Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  She was stroking lithely, but these clumsy-seeming mollusks were more agile. Their bodies matched the specific gravity of the water so that they neither lifted nor sank involuntarily, and they moved rapidly backward as they jetted water from their hyponomes. She could not catch any in her hands, try as she might. Soon she gave up the attempt, and then they drifted confidently closer to her, shells sparkling iridescently.

  It was a wonderland of bright living coral and sponge and jellyfish and crabs and forestlike seaweed, with the abundant 'bony' fish circulating everywhere. But the cephalopods

  dominated the scene - small squids shooting past in shoals, almost indistinguishable from fish at that velocity. There were also the relatives of the cephalopods: the belemnites, and the nautiloids and ammonites. The mollusks did not swim in the manner of vertebrates, however; they all moved by that same jet propulsion, using their finlike members only for guidance. The belemnites were cigar-shaped shells completely surrounded by flesh, almost like little mama rays with backbones fused.

  They were feeding now, culling animalcules and tiny fishes from the water with their myriad tentacles and bearing them in to the mouth parts. Their big round eyes stared at her as she went along. The individuals were getting larger; some were more than a foot in diameter across the coiled shell, and their short tentacles were six inches.

  Their shells were varied, but nowhere did the markings of the septa show. She remembered that Cal had explained about mat: the sutures were the internal joining places of the septa, analogous to the dark rings inside a poorly washed coffee cup. They did not ordinarily show externally. Where the septum, or disk blocking off a segment of the interior was flat, the suture merely ringed the inside of the shell. But the more advanced ammonites had fluted sutures, reflecting a convoluted septum. She visualized the situation, using a straight shell for convenience rather than a normal coiled one:

  LIVE, FLAT FLUTED

  The sutures became more and more complex as the ammonoids developed, until in the middle Cretaceous they were phenomenal. Loops formed within loops, resembling the profile of elaborate branching coral.

  Aquilon contemplated an ammonite fully eighteen inches in diameter, tentacles as long as her hand reaching out from it. The creature was impressive in much the manner of a monstrous spider. She waved her hand at it, and it snapped back into its shell, closing its hood over its head. She laughed, making bubbles in the water (where did she find air to breathe? she wondered fleetingly, but this was immaterial) and waited for the cephalopod to lift its anterior portcullis and peep out again. So much like a hermit crab, she thought - only this was a hermit octopus, who constructed its own shell.

  'Take me to your leader,' she said as its eyes reappeared.

  The ammonite nodded with its entire body and jetted away, its tentacles streaming behind. She followed, not really surprised.

  Through bays and inlets of coral they swam, by algae-covered rocks and sea moss like green waving hair, and now and then a stray brown kelp anchored to the bottom with its top held near the surface by small bladders of gas. Purple, green, orange, solid or tenuous, the shallow-water plants decorated the reef. Starfish crowded near vaselike sponges, and beautiful but dangerous sea anemones perched on stones or the backs of crabs. Green spiked sea urchins and dark sand dollars dotted the bottom sand (where sand occurred), and green lobsters gestured with their terrible pincers. She had to swerve to avoid a giant ancient horseshoe crab. And the bivalves - they were everywhere!

  She longed to stop and begin painting - but then she would lose the guide, for that fast-jetting mollusk gave her no time to lag. Tragedy!

  Then, abruptly, she faced it; a coiled ammonite shell over six feet in diameter. Her guide was gone, perhaps afraid for its own safety, and she was on her own.

  The tremendous hood hoisted up, a gateway almost as tall as she was in that position. Yellow tentacles snaked out, writhing toward her. She was frightened now, but she stood her ground as well as her buoyancy permitted. An eye the size of a small saucer fixed on her.

  'Yes?' the king of the ammonites said. No bubbles rose, for it was not an air breather.

  She didn't want to admit that its speech surprised her, so she asked it an inane question. 'Are your sutures fluted?'

  A hundred tentacles formed a frown. 'Are they fluted, what?'

