Mer-Cycle

by Piers Anthony

  “Maybe that’s our mission,” Don said. “To explore this region and map the remaining treasure ships.”

  “I’d be disappointed if so,” Gaspar said.

  “Yes,” Melanie agreed. “We have to hope that something more than greed is responsible for us.”

  “We can best find out by getting on with the mission,” Eleph said. That damped the dialogue.

  Gaspar led the way to the more level bottom and located a peaceful hollow in the sand. There was no sign of gold. This time they pitched their tents, which they had not bothered to do before: one for Eleph, one for Melanie, and one formed from Don and Gaspar’s combined canvas.

  This really was more comfortable than sleeping in the open, though the difference was more apparent than real. There was nothing to harm them in their phased state anyway. But Don liked the feeling of being in a protected, man-made place. Appearances were important to his emotions. Which brought him back to the subject of Melanie. Her appearance—

  He shoved that thought aside. The emotions were too complicated and confused. That business about the autographs—where had he gone wrong? Suddenly he had run afoul of her, and he didn’t quite understand how it had happened. So it was better to let it lie, for now.

  “That wig,” Gaspar said.

  So much for letting it lie! “You noticed it too,” Don said with gentle irony.

  “I want to be candid with you, because it might make a difference. Melanie is one attractive woman, and I’d be interested in her. Except for that wig. If she meant to see whom it fazed, she succeeded.”

  Fazed. A pun, since they were all phased? Evidently not. “But there’s more to a woman than hair,” Don said, arguing the other side.

  “I know that. You know that. Everybody knows that. But I have a thing about hair on a woman. I like it long and flowing and smooth. I like to stroke it as I make love. My first crush was on a long-haired girl, and I never got over it. So when I first saw Melanie I saw a nice figure and a pretty face, but the hair didn’t turn me on. Too short and curly. But hair can grow, so if she was otherwise all right, that could come. But then she took off that wig, and I knew that her hair would never grow. A wig won’t do it, for me. The hair has to be real, just as the breasts have to be real. I don’t claim this makes a lot of sense, but romance doesn’t necessarily make sense. Melanie is not on my horizon as anything other than an associate or platonic friend, regardless of the other aspects of our association.”

  Don was troubled. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I can see you are shy with women. You wouldn’t want to go after one actively. You sure wouldn’t compete with another man for one. Well, maybe you don’t have the same hang-up as I do. In that case, I just want you to know that there’s no competition. If you can make it with Melanie, I’ll be your best man. The field is yours.”

  “B-but a woman can’t just be p-parceled out!” Don protested.

  “There’s a difference between parceling and non-commitment. I think Melanie needs a man as much as you need a woman. In fact I think you two might be just right for each other. If you were with her, you’d keep her secret, and she’d love you for it, and other men would wonder what she saw in you, and she would never give them the time of day. Ideal for you both, as I see it. I can see already that she’s got her quirks, but is one great catch of a woman. But matchmaking’s not my business. I’ll stay out of it. Just so you know that no way am I going to be with her. She lost me when she lifted that wig, and she knows it. You are in doubt. I mean, she doesn’t know whether you can handle the business of the hair. When you decide, that will be it. I won’t mention this again.”

  “Th-thanks,” Don said. His emotions remained as confused as ever. He knew that the best thing he could do was to put all this out of his mind and let time show him the way of his feelings and hers. He would just relax.

  Yet sleep was slow, again. He told himself it was because of his recent nap in the patch-coral cave, but he knew it was more than that. There was a wrongness about this project, and not just in spoiled rations or breaking bicycle chains or undue secrecy. Gaspar seemed to be the only one qualified to do anything or learn anything here. Don himself was a misfit, as was Melanie—and what was a man like Eleph doing here? Not a geologist, not a biologist, not even an undersea archeologist—but a physicist! His specialty could have little relevance here. A mysterious mission like this was hardly needed to check out the performance of the phase-shift under water—if that were really what Eleph was here to do. The man wasn’t young and strong, and certainly not easy to get along with. He could only be a drag on the party. At least Melanie wasn’t a drag.

