Home from the Shore

by Gordon R. Dickson

  His voice stopped.

  "We won't,” said Emil. He stood up from the chair in which he was sitting. The rest of the people began to rise, too. “We’ll be going to Castle-Home, shortly. And Castle-Home will straighten it out with the Closed Congress ashore, the way they've always done before. After all, we're a free people here in the sea. There's no way they can make us do for them against our will."

  The people nearest the exit irises were already slipping out. Beyond the transparent front walls of the small-Home they were leaving.

  The encompassing waters were already darkening toward opaqueness. By ones and severals, saying good night to Johnny, they melted away toward their own small-Homes in the wheel-shape that was the Joya Group’s combined Home.

  Johnny found himself alone by the pool.

  He looked about for Sara, but he could not see her. As he stepped toward the iris leading to the inner part of the small-Home unit, she came out of it. He reached out to her, but she avoided his grasp and took his hand. Puzzled, he let her lead him through the eye-baffling shimmer of the iris.

  Beyond it he found not one bedroom, but two, for another iris led to a further sleeping room.

  But in this first area, a single bed was against a wall, at the foot of which a small night-light glowed.

  On the bed, under a light cover with his face dug sideways into the softness of a pillow that was dampened by his open-breathing mouth, lay a small interloper. It was the boy who had spoken up earlier to ask about the space bats.

  Politeness was for all ages among the sea people. Johnny stepped to the bed and reached down to shake gently a small bare shoulder and wake him to the fact that he was in the wrong small-Home. But Sara caught Johnny's hand; and when he looked down into her face he found it luminous with an emotion he did not know.

  "Tomi,” she said. "His name's Tomi. He’s your son, Johnny."

  Johnny stared at her. They had talked to and written each other across the distance between them these last four and a half years, and never once had she mentioned a child. Among the sea-bom that was her right, of course. But somehow Johnny had never thought that Sara would not tell him if. . .

  He forced his gaze away from her watching face, back down to the boy. His son slept the heavy slumber of childhood's exhaustion.

  Slowly he sank on his knees by the bedside, drawing his hand out of Sara's grasp. A chill ran through him. He felt the heavy muscles of his stomach contract. In the small white glow of the night-light reflected from the palely opaque walls, Tomi slumbered as if in a world remote, not only from land and sea and all the reaches of space, but from all things outside this one small room.

  He breathed without a sound. His chest movements were almost invisible, his skin fine to the point of translucency. The chill in Johnny spread numbness through all his body and limbs, and his neck creaked on stiff tendons.

  He reached out slowly. With what seemed an enormous, creased and coarse-skinned fingertip, he traced the slight line of an eyebrow on the boy. The brown, fine hairs were crisp to his touch. An abrupt flush of emotion rushed through him, burning away the chill like a wave of fever.

  He felt clumsy and helpless; and a wild desire prompted him to gather the boy in his aims and, holding him tightly, snarl above him at all the forces of the universe. Wrung and bewildered, Johnny turned his face up to Sara.

  "Sara!" It was almost a wail of despair from his lips.

  She knelt down beside him and put her arms around him and the boy, together. He clung to her and the sleeping youngster; and the boy, half-waking, roused and held to them both.

  And so they held together, the three of them, there in the glow of the night-light.

  Chapter 5

  "It’s good to have you back with us,” said Patrick.

  The two of them with Baldur and Pat’s sea-friend, a spectacled porpoise named Manui, lazed on the surface some two hundred miles off the eastern coast of the North American continent. The sky was blue and clear with only a few scattered clouds, the day warm with a light wind and the ocean swells normal; but they could both feel the warning of heavy weather to come in the next few days, like a prickling under their skins.They had gone out together as once they had when they had been boys, addicted to weeks-long explorations of the ocean that surrounded them. But in this case, it had been mainly a search for privacy that had taken them off. Both knew that there were things on the mind of the other.

  "It's good to be back," Johnny answered as they floated on their backs, watching the sky, barely aware of their own small, instinctive arm and leg movements that kept them half-reclined in the sea-swell, rocking with the movement of it.

  "But you think I ought to have stayed, don't you Pat?"

  "Not you. Not if you didn't want to."

  "But you think I shouldn’t have led the other cadets home."

  “Yes," said Patrick, simply. "I do think that. I don't know what it was like for all of you. But, having gone, I think I would have stayed."

  "You were against our going in the first place."

  "Yes," said Patrick. "But after you all went, anyway, the sea was committed. It's no solution to our problems with the land to first agree to join with them, and then abandon them.There's no answer in just running away from it all.”

  I know. But we couldn't stay any longer,” Johnny said. "It got to the point of being plain, finally, that there wasn't any hope in staying."

  Pat said nothing.

  “All right then, what would you do now?" Johnny turned his head to watch Patrick’s profile, against the blue sky and the green water beyond.

  Patrick sighed to the sky and the clouds.

  "Go back, I guess," he said.

  "Back to the Academy? What would that solve?"

