Surfacing

by Walter Jon Williams

“Half the time you don’t even talk to me. I don’t know why I’m eating supper with you.“

  “Let me clean up. Then we can go to the Mary Villa.”

  Nick shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “But you’re buying. You cost me a customer last night.“

  Anthony slapped him on the shoulder. “Least I can do, I guess.”

  A good day.

  *

  Near midnight. Winds beat at the island’s old volcanic cone, pushed down the crowns of trees. A shuttle, black against the darkness of the sky, rose in absolute silence from the port on the other side of the island, heading toward the bright fixed star that was Overlook Station. The alien, Telamon, was aboard, or so the newscasts reported.

  Deep Dwellers still sang in Anthony’s head. Mail in hand, he let himself in through the marina gate and walked toward his slip. The smell of the sea rose around him. He stretched, yawned. Belched up a bit of the tequila he’d been drinking with Nick. He intended to get an early start and head back to sea before dawn.

  Anthony paused beneath a light and opened the large envelope, pulled out actual page proofs that had been mailed, at a high cost, from the offices of the Xenobiology Review on Kemps. Discontent scratched at his nerves. He frowned as he glanced through the pages. He’d written the article over a year before, at the end of the first spring he’d spent here, and just glancing through it he now found the article over-tentative, over-formal, and, worse, almost pleading in its attempt to justify his decision to move himself and the whales here. The palpable defensiveness made him want to squirm.

  Disgust filled him. His fingers clutched at the pages, then tore the proofs across. His body spun full circle as he scaled the proofs out to the sea. The wind scattered thick chunks of paper across the dark waters of the marina.

  He stalked toward his boat. Bile rose in his throat. He wished he had a bottle of tequila with him. He almost went back for one before he realized the liquor stores were closed.

  “Anthony Maldalena?”

  She was a little gawky, and her skin was pale. Dark hair in a single long braid, deep eyes, a bit of an overbite. She was waiting for him at the end of his slip, under the light. She had a bag over one shoulder.

  Anthony stopped. Dull anger flickered in his belly. He didn’t want anyone taking notice of the bruises and cuts on his face. He turned his head away as he stepped into his boat, dropped his bag on a seat.

  “Mr. Maldalena. My name is Philana Telander. I came here to see you.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  She gestured to the boat two slips down, a tall FPS-powered yacht shaped like a flat oval with a tall flybridge jutting from its center so that the pilot could see over wavetops. It would fly from place to place, but she could put it down in the water if she wanted. No doubt she’d bought a temporary membership at the yacht club.

  “Nice boat,” said Anthony. It would have cost her a fair bit to have it gated here. He opened the hatch to his forward cabin, tossed his bag onto the long couch inside.

  “I meant,” she said, “I came to this planet to see you.”

  Anthony didn’t say anything, just straightened from his stoop by the hatch and looked at her. She shifted from one foot to another. Her skin was yellow in the light of the lamp. She reached into her bag and fumbled with something.

  Anthony waited.

  The clicks and sobs of whales sounded from the recorder in her hand.

  *

  “I wanted to show you what I’ve been able to do with your work. I have some articles coming up in Cetology Journal but they won’t be out for a while.”

  “You’ve done very well,” said Anthony. Tequila swirled in his head. He was having a hard time concentrating on a subject as difficult as whale speech.

  Philana had specialized in communication with female humpbacks. It was harder to talk with the females: although they were curious and playful, they weren’t vocal like the bulls; their language was deeper, briefer, more personal. They made no songs. It was almost as if, solely in the realm of speech, the cows were autistic. Their psychology was different and complicated, and Anthony had little success in establishing any lasting communication. The cows, he had realized, were speaking a different language: the humpbacks were essentially bilingual, and Anthony had learned only that of the males.

  Philana had succeeded where Anthony had found only frustration. She had built from his work, established a structure and basis for communication. She still wasn’t as easy in her speech with the cows as Anthony was with a bull like Two Notches, but she was far closer than Anthony had ever been.