  “It’s Miami,” Gaspar said, startling him.

  “Who?”

  “Those coordinates. Offshore Miami. Must be another inexperienced man.”

  Don shook his head ruefully. “I wish I had your talent for identifying places like that! I can’t make head or tail of those coordinates.”

  “It’s no talent. Just understanding of the basic principle. The Earth is a globe, and it is tricky to identify places without a global scale of reference. On land you can look for roads and cities, but in the sea there are none. Think of it as an orange, with lines marked. Some are circles going around the globe, passing through the north and south poles. Those are the meridians of longitude, starting with zero at Greenwich, in London, England, as zero, and proceeding east and west from it until they meet as 180 degrees in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at the International Date Line. The others are circles around the globe parallel to the equator; they get smaller as they go north and south, but each is still a perfect circle. Thus we have parallels of latitude. Since we happen to be north of the equator and west of England, our coordinates are in the neighborhood of twenty five degrees north latitude and eighty degrees west longitude. Just keep those figures in mind, and you’ll know how far we go from where we are now.”

  It began to register. “Twenty five and eighty,” Don said. “Right here. So Miami is—”

  “Actually those particular coordinates would be about ten miles east of Miami, and fifty miles south of it,” Gaspar said. “We’re on the way there. I meant our neighborhood on a global scale.”

  “Just as all of man’s history and prehistory is recent, on the geologic scale,” Don said wryly. “Fifty miles is pinpoint close.”

  “Yes. Our bicycle meters give us our immediate locations.”

  “Still, I’ll remember those numbers. It will give me a notion how far we are from Miami, and that’s a location I can understand. Southern tip of Florida.”

  “Well—”

  “Approximately!” Don said quickly. “In geologic terms.”

  “Approximately,” Gaspar agreed, and Don knew he was smiling.

  Don returned to the matter of their next group member, glad to have company in his misgivings. “What do you think he is? An astronomer? An electrician? A—”

  “Could be a paleontologist. Because I think I know where we’re heading, now. The Bahamas platform.”

  “What?”

  “The Bahamas platform. Geologically, a most significant region. It certainly made trouble for us in the past.”

  Don would have been less interested, had he not wanted someone to talk to. “How could it make trouble? It is whatever it is, and was what it was, wasn’t it, before there were geologists?”

  “True, true. But trouble still, and a fascinating place to explore. You see, its existence was a major obstacle to acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics.”

  “Of what?”

  “Drifting continents.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” Don said. “They’re moving now, aren’t they? An inch a century?”

  “Faster than that, even,” Gaspar agreed wryly.

  “But I don’t see why those little islands, the Bermudas—”

  “Bahamas. The thesis was that all the continents were once a super land mass called Pangaea. The convection currents in the mantle of the
earth broke up the land, spreading the sea floor and shoving the new continents outward. North and South America drifted—actually, they were shoved—to their present location, and the Mid-Atlantic ridge continued to widen as more and more lava was forced up from below. But the Bahamas—”

  “You talk as if the world is a bubbling pot of mush!”

  “Close enough. The continents themselves float in the lithosphere, and when something shoves, they have to move. But slowly. We could match up the fractures, showing how the fringes of the continental shelves fitted together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. All except the Bahamas platform. It was extra. There was no place for it in the original Pangaea—yet there it was.”

  “So maybe the continents didn’t drift, after all,” Don said. “They must have stayed in the same place all the time. Makes me feel more secure, I must admit.”

  “Ah, but they did drift. Too many lines of evidence point too firmly to this, believe you me. All but that damned platform. Where did it come from?”

  “Where, indeed,” Don muttered sleepily.

