The body of the nozzler narrowed slightly behind the frontal region, tapering into a centipedelike arrangement of the ten middle segments, each with the hard black carapace (above the body and partially around the sides) and a soft, fleshy underbelly with hundreds of flexible cilia extending below The fanlike tail, which looked solid from a distance, was actually thirty or forty individual strips of textured material attached to a central nexus or ganglion located at the rear of the last of the middle segments.
Johann was fascinated by the nozzler. Although he was horrified by the sight of Kwame, the astonishing biology of the alien corpse piqued his curiosity Surveying the entwined pair while continuing to tread the water, Johann decided that he would tow them together to the island so that he could study the nozzler more closely.
He heard Maria’s frantic cries while he was still well off shore. When Johann had not returned to the cave at his normal time, the girl had panicked. Fortunately, she bad had the good sense to search the water for him, and her keen eyes had located him far out in the lake. After first verifying that the local currents were insignificant, Johann left his discovery a hundred meters from the beach and swam into shore so that he could reassure the girl.
Johann’s description of the dead pair was sufficient to send Maria into another bout of hysteria. No matter what he said, she insisted that the nozzler corpse should not, under any circumstances, ever touch their island.
“What if its friends or family should find it here,” she said, “and somehow decide that we were responsible for its death? What would happen to us then?”
Johann’s biological assessment that a nozzler was not a land animal was of no importance to Maria. She adamantly repeated that she never wanted to see “one of those things” again, dead or alive. There was no way that Johann could mitigate her fear.
He reluctantly swam back out to where he had left the pair of corpses and began the process of disconnecting Kwame from his foe. It was not an easy procedure. The tentacles around Kwame’s back were still tight and Johann could not muster much strength while he was treading water. Eventually he separated the pair. Remembering his lifeguard training in Berlin, Johann swam back to the island with Kwame in tow.
Maria was pointing outward with a terrified look on her face when Johann finally reached the shore with Kwame. She did not scream. She did not say anything at all. Out where he had left the nozzler corpse, Johann saw churning water and as many as a dozen blue tentacles wafting through the air. After depositing Kwame’s body on the sand near a grove of trees, Johann picked up Maria and carried her back to their cave.
FOUR
LATER THAT MORNING Johann dug a grave for Kwame not far from where he had buried Beatrice eight years earlier. Maria did not help. The girl was still in a state of shock and was incapable of doing anything. While Johann was depositing Kwame’s body in its permanent resting place, Maria was sitting with her back against the trunk of a large tree, gently rocking back and forth. She was holding the Beatrice figurine with one hand and clutching the Saint Michael amulet around her neck with the other.
Afterward, Maria showed no interest when Johann suggested that they go down to the pond and check on Gretel. She did not touch her lunch, nor did she respond to any of Johann’s attempts to cheer her up. Throughout the afternoon Maria sat by herself in the cave, over against one of the walls, with her eyes open but expressionless. Once her face contorted in fear, and she screamed. When Johann rushed over and asked her what was wrong, Maria ignored him. Instead she stared straight ahead, and mumbled to herself.
Johann prepared all her favorite foods for dinner and spread them out in front of her in the cave. The child managed to say “Thank you but I’m not hungry” in a tiny, faraway voice before retreating again into her inner, private world.
Maria did not object or resist when Johann picked her up that evening, moving her from the cave wall to her mat. She lay there on her back, her eyes staring fixedly at the ceiling. Occasionally tears would form in her eyes, roll out sideways, and run down her cheeks into her ears.
Johann’s grief over Kwame and his natural questions about the meaning of his friend’s appearance, after all these years, in their island realm, were pushed aside by his concern for Maria. At first he told himself that her total withdrawal was probably not that unusual a reaction for a child, that she was simply protecting herself until she could deal rationally with all the horrible events of the last few days. But when she showed no signs of improvement by evening, Johann’s concern changed to alarm.
Lying beside her on their mats, hours after they both would normally have been asleep, Johann periodically cast furtive glances in Maria’s direction, verifying that she was still awake. In between the glances, Johann thought pessimistically about their future life together, wondering how he would cope with Maria if she were permanently damaged psychologically by what had happened. It was not a comforting vision. Despite his attempts to force himself to focus on more pleasant subjects, Johann became more and more depressed and angry as the hours passed and Maria still did not fall asleep.
Finally; a few hours before daybreak, Maria’s eyes closed and her body relaxed into the rhythmic breathing of sleep. An exhausted and frustrated Johann rose from his mat and left the cave. He walked over to where he had buried Kwame that morning, allowed himself some fond memories and a few tears of grief beside the grave of his friend, and then proceeded across the small open area to Beatrice’s grave.
