The Songs of Distant Earth (10 page)

I’ll have to play my cards very, very carefully, Loren told himself. That Mirissa found him attractive, he already knew. He could read it in her expression and in the tone of her voice. And he had even stronger proof in accidental contacts of hand, and soft collisions of body that had lasted longer than were strictly necessary.

They both knew that it was only a matter of time. And so, Loren was quite sure, did Brant. Yet despite the mutual tension between them, they were still friendly enough. The pulsation of the jets died away, and the boat drifted to a halt, close to a large glass buoy that was gently bobbing up and down in the water.

“That’s our power supply,” Brant said. “We only need a few hundred watts, so we can manage with solar cells. One advantage of freshwater seas – it wouldn’t work on Earth. Your oceans were much too salty – they’d have gobbled up kilowatts and kilowatts.”

“Sure you won’t change your mind, uncle?” Kumar grinned.

Loren shook his head. Though it had startled him at first, he had now grown quite accustomed to the universal salutation employed by younger Lassans. It was really rather pleasant, suddenly acquiring scores of nieces and nephews.

“No, thanks. I’ll stay and watch through the underwater window, just in case you get eaten by sharks.”

“Sharks!” Kumar said wistfully. “Wonderful, wonderful animals – I wish we had some here. It would make diving much more exciting.”

Loren watched with a technician’s interest as Brant and Kumar adjusted their gear. Compared with the equipment one needed to wear in space, it was remarkably simple – and the pressure tank was a tiny thing that could easily fit in the palm of one hand.

“That oxygen tank,” he said, “I wouldn’t have thought it could last more than a couple of minutes.”

Brant and Kumar looked at him reproachfully.

“Oxygen!” snorted Brant. “That’s a deadly poison, at below twenty metres. This bottle holds air – and it’s only the emergency supply, good for fifteen minutes.”

He pointed to the gill-like structure on the backpack that Kumar was already wearing.

“There’s all the oxygen you need dissolved in seawater, if you can extract it. But that takes energy, so you have to have a powercell to run the pumps and filters. I could stay down for a week with this unit if I wanted to.”

He tapped the greenly fluorescent computer display on his left wrist.

“This gives all the information I need – depth, powercell status, time to come up, decompression stops – “

Loren risked another foolish question.

“Why are you wearing a facemask, while Kumar isn’t?”

“But I am.” Kumar grinned. “Look carefully.”

“Oh … I see. Very neat.”

“But a nuisance,” Brant said, “unless you practically live in the water, like Kumar. I tried contacts once, and found they hurt my eyes. So I stick to the good old facemask – much less trouble. Ready?”

“Ready, skipper.”

They rolled simultaneously over port and starboard sides, their movements so well synchronized that the boat scarcely rocked. Through the thick glass panel set in the keel, Loren watched them glide effortlessly down to the reef. It was, he knew, more than twenty metres down but looked much closer.

Tools and cabling had already been dumped there, and the two divers went swiftly to work repairing the broken grids. Occasionally, they exchanged cryptic monosyllables, but most of the time they worked in complete silence. Each knew his job – and his partner – so well that there was no need for speech.

Time went very swiftly for Loren; he felt he was looking into a new world, as indeed he was. Though he had seen innumerable video records made in the terrestrial oceans, almost all the life that moved below him now was completely unfamiliar. There were whirling discs and pulsating jellies, undulating carpets and corkscrewing spirals – but very few creatures that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be called genuine fish. Just once, near the edge of vision, he caught a glimpse of a swiftly-moving torpedo which he was almost sure he recognized. If he was correct, it, too, was an exile from Earth.

He thought that Brant and Kumar had forgotten all about him when he was startled by a message over the underwater intercom.

“Coming up. We’ll be with you in twenty minutes. Everything O.K.?”

“Fine,” Loren answered. “Was that a fish from Earth I spotted just now?”

“I never noticed.”

“Uncle’s right, Brant – a twenty-kilo mutant trout went by five minutes ago. Your welding arc scared it away.”

