Goodbye, goodbye. I and Anthony send fragrant farewells to one another.
White foam surrounded the slick, still place where Two Notches had fallen into the water. Suddenly the flybridge was very cold. Anthony’s heart sank. He cut speed and put the wheel amidships. The boat slowed reluctantly, as if it, too, had been enjoying the game. Anthony dropped down the ladder to his computer.
Through the spattered windscreen, Anthony could see Two Notches leaping again, his long wings beating air, his silhouette refracted through seawater and rainbows. Anthony tried to share the whale’s exuberance, his joy, but the thought of another long summer alone on his boat, beating his head against the enigma of the Dwellers, turned his mind to ice.
He ordered an infinite repeat of Two Notches’ last phrase and stepped below to change into dry clothes. The cold layer echoed his farewells. He bent almost double and began pulling the sweater over his head.
Suddenly he straightened. An idea was chattering at him. He yanked the sweater back down over his trunk, rushed to his computer, tapped another message.
Our farewells need not be said just yet. You and I can follow one another for a few days before I must return. Perhaps you and the nonbreathers can find one another for conversation.
Anthony is in a condition of migration. Welcome, welcome. Two Notches’ reply was jubilant.
For a few days, Anthony qualified. Before too long he would have to return to port for supplies, Annoyed at himself, he realized he could as easily have victualed for weeks.
Another voice called through the water, sounded faintly through the speakers. Air Human and Anthony are in a state of tastiest welcome.
In the middle of Anthony’s reply, his fingers paused at the keys. Surprise rose quietly to the surface of his mind.
After the long day of talking in humpback speech, he had forgotten that Air Human was not a humpback. That she was, in fact, another human being sitting on a boat just over the horizon.
Anthony continued his message. His fingers were clumsy now, and he had to go back twice to correct mistakes. He wondered why it was harder to talk to Philana, now that he remembered she wasn’t an alien.
He asked Two Notches to turn on his transponder, and, all through the deep shadow twilight when the white dwarf was in the sky, the boat followed the whale at a half-mile’s distance. The current was cooperative, but in a few days a new set of northwest trade winds would push the current off on a curve toward the equator and the whales would lose its assistance.
Anthony didn’t see Philana’s boat that first day: just before dawn, Sings of Others heard a distant Dweller conversation to starboard. Anthony told his boat to strike off in that direction and spent most of the day listening. When the Dwellers fell silent, he headed for the whales’ transponders again. There was a lively conversation in progress between Air Human and the whales, but Anthony’s mind was still on Dwellers. He put on headphones and worked far into the night.
The next morning was filled with chill mist. Anthony awoke to the whooping cries of the humpbacks. He looked at his computer to see if it had recorded any announcement of Dwellers, and there was none. The whales’ interrogation by Air Human continued. Anthony’s toes curled on the cold, damp planks as he stepped on deck and saw Philana’s yacht two hundred yards to port, floating three feet over the tallest swells. Cables trailed from the stern, pulling hydrophones and speakers on a subaquatic sled. Anthony grinned at the sight of the elaborate store-bought rig. He suspected that he got better acoustics with his homebuilt equipment, the translation softwear he’d programmed himself, and his hopelessly old-fashioned boat that couldn’t even rise out of the water, but that he’d equipped with the latest-generation silent propellers.
He turned on his hydrophones. Sure enough, he got more audio interference from Philana’s sled than he received from his entire boat.
While making coffee and an omelette of mossmoon eggs Anthony listened to the whales gurgle about their grandparents. He put on a down jacket and stepped onto the boat’s stern and ate breakfast, watching the humpbacks as they occasionally broke surface, puffed out clouds of spray, sounded again with a careless, vast toss of their flukes. Their bodies were smooth and black: the barnacles that pebbled their skin on Earth had been removed before they gated to their new home.