  She blushed. 'Are they fluted, Your Majesty?'

  The frown writhed into neutrality. 'Honeyshell,' King Ammon said, 'my sutures are royally fluted and convoluted, each in the shape of a finely crafted crown. Would you care to examine them from the inside?' Its purple tentacles were extending toward her, each a yard long, and its mouth pried itself open.

  'No,' she said, quickly, backpedaling.

  'One does not,' Ammon remarked slowly, 'say no to the king.' Several of its red tentacles were coiling around projections in the coral reef, as though ready to pull the entire shell forward suddenly.

  'I' meant - ' She cast about for the proper phraseology, 'Your Majesty, I meant that I could never think of doubting the statement of the king so it would be insulting to suggest any closer inspection, Your Majesty.'

  The tentacles relaxed while Ammon considered. 'There is that.' Somehow she had the impression the king was disappointed. Now he was green.

  'What I came to ask,' she said humbly, 'was why? Why do you need such a complex pattern, when no one can admire it ... from the outside?'

  'I can admire it very well from the inside - and my opinion is the only one that matters. And I am hungry.'

  'Hungry?' She didn't make the connection, unless this were a hint that she should get farther out of range. But the king surely could move through the water faster than she, and he had so many appendages! Brown, at the moment.

  'I perceive you do not comprehend the way of the ammonite.' Ammon remarked. 'You vertebrates are powerful but clumsy. You have only four or five extremities, one or two colors, and your shell is obscure.'

  'We do our best to live with our handicaps,' she said.

  'Actually, you're decent enough, for a lower species,' Ammon admitted graciously. 'It behooves me to educate you. Pay attention: our primitive ancestors, the Nautiloids, had simplistic septums, hardly more than dismal disks, and so their sutures were aconvolute. They scrounged and scavenged after a fashion, gobbling down anything they could catch, and doubtless made a living of sorts. But we ammonites learned the secret of specialization: by varying the size of the space between the torso and the outermost septum, the early ammonite was able to change its specific gravity. Larger air pocket (actually a unique gas - but you would not comprehend the secret formula), and he floated; smaller, and he sank. Do you understand?'

  'Oh, yes,' she said. 'That would be a big advantage in swimming, since you could maintain any level without effort.'

  'Hm.' King Ammon did not seem to be entirely pleased. 'Just so. Now with a flat septum there is not much purchase, since the body is anchored only at the rim and the siphuncle. You know what the siphuncle is, of course?'

  'No, sir,' she said.

  'Hm.' The mollusk was pleased this time. 'That is the cord of flesh that passes through the septa and chambers of the shell, right back to the very end. Have to keep in touch, you knew. I suppose your tail is a clumsy effort in that direction. At any rate, a convoluted septum, matching the configuration of the body surface, is a more effective base for adjustment of the volume of that gaseous partition. So we ammonites have superior depth control. That enables us to feed more effectively, among other things.'

  'How clever!' Aquilon exclaimed. 'I can see how you grew so large. But what do you eat?'

  'Zilch, naturally. What else would a sapient species bother to consume?'

  'I don't think we vertebrates are that advanced. I don't even know what zilch is.'

  Ammon's tentacles writhed and went rainbow at this astonishing confession of ignorance, but he courteously refrained from remarking on it. 'Call it a type of marine fungus. There are quite a number of varieties, and n
aturally each ammonite species specializes on one. I imbibe nothing less than Royal Zilch, for example. No other creature can feed thereon!'

  'By kingly decree?' She had not realized that ammonites were so finicky.

  'By no means, though it is an interesting thought. No lesser creature has the physical capability to capture a Royal Zilch, let alone to assimilate it. It is necessary to lock on to its depth and duplicate its evasive course precisely, or all is lost. One mistake, and the zilch eats you.'

  Oh. 'That's why your convolutions are so important. Your hunting is dangerous.'