  She and Anthony sat on the cushioned benches in the stern of Anthony’s boat. Steam rose from the coffee cup in Philana’s hand. Tequila still buzzed in Anthony’s head. Conflicting urges warred in him. He didn’t want anyone else here, on his boat, this close to his work; but Philana’s discoveries were too interesting to shut her out entirely. He swallowed more coffee.

  “Listen to this,” Philana said. “It’s fascinating. A cow teaching her calf about life.” She touched the recorder, and muttering filled the air. Anthony had difficulty understanding: the cow’s idiom was complex, and bore none of the poetic repetition that made the males’ language easier to follow. Finally he shook his head.

  “Go ahead and turn it off,” he said. “I’m picking up only one phrase in five. I can’t follow it.”

  Philana seemed startled. “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought—”

  Anthony twisted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t know every goddamn thing about whales,” he said.

  The recorder fell silent. Wind rattled the canvas awning over the flybridge. Savage discontent settled into Anthony’s mind. Suddenly he needed to get rid of this woman, get her off his boat and head to sea right now, away from all the things on land that could trip him up.

  He thought of his father upside-down in the smokehouse. Not moving, arms dangling.

  He should apologize, he realized. We are, he thought, in a condition of permanent apology.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just… not used to dealing with people.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” she said. “I’m only twenty-one, and…”

  “Yes?” Blurted suddenly, the tequila talking. Anthony felt disgust at his own awkwardness.

  Philana looked at the planks. “Yes. Truly. I’m twenty-one, and sometimes people get impatient with me for reasons I don’t understand.”

  Anthony’s voice was quiet. “I’m twenty-six.”

  Philana was surprised. “But. I thought.” She thought for a long moment. “It seems I’ve been reading your papers for…”

  “I was first published at twenty,” he said. “The finback article.”

  Philana shook her head. “I’d never have guessed. Particularly after what I saw in your new XR paper.”

  Anthony’s reaction was instant. “You saw that?” Another spasm of disgust touched him. Tequila burned in his veins. His stomach turned over. For some reason his arms were trembling.

  “A friend on Kemps sent me an advance copy, I thought it was brilliant. The way you were able to codify your conceptions about a race of which you could really know nothing, and have it all pan out when you began to understand them. That’s an incredible achievement.”

  “It’s a piece of crap.” Anthony wanted more tequila badly. His body was shaking. He tossed the remains of his coffee over his shoulder into the sea. “I’ve learned so much since. I’ve given up even trying to publish it. The delays are too long. Even if I put it on the nets, I’d still have to take the time to write it, and I’d rather spend my time working.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  He turned away from her. “I don’t show my work till it’s finished.”

  “I… didn’t mean to intrude.”

  Apology. He could feel a knife twisting in his belly. He spoke quickly. “I’m sorry, Miss Telander. It’s late, and I’m not used to company. I’m not entirely well.” He stood, took her arm. Ignoring her surprise, he
almost pulled her to her feet. “Maybe tomorrow. We’ll talk again.”

  She blinked up at him. “Yes. I’d like that.”

  “Good night.” He rushed her off the boat and stepped below to the head. He didn’t want her to hear what was going to happen next. Acid rose in his throat. He clutched his middle and bent over the small toilet and let the spasms take him. The convulsions wracked him long after he was dry. After it was over he stood shakily, staggered to the sink, washed his face. His sinus burned and brought tears to his eyes. He threw himself on the couch.

  In the morning, before dawn, he cast off and motored out into the quiet sea.

  *

  The other male, The One Who Sings of Others, found a pair of Dwellers engaged in a long conversation and hovered above them. His transponder led Anthony to the place, fifty miles south into the bottomless tropical ocean. The Dwellers’ conversation was dense. Anthony understood perhaps one word-phrase in ten. Sings of Others interrupted from time to time to tell Anthony how hungry he was.

