Mer-Cycle

by Piers Anthony

  A tentacle passed through his face. Don blinked—then shouted. “Glowcloud! Glowcloud! He’s here!” Indeed, it was almost as though the giant squid were trying to pull Melanie upward. They struggled a few more feet, until their heads were buried within the body of the monster, and collapsed. Oxygen!

  When they resumed the climb they were roped again. This time there was no question of the necessity; a misstep could mean a fall of hundreds of feet. Where the way became narrow, they anchored front and rear while the middle proceeded. Gaspar was the front, Pacifa the rear, with Eleph, Melanie and Don not ashamed to admit their incompetence in the center.

  And it was not so bad. Much of the climb was gentle, and some was downhill, for the continental slope was by no means regular. They were neither rushed nor hungry now, and they had become experienced at this sort of thing. Just so long as there was some current in the water, and some animal life.

  “I heard that,” Melanie said during one of their pauses for anchorage. “You think I’m beautiful?”

  It took Don a moment to orient. She was referring to the “Beauty and the Beast” exchange. “Yes.”

  “Physically?”

  “Th-that too.”

  She looked startled, but pleased.

  Then it was time to move the anchor along.

  At the next stop Don looked around. “Where’s Glow-cloud? Never thought I’d miss the sight of his ugly beak, but—”

  “We’re changing depth pretty rapidly,” Gaspar said. “Few creatures can handle substantial and rapid pressure differentials. We aren’t being subjected to them, phased out, or we’d be in real trouble. By the time he adjusts, we’ll be gone again.”

  “Too bad,” Melanie said. “But not worth going back down into that deadly valley!”

  Near the top—fifty fathoms—Gaspar gave a cry. “Hey! There’s a cave.”

  There was. “We need a safe place to spend the night,” Pacifa said. “Let’s check it out. I don’t want to roll off any ledges in my sleep.”

  Her given reason was spurious; she had no fear of ledges. She merely liked to explore. But so did the others. They were all adventurers, now that they had the means.

  They moved in cautiously, Don staying close to Melanie, or perhaps the other way around. There was no concern about wildlife, of course, except to make sure that it was present, but a gap in the floor would be every bit as hazardous to them as to land dwellers in a land cave. They remained roped.

  The passage wound about, going first up, then down. The floor was irregular, so that they would have to walk. Then the way opened into a large cavern.

  “Stalactites!” Don exclaimed. “This was once a land cave!”

  “Why not?” Gaspar called back. “You said yourself that the water receded this far during the ice age, and I agree.”

  “Stalactites,” Eleph repeated. “They hang from the top?”

  “And stalagmites rise from the floor,” Don said. “Remember it mnemonically: C for ceiling, G for ground. Stalac, stalag.”

  “Strange they have not dissolved away,” Eleph said.

  “They may, in time. They must have been millions of years in the forming, while the sea has been here for only a few thousand.”

  “Was the sea level down for millions of years?”

  “Well, no; but this cave could have been sealed off with air in it.”

  “Maybe cave men used it,” Pacifa said half facetiously. “They cut this passage in, little dreaming that the sea would return.”

  “I’m not sure the Amerinds used caves,” Don said. “Certainly, they did not paint on the walls the way the Reindeer People did in Europe.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Well, they—” He stopped. “You know, I don’t know! Maybe they did, at that.”

  “If habitable caves were available, they would have been stupid not to utilize them,” Eleph said. “Man is not stupid.”

  “Man’s an idiot,” Pacifa retorted. “Look at what he’s doing to the world!”

  “I can only draw a parallel to the European situation,” Don said. “Certainly caves were used there, from time to time—but not by all men, and seldom by civilized ones. There is evidence that many of the caves that were used, were not used for residence.”

  “What else would a cave be used for?” Eleph asked. “Storage?” He seemed to be fascinated by this region, though he evidently knew little about it.

