Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  Gijan showed him the stuff in the box again. It was pretty banged up and salt-rusted, and Warren guessed it had been left years ago when the freighter was still working. In the years when the Swarmers were spreading Warren had a gun like everybody else in the crew, not in his own duffel where somebody might find it but in a locker of spare engine parts. Now that he thought about it, a lifeboat was a better place to stow a weapon, down in with some old gear nobody would want. When you needed a gun you would be on deck already and you could get to it easy.

  He looked at Gijan’s pinched face and tried to read it, but the man’s eyes were blank, just watching with a puzzled frown. It was hard to tell what Gijan meant by some of his drawings and Warren got tired of the whole thing.

  They ate coconuts at sundown. The green ones were like jelly inside. Gijan had a way of opening them using a stake wedged into the hard-packed ground. The stake was sharp and Gijan slammed the coconut down on it until the green husk split away. The hard-shelled ones had the tough white meat inside but not much milk. The palms were bent over in the trade winds and were short. Warren counted them up and down the beach and estimated how long the two men would take to strip the island. Less than a month.

  Afterward Warren went down to the beach and waded out. A current tugged at his ankles and he followed with his eyes the crinkling of the pale water where a deep current ran. It swept around the island toward the passage in the coral, the basin of the lagoon pouring out into the ocean under the night tide. Combers snarled white against the dark wedge of the coral ring and beyond was the jagged black horizon.

  They would have to get fish from the lagoon and lines from shore would not be enough. But that was only one of the reasons to go out again.

  In the dim moonlight he went back, past the fire where Gijan sat watching the hissing distiller and then into the scrub. Uphill Warren found a tree and stripped bark from it. He cut it into chips and mashed them on a rock. He was tired by the time he got a sour-smelling soup going on the fire. Gijan watched. Warren did not feel like trying to tell the man what he was doing.

  Warren tended the simmering and fell asleep and woke when Gijan bent over him to taste the can’s thick mash. Gijan made a face. Warren roughly yanked the can away, burning his own fingers. He shook his head abruptly and set the can where it would come to a rolling boil. Gijan moved off. Warren ignored him and fell back into sleep.

  This night mosquitoes found them. Warren woke and slapped his forehead, and each time in the fading orange firelight his hand was covered by a mass of squashed red-brown. Gijan grunted and complained. Toward morning they trudged back into the scrub and the mosquitoes left them and they curled up on the ground to sleep until the sun came through the canopy of fronds above.

  The lines Warren had left overnight were empty. The fishing was bound to be bad when you had no chance to play the line. They had more coconuts for breakfast and Warren checked the cooling mash he had made. It was thick and it stained wood a deep black. He put it aside without thinking much about how he could use it.

  In the cool of the morning he repaired the raft. The slow working of the tide had loosened the lashings and some of the boards were rotting. It would do for the lagoon, but as he worked he thought of the Swarmers crawling ashore at the last island. The big things had been slow and clumsy, and with Gijan’s pistol the men would have an advantage, but there were only two of them. They could never cover the whole island. If the Swarmers came the raft might be the only escape they had.

  He brought the fishing gear aboard and cast off. Gijan saw him and came running down the hard white sand. Warren waved. Gijan was excited and jabbering and his eyes rolled back and forth from Warren to the break in the reef. He pulled out his pistol and waved it in the air. Warren ran up the worn canvas sail and swung the boom around so that the raft peeled away from the passage and made headway along the beach, around the island. When he looked back Gijan was aiming the pistol at him.

  Warren frowned. He could not understand the man. After a moment when Gijan saw that he was running steady in the lagoon, the pistol came down. Warren saw the man put the thing back in his pocket and then set to work laying his lines. He kept enough wind in the sail to straighten the pull and move the bait so it would look as though it were swimming.

  Maybe he should have drawn a sketch for Gijan. Warren thought about it a moment and then shrugged. An aft line jerked as something hit it, and Warren forgot Gijan and his pistol and played in the catch.

  He took four big fish in the morning. One had the striped back and silvery belly of a bonito and the others he did not recognize. He and Gijan ate two and stripped and salted the others, and in the afternoon he went out again. Standing on the raft he could see the shadows of the big fish as they came into the lagoon. A Skimmer darted in the distance and he stayed away from it, afraid it would come for the trailing lines. After a while he remembered that they had never hit his lines in the ocean, so then he did not veer the raft when the Skimmer leaped high nearby, rolling over in that strange way. Gijan was standing on the glaring white beach, Warren noticed, watching. Another leap, splashing foam, and then a tube rattled on the boards of the raft.

