Surfacing

by Walter Jon Williams

  “May I speak with you briefly?” Philana’s voice. “I’d like to get some data, at your convenience.” Her tone shifted to one of amusement. “The condition,” she added, “is not that of rut.”

  Anthony grinned. Philana had been considerate enough not to interrupt him, just to leave the message for whenever he wanted it. He picked up the telephone, connected directory assistance in Cabo Santa Pola, and asked it to route a call to the phone on Philana’s yacht. She answered.

  “Message received,” he said. “Would you join me for lunch?”

  “In an hour or so,” she said. Her voice was abstracted. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “When you’re ready. Bye.” He rang off, decided to make a fish chowder instead of sandwiches, and drank a beer while preparing it. He began to feel buoyant, cheerful. Siren wailing sounded through the water.

  Philana’s yacht maneuvered over to his boat just as Anthony finished his second beer. Philana stood on the gunwale, wearing a pale sweater with brown zigzags on it. Her braid was undone, and her brown hair fell around her shoulders. She jumped easily from her gunwale to the flybridge, then came down the ladder. The yacht moved away as soon as it felt her weight leave. She smiled uncertainly as she stepped to the deck.

  “I’m sorry to have to bother you,” she said.

  He offered a grin. “That’s okay. I’m between projects right now.”

  She looked toward the cabin. “Lunch smells good.” Perhaps, he thought, food equaled apology.

  “Fish chowder. Would you like a beer? Coffee?”

  “Beer. Thanks.”

  They stepped below and Anthony served lunch on the small foldout table. He opened another beer and put it by her place.

  “Delicious. I never really learned to cook.”

  “Cooking was something I learned young.”

  Her eyes were curious. “Where was that?”

  “Lees.” Shortly. He put a spoonful of chowder in his mouth so that his terseness would be more understandable.

  “I never heard the name.”

  “It’s a planet.” Mumbling through chowder. “Pretty obscure.” He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I’m from Earth.”

  He looked at her. “Really? Originally? Not just a habitat in the Sol system?”

  “Yes. Truly. One of the few. The one and only Earth.”

  “Is that what got you interested in whales?”

  Her spoon stirred idly in her chowder. “I’ve always been interested in whales. As far back as I can remember. Long before I ever saw one.”

  “It was the same with me. I grew up near an ocean, built a boat when I was a boy and went exploring. I’ve never felt more at home than when I’m on the ocean.”

  “Some people live on the sea all the time.”

  “In floating habitats. That’s just moving a city out onto the ocean. The worst of both worlds, if you ask me.”

  He realized the beer was making him expansive, that he was declaiming and waving his free hand. He pulled his hand in.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “about the last time we talked.”

  She looked away. “My fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.” He realized he had almost shouted that, and could feel himself flushing. He lowered his voice. “Once I got out here I realized…” This was really hopeless. He plunged on. “I’m not used to dealing with people. There were just a few people on Lees and they were all… eccentric. And everyone I’ve met since I left seems at least five hundred years old. Their attitudes are so…” He shrugged.

  “Alien.” She was grinning.

  “Yes.”

  “I feel the same way. Everyone’s so much older, so much more… sophisticated, I suppose.” She thought about it for a moment. “I guess it’s sophistication.”

  “They like to think so.”

  “I can feel their pity sometimes.” She toyed with her spoon, looked down at her bowl.

  “And condescension.” Bitterness striped Anthony’s tongue. “The attitude of, ‘Oh, we went through that once, poor darling, but now we know better.’”

  “Yes.” Tiredly. “I know what you mean. Like we’re not really people yet.”

  “At least my father wasn’t like that. He was crazy, but he let me be a person. He—”

  His tongue stumbled. He was not drunk enough to tell this story, and he didn’t think he wanted to anyway.

  “Go ahead,” said Philana. She was collecting data, Anthony remembered, on families.

  He pushed back from the table, went to the fridge for another beer. “Maybe later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

  Philana’s look was steady. “You’re not the only one who knows about crazy fathers.”