They had now left the sea bed and were slowly ascending along the graceful catenary of the anchor line. About five metres below the surface they came to a halt.

“This is the dullest part of every dive,” Brant said. “We have to wait here for fifteen minutes. Channel 2, please – thanks – but not
quite
so loud.

The music-to-decompress-by had probably been chosen by Kumar; its jittery rhythm hardly seemed appropriate to the peaceful underwater scene. Loren was heartily glad he was not immersed in it and was happy to switch off the player as soon as the two divers started to move upward again.

“That’s a good morning’s work,” Brant said, as he scrambled on to the deck. “Voltage and current normal. Now we can go home.”

Loren’s inexpert aid in helping them out of their equipment was gratefully received. Both men were tired and cold but quickly revived after several cups of the hot, sweet liquid the Lassans called tea, though it bore little resemblance to any terrestrial drink of that name.

Kumar started the motor and got under way, while Brant scrabbled through the jumble of gear at the bottom of the boat and located a small, brightly coloured box.

“No, thanks,” Loren said, as he handed him one of the mildly narcotic tablets. “I don’t want to acquire any local habits that won’t be easy to break.”

He regretted the remark as soon as it was made; it must have been prompted by some perverse impulse of the subconscious – or perhaps by his sense of guilt. But Brant had obviously seen no deeper meaning as he lay back, with his hands clasped under his head, staring up into the cloudless sky.

“You can see
Magellan
in the daytime,” Loren said, anxious to change the subject, “if you know exactly where to look. But I’ve never done it myself.”

“Mirissa has – often,” Kumar interjected. “And she showed me how. You only have to call Astronet for the transit time and then go out and lie on your back. It’s like a bright star, straight overhead, and it doesn’t seem to be moving at all. But if you look away for even a second, you’ve lost it.”

Unexpectedly, Kumar throttled back the engine, cruised at low power for a few minutes, then brought the boat to a complete halt. Loren glanced around to get his bearings, and was surprised to see that they were now at least a kilometre from Tarna. There was another buoy rocking in the water beside them, bearing a large letter P and carrying a red flag.

“Why have we stopped?” asked Loren.

Kumar chuckled and started emptying a small bucket over the side. Luckily, it had been sealed until now; the contents looked suspiciously like blood but smelled far worse. Loren moved as tar away as possible in the limited confines of the boat.

“Just calling on an old friend,” Brant said very softly. “Sit still
–
don’t make any noise. She’s quite nervous.”

She?
thought Loren. What’s going on?

Nothing whatsoever happened for at least five minutes; Loren would not have believed that Kumar could have remained still for so long. Then he noticed that a dark, curved band had appeared, a few metres from the boat, just below the surface of the water. He traced it with his eyes, and realized that it formed a ring, completely encircling them.

He also realized, at about the same moment, that Brant and Kumar were not watching it; they were watching
him.
So they’re trying to give me a surprise, he told himself; well, we’ll see about that …

Even so, it took all of Loren’s willpower to stifle a cry of sheer terror when what seemed to be a wall of brilliantly – no,
putrescently –
pink flesh emerged from the sea. It rose, dripping, to about half the height of a man and formed an unbroken barrier around them. And as a final horror, its upper surface was almost completely covered with writhing snakes coloured vivid reds and blues.

An enormous tentacle-fringed mouth had risen from the deep and was about to engulf them …

Yet clearly they were in no danger; he could tell that from his companions’ amused expressions.

“What in God’s – Krakan’s – name is that?” he whispered, trying to keep his voice steady.

“You reacted fine,” Brant said admiringly. “Some people hide in the bottom of the boat. It’s Polly – for polyp. Pretty Polly. Colonial invertebrate – billions of specialized cells, all cooperating. You had very similar animals on Earth though I don’t believe they were anything like as large.”

“I’m sure they weren’t,” Loren answered fervently. “And if you don’t mind me asking – how do we get out of here?”

Brant nodded to Kumar, who brought the engines up to full-power. With astonishing speed for something so huge, the living wall around them sank back into the sea, leaving nothing but an oily ripple on the surface.

