She listened thoughtfully. She seemed saddened by the tale, and worried that it had upset Seth. I will ask Al'ym and Ga'yl to ask of people they know. Perhaps we can learn of your Racart that way.
Seth relaxed somewhat. For reasons undefined, he felt no genuine urgency; he knew that time was slipping by, that he should report to his people, find Racart, make arrangements—but there was much to be done here, as well, and time seemed not so important as continuity, balance, and finding his way into the many-layered ways of Nale'nid thinking, Nale'nid being. And, there was Lo'ela.
He would remain here a while, doing what he was doing. That resolution gave him a quiet, and an unfamiliar, peace of mind.
He said, touching her cheek, "I suppose we will find these things out if we are patient."
Lo'ela said nothing, but once again she was smiling.
* * *
Later, she asked if they might go together to look at the stars. Seth agreed willingly enough but asked her, as she touched him to begin the "flux" journey, if she had not already seen the stars many times. It never occurred to me to notice them, she answered. Now come—you are attuned enough that we should no longer need Al'ym or Ga'yl to travel.
Quickly, quietly, they traveled from the city to a place on the nightside surface. It was cloudy; blanketed. They moved again. And again. The third time landed them on a high, flat promontory—under a sky fantastically showered with rivets of flame, the fires of a hundred thousand Cluster suns.
Lo'ela stared up at the sight, reacting slowly, her thoughts concentrating on Seth's and slowly filling with her own sense of awe as she absorbed his fascination. It had been weeks since Ernathe's cloudy skies had given Seth such a splendid view of the Cluster. Scattered fragments of cloud framed the sky near the horizon and a few scudded high overhead, lending perspective and depth to the clear, unparalleled spectacle. No part of the sky was without stars, but they concentrated smoothly, gradually, toward the central regions of the Cluster, which from this vantage point appeared slightly to one side of the zenith. Here the bits of flame clustered so densely as to merge into smudges of bright color. Looser and lonelier suns were flung in raindrop spatters against darkness, or against the glittery blur of dimmer, distant light.
Automatically, Seth searched for the suns of the Central Worlds, but it was an impossible effort; they were hopelessly lost in the sea of pointed lights. Lo'ela stirred against him, pressing close to his side. Her face was turned upward, her mouth open wide, her left arm half raised to point at the stars, her right arm tightly linked in Seth's. Her mind touched his with raw emotional static; she was experiencing joy, terror, awe, lust—perhaps it was just the winds of idle thoughts touching him, subdued emotions scattering free in confusing signals. Seth couldn't be sure, but he felt a kinship in everything he sensed from her, and in answer he moved his arm around her waist and squeezed affectionately, surprised again by the suppleness of her body beneath the curious, silken garment.
She pressed closer and said, so softly he did not know whether it was a whisper or a thought, "Your worlds?"
The memory of his homeworlds rushed over him in a swirl and rumbled away lost behind the sensation of the sea-woman at his side, and he pointed awkwardly, just to the right of the thickest concentration of stars, and said, "There . . . somewhere there."
It is so difficult to tell?
"Very difficult, Lo'ela." He gazed at her and knew that he was drifting into a deadly and beautiful state of mind, and he cared not at all that he knew it. Looking up from her eyes, back into the sky, with blurry eyes of his own, he felt his mind opening in a great rush and a hopeless scramble. In it and around it was the presence of Lo'ela the sea-woman, the Nale'nid. Her thoughts touched and danced about, and filled his, and sighed within his mind; and he held her tightly, then, hugging as she put her arms around his neck. For the moment he knew that he had found unexpected happiness, and he determined that, as long as he knew the presence of her human, Nale'nid love, gentle as the caress of her thoughts, this was something with which he would never willingly part.
Chapter Twelve
On a later day, Lo'ela announced that it was time, if Seth was willing, to travel to witness the "grotto-heralding." She gaily refused to give any details, and simply insisted that it would be an experience different from any he had had so far among the Nale'nid. She said it would help him to make sense of his ideas about her people. They would be underwater, in the water, most of the day—so Seth would be wearing underwater breathing equipment, to keep matters simpler.
