by Dan Simmons
“Don’t be silly,” said Siri. “We could always catch a keelroot and follow it back. That or a feeding tendril. Come on.” She tossed an osmosis mask at me and donned her own. The transparent film made her face look slick with oil. From the pocket of her caftan she lifted a thick medallion and set it in place around her neck. The metal looked dark and ominous against her skin.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Siri did not lift the osmosis mask to answer. She set the comthreads in place against her neck and handed me the hearplugs. Her voice was tinny. “Translation disk,” she said. “Thought you knew all about gadgets, Merin. Last one in’s a seaslug.” She held the disk in place between her breasts with one hand and stepped off the isle. I could see the pale globes of her buttocks as she pirouetted and kicked for depth. In seconds she was only a white blur deep in the water. I slipped my own mask on, pressed the comthreads tight, and stepped into the sea.
The bottom of the isle was a dark stain on a ceiling of crystalline light. I was wary of the thick feeding tendrils even though Siri had amply demonstrated that they were interested in devouring nothing larger than the tiny zooplankton that even now caught the sunlight like dust in an abandoned ballroom. Keelroots descended like gnarled stalactites for hundreds of meters into the purple depths.
The isle was moving. I could see the faint fibrillation of the tendrils as they trailed along. A wake caught the light ten meters above me. For a second I was choking, the gel of the mask smothering me as surely as the surrounding water would, and then I relaxed and the air flowed freely into my lungs.
“Deeper, Merin,” came Siri’s voice. I blinked—a slow-motion blink as the mask readjusted itself over my eyes—and caught sight of Siri twenty meters lower, grasping a keelroot and trailing effortlessly above the colder, deeper currents where the light did hot reach. I thought of the thousands of meters of water under me, of the things which might lurk there, unknown, unsought out by the human colonists. I thought of the dark and the depths and my scrotum tightened involuntarily.
“Come on down.” Siri’s voice was an insect buzz in my ears. I rotated and kicked. The buoyancy here was not so great as in Old Earth’s seas, but it still took energy to dive so deep. The mask compensated for depth and nitrogen but I could feel the pressure against my skin and ears. Finally I quit kicking, grabbed a keelroot, and roughly hauled myself down to Siri’s level.
We floated side by side in the dim light. Siri was a spectral figure here, her long hair swirling in a wine-dark nimbus, the pale strips of her body glowing in the blue-green light. The surface seemed impossibly distant. The widening V of the wake and the drift of the scores of tendrils showed that the isle was moving more quickly now, moving mindlessly to other feeding grounds, distant waters.
“Where are the …” I began to subvocalize.
“Shhh,” said Siri. She fiddled with the medallion. I could hear them then: the shrieks and trills and whistles and cat purrs and echoing cries. The depths were suddenly filled with strange music.
“Jesus,” I said and because Siri had tuned our comthreads to the translator, the word was broadcast as a senseless whistle and toot.
“Hello!” she called and, the translated greeting echoed from the transmitter; a high-speed bird’s call sliding into the ultrasonic. “Hello!” she called again.
Minutes passed before the dolphins came to investigate. They rolled past us, surprisingly large, alarmingly large, their skin looking slick and muscled in the uncertain light. A large one swam within a meter of us, turning at the last moment so that the white of his belly curved past us like a wall. I could see the dark eye rotate to follow me as he passed. One stroke of his wide fluke kicked up a turbulence strong enough to convince me of the animal’s power.
“Hello,” called Siri but the swift form faded into distant haze and there was a sudden silence. Siri clicked off the translator. “Do you want to talk to them?” she asked.
“Sure.” I was dubious. More than three centuries of effort had not raised much of a dialogue between man and sea mammal. Mike had once told me that the thought structures of Old Earth’s two groups of orphans were too different, the referents too few. One pre-Hegira expert had written that speaking to a dolphin or porpoise was about as rewarding as speaking to a one-year-old human infant. Both sides usually enjoyed the exchange and there was a simulacrum of conversation, but neither party would come away the more knowledgeable. Siri switched the translator disk back on. “Hello,” I said.
