We Have Fed Our Sea

by Poul Anderson

  "And there should be a bell to call him, shouldn't there?" asked Maclaren, very slowly.

  "You know how they get on the long haul," said Ryerson. He smote his chair arm with a fist that was all knobs. "The man is sleeping too hard to hear a thing. Or—"

  "Wait," said Maclaren. "We've waited long enough. We can afford a few more minutes, to make certain."

  Ryerson blazed at him, as if he were an enemy. "Wait? Wait, by jumping hell! No!"

  He set the control timer for transmission in five minutes and crept from his seat and down the ladder. Under the soiled tunic, he seemed all spidery arms and legs, and one yellow shock of hair.

  Maclaren stood up again and stumbled toward him. "No," he croaked. "Listen, I realize how you feel, but I realize it's space lunacy too, and I forbid you, I forbid—"

  Ryerson smiled. "How do you propose to stop me?" he asked.

  "I . . . but can't you wait, wait and see and—"

  "Look here," said Ryerson, "let's assume there is a freak in the signal. A test transmission comes through. At best, the standard object is merely distorted . . . at worse, it won't be recreated at all, and we'll get an explosion. The second case will destroy us. In the first case, we haven't time to do much more work. I doubt if I could climb around on the web outside any more. I know you could not, my friend! We've no choice but to go through. Now!"

  "If it's a ship at the other end, and you cause an explosion," whispered Maclaren, "you've murdered one more man."

  Drearily, and as if from far away, he recognized the hard­ness which congealed the other face. Hope had made David Ryerson young again. "It won't blow up," said the boy, and was wholly unable to imagine such a happening.

  "Well . . . probably not . . . but there's still the chance of molecular distortion or—" Maclaren sighed. Almost experi­mentally, he pushed at Ryerson's chest. Nothing happened; he was so much more starved that he could not move the lank body before him.

  "All right," said Maclaren. "You win. I'll go through."

  Ryerson shook his head. "No, you don't," he answered. "I changed my mind." With a lilt of laughter: "I stand behind my own work, Terangi!"

  "No, wait! Let me ... I mean ... think of your wife, at least ... please—"

  "I'll see you there," cried Ryerson. The blue glance which he threw over his shoulder was warm. He opened the transmitter room door, went through, it clashed shut upon him. Maclaren wrestled weakly with the knob. No use, it had an automatic lock.

  Which of us is the fool? I will never be certain, whatever may come of this. The chances are all for him, of course . . . in human terms, reckoned from what we know . . . but could he not learn with me how big this universe is, and how full of darkness?

  MACLAREN stumbled back toward the ladder to the chair. He would gain wrath, but a few more minutes, by climbing up and turning off the controls. And in those min­utes, the strangely terrifying negligent operator at the other end might read the teletype message and send a test object. And then Ryerson would know. Both of them would know. Maclaren put his feet on the rungs. He had only two meters to climb. But his hands would not lift him. His legs began to shake. He was halfway to the panel when its main switch clicked down and the transmitting engine skirled.

  He crept on up. Now I know what it means to be old, he thought.

  His heart fluttered feebly and wildly as he got into the chair. For a while he could not see the vision screens, through the night that spumed in his head. Then his universe steadied a little. The transmitter room was quite empty. The red light still showed contact. So at least there had been no destruction wrought in the receiving place. Except maybe on Dave; it didn't take much molecular warping to kill a man. But I am being timid in my weakness. I should not be afraid to die. Least of all to die. So let me also go on through and be done.

  He reached for the timer. His watch caught his eye. Half an hour since Dave left? Already? Had it taken half an hour for him to creep this far and think a few sentences? But surely Dave would have roused even the sleepiest operator. They should have sent a teletype to the Cross: "Come on, Terangi. Come on home with me." What was wrong?

  Maclaren stared at the blank walls enclosing him. Here he could not see the stars, but he knew how they crowded the outside sky, and he had begun to understand, really under­stand what an illusion that was and how hideously lonely each of those suns dwelt.