  SHIMA STONES CROSSING SAFE YOUTH

  WORLD NEST UNSSPRACHEN SHIGANO YOU SPRACHEN YOUTH UM! HIRO SAFE NAGARE CIRCLE UNS SHIO WAIT

  WAIT YOU

  LUCK

  Warren came ashore with it and Gijan reached for the slick sheet. The man moved suddenly and Warren stepped back, bracing himself. The two stood still for a moment, staring at each other. Gijan’s face compressed and intent. Then in a controlled way Gijan relaxed, making a careless gesture with his hands and helped moor the raft. Warren moved the tube and sheet from one hand to the other and finally, feeling awkward, handed them to Gijan. The man read the words slowly, lips pressed together. “Shima,” he said. “Shio. Nagare. Umi.” He shook his head and looked at Warren, his lips forming the words again silently.

  They drew pictures in the sand. For SHIMA Gijan sketched the island and for UMI the sea around it. In the lagoon he drew wavy lines in the water and said several times, “Nagare.” Across the island he drew a line and then made swooping motions of bigness and said, “Hiro.”

  Warren murmured, “Wide island? Hiro shima?” but aside from blinking Gijan gave no sign that he understood. Warren showed him a rock for STONE and drew the Earth for WORLD, but he was not sure if that was what the words on the sheet meant jammed in with the others. What did blackening in the w of WORLD mean?

  The men spoke haltingly to each other over the booming on the reef. The clusters of words would not yield to a sensible plan and even if it had, Warren was not sure he could tell Gijan his part of it, the English smattering of words, or that Gijan could get across to him the foreign ones. He felt in Gijan a restless energy now, an impatience with the crabbed jumble of language. WAIT WAIT YOU and then LUCK. It seemed to Warren he had been waiting a long time now. Even though this message had more English and was clearer, there was no way for the Skimmers to know what language Warren understood, not unless he told them. Frowning over a diagram Gijan was drawing in the floury sand, he realized suddenly why he had made the bark mash last night.

  It took hours to write a message on the back of the sheet. A bamboo quill stabbed the surface, but if you held it right it did not puncture. The sour black ink dripped and ran, but by pinning the sheet flat in the sun he got it to dry without a lot of blurring.

  SPEAK ENGLISH. WILL YOUTH COME HERE? ARE WE SAFE FROM YOUTH ON ISLAND? SHIMA IS ISLAND IN ENGLISH. WHERE ARE YOU FROM? CAN WE HELP YOU? WE ARE FRIENDLY.

  LUCK

  Gijan could not understand any of it or at least he gave no sign. Warren took the raft out again at dusk as the wind backed into the north and ebbed into fitful breezes. The sail luffed and he had trouble bringing the raft out of the running lagoon currents and toward the spot where flickering shadows played across the white expanse of a sandbar. A Skimmer leaped and turned as he came near. He held the boom to catch the last
gusts of sunset wind, and when the shadows were under the raft he threw the tube into the water. It bobbed and began to drift out toward the passage to the sea as Warren waited, watching the shadows, wondering if they had seen it, knowing he could not now catch the tube with the raft before it reached the reef, and then a quick flurry of motion below churned the pale sand and a form came up ripping the smooth water as it leaped. The Skimmer flexed in air and hung for an instant, rolling, before it fell with a smack and was gone in an upwash of bright foam. The tube was gone.

  That night the mosquitoes came again and drove them into the rocky ground near the center of the island in the morning their hands were blood-streaked where they had slapped their faces and legs in the night and caught the fat mosquitoes partway through their eating.

  In the morning Warren went out again and laid his lines as early as possible. Near the sandbar there were many fish. One of them hit a line, and when Warren pulled it in the thing had deep-set eyes, a small mouth like a parrots beak, slimy gills, and hard blue scales. He pressed at the flesh and a dent stayed in it for a while, the way it did if you squeezed the legs of a man with leprosy or dropsy. The thing smelled bad as it warmed on the planks so he threw it back, pretty sure it was poisonous. It floated and a Skimmer leaped near it and then took the thing and was gone. Warren could see more Skimmers moving below. They were feeding on the poison fish.

  He caught two skipjack tuna and brought them ashore for Gijan to clean. The man was watching him steadily from the beach and Warren did not like it. The thing between him and the Skimmers was his, and he did not want any more of the stupid drawing and hand waving of trying to explain it to Gijan.

  He went into the palm grove where the fire crackled and got the diving mask he had seen in Gijan’s box. It was made for a smaller head, but with the rubber strap drawn tight he could ride it up against the bridge of his nose and make it fit. As he came back down to the beach Gijan said something but Warren went on to the raft and cast off, bearing in the southerly wind out toward the sandbar. He grounded the raft on the bar to hold it steady.

