The creature recoiled, then slowly extended its neck at least threefold. Its entire frontal form lit up like a pinball machine, swirling patterns of hazel light on its breast feeding rib-like tubes under its skin that pulsed back and forth in rapid patterns too syncopated for her to follow. This was its primary language, she concluded.
Despite being so excited that she could hardly draw breath, Jan smiled at her wherewithal to hit the record button on the side of her ’pod. A scientist to the last. After fiddling with the projection options, she managed to flip her beamed image. It was one of her swimming with Stopper near the Pit Stop, taken by Vaughn shortly after his return from the Star Binder. She grinned. It was a helluva shot, one of her most viewed. It caught a miniature rainbow in the splashes made by Eusebius eels frenzying to catch their insect prey. And it captured Stopper’s unfiltered love for Jan as she serenaded him in the deep water; the way he gazed into her eyes, he was in heaven, and so was she.
She couldn’t have picked a better way to introduce the two of them. Stopper’s tail wag moved his whole body when he saw the corrected image.
The creature submerged.
“Hey! Don’t go yet. We’ve only just got—”
It reappeared, concentrating its light signals into its limbs for another round of show-and-tell. Jan noticed its flared gills between its first and second pairs of limbs. That explained the need to submerge. She switched off her beam. The creature spat its next mural onto the damp rock. It depicted Vaughn climbing one of the Ronkonkoma trees on the west side of the bay. Was he peering into a nest? That would explain why he’d—
Another image materialized in its place, showing Vaughn crossing the channel with the bore wave bearing down on him. Then a third fresco revealed a number of the amphibians erecting the wispweed bed for Vaughn on the east bank, with one digging the heated pool. A final picture saw Vaughn alone, wrapped in his blanket, just as Jan had found him.
“You saved his life,” she said. “I can never thank you enough. But I’m curious—why? Why did you do it? What are we to you?”
The creature let its mural melt away without responding, its colors still there but all definition sliding away like the gel seeping back into the rising tide. She noticed the water level had risen. It now lapped at her knees, and Stopper was almost afloat. Time was against them.
She had an idea.
Another favorite photo from her album, this one taken by Joy Horrigan, showed Jan, Stopper and Vaughn outside their cabin at Miramar. The closest to a family shot she had, it also adorned her nightstand as a liquigraph. She again pointed to herself, then to the projection. “This is my home. This is where I live.” Motioning to her new friend, “Where do you live?”
Several moments of illuminated body language later, the creature responded by showering a much larger portion of the wall with light and color. Jan’s wide eyes began to tear up. The fresco depicted a miraculous undersea grotto, as big as a cathedral, with sunlight penetrating fissures in the roof but otherwise unable to touch this secluded kingdom of the amphibians. Bioluminescent artwork adorned giant, hollowed pillars, sculpted walls, and crevices from which the creatures came and went. Meanwhile, undersea plants she’d never seen before wavered in cultivated fields. Orchards of trees bore insanely long, fruitful fronds festooned on scaffolds, from which pickers filled woven baskets. The overriding feeling it gave was one of tranquility – an ancient, untouched civilization thriving in isolation.
Here the slideshow took a darker turn.
The creature seemed to realize time was short and that the cave would soon be flooded. Its hazel body color deepened to a dark green, and pulsed more sluggishly. By contrast, the tempo of its projections increased. Jan swallowed when she discerned its next: a striking representation of the meteor shower from several nights ago. Another showed an ice-plosion behind a frosty forest. Further, a deep crater left in the thick Arctic ice, probably in one of the really old glaciers that still hadn’t thawed since the last ice age, was itself pocked with smaller, fresh holes, with piles of ice beside them.
“You’re showing me the crash site,” she said. “You know where I’m going. But what are you trying to tell me?”
The creature’s visage darkened further still, near to gray. A final image thrust onto the wall revealed a strange-looking, solitary rock among the flattened trees, inside the blast radius but outside the crater. It had been cracked open. There appeared to be a hollow cavity in its center, but there was nothing inside that she could see.