  "It’d return the situation to what it was before you left," Pat said. "With land and sea standing apart, tilings'll never work out, Johnny. We agreed about that once, you and I."

  "We still agree about it," said Johnny.

  “Then..."

  "No," said Johnny. "The facts are, we moved toward the land as much as we could. We gave, they didn't. But they're like young children. They took everything we gave them for granted. It never seemed to occur to them that they had to give anything back—or even that it costs us to give them what we did. The best of our best generation, Patrick! What if we'd asked that of them?"

  “When you deal with a sea-friend, you don't expect understanding from it that it hasn’t got."

  "These aren’t sea-friends. They’re us—grownup ashore. They can’t be excused for not understanding. If we can make the effort it takes to understand them, they can make the effort to understand us and our ways."

  "Maybe it just needs more time, Johnny.”

  "They’ve had, time. They’ve had four and a half years from when the first of us came ashore for them."

  "All right,” said Patrick, "then what are you going to do?"

  "What has to be done," Johnny said. "Wait for them to come to their senses. We tried it their way and it didn't work. Now we’ll wait for the lesson of that to sink in."

  "And if it doesn't? What if they decide to use force against us—all their technology and resources against the tiny amount we have?"

  Then they do," said Johnny. "Patrick, we can't go back to their way."

  "Fight or die?" Patrick said, sadly.

  "If you want to put it that way,” Johnny answered.

  They left it at that and spent the next two days roaming the surface and underwater within a hundred sea-miles or so of Joya-Home. It was a good time, if not a purely happy one—though few landers would have understood the pleasure of the two sea-born in what were apparently only miles and miles of water, empty except for an occasional sea-creature. The landers would have lacked the ability to understand how that water itself was living, charged with varied and fascinating information about where it had come from, what it had encountered along the way, and what in the way of other life forms had passed through it recently.

/>   For a while, both Johnny and Patrick managed to forget the deadly lack of understanding between land and sea. They lost themselves in the world of water to which with every instinct of their bodies and upbringings they could feel themselves to belong. But when at last they headed back to Joya-Home, a silence moved in between them and the closeness they had been feeling the last few days broke. They were left, each of them, separate in his own thoughts as they returned not merely to the Home but to the problems of the larger world beyond it. When they came at last to the spot on the ocean’s restless surface that their third-generation instincts told them was above the present location of Joya-Home—for the Home had moved a good two hundred miles since they had left it—Patrick lifted his head, looking around at the bright blue sky and sniffing the air.

  "Hurricane coming, all right," he said. "Soon."

  "Soon," agreed Johnny.

  They rolled over in the water like dolphins and swam down to the lighted wheel of their destination; and at it they parted, going each to his own small-Home without further words.

  The weather-warning they had felt on the surface had not misled them. It was the hurricane season and one big wind had begun its march north on the day Johnny left the Academy. On the fourth day after their return, it hammered the ocean above the Home into spume and dark, tall masses of leaning water. To the east, it battered Georgia and the North Carolina shore.

  The Joya Home slipped down to twenty fathoms depth and dwelt there in calm, green-blue silence.

  No effect of the howling, furious borderland between air and water reached down here to the bright wheel-shaped Home, away up in the middle of the ocean universe. The People of the Joya group hardly thought about what was happening above.

  In their swim-masks or small-Homes, they breathed the atmosphere made for them out of the water elements. They ate and drank of bounty the living ocean supplied. When they reached Castle-Home would be time enough to think about replacing any of the large, complex items of equipment that only the automatories of Castle-Home could supply.

  The land and all its problems might as well not exist.

  Amongst the others, Johnny moved like a ghost. He was of them but not with them. He told himself he had been too long away, too long on high land, and the awareness of the life ashore was standing like a thick, transparent wall between him and these, his People.

  To those People, and to their third generation in particular, there was no more a boundary between work and play than there was between place and place, wherever the deep oceans ran. All was one whole experience of life—unlike the compartmented lives they lived ashore. Johnny had gone without thinking, the first morning after he was home again, to the charts on which he had been working nearly five years before, the charts showing the movement of the great currents like the Gulf Stream, at various depths. He had been only one of the many People engaged in this, and he found the work far advanced since his last sight of it. He projected the current status of it in the display screen of the control area of Sara's small-Home, that was now his as well as hers and Tomi’s; and he was impressed by what he saw. The sea-born were very few in number to survey all the majority of the Earth’s surface that lay under deep salt water, but much work had been done since he had had a hand in it.

  In the computer file were a large number of reports that had been sent to him after he had left and before those reporting had realized that someone else would have to translate these into knowledge expressed on the current charts. Many of those reports would be out of date now, handled by other workers on the project about the world; but Johnny started to go through them to winnow out what still might be useful.

  It was a work that had fascinated him once.

  But now he discovered it had lost part of its power to hold him—as Sara's work with the temperature levels in the Gulf Stream would at this moment be holding her. Experience with the land beyond the sea and the space beyond both land and sea had made Johnny someone who could not lose himself in this former work—as all around him were losing themselves in theirs.