There was a final minute of silence and then our earphones were buzzing while the sea echoed shrill ululations.
distance/no-fluke/hello-tone?/current pulse/circle me/funny?
“What the hell?” I asked Siri and the translator trilled out my question. Siri was grinning under her osmosis mask.
I tried again. “Hello! Greetings from … uh … the surface. How are you?”
The large male … I assumed it to be a male … curved in toward us like a torpedo. He arch-kicked his way through the water ten times faster than I could have swum even if I had remembered to don flippers that morning. For a second I thought he was going to ram us and I raised my knees and clung tightly to the keelroot. Then he was past us, climbing for air, while Siri and I reeled from his turbulent wake and the high tones of his shout.
no-fluke/no-feed/no-swim/no-play/no-fun.
Siri switched off the translator and floated closer. She lightly grasped my shoulders while I held on to the keelroot with my right hand. Our legs touched as we drifted through the warm water. A school of tiny crimson warriorfish flickered above us while the dark shapes of the dolphins circled farther out.
“Had enough?” she asked. Her hand was flat on my chest.
“One more try,” I said. Siri nodded and twisted the disk to life. The current pushed us together again. She slid her arm around me.
“Why do you herd the islands?” I asked the bottle-nosed shapes circling in the dappled light. “How does it benefit you to stay with the isles?”
sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-Shark/old songs/new songs.
Siri’s body lay along the length of me now. Her left arm tightened around me. “Great Voices were the whales,” she whispered. Her hair fanned out in streamers. Her right hand moved down and seemed surprised at what it found.
“Do you miss the Great Voices?” I asked the shadows. There was no response. Siri slid her legs around my hips. The surface was a churning bowl of light forty meters above us.
“What do you miss most of Old Earth’s oceans?” I asked. With my left arm I pulled Siri closer, slid my hand down along the curve of her back to where her buttocks rose to meet my palm, held her tight. To the circling dolphins we must have appeared a single creature. Siri lifted herself against me and we became a single creature.
The translator disk had twisted around so it trailed over Siri’s shoulder. I reached to shut it off but paused as the answer to my question buzzed urgently in our ears.
miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/Shark/Shark/Shark.
I turned off the disk and shook my head. I did not understand. There was so much I did not understand. I closed my eyes as Siri and I moved gently to the rhythms of the current and ourselves while the dolphins swam nearby and the cadence of their calls took on the sad, slow trilling of an old lament.
Siri and I came down out of the hills and returned to the Festival just before sunrise of the second day. For a night and a day we had roamed the hills, eaten with strangers in pavilions of orange silk, bathed together in the icy waters of the Shree, and danced to the music which never ceased going out to the endless file of passing isles. We were hungry. I had awakened at sunset to find Siri gone. She returned before the moon of Maui-Covenant rose. She told me that her parents had gone off with friends for several days on a slow-moving houseboat. They had left the family skimmer in Firstsite. Now we worked our way from dance to dance, bonfire to bonfire, back to the center of the city. We planned to fly west to her family es
tate near Fevarone.
It was very late but Firstsite Common still had its share of revelers. I was very happy. I was nineteen and I was in love and the .93 gravity of Maui-Covenant seemed much less to me. I could have flown had I wished. I could have done anything.
We had stopped at a booth and bought fried dough and mugs of black coffee. Suddenly a thought struck me. I asked, “How did you know I was a Shipman?”
“Hush, friend Merin. Eat your poor breakfast. When we get to the villa, I will fix a true meal to break our fast.”
“No, I’m serious,” I said and wiped grease off my chin with the sleeve of my less than clean Harlequin’s costume. “This morning you said that you knew right away last night that I was from the ship. Why was that? Was it my accent? My costume? Mike and I saw other fellows dressed like this.”
Siri laughed and brushed back her hair. “Just be glad it was I who spied you out, Merin, my love. Had it been my Uncle Gresham or his friends it would have meant trouble.”
“Oh? Why is that?” I picked up one more fried ring and Siri paid for it. I followed her through the thinning crowd. Despite the motion and the music all about, I felt weariness beginning to work on me.
“They are Separatists,” said Siri. “Uncle Gresham recently gave a speech before the Council urging that we fight rather than agree to be swallowed into your Hegemony. He said that we should destroy your farcaster device before it destroys us.”