  “They finally concluded that the great breakup of Pangaea started right in this area. The earth split asunder, the land shoved outward in mighty plates—and then the process halted for maybe thirty million years, and the new basin filled in with sediment. When the movement resumed, there was the half-baked mass: the Bahamas platform. Most of it is still under water, of course, but it trailed along with the continent, and here it is. The site of the beginning of the Atlantic Ocean as we know it.” The man’s voice shook with excitement; this was one of the most important things on Earth, literally, to him.

  But Don wasn’t a geologist. “Glory be,” he mumbled.

  “That’s why I find this such a fascinating region. There are real secrets buried in the platform strata.”

  But Don was drifting to a continental sleep. He dreamed that he was standing with tremendous feet straddling Pangaea, the Paul Bunyan of archaeologists. But then it cracked, and he couldn’t get his balance; the center couldn’t hold. The more he tried to bring the land together, the more his very weight shoved it apart, making him do a continental split. “Curse you, Bahama!” he cried.

  CHAPTER 5

  PACIFA

  Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.

  Acknowledging.

  Status?

  Four members introduced, final one incipient. Progress good. Group is melding. They are as much concerned with interpersonal relations as with the mission, but unified in their perplexity about it. The likelihood of success seems to be increasing.

  That is good. We have lost another world via the straightforward approach. If your experiment is effective, we will try it on the remaining worlds.

  But the outcome is far from assured. Human reactions are devious and at times surprising.

  How well we know!

  Offshore Miami: the continental shelf was narrow here, but they could not approach the teeming metropolis too closely. The rendezvous was just outside the reefs, thirty fathoms deep and sloping.

  Gaspar tooted on his whistle. The answer came immediately. Before they could get on their cycles the fifth member of the party appeared, riding rapidly. Don noted the turned-down handlebars and double derailleur mechanism first: another ten-speed-or-more machine, perhaps an expensive one.

  “It’s a woman,” Gaspar said.

  Don and Melanie peered at the figure. It was female, but neither buxom nor young.

  She coasted up, turned smartly, and braked, like a skier at the end of a competition run. “Pacifa,” she said. Her hair was verging on gray, obviously untinted under the hard helmet.

  The others introduced themselves.

  “Well,” Pacifa said briskly. “If I had known you would be three handsome men and one pretty girl, I’d have sent my daughter. But she’s all shape and no mind and this is business not pleasure, so we’re stuck with each other for the duration. Any problems with the bikes?”

  They assumed that this was small talk, so demurred. Don saw Melanie react at the reference to “pretty girl,” but she did not speak. He wasn’t sure whether it was the first word or the second that bothered her.

  “No, I’m serious,” Pacifa said with peppery dispatch. “I’m your mechanic, in a couple of ways, and I can see already that none of you except Gaspar knows the first thing about cycles, and he doesn’t know the second thing. Three of you have insufficient and the fourth too much. Can’t be helped now, though. Who has the coordinates?”

  “Twenty four degrees, fifteen minutes latitude,” Melanie said. “Eighty four degrees, fifty minutes longitute.”

  “But that’s—” Don started, trying to figure it out.

  “Right back the way we came,” Melanie said. “Eleph was at 24°30’, and this is 24° 15’.”

  “But farther along,” Gaspar said. “In fact, offshore northern Cuba.”

  “We’re picking up a Cuban?” she asked.

  “Unlikely,” Gaspar said. “If there was supposed to be another person, he should have joined us at the same place Eleph did, not close by. Now I think we’re complete. A larger party would be unwieldy. So it’s more likely the site of our mission—or a supply depot.” He sounded disappointed. It seemed they were not going to the Bahamas platform.

  “Let’s go,” Pacifa said. She mounted and moved out with such smoothness that the three were left standing.

  Gaspar filled the leadership gap again. “Don, you catch her and make her wait. Eleph, I saw a map in your pack. Let’s you and I check it and find out more specifically where we’re going, because Cuba just doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe there’s something in the Gulf of Mexico I’m missing.”

