The Moment of Eclipse

by Brian Aldiss

  All these apparently random increases in animal population seemed not to have been made at the expense of any other ani­mal - though obviously that state of affairs would not be main­tained if the numbers multiplied to really abnormal proportions.

  It was a coincidence that these increases came at a time when the human population explosion had tailed off. Indeed, the ex­plosion had been more of a dread myth than an actuality; now it had turned into a phantom or might-have-been, rather like the danger of uncontained nuclear war, which had also van­ished in this last decade of the old twentieth century. Man had not been able voluntarily to curtail his reproductive rate to any statistically significant extent, but the mere fact of overcrowding with all its attendant physical discomforts and anti-familial pressures, and with its psychic pressures of neurosis, sexual aberration and sterility operating exactly in the areas previously most fecund, had proved dynamic enough to level off the accelerating birth spiral in the dense population centres. One result of this was a time of tranquillity in international affairs such as the world had hardly known throughout the rest of the century.

  It was curious to think of such matters on Kalpeni. The Laccadives lay awash in ocean and sun; their lazy peoples lived on a diet of dry fish and coconut, exporting nothing but dry fish and copra; they were remote from the grave issues of the cen­tury - of any century. And yet, Yale reminded himself, misquot­ing Donne, no island is an island. Already these shores were lapped by the waves of a new and mysterious change that was flooding the world for better or worse - a change over which man had absolutely no command, any more than he could com­mand the flight of the lonely albatross through the air above the southern oceans.

  II

  Caterina came out of the coral-built house to meet her husband.

  'Philip's home, Clem!' she said, taking his hand.

  'Why the anxiety?' he asked, then saw his son emerge from the shade, ducking slightly to avoid the lintel of the door. He came forward and put his hand out to his father. As they shook hands, Philip smiling and blushing, Yale saw he had indeed grown adult.

  This son by his first marriage - Yale had married Caterina only three and a half years ago - looked much as Yale himself had done at seventeen, with his fair hair clipped short and a long mobile face that too easily expressed the state of mind of its owner.

  'Good to see you again. Come on in and have a beer with me,' Yale said. 'I'm glad the Kraken got back here before you had to leave for England.'

  'Well, I wanted to speak to you about that, Father. I think I'd better go home on the Kraken - I mean, get a lift in it to Aden, and fly home from there.'

  'No! They sail tomorrow, Phil! I shall see so little of you. You don't have to leave so soon, surely?'

  Philip looked away, then said as he sat down at the table opposite his father, 'Nobody asked you to be away the best part of a year.'

  The answer caught Yale unexpectedly. He said, 'Don't think I haven't missed you and Cat.'

  'That doesn't answer the question, does it?'

  'Phil, you didn't ask me a question. I'm sorry I was away so long, but the job had to be done. I hoped you'd be able to stay here a bit longer, so that we could see more of each other. Why have you got to go all of a sudden?'

  The boy took the beer that Caterina had brought, raised his glass to her as she sat down between them, and took a long drink. Then he said, 'I have to work, Father. I take finals next year.'

  'You're going to stay with your mother in the U.K.?'

  'She's in Cannes or somewhere with one of her rich boy­friends. I'm going to stay in Oxford with a friend and study.'

  'A girl friend, Phil?'

  The attempt at teasing did not come off. He repeated sul­lenly, 'A friend.'

  Silence overcame them. Caterina saw they were both looking at her neat brown hands, which lay before her on the table. She drew them on to her lap and said, 'Well, let's all three of us go and have a swim in the lagoon, the way we used to.'

  The two men rose, but without enthusiasm, not liking to refuse.

  They changed into their swim things. Excitement and pleasure buoyed Yale as he saw his wife in a bikini again. Her body was as attractive as ever, and browner, her thighs not an ounce too heavy, her breasts firm. She grinned naughtily at him as if guessing his thoughts and took his hand in hers. As they went down to the landing stage, carrying flippers and goggles and snorkels, Yale said, 'Where were you hiding out when the Kraken arrived, Phil?'