  He lay on the raft and peered down at the moving shapes. They were at least five fathoms down and they had finished off the poison fish. Seven Skimmers hovered over a dark patch, rippling their forefins where the bony ridges stuck out like thick fingers. Sunlight caught a glint from the thing they were working on and suddenly a gout of gray mist came up from it and broke into bubbles. It was steam.

  Warren lay halfway over the side of the raft and watched the regular puffs of steam billow up from the machine. Without thinking of the danger he slipped overboard and dove, swimming hard, pushing as deep as he could despite the tightness and burning in his chest. The Skimmers moved as they saw him and the machine became clearer. It was a pile of junk, pieces of a ship’s hull and deck collars and fittings of all sizes. Four batteries were mounted on one side and rust-caked cables led from them into the machine. There were other fragments and bits of worked metal and some of it he was sure was not made by men. Knobs of something yellow grew here and there, and in the wavering, rippling green light there was something about the form and shape of the thing that Warren recognized as right and yet he knew he had never seen anything like it before. There is a logic to a piece of equipment that comes out of the job it has to do and he felt that this machine was well shaped, as his lungs at last burned too much and he fought upward, all thought leaving him as he let the air burst from him and followed the silvery bubbles up toward the shifting, slanting blades of yellow-green sun.

  FOUR

  In the lagoon the water shaded from pale blue at the beach to emerald in the deep channel where the currents ran with the tides. Beyond the snarling reef the sea was a hard gray.

  Warren worked for five days in the slow dark waters near the sandbar. He double-anchored the raft so the deck was steady. That way he could write well on it with the bark mash and then dry the sheets the Skimmers brought up to him.

  Their first reply was not much better than the earlier messages, but he printed out in capital letters a simple answer and gradually they learned what he could not follow. Their next message had more English in it and less Japanese and German and fewer of the odd words made up out of parts of languages. There were longer stretches in it, too, more like sentences now than strings of nouns.

  The Skimmers did not seem to think of things acting but instead of things just being, so they put down names of objects in long rows as though the things named would react on each other, each making the other clearer and more specific and what the things did would be in the relations between them. It was a hard way to learn to think and Warren was not sure he knew what the impacted knots of words meant most of the time. Sometimes the chains of words said nothing to him. The blue forms below would flick across the bone-white sand in elaborate looping arabesques, turning over and over with their ventral fins flared, in designs that escaped him. When the sun was low at morning or at dusk he could not tell the Skimmers from their shadows, and the gliding long forms merged with their dark echoes on the sand in a kind of slow elliptical dance.

  He lay halfway off the raft and watched them, when he was tired from the messages; and peered through the mask, and something in their quick darting glide would come through to him. He would try then to ask a simple question. He wrote it out and dried it and threw it into the lagoon. Sometimes that was enough to cut through the jammed lines of endless nouns they had offered him and he would see a small thought that hung between the words in a space each word allowed but did not define. It was as if the words packed together still left a hole between them and the job was to see the hole instead of the blur around it. He watched the skimming grace they had down in the dusky emerald green but he could not sort it out.

  He went ashore at dusk each day. The catch from the trailing lines was good in the morning and went away in the afternoon. Maybe it had something to do with the Skimmers. The easy morning catch left him most of the day to study the many sheets they brought up to him and to work on his own halting answers.

  Gijan stood on the beach most of the day and watched. He did not show the pistol again when Warren went out. He kept the fire and the distiller going and they ate well. Warren brought the finished sheets ashore and kept them in Gijan’s box, but he could not tell the man much of what was in them, at first because lines in the sand and gestures were not enough and later because Warren did not know himself how to tell it.

  Gijan did not seem to mind not knowing. He tended the fire and knocked down coconuts and split them and gutted the catch and after a while asked nothing more. At times he would leave the beach for hours and Warren guessed he was collecting wood or some of the pungent edible leaves they had at supper.

  To Warren the knowing was all there was, and he was glad Gijan would do the work and not bother him. At noon beneath the high hard dazzle of the sky he ate little because he wanted to keep his head clear. At night, though, he filled himself with the hot moist fish and tin-flavored water. He woke to a biting early sun. The mosquitoes still stung but he did not mind it so much now.

  On the third day like this, he began to write down for himself a kind of patchwork of what he thought they meant. He knew as soon as he read it over that it was not right. He had never been any good with words. When he was married he did not write letters to his wife when he shipped out even if he was gone half a year. But this writing was a way of getting it down and he liked the act of scratching out the blunt lines on the backs of the Skimmer sheets.