  Don took off. But Pacifa was already out of sight, lost in the vague dark background wash that was the deep ocean at dawn. There were not tire tracks, of course. It was hopeless.

  “Fool woman,” he muttered.

  “Whistle for her,” Melanie called. He hadn’t realized that she was following him, and indeed she wasn’t very close, but it was a good suggestion. He blew his whistle.

  Pacifa answered at once, just a short distance to the side. “Are you lost, young man?” she inquired solicitously as he drew up to her.

  “No. You are—were. Wait for the rest of us!”

  “Why?”

  “W-we have to operate as a p-party,” he said, annoyed.

  “I’m glad that’s settled. Let’s get on with it.”

  They returned to find Gaspar and Eleph poring over the paper held before one headlight. Gaspar lifted his bike and spun a wheel by hand when the headlight began to fade, to keep the light bright. There were a number of sections of the map, each overlapping the boundaries of the next, so that they could travel from one to another without interruption. It looked to Don as if the entire Gulf of Mexico was covered, and perhaps more.

  Gaspar looked up. “It’s in an American explosives dumping area,” he said.

  “A what?” Pacifa demanded. “That can’t be right.”

  “It’s the location Melanie gave us,” Gaspar said evenly. “Got any other?”

  “Do I understand correctly?” Eleph demanded. “Must we venture into a munitions dump?”

  “I have no knowledge of munitions dumps,” Pacifa said. “I don’t know anything about undersea coordinates either. It does seem strange, but if they want to keep our ultimate destination secret, this is as good a waystation as any, I suppose.”

  “That must be it,” Don said. “For some reason they don’t want us to know our mission any sooner than we have to. But it must be far enough away so we’ll have to reload on supplies.” He would be glad to get good rations to replace his bad ones; so far there had been plenty for the others to share with him, but it made him feel as if he wasn’t carrying his own weight.

  “But an explosives dump!” Gaspar said.

  “Can’t hurt us,” Don reminded him. “We’re out of phase.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. Our weight is still real, and if we were to r
ide over an old live depth bomb—”

  “They do not dump that way,” Eleph said. “Those weapons are sealed in.”

  “How do you know?”

  Eleph hesitated. “I have had military experience.”

  So there was a military background, Don thought. That explained the man’s military bearing and attitude. But it still didn’t explain his presence here.

  “Probably it was easier to dump supplies on a regular run,” Gaspar said after a moment, evidently not wishing to appear unduly negative. “But it’s a good three hundred and fifty miles from here. And if that’s only half way to our goal—”

  “Our goal may be even farther,” Don said. “Because we’ve been riding back and forth with our initial supplies.”

  “Of which we still have plenty,” Melanie said. “Even sharing.”

  “Sharing?” Pacifa inquired alertly.

  “Don’s are bad,” Melanie explained. “We don’t know if it’s poor quality control or what.”

  “Or what?” Pacifa asked.

  “Or intentional,” Gaspar said.

  “Whatever for?” Pacifa demanded.

  “We don’t know,” Don said.

  “Regardless, it seems odd to start us far from the site of our mission,” Gaspar said. “It’s been bad enough, having to ride all around just to assemble our party. Now to have to go farther yet—”

  “Maybe it’s that crater off South America,” Don suggested. “The one with the dinosaurs.”

  Gaspar brightened. “Could be. They could start us here, so that no one could guess our destination from our initial motions.”

  “But what’s the point of secrecy?” Don asked. “If that crater is sixty five million years old and has no military value—”

  “Never underestimate the secrecy of the military mind,” Eleph said.

  “Still, that’s a thousand miles!” Gaspar said.

  “That’s why we have our bicycles, isn’t it?” Pacifa asked.

  “A thousand miles!” Don said, horrified. “That’ll take weeks!”

  “Days,” Pacifa said. “What’s wrong with that?”