  One thing more I have learned, in this last moment, he thought. I know what it is to need mercy.

  Decision came. He set the timer for ten minutes—his prog­ress to the transmitter room would be very slow—and started down the ladder.

  A bell buzzed.

  His heart sprang. He crawled back, feeling dimly that there were tears on his own face now, and stared into the screen.

  A being stood in the receiving chamber. It wore some kind of armor, so he could not make out the shape very well, but though it stood on two legs the shape was not a man's. Through a transparent bubble of a helmet, where the air within bore a yellowish tinge, Maclaren saw its face. Not fish, nor frog, nor mammal, it was so other a face that his mind would not wholly register it. Afterward he recalled only blurred features, there were tendrils and great red eyes.

  Strangely, beyond reason, even in that first look he read compassion on the face.

  The creature bore David Ryerson's body in its arms.

  WHERE Sundra Straits lay beneath rain—but sunlight came through to walk upon the water—the land fell steep. It was altogether green, in a million subtle hues, jungle and plantation and rice paddy, it burned with green leaves. White mists wreathed the peak of a volcano, and was it thun­der across wind or did the mountain talk in sleep?

  Terangi Maclaren set his aircar down on brown-and-silver water and taxied toward the Sumatra shore. Each day he regained flesh and strength, but the effort of dodging praus and pontoon houses and submarines still tired him. When his guide pointed: "There, tuan," he cut the engines and glided in with a sigh.

  "Are you certain?" he asked, for there were many such huts of thatch and salvaged plastic along this coast. It was a wet world here, crowding brown folk who spent half their cheerful existences in the water, divers, deckhands, contracting their labor to the sea ranches but always returning home, poverty, illiteracy, and somehow more life and hope than the Citadel bore.

  "Yes, tuan. Everyone knows of her. She is not like the rest, and she holds herself apart. It marks her out."

  Maclaren decided the Malay was probably right. Tamara Suwito Ryerson could not have vanished completely into the anonymous proletariat of Earth. If she still planned to emi­grate, she must at least have a mailing address with the Au­thority. Maclaren had come to Indonesia quickly enough, but there his search widened, for a hundred people used the same P.O. in New Djakarta and their homes lay outside the cosmos of house numbers and phone directories. He had needed time and money to find this dwelling.

  He drove up onto the shore. "Stay here," he ordered his guide, and stepped out. The quick tropic rain poured over his tunic and his skin. It was the first rain he had felt since … how long? ... it tasted of morning.

  She came to the door and waited for him. He would have known her from the pictures, but not the grace with which she carried herself. She wore a plain sarong and blouse. The rain filled her crow's-wing hair with small drops and the light struck them and shattered.

  "You are Technic Maclaren," she said. He could scarcely hear her voice, so low did it fall, but her eyes were steady on his. "Welcome."

  "You have seen me on some newscast?" he inquired, banally, for lack of anything else.

  "No. I have only heard. Old Prabang down in the village has a nonvisual set. But who else could you be? Please come in, sir."

  Only later did he realize how she broke propriety. But then, she had declared herself free of Protectorate ways months ago. He found that out when he first tried to contact her at her father-in-law's. The hut, within, was clean, austerely fur­nished, but a vase of early mutation-roses sto
od by David's picture.

  Maclaren went over to the cradle and looked down at the sleeping infant. "A son, isn't it?" he asked.

  "Yes. He has his father's name."

  Maclaren brushed the baby's cheek. He had never felt any­thing so soft. "Hello, Dave," he said.

  Tamara squatted at a tiny brazier and blew up its glow. Maclaren sat down on the floor.

  "I would have come sooner," he said, "but there was so much else, and they kept me in the hospital—"

  "I understand. You are very kind."

  "I . . . have his effects . . . just a few things. And I will arrange the funeral in any way you desire and—" His voice trailed off. The rain laughed on the thatch.

  She dipped water from a jar into a tea kettle. "I gather, then," she said, "there was no letter that he wrote?"