Their song could be heard clearly even without the amplifiers. That was one change the contact with humans had brought: the males were a lot more vocal than once they had been, as if they were responding to human encouragement – or perhaps they now had more worth talking about. Their speech was also more terse than before, less overtly poetic; the humans’ directness and compactness of speech, caused mainly by their lack of fluency, had influenced the whales to a degree.
The whales were adapting to communication with humans more easily than the humans were adapting to them. It was important to chart that change, be able to say how the whales had evolved, accommodated. They were on an entire new planet now, explorers, and the change was going to come fast. The whales were good at remembering, but artificial intelligences were better. Anthony was suddenly glad that Philana was here, doing her work.
As if on cue she appeared on deck, one hand pressed to her head, holding an earphone: she was listening intently to whalesong. She was bundled up against the chill, and gave a brief wave as she noticed him. Anthony waved back. She paused, beating time with one hand to the rhythm of whalespeech, then waved again and stepped back to her work.
Anthony finished breakfast and cleaned the dishes. He decided to say good morning to the whales, then work on some of the Dweller speech he’d recorded the day before. He turned on his computer, sat down at the console, typed his greetings. He waited for a pause in the conversation, then transmitted. The answer came back sounding like a distant buzzsaw.
We and Anthony wish one another a passage filled with splendid odors. We and Air Human have been scenting one another’s families this morning.
We wish each other the joy of converse, Anthony typed.
We have been wondering, Two Notches said, if we can scent whether we and Anthony and Air Human are in a condition of rut.
Anthony gave a laugh. Humpbacks enjoyed trying to figure out human relationships: they were promiscuous themselves, and intrigued by ways different from their own.
Anthony wondered, sitting in his cockpit, if Philana was looking at him.
Air Human and I smell of aloneness, unpairness, he typed, and he transmitted the message at the same time that Philana entered the even more direct, We are not.
The state is not rut, apartness is the smell, Two Notches agreed readily – it was all one to him – and the lyrics echoed each other for a long moment, aloneness, not, unpairness, not. Not. Anthony felt a chill.
I and the Dwellers’ speech are going to try to scent one another’s natures, he typed hastily, and turned off the speakers. He opened his case and took out one of the cubes he’d recorded the day before.
Work went slowly.
By noon the mist had burned off the water. His head buzzing with Dweller sounds, Anthony stepped below for a sandwich. The message light was blinking on his telephone. He turned to it, pressed the play button.
“May I speak with you briefly?” Philana’s voice. “I’d like to get some data, at your convenience.” Her tone shifted to one of amusement. “The condition,” she added, “is not that of rut.”
Anthony grinned. Philana had been considerate enough not to interrupt him, just to leave the message for whenever he wanted it. He picked up the telephone, connected directory assistance in Cabo Santa Pola, and asked it to route a call to the phone on Philana’s yacht. She answered.
“Message received,” he said. “Would you join me for lunch?”
“In an hour or so,” she said. Her voice was abstracted. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“When you’re ready. Bye.” He rang off, decided to make a fish chowder instead of sandwiches, and drank a beer while preparing it. He began to feel buoyan
t, cheerful. Siren wailing sounded through the water.
Philana’s yacht maneuvered over to his boat just as Anthony finished his second beer. Philana stood on the gunwale, wearing a pale sweater with brown zigzags on it. Her braid was undone, and her brown hair fell around her shoulders. She jumped easily from her gunwale to the flybridge, then came down the ladder. The yacht moved away as soon as it felt her weight leave. She smiled uncertainly as she stepped to the deck.
“I’m sorry to have to bother you,” she said.
He offered a grin. “That’s okay. I’m between projects right now.”
She looked toward the cabin. “Lunch smells good.” Perhaps, he thought, food equaled apology.
“Fish chowder. Would you like a beer? Coffee?”
“Beer. Thanks.”
They stepped below and Anthony served lunch on the small foldout table. He opened another beer and put it by her place.
“Delicious. I never really learned to cook.”
“Cooking was something I learned young.”
Her eyes were curious. “Where was that?”
