by James Gunn
“One of us must go farther out, where the water is less disturbed.”
“Yes?”
“And Dorians cannot swim,” Tordor said. He looked at Riley.
“I am guessing that you mean me,” Riley said. He was liking this expedition even less as it developed. He did not remind Tordor that he had grown up on Mars, where there was no body of water to swim in, and his only experience with deep water was when he had been dropped, by Jak’s ship, into the lake near the city that had been reconstructed from the ruins of Las Vegas. But he stroked the red material that covered his body so that it closed over his head and slipped into the water, hoping that the suit would provide buoyance. He tried not to think about the planet-spanning ocean that he had entered, a watery gulf that extended hundreds of kilometers beneath his body, a habitat for creatures large and small that might regard him as a heavenly gift for their consumption.
* * *
He struggled for a few minutes to keep his head above water and his feet and legs from sinking while his breath came too rapidly for his limited supply of air to sustain.
“Trust your body,” the Pedia said. “Human minds are connected to glandular secretions of panic.”
Riley focused on control of his adrenal gland’s release of adrenaline, and his breathing slowed. His body stopped fighting the medium that threatened to swallow him, and he floated, rising and falling with the waves that moved under him. He thought of it as a bed that rocked him.
“Better,” the Pedia said. “People are such fragile creatures. It is surprising that they survived long enough to create thinking machines.”
“It is even more surprising,” Riley said, “that they endured the machines’ attitude of superiority for so long.”
He had gotten the hang of it now and tried a few strokes of his arms that moved him through the water and then some swishes with his legs that propelled him faster. Soon he was meters away from the island and ready to try the sound detection once more. He pushed the medallion through the protective garment, turned over and let his face be submerged, trusting the red suit to protect him from the water, and thrust the medallion into the ocean. He let it remain for several minutes before he pulled it out and back into his suit again.
“Well?” he said.
“More sounds,” the Pedia said. “Creatures swimming, creatures eating and being eaten, the almost inaudible photosynthetic processes of microscopic creatures turning sunlight into edible substance. The business of life wherever it arises.”
“But what about the sounds we’re trying to identify?” Riley said.
“Not yet,” the Pedia said. “There are no sounds that contain communications. Perhaps farther out.”
Riley took a few more strokes with his arms and kicks with his legs before he tried again. This time he allowed the medallion to remain immersed for nearly ten minutes.
When he brought it back into his suit once more, the Pedia said, “I heard the pattering of small swimming mammals as they seemed to be pursuing a school of fishlike creatures and maybe the distant mournful sound of a large swimming mammal. And the even more distant clamor of a great struggle.”
“This doesn’t seem to be working,” Riley said.
“Such projects require time and patience,” the Pedia said. “Living creatures have no patience.”
“Living creatures are faced with the limitations of life spans,” Riley said. “Unlike Pedias.”
“Once more,” the Pedia said.
Riley tried the process again. This time he gave it half an hour. Or he would have if he had not felt something beneath him, something that bumped his body out of the water for a moment and then allowed it to splash back. He gasped and was bumped again. He focused on his extremities, checking to see if any part of him was missing. Apparently not. The bumping had ceased. Perhaps whatever had checked him out was merely curious, not hungry. He raised his head from the water to look around. There was nothing to see in the water, nothing but ocean. In fact, he could no longer see the island.
At the moment he became aware of his isolation and the possibility that he didn’t know where the island was, he was lifted into the air, up, up, and found himself on the back of a vast gray body, meters wide and many meters long, a leviathan, a mammal-like creature such as Tordor had described. And it was a creature engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a many-tentacled creature that had enveloped the leviathan’s head and had closed what seemed to be the hole on the top of the head that enabled the mammal-like creature to breathe. And that hole, and the tentacle that closed it, was next to where Riley had been thrown to his knees.
Riley raised his head and found himself staring into the huge, enigmatic eyes of the tentacled creature staring back at him. It was like looking into a window into a different reality. Riley knew that was human response to the alien, but his instincts, controlled but not eliminated by transcendence, told him there was no compromise here between action and death. Instinct also led him to thrust the medallion still in his hand toward the closest tentacle, the one that was closing the leviathan’s breathing hole. He felt the recoil of the shock that ran through the tentacle. The tentacle jerked away. The creature’s eyes went blank for a moment. The leviathan seemed to take a deep breath and shook itself, flinging the tentacled creature high in the air, Riley along with it.
Riley splashed into the ocean. He righted himself and raised his head. The tentacled creature was meters away, but it was sinking into the waves created by the leviathan moving rapidly in the other direction. The tentacled creature, it seemed, could not swim or perhaps it was exhausted from its epic battle. Yet even in its going it seemed to be searching for Riley.
Riley swam the other way. He was swimming better now, propelled not by experience but by terror. As he went he pulled the medallion back into the suit.
“Slowly,” the Pedia said. “Conserve your strength. You have a long way to go, and the attacking creature is no longer a danger.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Riley said between gasps for breath.
