She tried to pick a path between the segments of the coral array, but the openings were too narrow, too winding; they left her unable to manage the boat behind. She picked a likely foothold, crossed some mental fingers, and pushed.
Next, making sure she was safely braced, she began to haul on her tow rope. The twin keels made an awful noise as she dragged the Cat on top with her, but the laminate wouldn’t even show scratches from the passage. Nicole herself would probably come out in worse shape.
She quickly found that while the light beneath her feet was beautiful, it was as much hindrance as help. There was residual water left in the gaps between the coral plates, as well as pools on their mostly flat surfaces; they caught the flashes, refracted them, scrambling her perspective and perceptions. She found it painfully reminiscent of being in flat calm under a midday sun, where each little reflection was a dagger made of diamond, punching one pinpoint hole after another in her vision until she was dazzled blind. Solution then would be to simply don her shades. Not a practical option in the dark.
She could hear the surf, and used that as an anchor, thankful that the sound of waves was much the same as on Earth, even if the water itself looked sometimes like burgundy and others like arterial blood. But hearing and actually reaching it were a pair of widely separated concepts.
She felt the faintest change in the quality of the air and searched around herself for a couple of minutes before finally registering that the stars weren’t as brilliant as when last she’d looked, before she’d started across the reef. The reason was clear in the east, a roseate glow right on the horizon. She dropped her line and left the Cat to scout ahead a ways, to see if there was any easier approach. She went farther than she should, all the way in fact to the edge of the reef, and it was like standing on a seawall with the full force of the ocean hammering against its face, sending up curtains of spray as it attempted to tear down what the little creatures so patiently and laboriously built up over the aeons. Eventually, she knew, the reef would grow high enough to put it continually above sea level. Sand would build up on top, a line of true barrier islands would begin to form. The water behind her might form a lagoon, or be trapped to form a lake, or simply be flushed out altogether so that the continent itself would expand a little farther.
A comber swept in, a rogue wave substantially larger than its fellows, cresting over the top of the reef where the others still fell short. Nicole saw it coming and was already backtracking when it hit. The water struck like a hearty shove to the body, and as she struggled to keep her feet a sneaker landed on a newly established outcropping that immediately gave under her weight.
She yelped as she fell, from surprise, and stayed flat while a second wave followed the example of the first. The tide was turning, with far more speed and violence than she had anticipated.
She scrambled up and hurried back to the Cat, grabbing the towline with redoubled effort. The approaching sunrise was muting the light show from the coral, but there wasn’t yet sufficient illumination overhead to make up for it. She wanted to surge forward, Hell for leather, desperately worried that she wouldn’t clear the reef before the waves started crashing full force onto it. She’d seen divers and swimmers unwary enough to be hammered like that, after being snared by the swirling, fiercely antagonistic currents set up by water action through the multihollowed structure of reef. Difficult enough to pull someone out of that maelstrom, impossible to fight free on your own. Instead, she forced herself to take her time and properly pick her path. She wore solid shoes, but nothing short of an armored combat sole would be proof against a spike through the foot. Even if she missed impaling herself, a gash could prove equally deadly. The reef was a living organism, but the true danger came from the vast panoply of microorganisms that made their home in the warm and fertile shallows. Any cut was virtually assured of infection. Nicole knew that the rules of Terran eco-biology might not apply here but she had nothing else to go on, since the Hal dealt with the sea by ignoring it. Best bet, she decided from the first, was to play things safe and assume the worst.
She was ready to collapse when she dropped the towline a final time, with the sun a full diameter above the horizon, sending her shadow stretching ten or twenty times her height along the wet, shimmery crest of the reef.
She didn’t have the time.
She secured the line—she was damned if, after all this body-busting effort, she was going to have it snag on some coral and hang her up—and checked her carryall to make sure it was lashed tight as well.
The wind was to her back, a stiff breeze that worked on the water in concert with the last of the ebbing tide to flatten the wave action. She wondered if Ciari had gotten this far and saw no reason to be ashamed of him for calling it quits.
She stood at the aft crossbar of the trampoline platform and stretched forward, body and arm to full extension, to catch the jib sheet. A series of hearty tugs raised the sail two thirds of the way up its track, and she tied it off on a handy mainstay. She scanned the rest of her lines a final time, as she would the panel of a spacecraft just before launch, knowing that she’d done her job properly from the start but always remaining careful enough to make certain.
Then, her body acting seemingly of its own accord, she lifted her head and roared a challenge, as primal as the setting and the moment. She had a stroboscopic image of the Hal from her dream, the ghost who’d marked her, uttering the same cry as she was yanked beneath the waves.
She hurled herself forward, putting her shoulder to the trampoline frame and heaving with every ounce of strength.
The Cat launched itself off the reef and immediately caught the crest of an incoming comber. Nicole leapt aboard and shot the rudder into place, straddling the tiller, pinning it between her knees to point the twin bows into the approaching swells at an angle of forty-five degrees. In the same motion, she grabbed for the main sheet and hauled like a madwoman, jamming the line between a pair of lockjaws and shoving the boom out to better catch the following breeze. Both main and jib fluttered in the wind, neither fully raised, she’d take the time to neaten things up after she cleared the surf—if she cleared the surf.
