He drew it from the sheath and handed it to her. I thought she seemed a little paler than usual. “Tell Kendry this —this will help her remember,” she told me. She drew the hunting knife forcefully across the barely healed scar.
Blood gushed out. Lawrence jumped to his feet and snatched the knife away from her. “Maddy! What are you doing? What’s the big idea?”
Moonlight was clutching her arm underneath the freely bleeding gash. “I think Kendry can tell us now,” she said.
We were all making noises of distress. “Sosa!” Kendry cried. “I don’t understand! Why did you wound yourself?”
“Amtor, tell her to remember the o ther time she saw a scar, and it was gashed by a knife.”
Ivry was dashing about wildly; as usual when something went wrong, he was inclined to blame Lawrence. Pettrus and I were relatively calm, and Kendry, though she couldn’t help making the distress si gnal, was trying to do as Madelaine had bidden her.
“I remember,” she said after a minute. “It happened when I was young, a long, long time ago.
“We were swimming along beside a canoe of the Splits, the brown Splits who live on islands in the big calm ocean. It was a big canoe, filled with people, and we were guiding them to a new island, where they had never been before.
“We sea people talked as we swam along, of course; a very old cousin of mine was telling us about something the Old Ones had had, c alled the ahln.
“The Split in the prow of the canoe had a scar on his shoulder, very like the one Sosa has. One of the oarsmen began to quarrel with him, and suddenly he jumped up from his oar and slashed at the other Split’s shoulder with his knife.
“Blood ran out over the scar, a lot of blood. The other men in the canoe took sides, and in a minute they were all fighting.
“The canoe upset and they all went in the water, even the women. That would not have been serious; they could all swim, and they could have righted the canoe. But the blood in the water drew sharks, more sharks than I had ever seen at one time, and we sea people had to leave the Splits struggling in the water and swim for our lives.
“I suppose they were all killed. I am not surpri sed I couldn’t remember about the ahln. Seeing a Split hurt is very shocking to one of the sea people.”
“But she remembers now?” Moonlight asked. She was still clutching her arm underneath the wound, to check the bleeding. The blood ran out over her fing ers and down her arm.
Kendry blew a long jet of air after I relayed the question. “Yes, I think so. I am not sure of the names of the metal, but perhaps Amtor can help with them.—It is at least a hundred years since I had thought of it.”
Lawrence had taken off his life jacket and was tearing a strip from the bottom of his shirt to serve as a bandage. He began tying the cloth around Madelaine’s arm. “Did your self-mutilation succeed in jogging Kendry’s memory?” he asked.
“She believes so.”
“Good,” Lawrence answered. “When we get back to the Naomi, you must tell me how you knew it would have that effect. Meantime, see if you can get her to dictate the details of the ahln’s construction to you.” He tied the ends of his bandage in a neat knot, “All right .”
Lawrence got a writing pad and pencil from his pocket and handed them to her. Madelaine seated herself on the rocky surface, the writing pad on her knee and Kendry in the water close to her feet. The tide was rising, and there was less of the rock abo ve water than there had been.
“I can’t tell you how to draw the ahln, Sosa,” Kendry said, faintly distressed. “I shall have to use Udra to make you draw the ahln as it is in my mind. Then you can ask me questions about what you have drawn. Will you objec t to this?”
“Tell her, not at all,” Madelaine said to me. “She is welcome to use my arm, or my whole body, as she pleases. I don’t find Udra frightening.”
There was a silence. Madelaine sat relaxed, her shoulders drooping, while blood seeped through th e bandage on her arm. Her eyes did not seem to be focused on anything. Lawrence lit cigarette after cigarette. The rock area above water diminished steadily.
Slowly Moonlight’s hand began to move. She drew on the writing pad for about fifteen minutes, sl owly and steadily, going back occasionally over what she had already drawn.
Her hand stopped moving. She gave a deep sigh. “That’s the ahln,” she said. “Take the pad, Doctor, and take good care of it. I can’t see to hand it to you.”
Lawrence’s hand had gone out to the note pad, but now he stopped, divided between curiosity over the drawing and solicitude for the girl.
