by Sam Smith
Jorge said that he and the Spokesman would walk down to meet them. Tulla told them to be careful, the gel was corrosive. Awen had listened to her conversation.
“How come they don’t dissolve then?” he asked her.
“They do,” Tulla said. “Look back here. See the dots where they died on the bottom?” They both looked through their cameras at the shrivelled dots on the floor of the road. Above those dots the mass of creatures wriggled on to the forward edge and to their death. Slowly the dots on the road floor disappeared.
“Must have some protective coating while they’re alive,” Tulla said. “Soon as they die they lose it.”
Hurrying after the leading edge Awen wondered what the creatures were.
“Probably some biological agents,” Tulla said with distaste. “Many of our primitive machines were bio-engineered. Until the use of living tissue was banned. The Nautili don’t seem to have much regard for life.”
“What are they going to use it for though?”
“Move heavy plant seems the most likely explanation.”
“Anyone ever seen it done?”
“No.”
Tulla paused to look through her camera. Awen hurried on ahead to set up his tripod in order to film in close-up the death and dissolution of one of the creatures. He was shutting up the tripod when he became aware of Tulla beyond the vanguard of the trail talking to the short round shape of the Spokesman and the tall thin shadow of Jorge Arbatov.
When Awen caught up with them they were taking it in turns to look through the camera Awen had leant Tulla.
“Got your scoop then?” the tall figure of Jorge greeted Awen.
“Would’ve been better in daylight,” Awen said.
“By my calculation it’ll be complete in another six hours,” Jorge said. “At dawn.”
“Pity,” Awen said, and moved on ahead to film once more the advance of the trail.
The two open cabin doors were now clearly visible twin obelisks of orange light. The group stopped as they heard the approach of another plane. Before they saw its navigation lights the Spokesman took the phone from Tulla, called up the police bases. The plane was not one of theirs, had come from the South.
The group watched the new plane land beside the Spokesman’s. The Spokesman told the police to intercept and redirect all other craft from the area; and the group advanced ahead of the trail to confront the plane’s occupants.
Its one occupant was the Senate Member for South Five. He came ambling unconcernedly along the top of the embankment to meet them.
“Soon as the Doctor told me the trail was making itself,” he laconically scratched his bristled jaw, “I had to come have a look. Can I?” He held out his hand to Tulla for the camera. Awen walked back with him to the trail. The Senate Member peered through the camera.
“What do you make of it?” Awen asked him. “Tulla reckons it’s bio-engineering.” The Senate Member for South Five chuckled,
“Far from it.” He adjusted the focus, “This is a migration.”
“You mean they’re Nautili?”
“Embryonic Nautili. No more than swimming eggs really. Fry. But they’re Nautili.” He removed the camera from his face, “Any objections to my taking a specimen?”
“Yes.” Jorge and the others had joined them. “No-one goes near that trail.”
“Pity. Could have learnt their genus.”
“Wouldn’t do you much good anyway,” Awen said. “Soon as they die they dissolve. Look.”
The Senate Member walked along with the leading edge, watched the wriggling creatures shrivel, die and dissolve on the surface of the road. He asked Awen if he had any close-ups of the process. Awen said he had.
“Might be able to get some idea of its genus from them.”
“What do you mean,” Tulla asked the Senate Member, “that this is a migration?”
“This is probably an integral part of their reproductive process. Why they always have to have an inland sea. Our pelagic brethren breed and spawn there, then the young have to make it overland to the wider oceans.”
“You’re saying that they deliberately send so many of their young to certain death?”
“A dramatic way of looking at it. Could say the same of our own reproductive process — all those millions of spermatozoa going to waste time after time. This is no different. The most able make it. And migrations of this sort are common amongst planetary creatures. They travel from one end of the planet to the other to breed, then travel back again. Fishes, birds, insects and mammals. Part of the process of natural selection. You have heard of natural selection?”
