Home from the Shore

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Maybe we are. Anyway, how can I tell him, Patrick?”

  "It has to be you or I. You and I are the only ones who understand him—and there's no one else but us he’d believe it from. I’ve tried and I haven't got through to him. So you’ve got to try now.”

  There was silence from Sara.

  "All right,” said the voice of Patrick. "Think about it anyway, and I'll talk to you again later..."

  Patrick’s voice was moving towards the iris as it ended its sentence. Johnny turned swiftly and left before he could be discovered.

  There was a new sadness in him that he could do nothing about. He had sensed from the moment of homecoming that there was something making Sara unhappy. It had been there to be felt in her, like a gaping rent in an otherwise perfect piece of fabric. In the first few seconds he had heard her talking with Patrick—and this, he now admitted to himself, was the reason he had stood back and listened—he had thought that what they spoke about was this same unhappiness of hers; and he would finally find out what it was.

  But that had not been the topic. Now he had two worries instead of one. Johnny's throat tightened painfully. He had given Sara a number of opportunities to bring her concern up to him, by herself. But she had refused to take advantage of any of them. In all other ways, she was the same as ever, equally tender, equally loving. But she would not speak of whatever silent grief or anger was gnawing at her. Plainly, whatever it was, it had something to do with Tomi. She had never explained why she had not told him about Tomi; and the boy did not call him Daddy, but Johnny.

  On the fourth morning a call came to rescue him from his personal problems. It was a phone call from Chad Ridell, Chief of Staff of the North Atlantic’s Castle-Home, one of ten such undersurface metropolises that cruised the seawaters of the world. Atlantic Castle-Home was nearest Joya-Home's present position, only about four hundred miles north of where Joya-Home drifted now.

  "This time," Chad said to Johnny, "we’re going to have to form a council to talk to the Closed Congress.”

  Chad was second-generation. His lean, fifty-four year old face had lines more suited to someone of the first generation. "They're as worked up ashore," he said, “about you Cadets going home as they were about keeping the whaling industry. Maybe more. The other Castle-Homes have delegated ours to speak for all. I thought we’d eventually have elections, with each ten Homes electing a representative. But for now, I'm simply bespeaking about twenty or so people I think are pretty sure of being elected."

  "Patrick, you mean?" said Johnny.

  "For one,” said Chad. "Because his music's made him known and respected on shore. You, for one of the representatives of the Cadets."

  Johnny nodded.

  "You'll come as quickly as you can, Johnny?"

  "Yes. Patrick too. I'm sure. All of us, I think," said Johnny.

  They broke their phone connection and Johnny went to tell the others. Within an hour, the Joya Home was beginning to break into the small-Home sections that made it up. Eachs mall-Home sent an electric current through its outer shell, and the plastic of that shell "remembered" a different shape, changing into an outline like that of a supersonic aircraft.

  Together, the fleet of altered small-Homes turned north at a speed of ninety knots, under the thrust of individual drive units that used a controlled hydrogen fusion process to produce high-pressure steam jets. They drove through the still waters for Castle-Home.

  Five hours later, reunited in wheel-shape,the Joya-Home inched into position and locked down atop a column of nine other previously arrived Homes. On three sides the column of Homes, which the addition of the Joya-Home had just completed, was locked and connected with three of the other ten-stacks of Homes that altogether made up the great underwater community clustering about—and momentarily part of—North Atlantic Castle-Home. Johnny, who was acting pilot for the Joya-Home, locked the controls and turned away from them.

  Tomi said, “Why didn’t Mommy wait here while you did that?"

  Johnny looked down. The small face, in which Johnny often found himself searching for a resemblance to himself, looked up at him across a gulf of years.

  "Her own folk’s Home may be here,” Johnny said. "She wanted to find out."

  “Grandpa," said Tomi. "And Grandma Light.”

  "Yes,” Johnny said.

  "They're my Grandpa and Grandma. They're not yours." The boy stood with feet apart. "Why didn’t she take me to see my Grandpa and Grandma Light?"

  Johnny looked out the wide transparency before him at the blue waters and the ten-Home upright columns of Castle-Home. “I think she wants us to become better acquainted.’’