Seth examined the diving gear with great care; it had been "secured" for him by Ga'yl, in a trip the Nale'nid had made to Lambrose. (That gave Seth a bad moment of suspicion as to Ga'yl's possible role in some of the Nale'nid disturbances, but Lo'ela assured him that her brother was innocent of such matters.) Lo'ela explained to him that the gear would make his safety easier to ensure. I could see to your air-needs as I have in the past to your tissue gases—bends?—but it would be tiring, and for such a long time your own methods are more suitable. She waited expectantly while he fitted the tubes of the film-mask together with the air-extraction regulator and tiny reserve bottles and then sat back to study the assembled contrivance.
Though he had dived before, he had never used a device quite like this, and he was slightly unnerved by its apparent simplicity.
"All right," he said, "I guess I'm all set." He was already stripped down to the simple wrap-on shorts Lo'ela had given him. She herself was wearing very little, just two stretchy swaths that offered modest protection but no more, and that only at Seth's rather distracted request; with her lightly tanned flanks exposed, she looked more than ever like an adolescent girl, but in her carriage she was as graceful as an adult dancer. Seth cleared his throat and looked back to the details of his gear.
First he put on the light, skintight jacket, with the accompanying buoyancy-control belt. Then he strapped the regulator and two miniature bottles to his waist, switched on the breather unit and checked a small gauge for proper airflow before fitting the featherweight film-mask over his face and head. The transition to breathing inside the glovelike mask was so easy as to be unnoticeable; the diaphragm-film covering his mouth and nose flexed gently with his breath and with the surge of circulating air. His voice was only slightly distorted by the diaphragm as he spoke. "Okay. I think." As a sudden afterthought, he stooped and picked up the foot fins lying beside him on the floor.
We'll be on land, first, so you can wait for those, Lo'ela said. She called out in her Nale'nid language, and Ga'yl came into the dome, dressed in shorts like Seth's. His body was slim and muscular; he beamed at both of them with an expression of readiness.
They traveled. Together, the three arrived on a rocky shoreline beneath a burning sun. One of the endless seas of Ernathe gleamed and flashed beneath the spanking rays, blue tropical water stirred only by the faintest whisper of a breeze. Lo'ela had said that the place was not far from the city; but as far as Seth could tell it might have been half a kilometer or a thousand. He squinted through the faint distortion caused by the dry film-mask, and guessed that they must be relatively near the Ernathene equator. Lo'ela and Ga'yl spoke briefly, gesturing toward the water; they waited, while Seth put on his foot fins.
You will like the water?
"Of course. I hope so," he grunted through the mask. Standing awkwardly, first on one foot and then on the other, he stretched the fins into place over his feet. He nodded.
Lo'ela touched his hand, and dove smoothly and effortlessly into the water, hardly disturbing the surface as she plunged. Ga'yl waited. After a moment, Seth followed Lo'ela's example by launching himself in a clumsy, shallow dive. Water crashed and muttered about his ears, and the sea closed over his head with a sparkle and a rush, and carried him gently over a mounded reef before he regained his sense of stability and control. He descended feet first, pinching his nostrils together to coax air into his middle ears, and looked up to see the shimmering mirror of the surface
falling away from him as he came down along the bottom line of near-shore reef.
Ga'yl was beside Lo'ela now, both of them watching him silently, their mouths open breathing seawater; Lo'ela was lithe and slim as a true sea-creature, her hair blossomed out like fine ochre-brown plant fronds, her eyes bright and sharp blue. She asked: Are you comfortable? Is the water cold for you?
"Yes and no," Seth said, drawing close, his voice booming queerly through the water. "You are very beautiful."
Come—with a trace of laughter.
He followed with energetic fin strokes as Lo'ela and Ga'yl moved quickly and easily through the water. He felt clumsy at first, but breathing in the mask was so effortless that he quickly began to feel at home in the water, and he enjoyed the weightlessness. His ears popped and squeaked as he descended, but he felt nothing else unusual; he concentrated on the view, and the feel of smooth and rhythmical movements. The water was relaxing, warm but not suffocatingly so. Blue sunlight, filtered from Lambern's gold, streamed in great dancing beams through the water, turning deeper and bluer until it splashed suddenly white and brown against the bottom sand, and yellow against the outcroppings of skeletal krael reef.
