Transformation

by James Gunn

  “If you can contact the ship,” he shouted, “you should tell them we’re in a hell of a fix.”

  “Communication is more difficult in these conditions,” the Pedia said. “But perhaps if you could—”

  “Yes,” Riley said and thrust the medallion through the red film before it became too rigid. He pressed it toward his waist where the tentacle was wrapped. And nothing happened. He tried again. Again there was no response.

  He pulled it back, and the red material snapped as it sealed itself against the pressure of the surrounding water. Only the medallion and his hand and arm were soaked.

  “Apparently,” the Pedia said, “this tentacled creature has felt my touch before and knows that it is not deadly.”

  “You think it is the same creature?”

  “There is no other explanation,” the Pedia said.

  As Riley was dragged deeper and felt the protective red suit stiffen further in an effort to keep the depths from crushing him, he had a moment to think that the beast he had stopped from destroying the mammal-like creature must have been lurking near the floating island, waiting for a chance to get revenge. Or, if that was too complex a motivation, for a chance to get a meal when its previous prey had been taken from it. And then he thought about the great ocean that covered the entire planet to a depth of unknown kilometers and how long the intelligent matter that made up the protective garment the red sphere had prepared for him would be able to keep him from being destroyed, either by the ocean depths or the beast that was pulling him down into them, or, less dramatically, using up his last reserve of air.

  The descent seemed endless, and only the red suit kept him from being drowned before he was squashed. The substance hardened until he felt like a larva inside a cocoon, unable to move his arms and legs or to turn his head to see more than straight ahead. He was not complaining. It was that or instant death, and there was nothing to see except darkening water. And while he was still alive, there was hope.

  “Is there any answer from the ship?” he asked.

  “It too is caught up in the storm,” the Pedia said, “and it is having difficulty touching down on the island without destroying it.”

  “And of reaching us?”

  “The atmospheric disturbance has created problems for location as well.”

  “So we can’t hope for rescue any time soon.”

  “So it seems,” the Pedia said. “But we must act as if help was imminent.”

  The truth of that was evident but hard to believe. So Riley focused on the water surging past his face and the occasional fishlike creature that swam past, until, at last, deep in the water’s dark depths, he saw a glimmer of light.

  * * *

  The glow from the ocean floor revealed the tops of slender projections that grew into taller spires like stalagmites and then slowly seemed transformed before his eyes into fairy towers illuminated by fluorescence coating their exteriors, and he realized that these were not natural formations but structures created by creatures like the one that was dragging him down into them. In spite of the probability of imminent death, Riley wondered about the imagination and ingenuity of the creatures buried beneath kilometers of ocean designing and constructing this magical city on the ocean floor. As he was drawn down between towering buildings, getting glimpses only as his protective cocoon was twisted by the movements of his captor through the water, slower now at these depths, Riley could see small, armored fish with fluorescent skins or lamp-like growths emerging from their foreheads swimming among the towers. He noticed that the luminescence came from organisms coating the exterior. He also could see that the structures were broken and weathered in places, as if they were ruins rather than functioning buildings.

  Farther down he got glimpses of a different kind of glow from what seemed to be a fracture in the ocean floor and wavering distortions in the light that might have been water heated by lava beds under the ocean bed, surrounded by long strands of ocean life halfway between animal and vegetable. And then smaller tentacled creatures that came close as if to inspect what had been drawn into their midst and larger creatures who seemed as if they would contest his captor for its prey.

  One of the largest of the tentacled creatures attacked, its flailing arms revealing something like suckers on the underside. Riley had a moment of hope that the creature who held him might release its grasp to fight off the attacker and he would surge toward the surface, but it struck back with its other tentacles and the attacker, battered, retreated. His captor, triumphant, dragged him farther down, away from all the rest, until they had reached an open space between buildings, like a plaza or a park if this had been a city in the open air. The creature settled down as if this was its lair or its private castle and held Riley up in front of its domed head and giant, staring eyes. It was, Riley realized, the same look he had seen in the eyes of the beast that had nearly killed the mammal-like creature, and perhaps the Pedia was right—maybe this was the same one and it recognized him as the source of its frustration.

  The creature raised another tentacle and wrapped it around Riley’s body, tugging at the red suit that protected him from both beast and ocean depth. The garment did not give way. The creature twisted the tentacle that held him in a direction opposite to the one it had placed above, as if it were trying to wring him apart. The red suit yielded for a moment, as if surprised, and then resisted. The creature paused to reconsider its options and then raised Riley above its head and slammed him to the ocean floor. It shook Riley’s entire body. The suit continued to protect him, but another blow like this, he thought dazedly, might be his last.

