Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  TWO

  He woke in the morning with the first glow of light. His left arm was crooked around the tiller to hold it even though he had moored it with a wire. The first thing he checked was the heading. It had drifted some and he sat up to correct it and then found that his left arm was cramped. He shook it. It would not loosen so he gave it a few minutes to come right while he unlashed the tiller and brought them around to the right bearing. He was pretty sure he knew the setting even though he could feel that the current had changed. The raft cut across the shallow waves more at this new angle. Foam broke over the deck and the swell was deeper and the planking groaned but he held to it.

  The left arm would not uncramp. The cold of the night and sleeping on it had done this. He hoped the warmth later would loosen the muscles though he knew it was probably because his body was not getting enough food or the right food. The arm would just have to come loose on its own. He massaged it. The muscles jumped under his right hand and after a while he could feel a tingling all down the arm although that was probably from rubbing the salt in, he knew.

  There was nothing on his lines. He drew in the bait but it had been nibbled away. He kept himself busy gathering seaweed with the gaff and resetting the lines with the weed but he knew it was not much use and he was trying to keep his mind off the thirst. It had been bad since he woke up and was getting worse as the sun rose. He searched for the Skyhook to take his mind off his throat and the raw puffed-up feel in his mouth but he could not see it.

  He checked the bearing whenever he remembered it but there was a buzzing in his head that made it hard to tell how much time had passed. He thought about the Swarmers and how much he wanted one. The Skimmers were different but they had left him here now and he was not sure how much longer he could hold the bearing or even remember what the bearing was. The steady hollow slap of the waves against the underside of the raft soothed him and he closed his eyes against the sun.

  He did not know how long he slept, but when he woke his face burned and his left arm had come free. He lay there feeling it and noticed a new kind of buzzing. He looked around for an insect—even though he had not seen any for many days—and then cocked his head up and felt the sound coming out of the sky. Miles away a dot drifted across a cloud. The airplane was small and running on props, not jets. Warren got to his feet with effort and waved his arms. He was sure they would see him because there was nothing else in the sea and he would stick out if he could just keep standing. He waved and the plane kept going straight and he thought he could see under it something jumping in the water after its shadow had passed. Then the plane was a speck and he lost the sound of it and he finally stopped waving his arms although it had not really come to him yet that they had not seen him. He sat down heavily. He was panting from the waving and then without noticing it for a while he began crying.

  After a time he checked the bearing again, squinting at the sun and judging the current. He sat and watched and did not think.

  The splash and thump startled him out of a fever dream.

  The Skimmer darted away, plunging into a wave and out the other side with a turning twist of its aft fins.

  A cylinder like the others rolled across the deck. He scrambled to catch it. The rolled sheet inside was ragged and uneven.

  WAKTPL OGO SHIMA

  WSW WSW CIRCLE ALAPMTO GUNJO

  GEHEN WSW WSW

  SCHLECT SCHLECT YOUTH UNSSTOP NONGO

  LUCK LOTS

  Now instead of NONGO there was OGO. Did they think this was the opposite? Again WSW and again CIRCLE. Another island? The misspelled SCHLECT, if that was what it was, and repeated. A warning? What point could there be in that when he had not seen a Swarmer in days? If UNS was the German we, then UNSSTOP might be we stop. The line might mean bad youth we stop not go. And it might not. But GEHEN WSW WSW meant go west south-west or else everything else made no sense at all, and he had been wrong ever since the island. There was Japanese in it too but he had never crewed on a ship where it was spoken and he didn’t know any. SHIMA. He remembered the city, Hiroshima and wondered if shima was “town” or “river” or something geographical. He shook his head. The last line made him smile. The Skimmers must have been in contact with something well enough to know a salute at the end was a human gesture. Or was that what they meant? The cold thought struck him that this might be goodbye. Or, looking at it another way, that they were telling him he needed lots of luck. He shook his head again.