  Tomi scowled.

  “What’s ‘acquainted’?"

  "We aren't acquainted," said Johnny. Hel ooked back at the boy.

  "What’s," said Tomi, “ac-quaint-ed, I say!"

  "Acquainted," said Johnny. “Acquainted’s what you are with your mother.”

  Tomi looked hard at him.

  "She’s my mother," he said at last.

  "And you’re my son." Johnny gazed at the boy. He was square-shouldered, solid and thick. His eyes were not brown like Sara’s but blue like Johnny’s. But their blueness was as transparent and unreflective as a pane of glass.

  Johnny said suddenly, "Did your mother ever take you to see the corral at a Castle-Home?"

  "Unh-uh!" Tomi shook his head slowly from side to side. "She never took me."

  "Get your mask and fins on, then," said Johnny. "I’ll take you."

  Outside the small-Home entrance iris, they found Baldur waiting with Sara's bottle-nosed dolphin, Neta, and Neta’s half-grown pup, Tantrums.

  "Not now, Tantrums!" Tomi shoved the five-foot pup aside and reached toward Baldur; but Baldur evaded the boy, spiraling up on Johnny's far side. Tomi muttered something and grabbed at the reins of the harness on Neta, who let him take them willingly.

  "No,” said Johnny. The mutter had barely reached his ears over the underwater radio circuit built into the swim masks. If they had been relying on voice-box communication from mask to mask through the water it would not have reached him at all. But he felt it was time to settle this matter. "Baldur is not your dolphin.”

  Tomi muttered once more. This time it was truly unintelligible, but Johnny did not need to understand the words in this case.

  "Our sea-friends pick us, not we them," said Johnny. "Baldur picked me many years ago. While I was gone he let you use him, but now I’m back. You'll have to let him do what he wants."

  Tomi said nothing. Letting the dolphins pull them, they headed across the top of Castle-Home through three fathoms of water to a far area of open water where yellow warning buoys stood balanced at various depths. Neta jerked the reins suddenly from Tomi and, herding Tantrums ruthlessly before her, headed home.

  "Bad Neta!" shouted Tomi through his voice-box. “Bad dolphin!"

  "No. Careful dolphin," said Johnny.

  "What do yellow buoys stand for?"

  "Danger," muttered Tomi. He glanced at Baldur and grumbled again.

  "Don't blame the dolphin," said Johnny. "If Sara were here, Neta wouldn't leave her even for Tantrum's sake. It's nothing against you. Someday you'll have your own dolphin for a sea-friend, and it'll stick with you."

  “Won’t!" muttered Tomi. "I don't want scared little dolphins! A great, great, big space bat, that's what I’ll get!"

  "Suit yourself,” said Johnny. "Well, that's the corral, beyond the buoys there and for four miles out. Want to go in?"

  Tomi's face mask jerked up sharply toward his father.

  "Past the yellow...?"

  "As long as I'm with you. Well?" Tomi kicked himself forward.

  "Let’s go in, Johnny."

  "All right. Stay close now.” Johnny led the way. Tomi crowded him. Baldur hesitated, then spurted level with them.

  They swam forward for thirty or forty feet.

  Tomi gradually forged ahead. Then, suddenly, he went into a flurry of movement, fl
ipped around and swam thrashingly back into Johnny.

  “Daddy!" He clung to Johnny's right arm and chest. "KillersI"

  Johnny put his left arm instinctively around the boy. Holding him, Johnny could feel the abrupt and powerful beat of the boy’s heart and the warmth of blood cresting out through his own body.

  "It’s all right," Johnny said.

  “They’re muzzled."

  Tomi still clung. The warmth racing through Johnny came up against a different, powerful pressure that seemed to spread out and down from behind his ears.

  "Look at them,” he said. Tomi did not move. The pressure moved further out and downward.

  He put his hands around the small waist and overpowered the boy's grip, turning him around.

  He held his son out, facing the killer whales.