  At that moment a large, dark shape cut off the luminescence from the surrounding structures. Something huge and amorphous descended upon the two of them, Riley and the tentacled monster that held him, and a giant, gray object, square and blunt like a battering ram, struck the creature holding him, knocking it several meters away. The tentacle that held him did not release, but the gray object, Riley now realized through the waves of vertigo that rippled through him, was the forehead of one of the mammal-like creatures. Perhaps, he thought, it was the creature whose life he had saved, and as his vision cleared he saw scars on the creature’s head where some tentacled creature’s suckers would have been attached. Yes, perhaps it was the same one, or simply another swimming behemoth out for its own meal.

  And then the mammal-like creature struck again, this time opening a giant mouth to bite down on a raised tentacle. In shock, the monster released its grip, and Riley shot free, like a cork released to shoot toward the surface. Riley had a moment to regret that he would not be able to observe the ending of the undersea battle between monstrous rivals before he focused on his own problems.

  He had no experience with diving or ocean depths, but he remembered from somewhere in his past reading, suddenly available to him from a memory that no longer forgot anything, that sudden decompression could cause deadly bubbles to form in his veins, and he sent his thoughts into his body, willing his veins and arteries to compress. As if in response, the suit that had protected him in the depths squeezed tighter around his body. It could not slow his ascent, but with Riley’s mastery of his own body they might minimize the damage. He felt his heart slow in response, but it did not stop.

  And then he popped to the surface and into the air above it before he fell back, still living, aching but not fatally damaged. The sky was still gray and rain still fell, but the wind had quieted and so had the waves. He rested for a moment on the rolling surface, feeling the debris from the destruction of the island brushing against his body and wondering what had happened to Tordor when the red sphere descended beside him, a hand reached out and pulled him through into the ship. It was Adithya’s hand, and he grasped it as if it were the hand of salvation.

  * * *

  Riley stood dripping inside the red sphere. He wiped his hand down his head and side, and the red garment that had saved his life fell in a shapeless heap to the floor and was absorbed into the substa
nce of the ship like rain into dry soil. “Where’s Asha?” he asked. His voice was husky, but it was a surprise to him that he could talk at all.

  “At the controls,” Adithya said. “Where her skills were even greater than her concerns.”

  “And what about Tordor?”

  “Here,” Tordor said, stepping out of the tunnel that led to the dining facility the red sphere had carved out for them.

  “He was able to hold on to a patch of the floating island, and we got him back as we were searching for you,” Adithya said.

  Riley felt the force of acceleration as the ship lifted itself out of the gravitational grasp of Oceanus. Asha appeared from the tunnel that led to what they had come to call the control room. There was no way of knowing what the people who had built the red sphere had used it for, if it had even existed.

  She put her arms around Riley and hugged him hard. It was nothing like the squeeze of the red suit, but it had the same life-sustaining effect. “Welcome back, partner,” Asha said. “We thought we had lost you this time.”

  “Me, too,” Riley said, and hugged Asha.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Except for some aching joints and the feeling that spiders are running across my skin,” Riley said. “But that will pass.”

  “It is unfortunate that we have to leave Oceanus without discovering any answers to why it has fallen silent,” Tordor said.

  “This place is too dangerous for explorers who aren’t prepared or equipped for a waterworld like this,” Asha said. “The storms, the lack of solid land, the ocean and its invisible dangers—”

  “The protective garments the ship provides are remarkably versatile,” Riley said. “They saved my life. Helped by the mammal-like creature that attacked my captor.”

  “Maybe,” Adithya said, “we have reached the limits of our ability to find the answers we are seeking.”

  “Without discovering what has silenced world after world?” Riley asked.

  “We have to measure our resources against the challenges,” Adithya said. “We may be too few and too poorly equipped to accomplish what we set out to do.”

  “Adithya may be right,” Tordor said. “It might be wiser to return to Federation Central for reinforcements and resupply. This intelligent matter that chance and Riley’s resourcefulness supplied us with is versatile, even miraculous, but it doesn’t substitute for targeted technology or personnel replacements in the case of loss. Our failure here is proof of that.”

  “If we return,” Asha said, “we will face the regulations you cited requiring automatic annihilation, and, if we avoid that, a delay of long-cycles in mounting another expedition to discover the details of what may be an alien invasion. And, in the interim, more worlds will have fallen to attacks that we still don’t understand.”

  “We could alert the Federation to the general nature of the threat so that it could prepare,” Tordor said.

  “Against what?” Riley asked. “We still don’t know much more about the nature of the danger than we knew at the beginning.”

  “And we may be able to learn little more,” Adithya said. “We should face the limits of our abilities.”

  “As for that,” Riley said, “we have learned that the danger is primarily mental. Every species has had its minds affected, and we transcendentals may be the best equipped to cope with the kinds of attacks that drove a Federation crew into homicidal frenzy. And we learned on Oceanus that the ancient partnership between the mammal-like creatures and tentacled creatures has returned to its even older competition between behemoth and beast. And I saw the civilization that their partnership had created on the ocean floor, one that was beginning to fall apart like their truce. We seem to be getting closer to the source of what is happening, and even if we have no additional clues to meaning—”

  “As for that,” the medallion on Riley’s chest said, “I have information that may help.”

