Songs of Thalassa

by Brian Tissot

  At all hours of the day, earthquakes now gripped the island, causing rocks to tumble down in their cave. Over the last week, they had grown in intensity and frequency as the volcanoes awakened on the planet. Dark clouds obscured their peaks, so they couldn’t see the eruptions that they heard rumbling in the distance. Georgia reminded them that the closest volcanoes were at least 40 miles away. But in the same breath, she talked excitingly about lava flows on Mars that ran for hundreds of miles in the low-gravity environment. The fact that their current plan was to head to higher ground, toward the potential eruption, just added to Sage’s anxiety and the feeling that they were trapped.

  As the peaceful world of Thalassa transformed into a violent torrent of madness, Milo’s mood darkened, and he lashed out at everyone, even Moshe. He seemed consumed with returning to the shuttle and broadcasting the historical news about his giant waves and the discovery of complex life on the planet. Every day his impatience and anger grew along with the growing tempest.

  Sage watched the rising tides and Milo’s anger with increasing dread. She felt pressure to do something, to get to high ground, but she was helpless against the power of the elements. At night, her tutu’s voice pushed her along. “…it’s time for you to become who you were meant to be.” Well, she thought, I’m not going to have a destiny if we don’t get out of here. On top of everything, the memory of her father, and his fate, hung like a thread amid all the chaos. What happens if we find the Proteus? Did he get caught in this madness?

  But at another level, deep down, she was in awe of the rising power of the planet—the torrential rains, screaming winds, raging tides, and growing quakes. Astonished by the flood of energy, she knew the Nesoi—indeed all living things on the planet—were adapted to surviving the massive cyclic upheavals. She wondered how much of the Nesoi’s intelligence and quick wit had evolved from these conditions and the need to navigate the cave complex to a haven to survive. As creatures tied to both land and sea, they adapted or died.

  Although she shared Milo’s anger—surfing Colossus was their crowning achievement in life, and they couldn’t share it with their mass of followers—she sensed something else at stake for him, another motive that remained hidden, adding to his frustration. They had a plan to get back to the Duke and make the big broadcast. Yet, he huddled in the back of the cave with Moshe, speaking in hushed voices, eyes darting at Sage and everyone else. They were definitely plotting something, but she couldn’t guess what. Sage shook her head at the jumble of emotions and jumped to her feet. Feeling bottled up and antsy, she walked to the edge of that cave. I’ve got to get out of here.

  A crack of sky appeared in the clouds. “Hey, Georgia,” Sage said, “do you want to take a quick walk? The rain’s slacking up a bit.”

  Georgia’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious? The last time we did that, we barely made it back.” Then as Sage tilted her head in disappointment, she said, “Oh, OK. It beats sitting here doing nothing.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Dina said with exasperation. “Anything to get out of this cave.”

  Moshe looked morose, so Sage smiled at him as she left and said, “Remember, no rain, no rainbows!”

  He laughed. “OK, I’ll remember that.”

  The three of them climbed out of the cave and carefully stepped over the rocks and pools of water as they slipped and slid down the slope to the beach. Running around to the ocean side of the island, they heard the sounds of a raging torrent of waves coming from the white madness on the horizon. Watching the ocean, Dina wandered down what remained of the beach while the Sage and Georgia looked around the littering of dead and decaying fronds piled up on the shore.

  Neither Melia nor Maka was in sight. Probably safe in their cave, thought Sage, which gave her a reassuring, warm feeling. They know how to deal with this chaos.

  Sage noticed Dina looking at some boulders and ran over to investigate. Getting closer, she was astounded to see that the yellow crusts had mushroom-like fingers emerging from their wavy surfaces. As they watched, the fingers were growing before their eyes and popping open, releasing a fine mist into the air and water.

  “Wow,” said Sage. “That’s amazing. It’s like lichens on Earth. They’re reproducing in the rain.”

  Dina shook her head, confused. “What? What do you mean reproducing?”

