Serpent’s Egg

by R. A. Lafferty

  Inneall-Annabella heard two persons talking, but she couldn't place the location of their voices.

  “Of course they are Serpent's Eggs,” one voice said, “and the world isn't safe with them in it. Henryetta is suspected of burning a City of one hundred thousand persons to the ground with all its people in it. It isn't certain that she did it, as there are other pyromegamaniacs in the world, but she is the Prime Suspect.”

  “And Inneall has a secret dream of extending her Ocean to cover the entire world with no land at all showing above the water. And it is almost certain that she will accomplish it if she's allowed to live. Thalassomaniacs are unreformable.” So spoke the other voice.

  “How could he have known my secret dream?” Inneall mused. “Oh, of course I intend to extend my ocean to cover the entire Earth! Already I hear the music of the waves going entirely around the world with no barrier to them at all. Around and around the world! Oh, yes, it will kill all the people and other creatures, but I'm not sure that any of them are real. All I know for certain is that my dream of the endless ocean going around and around the world is real. And my being able to make it is real.”

  “If they were not giants, why have they such giant tombstones?”

  “Where great whales come sailing by,

  Sail and sail, with unshut eye,

  Round the world for ever and aye.”

  —Matthew Arnold

  “For nine thousand years, somebody has been building these giant structures surreptitiously before our very eyes, and we still have not noticed who has built them. Nor have we accounted for their Oceanic qualities.”

  —Archeology Today. Winter 1927 Issue.

  “And down he went like a streak of light

  So quickly down went he,

  Until he came to a mer-ma-id

  At the bottom of the deep blue sea.”

  —Oxford Song Book

  “Oh ye whales and all that move in the waters.”

  “Slabs of stone, the quarries of the Ocean.”

  “Dragons in their pleasant places.”

  “The Castle named Domdaniel which is at the bottom of the Ocean.”

  “The dark unfathomed caves of Ocean.”

  “With the clamor of waters, and with might.”

  “Praise the Lord, all ye Whales of Ocean.”

  “There are dragons in the deep, the leviathans, the whales.”

  “When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and the parallels of latitude for a seines and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning, put myself to sleep with the thunder.”

  —Mark Twain

  “Yes, the whales first wrote in the runic alphabet on Ocean Stones. The Scandinavians learned runic writing from the whales.”

  —Olaf Hensen

  “The blood I spill, the blood I spill,

  Above, below the brine,

  Will some of it this night be yours,

  And some of it be mine.”

  —Henryetta

  “I looked to the weather side, and the summer had departed. The sea was rocking and shaken with gathering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles.”

  —Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Thomas de Quincey.

  “Is it true that the Temple of Angkor Wat was erected by Suryavarman II during the first half of the twelfth century? It looks older, and younger, than that, in all the wavering stones of it covered with their ocean-moss. Is it true that the name ‘Suryavarman’ means ‘King of Whales’? What is the strange ‘dripping’ quality of the stone-work at Angkor Wat, and how is the effect achieved? It is as if the whole Temple-City had been raised from the bottom of the Ocean only two minutes before and the water was still gushing out of every turret of it.”

  —Viet-Nam Diary. PFC Joseph Vukovitch.

  “We have heard of Elk Graveyards and of Elephant Graveyards where the beasts go to die. But this off of San Sabian is, I believe, a Whale Graveyard. Though the bones of only about a hundred whales are strewn there, there are great stone cenotaphs for a thousand of them. Oh the great hewn stones, the giant stones, the monumental stones, whole streets and concourses of them! God in Heaven, God in the Ocean, have you seen these stones? Come and see them.”

  —The Giant Underwater Cenotaphs off of San Sabian.

  Ocean Archeology, June 1988 Edition.

  They all got their good diving gear from the Ship Annabella Saint Ledger. Satrap Saint Ledger had ocean diving as one of his hobbies, and the Annabella had very often been his diving ship. He had every sort of diving gear on board, though as he said of himself he had now outgrown the need for gear himself. It was Satrap who decided what gear each of them should wear. But it did not seem quite adequate to several of them.

