We walked along the curve of the harbor and watched, fascinated.
"Are we to assume," Roland said, "that everybody's supposed to drive up on this thing and park?"
I looked the island over. No guard rails, lots of obstacles, no apparent way to get up to the decking, lots of curving slippery surface. "Can't imagine mat," I said, "but I can't imagine the alternative."
"It's a big fish and it swallows everyone," Susan said. We all stopped and looked at her. She giggled. "What else?" she asked.
About fifteen minutes later, we stood on a narrow strip of sand to one side of what we now knew to be the loading ramp. "I'll be damned," John said.
About seventy-five to one hundred seal-creatures were lined up behind a bony ridge that crested the forward bulge like a mammoth brooding brow. The creatures were using their forward flippers to beat rhythmically on the ridge. It all seemed orchestrated. Sections of them would start a rhythm sequence while another slapped out a syncopated beat. Then the first group would stop while the other played on, while still another ensemble joined in. As the percussion concerto continued, the high curving bow of the island inched closer to the end of the loading ramp. It took a while. Finally the two islands met, and the creatures began to beat in unison, smacking out a single rhythm ― one… two… three… one-two-three; three long, three short, keeping perfect time. The forward bulge began to rise slowly, as if on hydraulic lifts, raising the orchestra of drummers with it.
I think it was Susan who gasped audibly when the gigantic eye rose out of the water. I know it shook me. It's one thing to calmly contemplate a creature of that size. As it was docking, I mulled over the biophysics of the thing. How long would it take a nerve impulse to travel from one end of the critter to the brain (wherever that was) and back again? Thirty seconds ― a minute? How about internal heat? Getting rid of it would be a problem. Propulsion also. If the air-bag organs had evolved from fins to flotation aids, how did the creature move? But it was quite another thing to have that eye staring at you, an alien eye to boot. The outer structure was a red polyhedron with hexagonal facets. At the center of each hexagon was a six-sided pupil slowly contracting, and the whole eye was shot through with a riot of purple veins. I forgot about the biophysics and let the wonder wash over me.
And when that subsided, there was the mind-numbing sight of the mouth opening to contend with. The cavity was curved and so big we couldn't see the other side. The immediate interior was lined with a grinding surface composed of pinkish-white slabs of translucent cartilage, hexagonal in shape. Farther back in the mouth the light grew dim, but we could see pale
tissue forming the entrance to the throat, and below it, like a floor, a dark area. A tongue. This began to flow forward like a moving carpet. It swept over the tooth surface and came out to kiss the beach. The tongue was purple.
The punch line came when a group of crewmen in white uniforms came walking out of the cavernous interior and stepped onto the sand. They took up stations a few meters apart and began to admit vehicles into the mouth of the beast. We all laughed.
"How biblical," John said.
"Told you!" Susan said triumphantly.
Biophysics my ass. How do they mate?
"Well…" I thought of something. "Who's got money?"
The Teelies gave me hopeless looks.
"I have some," Darla said. "The ride's on me." She frowned. "That is, if I have enough for all of us."
"Wonder if they're taking on deckhands."
We made our way through the lines of vehicles moving down the ramp. The men at the entrance were taking fares. I walked up to the nearest of them. He spoke no English, and our exchange in 'System got me nowhere. He gabbled something and motioned impatiently toward the next man. Everybody followed me over.
"Excuse me… sailor?"
"Huh?" This one was young, on the chubby side, with stringy blond hair. Fuzz sprouted on his upper lip. His uniform was immaculate, flowing with red and gold embroidery, and he wore a matching white cap with a black shiny visor. "I'm an officer, kamrada. Belowdecks Supervisor Krause. Whaddya want?"
"Sorry, Mr. Krause. How do we book passage on this… vessel?"
"Don't have tickets?"
"No. Where do we get them?"
"From me. Where's your vehicle?"
"Had a breakdown. How much for just passenger fare?"
He craned his head around and glanced at us, then turned to take another fare. "Uh, that'd be―" He jerked his head around again and noticed Darla. "Yeah. That'd be a hunnert consols."
"Consols?"
"Yeah, consols. Consolidation Gold Certificates. CGCs.
Consols." He took a blue square of plastic from a gloved alien hand. The face of the card bore a stylized picture of a boat mounted on an island-beast.