With all of them wanting to hear what was being said, with all of them stumbling into and bumping off each other as they tried to keep pace with the trail, with one or another of them gasping or hissing cursing as a part of their lower anatomy came into unexpected contact with a hard rock, with one or another of them clutching an arm, a tunic, a leg to stop themselves overbalancing, with one or another of them glancing always apprehensively to the night sky for Nautili ships, the excitement of that small group of people was palpable.
“So that,” Tulla gestured back to the inland sea, “is their nursery?”
“Could put it that way,” the dark head of the Senate Member nodded.
“It would explain why they don’t like primitives fishing on it. Be like us letting a mad butcher loose in our kindergartens.”
“And why the Nautili wipe out the plankton feeders.”
“Yes. Yes,” Tulla said. “You got all this Awen?”
“I got it,” Awen said from behind his camera.
“If it is their nursery,” the Senate Member said, apologised as he collided with Jorge, “it would satisfactorily explain their forty year spread. The colonisation is pursued by the offspring, who breed in the new planet’s seas, who in turn produce more offspring who venture out in search of new planets, new seas.”
“So the planets,” the Spokesman said, “turn out to be the breeding grounds in more ways than one.”
“Must be the trace elements,” the Senate Member trundled out the old joke.
“I thought,” Jorge said to Tulla, “the trails were only 40 centimetres thick. This one’s closer to a meter.”
“A couple of days evaporation,” the Senate Member replied on Tulla’s behalf, “will soon condense it.”
The group was now almost level with the cabins. The Spokesman hurried on ahead to make everyone coffee. In Tulla’s cabin, while the trail passed them by, the five of them discussed the night’s new ideas. At one point Tulla said,
“They can’t be that advanced if they still have to rely on such primitive methods of reproduction.”
“Maybe,” Awen grinned at her, “they enjoy it.” Tulla blushed.
The Senate Member for South Five asked if he could have copies of all the film Awen had taken this night,
“From film of the young we may be able to build up a picture of an adult. And I must disagree with you,” he turned on Tulla, “about their not being advanced. Indeed this is proof, if proof were needed, that they are extremely advanced. Most marine creatures eat their young. Not that all fishy creatures are cannibals, but the free-floating young of most marine species are hard to distinguish. A few young of course always survive. Maintains the equilibrium of the environment. At some time in the Nautili’s distant past, though, they must have learnt to distinguish their own offspring from the rest. And not only did they themselves not eat them, they also prevented others eating them. Thus the equilibrium of their environment was upset. Thus they began to expand. Thus they colonised other planets.”
“That sacrificial vanguard,” Jorge said, “goes some way to explaining their lack of regard for the sanctity of life.”
“Nonsense,” the Senate Member for South Five said. “As I said before, look at our own sperm production. We send forth millions in the hope that one arrives. Safety in numbers. That fact of our physiology doesn’t figure greatly in our philosophies. Thou
gh I think this reproductive analogy could prove to be misleading. It would be as valid a comparison to call the inland sea the Nautili womb and this trail the birth canal.”
“And the savages who fish in that sea,” Tulla said, “butchers and abortionists.”
“Yes. Whichever way you look at it one can see why they’re so fiercely protective of their seas.”
Coffee drunk, bloodied and bruised legs ruefully examined, they trooped quietly back out into the silent night. The trail, having passed the shallow apex of the road, was now going noticeably faster. The group concentrated on overtaking it, slowed their pace once they were level with its forward edge.
“I’ve been thinking about your idea of igniting the brown dwarves,” the Senate Member for South Five and Tulla were walking together. “You could easily hurry the process along. Soon as you have a hydrogen-carbon reaction you’d only — on any one of a brown dwarf’s planets — have to sow some blue algae to start a life cycle. Depends of course on exactly what criteria the Nautili need. You do realise they’re probably carnivorous?”
“Probably.” Tulla was tired. “Whatever... it will still take millions of years.”