  'I was in the fort, and I was not hiding.'

  'I was only asking. Cat says you're taking up writing.'

  'Oh, does she?'

  'What are you writing? Fiction? Poetry?'

  'I suppose you'd call it fiction.'

  'What would you call it?'

  'Oh, for Christ's sake, stop examining me, can't you? I'm not a bloody kid any more, you know!'

  'Sounds as if I came back on the wrong day!'

  'Yes, you did, if you want to know! You divorced mother and then you went chasing after Cat and married her - why don't you look after her if you want her?'

  He flung his equipment down, took a run along the wooden platform, and made a fast shallow dive into the blue waters. Yale looked at Caterina, but she avoided his stare.

  'He sounds as if he's jealous! Have you been getting a lot of this sort of thing?'

  'He's at the moody stage. You must leave him alone. Don't annoy him.'

  'I've hardly spoken to him.'

  'Don't oppose his going away tomorrow if he's set on it.'

  'You two have been quarrelling over something, haven't you?'

  He was looking down at her. She was sitting on the platform, putting on her flippers. As he looked down at the well between her breasts, love overcame him again. They must go back to London, and Cat must start a baby, for her sake; you could sacrifice too much just for the sake of sunlight; civilized be­haviour could be defined as a readiness to submit to increased doses of artificial light and heat; maybe there was a direct rela­tionship between the ever-growing world demand for power and a bolstering of the social contract. His moment's speculation was checked by her reply.

  'On the contrary, we got on very well when you weren't here.'

  Something in her tone made him stand where he was, looking after her as she swam towards her stepson, sporting in the middle of the lagoon beyond the Kraken. Slowly, he pulled down his goggles and launched himself after her.

  The swim did them all good. After what Vandranasis had said, Yale was not surprised to find jewfish in the lagoon, al­though they generally stayed on the outer side of the atoll. There was one fat old fellow in particular, over six feet long and half-inclined to set up a leering and contemptuous friendship that made Yale wish he had brought the harpoon gun.

  When he had had enough, Yale swam over to the north-west side of the lagoon, below the old Portuguese fort, and lay in the gritty coral sand. The others came and joined him in a few minutes.

  'This is the life,' he said, putting an arm round Caterina. 'Some of our so-called experts explain all of life in terms of our power drives, others see everything explicable in terms of God's purpose; for another, it's all a matter of glands, or for another it all boils down to a question of sublimated incest-wishes. But for me, I see life as a quest for sunlight.'

  He caught his wife's strained look.

  'What's the matter? Don't you agree?'

  'I - no, Clem, I - well, I suppose I have other goals.'

  'What?'

  When she didn't answer, he said to Philip, 'What are your goals in life, young man?'

  'Why do you always ask such boring questions? I just live. I don't intellectualize all the time.'

  'Why did Fraulein Reise go home? Was it because you were as discourteous to her as you are to me?'

  'Oh, go to...' He got up, roughly pulled on his mask, and flung himself back in the water, striking out violently for the far beach. Yale stood up, kicked off his flippers, and trod up the beach, ignoring the sharp bite of the
coral sand. Over the top of the bank, scraggy grass grew, and then the slope tilted down towards the reef and the long barrier of ocean. Here the whales lay rotting, half out of water, flesh that was now something too terrible to count any more as flesh. Fortunately the south-west trades kept the stench away from the other side of the island; sniffing it now, Yale recalled that this scent of corruption had trailed far across the sea to the Kraken, as if all Kalpeni were the throne of some awful and immeasurable crime. He thought of that now, as he tried to control his anger against his son.

  That evening, they gave supper to the men of the little trawler. It was a genial farewell meal, but it broke up early and afterwards Yale, Philip, and Caterina sat on the veranda, taking a final drink and looking across to the lights of the Kraken in the lagoon. Philip seemed to have completely recovered from his earlier sulkiness and was talking cheerfully, burbling on about life at the university until finally Caterina interrupted him.