  Sage leaned in to take a closer look. “I always thought they were like lichens and now I’m even more convinced. Lichens are a unique combination of a fungus, like a mushroom, and algae, like an aquatic plant. The algae grow from sunlight, while the lichen gives the algae support and lives off the organic matter. It’s a symbiosis. Just like those tiny animal-algae things we saw in the ocean, the plankton of Thalassa. They’re almost a self-contained ecosystem. It makes sense because on Earth lichens can tolerate extreme conditions with little water, intense temperatures, or strong UV light. They even survive in space! These mushroom-like structures are probably fruiting bodies, and they’re launching spores into the water to reproduce. They are taking advantage of the rain to synchronize their reproduction efforts, which cost energy, and disperse their offspring.” She pointed to small round red tidbits floating in the water. “Look, spores are everywhere. There’s a massive reproductive event going on.”

  Dina nodded her head at the biology lesson. “OK, got it. Cool.” Then, they heard Georgia yelling and pointing, and they both ran over to investigate.

  “Sage!” Georgia said as she danced around pointing to a squirming mass of something emerging from the fine-grained sediments. “What the hell is that?”

  As they watched, creatures emerged from the ground. Their inch-long bodies had a row of sharp spines. The animal slid through the mud on a muscular foot preceded by a long snout protruding from their head. As they emerged from the ground, they spun around and started moving through the pools of water, using their snout to guide them and eating every spore in sight.

  “They look like slugs!” Sage said. “And they’re eating the lichen spores,” she added bouncing from foot to foot. “It’s like an early food chain of the critters that invaded land on Earth.”

  Dina was unimpressed. “That’s cool,” she said, looking up at the sky, “but we should be getting back to the cave before it starts pouring again.” But as she turned around to leave, she twisted her foot on a bump in the sand and fell.

  Sage rushed over to help but couldn’t resist teasing her friend. “The great Dina Sunn: champion big-wave surfer, klutz on the beach.”

  Dina nursed her ankle while they looked at what tripped her up. Her foot had uncovered a metal object, and Sage dug it out. As she wiped away the sand, a NASA logo appeared. “Uh, guys. I have something here.”

  Georgia and Dina looked at the short tubular object the size of a large spray can. “Oh my god!” screamed Georgia. “It’s a camera. It must be from the Proteus.”

  Sage felt a tingling run down her back, realizing the camera was from her father’s mission. “Wow, that’s incredible. Let’s get back to the cave and check it out.”

  They were walking back, with Dina limping along on her injured ankle, when the rain returned. It started gently but quickly picked up in intensity. Frowning, Dina said, “Georgia, what’s wrong with your arms?”

  Georgia held up her arms, covered in black specks. “What the hell?” She tried to wipe them off, but created black streaks on her arms.

  Sage looked up. “It’s not just you; we’ve all got it. Must be in the rain, like black soot or something.”

  Georgia shook her head while rubbing her arms. “I don’t like the look of this. It’s volcanic. With all the earthquakes, my guess is those volcanoes are clearing their throats, blasting gas and soot into the atmosphere. I thought they were far enough away that we wouldn’t get any of the runoff over here, but maybe…I can’t be sure about it, but maybe I was wrong.”

  “What? Well, holy shit!” said Sage. “Let’s
get the hell out of here.” Sage and Georgia supported Dina between them so they could pick up the pace.

  When they entered the cave, Milo came running over. “Good, you’re back. Did you see anything? Find a way off?” His brow crinkled when he noticed the spots. “What the heck is going on? You have black shit all over you.”

  But before anyone could answer, the cave began to shake violently, knocking them all to the ground.

  “There’s your answer, Milo,” said Georgia after the quake stopped. “The eruptions are getting closer, and those volcanoes are blasting ash into the atmosphere. Still want to move to the mainland?”

  “Well, that’s just fucking great,” Milo said, chewing his lip. “But we don’t have any other option, do we? We need to cross over and soon. Have you seen how high the tides are getting? Waiting here is suicide.”

  Dina hopped over on one leg and held out the camera. “We did find this.”