She hit another wave and spat water from her mouth, aware that she had the damnedest grin on her face and a laugh of exultation every bit as rich as the challenge cry she’d uttered minutes before. Now—finally—all that was Hal in her huddled deep in its cave and let the human claim ascendancy.
In quick, practiced moves, she shackled her harness to the trapeze, although it wasn’t time yet to hike herself out off a pontoon. She hauled the jib sheet until it was tight and tied it off, then repeated the process with the main. The Cat was riding more easily as it slowly fought clear of the reef and cresting combers gave way to rolling swells.
Nicole turned the bows farther away from land, checking the telltales atop the mast—fluttering strips of tape that indicated the wind’s direction and speed—as she put herself on a broad reach.
She held her course through the early morning, while the breeze stayed firm, watching the shore dwindle in her wake until all she could make out were the coastal hills and the mountains far beyond. There was no stress to this kind of sailing, it was mainly a matter of getting her boat and herself properly tidy. She had donned both hat and glasses and was happily centered in ways she hadn’t felt since leaving Earth.
She had no MapMaker, no nav aids of any kind save a compass that was integral to the mast. Hopefully, she wouldn’t be out long enough or far enough to need them; though the Cat handled superbly, it wasn’t equipped for voyages of any duration. Ciari had chosen himself a day sailor, probably for the fact that it didn’t look much like a boat more than its practicality.
To check the trapeze, she swung the Cat closer to the wind, gradually hiking herself out on the upwind pontoon as the boat picked up speed. The pontoon beneath her lifted from the water, and she leaned back, counterbalancing the force of the breeze with her own weight, serving the same function here that a lead k
eel did on a big single hull like Sundowner. She didn’t press for the max, Cats being notoriously easy to flip. She had few doubts about being able to right the boat if it did indeed capsize, but there was no one to offer assistance if anything went seriously wrong. As well, she didn’t know what lived beneath the local waves—save for that one awesome monstrosity she’d seen during the Range Guide travelogue—and had no desire to learn about them the hard way.
She moderated her course, deciding to push on a bit farther before beginning her sweep across the mouth of the huge estuary towards Shavrin’s Memorial Mount. She felt a twinge as she swung inboard and breathed a heartfelt curse when she bent her leg double to see why.
“Look what I missed in all the excitement,” she told herself aloud. “Terriffic!”
It was a long surface slash along the meat of the calf, deep enough so that it was still showing blood. Now that she was actually looking at the wound, she suddenly felt the sting of salt water in the cut and felt the residual pain, both from the injury itself and the subsequent use she’d put to the leg. There were some lesser scratches as well, and a shredded tear up one seam of her shorts that left them dramatically shredded almost to the hip.
She scrabbled in her carryall for a medical kit, and expended almost the whole tube of antibiotic lathering the slash and the attendant abrasions. She had no tape, or bandages big enough—not that they’d be much use, considering that water was breaking pretty much continuously over the trampoline—so she settled for tying her bandannas around her shin to hold the wound as closed as possible. Beyond that, she had to hope her blood would clot with its usual enthusiasm and efficiency.
She could guess when it happened, when the big wave decked her—which meant she’d been humping across the reef, floundering in pools and channels, with an open wound.
“Hey,” she said hopefully, “it’s another world. Who’s to say the neighborhood microbes have the slightest interest in out of town visitors?”
By midday, she was becalmed, in that hellish slot of time when land- and sea-based breezes canceled each other out, creating swirling cyclonic eddies of no use to any sailor, or not a puff of wind at all. She was out of sight of land in all directions and her leg had begun to resemble something out of an old Popeye cartoon.
It was hot to the touch, but then so was every other exposed surface, the sun’s intensity muted only slightly by a veil of high-altitude clouds. It didn’t hurt, for which she was unbelievably grateful. It also couldn’t be moved worth a damn, neither at knee nor ankle, and it seemed to weigh as much as the rest of her. It looked like a sausage, in the process of being nuked in a microwave to the point of bursting.
“Well,” she said matter-of-factly, “this seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She lolled on the trampoline, aware that she should be watching the water for the telltale shadows that indicated an approaching gust. But what was the point? Sure, she’d forge ahead, blaze new trails, cross far horizons, behold sights none of her kind had ever seen before. It’s what she always wanted. To hurl herself across the stars, to be all the things her parents’ generation could only dream of.
“Beat that, Mom,” she said with deep and abiding satisfaction. Then she frowned, wondering where that thought had come from. Or rather the resentment behind it.
The thought was too much effort, the products of her head had suddenly each grown as heavy as her leg, and so she let it slip from her fingers. She felt the main sheet start to follow and convulsively tightened her grip. The Cat was drifting, propelled by tidal action. Nicole had no idea of the local currents but she’d been beating against the inbound tide since she launched; if the sun’s position was any indication, the tide had to be nearly full. Once it turned, she’d be in the position of being swept out to sea, which she didn’t want—although she was finding it increasingly harder to care one way or the other. By the same token, the deepening afternoon should bring with it a decent wind.