  For a second, as he turned him, Tomi had gone rigid through all his body. Now the rigidity began to go out of him. He stared straight at the looming shape of the nearest killer whale with the open basket-weaving of the enormous muzzle covering the huge head. Johnny's fingers pressed about the light arch of childish ribs; but he felt no shiver or tremble. He was aware of Baldur quivering in the water at his back; but between his hands there was only stillness.

  The boy relaxed even more. He hung, staring at the great, dim shape just ahead. After a second his hands went to Johnny's hand and he pushed Johnny's grip from his waist. He swam a few strokes forward.

  Johnny felt the hard beating of his own heart against the pressure in his brain. He was tense as a strung bow himself and his heart beat with the hard, proud rhythm of a man foiling a sword for his own carrying. Without warning he remembered the striped gold length of a Siberian tiger lying in his cage outdoors at the zoo ashore in San Diego. And the small, dancing figure of a ruby-throated hummingbird which floated from some nearby yellow tulips, in through the gleaming bars of the cage. It had hesitated, then, hovering on the blurred motion of its wings, moved driftingly toward the great head and sleepy eye of the tiger that watched it advancing.

  Johnny looked about him.

  At first there had been only the one killer to be seen. Now, like long boxcar lengths resolving jut of the green dimness, other ponderous, dark-backed shapes were making their appearance without seeming to exert any of the effort of swimming. It was as if they coalesced, and came drifting close under some magnetic influence. They approached sideways. Through the open-work of the muzzle about the one now drifting, rising toward him on his left, Johnny could see the murderously cheerful mouth, the dark intelligent watching of the eye.

  The eye, dark and reflective, approached Johnny, growing as it came. Behind it lay the large cetacean brain, and a mind close to Johnny's own.

  But that mind was a stranger, self-sufficient.

  Staring now into the approaching eye, Johnny thought he caught there his own sea-image. And it came to him then that it was for something like this he had advised the Cadets' return. It was for something like this that he had brought his son to the killer’s pen.

  Very mighty, ignorant of domination, moved by deep instincts to act to an end unseen but surely felt, the reflecting eye of the killer whale looked out on an unending liquid universe where there were no lords, no chains, nor any walls. Through this universe only the dark tides of instinct moved back and forth. For the killer whale as for the people, now, those dark tides spoke with a voice of certainty. To listen to that voice, to follow the path it told of, setting aside all things of the moment, all pity, all fear of life or death—it was this knowledge Johnny saw reflected in the killer’s eye. In the movement of those dark tides there was neither wife nor child, nor friend nor enemy—but only truth and what the mind desired. First came survival.

  After that what the individual chose to accept.

  That was the truth, the secret and the truce of the dark tides.

  And that was why, thought Johnny over the strong beating of his heart, that it had been safe to bring his son to this place. His son was of the sea. In this place was the truce of the sea, and in that truce he was safe.

  "Daddy!”

  Tomi's voice shouted suddenly in Johnny's earphone, in the close confines of the mask and over the sound of the bubbling exhaust valve.

  "Daddy! Look at me!"

  Johnny jerked around in the water. Twenty feet from him and a little higher in the water, Tomi was disregarding one of the oldest knowledges of the People—that the quicksilver members of the dolphin family hated to be held or clung to by any but their oldest friends. Like a boy on a Juggernaut, Tomi rode high on the shoulder area of the first killer whale.

  "—Tomi,” said Johnny. He felt neither heart-beat, nor pressure now. Only a wide,hollow space inside him. He kept his voice calm.

  "Uh-huh!” Tomi kicked carelessly with the heels of his swim fins against the great swelling sides of the killer. Five feet ahead and below him, the dark eye there looked like a poker player's through an opening in the muzzle. It gazed steadily on Johnny. The great flukes of the killer, capable of smashing clear through the side of a small row-boat, hung still in the water. Johnny thought of the truce, of the primitives ense of fun to be found in all the dolphins, the savage humor of the killer whales.

  "Tomi," he said, surprised at his own calmness, "it’s time to go home."

  "All right." Surprisingly without argument, Tomi kicked free of the twenty-five-foot shape and swam down towards his father. For a moment Johnny saw the boys legs beating the underwater by the muzzle where the dark eye watched, and then he was swimming freely toward Johnny.