  “Religion. Or some similar ceremony. The golden age of stone age man was probably the Magdalenian culture, about fifteen thousand years ago. They hunted reindeer and other animals during the ice age, and used sympathetic magic to help overcome these creatures. They painted pictures of them on the walls and ceilings of deep grottoes, some of the finest naturalistic art ever rendered. But then the glaciers receded, the reindeer migrated north, and the Magdalenians declined.”

  “The glaciers,” Gaspar said. “That was an ice age culture.”

  “You haven’t been paying attention,” Pacifa said.

  “Very much an ice age culture,” Don said sadly. “In some ways man’s civilization was shaped by the ice. It gave him a real hurdle to overcome, for it overran his choicest residential areas and reshaped the land. To survive he had to develop clothing—”

  “And that killed him,” Melanie said. “It stopped the sun from striking his skin, and Neanderthal man was wiped out by rickets, the Vitamin D deficiency disease.”

  Don stopped short. “Where did you hear that?”

  “I read it somewhere. Isn’t that what you were saying?”

  “No. It may have been Cro-Magnon man who developed civilization as we know it, and he wore clothing too. We can assess its approximate coverage by noting the places where our own bodies lack heavy hair. We have light hair all over our bodies, of course. Possibly his skin was lighter, so that he could adapt better to the scant sunshine of the northern latitudes, but that alone could hardly have wiped out Neanderthal. He lived in the tropics as well, after all.”

  “Ah, well,” she said with cute resignation. “But then what happened to Neanderthal man?”

  “We’re still not sure. He overlapped modern man by eighty thousand years or so, so it seems unlikely that he was conquered. There is evidence that Neanderthal was truly robust, physically, capable of feats that our champions can’t match today. He had the same braincase and tools as Cro-Magnon. But it may have been his diet.”

  “No Vitamin D enriched milk?”

  Don had to laugh. “Vitamin D isn’t even a vitamin! No, he seems to have become a vegetarian, perhaps living on fruits and nuts. He may have driven Cro-Magnon man out of the good forests and forced him to become a scavenger, taking the leavings of hunting animals. Finally modern man became a hunter himself, his system adjusting with difficulty to the wholesale consumption of flesh. Then the climate changed and the dense forests shrank—and Neanderthal man was starved out, because he could not eat the foods of the savanna. It may be that he had never developed truly organized hunting techniques, and it was too late for him to change. When modern man did, he started hunting game species of animals to extinction—and perhaps used those same techniques on his longtime rival Neanderthal, exterminating him at last. Cro-Magnon man was better equipped to survive, being less specialized. It’s a common theme, paleontologically.”

  “You mean we’re murderers?” Melanie asked, distressed.

  “As Cain slew Abel, perhaps. It’s all conjecture.”

  “But the glaciers,” Gaspar said again. “There’s the connection.”

  “Between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man?” Don asked.

  “No, between the Minoans and the Mayans. Your finest cave culture was the result of the ice age. Well, the ice age was worldwide. Why couldn’t there have been fine cave cultures over here in the Americas, too?”

  “And when the world warmed up,” Melanie added eagerly, “and the waters rose, those cultures didn’t just expire, they went elsewhere. Maybe they kept their civilization alive for t
housands of years, building great cities, until—”

  “Hunter-gatherer societies do not build cities,” Don said, laughing. “How many reindeer do you see roaming the streets of New York?”

  “Well, small cities, then,” she said. “Villages, maybe. Rome was not built in a—”

  “Something strange ahead,” Eleph said, and they broke off. This spared Don the onus of debating against more amateur theories of civilization.

  Strange it was. A horizontal sheet of something crossed the entire top of the next cavern, cutting it off. The demarcation was so level and regular that it had to be artificial. A sheet of clear plastic?

  “That’s the surface!” Gaspar cried, laughing.

  “At forty five fathoms?” Eleph demanded.

  “An air pocket. Come on, we can ride up out of the water for a change.”

  But they couldn’t. The surface was twenty feet above their heads, and the cavern walls were vertical. They could only look.