  That night he dreamed about the eyes and blood and fin fluid of the Swarmers, about swimming in it and dousing his head in it and about water that was clear and fresh. When he woke, the sun was already high and hot, the sail billowed west. He got the heading close to what he could remember and then crawled into the shadow of the sail, as he had done the days before.

  He had kept his clothes on all the time on the raft and they were rags now. They kept off the sun still but were caked with salt and rubbed in the cuts and stung when he moved. At his neck and on his hands were black patches where the skin had peeled away and then burned again. He had worn a kind of hat he made before from Swarmer skin and bone and it was good shade but it had gone overboard in the storm.

  Warren thought about the message but could make no more sense of it. He scratched his beard and found it had a crust of salt in it like hoarfrost. The salt was in his eyebrows too and he leaned over the side facedown in the water and scrubbed it away. He peered downward at the descending blades of green light and the dark shadow of the raft tapering away like a steep pyramid into the shifting murky darkness. He thought he saw something moving down there but he could not be sure.

  He was getting weak now. He caught some more seaweed and used it as bait on the lines. The effort left him trembling. He set the heading and sat in the shade.

  He woke with a jerk and there was splashing near the raft. Skimmers. They leaped into the noonday glare and beyond them was a brown haze. He blinked and it was an island. The wind had picked up and the canvas pulled full-bellied toward the land.

  He sat numb and tired at the tiller and brought the raft in toward the island, running fast before the wind and cutting the waves and sending foam over the deck. There was a lagoon. Surf broke on the coral reefs hooking around the island. The land looked to be about a kilometer across, wooded hills and glaring white beaches. The Skimmers moved off to the left, and Warren saw a pale space in the lagoon that looked like a passage.

  He slammed the tiller over full and the raft yawed and bucked against the waves that were coming harder now. The deck groaned and the canvas luffed, but the raft came into the pocket of the pale space and then the waves took it through powerfully and fast. Beyond the crashing of surf on the coral he sailed close to the wind to keep away from the dark blotches in the shallows, and then turned toward shore. The Skimmers were gone now, but he did not notice until the raft tugged on a sandbar and he looked around, judging the distance to the beach. He was weak and it would be stupid to risk anything this close. He stood up with a grunt and jumped heavily on the free side of the raft. It slewed and then broke free of the sandbar and the wind blew it fifty meters more. He got his tools and stood on the raft, hesitating as though leaving it after all this time was hard to imagine. Then he swore at himself and stepped off.

  He swam slowly until his feet hit sand and then took slow steps up to the beach, careful to keep his balance, so he did not see the man come out of the palms. Warren pitched forward onto the sand and tried to get up. The sand felt hard and hot against him. He stood again with pains in his legs and the man was standing nearby, Chinese or maybe Filipino. He said something to Warren and Warren asked him a question and they stared at each other. Warren waited for an answer, and when he saw there was not going to be one he held out his right hand, palm up. In the silence they shook hands.

  THREE

  For a day he was weak and could not walk far. The Chinese brought him cold food in tin cans and coconut milk. They talked at each other but neither one knew a single
word the other did and soon they stopped. The Chinese pointed to himself and said “Gijan” or something close to it, so Warren called him that.

  It looked as though Gijan had drifted here in a small lifeboat. He wore clothes like gray pajamas and had two cases of canned food.

  Warren slept deeply and woke to a distant booming. He stumbled down to the beach, looking around for Gijan. The Chinese was standing waist-deep in the lagoon. He pointed a pistol into the water and fired, making a loud bang but not kicking up much spray. Warren watched as slim white fish floated up, stunned. Gijan picked them from the water and put them in a palm frond he carried. He came ashore smiling and held out one of the fish to Warren. Its eyes bulged.

  “Raw?” Warren shook his head. But Gijan had no matches.

