Home from the Shore

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Something personal," she said. "That's why I’d like you to be the one to talk to them about it. They’ve given me the number one room on portside, and Mayal ended up in room sixty-eight, away back down the line on starboard. It's not only the distance. That's going to put us indifferent watches."

  “Of course,” said Johnny. Peri and Mayal Dumayne were sea-sisters.

  "It’s not as if we can’t survive the time we're out in space with a hello and wave from time to time," said Peri. "But Ykari Dhu was the one they put into room two next to me and he’s perfectly willing to trade with Mayal. There doesn’t seem to be any good reason why the duty officer won’t let them. But he won’t.”

  “You’d like me to ask him for you?”

  "If you don't mind. Unless you know some reason why it can't be done.”

  “I don’t," said Johnny. "I’ll ask him. Just a minute while I finish stowing the last of my things here.”

  Peri led him down to the end of the corridor and across to the port side of the spacecraft.

  At the last minute, she hesitated.

  "You might have better luck if I'm not there,’’ she said. "He’s geared up to disagree with me.”

  "Maybe you're right," said Johnny.

  "All right, I'll go on alone."

  He left her and started down the corridor.

  “His name's Shiefer,” she called after him. "He's a lieutenant.”

  He was, in fact, the same lieutenant who had checked Johnny into his room, a trim man in his late thirties with thinning brown hair and sharp blue eyes.

  "Aren’t you from over on starboard?” he asked as Johnny came up. He glanced at his coder.

  "That’s right, sir. I’ve already got my room,” Johnny said. "But I’m also representative for the sea-born Senior Class.”

  The blue eyes sharpened.

  "Something wrong, Mr..."

  "Joya. Johnny Joya, sir.”

  "Something wrong, Cadet Joya?”

  "Just a minor problem." Johnny spoke slowly and casually as he had learned to speak to the lander cadre at the Academy. "You’ve got a cadet named Peri Tashkent in room one, here. She spoke to you, I think, about Ykari Dhu—who's in next to her—trading places with another cadet named Mayal Dumayne, over on portside.

  Is there any particular reason why they can’t trade rooms and assignments?”

  "If we start it with them, we’ll have everybody wanting to trade. This is space, not a picnic outing.’’ The lieutenant almost peered at Johnny. “Why do they have to be in adjoining rooms, anyway?"

  "They’re sea-sisters,” said Johnny. He had sympathized from the start with Peri and her problem of explaining the matter to a lander. Sea-sisters had no counterpart ashore; any more than had sea-friends, the family customs of the People and innumerable other matters that were part of the very fabric of society and existence to the third generation of the sea-born. Aside from the difficulty of making the concept of sea-sisters comprehensible to a lander like this,there would be a personal element for Peri herself in making such an explanation. It was easier for someone outside the relationship to do it.

  "Sisters?” the lieutenant was saying.

  "Not blood sisters—sea-sisters,” said Johnny. "It’s a matter of choice, starting at a very eariy age. They grow up together and they're very close."

  It was a weak explanation of the essentially psychic kinship that could spring up between two sea-born of the same age. There was a sensitivity and awareness to that relationship that the land could not know, matching the two individuals to the point where they could almost read each other’s minds. Only the unusual strength of individual wills in Patrick and himself had prevented sea-brotherhood between him and Johnny.

  "Close?" The lieutenant was frowning.

  "What do you mean—close?"

  "I mean they’re very much alike," said Johnny, still trying to give the other something he could understand in lander terms. "So alike that they're almost one person. Like natural, identical twins. Only, as I say, in this case there’s no family relationship between them.”

  The lieutenant shook his head slightly.

  "No," he said. "No. That’s not enough of a reason to go making changes. As I said, if I let them switch everyone's going to want to.”

  “They won't, sir."

  "Oh? Why?” the lieutenant gave him a hard grin. "What makes you so sure? Aren't there more of these sisterhoods among the cadets we've got on this cruise?"

