Home from the Shore

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Then the water closed in on him, he felt himself seeming to fly apart in all directions, and he lost track abruptly of what was going on.

  ...At some time later when he came back to his senses, he and the world about him were moving very fast. He was rushing through the water in the black suit of cold-water skins he had never taken off and his mask was over his face, in position. Baldur was with him. He had hold of the dolphin's reins and Baldur was towing him swiftly through debris-strewn water at about the fifteen-fathom depth. They came at last to Johnny's own small-Home, sheared almost in half and floating loggily in the surrounding water. '

  The pool entrance was missing. Neta, Sara’s dolphin, was frantically trying the impossible feat of entering the small-Home through the air-iris, all unmindful of Tantrums beside her.

  Johnny pushed her aside and dove through himself.

  Across the room, beyond the pool, he saw Sara lying on a couch covered by a drape. Tomi was sitting huddled with his knees together on a hassock beside the couch. Johnny ran around the pool and dropped on his knees by the couch.

  “My mommy's not feeling good," Tomi said.

  Johnny looked at Sara. The world, which had been moving so fast about him, slowed and stopped. All things came to an end, and stopped.

  Sara lay still, on her back. There was a little blood dried at the comers of her mouth.

  Her eyes were not quite closed. They looked from under her eyelids at nothing in particular and her cheeks seemed already sunken in a little under her high, cold cheekbones.

  He stared down at her and a slow and terrible chill began to creep gradually through him. He could not take his eyes off her still face. Slowly he began to shiver. The shivers increased until he shuddered through his whole body and his teeth chattered. He saw Tomi coming toward him with arms outstretched to put them around his father. And suddenly Johnny broke the spell holding him and shoved the boy back, away from him, so hard he staggered.

  "Stay away from me!" Johnny shouted. The room tilted and spun around him. The eye of the killer whale rushed abruptly like death upon him through the wall behind the couch, and he fell forward into roaring nothingness.

  When he came back after this, it was to find Tomi clinging to him and sobbing. Johnny awoke as somebody might who had been asleep for a long night. The great gust of feeling that had whirled him into unconsciousness was gone. He felt numbed and coldly clear-headed.

  Automatically he soothed Tomi. Reflexively he went about the small-Home, pulling out a sea-sled and loading it with clothing, medical supplies, weapons and other equipment for living off the sea.

  When it was loaded he took it outside and left Tomi, now also dressed in cold-water skins, fins and mask, to harness Baldur to it. He himself went back inside.

  He set straight the drape over Sara and stood a little while looking down at her body.

  Then he detached the governor from the small-Home's heating element and went back outside. Together, he and Tomi watched as the small-Home caught fire inside.

  Collapsing inward, as its walls melted, it sank away from them, a flickering light into dark depths, with Neta and her pup circling bewilderedly down after it.

  "Where are we going?" said Tomi, as Johnny handed a rein to Tomi and took one himself.

  "Where you'll be safe," said Johnny. He put the boy's other hand on a rail of the sled.

  "All by ourselves?" said Tomi.

  "Yes." Johnny broke off suddenly. Inside Tomi’s mask, he saw the boy pale and frowning, the way Sara had been used to frown. Something moved in Johnny’s guts. "All right," he said; but he did not say it to Tomi.

  He touched the radio controls of his mask with his tongue, turning the circle of reception up to full. A roar of conversations sounded like surf in his ears.

  "This is Johnny Joya," he said into the mike. "Are there any Council members listening?" The surf-sound of voices roared on unchanging. "This is Johnny Joya speaking. Are there any Council members who can hear me?"

  There seemed no change in the sound coming into his earphone. He turned to Tomi, shrugging. And then the roar began to diminish a little.

  It slackened. "This is Johnny Joya," he said.

  "Are there any Council members listening?"

  The voices dwindled, faded and disappeared. Silence roared instead in his earphone. From far away, blurredly, a single voice spoke.

  "Johnny? Johnny, is that you? “This is Eva Loy. Johnny, we're the only Council members left. I found the room. None of the rest got out. She hesitated. "Johnny, can you hear me? Where are you?"

  North of you, said Johnny. "And swimming north.'' There was a cold, clean, dead feeling in him, like a man might experience after an amputation when the pain was blocked. "I'm taking my son, my dolphin and sea-camping equipment and I'm heading out."

  "Heading out?”

  "Yes,” said Johnny.

  He touched the rein and moved it and Baldur began to swim, pulling the sled and the two humans with it. Through the rushing gray-blue water, Johnny saw the young arm and hand of Tomi in its black sleeve clinging to the sled rail; and he remembered Patrick's arm, older and larger, seen in the same position. "The rest of you should do the same thing.”

  “Head out?” Eva’s voice faded for a second in the earphone. “Out into the sea without small-Homes?"

  "That's right," said Johnny. He watched Baldur sliding smoothly through the water. “Castle-Home is gone. By this time the other Castle-Homes are probably gone, too. We're Homeless, now. Everybody might as well face that."

