by Brian Aldiss
‘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; civilised 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 intellcctualise 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 penguin 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 realise 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 Organisation, 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 copepod 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 the 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 your 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 Sorrento, 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 Organisation. 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 understanding, 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 me. 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?’
‘It’s certainly a long discovery – nine and a half thousand miles long.’
‘Oh, be serious, darling. You’re underplaying what you’ve done as usual, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, terribly! I may get a knighthood any day. Anyhow, we’ll have to fly to London in a week to receive some sort of applause, and I’ll have to make a fuller report than I have done so far. In fact there is another discovery that I’ve only communicated to one other person as yet which makes the discovery of Devlin’s Current seem nothing, a discovery that could affect every one of us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s late and we’re both tired. You shall hear about it in the morning.’
‘Can’t you tell me now, while you’re feeding the birds?’
‘They’re okay. I just wanted to check on them. They’ll feed better in the morning.’ He looked speculatively at her.
‘I am a greedy man, Cat, though I try to hide it. I want life, I’d like to share life with you for a thousand years, I’d like to roam the Earth for a thousand years – with or without a knighthood! That may be possible.’
They stood looking for each other, feeling for the neural currents that flowed between them, relaxed enough after their tiff to feel that they were no longer two entirely separate organisms.
‘There’s a new infection in the world’s bloodstream,’ he said. ‘It could bring a sort of illness that we could call longevity. It was first isolated in the herring schools in the Baltic a decade ago. It’s a virus. Cat – you understand how we traced the Devlin Current, don’t you? We had deep trawls and sonar devices and special floats that sink to predetermined water densities, so that we could trace the particular salinity and temperature and speed of our current all the way. We could also check the plankton content. We found that the copepods carried a particular virus that I could identify as a form of the Baltic virus – it’s a highly characteristic form. We don’t know where the virus came from originally. The Russians think it was brought to Earth encased in a tektite, or by meteoritic dust, so that it may be extraterrestrial in origin –’
‘Clem, please, all this is beyond me! What does this virus do? It lengthens life, you say?’
‘In certain cases. In certain genera.’
‘In men and women?’
‘No. Not yet. Not as far as I kno
w.’ He gestured towards the equipment on the lab bench. ‘I’ll show you what it looks like when I get the electron microscope set up. The virus is very small, about twenty milli-microns long. Once it finds a host it can use, it spreads rapidly through the cell tissue, where its action appears to be the destruction of anything threatening the life of the cell. In fact, it is a cell repairer, and a very effective one at that. You see what that means! Any life form infected with it is inclined to live for ever. The Baltic virus will even rebuild cells completely where it finds a really suitable host. So far, it seems to have found only two such hosts, both sea-going, one fish, one mammal, the herring and the blue whale. In the copepods it is merely latent.’
He could see that Caterina was trembling. She said, ‘You mean that all herring and blue whales are – immortal?’
‘Potentially so, if they’ve caught the infection, yes. Of course, the herrings get eaten, but the ones that don’t, go on reproducing year after year with unimpaired powers. None of the animals that eat the herring appear to catch the infection. In other words, the virus cannot sustain itself in them. It’s an irony that this minute germ holds the secret of eternal life, yet is itself threatened constantly with extinction.’
‘But people–’
‘People don’t come into it yet. The copepods we traced along our current were infected with the Baltic virus. They surfaced in the Antarctic. That was one of the discoveries I made – that there is another species that can be infected. The Adelie penguins have it too. They just don’t die from natural causes any more. These two birds here are virtually immortal.’
She stood looking at them through the mesh of the cage. The penguins perched on the edge of their tank, their comical feet gripping its tiled lip. They had awakened without removing their beaks from their wings, and now regarded the woman with bright and unwinking eyes.