  Milo squeezed Dina and spoke with a wide grin. “It’s from the Proteus. We’re saved.” Moshe ran over as everyone crowded around their discovery.

  Georgia turned the object around in her hands. “Looks like a camera to me. Just a quick rinse, and hopefully…”

  Georgia pressed the button to turn on the camera and everyone peered at the small screen in the back. Amazingly, a red light blinked on, and the screen showed a few seconds of a jumbled shot, the camera tumbling underwater. Then it went blank.

  “Back it up, that looks like the end of a recording,” commanded Milo.

  “All right, hang on,” Georgia replied as she pushed a button and the time code began rolling back. As they watched, they could see the date stamped in the upper-right corner—UTC 2078-02-15 11:41:34—then the light blinked “low power.” Georgia quickly pressed Play, and they watched as a scene unfolded in front of them from 12 years before.

  Sage sat spellbound. The Proteus was in a large valley next to a raging river with the roar of the tide in the background. It was pouring rain, and two people were visible, both covered in blue NASA suits. One was working on the camera, the face obscured, the other was next to the ship repositioning an antenna. They sucked in their breaths as a massive dark shape with multiple appendages on its head emerged from the raging water and quickly attacked the person near the camera, knocking the view sideways into the mud. From the skewed perspective, several pairs of feet moved frantically around until a green object obscured the jumbled view. The view went black as the camera fell into the mud. A minute later, they saw an Asian man dragging the camera with him as the monstrous shape dashed back into the whirlpools.

  Sage’s hand covered her mouth in surprise as she recognized her father. “Oh my fucking god!” But as the creature dragged him into the river, she saw Nesoi emerge and try to pry his body away from the creature. “Stop, stop. I can’t watch.” With tears, she peered through clenched hands as the whole tangle of animals, along with her father, tumbled down the river in a jumble of madness. As she stared blankly at the camera, the screen blinked off. Georgia tried to back it up, but the batteries were dead.

  Milo cocked his head at the camera, his hands shaking. “What the hell was that?”

  No one seemed to have the words to answer him. They all looked at Sage.

  Sage sat in silence, stunned at finally learning the truth about her father’s death. While she was amazed to see that the Nesoi had tried to help him, she somehow had even more questions about what happened, which added to her growing anxiety. “That…” she said quietly, “was my father.”

  Dina put her arm around Sage. “We’ll figure it all out, just hang in there.”

  “What was that thing that came out of the river?” Georgia asked. “It was like a mixture of several species.”

  Moshe cleared his throat. “I don’t know if anyone noticed, but that valley in the background looks familiar. It looks like the one across from us.”

  “Moshe’s right,” Milo said, jumping to his feet. “I recognize it too. And there’s got be an energy source there we can use for the remote.”

  Sage looked up with red eyes. “Can’t we use that camera as an energy source or recharge what we have with the solar panels in the two surfboards? Do we have to cross that hell hole?”

  Georgia let out a deep breath. “Sorry,” she said tenderly, like she wished she had any other thing to say, “but with all this rain we can’t recharge anything, and the camera is dead. I’ll open it up, but even if it had juice, I don’t think it would have the wattage to power up the Duke’s remote. We need something more powerful, like a graphene battery, which I hope we can find on the Proteus. I’m afraid we’re going to have to huff it over on foot.”

  After discussing and rejecting several other ideas, they decided to wait and watch. Hopefully, the opportunity to cross would present itself. They avoided talking about the alternative of staying.

  In the middle of the night, a change in the environment woke Sage: the rain had stopped, and it was deadly quiet. Walking to the mouth of the cave, she observed a gaping hole in the clouds that provided a clear view of the string of volcanoes on the horizon.

  She turned and yelled to wake everyone up. “Hey! You gotta check this out.” Everyone jumped up to witness the stunning panorama. Against a clear black sky, they saw the white dwarf and a large bright partial moon dominating the sky. It was high tide, and the ocean had flooded the inland sea to within 10 feet of their cave.

