The noise was deafening. Each of the adoclynes guiding Johann’s raft, plus most of the rest of the nozzlers in the intersection, issued periodic blasts, creating a terrible cacophony that was almost painful. Dr. Jailani kept his hands over his ears the entire time.
Three fresh pairs of nozzler claws suddenly appeared on the back side of their raft and an instant later the old ones vanished. As Johann and Dr. Jailani entered a new canal three-fourths of the way around the dodecahedron and left the rotary intersection behind, the noise abated. Johann noticed immediately that the traffic ,was very sparse on this branch of the canal system. He suddenly thought about Maria, whom he had not seen since her raft entered the grotto, and turned to ask Dr. Jailani a question.
The man was on his knees at the back side of the raft, facing away from Johann. He was conducting what was obviously a serious conversation with a trailing nozzler whose tentacles and claws were elevated half a meter above the canal surface. Johann chose not to say anything and instead simply watched the amazing communication for a minute or two.
The canal on which they were traveling split into two parts. Their raft took the left fork, an extremely narrow, poorly illuminated passageway with a very low ceiling. A few hundred meters farther along, this tributary turned to the right and then widened into a pool. Maria’s raft was already in the pool, drifting back and forth next to a thick seaweed gate under which the canal water continued to flow. Maria greeted Johann with a joyful shout and started peppering him with questions from afar. Johann returned her greeting and then, when the two rafts were much closer together, informed the girl that he didn’t know any more than she did.
“That man must know,” Maria said angrily, pointing at Dr. Jailani. “He’s one of them. He tricked me into the water so the nozzlers could grab me.”
Dr. Jailani acted as if he had not heard Maria’s comments. He waited until the two rafts were in contact before speaking. “You will continue from here without me,” he said. “The adoclynes will take you to your destination… You may join the girl on her raft now.”
“Where are we going?” Johann asked.
“You will be with the others,” Dr. Jailani replied in his monotone.
“Why are we here? What is going to happen to us?” Johann said.
Dr. Jailani ignored his questions. He picked up one of the two bundles and leaned over to place it on Maria’s raft. Johann grabbed the other bundle and stepped carefully across the narrow strip of water between them. Maria threw her arms around him.
Dr. Jailani’s raft moved away immediately. “The others know all the rules,” he said. “They will explain them to you. Do not violate the rules or the adoclynes will punish you severely.”
Two nozzler claws holding dead sea creatures that Johann had never before seen dropped their contents on Dr. Jailani’s raft. The man’s face brightened, the first exhibition of emotion from him that Johann had seen since they had entered the grotto. Dr. Jailani picked up the new food and began eating with gusto. He never looked again at Johann and Maria as his raft disappeared around the corner.
THEY HAD NO time to talk. Less than a minute after Dr. Jailani departed, one of the nozzlers who had been guiding Maria’s raft broke the surface, rolled over on its side, and began blasting with its clustered pearl organ. It made two loud, long sounds, and then paused. Three shorter blasts followed. An answer, two quick, sharp bass noises, came immediately from the other side of the seaweed gate. The adoclyne near Johann and Maria next emitted four more blasts in this order: short, long, long, short. At the conclusion of the set the heavy seaweed gate opened in the middle and the two sides pulled back against the rock walls. Johann and Maria’s raft passed through the open gate, which closed behind them only a few seconds later.
There was even less light in this section of the grotto. The narrow canal wandered slowly to the right, passing a large open room cut into the wall. Two nozzlers were resting on the lip of the room, their turquoise heads lying on the rock floor and their segmented carapaces partially beneath the surface of the canal. Inside the room Johann and Maria could see a dozen of the adoclynes, a few moving slowly around propelled by wave motion in the hundreds of cilia beneath their bodies. It was the first time that Johann had ever seen one of the creatures completely out of the water.
The nozzlers steering their raft and one of the two hanging on the lip of the room exchanged a few blasts before the latter slid into the water and started swimming toward the raft. Maria cringed and huddled against Johann as one of the new nozzler’s tentacles elevated, moved slowly over the boat, and dropped its claw gently down on Johann’s head. Although his heart was pumping furiously, Johann exhibited no fear. With a surprising deftness, the adoclyne picked up and let drop several hairs near the back of Johann’s head. Its curiosity satisfied, the creature retracted its tentacle and claw into the water, said something to its colleagues with three bass blasts, and swam back toward the room where it had been resting.
Johann and Maria started hearing a mixture of new and different noises they could not identify as their raft approached another canal intersection. In the middle of this much smaller junction, into which four canals, again separated by ninety degrees, emptied, was a solid rectangular block elevated half a meter above the surface of the water. Two huge nozzlers, facing in opposite directions, were sitting on the block. One of these nozzlers turned toward Johann and Maria’s raft and made two short sounds. Before any of their guiding adoclynes could reply, a long foghorn blast burst from the canal on their left. Johann recognized the sound immediately and goose bumps formed on both his arms. While he was trying to tell Maria that the foghorn noise could only have come from an elevark, a chorus of barks, hoots, and whistles issued from the canal on the right.