"You don't take Universal Trade Credits?"
He laughed. "Not on this stretch of road, kamrada."
"Sorry. You see, we just came from―"
"Yeah, I know, you just lucked through. That right?"
"Lucked… yes, we did."
"Well, welcome to the Consolidated Outworlds, kamrada. Your UTCs won't buy you merte out here."
The guy's manners were growing on me like an itchy wan. "What do you take from aliens?"
"Gold, precious metals, gems, anything. Hey, I got fares to take. Okay?"
"Sony to put you to any trouble, but we're in a pickle."
"Yeah, yeah. One troy ounce of gold'll do it. Apiece, that is."
"Jake." It was Darla, holding out some gold coins to me. I took them. They were very old pieces. South African gold. Amazed, I turned to her and was about to ask where she'd gotten them, but she smiled, sphinxlike, and I knew. That bottomless pack again. I looked at the coins. They were probably worth more as collector's items than as specie ― on the black market, of course. The CA handled all gold. I handed them to Krause.
"Jesus Christ." He jingled them, feeling their weight. "Where'd you snag these, a museum?" He bit into one, checked the tiny toothmark. Something about pure gold; you can tell. "Yeah, they'll do. But… uh, you're two short, right?"
"I'm afraid that cleans us out. Is it possible that some arrangements could be made? Otherwise we'll be stranded here."
"Sony, no credit. But… well, maybe we can work something out. Know what I mean?"
"Such as?"
He was eyeing Darla. "Like to buy you and your friends a drink. In my cabin, of course. Can't fraternize with the passengers 'cept at the Captain's table, but what the Old Man don't know… unnerstand?" He took more tickets. "Yeah, in my cabin, especially your femamikas here―" He did a double take, finally noticing Susan's breasts. "Sure would be my pleasure."
"Look, friend―" "Jake, take it easy." To Krause, Darla said, "I'd love to lift a few with you, sailor, but my friend Susan's a teetotaler. You and I can have a pretty good time, though, just the two of us." She actually winked at him. "Deal?"
He laughed. "I dunno, three heads are better sometimes." He must have noticed my face turning black, and sobered up. "Yeah, sure. Just you and me."
I held out my hand. "Our money, please."
Darla took my arm. "Wait a minute."
"Hand it over, sailor. We'll startuke it."
"Suit yourself," Krause said, reluctantly handing me the coins, "but hikers don't have much luck around here. Limit's four passengers per vehicle, big extra charge for more."
Yeah, sure. "We'll take our chances."
"You're going to be sony come high tide, kamrada."
When we got back to the beach, Darla was ready to kill me. "Startuke it? Who's going to pick up five of us plus an alien anthropoid?"
"We'll go in different vehicles."
"Feel lucky today? I don't." She stamped a boot in the sand. "Damn it, Jake, sometimes I don't understand you. Do you actually think I'd let that cretin get near me? Sure, I'd go to his cabin, even have a few with him. But you'd be surprised what else I have in that pack. Little transparent capsules that make you very sick f
or a long, long time. And they work fast. Wouldn't kill him, of course. Understand? Besides, even if I had to sleep with him…" She didn't finish.
She was right. "Sorry, Darla. I should have finessed it."
"But you have to take every trick, don't you?" She was furious with me ― and proud of me, all at once.
"Jake, Roland?" John was standing at the waterline, letting little waves lap over his feet. "Is it my imagination," he asked, "or is the water getting higher?"
"He's right," Roland said. "I've been noticing it. And there's the cause." He pointed to the eastern sky.
The edge of a huge white disk was showing above the horizon. A moon, and a big one, twice Luna's size, I guess-timated. The tides would be fierce, and high tide here could mean complete inundation. Great.
"What should we do?" John asked.
"I'm going back to him," Darla said. "I hope he's still in a mood to deal."
She was so right I wanted to strangle her. "Hold it a minute. There's got to be another way. He could be trouble."
"Not the type. I've met his ilk before, the chubby little fart. You stay here. I can handle him."
"Maybe one of the other men…"
She gave me a world-weary look. "Jake."
"Right." I gave it up. Our relationship was about as well-defined as ghosts in a fog. Not only did I not have a leg to stand on, the leg had nothing to stand on.