  "Well, yes, there are," said Johnny. "But—"

  "But what's so different about—” he glanced at his coder and tapped buttons with one finger, "Cadet Tashkent and her friend, that makes them unique?"

  Johnny played his last card.

  "Cadet Tashkent is Cadet Commander for the Senior Class.”

  "Oh?” the lieutenant’s face changed. He looked startled and a little wondering, then almost suspicious. "She didn't tell me that.”

  "It wouldn't have occurred to her to, sir.”

  "Well, of course the lieutenant tapped buttons on his coder again. "The Cadet Commander's entitled to some special consideration. All right, it’s done. But she should have told me. It does her credit that she didn’t want to use her rank, but it would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

  "Yes sir."

  It was the right result for the entirely wrong reason. Peri and Mayal would have been insulted by the idea that their special rapport was so light a thing that it could be made the tool of a desire to pull Cadet rank.

  Johnny saluted and left. Like all the others, he had been hoping that once they were into space with actual, working Space Force personnel, a lot of the misunderstanding between landers and themselves would evaporate. Instead, he began to fear that out here, if anything, the difference between sea and land cultures might be intensified. Hopefully, he would turn out to be wrong in this.

  He did not. And the difference the sea-born felt came to localize itself in paneled walls and the simulated depth-dimensional, antique landscapes in the artificial windows along the corridors, in every cabin and wardroom. These constructs had been meant to alleviate the shock and loneliness of being away from the familiar Earth; but one of the extra senses evoked by ocean living made such devices useless to the sea-born, who responded only to that which was real and alive.

  "I’ll agree the picture-screens work for the landers, if that's what they claim,” Joaquin Loy said to Johnny on the fifth day out of Earth parking orbit, when they were alone for a moment,on duty in the chart room. "I’ll take it on faith,if that’s what they want from us, that all this imitation of planetside means something to them. But, Johnny, I really can't believe it, not down in my guts. Maybe it’s true, and they don't feel how false it is, like we do; and maybe again, they can't feel the steel walls beyond the screens, and space, and the stars beyond that. But they have to know, intellectually know, that these pictures and things are fakes—so how can it be any real help to them?”

  "Because it is,” Johnny said. "That's just one of the differences they have from us, that is all. They can trick themselves and get some comfort from it. We can’t. That’s all."

  "Then how are they and we ever going to get together?" demanded Joaquin.

  Johnny shook his head; and a moment later the cadre officer in charge of the chart room came back in, so that there was no more chance for private talk.

  Their transport continued to fall, outward from the sun toward the orbit of Mars; and Johnny found himself becoming excited over the prospect of their flight, after all. The sea-born all had being closer to the sun than Mars orbit which was painful or distressful to them.

  Perhaps, thought Johnny, that something might be something non-physical but nonetheless strong—like the feeling of unnaturalness that came on the sea-born themselves whenever they came ashore. To the space bats, it was theorized, the apparently empty void was a place of great currents and pressures—some of them violent, perhaps—as well as other things imperceptible to humans. That space was i
n fact such a place, the sea-born felt instinctively; and they talked about that aspect of it as their transport moved away from the sun.

  "It’s so full of life out there—"

  Albert Paredho, one of the oldest of the seniors, gestured at the landscaped wall of their wardroom, beyond which was the hull and the endlessness of space— "It quivers. I suppose that’s one more thing that the landers don't feel."

  "What makes you so sure they don't?" Joaquin asked. "They could be pretending not to because they want to see our reactions to it. How about that, Johnny?"

  "I don’t know," Johnny had to say, once more. "But there’s no point in our mentioning it to them until they mention it to us. Is space bothering you, Joaquin?"

  "I’m having some trouble sleeping," Joaquin said. "And I've talked to a few others who're having the same. It's not unpleasant, but. . . you close your eyes and lie back. It's dark, and these sorts of jagged, electric lines of light start sliding back and forth in your head."