“The vibration’s scared it,” Brant explained. “Look through the viewing glass – now you can see the whole beast.”

Below them, something like a tree-trunk ten metres thick was retracting towards the seabed. Now Loren realized that the “snakes” he had seen wriggling on the surface were slender tentacles; back in their normal element they were waving weightlessly again, searching the waters for what – or whom
–
they might devour.

“What a monster!” he breathed, relaxing for the first time in many minutes. A warm feeling of pride – even exhilaration
–
swept over him. He knew that he had passed another test; he had won Brant’s and Kumar’s approval and accepted it with gratitude.

“Isn’t that thing –
dangerous?”
he asked.

“Of course; that’s why we have the warning buoy.”

“Frankly, I’d be tempted to kill it.”

“Why?” Brant asked, genuinely shocked. “What harm does it do?”

“Well – surely a creature that size must catch an enormous number of fish.”

“Yes, but only Lassan – not fish that
we
can eat. And here’s the interesting thing about it. For a long time we wondered how it could persuade fish – even the stupid ones here – to swim into its maw. Eventually we discovered that it secretes some chemical lure, and that’s what started us thinking about electric traps. Which reminds me …”

Brant reached for his comset.

“Tarna Three calling Tarna Autorecord – Brant here. We’ve fixed the grid. Everything functioning normally. No need to acknowledge. End message.”

But to everyone’s surprise, there was an immediate response from a familiar voice.

“Hello, Brant, Dr. Lorenson. I’m happy to hear that. And I’ve got some interesting news for you. Like to hear it?”

“Of course, Mayor,” Brant answered as the two men exchanged glances of mutual amusement. “Go ahead.”

“Central Archives has dug up something surprising. All this has happened before. Two hundred fifty years ago, they tried to build a reef out from North Island by electroprecipitation – a technique that had worked well on Earth. But after a few weeks, the underwater cables were broken – some of them
stolen.
The matter was never followed up because the experiment was a total failure, anyway. Not enough minerals in the water to make it worthwhile. So there you are – you can’t blame the Conservers. They weren’t around in those days.”

Brant’s face was such a study in astonishment that Loren burst out laughing.

“And you tried to surprise
me!”
he said. “Well, you certainly proved that there were things in the sea that I’d never imagined.”

“But now it looks as if there are some things that
you
never imagined, either.”

20. Idyll

T
he Tarnans thought it was very funny and pretended not to believe him.

“First you’ve never been in a boat – now you say you can’t ride a bicycle!”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Mirissa had chided him, with a twinkle in her eye. “The most efficient method of transportation ever invented – and you’ve never tried it!”

“Not much use in spaceships and too dangerous in cities,” Loren had retorted. “Anyway, what is there to learn?”

He soon discovered that there was a good deal; biking was not quite as easy as it looked. Though it took real talent actually to fall off the low centre-of-gravity, small-wheeled machines (he managed it several times) his initial attempts were frustrating. He would not have persisted without Mirissa’s assurance that it was the best way to discover the island – and his own hope that it would also be the best way to discover Mirissa.

The trick, he realized after a few more tumbles, was to ignore the problem completely and leave matters to the body’s own reflexes. That was logical enough; if one had to think about every footstep one took, ordinary walking would be impossible. Although Loren accepted this intellectually, it was some time before he could trust his instincts. Once he had overcome that barrier, progress was swift. And at last, as he had hoped, Mirissa offered to show him the remoter byways of the island.

It would have been easy to believe that they were the only two people in the world, yet they could not be more than five kilometres from the village. They had certainly ridden much farther than that, but the narrow cycle track had been designed to take the most picturesque route, which also turned out to be the longest. Although Loren could locate himself in an instant from the position-finder in his comset, he did not bother. It was amusing to pretend to be lost.

Mirissa would have been happier if he had left the comset behind.

“Why must you carry that thing?” she had said, pointing to the control-studded band on his left forearm. “It’s nice to get away from people sometimes.”