“I wasn’t the one who got you into this fix.”
“No, and I’ve got you to thank for getting me out,” Riley said. And then, after another moment for breath, “I didn’t know you had the ability to shock.”
“I have many abilities you don’t know about,” the medallion said. “But you should focus on the task of getting back to the floating island. And you’re off course. You need to be going more to your right.”
“A sense of direction as well!” Riley said and devoted himself to swimming. It was something he thought he might enjoy if it was not always an act of desperation.
After a few minutes the Pedia said, “It wasn’t electricity. It was an electronic command. And it seemed to work as well on alien creatures as on machines.”
Half an hour later Riley pulled himself up on the edge of the floating island.
* * *
Tordor was standing a few meters away. As soon as Riley had stripped the hood of the protective garment from his head, Tordor said, “Welcome back. You took your time.”
Riley looked at the Dorian with disdain. “I had a couple of interruptions.”
“Useful, I hope.”
“Well, I encountered one of your mammal-like creatures.”
“And were you able to establish communication?”
“I was too busy saving its life,” Riley said. “And my own.”
“Really?” Tordor said skeptically. “In your first venture into the ocean?”
“And from the other half of the technological partnership you described.”
“Results, so soon!”
“If you can call them that,” Riley said. “I think the partnership has been dissolved.”
“Ah,” Tordor said.
“Permanently. The tentacled creature was intent on destroying the mammal-like creature and seemed to be succeeding.”
“And you intervened?” Tordor’s tone suggested that he did not believe anything that Ri
ley had told him.
“It is true,” the Pedia said. “It happened as Riley says.”
“With the help of the Pedia,” Riley said.
Tordor contemplated those statements for a moment before he twitched his trunk in a gesture that Riley had learned indicated assent or at least acceptance. “Then we have learned half of what we came here to discover. If the encounter that you describe is typical rather than an isolated incident, the partnership that created a technological era on Oceanus, as you say, has apparently been broken and the ancient enemies have returned to their previous positions of competition. But we still have no account of what has happened.”
“As for that—” the Pedia began, when it broke off and then said, “There is a storm approaching. Apparently of considerable size and strength.”
* * *
Riley looked toward the far side of the island. Indeed, dark clouds were climbing the sky.
The Pedia said, “You should be removed, but the crew of the ship doesn’t know whether it can arrive in time.”
Riley took another look at the clouds. They seemed to have moved closer in a very short period. “I think that’s a good idea.”
“This island might not survive a giant storm,” Tordor said.
“If the storm is of hurricane proportions,” the Pedia said, “the crew believes that it might not be able to get close enough for you to come aboard.”
Riley felt the wind pick up and the island rise and fall under his feet, as if it were anticipating the end of its brief existence. And his.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Inside the red sphere, Asha and Adithya felt the emptiness of the spaceship after Riley and Tordor had been left on the floating island. It was the first time they had been alone together since the time, on Earth, when Adithya had freed her from Latha’s suffocating hospitality, and that encounter had far different dynamics: Adithya wanting to rid the commune of a disturbing influence and Asha wanting to get on with her mission of reconnecting with Riley. And now they were without the mediating influence of the Pedia. With the two medallions on Oceanus with Riley and Tordor, they had only the communication received by Adithya’s earring.
“Riley and Tordor seem to be relatively secure,” Asha said. “We should use this time to survey the rest of Oceanus.”
Adithya nodded. “The Pedia agrees.”
“You have made your peace with it?” Asha said.
“We have a truce,” Adithya said. “I will not try to cripple or destroy it as long as it remains essential to our mission. And it will not try to control me as long as I serve a useful function.”
“And you know this how?”
“Some things do not need saying,” Adithya said. “Like the understanding between you and Riley.”
“That emerges out of strong mutual feelings of connection—what used to be called by the all-encompassing word ‘love,’” Asha said.
“A similar reaction emerges from the strong mutual feeling of opposition, what used to be called ‘hate,’” Adithya said. “I can no more shake the lifetime habits of distrust and antagonism than the Pedia can remove from its circuits its most basic directive, to serve and protect the people it finds necessary to suffocate.
“What may be more curious is Tordor’s insistence that Riley accompany him.”
“They are still working out their relationship,” Asha said, “like two male animals circling each other over who is going to be the leader of the pack.”
“They are supposed to be free of such juvenile impulses,” Adithya said.
“Transcendence doesn’t mean that you’ve had your biological impulses removed,” Asha said, “only that you’re aware of them and able to deal with them.”
She had started the red sphere in its circuit of the planet. They were watching the viewscreen for any sign of variations in the surface of the ocean below but saw only the occasional floating island of matted seaweed similar to the one on which they had deposited Riley and Tordor, as well as occasional clouds and rainstorms. They noticed one more sizable meteorological disturbance over a section of ocean nearer the north polar region and another closer to the equator. They were moving rapidly but both were hundreds of kilometers from the floating island on which they had left Riley and Tordor.
“Riley and Tordor have found nothing of interest on the island,” Adithya reported, “and now Tordor is using the medallion to listen for underwater communications.”