  “Do you suppose there are cave paintings remaining in the dry portion?” Eleph asked.

  “I doubt it,” Don said. “But I’d sure like to look.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Gaspar said. “Let’s find a place to set up our tents.”

  This callousness to archaeological potential irritated Don, but he knew Gaspar was right. The man wasn’t really uninterested; he merely wasn’t going to worry about reaching an inaccessible spot. He was being practical.

  “Perhaps if we used the balloons,” Eleph murmured.

  “Yes!” Don agreed. It was becoming difficult to dislike the man.

  Gaspar and Pacifa set up camp, anchoring the tents to the rising spires of old stalagmites. Don and Melanie and Eleph blew up balloons, waiting for them to achieve sufficient flotation. Working together, they inflated six balloons in somewhat over an hour, and hitched them to Don’s bicycle. In time Don lurched to the surface and whipped his lamp around.

  There was nothing. The walls were completely natural.

  A small blind fish nosed up. “Get out of here!” Don shouted, bashing through it with one fist.

  But the disappointment was minor, compared to what had been discovered before. As they settled down for the night, Melanie took his hand again. “But suppose you found a girl with real hair?” she murmured.

  “What is hair?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s just dead cells. It’s superficial. I can take it or leave it, now.”

  “Can you? I think you should meet such a girl, and see.”

  He laughed. “Here?”

  “Well, after the mission. Then you’ll know.”

  She didn’t want to be hurt. He understood that. He knew that if he met a pretty girl in the regular world he would be tongue-tied anyway. Part of the appeal of Melanie was that he had seen her shorn, and gotten to know her without romantic pressure, and now there could be romance, if she wanted it. Evidently she did want it, if she could only be sure of him. He had accepted her without hair, but that was only half way there. He had to show that he would not change his mind when he encountered a woman with body and hair. That he did not see her as a Neanderthal, to be discarded in favor of Modern. So it was necessary to play it through. Once she saw him with anyone else, she would know that hair had nothing to do with it, anymore.

  In the morning they completed their preparations and moved out, single file. Don hated to leave this cave without exploring it more thoroughly, for the discussion of the evening before had taken hold of his fancy. Suppose man had lived here? This cave was three hundred feet below the present surface of the ocean. Its entrance, could have been exposed only when the water was low enough—if, indeed, someone had not cut the passage into it, as Pacifa had suggested. Ludicrous, yet not impossible. Either way, that would have been 15,000 years ago, at the height of the ice age—the same time as the European Reindeer culture. A fantastic notion, but tempting.

  Yet hardly more fantastic than the idea of a mighty city off the coast of the Yucatan, dating back perhaps six thousand years and containing Minoan artificats. But with the sea washing off any pictures that might have been on the walls, and the fish consuming any bones, and the sediment covering whatever remained, this quest was hopeless. If only he had the facilities to investigate thoroughly!

  Don sighed. That was the nature of archaeology. The breakthroughs were wonderful, but most of it came to nothing significant. Some other man would have to discover the wonders of pre-Mayan cave cultures, if any were to be found.

  The trip along the continental shallows was more difficult than Don had anticipated. While the Yucatan was hardly a modern center of commerce, it was populated. Small boats plied its waters, fishing and hauling. Several times the cyclists had to hide, to prevent possible discovery. But the shelf here was so narrow that they had either to remain quite close to shore, or negotiate the descending slope to rejoin Glowcloud and perhaps the valley of death.

  It was hot. Maybe the ambient temperature was governed mainly by the converter and the nitrogen atmosphere of the phase world, but when Earth was warm, Don was warm. Their terrain was not smooth, and he sweated steadily with the exercise. So did Melanie; her blouse was plastered to her skin. He knew she would not appreciate him staring, so he tried not to. Hair? Who cared about hair!

  The problem was that the mountainous inland features were duplicated near the water, forcing repeated gear-shifting and portages, with occasional use of the safety rope. At one point they actually had to cross overland in order to avoid an ocean canyon that would have forced an unreasonably long detour.