  Warren pointed to the pistol. Gijan took the medium caliber automatic and hefted it and looked at him. “No, I mean, give me a shell.” He saw it was pointless, talking. He made a gesture of things coming out of the muzzle and Gijan caught it and fished a cartridge out of his pocket. Gijan took the fish up on the sand as they started flopping in the palm frond, waking up from the stunning.

  Warren gathered dry brush and twigs and mixed them and dug a pit for the mixture with his hands. He still had his knife and some wire. He forced open the cartridge with them. He mixed the gunpowder with the wood. He had been watching Gijan the night before and the man was not using fire, just eating out of cans. Warren found some hardwood and rubbed the wire along it quickly while Gijan watched, frowning at first. The fish were dead and gleamed in the sun.

  Warren was damned if he was going to eat raw fish now that he was on land. He rubbed the wire harder, bracing the wood between his knees and drawing the wire quickly back and forth. He felt it warming in his hands. When he was sweating and the wire was both burning and biting into his hands, he knelt beside the wood and pressed the searing wire into it. The powder fizzled and sputtered for a moment and then with a rush it caught, the twigs snapped and the fire made its own pale yellow glow in the sun. Gijan smiled.

  Warren had felt a dislike of using the gun to get the fish. He thought about it as he and Gijan roasted them on sticks, but the thought went away as he started eating them and the rich crisp flavor burst in his mouth. He ate four of them in a row without stopping to drink some of the coconut milk Gijan had in tin cans. The hunger came on him suddenly, as if he had just remembered food, and it did not go away until he finished six fish and ate half the coconut meat. Then he thought again about using the gun that way but it did not seem so bad.

  Gijan tried to describe something, using his hands and drawing pictures in the sand. A ship, sinking. Gijan in a boat. The sun coming into the sky seven times. Then the island. Boat broken up on the coral, but Gijan swimming beside it and getting it to the shore, half sunken.

  Warren nodded and drew his own story. He did not show the Swarmers or the Skimmers except at the shipwreck, because he did not know how to tell the man what it was like and also he was not sure how Gijan would like the idea of eating Swarmer. Warren was not sure why this hesitation came into his head but he decided to stick with it and not tell Gijan too much about how he survived.

  In the afternoon Warren made a hat for himself and walked around the island. It was flat most of the way near the beach with a steep outcropping of brown rock where the ridgeline of the island ran down into the sea. There were palms and scrub brush and sea grass and dry stream beds. He found a big rocky flat space on the southern flank of the island and squinted at it awhile. Then he went back and brought Gijan to it and made gestures of picking out some of the pale rocks and carrying them.

  The man caught the idea on the second try. Warren scratched out SOS in the sand and showed it to him. Gijan frowned, puzzled. He made his own sign with a stick and Warren could not understand it. There were four lines like the outline of a house and a crossbar. Warren thumped the sand next to the SOS and said “Yes!” and thumped it again.

  He was pretty sure SOS was an international symbol but the other man simply stared at him. The silence got longer. There was tension in the air. Warren could not understand where it came from. He did not move. After a moment Gijan shrugged and went off to collect more of the light-colored rocks.

  They laid them out across the stony clearing, letters fifty meters tall. Warren suspected the airplane he had seen was searching for survivors of Gijan’s ship, which had gone down nearby, and not the Manamix. It was funny Gijan had not thought of making a signal but then he did not think of making a fire either.

  The next morning Warren drew pictures of fishing and found that Gijan had not tried it. Warren guessed the man was simply waiting to be picked up and was a little afraid of the big silent island and even more of the empty sea. Gijan’s hands were softer than Warren’s and he guessed maybe the man had been mainly a desk worker. When the canned food ran out Gijan would have tried fishing but not before. So far all he had done was climb a few palms and knock down coconuts. The palms were stunted here though, and there was not much milk in the coconuts. They would need water.

  Warren worked the metal in the leftover cans and made fishhooks. Gijan saw what he was doing and went away into the north part of the island.