  Truly, he was the odd member of the community, though the others as yet had not seemed to suspect it. Restlessly, on the second day of the storm, Johnny left his work and went out to roam the other small-Home units. Entering the water, just outside his small-Home, he had to detour around the crowd of young bodies at play. Among them he caught a glimpse of Tomi. The boy was so intent on the underwater group chase going on that he did not even see his father passing, less than the width of a small-Home away. Johnny felt himself nuzzled, and turned to see that Baldur had joined him.

  “Not now," he told the dolphin, giving the hand signal that said he would not be leaving the area of the Home. He swam on and entered one of the community small-Homes that operated as everything from lounges to laboratories.

  The one he had entered was currently acting as a study area for a research group examining piles of different dried sea weeds. Faces looked toward him as he entered.

  Hello, Johnny," the workers said in several different voices, tempos, and times.

  They went back to their work. He walked through and found himself in a biochemical laboratory where a brief glance and a smile was all the workers there had time to spare for him.

  He went on to prowl the whole of Joya Home and it was the same everywhere. The adults were all at their self-chosen occupations. The younger generation were lost in play. Patrick was not about and Sara, with others, would be a thousand fathoms down measuring her temperature differences. He, alone, was a ghost at the feast.

  Saddened, he went out and swam off, away from the Home, without Baldur, to think things out. Either one of two things had to be true, he told himself, moving through the underwater. Either he was wrong and the land, with all the trouble it implied, could be safely forgotten. Or he was right—and all of the others in Joya Home were wrong in thinking that the land could be ignored. If the life they loved was to continue in the sea, then the situation on the shore had to be dealt with. They could not turn their backs on the problems there—the overpopulation, the hunger and the need for other worlds to provide living space. They could no longer ignore the way in which the land had ceased to grow, had gone instead into what was almost a backward movement toward savagery and decay.

  He could not be wrong. He could not be wrong because not only he, but the other Cadets, had experienced that savagery and decay ashore.The land had not only not understood the needs and the growth of the people in the sea, as they had not understood the space bats, they had not been able to see that their ways led only down a blind alley to racial death. What good would it do them to take over all the seas, or finally all the planets they could use, if they were to continue to remain blind to the larger spectrum of life and sensation, that stirred in the sea-people and ran like a rainbow of colors through the living fabric of the space bats?

  And, that being the case, what good did it do for the sea-people to lose themselves in the seas as they had always known them, ignoring the storm ashore as they now ignored the meteorological storm overhead. The road to survival led to conflict with the land—unless the land would learn from the sea. And they would not. They had proved that. The storm of war would leave the safe and distant surface outside the lives of the sea-born and come down among them. They had no choice, because the land was wrong, and the sea must fight or die if the human race was to survive.

  And he, who was aware of this, could not make his own people aware of it also.

  He turned back finally to the Joya Home.

  Coming into his own small-Home, he stepped through the iris into the main room and checked himself just in time, overhearing the voices of Patrick and Sara coming from the next of the two inner rooms.

  "It’s up to you,” Patrick was saying.

  Me? In what way?" asked Sara’s voice.

  He took a step to his right and was able to see through the open iris to the adjoining room.

  The two of them stood quite alone, facing each other bes
ide a desk piled with notes on which Sara must just have been working. Patrick stood tall, a little bent-shouldered and concerned above the shorter figure of Sara; and Sara had an unhappy look on her face.

  Johnny stepped back around the comer of the iris entrance. He was about to leave the small-Home again, when it registered on him that he was the subject of their conversation; and he checked, listening; feeling like a thief in the night for doing so—but doing so.

  "Talk to him.” It was Pat's voice.

  "What about?” Sara said.

  You know what about. About his responsibility to the sea-people. You and I are the only ones who can talk to him. The others only think of taking care of him and doing what he says."

  "Yes, and he doesn’t know it."

  "Of course he doesn't know it. He’s never really understood how he leads them. He doesn't understand how blindly they follow him.”

  "He could look."

  "How, Sara? He hasn’t got our point of view. He's the one person in the world who's inside Johnny Joya. From where he stands everything he does looks like dull common sense, so he thinks it's the common sense of it that makes other people agree with him. He doesn't know it's what he is, the different sort of person he’s always been, and how that's marked him and made other people trust him instinctively.”

  "It doesn't matter. He’s still got to see himself as he is.”

  "Can you see yourself as you really are? Can I? Can anybody? Johnny's as limited that way as anyone else; and it happens he sees himself as a cut-down version of what he really is. So he thinks he’s being right, when he’s really only being charismatic. And he can’t understand it any other way. So we have to tell him, Sara, you and I—because there’s no one else can reach him the way we can. We’ve got to make him see himself so he can break down and face the fact he’s wrong to separate us from the land, this way."

  She sighed.

  "Maybe he’s not wrong,” she said, wearily.