  “Three of us are humans,” Ruddy Lord Randal said, “air-breathing humans. And we will be going to the fair depth of half a mile in the ocean, and we'll be staying down several hours there. These little face masks and their small canisters of oxygen just aren't sufficient. They're for shallower prowling. For a half mile, there'll have to be tubes and pumps, and a pressure chamber half way down to protect us from the bends. I can swim, I can dive, but I'm not willing to dive to my death.”

  “Why are you fearful?” Satrap asked him. “I will prepare you quickly, though I'm astonished to find you unprepared for this. The education of all the Experiment-Children was to be ‘Everything in the world’. How could you have missed the ocean? For real Ocean Diving, you must conjure yourself into the proper state of mind and body. You must put yourself into the Ocean Metastasis, a dream state of incomparable vividness. If you were a true master of the technique, you would not need even the small canister of oxygen. You could live and prowl in the deep ocean for up to seventy-two hours without any equipment at all.”

  “You are saying that we could breathe water?” Carcajou laughed in disdain. “What is this, Grandfather Satrap, a trick that you learned from a High Lama in Tibet?”

  “Of course not. There is no ocean and no oceanography in High Tibet. And the Masters there are not Ocean Masters. No, the free diving and moving in the Ocean is a trick I learned from Masters in the Indian Ocean. I will go with you this afternoon, all the way down without equipment. But I do not expect to make total believers of you in one day. The Bear and the Chimp will be considered as humans on this adventure; so I will put the five of you, Ruddy Lord Randal, Henryetta, Carcajou, Dubu, and Schimp into the pseudo-dream state of Oceanic Metastasis. Please pay attention. Give me the same hearing you would give me if I were lecturing you on higher mathematics.”

  “You lecture us on higher mathematics?” Henryetta queried, and all of them laughed.

  “Anyhow, listen closely to me, you five,” Satrap said.

  “Not five. There are six of us,” came the voice of Invisible Alfred. And he opened one eye in what they all called his ‘reverse wink’. “I once spent a thousand years chained to a great rock on the floor of the deepest Ocean, and I survived. But my technique is rusty now, and I’d appreciate taking your crash course with the others, Satrap.”

  “All right, Alfred. As to Inneall, she is a machine and she will have no trouble at all. As a matter of fact, her regular mental and somatic state is almost exactly the same as the pseudo-dream state of Oceanic Metastasis. Marino the Seal may profit from the instruction and para-hypnosis that is part of it, though I suspect that he is already into at least first-step Metastasis. That leaves the Python and the Parrot, and I am not an expert on the fundamental nature of either species. How will it be with you, Lutin?”

  “Oh, most pythons take a sabbatical year at the bottom of the ocean. It's part of their growing up and achieving full prophetic power. Unfortunately I missed that year because my upbringing was with a Bear and a Chimp and not with Pythons. But I'll have no trouble with a few hours at the bottom of a rather shallow ocean. I am presently suffering from the most delightful and the most soul-wrenching sickness imaginable, bu
t a little ocean adventure will neither kill nor cure me. It will be a pleasant distraction. I will wear the face-mask and goggles, yes, but only for appearances’ sake.”

  “Good. And Popugai, you sheep-killing parrot and most unlikely mega-person ever. Have you any idea what you'll need?”

  “Ballast, ballast, and still more ballast, Grandfather Satrap. I'm a bird with hollow bones and more air sacs than you could count. I love to dive for fish, but I can't dive very deep. I pop right up again with a fish in my beak. But if I have sufficient weights attached to me, then I can get to the bottom. Oh, I can breathe the air in my hollow bones and in my air sacs for a long while. But I'll wear the goggles and mouth-piece just because of the dapper look they give me.”

  “All right, Popugai.”

  Then Satrap Saint Ledger indoctrinated the humans and the ‘wider humans’ with first-stage entry into the pseudo-dream state of Oceanic Metastasis. The method and content of this indoctrination is secret, and we do not have permission to enter it here in this Log of the First Ocean-Floor Adventure.

  “I want a sharp short-bladed knife such as the ones that you gave to the three boys,” Henryetta told Pirate Crewman Quentillius Quern the Fifth. “Give me one please.”

  “There are no more of them, red-haired Henryetta. They can only be had by taking them from the Dolophonoi. I’d have to kill another Dolophonos to get one for you.”

  “Do it then, Quentillius. “I will need the knife by nightfall.”