“You’re telling me to find this? You want me to figure out what it is?”
The creature flickered recognition of some sort, a lighter hue girding its ribs. Then it ended the slideshow, hit Jan and Stopper with another of its sonar pings – her ears tickled again – before contorting its body into a slinky, twisting dive. It vanished into the lower underwater cavity.
She hugged her boy as she told him, “Remember this day, Stops. This is what it was all about. This is why we came here. Those assholes think they can build condominiums. But they have no idea – we’re not alone. We’re the tourists here, we’re the guests, and the tour’s over. It all changes now. It’s time to put science back in charge.”
He didn’t wait for her to finish. The seawater went up his nostrils, so he squirmed out of her embrace and started swimming for the west bank, where Vaughn was…not in his bed.
Chapter Eight
Vaughn was stumbling in the shallows of the southeast bank on a quest for solid footing, but the stepping stones Jan had used, those uneven boulders, were now submerged. He slipped again and again, each time struggled back to shore after an awkward dip. It pained her to see him like this—pathetic, uncoordinated, about as far from his alert Omicron self as it was possible for him to get. Stopper reached him first and bowled him over with shocking ease, then gave him a vigorous licking until Vaughn wrestled himself upright, onto his knees at least. From there he hugged the big Boxer in his usual unguarded style, but the joy was not writ on his face; it was internal, and he was therefore not himself.
“I—I saw the lights,” he slurred as Jan approached. “In the cave. And I…the tracks led…yeah, I figured you…and the lights…”
“Take it slow,” she replied. “I’ll explain everything, but first tell me what happened. Did you hit your head?”
“I—I was crossing there.” He pointed to the far bank. “Up in the…in the things, but they were…there was nothing there.”
“The larspar nests? The hatching season’s passed, so you’ll have probably just missed the chicks’ first flights by a matter of weeks. Good effort, though, Vaughn. You remembered, huh. You remembered what I said. But you forgot about the bore wave?”
“Didn’t know what one was. I remembered the words, but I never knew what they meant. Tidal—tidal bore.”
Jan cursed herself. Her prattling often left laypeople in the lurch—the tourists had forced her to slow it right down, to explain everything as it came up, but in private she just reamed it off without a care. Her poor man had tried to keep up with her, but without an encyclopedia he had a thankless task.
“I’ll do better next time, I promise,” she said. “For now, let’s get you seen to. You hit your head, right?”
He nursed a sore spot in the center of his pate. Jan felt a lump there. “We don’t want to take any chances. You were out for a while—that might be a serious concussion.” Out long enough for our new friends to make him a bed, blanket and heater. “Come on, let’s get you warm, then I’m taking you back to Doc Cochran.”
He didn’t argue, nor did he refuse her support as he walked slowly—ever so slowly—back to the bayside bed. Jan sat beside him on the springy wooden lattice, draped the wispweed blanket over them both. They warmed their hands in the heat from the pool. Stopper sat nearby, watching Vaughn intently.
“Jan?”
“Yeah.”
“What were those lights in the cave? I followed your tracks, yours and Stopper’s, so I figured
you’d…that you were exploring in there. But those lights—they looked like holograms or something. Brilliant colors.”
She clasped his hands and rubbed them in the heat. “How do like your bed and blanket?”
“Ingenious,” he replied. “I never did take that AESOP training. You’ll have to teach me sometime.”
“And the heated pool?”
“I want one. A big one. Our own private Jacuzzi—apparel absolutely prohibited.”
Jan grinned. He was getting his old self back, complete with cheeky humor.
“So you’ll be surprised to know that I didn’t make them, any of them.”
He gently gripped her hands, mid-rub. Held them still. “You’re telling me you found me like this?”
“Snug as a bug in a rug.”
“Then who—”
“You mean what.”