  IN THE LONG TIMES BEFORE, THE EARLY FORMS WENT EASY IN THE WORLD, THEN ROSE UP LEAPING OUT OF THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, TO THE LAND, MADE THE TOOLS WE KNEW, STRUCK THE FIRE, MADE THE FIRE-HARDENED SAND WE COULD SEE THROUGH SO THAT WE COULD CUP THE LIGHT. THE CLOUDS OPEN, WE CAN SEE LIGHTS, LEARN THE DOTS ABOVE, WE SEE LIGHTS WE CANNOT REACH, EVEN THE HIGHEST JUMPER OF US CANNOT TOUCH THE LIGHTS THAT MOVE. WE CUP THE LIGHT, SCOOP IT UP, AND FIND THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY ARE SMALL AND HOT, BUT THERE IS ONE LIGHT THAT WE CUP TO US AND FIND IT
IS A STONE IN THE SKY. WE THINK OTHER LIGHTS ARE STONES IN SKY THOUGH FAR AWAY; WE SEE NO OTHER PLACE LIKE THE WORLD. WE SWIM AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERYTHING—IN THE WORLD, THE PLACE WHERE STONES WANT TO FALL—BUT THE FALLING FLOW TAKES THE STONES IN THE SKY, MAKES THEM CIRCLE US, CIRCLE FOREVER LIKE THE HUNTERS IN THE WORLD BEFORE THEY CLOSE FOR THE KILLING, SO THE STONES CANNOT STRIKE US IN THE NEST OF US, THE WORLD OF THE PEOPLE. WE THOUGHT THAT OURS WAS THE ONLY WORLD AND THAT ALL ELSE WAS COLD STONE OR BURNING STONE. AND AS WE CUPPED THE LIGHT NOT THINKING OF IT, WE SAW THE COLD STONE IN THE SKY GROW A LIGHT WHICH WENT ON, THEN OFF, THEN ON, AGAIN AND AGAIN, MOVING NOW STRANGELY IN THE SKY AND THEN GROWING MORE STONES, MOVING, STONES FALLING INTO THE WORLD, STONES SMALLER THAN THE BIG SKY STONE, HITTING KILLING BRINGING BIG ANIMALS THAT STINK, EATING EVERY PIECE OF THE WORLD THAT COMES BEFORE THEM, TAKING SOME OF US IN THEM, BIG STONES MAKING BIG ANIMALS THAT ARE NOT ALIVE BUT SWALLOW, KEEPING US IN THEM IN WATER, SOUR WATER THAT BRINGS PAIN, WE LIVE THERE, LIGHT COMING FROM LAND THAT IS NOT LAND, A WORLD THAT IS NOT THE WORLD, NO WAVES, NO LAND BUT THERE IS THE GLOWING STONE ON ALL SIDES THAT WE CANNOT CLIMB, NO LAND FOR THE YOUTH TO CRAWL TO, LONG TIME PASSING, WE SING OVER AND OVER THE SOON-BIRTHING BUT IT DOES NOT COME, THE SONG DOES NOT MAKE BIRTHING STIR IN THIS RED WORLD, THIS SMALL WORLD THAT ONE OF US CAN CROSS IN THE TIME OF A SINGLE SINGING. THE YOUTH CHANGE THEIR SONG SLOWLY, THEN MORE AND THEN MORE, THEIR SONG GOES AWAY FROM US, THEY SING STRANGELY BUT DO NOT CRAWL. HOT RED THINGS BUBBLE IN THE SMALL WORLD WHERE WE LIVE AND THE YOUTH DRINK IT. THE SMOOTH STONE ON ALL SIDES THAT MAKES THIS WORLD GLOWS WITH LIGHT THAT NEVER GROWS AND NEVER DIMS. WE KEEP SOME OF OUR TOOLS AND CAN FEEL THE TIME GOING, MANY SONGS PASS, WE DO NOT LET THE YOUTH SING OR CRAWL BUT THEN THEY DO NOT KNOW US AND SING THEIR OWN NOISE, DRINKING IN THE FOUL CURRENTS OF THE BIG ANIMAL WE INHABIT, THE SMOOTH STONE OOZING LIGHT, ALWAYS RUMBLING, THE CURRENTS NOT RIGHT. WE MOVE THICKLY, LOSE OUR TIDES, THE RED CURRENTS SUCK AND BRING FOOD SWEET AND BITTER, WRONG, THE YOUNG ONES WHO SHOULD CRAWL ON LAND NOW EAT THE FOOD AND CHANGE, LONG TIMES THE WALLS HUMMING AND NO WAVES FOR US TO FLY THROUGH AND SPLASH WHITE.