  All Ocean Creatures are obscene, in the nicest sense of that word. And Ocean-Creature Satrap Saint Ledger was surely obscene as he dove through the half-mile depth of New Ocean without any sort or equipment except his state of full Oceanic Metastasis. Nobody knew how old Satrap might be, but all Ocean Creatures are ageless anyhow. He was enormous, he was grotesque, he was comic, even for a fish.

  There is a sort of folk legend (we hope it is no more than that) that the seven richest men in the world are all of them metamorphic creatures who can turn into Deep Ocean Denizens. These, so the folk legend says, meet once a year at a place two miles deep in the Atlantic Ocean, and they meet there without any breathing apparatus, for they are not at all what they seem. They sit in coral chairs before a coral table (to one who asks what coral is doing two miles deep, the answer is that this part of the ocean floor has sunk), and they decide on the financial processes of the world for the following year. Then they return to the surface of the Ocean and travel back to their seven respective countries.

  But the implication that Satrap Saint Ledger might be one of this metamorphic company of the seven richest men is false. According to the Money Mart ratings, Satrap is only the eleventh richest man in the world. He is just barely of Midas Class.

  But the Nine who were accompanying Satrap as he descended without equipment down to the depths were all seeing him through other eyes. One of the goals of the Experiments had been to see the world with different eyes (but not too cockeyed different). Now the Oceanic Hyper-Active Dream State (the Pseudo-Dream State of the Oceanic Metastasis was Satrap's name for it) did certainly provide new eyes and new ways of looking at the world, along with the other things in its kit. And this new state had settled on all of them completely. None of them would ever be free from it henceforth, and several of them would soon die while still totally in the state.

  One of the advantages of the new state was heightened apperceptions and more acute sensing. It wasn't really very sunny and bright half a mile deep in the ocean even on a sunny afternoon. But seen through the new Metastatic eyes the whole Ocean Depth was gloriously sunlit and of the sharpest and most varied colors in the world. The old tale about there being four colors in the Ocean Depths in addition to those in the Bow in the Sky was seen to be a true tale.

  “I dream of Castles day and night.

  They are the soul of me.

  My Dream is of a Castle bright

  At bottom of the Sea.”

  —Lutin's Lutings

  Those four additional colors of the ocean bottom all adhered to the square marble columns and lintels that had been raised, or were still being raised, from the Ocean floor. This marble had been only minimally-crystalized limestone when Satrap had sold it by the hundreds of tons to the whales, and had tipped it at designated places in the New Ocean out of tip-barges. But now it was integrated, ingrained, totally crystalized variegated marble. Limestone and marble are chemically identical. When limestone receives its Patent of Nobility (which happens by a sea change of either long or short period) it becomes marble, the favorite building stone of whales. And the whales were making giant crypts and cenotaphs and menhirs from the blocks and shafts and trabants of marble. It was utterly strange down there at Whale Town, and completely homey also. A sign which the whales had put up proclaimed to all visitors “We're Glad You're Here”.

  There seemed to be a shimmering, shining golden mist over everything, but how could there be a mist at the bottom of an ocean? The whales were not good workers. Good workers are always busy and working to a purpose. The whales were only perfect workers. And perfect workers never seem to be doing very much; and, as to the things that they do, they appear to be doing them aimlessly. But the whales themselves are really in a perpetual hyper-active dream-state, and in that state they accomplish prodigies and wonders while seeming to accomplish nothing. The Temple-City that the Whales were building was certainly prodigious and entirely wonderful.

  “It is all part of the New Ocean Syndrome,” Satrap Saint Ledger was saying; and all of them who were in the pseudo-dream state of Oceanic Metastasis were able to hear him even though they were all under water. “Just as the early-day human sail-ship men were always nervous when they were out of sight of land, so are the whales nervous when they are more than five hundred sea-miles from one of their Temple-Cities. Whenever a New Ocean is opened up (and new oceans haven't been of very frequent appearance these last nine thousand years), then the Whales will make haste to build one of their Temple-Cities at the furthest extremity of the New Ocean. And because of the new-built city, the otherwise perilous new waters will become safe waters for them.”