“Can’t see to hand it to me?” he said. “What do you mean by that? Is something wrong with your eyes?”
“No. I mean, yes, there i s, but I think it will pass. Translating Kendry’s multidimensional picture into human, two-dimensional terms has affected my vision. But I think it will pass. Take the pad, Doctor. Take good care of it.”
He obeyed. Madelaine was rubbing the back of her n eck and sighing. He looked at the drawing thoughtfully.
“What are the wires in the upper left corner made of?” he asked after an instant.
“Cy—copper, I think.”
“And what’s that prism-thing in the middle? It doesn’t seem to be glass.”
“No, it’s not,” the girl answered. “Amtor, ask Kendry what the prism is.”
“She says it’s a heavy dull metal that’s quite soft,” I reported. “She says Splits use it on fishing lines. I think she means lead.”
“What’s the purpose of the prism, though?” Lawrence asked.
“Kendry says it regulates the amount of heat that is produced,” I reported.
“Um. And the little helix down on the right? Is it the same as the copper wire?”
“No, it’s not,” Madelaine said after I had put the question to Kendry. “It’s a silvery metal , very heavy, that’s resistant to almost everything. It’s hard to work. Kendry has never seen a specimen of it.”
“She must mean platinum,” Dr. Lawrence said. He was still studying the drawing. “Well, I guess we could make this thing without too much trou ble. Even the platinum wire wouldn’t be impossible.
“But I don’t see what it would do after we made it. For one thing, there’s no indication of a power source on the drawing. It isn’t self-powered, is it? Where does the power come from?” He gave the draw ing a final dissatisfied glance and put it in his breast pocket, under his life jacket.
“Ask Kendry, Amtor,” Madelaine said. She was rubbing her eyes.
“She says it is not self-powered. It has to have an external source of power.”
“Well, what is it? A battery? Electric current? What?”
“She says it is none of these,” I reported after I had relayed Lawrence’s question. “She says she cannot tell us how it is powered, though she knows it is something Splits do not have. But what it is exactly, she has ne ver known. She was never told.”
Dr. Lawrence grew rigid. “Why didn’t the old lady tell us this before?” he demanded angrily. “It would have saved us all trouble, and Madelaine needn’t have that nasty cut on her arm. I don’t see how this contraption could do anything anyhow. But it’s perfectly useless if it can’t be powered.” He gave an exasperated snort.
“Maybe not useless,” Madelaine answered. She reached out her hand gropingly and laid it on the doctor’s arm. “Be patient a little.—Amtor, ask Kendry ab out this.”
Kendry and I talked for several minutes. Madelaine listened carefully, but Lawrence, of course, could only wait.
At last I said, “She says Madelaine and I must unite our minds to try to find out how to power it. We must unite our minds and r each out.”
“Reach out? To where?” Lawrence was still fuming with exasperation.
“She says it will not be easy, but Madelaine has become enough like one of the sea people to make-it possible. We must unite our minds and reach out with all our strength to the sun from which the Old Ones came. We must reach out to Alta
ir.”
“A storm is coming up,” Kendry continued. “Sosa must have a place where she can be quiet and warm before she and Amtor try what they have to do. Sail your boat south, down the coast, and try to find a quiet anchorage.”
Dr. Lawrence, though the water was lapping around his knees when this message was relayed to him, sat motionless. “Before we go off on another wild-goose chase,” he said, “find out from Kendry why she thinks the ahln is powered by something Splits don’t currently have. I don’t want Madelaine to knock herself out only to discover that the ahln is powered by something on the order of a flashlight battery. Ask her, Amtor.”
It occurred to me that Lawrence’s app etite for marvels was temporarily satiated; the idea of trying to make psychic contact with Altair seemed to annoy him.
“She says that ‘powered’ is not exactly the right word,” I reported. “She says that what the ahln needs to be effective might be somet hing Splits do have; she isn’t sure. But the secret lies in how it is used. And she is sure Splits have no knowledge of the principle of the ahln, or they would have made great changes in their environment.
“She thinks we had better start south, before t he storm comes up.” I did not repeat the last part of Kendry’s reply, which Sosa had heard as well as I had: that we must use all care to prevent the knowledge of the ahln from coming into the hands of other Splits. There was too much power represented in. it to be trusted to the good intentions of humanity.