Seth's hands, sticking from the sleeves of his jacket, were pale in the altered light. On Lo'ela, the effect seemed healthy and (of course, he thought) Nale'nid-like. He hurried and caught her extended hand, held it and her glance for a moment, and followed her beckoning tug. The outcropping was a comforting cupped hand rising beside them, and they followed the edge of sand beneath its bold overhang while Ga'yl led the way some distance ahead of them, a small figure gliding with quick breast-stroke surges beneath the elkhorn eaves of krael. Seth marveled at Ga'yl's fishlike movements, among the lazy clusters of reef fish crossing and re-crossing their paths. Lo'ela, it was clear, loved the water as her home—but for Ga'yl it was more than a love, more than a belonging, it was clearly a focus, an intense and irrepressible focus, a communion with the sea on the most bare and basic levels of his existence. For Seth it was a marvelous and awesome trait to observe. The understanding of it came so naturally that he was hardly aware of his own growing attunement to the Nale'nid way of thinking.
Lo'ela spoke without turning, swimming smoothly ahead of him. He wishes us to hurry, he is impatient to see the grotto-heralding.
Coming, love.
Lo'ela stopped and turned to him with a delighted smile—and only then he realized that he had just addressed her without speaking aloud. Yes, he thought to her—and shrugged, because he knew that it had not worked that time. "Yes. Yes, indeed," he croaked through his plastic mask. Ga'yl, ahead, glanced back at the sound; the voice had traveled far through the water. Seth, however, had his eyes on Lo'ela, and was startled to find himself not the least bit embarrassed at the thought that had slipped. Her face was pleasantly framed by flying hair and blue mist, her limbs dark and lithe and smooth—a beautiful not-quite-human, who was very human indeed. Love? Yes, the thought fit.
Her smile flashed and vanished, and she was off again, with Seth swimming hard close behind. They moved quickly, Seth puffing inside his plastic headgear; they skimmed beneath the krael reef-edge like eels, Lo'ela happily breathing water and pointing first one way and then another at reef formations, schooling fishes and solitary lurkers in the crevices and shadows of the krael. Sand and water and distance fell away behind them, well beyond Seth's ability to measure.
Ga'yl, always at a considerable lead, took them through tall, clustering formations that seemed a queer animal-plant hybrid of krael and kelp, and then upward along a smooth-bottomed incline until the surface once again flashed close and silvery over their heads. Seth's ears creaked like rusted hinges as they ascended; he hoped that Lo'ela was remembering to focus within his body and do whatever she did to prevent nitrogen from bubbling in his blood.
They swam around an enormous krael mount, and then dived back downward alongside a tumbling palisade, which turned in sharp angles as it fell, and drew them like a magnet around its corners into a breathtaking deepsea-blue basin. Seth stopped kicking and slowly sank, astonished speechless, oblivious to Ga'yl's intent grin and Lo'ela's quirky smile. They were at the mouth of a great deep undersea lagoon, an enormous bowl, which was like a sea within the sea, encircled at its rim with forests of horny krael that stood so boldly against the lighted surface they seemed to stand against the sky—though even the highest of the features were many meters removed from the world of air. Submerged though they were already, Seth and the two Nale'nid were poised at the shores of another, a deeper crystal-water sea.
They sank, swooping and gliding in exhilaration.
The basin initially seemed dark, but as Seth's eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, he could see well enough to realize that they had company—or they were company. The Grotto Gateway, as Lo'ela named it, was swarming with Nale'nid. Sea-people came to this place from all the cities, she had said, and Seth believed it; they flocked like fishes, swimming laterally across the wide basin or lazing upward past the descending trio. A very young, small Nale'nid darted downward past them out of nowhere, followed by an older sea-girl, less hurried. An adult male-female pair gazed curiously at Seth and Lo'ela, but did not alter their leisurely course, which carried them over the heads of the three and off into the edge of gloom. The water grew slightly cooler in stages, but even the coolness of depth was dispelled, at least in Seth's mind, by the crystal clarity of the water and the magnificently blued sunlight that, now that his eyes had adjusted, seemed to sparkle and penetrate everywhere with its cerulean illumination. Even the reds and yellows, which were at this depth absent from the light altogether, were restored to his vision by memory, imagination, and guesswork.