  But they made it in good order to the third depot. There was plenty of food there, and spare wheels for their bicycles—most of which did not fit, since it had been presumed they would be in the better ten-speed machines that had supposedly been waiting at the first depot.

  “Eighteen degrees, thirty minutes north latitude,” Melanie said. “Seventy eight degrees, ten minutes west longitude.”

  “I don’t know coordinates, but I know that’s toward Cuba,” Pacifa snorted.

  “Maybe,” Gaspar said, sounding disappointed. “It’s not toward South America, for sure. Let me work it out. Eighteen, nineteen—no, that’s Jamaica. Northern coast, I think.”

  “Port Royal!” Don exclaimed. “We’re going to see Port Royal!”

  “That doesn’t sound like a stone age culture, or even an old Mayan city,” Pacifa said.

  “It isn’t. Port Royal was an English town of the seventeenth century, notorious for its illicit trade and rich living. It suddenly sank beneath the sea, around 1690 I think. Its enemies thought it was divine retribution. But for my purpose a quick burial is much better than a slow decline, because all the common artifacts of daily existence remain.”

  “You archaeologists are ghoulish,” Melanie said, smiling.

  “I remember the story,” Gaspar said. “That’s a legitimate case of subsidence along the fault. It does happen. But wasn’t Port Royal on the south of the island? We’re going to the north of it.”

  “I don’t remember,” Don said, disappointed. “The New World just isn’t my specialty. You’re probably right.”

  “It’s as if whoever set this up is teasing you,” Melanie remarked. “Sending you close to something really important to you, then turning away.”

  “What would be the point of teasing us?” Gaspar asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand what’s going on at all.”

  “You and the rest of us,” Pacifa agreed.

  “The spot is very near the trench, isn’t it?” Eleph asked. “It may be several thousand fathoms down. What could be so important there?”

  “Maybe an eight-thousand-year-old pre-Minoan city,” Gaspar said with half a smile. “Complete with television sets.”

  Don did not deign to respond.

  They proceeded. The great Cayman trench coincided almost exactly with the Honduras shoreline in this region, forcing them to hew to an even narrower margin than before. Here they could not avoid a canyon, so th
ey used rope and balloons in combination and followed it down … and down.

  “Just how far did the waters recede during the ice age?” Pacifa demanded.

  “Three hundred feet,” Don said. “Four hundred at the most.”

  “Do you realize that we are down to two hundred fathoms? Twelve hundred feet, and no sign of the end?”

  “I can’t explain it,” Don said.

  “Fortunately I can,” Gaspar said. “You were right about the cutaway on the Yucatan shelf. But the really large canyons are below that level. Some go right to the ocean floor, three miles deep.”

  “How can they be formed, with the water always there?” Pacifa asked.

  “Turbidity currents. A function of that same sediment you see all over the ocean floor. The large rivers deposit a lot of silt, and a lot remains suspended in the water. Periodically it builds up to the point where it must come down, especially when the motion of the river is lost within the mass of the sea. So it overturns, and the loaded water drops. That forms some pretty formidable currents—up to forty miles per hour. With that sort of motion, you can cut canyons anywhere. They still have trouble with undersea cables getting snapped that way. Any natural tremor can set off a mud slide, and once it starts, it’s like an avalanche. That has a similar effect.”

  “Ocean currents and mud slides cut this?” Pacifa asked, gesturing about. “This is like the Grand Canyon!”

  “Makes you respect mud, doesn’t it,” Gaspar said, smiling. “We’d better move on, because even in our phased-out state we could be in trouble if some such action occurred around us.”

  There was no argument, though Don was sure they would have to wait years for a mudslide. Why take any more of a risk than they had to? And suppose their passage did set off such a slide? He tried to suppress his nervousness.

  They rode and hauled and climbed vigorously, searching for safer waters. But it was more than a hundred miles before there was room to diverge freely from the trench’s edge. Even then there was not much improvement, because the sea floor became mountainous. Progress was slow.