  "But we’re going to have to build new Homes.”

  “We can’t," said Johnny. “With Patrick helping, the Landers’ll just go on destroying them.”

  "But we’ve got to have Homes!”

  "No," said Johnny. A strap on the sled was working loose. He reached forward automatically and unbuckled it. "That’s what the Landers think. But they’re wrong. Everyone of the third generation and lots of the second have lived off the sea without Homes, for the fun of it. We can do it permanently. We can take care of the older people, as well, if necessary.”

  "But,” Eva’s voice came stronger in the earphone for a second, "we’ll be nothing but a lot of water-gypsies!"

  She fell silent, as if she had suddenly run out of words.

  "No," said Johnny. He pulled the strap tight and buckled it again. It held well this time. “Our Homes were something we brought to the sea from the land. Sooner or later we were bound to leave them behind and live like true People of the sea. The Land’s just pushed us to it a little early." He checked the other straps.

  They were all tight. "I'm only telling you what I think—what I’m going to be doing myself. You can all make your own choices."

  There was a long moment of rushing silence in the earphone. Then Eva's voice called out.

  "Johnny! You aren't leaving us?"

  "Yes," said Johnny.

  "But some day we’ll be carrying the fight back to the Landers. We need you to plan for then. We need you—"

  "No!" The word came out so harshly that Johnny saw Tomi flinch alongside him and stare in his direction. "I’ve helped too much already. Get someone else to make your plans!"

  He felt Tomi’s eyes reach into him, and Sara's ghost hand on his shoulder. He reached into himself for calmness. For a moment he had almost come back to life, but now the safe feeling, the cold, clean, dead feeling, took him over once again.

  “No," he said, more quietly. "You don’t want my help, Eva. And besides, my wife is dead and I made her a promise to keep our boy safe. That's all the job I have now. I wouldn't take any other if I could. If you'll take a last piece of advice, though, you'll all scatter the way I'm doing. Spread out through the seas, well be safe.”

  He turned off his mike, then turned it on.

  "Good-by, Eva,” he said. "Good-by, People. Good luck to you all."

  Eva’s voice spoke again, but Johnny no longer listened. He picked up the reins and turned Baldur's head a little to the north
east, along the water road of the North Atlantic Current. He shut his mind to all the past.

  Baldur responded smoothly. He swam easily and not too fast, in the graceful underwater up and down weaving motion of the dolphin that brought him occasionally to the surface to breathe. In the earphone, the perplexed conversations picked up once more.

  Johnny did not listen. He felt emptied of all emotion. Of sorrow, of bitterness, of fear, of anger. He looked ahead and northward into a future as wide and empty as the Arctic waters. Only the wild wastes of the endless oceans were left now to the people of the sea. They would gather at Castle-Home no more.

  He thought that he had no feeling left in him; and that this was a good thing.

  Then, in his earphones, he heard one of the parting People begin to sing:

  Hey, Johnny! Hey-a, Johnny!

  Home from the shore . . .

  And other voices took it up, joining in.

  The earphone echoed to a spreading chorus.

  Hey-o, Johnny! Hey, Johnny!

  To high land go no more!

  The song blended in many voices. It reached through the cold, dead feeling of amputation in him to the awareness that had come as he stood in the Conference Room and felt the beating lives of the hundred and twenty-nine prisoners as if he held them in his hands.

  It took hold of him as he had been taken hold of, in the moment of perception that had linked him with the other ex-Cadets as, deafened and smoke-blinded, they made their escape into the East River. He had cut himself loose from his people. But he saw now he could not escape them. No, never could he escape them, anymore than a molecule of water, in its long journey by sky and mountain and field and harbor-mouth, could escape its eventual homecoming to the salt sea. And the knowledge of this, discovered at last, brought a sort of sad comfort to him.

  He opened his mouth to sing with them; but—as in the small-Home returning from Manhattan Island—he found the words would not come. He held to the sled, listening. About him, three fathoms of water pressed against his passage. Baldur swam strongly to the north. The Atlantic Drift was carrying them east and north and in time they could come to the Irminger Current, swinging north between the Iceland coast and the Greenland shore ... he, his son, and his dolphin. They would survive.

  Baldur swam strongly, as if he could sense the purpose of their going. Behind, in his earphone, Johnny could hear the voices of the singers beginning to fade and dwindle as they moved out of range. The number of their voices lessened and became distant.

  The sun was going down. The three of them broke surface for a moment and the cloud-heavy sky above was darkening gray. Soon it would be full dark, and somewhere in the black water under the stars they would camp and sleep. Tomi held without a word to the sled. The dolphin swam with strength to the north and east. Behind, the last voices were failing, until only one still sounded, faintly in the earphone:

  Long away, away, my Johnny!

  Four long years and more.

  Hey-o, Johnny! Hey, Johnny!

  Go to land, no more.

  And still the three of them swam to the north, under a gray sky that was like a road, and forever-flowing.