Johann knelt down on the ground and clasped his hands in front of him. “I do not know to whom I should address this plea,” he said out loud, “but I need some help. So God, or alien host, or quasi-Beatrice, or whoever might be listening, please hear what I have to say… I do not know what I’m supposed to do with Maria. I have no experience with children in situations like this. But I do know that I can’t raise a mentally disturbed child, by myself, all alone on this alien island. I’m not Job, nor do I have any desire to be. Life, in order to be worth living, must have some happiness. And some hope. Otherwise, it makes no sense at all.”
Johann stopped, looked up at the dark ceiling far above him, and then stood up. He spread out his arms. “Does anyone hear me?” he shouted. “Does anyone even care about us? I am Johann, the girl is Maria. We are here together on this island, not knowing where we are or what we are doing here… We can’t go on forever like this. And I can’t bear Maria’s pain… Help me, oh please, help me now!”
His shouts died out in the darkness of the night. Johann searched the sky for more than a minute for some kind of a sign. He saw nothing. Then he shrugged and turned around.
“Johann?” he heard a little girl’s voice say. “Are you all right?”
Maria’s silhouette was standing on the path that led to their cave. He hurried over to her and they embraced. “Your shouting woke me up,” she said. “I came out to see what was going on.”
“Are you feeling better?” he asked, astonished at both her presence and her demeanor.
“A little,” she said with a yawn. “I’m really tired… But I don’t dare think about either Hansel or that man Kwame. His body was absolutely—”
Maria stopped in mid-sentence. She was staring at something on the other side of Johann. “Look, Johann,” she said. “There’s a light coming this way.”
Johann spun around and looked where Maria was pointing. High in the spacecraft sky a ribbon of light was approaching their island. When it drew close enough that Johann and Maria could just barely make out the tiny, sparkling, dancing particles inside its structure, the ribbon suddenly plummeted, landing somewhere close to the beach.
At first Johann was disappointed. “Our boat,” Maria said. “I think it landed near our boat.”
They walked carefully down the pathway and then along the beach toward the grove where Johann had been building the boat. The ribbon of light rose in the air a minute or so before their arrival. It hovered twenty meters above them for only a few seconds, and then zoomed off in the dir
ection from which it had come. Johann stared at the ribbon as it grew smaller and smaller. Maria kept walking toward the boat.
“Come here, Johann,” he heard her yell exultantly. “The ribbon has painted our boat.”
She was correct. When Johann burst into the clearing, he saw that their large rowboat had been painted white, with a rich red stripe decorating the edges. Now this is an unmistakable sign, Johann said to himself, holding the excited girl in his arms.
THEY SPENT THREE days preparing to depart. Maria was totally consumed by the activity. She behaved normally during the days. Only at night did the child show any residual signs of the terror that had overwhelmed her following their discovery of Kwame’s body. She asked that Johann move his mat over to where she could hold his hand while she was sleeping. He complied willingly.
Johann was busy planning their voyage. He surveyed all their possessions, making mental notes about what was essential, what would be useful, et cetera. He also estimated the amount of gravity in their worldlet by measuring the length of time it took for objects to reach the lake when dropped from the cliff, on the far side of their island. He then calculated how much weight the boat would be able to carry and shared his results with Maria.
She did not like what he told her. From the beginning Maria had insisted that Gretel should ride with them, in the boat, so that her aquatic friend would not be in any danger from the nozzlers. Johann argued that Gretel could swim beside them, and that he could protect her, if necessary; by using his oars as weapons. “Otherwise,” Johann told Maria, “we will not be able to take enough food or other necessities. Gretel is very heavy”
When Johann told Maria that she would be forced to leave behind all her toys to make room for Gretel, the girl simply refused to accept Johann’s engineering judgment. She told Johann instead that she had looked at the boat and that, in her opinion, there was plenty of room inside for everything on their list, including Gretel.
Johann carefully explained to Maria that it was total weight he was worried about, not the volume of material that the boat could contain. She remained intransigent. The exasperated Johann decided that he would conduct an engineering experiment to prove his case to the child. Besides, he rationalized to himself, she’ll learn something from all this.
After simulating the weight of all their provisions and necessary equipment, including the “minimum list” of Maria’s toys, by stacking dirt and rocks in the boat (Maria carefully supervised the process to make certain that Johann was not biasing the results), he then took Gretel out of the pond and carried her to the boat. Once Gretel was inside, Johann pushed the boat into deeper water and then climbed in himself. The boat sank almost immediately. Gretel thought the entire experiment was a game and tried to frolic in the water with Maria. The girl was angry and disappointed, but at least she understood the point that Johann had been making. She helped him bail the water out of the boat and reluctantly agreed that Gretel could swim beside them while they traveled.
The day before they were scheduled to leave, Johann and Maria toured their island one final time, staring out at the lake from every coign of vantage and attempting to discover some kind of landmark that they might have missed previously. There was nothing but unbroken water in every direction.