  “What kind?” Asha asked.

  From the medallion came the long, low, mournful sound of the Oceanus behemoth’s song.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Travel to the nexus point that would take them to their next silent world was tedious, as always, and Asha could not help wondering about the progress of the alien invasion over the long-cycles that their investigation had consumed. But they also had been gone long-cycles from what was happening at Federation Central. Not far from her everyday thoughts was what was happening to their plans for transforming the varied and imperfect species that made up the Federation into more reasonable and reasoning creatures: transcendents capable of coping with the challenges a still enigmatic universe could spring upon them. Completing the transition from the struggle for survival to the drive to understand. Transcendence was one more tool in the unending struggle between intelligent life and brute matter, between plan and accident, between order and disorder.

  The Pedia repeated the long, mournful song of the great mammal-like creatures of Oceanus until it filled their dreams as well as their waking moments. When at last Adithya complained and Tordor agreed that they could not endure the sounds any longer, the Pedia told them that it could continue its analysis without their participation, but that they possessed what he did not. They had organs for hearing and the song was meant to be heard. It could model the song digitally, but only creatures with ears could respond to it as sound and melody.

  “Unfortunately,” Asha said, “we interpret its meaning according to our own physical equipment, which varies from species to species and by individual differences and experiences. The song sounds sad, but that may be a human response to a unique set of tones and melodies, and those may be determined not by choice but by the sound-producing organs of the singers. And even to identify it as a song suggests the impulse to place phenomena in recognizable categories.”

  “But there is a suggestion here,” Riley said, “that this is a narrative—a story of epic struggle against great difficulties that ends with defeat and sorrow.”

  “I agree with that,” Adithya said.

  “If we are not bestowing on it our own values,” Tordor said. “Or at least the values of humans. Dorians have no songs.”

  “Like Pedias,” the Pedia said, although its typical matter-of-fact communication did not suggest whether this was a compliment or a criticism. “My analysis, however, suggests that Riley and Adithya are correct. There is a message here, a long message, what Riley has called a narrative, and I am beginning to understand it.”

  “And what is it you understand?” Adithya asked.

  “The song—and it is a song according to the comparisons in my data bank—has a long opening passage of similar frequencies punctuated by moments of sharp increases in frequency, which I interpret to be a saga of long stretches of ordinary existence interrupted by conflicts, perhaps with the tentacled creatures, perhaps with giant storms such as the one we experienced, perhaps both,” the Pedia said.

  “That sounds no better than guesses we might make,” Tordor said.

  “But based on analysis,” the Pedia said. “And then, in the middle, a calm passage where the frequencies are low and undisturbed, which I interpret as the time in Oceanus history when the mammal-like creatures convinced the tentacled creatures to join in creating a technological civilization—a Golden Age, if that human term can be applied to this alien world.”

  “Hardly appropriate to this watery planet,” Adithya said.

  “Go on,” Asha said.

  “Toward the end of the song, a slow rise in frequency brings it to a steady, higher state, which may be the period when the Federation discovers the Oceanus civilization and the mammal-like creatures incorporate in their saga a more complete understanding of the universe that they had only philosophized about,” the Pedia said.

  “That sounds reasonable,” Tordor said.

  “And then, at the end of that long passage that represents a kind of grand finale to a symphony of origins, struggle, mastery, and comprehension comes a sudden clash of
frequencies leading to a sharp spike that ascends higher than anything before.”

  “The arrival of the alien invaders,” Riley said.

  “A conclusion that I have also reached,” the Pedia said. “And those sharp notes are followed by a return to the theme of the opening passage. And that is where it ends.”

  “Poetry,” Tordor said. It was clear that he did not think much of poetry.

  “And yet that is what epics are,” Asha said. “An attempt to express the inexpressible, to imply in a few well-chosen phrases of language or song the indescribable complexities of life and experience.”

  “That gets us nowhere,” Tordor said.

  “A beginning,” Riley said.

  “Exactly so,” the Pedia said. “What remains is a closer analysis of the penultimate phrase of the song, that moment when, if my evaluation is correct, the aliens arrived and changed everything. By comparing that passage with the information we have gained from our earlier discoveries, I may be able to determine what it was that attacked the tentacled creatures, though perhaps not the mammal-like creatures, or not to the same extent.”

  “May, if, perhaps—all those indefinite qualifiers. We have something more solid and certain to consider,” Tordor said.

  “And what is that?” Asha said.

  “The next world we have to investigate,” Tordor said. “The deep atmosphere world of Aerie.”

  * * *

  “Aerie is a strange name for a planet,” Adithya said.

  “You will come to understand why that name is appropriate,” Tordor said. “Of course this is how the Federation refers to this world, just as it refers to my planet as Dor, which means the world of rolling plains where Dorians live, and to Earth as Asylum, the world of troubled humans. They are not the names the native species give their worlds, which all are variations of ‘the world.’”