  'I've heard enough about Oxford over the past few weeks. How about hearing about the Antarctic from Clem?'

  'It all sounds a gloomy dump to me.'

  'It has its vile moments and its good moments,' Clem said, 'which I suppose could be claimed for Oxford too. Take these penguins I've brought back. The conditions in which their species mates are death to man - perhaps minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit and with a howling snowstorm moving over them at something like eighty miles an hour. You'd literally freeze solid in that sort of weather, yet the penguins regard it as ideal for courting.'

  'More fool them!'

  'They have their reasons. At certain times of year, Antarctica is swimming with food, the richest place in the world. Oh, you'll have to go there one day, Philip. Great doses of daylight in the summer! It's - well, it's another planet down there, and far more undiscovered than the moon. Do you realize that more people have set foot on the moon than have ever ventured into the Antarctic?'

  The reasons for the Kraken's sailing into those far south waters had been purely scientific. The newly established World Waters Organization, with its headquarters in a glittering new skyscraper on the Bay of Naples, had inaugurated a five-year study of oceans, and the rusty old Kraken was an inglorious part of the Anglo-American contribution. Equipped with Davis-Swallows and other modern oceanographic instrumentation, it had been at work for many months charting the currents of the Atlantic. During that time, Clement Yale had done an unex­pected piece of detective work.

  'I told you this morning I had something important to say. I'd better get it off my chest now. You know what a copepod is, Cat?'

  'I've heard you speak of them. They're fish, aren't they?'

  'They're crustaceans living among the plankton, and a vital link in the food chain of oceans. It's been computed that there may be more individual copepods than there are individuals in all other multi-celled animal classes combined - all human be­ings, fish, oysters, monkeys, dogs, and so on - the lot. A cope-pod is about the size of a rice grain. Some genera eat half their own weight of food - mainly diatoms - in a day. The world's champion pig never managed that. The rate at which this little sliver of life ingests and reproduces might well stand as a sym­bol of the fecundity of old Earth.

  'It might stand, too, for the way in which all life is linked all round the globe. The copepods feed on the smallest living par­ticles in the ocean, and are eaten by some of the largest, in particular the whale shark and the basking shark and various whales. Several sea-going birds like a bit of copepod in their diet too.

  'The different genera of copepod infest different lanes and levels in the multi-dimensional world of die ocean. We followed one genus for thousands of miles while we were tracking one particular ocean current.'

  'Oh - oh, I thought he was edging on to his favourite topic!' Philip said.

  'Get you father another drink and don't cheek him. The com­plex of ocean flow is as necessary to human life as the circula­tion of the blood. The one as much as the other is the stream of existence, bearing us all forward willy-nilly. On the Kraken, we were interested in one part of that stream in particular, a cur­rent of whose existence oceanographers were aware in theory for some time. Now we have charted it exactly, and named it.

  'I'll tell you the name of this current in a minute. It'll amuse you, Cat. The current starts lazily in the Tyrrhenian Sea, which is the name of the bit of the Mediterranean between Sardinia, Sicily, and Italy. We've swum in it more than once off Sorento, Cat, but to us it was just "the Med". Anyhow, the evaporation rate is high there, and the extra salty water sinks and spills out eventually into the Atlantic, of which the Med is just a land­locked arm.

  'The current sinks further and deflects south. We could fol­low it quite easily with salinity gauges and flow-rate recorders and so on. It divides, but the particular stream we were in­terested in remains remarkably homogeneous and comprises a narrow ribbon of water moving at a rate of about three miles a day. In the Atlantic, it is sandwiched between two other cur­rents moving in the opposite direction, currents that have been known for some years as the Antarctic Intermediate Water and the Antarctic Bottom Water. Both these north-flowing streams are considerable masses of water - main arteries, you could call them. The Bottom Water is highly saline and icy cold.