“Very well,” Lawrence said. “I suppose we’d better try it, anyhow. Ivry, may I ride on your back till we get to the Naomi?”
“All right,” Ivry agreed without enthusiasm. Sosa was already astride me. She leaned forward and caressed Ken-dry’s head delicately.
“Tell her good-bye, and that we will hope to see her again,” she said.
Kendry answered, “Yes, we can hope. But I am getting old. Sosa, if I never see you again, remember how happy I am that you came to help us in our need. Good-bye, dear Sosa.”
We began to swim away. Moonlight waved her hand in farewell. As we looked back at Kendry’s rocks from a distance, we saw that the water had almost closed over them.
By the time we got back to the Naom i, the first drops of rain had begun to fall. The doctor had Madelaine lie down on the settee in the cabin. Then he sent me down to bring up the anchor, while he laid a course to the south.
“Can you dolphins swim ahead and warn me of any rocks?” he asked . “I want to sail close to the coast, so I can see if we get near a suitable anchorage.”
This was agreed, and Lawrence had Sosa take the wheel briefly while he put a better bandage on her arm and gave her an injection of penicillin. Then he took the helm again.
We soon left the storm behind us, except for brief squalls and bursts of rain. A little before dusk, the doctor saw a small circular bay ahead of us. It seemed to be the site of a village: small craft were drawn up on the beach, and there was a t iny jetty where a larger boat was moored. It was obviously the place he had been looking for.
He took the Naomi in neatly and tied her up beside the other boat. “You dolphins had better go out to sea,” he told us softly. “Strangers in a place this size a re sure to attract a lot of attention.-Come back tonight, when the lights are out and it’s quiet, and we’ll try this reaching-out-to-Altair bit.”
“All right,” I answered. “Are you sure you can keep Madelaine warm enough, Doctor? Kendry said it was import ant.”
“I think so. It’s warm in the cabin, and I can cover her with my jacket. You’d better go now.”
We swam unobtrusively. The doctor had been right; by the time Madelaine came out on the deck, everybody in the little town had come down to the jetty t o look at the strange boat. They jostled each other, stared with bright dark eyes, and tried to sell the two North Americans baskets, serapes and fruit. Fortunately it was getting dark, and in an hour or so the visitors went home to supper. The Naomi was l eft alone.
“I wish I’d worked harder at Spanish when I was in high school,” Lawrence said. “As it is, ‘buenas dias’ and ‘quanto vale’ are about my limit. Don’t touch that fruit, Maddy, until I’ve dipped it in a sterilizing solution. Lie down on the sette e, and I’ll open something for us to eat.”
“All right. Did you find out what the name of this place is?”
“Bahia something or other.” He was busy with the can opener. “You know, Maddy, there are lots of things in what Kendry told us that I don’t underst and. For instance, how can knowledge of the ahln’s power source be communicated telepathically —I suppose that’s what’s involved in ‘reaching out to Altair’—when the knowledge of how to construct the ahln itself couldn’t be communicated that way.”
“I don’t know either,” Madelaine answered. “I think it must be something quite simple, so simple that telepathic communication will do for it. Of course, it may need telepathy of a special kind.”
“Perhaps.” He plainly wasn’t satisfied. He dumped cold canned cho w mein onto paper plates. “And then, about the ahln itself. We talk about a power source for it, but is the ahln a device for releasing heat from a fuel it destroys in the way that a furnace releases heat from coal, or is the ahln a machine that acts to c r eate heat from a power source that activates it, like an electric heater? Is what we’re going to try to get from Altair knowledge of a fuel, or of a power that can be transformed into great heat? I think these are quite different ideas.”
“It might be neither,” Madelaine answered thoughtfully. “The ahln might be like a pipe that conducts heat from a power source, like a pipe that carries hot water away from a geyser or an underground hot spring. It is possible there are sources of heat in the universe tha t human beings are not aware of,” she said. “I don’t mean atomic energy, I mean —the energy that creates atoms. Perhaps the ahln taps that. Perhaps it goes back in time, to the beginning of the universe, and brings heat back from there. Perhaps —well, I supp ose we will have to wait to find out.”