“Lees.” Shortly. He put a spoonful of chowder in his mouth so that his terseness would be more understandable.
“I never heard the name.”
“It’s a planet.” Mumbling through chowder. “Pretty obscure.” He didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’m from Earth.”
He looked at her. “Really? Originally? Not just a habitat in the Sol system?”
“Yes. Truly. One of the few. The one and only Earth.”
“Is that what got you interested in whales?”
“I’ve always been interested in whales. As far back as I can remember. Long before I ever saw one.”
“It was the same with me. I grew up near an ocean, built a boat when I was a boy and went exploring. I’ve never felt more at home than when I’m on the ocean.”
“Some people live on the sea all the time.”
“In floating habitats. That’s just moving a city out onto the ocean. The worst of both worlds, if you ask me.”
He realized the beer was making him expansive, that he was declaiming and waving his free hand. He pulled his hand in.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “about the last time we talked.”
She looked away. “My fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” He realized he had almost shouted that, and could feel himself flushing. He lowered his voice. “Once I got out here I realized . . .” This was really hopeless. He plunged on. “I’m not used to dealing with people. There were just a few people on Lees and they were all . . . eccentric. And everyone I’ve met since I left seems at least five hundred years old. Their attitudes are so . . .” He shrugged.
“Alien.” She was grinning.
“Yes.”
“I feel the same way. Everyone’s so much older, so much more. . . sophisticated, I suppose.” She thought about it for a moment. “I guess it’s sophistication.”
“They like to think so.”
“I can feel their pity sometimes.” She toyed with her spoon, looked down at her bowl.
“And condescension.” Bitterness striped Anthony’s tongue. “The attitude of, oh, we went through that once, poor darling, but now we know better.”
“Yes.” Tiredly. “I know what you mean. Like we’re not really people yet.”
“At least my father wasn’t like that. He was crazy, but he let me be a person. He—”
His tongue stumbled. He was not drunk enough to tell this story, and he didn’t think he wanted to anyway.
“Go ahead,” said Philana. She was collecting data, Anthony remembered, on families.
He pushed back from the table, went to the fridge for another beer. “Maybe later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”
Philana’s look was steady. “You’re not the only one who knows about crazy fathers.”
Then you tell me about yours, he wanted to say. Anthony opened the beer, took a deep swallow. The liquid rose again, acid in his throat, and he forced it down. Memories rose with the fire in Anthony’s throat, burning him. His father’s fine madness whirled in his mind like leaves in a hurricane. We are, he thought, in a condition of mutual distrust and permanent antagonism. Something therefore must be done.
“All right.” He put the beer on the top of the fridge and returned to his seat. He spoke rapidly, just letting the story come. His throat burned. “My father started life with money. He became a psychologist and then a fundamentalist Catholic lay preacher, kind of an unlicensed messiah. He ended up a psychotic. Dad concluded that civilization was too stupid and corrupt to survive, and he decided to start over. He initiated an unauthorized planetary scan through a transporter gate, found a world that he liked, and moved his family there. There were just four of us at the time, dad and my mother, my little brother, and me. My mother was – is – she’s not really her own person. There’s a vacancy there. If you’re around psychotics a lot, and you don’t have a strong sense of self, you can get submerged in their delusions. My mother didn’t have a chance of standing up to a full-blooded lunatic like my dad, and I doubt she tried. She just let him run things.
“I was six when we moved to Lees, and my brother was two. We were—” Anthony waved an arm in the general direction of the invisible Milky Way overhead. “—we were half the galaxy away. Clean on the other side of the hub. We didn’t take a gate with us, or even instructions and equipment for building one. My father cut us off entirely from everything he hated.”