  The recordings would require days of work before Anthony could even begin to make sense of them. He wanted to stay on the site, but the Dwellers fell silent, neither Anthony nor Sings of Others could find another conversation, and Anthony was nearly out of supplies. He’d been working so intently he’d never got around to buying food.

  The white dwarf had set by the time Anthony motored into harbor. Dweller mutterings did a chaotic dance in his mind. He felt a twist of annoyance at the sight of Philana Telander jumping from her big air yacht to the pier. She had obviously been waiting for him.

  He threw her the bowline and she made fast. As he stepped onto the dock and fastened the sternline, he noticed sunburn reddening her cheeks. She’d spent the day on the ocean.

  “Sorry I left so early,” he said. “One of the humpbacks found some Dwellers, and their conversation sounded interesting.”

  She looked from Anthony to his boat and back. “That’s all right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have talked to you last night. Not when you were ill.”

  Anger flickered in his mind. She’d heard him being sick, then.

  “Too much to drink,” he said. He jumped back into the boat and got his gear.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked. “Somebody told me about a place called the Villa Mary.”

  He threw his bag over one shoulder. Dinner would be his penance. “I’ll show you,” he said.

  *

  “Mary was a woman who died,” Anthony said. “One of the original Knight’s Move people. She chose to die, refused the treatments. She didn’t believe in living forever.” He looked up at the arched ceiling, the moldings on walls and ceiling, the initials ML worked into the decoration. “Brian McGivern built this place in her memory,” Anthony said. “He’s built a lot of places like this, on different worlds.”

  Philana was looking at her plate. She nudged a ichthyoid exomembrane with her fork. “I know,” she said. “I’ve been in a few of them.”

  Anthony reached for his glass, took a drink, then stopped himself from taking a second swallow. He realized that he’d drunk most of a bottle of wine. He didn’t want a repetition of last night.

  With an effort he put the glass down.

  “She’s someone I think about, sometimes,” Philana said. “About the choice she made.”

  “Yes?” Anthony shook his head. “Not me. I don’t want to spend a hundred years dying. If I ever decide to die, I’ll do it quick.”

  “That’s what people say. But they never do it. They just get older and older. Stranger and stranger.” She raised her hands, made a gesture that took in the room, the decorations, the entire white building on its cliff overlooking the sea. “Get old enough, you start doing things like building Villa Marys all over the galaxy. McGivern’s an oldest-generation immortal, you know. Maybe the wealthiest human anywhere, and he spends his time immortalizing someone who didn’t want immortality of any kind.”

  Anthony laughed. “Sounds like you’re thinking of becoming a Diehard.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Yes.”

  Anthony’s laughter froze abruptly. A cool shock passed through him. He had never spoken to a Diehard before: the only ones he’d met were people who mumbled at him on streetcorners and passed out incoherent religious tracts.

  Philana looked at her plate. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why sorry?”

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  Anthony reached for his wine glass, stopped himself, put his hand down. “I’m curious.”

  She gave a little, apologetic laugh. “I may not go through with it.”

  “Why even think about it?”

  Philana thought a long time before answering. “I’ve seen how the whales accept death. So graceful about it, so matter-of-fact— and they don’t even have the myth of an afterlife to comfort them. If they get sick, they just beach themselves; and their friends try to keep them company. And when I try to give myself a reason for living beyond my natural span, I can’t think of any. All I can think of is the whales.”

  Anthony saw the smokehouse in his mind, his father with his arms hanging, the fingers touching the dusty floor. “Death isn’t nice.”

  Philana gave him a skeletal grin and took a quick drink of wine. “With any luck,” she said, “death isn’t anything at all.”