“Oh?” I said. “Did he say how he was going to do that? The last I heard, you folks had no craft to get off world in.”
“Nay, nor for the past fifty years have we,” said Siri. “But it shows how irrational the Separatists can be.”
I nodded. Shipmaster Singh and Councilor Halmyn had briefed us on the so-called Separatists of Maui-Covenant. “The usual coalition of colonial jingoists and throwbacks,” Singh had said. “Another reason we go slow and develop the world’s trade potential before finishing the farcaster. The Worldweb doesn’t need these yahoos coming in prematurely. And groups like the Separatists are another reason to keep you crew and construction workers the hell away from the groundlings.”
“Where is your skimmer?” I asked. The Common was emptying quickly. Most of the bands had packed up their instruments for the night. Gaily costumed heaps lay snoring on the grass or cobblestones amid the litter and unlit lanterns. Only a few enclaves of merriment remained, groups dancing slowly to a lone guitar or singing drunkenly to themselves. I saw Mike Osho at once, a patchworked fool, his mask long gone, a girl on either arm. He was trying to teach the “Hava Nagilla” to a rapt but inept circle of admirers. One of the troupe would stumble and they would all fall down. Mike would flog them to their feet among general laughter and they would start again, hopping clumsily to his basso profundo chant.
“There it is,” said Siri and pointed to a short line of skimmers parked behind the Common Hall. I nodded and waved to Mike but he was too busy hanging on to his two ladies to notice me. Siri and I had crossed the square and were in the shadows of the old building when the shout went up.
“Shipman! Turn around, you Hegemony son of a bitch.”
I froze and then wheeled around with fists clenched but no one was near me. Six young men had descended the steps from the grandstand and were standing in a semicircle behind Mike. The man in front was tall, slim, and strikingly handsome. He was twenty-five or twenty-six years old and his long blond curls spilled down on a crimson silk suit that emphasized his physique, In his right hand he carried a meter-long sword that looked to be of tempered steel.
Mike turned slowly. Even from a distance I could see his eyes sobering as he surveyed the situation. The women at his side and a couple of the young men in his group tittered as if something humorous had been said. Mike allowed the inebriated grin to stay on his face. “You address me, sir?” he asked.
“I address you, you Hegemony whore’s son,” hissed the leader of the group. His handsome face was twisted into a sneer.
“Bertol,” whispered Siri. “My cousin. Gresham’s younger son.” I nodded and stepped out of the shadows. Siri caught my arm.
“That is twice you have referred unkindly to my mother, sir,” slurred Mike. “Have she or I offended you in some way? If so, a thousand pardons.” Mike bowed so deeply that the bells on his cap almost brushed the ground. Members of his group applauded.
“Your presence offends me, you Hegemony bastard. You stink up our air with your fat carcass.”
Mike’s eyebrows rose comically. A young man near him in a fish costume waved his hand. “Oh, come on, Bertol. He’s just …”
“Shut up, Ferick. It is this fat shithead I am speaking to.”
“Shithead?” repeated Mike, eyebrows still raised. “I’ve traveled two hundred light-years to be called a fat shithead? It hardly seems worth it.” He pivoted gracefully, untangling himself from the women as he did so. I would have joined Mike then but Siri clung tightly to my arm, whispering unheard entreaties. When I was free I saw that Mike was still smiling, still playing the fool. But his left hand was in his baggy shirt pocket.
“Give him your blade, Creg,” snapped Bertol. One of the younger men tossed a sword hilt-first to Mike. Mike watched it arc by and clang loudly on the cobblestones.
“You can’t be serious,” said Mike in a soft voice that was suddenly quite sober. “You cretinous cow turd. Do you really think I’m going to play duel with you just because you get a hard-on acting the hero for these yokels?”
“Pick up the sword,” screamed Bertol, “or, by God, I’ll carve you where you stand.” He took a quick step forward. The youth’s face contorted with fury as he advanced.
“Fuck off” said Mike. In his left hand was the laser pen.
“No!” I yelled and ran into the light. That pen was used by construction workers to scrawl marks on girders of whiskered alloy.