The basin, flattened at the bottom, was paved with stone and white sand. Ga'yl led the way, with an easy, fluid style Seth matched with a hard, steady fin kick. He glided playfully with his nose flying just above the sand, and looked up occasionally to check for Lo'ela's presence or to gauge the flow of traffic of Nale'nid toward the other end of the basin. Amidst the random-seeming movements of the sea-people, there was a general migration toward a narrowing point where the basin appeared to become a valley of sorts, channeling into a break in the far wall.
Ga'yl took them straight through the gateway and into a dark cavern or tunnel, through which Nale'nid moved like vehicles in a two-way flow. Seth shuddered a bit at the forbidding appearance of the channel walls, and for the first time felt a sense of claustrophobia, of discomfort with the weightlessness of immersion and with the weight of the water he knew to be pressing against his face. The feeling passed, as the tunnel gave way to a true open cavern, mammoth and lighted softly and indistinctly with an apparently source-less yellowish glow. It took him several minutes of staring about, past the swarming and congregating Nale'nid, to gain a sense of the cathedral formation. The light, he realized, came from the nooks and crevices of the cavern walls. Many of the luminous plants and animals used by the Nale'nid for night lighting in their city were tucked discreetly out of view.
They did not stay long in this chamber, however. Ga'yl and Lo'ela took him straight through, across its length, and into another, wider, lighter tunnel, which slanted upward, twisted and crooked, and spilled into a great sunlit pool, a clear shallow sea whose surface danced brightly and gaily only ten meters or so overhead.
It was an amphitheater, an arena beneath the sea.
They stopped here, finally, and Seth was able to look about; he estimated that well over a hundred Nale'nid were present, most of them gliding about like theatergoers, or simply relaxing and drifting without effort. The sky above the sea must have been clear, because the light, even after his eyes readjusted, was dazzling; in fact, when he rolled on his back and looked carefully, he could see—through the half-silver, mirror of the surface—the fuzzy white shapes of a few scattered clouds. That other world, that sky, seemed alien to him now.
Some sort of activity seemed about to get underway—Seth recognized this without any overt s
ignals from Lo'ela, but he decided that he was picking up hints or at least moods and expectations from her on a subverbal level—and he followed his two hosts around the outside of the arena to find a better place to settle in. Along the perimeter of the area there were a great many caves and archways and entrances to large grotto chambers. Lo'ela informed him that they would visit some of these later. Presently, they found a niche in the rock basin where the crowd was relatively sparse, and there waited and relaxed; and Seth took time to pay more attention to Lo'ela. She looked better than ever: bright, alert, and happy. She beamed right back at him, and intertwined her fingers with his.
Something was happening down in the arena's center. A pathway was opening among the sea-people closest to the sandy "stage." A nude female Nale'nid came into view from the misty edges of the space, swimming leisurely to the center—and following her was a long, slithering creature, an eel of some sort, and behind it another eel, and then two more—and bringing up the rear a male Nale'nid, also nude. Seth crossed his legs and sat, valving off some buoyancy-gas from his belt, to watch. The short parade concluded at center stage, a circle of two Nale'nid and four eels. They floated, nearly still, all seemingly aware only of each other. A general stillness came over the amphitheater—no one was moving—and an air of tense anticipation struck Seth as surely as though he actually knew what was to take place. Was this the grotto-heralding?
Yes.
He nodded, smiling to himself, and waited, imagining what kind of music might fit this scene. Something slow, perhaps, a contained, restrained rhythm. And then, hardly had the thought crossed his mind when a low drumming sounded through the water—a curious sound, muted, like the synchronized thrumming of a troop of bellows-fishes, which perhaps, he realized, was actually the source. The drumming was quickly joined by a second, a watery popping sound, pôk-pôk-pôk-pôk-pôk, like sonar pulses. The rhythms of the two sounds were at first dissonant, uncoordinated, but after a minute they began to coalesce, to match in tempo, and from that point on were never out of phase regardless of the patterns and syncopations chosen by the separate sources.
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