  "It can’t be helped,” said Johnny. "We have to live with it, that’s all."

  "Then you haven’t felt it, yourself?"

  "Yes," Johnny said. "I’ve felt it too."

  He had. But for him it had taken on a different form than that reported by Joaquin. To him the Slackness had seemed one long endless eternity, one endless depth of living velvet. It was true that he could fed the web of great forces running through it. But the velvet itself was what fascinated in his case. It was a velvet alive but permeable; so that other living forces could pass through it, as they and the landers and the ship were passing through it—as the planets themselves passed through it with their great cargos of life of all kinds, from the lowest one-celled animal and even smaller viruses, to the elephant and the great blue whale, now extinct. The feelings peaked in him—the feelings peaked in them all—as they passed Mars orbit and reached the territory of space where the great semi-transparent space bats were to be found.

  Two ship’s days later, at a hundred and eighty thousand miles beyond Mars orbit, they picked up their first bat on the scanning equipment. But its blip stayed on their screens for only a few seconds,then disappeared. At a distance, such as this one had been, the very fact of the bat’s turning sideways to the scanning sweep caused it to dropout of view. In the next four days they picked up two more blips, but lost both—one after a five hour chase.

  ‘‘We’ve only got five days out here," said Joaquin. “We’ll never catch up with one in that time."

  But on the fourth day they picked up one and it was not able to lose them. Given a close discovery of any bat whose relative velocity was not too high, it was impossible for the creature to escape. The ship was not only more maneuverable, but capable of accelerations far beyond the bat's ability; for under the light-push these space creatures built velocity slowly, and their changes of direction were effected only gradually. Beyond that push they had a very limited ability of movement, some kind of propulsive system in which they threw off tiny amounts of bodily mass at high velocities—the mechanics of which humans had not yet pinned down.

  So the ship closed swiftly with this latest prey, once the velocities of the two were close to being matched. Aboard, there was a flurry of activity.

  “Suit up!" roared the amplified voice of the duty officer over the intercoms.

  There were suits—really small one-man space vehicles—for only a little more than one-third of the cadets. The rest would have to watch through monitor screens tied to one or other of the suits of those lucky enough to leave the ship.

  Johnny, in the upper third of his class academically,was one of those who rated a suit. He had been through this drill with mock-ups back on Earth a thousand times; but now he felt a weird, almost a lightheaded, feeling as he fitted himself into the massive, mechanically-appendaged globe.

  Once within it, locked in the webbing of his harness, with the vision screen inches from his eyes, and his fingers resting on the keys of the controls, the feeling lessened, but it was still there as the chamber about him decompressed explosively, and shot him in his suit into the airlessness beyond the ship’s skin.

  He activated the suit’s vision screens. Other personnel were already out of the ship and their number in the near vicinity of it was increasing rapidly. The bat was being paced steadily now by the ship; and the suited men and women who would try to make the capture shared the same intrinsic velocity as the ship and the bat.

  To Johnny, it was as if they were all at rest in space, the only indication of motion being the rippling of the several-miles wide body of the bat, as it tried to change direction and escape, and the shifting of the navigation lights of the suited chasers as they closed in on it with the semi-electronic vast net in which they planned to enclose and capture it.

  From the distance at which he first saw it,the bat looked to Johnny like nothing so much as a rippling gossamer handkerchief, some five kilometers wide in one direction and four in the other, painted with a rainbow of colors which flowed and spread about its moving surface like the aurora borealis, in their flow over the dark bowl of the sky in both arctic regions of Earth.

  "Chaser twelve-forty-nine, move up to position!” crackled the speaker in Johnny's suit.

  "Moving up to position,” he answered, and set his suit motors to driving him forward. Watching the distance-shrunken figure swell as he approached it, the sight brought a heaviness of excitement to his chest. He had felt this particular sensation only once before. It had been miles deep in the Mindanao Trench of the Pacific Ocean,six years ago, when the running lights of his sea-home had suddenly shown him what seemed at first to be only a gray-pink cable or hawser from some sunken ship, lying on the diatomaceous ooze of the deep sea-bed.