  To the unpenetrating eye, the building-activity of the whales seemed to be in a state of beautiful and multi-colored confusion. But to one in the Oceanic Metastatic State, to one moreover who was an expert on these things (and Ruddy Lord Randal had thoroughly researched Megalithic Archeology, especially in its Ocean Floor context) the plan of it all was as clear as it was beautiful. The Whale Temple-City had at its core a Tau-Temple (cross-shaped, with all four arms of the cross equal lengths), with its ornate front door facing East. The Temple was also a calendar, but that was strictly a matter of custom. Yes, there were alignments of stones and turrets by which one might see and clock the helical rising of the Dog Star, for instance, and much else. But it was no longer important, as once it had been, that Whales should observe the helical rising of the Dog Sirius. What was really central to the Tau-Temple Complex was a group of small (human-sized and not whale-sized) Monuments or Cenotaphs or Tombs. What man-sized creatures would someday occupy these empty cenotaphs and tombs? And when?

  Besides the wonderfully varicolored marble, there were shafts and lintel stones of Wichita-Mountain Granite. Satrap Saint Ledger had felt a slight pang when he realized that this granite had not been sold to the whales by his own building-stone company but by one of his competitors. But one does not feel serious pangs while being an Ocean Obscenity or Monster.

  The beautiful pink, lilac, tan, orange, and mauve-tinted marble of the Whales’ Constructions had also on it happy blotches and gouts of the greenest green ever. It was a color so green that no language of Earth except only Malay has a word for the color. Malay does have a twelve-syllable name for the color, a name that might be translated as ‘The Green of Swarming, Ocean-floor etching, deep-sea lice’. Yes, that vivid green was a living color, and one beautiful blotch of it, festooning the caput of a pillar, might contain a million of the small ocean-floor sculpturing Lice. They were qu
ite small.

  The small ocean-lice were etching figures and faces into the big marble and granite stone-pillars. Though not one, and not ten thousand of the little lice had enough scope and reach to comprehend what they were sculpting, to know what the statuary was all about, yet the lice were receiving and obeying orders from somebody, and likely from the whales. The great portraiture art, cut in high-and-bas relief out of the giant stone pillars and walls and lintels, had to be the Art of the Whales.

  Mostly the faces and forms were those of famous whales of yore. But there were also distinguished-looking animal faces, human faces, god faces, even strange computer faces, all emerging from the big stones that the sea-lice were sculpting for the whales. And whenever they had finished one of the great and distinguished faces, the sea-lice covered it over with a beautiful and thin plating of nacre or mother-of-pearl.

  There was a running excitement among all the fish and shelly folks of the new ocean. This was gala time for them. Theirs was the excitement of discovery. For this part of the ocean had not been here a week before. The Nations of the Fishes had known all the old Oceanic World; and now they had flocked here on the sea-rumor that there were new and unknown ocean waters to be explored. It was as if the humans had heard the rumor that there was a new and large and commodious Continent never before even expected. And then it was as if the rumor had proved to be true. The people in that case would flock to see the new marvels in the new place.

  So there came fishes from all the far Oceans, Paddle-Fishes and Sturgeons, Garpikes and Bowfins, Ocean Carp, Suckers, Ocean Catfish, Herrings, Trout, Salmons, Tarpons, Whitefishes, Pikes, Eels and Conger Eels, Sticklebacks, Pipefishes, Seahorses, Silver-Sides, Mullets, Spinny-Rays, Sea-Basses, Bluefish, Porcupine Fishes, Remoras, Anglers, Mackerels, Swordfishes, Flounders, Codfishes. Red-Snappers, Lungfish, Alligator-Gar, Salt-Water Dogfish, the Stomias Boa. Starfish and Squids. Oh, the Sharks! The Dogfish Sharks, the Great White Sharks, the Sand Sharks, the Hammerhead Sharks. All of the underwater creatures live in an active state of churning unconsciousness which would have to be called ‘sleep’ from the landsman's view. All of them live in dreamworlds. But almost alone among the creatures of the Deep do the sharks habitually have nightmares in their sleep. The Rays and the Skates and the Swordfish! The Torpedo Fish. The pseudo-fish named Chimaera Monstrusa or the ‘Nightmare Monster’; but it really has a more pleasant disposition and a more pleasant name, the Sea-Cat.