  "No. Somehow . . . I don't know. For some reason none of us wrote any such thing. Either we would all perish out there, and no one else would come for fifty or a hundred years, or we would get back. We never thought it might be like this, a single man." Maclaren sighed. "It's no use trying to foresee the fu­ture. It's too big."

  She didn't answer him with her voice.

  "But almost the last thing Dave said," he finished awk­wardly, "was your name. He went in there thinking he would soon be home with you." Maclaren stared down at his knees. "He must have . . . have died quickly. Very quickly."

  "I have not really understood what happened," she said, kneeling in the graceful Australian style to set out cups. Her tone was flattened by the effort of self-control. "I mean, the ‘cast reports are always so superficial and confused, and the printed journals so technical. There isn't any middle ground any more. That was one reason we were going to leave Earth, you know. Why I still am going to, when our baby has grown just a little bit."

  "I know how you feel," said Maclaren. "I feel that way my­self."

  She glanced up with a startled flirt of her head that was beautiful to see. "But you are a technic!" she exclaimed.

  "I'm a human being too, my lady. But go on, ask me your question, whatever you were leading up to. I've a favor of my own to ask, but you first."

  "No, what do you want? Please."

  "Nothing very important. I've no claim on you, except the fact that your husband was my friend. I'm thinking of what you might do for his sake. But it will wait. What did you wonder about?"

  "Oh. Yes. I know you tuned in the aliens' transceiver and didn't realize it. But—" Her fists clenched together. She stared through the open door, into the rain and the light, and cried forth: "It was such a tiny chance! Such a meaningless accident that killed him!"

  Maclaren paused until he had all his words chosen. Then he said, as gently as might be:

  "IT wasn't so wildly improbable. All this time we've known that we couldn't be the only race reaching for the stars. It was absurd to think so; that would have been the senseless unlikelihood. Well, the Cross was farther out than men had ever gone before, and the alien spaceship was near the aliens' own limit of expansion. It was also bound for Alpha Crucis. Odd what a sense of kinship that gives me, my brother mari­ner, with chlorine in his lungs and silicon in his bones, steer­ing by the same lodestar. Contact was certain eventually, as they and we came into range of each other's signals. Your David was the man who first closed the ring. We were trying call patterns we could not measure, running through combina­tions of variables. Statistically, we were as likely to strike one of their patterns as one of ours."

  The water began to boil. She busied herself with the kettle. The long tresses falling past her face hid whether she was crying or not. Maclaren added for her, "Do you know, my lady, I think we must have called hundreds of other space-traveling races. We were out of their range, of course, but I'm sure we called them."

  Her voice was muffled: "What did the aliens think of it?"

  "I don't know. In ten years we may begin to talk to them. In a hundred years, perhaps we will understand them. And they us, I hope. Of course, the moment David . . . appeared . . . they realized what had happened. One of them came through to me. Can you imagine what courage that must have taken? How fine a people your man has given us to know? There was little they could do for me, except test the Cross' web and rule out all the call patterns which they use. I kept on trying, after that. In a week I finally raised a human. I went through to his receiver and that's all. Our technicians are now building a new relay station on the black star planet. But they'll leave the Cross as she is, and David Ryerson's name will be on her."

  "I thought," she whispered, still hiding her face, "that you I mean, that quarantine rules—"

  "Oh, yes, the Protectorate tried to invoke them. Anything to delay what is going to happen. But it was useless. Nothing from the aliens' planet could possibly feed on Terrestrial life. That's been established already, by the joint scientific commis­sion; we may not be able to get the idea behind each other's languages yet, but we can measure the same realities! And of course, the aliens know about us. Man just can't hide from the universe. So I was released." Maclaren accepted the cup she offered him and added wryly: "To be sure, I'm not exactly welcome at the Citadel any more."