  Warren was surveying the lagoon, looking for deep spots near the shore when he found the raft moored in a narrow cove. Gijan must have found it drifting and tied it there. The boards looked worn and weak and the whole thing—cracked tiller, bleached canvas, rusted wire lashings—carried the feel of an old useless wreck. Warren studied it for a while and then turned away.

  Gijan found him at a rough shelf of rock that stuck out over the lagoon. Gijan was carrying a box Warren had not seen. He put the box down and gestured to it, smiling slightly, proud. Warren looked inside. There was a tangle of fishing line inside, some hooks, a rod, a diving mask, fins, a manual in Chinese or something like it, a screwdriver, and some odds and ends. Warren looked at the man and wished he knew how to ask a question. The box was the same kind that the canned food was in, so Warren guessed Gijan had brought all this in the boat.

  They went down to the beach and Gijan drew some more pictures and that was the story that came out of it. He did not draw anything about hiding the box away but Warren could guess that he had. Gijan must have seen the raft coming and in a hurry, afraid, he would snatch up what he could and hide it. Then when he saw that Warren was no trouble he came out and brought the food. He left the rest behind just to be careful. He was still being careful when he used the pistol to fish. Maybe that was a way to show Warren he had it without making any threats.

  Warren smiled broadly and shook his hand and insisted on carrying the box back to their camp. Land crabs skittered away from their feet as they walked, two men with a strange silence between them.

  Warren fished in the afternoon. The canned goods would not last long with two of them eating and Warren was more hungry than he could ever remember. His body was waking up after being half dead and it wanted food and water, more water than they could get out of the coconuts. He would have to do something about that. He thought about it while he fished, using worms from the shady parts of the island, and then he saw moving shadows in the lagoon. They were big fish but they twisted on their turns in a way he remembered. He watched and they did not break water but he was sure.

  He began to notice the thirst again after he had caught two fish. He left a line with bait and went inland and knocked down three coconuts but they did not yield much of the sweet milk. He took the fish back to camp where Gijan was keeping the fire going. Warren sat and watched him gut the fish, not making a good job of it. He felt the way he had in the first days on the raft. New facts, new problems. This island was just a bigger raft with more to take from but you had to learn the ways first.

  Gijan’s odd box of equipment had some rubber hose that had sheared off some missing piece of equipment. Warren stared at the collection in the box for a while. He began idly making a cover for one of the large tin cans, fitting pieces of metal together
. Crimping them over the lip of the can and around the edge of the hose, he found that they made a pretty fair seal. He made a holder for the can, working patiently. Gijan watched him with interest. Warren sent him to get seawater in a big can. He rigged the hose to pass through a series of smaller cans. With the seawater he filled the big can and sealed the tight cover and put it on the fire. The men watched the water boil and then steam came out of the hose. Gijan saw the idea and put seawater into the small cans. It cooled the hose so that at the end the thin steam faded into a dribble of fresh water.

  They smiled at each other and watched the slow drip. By late afternoon they had their first drink. It was brackish but not bad.

  Warren used gestures and sketches in the sand to ask Gijan about the assortment of equipment. Had he been on a research vessel? A fast skimship?

  Gijan drew the profile of an ordinary freighter, even adding the loading booms. Gijan pointed at Warren, so he drew an outline of the Manamix. With pantomime and gestures and imitating sounds they got across their trades. Warren worked with machines and Gijan was some kind of trader. Gijan drew a lopsided map of the Pacific and pointed to a speck not big enough or in the right place to be any island Warren knew about. Gijan sketched in nets and motorboats and Warren guessed they had been using a freighter to try for tuna. It sounded stupid. Until now he had not thought about the islands isolated for years now and how they would get food. You could not support a population by fishing from the shore. Most crops were thin in the sandy soil. So he guessed Gijan’s island had armored a freighter and sent it out with nets, desperate. If it was a big enough island they might have an airplane and some fuel left and maybe that was the one he saw.