The thing had an enormous hemispherical canopy, subtly multicolored by thin-film interference of light waves in the quivering soap-bubble colors of mother-of-pearl; below it dangled a long skirt of slender tentacles and veil-like pink membranes. Above, the vessel was nobbed with spiral windows and barnacle-like projections. Below, its tentacles and fleshy draperies ponderously, rhythmically, stirred the water.
Blake peered at it. “What’s that, an animal or a submarine?”
“It’s a medusa,” Sparta said.
“Like the ones on Jupiter?” he said, disbelieving.
“Related, anyway,” she replied. “And I think we’re about to find out what this species does.”
Acting on some unspoken signal, dozens of aliens moved in close around the humans, tumbling and sliding past each other like minnows thrashing in a tank, although they were so quick and agile there was no sense of struggle or crowding. The humans were deftly herded below the medusa, toward its center, where in a living jellyfish the mouth and stomach parts would be.
They were not eaten, however. The aliens guided their guests into the interior of the vessel, urging them on with a thousand feathery nudges of tentacles; they might have been in the gentle grip of one enormous, amorphous, softly glowing organism.
“I wish they’d give us time to see,” Blake protested.
“It looks familiar,” Sparta said. “Like the world-ship.”
They were in a maze of transparent bulkheads and passageways writhing with organic shapes that may or may not have been alive. Then, abruptly, they found themselves inside a transparent blister on the very top of the huge dome, looking straight into the teeming ocean.
“What are we looking at, a hologram?”
“Reality,” she replied. “Through an invisible window, only a few molecules thick.”
Somehow the diaphanous window withstood the extreme water pressure without apparent strain. Inside the transparent chamber with them were two or three dozen of the squid-like creatures—some, tiny graceful shapes, sparkling with bright blue and orange, others much bigger, green and copper hulks—who filled the watery space with multiphonic sound, all speaking together.
All that you see—alt but the balanced salt ocean itself—we carried here. Now regard how skillfully we have worked to fulfill the Mandate.
Blake and Sparta exchanged a puzzled glance. The medusa began to move. Peering to the side and backward, they could see the great trailing veils rising and falling, oaring the craft in a smooth forward glide. The huge sphere of living creatures that surrounded them opened, then closed again behind them as if expelling them, and their supple vessel was soon moving swiftly through featureless benthic waters.
Out of the darkness below, a wide barrier reef rose before them; soundlessly, their vessel moved into what seemed a crowded freeway for fish, a passage between walls of chalky coral skeletons covered with living coral and a hundred species of urchins and sea stars in scarlet and pink; shrimps danced nimbly among the anemones; crabs stumbled frantically after floating crumbs; the water between the walls was thick with schools of striped and glittering fis
h. Effortlessly, the vessel twisted and turned among them, following the random turnings of the corridor.
Observe, sang the creatures who surrounded them. The harmony of the myriad creatures is gloriously perfect. Carbon life arises from the sea floor and floats in the waters. Above us, carbon life covers the surface of the land and takes wing in the skies. The delicate web is complete; the elements are in dynamic balance.
They came into an open lagoon. Flotillas of real jellyfish pulsated above them; the bottom was lost in inky blue depths.
The light-eating creatures of the shallow waters die and sink to the ocean floor, carrying their carbon with them. The light-eating creatures of the land surface die and decay, adding their carbon to the soil. All the myriad matures feed on the light-eating creatures and on each other. Thus all exist in complex harmony, a model of the place of origin. The song was a hymn, with a quality of having been often rehearsed, completely lacking in spontaneity.
These seas are beautiful, filled with life, Sparta said, pushing the appropriate booms and clicks out of her chest, meanwhile attempting an engaging smile—and wondering what impression a smile made upon them.
At her glance Blake took the hint, and he hummed sonorously along with her when she added, You haw done well indeed.
But as Sparta gazed into the green-blue waters, as clear as the tropical seas of Earth, she knew they were less enriched with nutrients than a colder, hazier, plankton-laden ocean would be. Yet these were the higher latitudes of the planet. Perhaps the seas of Venus were not as full of life as their hosts would wish.
As if changing the subject of her unvoiced thoughts, the vessel suddenly heaved itself upward. Bubbles and jellyfish flowed away over the invisible curving dome and the mother-of-pearl hemisphere around it, and they broke surface.