Things happened very quickly then. Bertol took another step and Mike flicked the green beam across him almost casually. The colonist let out a cry and leaped back; a smoking line of black was slashed diagonally across his silk shirtfront. I hesitated. Mike had the setting as low as it could go. Two of Bertol’s friends started forward and Mike swung the light across their shins. One dropped to his knees cursing and the other hopped away holding his leg and hooting.
A crowd had gathered. They laughed as Mike swept off his fool’s cap in another bow. “I thank you,” said Mike. “My mother thanks you.”
Siri’s cousin strained against his rage. Froths of spittle spilled on his lips and chin. I pushed through the crowd and stepped between Mike and the tall colonist.
“Hey, it’s all right,” I said. “We’re leaving. We’re going now.”
“Goddamn it, Merin, get out of the way,” said Mike.
“It’s all right,” I said as I turned to him. “I’m with a girl named Siri who has a …” Bertol stepped forward and lunged past me with his blade. I wrapped my left arm around his shoulder and flung him back. He tumbled heavily onto the grass.
“Oh, shit,” said Mike as he backed up several paces. He looked tired and a little disgusted as he sat down on a stone step. “Aw, damn,” he said softly. There was a short line of crimson in one of the black patches on the left side of his Harlequin costume. As I watched, the narrow slit spilled over and blood ran down across Mike Osho’s broad belly.
“Oh, Jesus, Mike.” I tore a strip of fabric from my shirt and tried to staunch the flow. I could remember none of the first aid we’d been taught as midShipmen. I pawed at my wrist but my comlog was not there. We had left them on the Los Angeles.
“It’s not so bad, Mike,” I gasped. “It’s just a little cut.” The blood flowed down over my hand and wrist.
“It will serve,” said Mike. His voice was held taut by a cord of pain. “Damn. A fucking sword. Do you believe it, Merin? Cut down in the prime of my prime by a piece of fucking cutlery out of a fucking one-penny opera. Oh, damn, that smarts.”
“Three-penny opera,” I said and changed hands.
The rag was soaked.
“You know what your fucking problem is, Merin? You’re always sticking your fucking two cents in. Awwwww.” Mike’s face went white and then gray. He lowered his chin to his chest and breathed deeply. “To hell with this, kid. Let’s go home, huh?”
I looked over my shoulder. Bertol was slowly moving away with his friends. The rest of the crowd milled around in shock. “Call a doctor!” I screamed. “Get some medics up here!” Two men ran down the street. There was no sign of Siri.
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” said Mike in a stronger voice as if he had forgotten something important. “Just a minute,” he said and died.
Died. A real death. Brain death. His mouth opened obscenely, his eyes rolled back so only the whites showed, and a minute later the blood ceased pumping from the wound.
For a few mad seconds I cursed the sky. I could see the L.A. moving across the fading starfield and I knew that I could bring Mike back if I could get him there in a few minutes. The crowd backed away as I screamed and ranted at the stars.
Eventually I turned to Bertol. “You,” I said.
The young man had stopped at the far end of the Common. His face was ashen. He stared wordlessly.
“You,” I said again. I picked up the laser pen from where it had rolled, clicked the power to maximum, and walked to where Bertol and his friends stood waiting.
Later, through the haze of screams and scorched flesh, I was dimly aware of Siri’s skimmer setting down in the crowded square, of dust flying up all around, and of her voice commanding me to join her. We lifted away from the light and madness. The cool wind blew my sweat-soaked hair away from my neck.
“We will go to Fevarone,” said Siri. “Bertol was drunk. The Separatists are a small, violent group. There will be no reprisals. You will stay with me until the Council holds the inquest.”
“No,” I said “There. Land there.” I pointed to a spit of land not far from the’ city.
Siri landed despite her protests. I glanced at the boulder to make sure the backpack was still there and then climbed out of the skimmer. Siri slid across the seat and pulled my head down to hers. “Merin, my love.” Her lips were warm and open but I felt nothing. My body felt anesthetized. I stepped back and waved her away. She brushed her hair back and stared at me from green eyes filled with tears. Then the skimmer lifted, turned, and sped to the south in the early morning light.