“The maskets,” Maria said excitedly “They’re here too!”
Johann could barely hear her, even though they were standing next to each other on the raft, because of the terrible din that had now erupted. What seemed like dozens of different animal sounds, including more barks, hoots, and an occasional foghorn blast, flooded the canal intersection, making it impossible for Johann and Maria to talk, or for the nozzlers to communicate. One of the two adoclyne sentries extended a tentacle toward a small black object in the center of the block and immediately thereafter a loud, shrill whistle could be heard above all the other multifarious sounds.
Johann and Maria’s raft eased toward the center of the intersection pool and then stopped altogether. Less than a minute later, with all the noises still continuing, the water in the canal that they had just traveled began to churn with the presence of nozzlers. They were swimming breathtakingly fast, and they were into the intersection and down the canals on the left and right in a matter of seconds.
The alarm whistle terminated, allowing Johann and Maria to hear more distinctly the other animal sounds, which had now changed character and seemed to be charged with pain and fear. Both the loudness and the frequency of the noises coming from the two canals diminished rapidly What could be heard was only an occasional plaintive cry or wail.
The nozzler police swam back through the intersection less than a minute after silence was restored. Immediately after they departed, a nozzler sentry again looked toward Johann and Maria’s raft and emitted two bass sounds. One of their steering adoclynes responded with a similar set and the raft moved away from the sentry block, heading for the canal directly opposite the one on which they had entered.
Even in the dim light Johann could see the fear in Maria’s eyes. He took the girl in his arms and gave her a consoling hug. “What’s going to happen now, Johann?” she asked in a soft, whimpering voice.
“I don’t know, Maria,” he replied. “But if Dr. Jailani is to be believed, I think we’ll soon see Vivien, Sister Nuba, and the children.”
“Then are we all prisoners of the nozzlers?” she asked.
“I guess so,” Johann said.
Meanwhile their raft moved slowly along the darkest, narrowest canal th
ey had yet encountered in the grotto. The ceiling here was so low that Johann dropped to his knees to avoid scraping his head against it. Soon thereafter they heard what both Johann and Maria were certain was the mournful wail of a young human child.
“That can’t be Jomo,” Maria whispered as the sounds became louder. “I have heard his cry many times… This one is different.”
The narrow waterway split into two parts and their raft followed the canal to the right. The child’s cry reached a maximum at the junction and then dropped off rapidly as they wound through the rock. A few minutes later the raft pulled over against one of the walls and stopped.
Maria saw the tiny opening, barely wide enough for a single adult human, long before Johann did. Since the raft was no longer moving, they both concluded that they were supposed to disembark. Maria entered the tiny passageway first. Johann followed, struggling to squeeze through with the two bundles in his arms. As soon as both of them had their feet on the rock floor, their raft departed.
Once Johann became temporarily wedged between the walls on either side of the path. After he freed himself Maria and he both laughed. “You see,” she said, “there are some advantages to being little.”
The voice they heard immediately was music to their ears. “Maria? Brother Johann? Is that you?” Sister Nuba said.
“Yes, Nuba,” Johann boomed, his excitement raising his voice by several decibels. “We’re coming.”
“Sister Vivien, children,” they heard Nuba shout. “Come quickly. It’s a miracle God has answered our prayers. Maria and Brother Johann have arrived.”
Vivien was waiting for him when Johann squeezed through the final gap. He held her body against his for what seemed like an eternity.
THREE
THE JOY AND excitement of the reunion lasted for several days. The children had forgotten the unpleasant circumstances associated with Maria’s previous departure and were eager to renew their friendship. Maria regaled Beatrice, Keiko, and Jomo with tales of the maskets, sometimes embellishing the facts with her precocious imagination. Vivien and Sister Nuba told Johann how the nozzlers had grabbed the children while they were playing in the bay and the other details of what had happened to them since their separation. When Vivien referred for the first time to the “mystery man” who could somehow communicate with the nozzlers and had helped them get settled in the grotto, Johann explained who Dr. Jailani was and the reasons why the Malaysian scientist had originally come to Valhalla. Johann also told them that he suspected Dr. Jailani had been part of the adoclyne plot to kidnap Maria, although he admitted that he had no hard evidence to corroborate his accusation.
Johann was delighted to learn that in spite of the difficulty of their living conditions, Vivien’s pregnancy, which was now in its fifth month, continued to be normal.
“I must have been created to be a mother,” she laughed. “I have never had any problems, not even with labor or delivery.”
“I really can’t see that much difference,” he said, patting her stomach affectionately. Johann grinned. “Except maybe your breasts are a little larger.”
The first few days, when everyone else was asleep, Johann and Vivien dragged the seaweed mats provided by the adoclynes over against the opposite wall and made love with a quiet, subdued passion that amused Vivien.
“You don’t have to be that gentle, giant Johann,” she said with a coy smile after their second time together. “I assure you that your child will not be injured even if there’s a little more vigor in your lovemaking.”