  Johnny turned and they swam together toward the edge of the corral. Baldur shot on ahead.

  "Tomi—" said Johnny; and found words did not come easily. He started again. “I should have warned you not to get close to them. Killers aren't like dolphins—"

  "He's going to be my sea-friend, I think," said Tomi, kicking vigorously through the water.

  "Tomi,” said Johnny, "killers don’t make sea-friends like dolphins.”

  "Then why does he keep coming after me, Daddy?"

  Johnny’s head jerked around to look back over his shoulder. A dozen feet behind them, the basket shape of a killer whale's muzzle was gliding through the water. At that moment the yellow buoys loomed before them, and they passed through. Here the killer should stop following.

  But he came on through with them.

  “Tomi," said Johnny quietly. "You see the iris in the wall there?"

  “I see it,” said Tomi, looking ahead to the side of Castle-Home.

  “When I tell you to, in just a minute when we get close, I want you to start swimming for it. And don't look back. You understand? I want you to swim as fast as you can and not stop."

  The sudden wild clangor of an alarm bell broke through his words, racketing through the water all around them and over Castle-Home.

  A buzzer sounded in the earphones of their mask-radio circuit.

  “All bespoke members of the Council, this is Chad Ridell speaking," said the voice of the Chief of Staff of Castle-Home. "Please come to the Conference Room at once. All members—" Chad's voice repeated the request twice more.

  Daddy!" said Tomi, as the voice stopped. Johnny turned swiftly to him. “Look, Daddy," Johnny followed the boy's pointing finger and saw the waters behind them empty and still. "My killer's gone!"

  "Never mind,’’ said Johnny automatically. "We’ve got to streak for home now." He caught up a rein from Baldur and handed another rein to Tomi.

  When the two of them entered their own small-Home again, Sara was back.

  "Mommy! Mommy, listen!" Tomi ripped off his mask. "We went in the corral with the killers. And I made friends with one and rode on his back and he followed us but the bell scared him—"

  Sara’s face flashed up to stare into Johnny’s. Her eyes were wide, her nose pinched, the skin over her cheekbones tight and pale. There was a white look to her eyes.

  "I’ve got to go—” said Johnny. He pulled on his mask and hurried out of the small-Hom
e.

  He saw he was late as he stepped into the conference room. About twenty of the others were already there. They were seated in a semicircle near the far end of the green-walled room, around the broadcast image of a small middle-aged man, standing, in gray slacks and Lander jacket.

  Johnny recognized him. It was Pul Vant, Secretary-Advocate for the Closed Congress, governing body of the grouped nations of the land.

  Johnny came up quietly and took a seat.

  His cousin Patrick was among those already there, as were two other representatives of the ex-Cadets—Mikros Palamas and Toby Damley of the Communications Dome, here at Castle-Home. And Anea Marieanna, a dark-haired woman of the second generation, startlingly beautiful still in her forties and in spite of the fact her left hand was gone at the wrist. She smiled at him across the semicircle, and he smiled back briefly.

  "...ringleaders," Pul Vant was saying.

  "I tell you," Ridell interrupted. "There are no ringleaders among the People.”

  "Very well. Setting that aside then—"

  Vant gestured neatly with his hands as he talked.

  He had the smooth movements of an actor. "I'm trying to explain to you what the Space Program and the Academy can mean to a frontierless people ashore." He went on talking. It was an old argument, one Johnny had heard before. He looked around the semicircle, noting the difference of his people from this little man of the land.

  Anea Marieanna was not the only one marked by the sea among the older generations; and in his own generation the very structure of mind and body was different. Different from the Landers.

  Already they were starting to use the same words to mean different things on each side. And the dangerous thing was they did not realize the difference that was there in their words.

  "Now," Vant was saying, "the Congress is ready to make the same offer. To take you in as a full member nation . . ."

  "No," said Chad.

  "You understand," Vant said, "we can't have six million people without even a government holding seventy-point-eight per cent of the world's surface area. You can't do that."

  "We've been doing it," said Chad. “We intend to keep on."