  Then you tell me about yours, he wanted to say. Anthony opened the beer, took a deep swallow. The liquid rose again, acid in his throat, and he forced it down. Memories rose with the fire in Anthony’s throat, burning him. His father’s fine madness whirled in his mind like leaves in a hurricane. We are, he thought, in a condition of mutual trust and permanent antagonism. Something therefore must be done.

  “All right.” He put the beer on the top of the fridge and returned to his seat. He spoke rapidly, just letting the story come. His throat burned. “My father started life with money. He became a psychologist and then a fundamentalist Catholic lay preacher, kind of an unlicensed messiah. He ended up a psychotic. Dad concluded that civilization was too stupid and corrupt to survive, and he decided to start over. He initiated an unauthorized planetary scan through a transporter gate, found a world that he liked, and moved his family there. There were just four of us at the time, dad and my mother, my little brother, and me. My mother was— is— she’s not really her own person. There’s a vacancy there. If you’re around psychotics a lot, and you don’t have a strong sense of self, you can get submerged in their delusions. My mother didn’t have a chance of standing up to a full-blooded lunatic like my dad, and I doubt she tried. She just let him run things.

  “I was six when we moved to Lees, and my brother was two. We were—” Anthony waved an arm in the general direction of the invisible Milky Way overhead. “—we were half the galaxy away. Clean on the other side of the hub. We didn’t take a gate with us, or even instructions and equipment for building one. My father cut us off entirely from everything he hated.”

  Anthony looked at Philana’s shocked face and laughed. “It wasn’t so bad. We had everything but a way off the planet. Cube readers, building supplies, preserved food, tools, medical gear, wind and solar generators— Dad thought falkner generators were the cause of the rot, so he didn’t bring any with him.

  “My mother pretty much stayed pregnant for the next decade, but luckily the planet was benign. We settled down in a protected bay where there was a lot of food, both on land and in the water. We had a smokehouse to preserve the meat. My father and mother educated me pretty well. I grew up an aquatic animal. Built a sailboat, learned how to navigate. By the time I was fifteen I had charted two thousand miles of coast. I spent more than half my time at sea, the last few years. Trying to get away from my dad, mostly. He kept getting stranger. He promised me in marriage to my oldest sister after my eighteenth birthday.” Memory swelled in Anthony like a tide, calm green water rising over the flat, soon to whiten and boil.

  “There were some whale-sized fish on Lees, but they weren’t intelligent. I’d seen recordings of whales, heard the sounds they made. On my long trips I’d imagine I was seeing whales, imagine myself talking to them.”

  “How did you get away?”

  Anthony barked a laugh. “My dad wasn’t the only one who could initiate a planetary scan. Seven or eight years after we landed some resort developers found our planet and put up a hotel about two hundred miles to the south of our settlement.” Anthony shook his head. “Hell of a coincidence. The odds against it must have been incredible. My father frothed at the mouth when we started seeing their flyers and
boats. My father decided our little settlement was too exposed and we moved farther inland to a place where we could hide better. Everything was camouflaged. He’d hold drills in which we were all supposed to grab necessary supplies and run off into the forest.”

  “They never found you?”

  “If they saw us, they thought we were people on holiday.”

  “Did you approach them?”

  Anthony shook his head. “No. I don’t really know why.”

  “Well.” Doubtfully. “Your father.”

  “I didn’t care much about his opinions by that point. It was so obvious he was cracked. I think, by then, I had all I wanted just living on my boat. I didn’t see any reason to change it.” He thought for a moment. “If he actually tried to marry me off to my sister, maybe I would have run for it.”

  “But they found you anyway.”

  “No. Something else happened. The water supply for the new settlement was unreliable, so we decided to build a viaduct from a spring nearby. We had to get our hollow-log pipe over a little chasm, and my father got careless and had an accident. The viaduct fell on him. Really smashed him up, caused all sorts of internal injuries. It was very obvious that if he didn’t get help, he’d die. My mother and I took my boat and sailed for the resort to bring help.”