“Not necessarily. You’re forgetting that the Nautili are capable of moving planets. Nor are they necessarily carnivorous. Many of the smaller molluscs are herbivores. Scavengers in fact. Detritus feeders. Like them the Nautili’s entire armoury could be solely for self-protection.”
Tulla’s phone jangled into the mountains’ silence. Tevor Cade’s voice was an excited scream that all those about Tulla could hear.
“They’re transmitting! They’re transmitting! Long and loud. Like nothing we’ve ever had before. All in their own language. They’re talking to us dammit!”
“Now there’s a happy man,” the Senate Member said.
“How long?” Tulla asked Tevor.
“Half an hour now. Half an hour solid! I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe it. This is it! This is it!”
All those about Tulla enthusiastically conjectured on the meaning of this latest development. Awen stood apart to film that excited group of gesticulating grey figures on the embankment above the road, above the onward rolling slime trail. He then raced ahead of them down to the end of the road.
The ocean was as calm as the inland sea had been. Awen set up two tripods to film the trail’s arrival. The rest of the group, their momentary agitation abated, came wearily at a pace with the slime trail, took turns to look through the camera that Awen had leant Tulla.
Dawn was whitening the sky when the silver trail reached Awen’s photoelectric cells. Awen, knowing that his alarms would be buzzing in the empty cabin, imagined that he could hear them.
The trail then met the limpid water, and Awen dutifully recorded the first of the black fry to wriggle free of the slime and into the grey-green sea.
Thereafter thousands upon thousands of the black fry, possibly millions, with a quick wriggle left the slime and scattered into the ocean. Jorge Arbatov, Tulla Yorke, the Spokesman and the Senate Member for South Five stood by Awen on top of the embankment, on a cliff above the placid ocean, mesmerised by the spectacle.
When the first rays of the orange sun rose over the yellow mountains Tulla noticed that the fry were becoming fewer. Gradually there were less and less. Except for a few isolated wriggling dots the slime trail was soon almost clear.
“Does the length of the trail, I wonder,” the Senate Member said, “determine the number of Nautili on a planet? Or does the estimated length of the trail predetermine the number of young they produce?”
“Look!” shouted the Spokesman, pointing with his chubby arm.
Coming low over the road from the inland sea was a Nautili ship. Its dark diffuse shape hurtled towards them, passed them and plummeted into the ocean. Awen had dropped into a crouch. Another ship came. Awen turned swiftly as the ship shot overhead, changed cameras with unconscious sleight of hand and filmed it as it plunged into the deep blue sea, immediately turning back and changing cameras to film the next ship.
Face on each ship looked like a black toenail clipping, from the side like a curved teardrop — blunt at the prow, sharp at the stern. Seven ships in all passed them by at five second intervals. Each ship was under ten meters in length. Each ship was black, a blackness that seemed to absorb the light, that was not even reddened by the rising sun; with each ship’s black reflection in the slime trail like a fleeting shadow.
The water became calm where the last ship had entered it. All was quiet except for a large bird calling far off over the mountains.
“How about that?” the Senate Member for South Five rubbed his stubble.
“Dammit dammit dammit!” Awen kicked a stone off the cliff. “Done it again! Didn’t you hear? No bloody noise!”
Now that Awen had drawn their attention to it all that the others could recall was a faint thrumming of the air as each ship had passed. Awen turned groaning in a frustrated circle, kicked another stone,
“Hardly a damn whisper. Done it again!” he shouted at the sea, “All this time and now nobody’ll believe it. Planets!”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Before that weary group with the bruised and bloodied legs reached the cabins, it was decided that the Spokesman would fly back alone to his farm while Jorge, Tulla and Awen would travel in the Senate Member for South Five’s plane to the estuary. After they had conferred with Tevor Cade, they would then join the Spokesman at his farm.
At the cabins Tulla and Awen separated to pack their belongings, stowed their luggage on the Spokesman’s plane, and boarded the Senate Member’s plane. The Senate Member’s plane was the first to leave.