  But their attention was drawn to the volcanoes, lit with orange glows at their summits and red lines streaming down their flanks, belching lava onto the landscape and down the valleys. The sky was full of bright streaks of light from the trails of meteorites hitting the atmosphere. It was a remarkable sight, and they all froze in awe.

  Georgia broke the silence. “Well, that confirms it. Now we know where the ash is coming from. But, that’s likely because as we discussed, the volcanoes are—wait, oh my god, look at Hina!”

  Sage looked over at the second moon, which in addition to being very close and huge, about twice the size of Earth’s moon, was lit up with multiple points of light on its dark surface and bright orange-red plumes on its horizon. Moreover, it was in a waning gibbous phase, with a third now in darkness, as it approached perigee with Thalassa.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Milo impatiently. “What does this mean? It’s like Armageddon here, and it’s starting to scare the shit out of me.”

  Sage scoffed at Milo’s fear. “I think it’s rad!”

  Georgia suppressed a laugh. “Hina is erupting, that’s all. Remember the effects of elliptical orbits? The mutual gravitational forces?”

  Milo shook his head vigorously. They could see he was not in the mood for lectures. Small meteorites the size of softballs fell from the sky, landing with sharp thuds around the outside of their cave.

  “That’s just fucking great,” said Milo. “In addition to the raging tides and relentless rain filled with black snot, now we have hot rocks pelting down on us. What’s next? Comets?”

  Georgia shook her head. “Don’t say that! As the moon approaches, both Thalassa and Hina are tugging gravitationally at each other. The tidal forces generated by their mutual orbits are triggering volcanism both here and on that moon. The forces are so strong they create waves in the deep mantle and core of both bodies, deforming and heating rock that drives magmatic eruptions. It must be hell up there. Maybe that’s why we’re getting these meteor showers. It’s probably debris from massive eruptions on Hina. See the volcanic plumes on the horizon?”

  “But what are those bright areas on Hina?” asked Sage, pointing at bright light splotches among dark areas on the moon.

  Georgia squinted. “Hmm, I’m not sure, but it could be ice.”

  “Fire and ice, just great,” Milo interjected. “I guess that means there’s water up there too.”

  “Well, possibly,” Georgia replied. “Even more interesting is
that the moon is phasing.”

  “Awesome,” added Milo sarcastically. “What’s that mean for us?”

  Georgia glared at Milo then looked back up at the moon. “Just that Hina is flinging around the planet as it enters its closest approach to Thalassa, their perigee. Hina will swing around between Procyon and the planet—like a new moon—then back around the other side, eventually moving away from Thalassa. Hey, I wonder if we’ll get an eclipse? It’s an awfully big moon and so close too.”

  Sage nodded. “So the tides should be maxing out soon, right? Probably in a few days or so?”

  “That’s correct,” replied Georgia. “In elliptical orbits, they zing by the orbiting body in perigee, Thalassa in this case, quite quickly. The rest of the time Hina moves slowly, far out in space. Without any data, how long is anyone’s guess. But it must be years.”

  “All right then,” said Milo. “That’s the first good news I’ve heard. Let’s get ready to cross in the next few days. Get your gear together, such as it is, and be ready to go for it.”

  Each day the tides continued to advance higher on the rocky island, the cave shaking as the tide came rushing back in and colliding in the channel. After every roaring collision, Sage looked at Dina, who was still nursing her bruised ankle, and cringed. When the water chased them out of their cave to a higher location at the top of the island surrounded by red lichens, she knew they had nowhere else to go. That night, they debated when to cross.

  “We must be at least 300 feet above sea level,” Milo said. “When the next low tide happens, I say we go.”

  Georgia shook her head “Even if it’s flooded with water? Even if we can’t see across? You’re crazy. If we get stuck out there, we’re dead. It’s at least a mile across, which will take us 15–20 minutes on dry land, perhaps a lot more in all that muck, and Dina’s injured.”

  “I’m with Georgia,” said Dina. “If we wait a few weeks, these tides will be over, and we can just swim across.”