"What's that noise?" Roland asked.
I tore the beeping key from my pants pocket. "Sam! Sam, is that you?"
"Who the hell were you expecting, the Chairman of the Colonial Politburo? Of all the goddamn stupid things you've done, boy, this has to be the grand prizewinner. There's three things any moron can learn in life without too much trouble, but you can't seem to get 'em straight. Want to know what they are? I'll tell you. Don't spit out the port at Mach one, don't eat blue snow on Beta Hydri IV, and don't ever poke your nose through a potluck portal! Common sense, right ― and you'd think any pudknocker'd pick that up real easy, but not you, boy, not by a long shot―"
We laughed and laughed and laughed.
14
"And another thing," Sam was saying when we finally found him, "what the hell's the idea of not telling me where you're going?" He was mad as heck. "Too busy at the time. Sony." "Well, maybe you were, at that," he grumbled. "I hate to bring it up, but where the hell have you been?" "Rescuing Petrovich, or whatever his name is." "Petrovsky! I thought he was cylinder-skin. My god, Sam, how? And why?"
The others were crowded in the aft cabin, discovering how many bodies could fit into a sauna stall ― except for Darla, who was whipping up a quick brunch. They were making a lot of noise. It was good to be back home.
"Well, it was like this," Sam said. "There I am,cutting vacuum like nobody's business. Must've hit Mach point four five there for a stretch ― Stinky's a genius, by the way ― and I'm calling you and calling you and not getting an answer. Then I see the flash and sure enough it's gammashine, and I'm saying to myself, well, scratch OIK male offspring, but I think ― maybe not, what with that strange buggy you were driving. I figure maybe you're just disabled and can't key for help. So I start scanning on infrared for survivors. What did I know? Last thing I expected was that you'd shot the portal. Anyway, I pick something up out there about three klicks from the commit markers, and I pull off the road onto the ice and go on out. And there's this cop in a vacuum suit lying on his back in the middle of nowhere, no sign of his batmobile, but his ejection sled's in pieces all over the place. He's frozen solid to the ice and there's something funny about his left hand."
"Hand?" I said.
"Yeah, he didn't have one. Instead, there's this big frozen gob of blood on the end of his arm, looking like a cherry ice pop. Damnedest thing you ever saw. But the rest of him was in one piece… and he was alive."
"Jesus." And I knew what he'd done too. He'd angled the blast of his descent rockets to push him away from the cylinders' grav field instead of setting him comfortably down, but how he'd survived that desperate gamble was beyond me. The severed hand wasn't hard to explain either. It was a miracle that the tangled line hadn't cut him in two. "How'd you get him into the cabin?"
"First I had to unfreeze him from the ice. I put the exciter gun on wide beam and cooked him a bit until he could move. Then he hauled himself in. There couldn't have been an unbroken bone in his body, but he did it. Then there was the problem of his arm. If I recycled the cab and brought it up to room temperature, he'd bleed to death. If I kept it vacuum, he'd have frozen. The suit had self-sealed but he was half icicle already. So I had to figure out a way to pressurize and keep the temp below zero. They just don't make life-support gear like that ― had a hell of a time bypassing the right systems."
"Did he say anything?"
Sam hesitated the barest second. "Not much, just groaned a lot."
I looked back just then and noticed Darla standing at the kitchette, listening intently ― eavesdropping. "Go ahead," I said.
"Well, I grabbed slab back to the Ryxx cutoff, but there wasn't any traffic. Had to go all the way back to the T-Maze road. Gave a yell on the skyband, and two riggers picked him up. Incidentally, on the way I saw our Rikki friends."
"I know, they're here. Do you think he pulled through?"
"He was out cold by the time they got to him, so I really don't know. But he's one hell of a survivor type." Sam paused. "What d'you think, did I do wrong?"
"Hell, no, you did the right thing."
"Well, my conscience is clear anyway. And one way or another, he's out of the picture."
Darla came forward and handed me a bowl of beef stew and crackers. I thanked her, then tore into it, finishing it off in record time. I washed it down with a can of Star Cloud Ale. The burp was thunderous. I smiled at Winnie, who was in the shotgun seat, finishing off the remnants of her picnic lunch. She burped and grinned back. Some things are truly universal.