She hesitated. “Something else is bothering me,” she said. “How are we to reach out to Altair? I mean, to Altair specifically. There are billions and billions of suns in the universe, there are thousands of stars vi sible in the sky. How are Amtor and I to aim for Altair? Surely the name alone isn’t enough!”
“I can show you Altair in the sky, if you don’t know where it is,” the doctor offered. “It’s sure to be visible later in the night. Would that help?”
“It might. I’ll ask Amtor when he conies back. Kendry wouldn’t have told us to do it unless she thought it was possible. Let’s eat, and then try the fruit. It looks good.”
Meantime, we sea people were enjoying good fishing in the warmer-waters. Once or twice we had shark scares, but, since we weren’t carrying passengers, we outdistanced the predators easily. We went back to the Naomi a little before ten.
There were no lights in the village and, except for a dog barking somewhere, no sounds either. Lawrence and Madelaine were out on deck.
“Madelaine!” I called softly.
“Amtor! The doctor has been showing me the star he says is Altair. I’ve been wonderi ng …” She explained her diffi culty to me.
“I don’t think reaching out for Altair will be difficult,” I answered. “It’s one of the stars we sea people navigate by, and we are always aware of where it is. Let me do the reaching out, Sosa. Abandon your mind to me.”
“All right. The doctor thinks I should lie down on the settee in the cabin. Will the reaching out be like Udra?”
I saw she was a little nervous. “It will be like Udra at first,” I told her. “Later —I don’t know. We can’t tell until we try.”
The Splits went into the cabin. I floated in the water near the jetty, Ivry on one side of me and Pettrus on the other, and tried to get into the Udra-state. Moonlight and I had been in psychic contact a number of times before, of course, and she was not unused to Udra, either; but we both felt that this time was going to be different in its nature from anyt
h ing before. For one thing, we must try for a more intimate psychic union than any we had had earlier; and then, we had never tried to reach such a target together. Splits say that light from Altair must travel for almost sixteen years to reach our earth.
My mind touched Madelaine’s. Men and dolphins are of one stock, but by now the gulf between us is enormous. It is a constant miracle that we can communicate at all. Our sensory equipment is not identical: we sea people have a pressure sense and a navigati onal sense that seems to have no human analogue; and human color vision is so much better than ours as to be almost a separate sense, though we can see farther into the ultraviolet and infrared regions than Splits can. And there is a constant, basic diffe r ence caused by the human possession of hands.
This gulf between Madelaine and me, this sensory and mental difference, meant that in our knowledge of each other there would be places where we could only be conscious of a terrifying, incomprehensible void. And yet our minds must join, and join very closely, if we were to reach out for Altair.
Time passed. The edges of Sosa’s mind and mine, despite our mutual fear, began to overlap. We were getting closer and closer. And then, like a diamond blade cutting into my brain, I got a violent psychic shock.
It was different from, and worse than, the shock I had had in Sausalito when I was in the Udra-state and the dolphins near Hawaii were killed. Ivry and Pettrus say I gave a scream, so high-pitched that they c ould hardly hear it They were thoroughly alarmed.
My first thought was that Dr. Lawrence had taken advantage of Sosa’s being in a trance state to attack her with his hunting knife. It was the kind of idea Ivry would have had, but I had it.
What had really happened was something different. Madelaine, in the Naomi’s cabin, was breathing quietly, her eyes closed, when Lawrence saw, or thought he saw, two fine greyish threads rising into the air from her breasts. The threads joined together about a foot abo ve her chest and curled away in a thicker strand into the darkness of the ceiling.
This was not very different from the kind of thing Lawrence had often encountered in his study of the literature of spiritualism, but he was startled to see it actually ha ppen. He took the girl’s pulse —it was very slow and weak —and then put a thermometer in her arm pit. She had felt cold to his touch, and when he read the thermometer, the mercury was so low that he decided he had better try to get her back to normal consc i ousness at once. It was this abrupt withdrawal of Sosa from her psychic contact with me that had shocked me so.
Margaret St. Clair Page 13