  The words dried up. This was where things got ugly. Anthony decided he really couldn’t trust Philana with it, and that he wanted his beer after all. He got up and took the bottle and drank.

  “Did your father live?”

  “No.” He’d keep this as brief as he could. “When my mother and I got back, we found that he’d died two days before. My brothers and sisters gutted him and hung him upside-down in the smokehouse.” He stared dully into Philana’s horrified face. “It’s what they did to any large animal. My mother and I were the only ones who remembered what to do with a dead person, and we weren’t there.”

  “My God. Anthony.” Her hands clasped below her face.

  “And then—” He waved his hands, taking in everything, the boat’s comforts, Overlook, life over the horizon. “Civilization. I was the only one of the children who could remember anything but Lees. I got off the planet and got into marine biology. That’s been my life ever since. I was amazed to discover that I and the family were rich— my dad didn’t tell me he’d left tons of investments behind. The rest of the family’s still on Lees, still living in the old settlement. It’s all they know.” He shrugged. “They’re rich, too, of course, which helps. So they’re all right.”

  He leaned back on the fridge and took another long drink. The ocean swell tilted the boat and rolled the liquid down his throat. Whale harmonics made the bottle cap dance on the smooth alloy surface of the refrigerator.

  Philana stood. Her words seemed small after the long silence. “Can I have some coffee? I’ll make it.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  They both went for the coffee and banged heads. Reeling back, the expression on Philana’s face was wide-eyed, startled, faunlike, as if he’d caught her at something she should be ashamed of. Anthony tried to laugh out an apology, but just then the white dwarf came up above the horizon and the quality of light changed as the screens went up, and with the light her look somehow changed. Anthony gazed at her for a moment and fire began to lap at his nerves. In his head the whales seemed to urge him to make his move.

  He put his beer down and grabbed her with an intensity that was made ferocious largely by Anthony’s fear that this was entirely the wrong thing, that he was committing an outrage that would compel her shortly to clout him over the head with the coffee pot and drop him in his tracks. Whalesong rang frantic chimes in his head. She gave a strangled cry as he tried to kiss her and thereby confirmed his own worst suspicions about this behavior.

  Philana tried to push him away. He let go of her and stepped back, standing stupidly with his hands at his sides. A raging pain in his chest prevented him from saying a word. Philana surprised him by stepping forward and putting her hands on his shoulders.

  “Easy,” she said. “It’s all right, just take it easy.”

  Anthony kissed her once more, and was somehow able to restrain himself from grabbing her again out of sheer panic and desperation. By and by, as the kiss continued, his anxiety level decreased. I/You, he thought, are rising in warmness, in happy tendrils.

  He and Philana began to take their clothes off. He realized this was the first time he had made love to anyone under two hundred years of age.

  Dweller sounds murmured in Anthony’s mind. He descended into Philana as if she were a midnight ocean, something that on first contact with his flesh shocked him into wakefulness, then relaxed around him, became a taste of brine, a sting in the eyes, a fluid vagueness. Her hair brushed against his skin like seagrass. She surrounded him, buoyed him up. Her cries came up to him as over a great distance, like the faraway moans of a lonely whale in love. He wanted to call out in answer. Eventually he did.

  Grace(1), he thought hopefully. Grace(1).

  *

  Anthony had an attack of giddiness after Philana returned to her flying yacht and her work. His mad father gibbered in his memory, mocked him and offered dire warnings. He washed the dishes and cleaned the rattling bottlecap off the fridge, then he listened to recordings of Dwellers and eventually the panic went away. He had not, it seemed, lost anything.

  He went to the double bed in the forepeak, which was piled high with boxes of food, a spool of cable, a couple spare microphones, and a pair of rusting Danforth anchors. He stowed the food in the hold, put the electronics in the compartment under the mattress, jammed the Danforths farther into the peak on top of the anchor chain where they belonged. He wiped the grime and rust off the mattress and realized he had neither sheets nor a second pillow. He would need to purchase supplies on the next trip to town.