“I—I don’t follow. The wave threw me up against the cave wall. I hit my head. I don’t remember anything after that. Until I saw the colored lights. And your tracks…”
“Vaughn, I’m going to show you something. Don’t pinch yourself. Definitely don’t pinch me. But know that this isn’t a dream. This really happened—over there in that cave—minutes ago.”
“Oh—kay.”
Jan’s excitement welled up again as her eyecraft moved too fast for the interface to read, prolonging the anticipation of sharing her awesome secret for the first time. She finally figured out how to stream the video feed directly to Vaughn’s ’pod, took a deep breath, and blinked it across.
She watched him watching it for about thirty seconds, vicariously reliving the magic, but he was stoic and taciturn and she couldn’t stand not being able to imagine it through his eyes. So she opened the visual stream on her own ’pod, gawped at the alien artist’s dazzling technique and palette, and pinched herself when she tried to come to terms with the fact that this had really happened—over there in that cave—minutes ago. And she—Jan Corbija—had lived to see it.
Now Vaughn had too.
“They were here, all this time, and no one knew?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How?”
“They must be reclusive,” she replied, “and careful. Like I keep saying, we’ve barely begun to explore these oceans.”
“But we’ve been here for decades.”
“Humans have been around on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and there are still parts of its deep oceans we haven’t touched.”
He rubbed his hands in the heat again. “This puts the Hesp in a whole new category, right? A world with advanced intelligent life?”
“That’s right. It’s a whole new ballgame. And it’s my discovery—ours—I mean our discovery.”
“That doesn’t sound like you,” he said.
“What? Sharing the kudos?”
“No. Thinking of yourself first when it comes to the Hesp.”
She frowned. “I wasn’t. As a matter of fact, I want us to talk this over at length before I even think of reporting it. It’s an ethical can of worms. And it’s unprecedented. Colonists have always known for certain whether or not a planet has been home to intelligent life. And if it has, and those life-forms are indigenous, ISPA has always banned humans from settling there. So it puts us in a bind. We’ve already settled here in a sense, but we’ve also been prohibited from adapting the Hesp in any significant way, so we’re technically a temporary colony. In the official charter, when the science is done, we’re required to dismantle all materials and equipment we’ve brought here and remove them from Hesperidia. Granted, the science will never be done, at least not in my lifetime. But with this new twist, ISPA could very well tear up the official charter and write a new one banning all tours. If that happened, we’d revert back to government funding, which would drastically alter what we do here. There’d be fewer rangers, stricter guidelines on travel and field work. But the powers that be would want to know all about our new friends: where they live, what they can do, how they evolved the ability to manipulate light. It wouldn’t be an invasive operation—no kidnapping and dissecting, or any of that nonsense—but we would have to encroach on their habitat, if only using submersible drones. And because they made first contact with us, it opens the door for ISPA to instigate some sort of official communication, so we can learn more about them with their consent.”
“Like you say, it’s a slippery slope, ethically,” replied Vaughn. “Or we can just keep it between us.”
“That would be my preference,” she said.
“But for how long—you know, before someone else stumbles onto them?”
“Exactly.”
“But like you say, they made the first move. They saved my life and hung around to meet you. What if they want to make themselves known to us as a species, officially?”
“Hmm.” She combed his damp hair back behind his ear. “I knew you’d be good at this.”
“Or maybe you and me could, I don’t know, convince them to stay in hiding or something. Until you get to be in charge—First Ranger, is it?—and can make some sweeping reforms, reduce the human presence on the Hesp—maybe we can persuade them to keep a low profile. Gotta be worth a try, right?”
“We’ll see. Right now I’m taking you back to—”
“Ah, ah.” He flung the wispweed blanket off his shoulder and stood up. “I haven’t finished with this trip. There’s something off about that meteorite crash site. A rock that doesn’t belong. It seemed to be the real reason our new friend set up that rendezvous with you.”