  'Yes. I can, among other feats, navigate to an accuracy of two millimeters, plus or minus 15 percent, while interpenetrating the zilch with seventy-three tentacles.' Gray members

  waved proudly. 'And I've seldom been slashed.'

  This was beginning to sound like doubletalk to Aquilon. But she remained entirely too close to the king to risk contradicting him directly. He might yet develop an appetite for bipedal vertebrate a la blonde. 'I'm amazed you can coordinate so well.'

  'Your amazement is entirely proper, my dear. You, with your mere five or six appendages, can hardly appreciate the magnitude of the task. And every unit has to be under specific control. The nervous system this entails - you know what a brain is?'

  'I think so.'

  'Hm. Well, I have a sizable brain. As a matter of fact, the convolutions of my septa merely reflect the configuration of the surface lobes of my brain, which are naturally housed deep within my shell for proper protection. It is my advanced brain that sets me off from all other species; nothing like it exists elsewhere, nothing ever has, nothing ever will. That is why I am king.'

  Aquilon searched for some suitable comment.

  Suddenly Ammon turned orange and lifted grandly in the water. She had supposed him bottom-bound because of his size, but he moved with exactly the control he had claimed, smoothly and powerfully. 'There's one!'

  She peered about anxiously. 'One what?'

  'One Royal Zilch. My meal!' And the king jetted off.

  Now she saw his prey, a flat gray shape. 'No!' she cried with sudden horror. 'That's Circe!'

  But the chase was already on, the monster cephalopod shooting backwards in pursuit of the fleeing manta. She knew how helpless the mantas were in water, and foresaw only one outcome of this chase. 'No!' she cried again, desperately, but the bubbles merely rose upward from her mouth, carrying her protest snared within them.

  She woke with a mouthful of sea water, her body soaking and shivering, and she still felt sick. She clambered out into the chill breeze. It was 4.00 a.m., or close enough and time for her shift on watch to begin.

  Veg had the four-to-eight sleep, and she didn't envy him his attempt in the watery cabin. The mantas wisely remained oh the roof, seemingly oblivious of the continual spray. A gentle

  phosphorescence showed the outlines of the rolling waves, and the wind continued unabated. Now that she was fully awake and erect, she found the chill night breeze refreshing.

  There was not much to do. Veg had lashed the rudder and cut the sail to a quarter spread, and the Nacre was stable. They had merely to remain alert and act quickly if anything untoward happened. She did not expect to see more than routine waves, however.

  'Cal,' she ventured.

  'Yes, 'Aquilon,' he said Immediately. He did not sound tired, though he could not have had any better rest than she had had, during his turn in the cabin. This was a rough vigil for him. The fact that he was able to bear up at all meant that he had gained strength considerably since Nacre. That was reassuring.

  'The ammonites - could they have been intelligent?'

  She was afraid as she said it that he would laugh; but he was silent for a time, considering it. She waited for him, feeling the damp air in her hair, the vibrations of the shifting logs underfoot. No, Cal was not the one to laugh at a foolish question; he always took in the larger framework, the reason behind the statement.

  'Highly unlikely, if you mean in any advanced manner. They had neither the size nor the metabolism to support extensive brain tissue, and water is a poor environment for intellectual activity. It -'

  'I mean - the big ones. As big as us.'

  'Most ammonites were quite small, by human standards. But yes, in the late Mesozoic some did achieve considerable size. I believe the largest had a shell six and a half feet in diameter. However -'

  'That's the one!'

  He glanced toward her in the dark; she could tell this by the changing sound of his voice. 'Actually, we know very little about their biology or life habits. The soft parts are not ordinarily preserved in fossils, and even if they were, there would be doubt about such things as color and temperament. But still, there are considerable objections to your thesis.'

  'In short, no,' she said, smiling. She liked to smile, even when no one could see; it was a talent she had not always had. 'Try this: could they have eaten a kind of swimming fungus exclusively, and become extinct when it disappeared?'