On the plane Awen continued to intemperately demand explanations for the absence of noise from the Nautili ships. He had been offered all the conventional hypotheses, none of which satisfied him. Tulla had attempted to explain the old theories of dynamic propulsion, which she herself did not wholly understand and which, therefore, left Awen none the wiser.
Finally Awen exhausted Tulla and Jorge’s patience, and, exhausted too by their night’s work, they both dozed. Awen took himself forward to sit with the Senate Member.
“Why no noise?” he asked of him. The Senate Member was amused by Awen’s outrage,
“But there was a noise. You’ll notice it when you play your film back. Ever heard a stone thrown past you? It hums.” Awen had never had stones thrown at him.
“Can you throw stones at me when we land?” he asked the Senate Member. “I’ll film it fast. Then if I have missed the noise of the ships I can edit the stone over it.”
Satisfied with that compromise Awen was silent, considering exactly what he would have to do, checking the remaining film in his cameras, changing a lens.
“Couldn’t the Nautili,” he spoke the thought as it occurred to him, “have machines below the water? Machines that threw the ships up?” Awen became excited by his own idea, “That way they’d make the same noise as a thrown stone. Wouldn’t they?”
“Trouble is,” the Senate Member smiled at him, “there are many recorded accounts, independent accounts — though none on film — of their ships having been seen to accelerate. Both within Space and within a planet’s atmosphere. And not one account mentions an increase in noise levels. Even when the ships were exceeding the speed of sound.”
“Damn,” Awen said. The Senate Member laughed,
“I diagnose an incipient case of Nautili bug. You’re hooked.”
Both tired they yawned over the twinkling blue sea. A camera went automatically to Awen’s eye when the Spokesman called them from his plane.
“Just received a report,” he said. “We can detect the satellites again and we’re receiving transmissions from Space.”
“Looks like it worked then,” the Senate Member said.
“My gratitude and congratulations to the Director and Tulla Yorke,” the Spokesman said, asked for the Director’s permission for local reporters to visit the Nautili’s trail.
Awen went back to Tulla, woke her and told her the news. Tulla groggily nodded.
“Your road worked,” Awen tried to rouse some enthusiasm from her.
“Or would they,” Tulla said with a tired smile at herself, “have lifted the blockade anyway once the trail was laid?”
“Have to wait and see,” Awen patted her cheek, “what they’ve said to the Doctor.”
“Might have to wait some time,” Tulla closed her eyes.
Jorge, when woken, gave his permission for the local reporters to visit the trail, suggested that the Spokesman issue an official statement and that the police planes resume their patrols. Awen relayed that message to the Senate Member, who relayed it to the Spokesman.
On landing at the research station Awen was the first out of the plane, ran across the apron to the research ship. On Awen’s entrance Tevor Cade removed some headphones. His haggard features said that he too had not slept the previous night.
“Let’s hear it then.” Awen primed cameras, “From the beginning.”
Tevor Cade obediently keyed some buttons, flicked a switch. The noise that filled the ship was not the hooting whistling cacophony of the Nautili’s last mass transmission — prior to the destruction of the buoys — this was a mellifluous sound, like underwater woodwinds practising their scales. Nor were the oscilloscope patterns on the screens as ragged and erratic as before. Now they flowed harmoniously one into the other.
Jorge, Tulla and the Senate Member had followed Awen into the ship. All were standing in various listening postures. Jorge Arbatov had his bald head bowed and slightly twisted. Head still aslant he looked over to Tevor Cade,
“This is new?”
For answer Tever Cade sombrely nodded. Aware of the onerous task ahead of him he displayed a distinct lack of jubilation.
“I have already identified some of the phrases from their lexicon,” he stopped the recording. “This phrase,” he fingered buttons, “is used quite often.”
Tevor Cade played them a five note sequence from the lexicon. Then he searched up the recording of the transmission, played the same five note sequence, ran the recording on and played it to them again.