They had no idea what direction to go in the boat. Maria favored rowing along a line perpendicular to Potsdam on the beach, primarily because she had concluded that Kwame must have come from that direction. Johann, standing beside his ward on the top of the island’s summit and seeing nothing as he looked around, admitted to himself that he had no reason to favor any particular direction.
Toward the end of the day they took everything that was going with them except for their sleeping mats and carefully packed the boat. Back in the near empty cave, Johann and Maria chatted excitedly, both wondering if their lives would be irrevocably changed by the events of the following day.
“We may end up returning to this island after all,” Johann said just before they stretched out on the mats. “That’s what happened to your father. He built a boat and took off one morning, but he came back the next day.”
Johann had never mentioned Yasin’s brief attempt to depart from the island to Maria before, and he was not completely prepared to merge this new story with his fabricated history of the life that Yasin, Beatrice, and he had shared. Nevertheless, he stumbled through Maria’s questions without too many inconsistencies. What he wanted her to understand was that they were not necessarily leaving the island forever.
“If we reach a place where we have eaten half our food,” he said, “and still have no possible destination in sight, it will be prudent for us to return to our island. We have no guarantee that there exists any other place in this sphere where we can survive.”
Johann remained awake for an hour or so after Maria fell asleep. He found himself having mixed emotions about their departure. This island has provided a good life for us for many years, he thought. We have created a comfortable existence for ourselves.
As he lay there, reflecting, Johann recalled the other great transitions in his life—his decision to move from Earth to Mars, his departure from Valhalla, the death of Beatrice and the birth of Maria, and his return to the island from Whiteland with the infant Maria. I guess change is the only certainty in life, he thought. We resist change, but it comes anyway, sometimes in overwhelming bursts. We struggle to achieve stability between the major upheavals. Yet we know that some future change will utterly destroy any equilibrium we establish.
FIVE
MARIA WAS UP before dawn. She had already rolled up her mat, and bound it with their makeshift twine, before Johann even opened his eyes.
“Come on, lazybones,” she said to him. “You said yourself that we wanted to have an early start so that we could increase our chances of finding something before nightfall.”
Johann and Maria ate fruit and grain for breakfast and were down beside Gretel’s pond before the day was even one hour old. Maria fed Gretel the last of the fish in the bucket beside the pond and then motioned for her to come over to them. Johann waded into the pond and picked the aquatic creature up in his arms.
Since the boat had been packed the previous day, there was not much that needed to be done before they left. Johann dropped Gretel in the lake, placed Maria in her spot in the boat, and pushed it off the sand. Once the boat was floating in the water Johann lit the small torch he had carefully constructed on the prow Then he climbed into the boat and started rowing with the larger pair of oars.
Gretel swain circles around the boat. “I had a long talk with her yesterday,” Maria said, “while you were packing everything. I told her that we were going on a big trip… I think she understood.”
Johann’s strong, regular strokes with the oars propelled them swiftly through the water. The island receded behind them. After a couple of hours, when Johann declared a snack break, they could still see the outline of the island, but could no longer distinguish any of its features.
Maria glanced in every direction while taking a bite of the brown carrotlike tuber that was her favorite vegetable from the island. “I don’t see anything else out there,” she said to Johann. “I thought that by now we would find something.”
Up until this point Gretel had been swimming either behind or beside their boat. While Johann and Maria were snacking, Gretel began jumping out of the water, looking at them and squealing with each leap. She circled the boat twice and then took off to the left, making a sixty-degree angle with the direction the boat had been traveling before the break. When Gretel was about fifty meters away, she breached the water again with a vertical jump that carried her completely out of the lake.
“Gretel is signaling to us, Johann,” Maria said. “She wants us to follow her.”
Johann did not argue. He thought it was extremely unlikely that this alien aquacreature actually had any idea why Maria and he were taking this voyage. He was willing to follow Gretel, however, because he didn’t have
any preferred direction in mind.
Gretel kept the same general heading for most of the next hour. As the island became a speck and then disappeared from his view altogether, Johann attempted to track their position using both Maria’s superb eyes and the stationary artificial light source above them as references. He marked their estimated path with his knife on a roll of thin bark that he had prepared before they departed. When Maria admitted that the island was approaching the limit of even her vision, Johann stopped rowing and pulled his oars back into the boat.
“Maria,” Johann said in a serious voice, “we have reached a very important decision point in our journey,” He motioned for her to come over beside him to look at the map. “This map shows the approximate positions of our boat, the island, and the light above us. I could navigate back to the island from any point near where we are at the present. However, once we are out of sight of the island, our ability to return there will depend upon how accurately I have assessed the direction and distance of our additional travel. There will then be some risk that we might not be able to find our way back to the island.”
Rama: The Omnibus Page 224