  'We followed our current right across the Equator and down into southern latitudes, into the cold waters of the Southern Ocean. It is eventually forced to the surface, fanning out as it rises, from the Weddell to the Mackenzie Sea, along the Antarc­tic coast. In this warmer water, during the short polar summer, the copepods and other small fry proliferate. Another little crus­tacean, the euphaustids or "krill", turns the seas cinnamon, so many of them pack the waters. The Kraken often rode on a pink sea. While they're feeding on diatoms, the whales are feed­ing on them.'

  'Nature's so horrible!' Caterina said.

  Yale smiled at her. 'Maybe, but there's nothing else but nature! Anyhow, we were very proud of our current for making such a long journey. Do you know what we have called it? We've named it in honour of the Director of the World Waters Organization. It is to be known as the Devlin Current, after Theodore Devlin, the great marine ecologist and your first hus­band.'

  Caterina looked most striking when she was angry. Reaching for a cigarette from the sandalwood box on the table, she said, 'I suppose that is your idea of a joke!'

  'It's an irony perhaps. But it's only fitting, don't you know. Give the devil his due! Devlin's a great man, more important than I shall ever be.'

  'Clem, you know how he treated me!'

  'Of course I do. Because of that treatment, I was lucky enough to get you. I hold no malice for the man. After all, he was once a friend of mine.'

  'No, he wasn't. Theo has no friends, only expediencies. After my five years with him I should know him better than you.'

  'You could be prejudiced.' He smiled, rather enjoying her annoyance.

  She threw the cigarette at him and jumped up. 'You're crazy, Clem! You drive me mad! Why don't you sometimes get your back up at someone? You're always so damned level-tempered. Why can't you hate someone, ever? Theo in particular! Why couldn't you hate Theo for my sake?'

  He stood up too. 'I love you when you're trying to be a bitch.'

  She smacked him across the face, sending his spectacles fly­ing, and stamped out of the room. Philip did not move. Yale went over to the nearest cane chair and picked his spectacles up from the seat; they were not broken. As he put them on again, he said, 'I hope these scenes don't embarrass you too much, Phil. We all need safety valves for our emotions, women in particular. Caterina's marvellous, isn't she? Don't you think? You did get on well with her, didn't you?'

  Philip flushed a slow red. 'I'll leave you to your capers. I have to go and pack.'

  As he turned, Yale caught his arm. 'You don't have to go. You are almost adult. You must face violent emotions. You never could as a child - but they're as natural as storms at sea.'

  'Child! You're the child, Father! You think you're so poised and under
standing, don't you? But you've never understood how people feel!'

  He pulled himself away. Yale was left standing in the room alone. 'Explain and I'd understand,' he said aloud.

  III

  When he walked into the bedroom, Caterina was sitting deject­edly on her bed, barefoot, with her feet resting on the stone floor. She looked up at him intently, with something of the inscrutable stare of a cat.

  'I drank too much tonight, darling. You know beer doesn't agree with rne. I'm sorry!'

  Yale went over to her, pulled the rug under her feet, and knelt beside her. 'You horrible alcoholic! Come and help me feed the penguins before we turn in. Philip's gone to bed, I think.'

  'Say you've forgiven me.'

  'Oh, Christ, let's not have that, my sweet Cat! You can see I have forgiven you.'

  'Say it then, say it!'

  He thought to himself, 'Phil's entirely right, I don't under­stand anyone. I don't even understand myself. It's true I have forgiven Cat; why then should I be reluctant to say so because she insists I say so? Maybe it was because I thought there was so little to forgive. Well, what's a man's dignity beside a woman's need?' And he said it.

  Outside, the waves made slumberous noises along the reef, a sound of continuous content. The island looked so low by night that it seemed a wonder the sea did not sweep over it. Not a light showed anywhere except for the lamp on the Kraken's mast.

  The two penguins were in one of the permanent cages at the rear of the lab. They stood with their beaks tucked under their flippers, asleep, and did not alter their position when the lights came on.

  She put an arm round his waist. 'Sorry I flew off the handle. I suppose we ought to have congratulated you? I mean, I sup­pose this current is rather a big discovery, isn't it?'