Anthony looked at Philana’s shocked face and laughed. “It wasn’t so bad. We had everything but a way off the planet. Cube readers, building supplies, preserved food, tools, medical gear, wind and solar generators – Dad thought falkner generators were the cause of the rot, so he didn’t bring any with him. My mother pretty much stayed pregnant for the next decade, but luckily the planet was benign. We settled down in a protected bay where there was a lot of food, both on land and in the water. We had a smokehouse to preserve the meat. My father and mother educated me pretty well. I grew up an aquatic animal. Built a sailboat, learned how to navigate. By the time I was fifteen I had charted two thousand miles of coast. I spent more than half my time at sea, the last few years. Trying to get away from my dad, mostly. He kept getting stranger. He promised me in marriage to my oldest sister after my eighteenth birthday.” Memory swelled in Anthony like a tide, calm green water rising over the flat, soon to whiten and boil.
“There were some whale-sized fish on Lees, but they weren’t intelligent. I’d seen recordings of whales, heard the sounds they made. On my long trips I’d imagine I was seeing whales, imagine myself talking to them.”
“How did you get away?”
Anthony barked a laugh. “My dad wasn’t the only one who could initiate a planetary scan. Seven or eight years after we landed some resort developers found our planet and put up a hotel about two hundred miles to the south of our settlement.” Anthony shook his head. “Hell of a coincidence. The odds against it must have been incredible. My father frothed at the mouth when we started seeing their flyers and boats. My father decided our little settlement was too exposed and we moved farther inland to a place where we could hide better. Everything was camouflaged. He’d hold drills in which we were all supposed to grab necessary supplies and run off into the forest.”
“They never found you?”
“If they saw us, they thought we were people on holiday.”
“Did you approach them?”
Anthony shook his head. “No. I don’t really know why.”
“Well. Your father.”
“I didn’t care much about his opinions by that point. It was so obvious he was cracked. I think, by then, I had all I wanted just living on my boat. I didn’t see any reason to change it.” He thought for a moment. “If he actually tried to marry me off to my sister, maybe I would have run for it.”
“But they found you anyway.”
“No. Something else happened. The water supply for the new settlement was unreliable, so we decided to build a viaduct from a spring nearby. We had to get our hollow-log pipe over a little chasm, and my father got careless and had an accident. The viaduct fell on him. Really smashed him up, caused all sorts of internal injuries. It was very obvious that if he didn’t get help, he’d die. My mother and I took my boat and sailed for the resort.”
The words dried up. This was where things got ugly. Anthony decided he really couldn’t trust Philana with it, and that he wanted his beer after all. He got up and took the bottle and drank.
“Did your father live?”
“No.” He’d keep this as brief as he could. “When my mother and I got back, we found that he’d died two days before. My brothers and sisters gutted him and hung him upside down in the smokehouse.” He stared dully into Philana’s horrified face. “It’s what they did to any large animal. My mother and I were the only ones who remembered what to do with a dead person, and we weren’t there.”
“My God. Anthony.” Her hands clasped below her face.
“And then—” He waved his hands, taking in everything, the boat’s comforts, Overlook, life over the horizon. “Civilization. I was the only one of the children who could remember anything but Lees. I got off the planet and got into marine biology. That’s been my life ever since. I was amazed to discover that I and the family were rich – my dad didn’t tell me he’d left tons of investments behind. The rest of the family’s still on Lees, still living in the old settlement. It’s all they know.” He shrugged. “They’re rich, too, of course, which helps. So they’re all right.”
He leaned back on the fridge and took another long drink. The ocean swell tilted the boat and rolled the liquid down his throat. Whale harmonics made the bottle cap dance on the smooth alloy surface of the refrigerator.
Philana stood. Her words seemed small after the long silence. “Can I have some coffee? I’ll make it.”
“I’ll do it.”
They both went for the coffee and banged heads. Reeling back, the expression on Philana’s face was wide-eyed, startled, fawnlike, as if he’d caught her at something she should be ashamed of. Anthony tried to laugh out an apology, but just then the white dwarf came up above the horizon and the quality of light changed as the screens went up, and with the light her look somehow changed. Anthony gazed at her for a moment and fire began to lap at his nerves. In his head the whales seemed to urge him to make his move.
The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 12