  Then, following the line of it, he had slowly begun to recognize it as undeniably a tentacle, but a tentacle impossibly large. He had gone on following it, driven by a fascination he could not clearly name, and had ended by illuminating one of the legendary, great deep-sea squids who looked on even the largest whales as legitimate opponents; one of those krakens of ancient mythology and sailors' tales, who had been reputed to pull down tall sailing ships to a watery grave.

  But the monster squid, somnolent and indifferent to the mosquito-like flitting of the small sea-home about it, had radiated to Johnny then, along with its impression of power and mightiness, only an animal predator’s ruthlessness and animal savagery. There was no such feeling emanating from the space bat, now. This greater creature of the void impressed him in this moment only with a strange feeling of beauty and wild freedom, coupled with an inability to understand why this small thing that was the spaceship, and these even tinier things that were the suited human hunters, should wish to trouble it.

  Now, moving swiftly to the capture net, headed for his position on its outer rim, Johnny felt the velvet living depths all about him pressing in on him with a power many times that which he had felt on board. This was not Earth. Nor was it that little fragment of pseudo-Earth that men had made out of metal and carpeting and glass and called a ship. This was the ultimate reality that was the universe, casting the special unreality of one little planet s surface into insignificant contrast.

  Out here was another place—a place where the space bat belonged, and it could be that humans like himself did not.

  Johnny was almost to the rim of the net and his position on one of the generator rods, which produced a fabric of force lines that, out here where there was no atmosphere, would be more effective in restraining the bat than cables of steel. Johnny reached his rod and closed two of the mechanical hands of his globe-shaped spacesuit upon it. Activating the rod, he began to move off at an angle with it, fitting the lines of force it now projected into relationship with the other lines being projected by the generators of the chasers on either side of him.

  Section by section, as more chasers came up to take control of their individual rods, the net of force lines wove itself into existence, and then, complete, began at a signal from the captu
re officer to move in about the bat.

  It felt them coming. Plainly, it sensed their approach, although there was no way to tell how, for it was only a mist-thin web of molecules with no visible eyes, or ears or other organs of detection. It writhed more actively in its airless universe that had always until now been free of attackers. A faint drift, like a sparkle of stardust, seen for a second off one edge, signalled its throwing off some of its bodily mass in an effort to accelerate away from the metal-suited chasers and the net of bright force-lines.

  But it was no use. Swiftly—seemingly more and more swiftly as they came closer and closer, the space-suited humans and the net surrounded and closed upon it, the net swirled about it, several times larger than even the bat itself. . . and closed.

  It was trapped. Held. Captured.

  For a moment more after it found that there was no longer hope of escape, it flared and burned with a racing tide of brilliant colors. Then, before the eyes of Johnny and all the others on the net, it began to die.

  Its colors flickered and faded. Its frantic rippling slowed arid stopped. It seemed to contract, to fall in on itself, to shrink and decay into a lightless, smaller version of itself. In the suits, Johnny and the other sea-born cadets felt its dying, felt its life dwindling like a guttering candle, going away and away from them until it was only a faint, glowing spark—and then even that spark was gone.

  There was no more light, no color left—only a drifting, grayish mass without purpose or value—enclosed in the net.

  Chapter 2

  "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," the ship Commander said to Johnny. "Your classmates knew from the beginning that these space bats died when captured. Of course we understand that being from the sea you’re different. I suppose something can be done."

  He was a short, lean, gray-haired man in his late fifties with a narrow face set off by a neat mustache that was still sandy-colored.

  There were noticeable crows-feet at the outer corners of his pale blue eyes. The skin beneath them was puffed, and the eyes themselves more bloodshot than usual, after the recent long hours of duty. He sat, very human and a little incongruous looking, before a wall picture-scene showing a section of the towering Yukon Rocky Mountain range.