  The peak didn’t smell good. He opened the forehatch and tried to air the place out. Slowly he became aware that the whales were trying to talk to him. Odd scentings, they said. Things that stand in water. Anthony knew what they meant. He went up on the flybridge and scanned the horizon. He saw nothing.

  The taste is distant, he wrote. But we must be careful in our movement. After that he scanned the horizon every half hour.

  He cooked supper during the white dwarf’s odd half-twilight and resisted the urge to drink both the bottles of bourbon that were waiting in their rack. Philana dropped onto the flybridge with a small rucksack. She kissed him hastily, as if to get it over with.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  He kissed her again. “I do,” he said. She laid her cheek against his woolen shoulder. Blind with terror, Anthony held onto her, unable to see the future.

  *

  After midnight Anthony stood unclothed on the flybridge as he scanned the horizon one more time. Seeing nothing, he nevertheless reduced speed to three knots and rejoined Philana in the forepeak. She was already asleep with his open sleeping bag thrown over her like a blanket. He raised a corner of the sleeping bag and slipped beneath it. Philana turned away from him and pillowed her cheek on her fist. Whale music echoed from a cold layer beneath. He slept.

  Movement elsewhere in the boat woke him. Anthony found himself alone in the peak, frigid air drifting over him from the forward hatch. He stepped into the cabin and saw Philana’s bare legs ascending the companion to the flybridge. He followed. He shivered in the cold wind.

  Philana stood before the controls, looking at them with a peculiar intensity, as though she were trying to figure out which switch to throw. Her hands flexed as if to take the wheel. There was gooseflesh on her shoulders and the wind tore her hair around her face like a fluttering curtain. She looked at him. Her eyes were hard, her voice disdainful.

  “Are we lovers?” she asked. “Is that what’s going on here?” His skin prickled at her tone.

  Her stiff-spined stance challenged him. He was afraid to touch her.


  “The condition is that of rut,” he said, and tried to laugh.

  Her posture, one leg cocked out front, reminded him of a haughty water bird. She looked at the controls again, then looked aft, lifting up on her toes to gaze at the horizon. Her nostrils flared, tasted the wind. Clouds scudded across the sky. She looked at him again. The white dwarf gleamed off her pebble eyes.

  “Very well,” she said, as if this was news. “Acceptable.” She took his hand and led him below. Anthony’s hackles rose. On her way to the forepeak Philana saw one of the bottles of bourbon in its rack and reached for it. She raised the bottle to her lips and drank from the neck. Whiskey coursed down her chin, her throat. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at him as if he were something worthy of dissection.

  “Let’s make love,” she said.

  Anthony was afraid not to. He went with her to the forepeak. Her skin was cold. Lying next to him on the mattress she touched his chest as if she were unused to the feel of male bodies. “What’s your name?” she asked. He told her. “Acceptable,” she said again, and with a sudden taut grin raked his chest with her nails. He knocked her hands away. She laughed and came after him with the bottle. He parried the blow in time and they wrestled for possession, bourbon splashing everywhere. Anthony was surprised at her strength. She fastened teeth in his arm. He hit her in the face with a closed fist. She gave the bottle up and laughed in a cold metallic way and put her arms around him. Anthony threw the bottle through the door into the cabin. It thudded somewhere but didn’t break. Philana drew him on top of her, her laugh brittle, her legs opening around him.

  Her dead eyes were like stones.

  *

  In the morning Anthony found the bottle lying in the main cabin. Red clawmarks covered his body, and the reek of liquor caught at the back of his throat. The scend of the ocean had distributed the bourbon puddle evenly over the teak deck. There was still about a third of the whiskey left in the bottle. Anthony rescued it and swabbed the deck. His mind was full of cotton wool, cushioning any bruises. He was working hard at not feeling anything at all.