  *

  Wind chilled the night, pouring upon the town through a slot in the island’s volcanic cone. Anthony watched a streamlined head as it moved in the dark windwashed water of the marina. The head belonged to a coldblooded amphibian that lived in the warm surf of the Las Madres; the creature was known misleadingly as a Las Madres seal. They had little fear of humanity and were curious about the new arrivals. Anthony stamped a foot on the slip. Planks boomed. The seal’s head disappeared with a soft splash. Ripples spread in starlight, and Anthony smiled.

  Philana had stepped into her yacht for a sweater. She returned, cast a glance at the water, saw nothing.

  “Can I listen to the Dwellers?” she asked. “I’d like to hear them.”

  Despite his resentment at her imposition, Anthony appreciated her being careful with the term: she hadn’t called them Leviathans once. He thought about her request, could think of no reason to refuse save his own stubborn reluctance. The Dweller sounds were just background noise, meaningless to her. He stepped onto his boat, took a cube from his pocket, put it in the trapdoor, pressed the PLAY button. Dweller murmurings filled the cockpit. Philana stepped from the dock to the boat. She shivered in the wind. Her eyes were pools of dark wonder.

  “So different.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “This isn’t really what they sound like. What you’re hearing is a computer-generated metaphor for the real thing. Much of their communication is subsonic, and the computer raises the sound to levels we can hear, and also speeds it up. Sometimes the Dwellers take three or four minutes to speak what seems to be a simple sentence.”

  “We would never have noticed them except for an accident,” Philana said. “That’s how alien they are.”

  “Yes.”

  Humanity wouldn’t know of the Dwellers’ existence at all if it weren’t for the subsonics confusing some automated sonar buoys, followed by an idiot computer assuming the sounds were deliberate interference and initiating an ET scan. Any human would have looked at the data, concluded it was some kind of seismic interference, and programmed the buoys to ignore it.

  “They’ve noticed us,” Anthony said. “The other day I heard them discussing a conversation I had with one of the humpbacks.”

  Philana straightened. Excitement was plain in her voice. “They can conceptualize something alien to them.”

  “Yes.”

  Her response was instant, stepping on the last sibilant of his answer. “And theorize about our existence.“

  Anthony smiled at her eagerness. “I… don’t think they’ve got around to that yet.“

&nbs
p; “But they are intelligent.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe more intelligent than the whales. From what you say, they seem quicker to conceptualize.“

  “Intelligent in certain ways, perhaps. There’s still very little I understand about them.“

  “Can you teach me to talk to them?”

  The wind blew chill between them. “I don’t,” he said, “talk to them.”

  She seemed not to notice his change of mood, stepped closer. “You haven’t tried that yet? That would seem to be reasonable, considering they’ve already noticed us.”

  He could feel his hackles rising, mental defenses sliding into place. “I’m not proficient enough,” he said.

  “If you could attract their attention, they could teach you.” Reasonably.

  “No. Not yet.” Rage exploded in Anthony’s mind. He wanted her off his boat, away from his work, his existence. He wanted to be alone again with his creatures, solitary witness to the lonely and wonderful interplay of alien minds.

  “I never told you,” Philana said, “why I’m here.”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  “I want to do some work with the humpback cows.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes widened slightly. She had detected the hostility in his tone. “I want to chart any linguistic changes that may occur as a result of their move to another environment.” .

  Through clouds of blinding resentment Anthony considered her plan. He couldn’t stop her, he knew: anyone could talk to the whales if they knew how to do it. It might keep her away from the Dwellers.

  “Fine,” he said. “Do it.”

  Her look was challenging. “I don’t need your permission.”

  “I know that.”

  “You don’t own them.”

  “I know that, too.”

  There was a splash far out in the marina. The Las Madres seal chasing a fish. Philana was still staring at him. He looked back.

  “Why are you afraid of my getting close to the Dwellers?” she asked.

  “You’ve been here two days. You don’t know them. You’re making all manner of assumptions about what they’re like, and all you’ve read is one obsolete article.”

  “You’re the expert. But if my assumptions are wrong, you’re free to tell me.”