"Shameful the way young women run around these days without wearing so much as a blush," Sam said.
"I heard that, Sam," Darla called out. "Tell me you don't enjoy it."
"I'm getting old. Hell, I am old. In fact, I'm dead."
"Sam, cut the merte," I said. "You'll never die, and you know it. Did I ever tell you they had to bury you three times before you'd stay down? You kept popping back up like crabgrass."
"Such talk. Where's your respect for the deceased?" Sam chuckled. "Darla, I was kidding you ― back in my day prudes were saying that morals couldn't get any worse. I happen to agree. It was a decadent period, if the term means anything. Spend a weekend with me on New Vegas and I'll tell you all the juicy details."
"Name the date, Sam."
He laughed. "Jake, tell me more about this whale we're going to get swallowed by. Sounds like it's got the iceberg fish back on Albion beat to hell. Did I ever tell you about the exozoological expedition I went with to trace their migration patterns? This was while you were still in school. Must have been twenty-five, no, thirty Standards ago…."
Sam went on with a yam he'd run into the ground years before, and I wondered what he was doing until I heard his voice over the bone-conduction transducer in my ear.
"Son, brace yourself. Darla's an agent. I think she's working for Petrovsky."
Well, it was out. I would've had a hard time keeping the ugly thing's head submerged any longer. I realized that I'd known for some time.
"That's it, just keep a poker face. No hard evidence, but listen to the playback."
It was Petrovsky, babbling Russian in my ear.
"He was delirious by this time. Listen."
Babble, then a name, then more babble, and again the name, over and over. The name sounded like Dar-ya. It had been a long time since I'd studied Russian, but I didn't think Dar-ya was the Russian equivalent to Darla, if there was one. I turned toward Sam's eye and silently shook my head.
"No? Christ, I'm sorry, son. I have a hell of a time picking up some words now and then, especially from non-Inglo s
peakers. Thought it was 'Darla,' but it did sound funny."
But it very well could be Darla, I thought, as I heard Petrovsky now saying, "…Darishka, Darishka…" And then another name, suddenly: "… Mona…"
"What d'you make of that?"
I'd heard through the roadbuzz circuit that Mona's current liaison was with a Militia Intelligence officer, and a high-ranking one, so it tracked. Could P^trovsky have fallen madly and instantly in love with Darla? Knowing the man even to the limited extent I did, it didn't make sense.
"Well, it's something to think about, Jake."
Sam's understatement only pointed out to me the need for less thinking and more facts. "Sam," I said aloud, "sony to interrupt your enthralling story, but I ^vant you to do a search for me."
"I was just getting to the exciting part. Okay, what is it?"
"Do you still record news feeds whenever you can?"
"Every chance I get, just like the program says. I even got the six o'clock on Goliath. Why?"
"How long do you keep 'em?"
"Thirty Standard days, then I pitch them."
"Merte. Okay, listen. I want you to fetch anything from your news file with these tag-words. 'Corey Wilkes,' 'intelligence,' 'Colonial Assembly,' 'Reticulan,' 'Militia,' and.. um, let's see, what else…"
"'Roadmap'?"
"That's a long shot, but go ahead."
"Why 'Colonial Assembly'?"
"A hunch."
"Right. Wilkes should turn up like a bad penny. He loves hobnobbing with the great and near-great, makes the feeds all the time. Okay, then, let me go down to that dusty basement where I keep old newspapers. Want me to start now?"
"Yeah," I said, "but hold off reading it out until I tell you. Meanwhile, I'm due for a shower."
Everyone was out of the stall by then, all fresh and scrubbed and settled down to eat. I went to the ordnance locker, got out the liter of Old Singularity, and had a jolt. The tidal forces were terrific. Then it was into the locker-size stall for a steam treatment followed by a fog bath. Standing in the swirling mist, I shut my mind off and the pattern of the last few days emerged crisp and clear. The fine detail was missing, but the overall view was enough. I was beginning to see things, understand things. With a little luck, I'd soon know more. The biggest unknown was still Darla, but even she was slowly taking shape like a wraith in the mist. The fog had parted fleetingly back there on the beach. What had I seen? Could her vulnerability have been grief, her passion the widow's consolation?
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