  She raised large eyes to him. He saw how they glimmered. "Why not?" she asked. "You must be a hero to—"

  "To spacemen, scientists, some colonials, and a few Earthmen glad of an end to stagnation. Not that I deserve their gratitude. There are three dead men who really did all this. But at any rate, my lady, you can foresee what an up­heaval is coming. We are suddenly confronted with—Well, see here, the aliens must be spread through at least as large a volume of space as man. And the two races don't use the same kind of planets. By pooling transceiver networks, we've dou­bled both our territories! No government can impose its will on as many worlds as that."

  "But more. There are sciences, technologies, philosophies, religions, arts, insights they have which we never imagined. It cannot be otherwise. And we can offer them ours, of course. How long do you think this narrow little Protectorate and its narrow little minds can survive such an explosion of new thought?" Maclaren leaned forward. He felt it as an upsurge in himself. "My lady, if you want to live on a frontier world, and give your child a place where it's hard and dangerous and challenging—and everything will be possible for him, if he's big enough—stay on Earth. The next civilization will begin here on Earth herself."

  Tamara set down her cup. She bent her face into her hands and he saw, helpless, how she wept. "It may be," she said to him, "it may be, I don't know. But why did it have to be David who bought us free? Why did it have to be him? He didn't mean to. He wouldn't have, if he'd known. I'm not a sentimental fool, Maclaren-san, I know he only wanted to come back here. And he died! There's no meaning in it!"

  THE North Atlantic rolled in from the west, gray and green and full of thunder. A wind blew white manes up on the waves. Low to the south gleamed the last autumnal daylight, and clouds massed iron-colored in the north, brewing sleet.

  "There," pointed Tamara. "That is the place."

  Maclaren slanted his aircar earthward. The sky whistled around him. So Dave had come from here. The island was a grim enough rock, harshly ridged. But Dave had spoken of gorse in summer and heather in fall and lichen of many hues.

  The girl caught Maclaren's arm. "I'm afraid, Terangi," she whispered. "I wish you hadn't made me come."

  "It's all we can do for David," he told her: "The last thing we'll ever be able to do for him."

  "No." In the twilight, he saw how her head lifted. "There's never an end. Not really. His child and mine, waiting, and—At least we can put a little sense into life."

  "I don't know whether we do or whether we find what was always there," he replied. "Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose—order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it—does exist."

  "Here on Earth, yes," she sighed. "A flower or a baby. But then three men die beyond the sun, and it so happens the race benefits a little from it, but I
keep thinking about all those people who simply die out there. Or come back blind, crippled, broken like dry sticks, with no living soul the better for it. Why? I've asked it and asked it, and there isn't ever an an­swer, and finally I think that's because there isn't any why to it in the first place."

  Maclaren set the car down on the beach. He was still on the same search, along a different road. He had not come here simply to offer David's father whatever he could: reconcilia­tion, at least, and a chance to see David's child now and then in the years left him. Maclaren had some obscure feeling that an enlightenment might be found on Skula.

  Truly enough, he thought, men went to space, as they had gone to sea, and space destroyed them, and still their sons came back. The lure of gain was only a partial answer; spacemen didn't get any richer than sailors had. Love of ad­venture . . . well, in part, in some men, and yet by and large the conquerors of distance had never been romantics, they were workaday folk who lived and died among sober realities. When you asked a man what took him out to the black star, he would say he had gone under orders, or that he was getting paid, or that he was curious about it, or any of a hundred reasons. Which might all be true. And yet was any of them the truth?

  And why, Maclaren wondered, did man, the race, spend youth and blood and treasure and all high hopes upon the sea and the stars? Was it only the outcome of meaningless forces—economics, social pressure, maladjustment, myth, whatever you labeled it—a set of chance-created vectors with the sar­donic resultant that man broke himself trying to satisfy needs which could have been more easily and sanely filled at home?

  If I could get a better answer than that, thought Maclaren, I could give it to Tamara. And to myself And then we could bury our dead.

  He helped her out of the car and they walked up a path toward an ancient-looking cottage. Light spilled from its win­dows into a dusk heavy with surf. But they had not quite reached it when the door opened and a man's big form was outlined.