“Yeah. So? I can always return to the crash site after—”
“After nothing. We don’t want this Ruben guy finding it first, getting the kudos. You will make the discovery, and you will be the one who figures out what’s got our new friends so worried. I’ve already ordered my cap and t-shirt that say ‘First Ranger’ on them.”
“Vaughn, you really are an astonishing geek.”
He shrugged. “I’ve got a good teacher.”
Jan sighed as she rolled up the blanket. “It’s bad medical practice. You sure you’re okay?”
“When I’m with you, I’m always okay.”
“Well, you’re cheesy enough for Vaughn in his prime. I guess you’ll do. Here, grab the bed. We’re taking it with us.”
“A keepsake?”
“Research.”
“Right,” he said. “Our first piece of bona-fide alien-made furniture. We could start a catalogue.”
“You are back to normal.”
“Told ya.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
When they reached the ship, first Jan, then Vaughn gazed back over the sweep of the bay, hoping to catch a glimpse of their mysterious new allies. The water continued to inch up the tiered bank. High tide wouldn’t quite reach the heated pool, she reckoned, but it had already covered the glowing rocks inside the cave. Their pink-orange points were still visible, lurking like the eyes of several patient monsters from the deep. But there was no sign of the amphibians. Reclusive, artful, intelligent: how long had they remained hidden from the surface world? Were they hiding? If so, what were they hiding from?
As she sealed Stopper in his own unpressurized compartment in the tail of the ship, and climbed into the main airlock, Jan wondered if she would ever see the strange creatures again. Or whether they would ever let themselves be found.
A sudden tiredness overcame Vaughn during the flight north; he could barely keep his eyes open, so Jan insisted he land at once, in the middle of a vast moorland of tundra, to get a nap. He grumbled a little but soon relented when she recited her professional credentials. Moments after his head sank into the pillow, he was snoring like oxus megallus.
Any time lost to Ruben they could make up with this bird’s much higher top speed. Jan kicked her boots off, settled onto the lounge sofa, and replayed the video of her extraordinary cave encounter. She managed to isolate and enlarge the creature’s murals, and place them in a slideshow for further analysis. Then, feeling a re
turn of her own nausea from that morning, she popped a couple of Doc Cochran’s antiemetic pills. They were pretty strong. She didn’t remember drifting to sleep, but when she opened her eyes it was dark outside.
The beam of Vaughn’s flashlight roved across the tussocks. It caught Stopper foraging in the undergrowth. He squatted, then did that little dance he always did to claw dirt over his pile, but the topsoil was frozen solid. Vaughn brought him back into his unpressurized kennel and then made his way into the galley, where he fixed Jan up a couple of pancakes with powdered egg and synth-bacon rashers. She devoured them. He’d already eaten.
“The comm port has been red hot,” he said. “Your buddy Ruben left about a dozen messages while we were catching zees.”
“Crap. I told them I’d check in every three hours. We’re, ah, let’s see, about eleven hours overdue.” She blew a stray lock of hair away from her eyes. “There goes my First Ranger punctuality and good behavior badges. Stops won’t be the only one in the doghouse when Frau Zeller catches up with me.”
“Is it serious? For your chances, I mean?”
“Oh, who knows. So much has gone wrong today, I’m this close to telling them all where they can shove their freaking contest.”
“I know you,” he said. “You’ll be insufferable if anyone else gets that job, especially another ranger. Why not see this thing through. Show ’em what you’re made of. And let me be your chauffer for a while. Bed and breakfast is included, and everything in between.”
She stuffed a hand over her humungous yawn.
“Jeez. I’ve had better endorsements,” he said.
“Sorry. It’s these meds. You’re on, Omicron, and the clock’s ticking.”
“Yes, ma’am. Strap yourself in. Next stop, somewhere really freaking cold.” He adjusted the environmental controls on his way to the cockpit, then called back, “Best answer your messages. They’ll have half the shuttles on the Hesp scouring that bay if you don’t.”
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