Vivien, Sister Nuba, and the children had already developed a daily routine before Johann and Maria arrived. Because the glowing lights in their room always remained at substantially the same level, there was really no explicit way to gauge the passage of time. The only external events that occurred with any regular frequency were the deliveries of food and water by the adoclynes, which came approximately every eleven hours (a consensus estimate from the two women), and the appearance of the nozzler cleaner who emptied their crude toilet and collected their garbage between every sixteenth and seventeenth food delivery. The food, mostly seaweed with an occasional piece of meat from an unknown sea creature, came wrapped in a bundle tied to a rope pulley that ran along the top of one of the rock walls on the side of the tiny passageway between their room and the canal. The water arrived in a similar fashion, in a long cylindrical bucket hanging from a seaweed rope.
“But why is it necessary for them to send us water?” Johann asked. “Why don’t we just fill the bucket from the canal?”
“One of the rules,” Sister Nuba informed him, “is that we must stay completely inside our room here. Dr. Jailani was very explicit. Even the passageway is off limits.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Johann protested. “What if we want to take an extra bath or need some more water for some other reason?”
“The water allocations are really quite generous,” Vivien said. “And they have made it obvious that they do intend for us to follow their rules. The children disobeyed us soon after we arrived,” Vivien added, “and one of the nozzler patrols caught Jomo kicking his feet in the canal. He was pinched on the shoulder, enough to make him bleed, and Dr. Jailani showed up no less than an hour later. He made it clear that a repeat incident would have much more painful consequences.”
“I think that the nozzlers don’t want us to see what is happening on the canal,” Sister Nuba suggested.
“What are the other rules?” Johann asked.
“Only one other of any major consequence,” Vivien answered. “When the cleaning nozzler arrives, with or without Dr. Jailani, we are all to stand against the far wall, and not interfere in any way with the performance of its duties. Dr. Jailani said this rule is for our own protection. Cleaning our toilets and taking away our garbage, he informed us, is assigned to juvenile adoclynes who might interpret anything we do as hostile.”
The women used the food deliveries to define and divide up their day The sound of the food and water moving along the pulley was the morning alarm. Vivien and Sister Nuba woke the children, fed them breakfast, and then spent two or three hours in what Nuba creatively called “oral schooling.” After school was exercise and games. Even though they had brought no toys with them, the adult women and the three children used their imaginations to make up games that required a minimum of props. A small lunch, saved from the morning delivery was followed by a short nap, “religious discussion,” and then free play The next food and water delivery started the dinner preparations. After dinner was a story period, which lasted until it was time for bed.
Johann and Maria’s arrival upset the routine somewhat, but by the third or fourth day they too had accepted the established regimen. The existence of Maria’s new figurines, however, became a major source of contention during the games and play periods. Maria, well aware of the fact that she possessed the only desirable toys, quickly took control of the children’s activities. She meted out rewards—playing with one or more of the figurines—according to her own caprice. Within a few days, she had purposely driven a wedge between her nemesis Beatrice and the other children.
Several days after their arrival, Johann was helping Vivien and Sister Nuba strip the inedible parts off a spherical sea creature when the disconsolate Beatrice came over to them with tears in her eyes. Across the room, Keiko, Maria, and Jomo were engaged in animated play with a tusker, an elevark, and one of the two maskets. “She won’t let me play,” Beatrice said angrily. “She says I can’t even touch her toys without her permission.”
Vivien pointed at the cache of small rocks against a nearby wall and suggested that Beatrice could play a game of checkers with either Johann or Sister Nuba, since all three of them were not needed in the dinner preparation.
Her mother’s suggestion did not mollify the girl. “I don’t want to play checkers,” she yelled. “It’s boring. I want to play with the figurines.”
Johann crossed the room to the other children. “What’s the proble
m, Maria?” he said evenly. “Why can’t Beatrice play with you?”
“She won’t follow the rules,” Maria replied.
“You always make the rules,” Beatrice shouted bitterly from across the room. “And my creature always dies first.”
Maria started to respond but Johann quickly reached into the middle of the group and snatched all the figurines. “I’m sorry; children,” he said, “but this game is over for today I’m going to keep these toys until we can determine a fair way for everyone to play with them.”
Maria’s eyes flashed with anger. “They’re my figurines, Johann,” she said. “You gave them to me.”
“Yes, I did, Maria,” Johann said. “But we’re in a different situation now. I can’t make any new ones, and none of the other children have equivalent toys. You must all share these somehow.”
Maria didn’t say anything but her eyes indicated she was not happy with his decision.
THE NEXT SCHEDULED day for their adoclyne hosts to clean the toilet and take away the garbage was the seventh day after Johann and Maria arrived. While the children were playing a blindfold tag game invented by Johann and Sister Nuba, the two women were explaining to Johann in detail what their nozzler visitor would be doing.
“Do you think we would even have a toilet if Dr. Jailani couldn’t communicate with them?” Vivien asked.
“We have no way of knowing,” Johann said. “But I’m reluctant to give that guy credit for anything.”
“You’re too hard on him, Johann,” Vivien said. “It’s obvious he’s been traumatized and brainwashed. The same thing might have happened to us under similar circumstances.”
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