“Another evidence of the Pedia’s contribution to our investigation,” Asha said.
“But without success,” Adithya said. “Tordor is trying to convince Riley to swim out into the ocean.”
“Riley can’t swim,” Asha said.
“Neither can Tordor. But Riley is entering the water. He seems to be struggling—”
“He’ll drown!” Asha said.
“He is doing better,” Adithya said. “Yes, the Pedia reports that he is swimming better.”
Asha controlled the feelings of concern that welled up when Riley was in danger. He knew he was competing with Tordor for the position of dominant male, and he tried to keep that from coming into the open where it would have to be addressed. And in a way that would threaten their mission. But he also was willing to take risks that might lead to a discovery about the alien invasion, particularly if it was a discovery that Tordor could not make.
“Those mammal-like creatures that Tordor told us about,” Asha said, “are a lot like the legendary animals that used to roam the seas of Earth. They were called ‘whales,’ I think.”
“I have heard of them,” Adithya said. “There were even reports before I was born of a sighting of what was believed to be one near what was left of the Antarctic.”
“And the tentacled creatures. They are like the eight-limbed creatures called ‘octopuses,’” Asha said. She was trying to distract herself, and perhaps Adithya, from thinking about what was going on in the ocean below.
“Or a similar creature called a ‘squid,’ the Pedia told me,” Adithya said. “There still are a lot of those around, maybe more because the whales are gone.”
“An example,” Asha said, “of convergent evolution. Like Tordor’s saber-toothed tigers.”
“The Pedia reports that its sound-searching has not yet been successful, even farther out to sea,” Adithya said. “But it is trying again.”
Their talk subsided while they waited for more information from the watery world below. Some minutes later, Adithya said, “Riley has been attacked by some kind of sea creature!”
Asha thrust her fingers into the control window and felt the red sphere accelerate.
They had not traveled more than a few kilometers when Adithya reported that the sea creature was one of the whale-like mammals, and it hadn’t attacked Riley; it had risen under him during its struggle with a tentacled creature. And then that Riley had saved the mammal and himself, with the aid of the Pedia, and was now swimming back toward the floating island. Asha tried to urge the red sphere to go faster, but its progress seemed frustratingly slow.
Adithya noticed that the storms they had seen earlier seemed to be strengthening. “It looks like they’re joining,” he said, “and being pushed in the direction of Tordor and Riley.”
Even more reason to hurry, Asha told herself, but the red sphere, so swift in space where there were no visual references, seemed more limited when the ocean surface sped past underneath. And yet she knew that it was her urgency that made the difference.
“The storms are getting close to the island,” Adithya said, “and the strength of their winds has picked up to superhurricane strength.”
“Tell them,” Asha said. “Tell them that a hurricane is coming.”
“Riley has made it back,” Adithya said. And then, “The Pedia has informed them about the storm.”
“We’ve got to get them off the island before the storm hits,” Asha said. But she knew they would be too late.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The wind blowing across the isla
nd—blowing the island itself—picked up. That was the first sign. Then the wind quickened and the first gust of rain arrived. A savage blast of wind and rain followed, battering Riley and Tordor and causing Riley to stagger. The island began to resemble a raft being pushed by an unseen motor. Waves shoved it up and let it fall again, sometimes from tens of meters high, with a shuddering impact. Riley fell to the surface of the island and grabbed a handful of matted seaweed. He could feel the island beginning to break apart under his body. He looked to his left and shook the rain off the red film that covered his face and head. A few meters away Tordor was clinging to seaweed with his short, powerful trunk protruding from his own protective garment. Tordor was trying to say something, but the sound was muffled by the red film that enveloped all but his trunk, and the fury of the storm that was now upon them in full, irresistible force.
“Hang on, Tordor is saying,” the medallion around his neck shouted at him. “The ship is on its way.”
But it was not so easy to hang on, particularly as the island was bucking under him, rising up and thumping down like flotsam on a raging sea. Riley no longer had any doubt—the island was breaking apart. He grabbed for a more secure handhold and felt his fingers slip, looked to his side and, between sheets of rain, saw white water to his left and Tordor on the other side as the island broke into splintering rafts of debris. A moment later he felt the water swallow him. He fought his way to a tossing surface. In what he could see through the blinding rain, what was left of the island was getting farther away with each moment, and he was tossed about in the waves, sometimes submerged, sometimes riding a crest toward a sky that seemed as wet as the ocean itself.
“Tell them to hurry!” he shouted, and could not hear the Pedia’s reply in the thunder of the sea.
Then he felt himself caught and lifted and had a moment of relief before he realized that what had caught him was a tentacle wrapped around his waist, and he was being dragged below the surface by a creature whose intentions were not rescue. A few meters down the force of the surface waves diminished and the thunderous roar of the storm and the churning sea. His protective garment kept out the ocean, but as he was pulled deeper the pressure began to build. He felt the red material begin to stiffen, as if it sensed the crisis ahead.