Her knee was numb. She trailed a rope end up from her ankle but for all the sensation, she might as well have been stroking the pontoon.
She felt desperately thirsty but allowed herself only a single swallow. Sick, she was; stupid, she was determined not to be.
It was just getting to be such an effort simply to hold up her head!
She couldn’t tell about her color. The value of the Hal sun red-shifted everything a step, which made the warm colors appear richer than they were. Sallow flesh looked healthy and healthy skin downright glowed. In her case, Nicole figured she was radiating a heat signature that would attract a decent hotdog missile.
She narrowed her eyes, shifting position awkwardly on the cloth trampoline and scrabbling at her glasses, trying to unhook the semicircular mountain frames from her ears and get them off so she could see better, the lens having been degraded by caked sea scunge.
There’d been a stir in the water, off in the distance, hope flaring that it might be a wayward zephyr, then fading as the surface settled back to sparkly stillness.
She wondered about Raqella and Amy, and Ciari, but mostly she found herself thinking of the silver-haired Hal. All along, she’d been trying to place what seemed so familiar about her. For some reason, with her faculties at their literal worst, Nicole made the connection. She looked and moved mostly like the male Nicole had seen, yet she stood. She made the effort to relate to everything—people, environment, situations—from two legs.
She’d seen enough of the local Hal to conclude that they were intelligent. They reasoned, they used tools, there was evidence of both. Yet they remained random hunter-gatherers, as though at some point the race had reached some evolutionary crossroads and they were the ones who chose to stay behind. She knew she was on the right track, but there were too many gaps in the line of dominoes, still too many places where she had to make a frantic leap to keep them falling in sequence. She was dancing the same dervish fandango she had a long time past with Amy—rueful noise, meant to be a laugh, possibly not as she considered the propriety of such a lively image in her present state—with all these pieces scattered before her but no sense of the structure to build from them. Because here, as with Amy, the answer had to be so far beyond common experience as to be almost outlandish.
“Oh, goody”—with a dangerously giddy giggle, wonderfully impressed with herself for the impending revelation—“they’re all clones.”
The water beneath the Cat changed color.
It was dark for a time, then light, then dark for a very long time, then light again. Nicole stared stupidly, head plopped over the edge of the trampoline, all thought of driving her boat cast away by this latest curiosity. Try as she might, she couldn’t find an explanation for this either. There was certainly nothing soaring past upstairs to generate such a shadow.
She was still trying to puzzle things out when the first questing tentacle—a little thing, hardly thicker than a finger—plipped into the air to touch her right between the eyes.
She felt herself tumbling, one of those madcap testosterone stunts, where you find yourself and a clutch of likewise nutcases heaving bodily out the back of a perfectly good aeroplane a dozen klicks above the ground, with a FastPak of O2 and an acrobatic chute to bring you to a safe landing. Problem with skydiving, she always felt, was that it was essentially a one-way ride. No matter what you tried, all you could do was modify your rate of descent; you never actually went back up. A primal rush to be sure, but that would only take a body so far. That was why she preferred riding something with wings, it gave a body alternatives.
Only consolation here was that there was no more sense that she was cooking beneath her skin. Delightfully cool, it was, akin to fresh sheets of top-quality cotton.
She could feel a wind now, a tickling caress across every centimeter of her body, charged particles hurtling outward from their star, yet at the same time she felt enfolded in a primordial element, not a faint sensation—like the other—but more of an embrace.
She’d calved before, crack
ing into parts Hal and human, and felt it happening again, a duality of vision that told her she was sick, she was well, she was alone, she was with Hana, she was lost, she knew precisely where she was, she was helpless, she was acting.
She wanted to scream, but none of her broken selves had any means to give her desire voice.
Sound rippled through her, a basso profundo thrum of such low frequency that she didn’t perceive it as noise. Rather, it was something far beyond that frame of reference; the only analogy she could apply was the memory of standing on the Visitor’s Gallery at Canaveral when a shuttle launched. The motors generated such raging power that even kilometers from the gantry, the sound of them possessed palpable physical force. She’d stood closer still, at Edwards, for a static test firing of the main engines for her spaceplane. It was as though her body had become the world and been cast into a period of perpetual earthquakes.
But if those were her benchmarks, they were wholly inadequate to encompass what she felt now as the sonic pulses beat through her.
At the same time, with curious dispassion melded to a giddy and near overwhelming effervescence, she found a scale to measure it.
Stop, she tried to say, to all the splintered parts of her, as the pain from without was matched by that within.
The latest pulse was the last.
Questing fingers now, sliding under clothes, over skin, following the triple strand tattoo left by her ghost. Perhaps it was the sensation of actual contact—flesh on flesh—that sparked a vague awareness in her, shunting circuits together to finally build a proper sequence of perceptions. She struggled—feebly to begin with, but gathering strength with each flailing roundhouse swipe of arms and legs—to reorient herself. There was a burning in her chest that demanded immediate attention. She knew the signs well, she was short of air, and her eyes opened wide and focused as she realized that she was drowning.
Sundowner Page 35