  'One would then have to explain the abrupt extinction of the fungus,' he pointed out.

  'Maybe it emigrated to Nacre ... ' But this was another dead end. It had been quite convincing in her dream, but it lacked that conviction here. The mystery remained, nagging her: why had so highly successful a subclass as the Ammonoidea, virtually rulers of the sea during the Cretaceous period, become abruptly extinct? Survived only by its far more primitive relative, the pearly nautilus...

  'What, if I may inquire into such a personal matter, brought the status of the cephalopods to mind? I had understood these were not of paramount interest to you.'

  'You showed me those shells and explained, and I - had a dream,' she said. 'A foolish, waterlogged vision ... if you care to listen.'

  'Oh, I have enormous respect for dreams,' he said, surprising her. 'Their primary purpose is to sort, assess, and file the accumulated experience of the preceding few hours. Without them we would soon all be thoroughly psychotic, particularly on so-called contemporary Earth. Adapting to this Paleocene framework is difficult, but have you noticed how much less wearing it is intellectually than was merely existing on Earth? So it is not surprising that your dreams reflect the change. They are reaching out into the unbounded, as your mind responds to this release.'

  The odd thing was that he was right. She had longed to return to Nacre, because of the relief it offered from the tensions of home - but this world served the purpose just as well. She would rather be battered, seasick, and in fear of her life here, than safe and comfortable there.

  But it was not entirely the freedom from Earth that was responsible, she knew. Cal, Veg, the manias - she loved them all, and they all loved her, and Earth had nothing to match that.

  She told Cal in detail about colorful King Ammon, and both laughed and it was good, and her seasickness dissipated.

  At eight, daylight over the water, Veg came up to relieve Cal. 'Do snails have false teeth?' he inquired groggily. 'I had this dream -'

  Direct sunlight hustled the mantas back inside the cabin, the solar rathation too hard on them. There had been tree shade on the island, and irregular cloud cover; apart from that they tended toward the night. It was not that they were naturally nocturnal; but high noon on the planet Nacre was solid fog, and the beam of the sun never touched their skins. These four were more resistant to hard light than were their kin on Nacre, for they had been raised on Earth - but environment could modify their heredity only so much. They could survive sunlight here, but not comfortably and not long.

  The day swept on, the wind abating only momentarily. Her heart pounded pusillanimously during such hesitations, anticipating the consequence of a prolonged delay in mid-ocean. What use would land within a hundred miles be, if they had to row die clumsy craft there? And should the wind shift...

  At dusk, windchapped and tired, they watched the mantas come out and glide over the water, their pumping feet invisible as they moved at speed. How clearly this illustrated the fact that mantas did not p
erambulate or fly or swim! They jumped, and their flat bodies braced against the air in the manner of a kite or airplane wing, providing control. They either sat still and lumplike, or traveled at from thirty to a hundred miles per hour; they could not walk. They were beautiful.

  And they were hungry. Circling near the raft, they lashed at surfacing fish. She heard the whip-snap of their tails striking water, and saw the spreading blood. Cal brought out a long-handed hook Aquilon hadn't known was aboard and hauled the carcasses in. He spread them on die deck, and one by one the mantas came in to feed. Circe first - and Aquilon watched her chip the fish up into small chunks with her deadly tail, then settle on top of the mess for assimilation. Cal had placed a section of sail over the logs so that the fluids of this process would not be lost.

  Veg did not watch, and neither, after a moment, did Aquilon. They all understood the necessity of feeding the mantas, and knew that the creatures could not digest anything but raw meat, and would not touch any but the flesh of omnivorous creatures - but this proximity was appalling. Circe had fed on rats in the theoretically aseptic far-cellar of Aquilon's Earth apartment building, and this had been accomplished privately. No doubt Hex had similarly isolated himself from Veg in the forest at feeding time. Now it was hard to accept physically what they had known intellectually. Only Cal seemed unaffected - and of course he had foreseen this problem too.